Yeah, cheap was an important modifier there. It’s not expensive crap, and great cheap stuff isn’t an option in real life.

For clothes especially, yeah, the ultra-fast fashion is all online. Probably for the same reason online gambling seems to be everywhere now.

Which gets to the real meat of the issue: In some categories, people don’t want good stuff, they want cheap crap they can throw away, and then buy again for another dopamine hit. Similarly, new cars are getting more and more expensive, because anyone that’s not loaded buys them used, and it’s a k-shaped economy.

Markets have had all kinds of unfortunate features, which on Lemmy need no introduction, but outside of the most extreme monopolies, they’re pretty flawless at delivering the kinds of products people are shopping for.

If so, that’s great. Literally was taken; sometimes you’re trying to communicate something that sounds figurative, or like hyperbole, but it’s not.

I’ve actually noticed quality of textiles on IRL shelves going back up since COVID. If you’re buying from Temu or something, then yes, it will be cheap. In a direct counterexample, cars get more and more luxury and huge all the time.

Food is a thing, and it’s basically because you can’t taste it in the store, so it’s bred more for looks.

Literally is still understood, it just gets misused.

Going in a bit of a different direction, emojis and things like /s are well understood now, which is an addition.

Depends what my left behind husk is labouring for. If this is the grand plan for humanity - we all go into a simulated utopia and leave our bodies behind to maintain it - sure. If it’s for something evil, nah.

Absolutely. It’s short.

Do note that most of how communism worked, on paper and in practice, originated later, though. Marx, a German who mostly lived in England, wrote the Manifesto in 1848 and died in 1883, while the revolution was in Russia in 1917. And there’s stuff in the manifesto that obviously didn’t age well, like the bit about the invention of trains leading to the end of nationalism.

Still, it’s great historical perspective, and obviously inspired how the Soviet Union looked at things pretty heavily.

As you can see on your map, Germany is actually really dense, not typical. Europe has had an easy few centuries, and that, alongside the UK, is the densest part of Europe. If you pick a random patch of civilisation-friendly terrain, it has a greater than 50% chance to be yellow, which is like the empty central parts of Spain.

Looking over the list on Wikipedia, Germany is number 63 out of 245. What’s ahead of it is mostly island and city states, with a few other major nations in the mix.

CAR is pretty empty, and that might be down to jungle. Why the jungle would be hard to live in, once you cut down a few trees, is unclear to me as a Canadian (maybe poor soil?). Plus, there are populous jungle regions, like in SE Asia. But, there definitely is a pattern.

DRC south of it is mostly yellow, and to the south-east you hit the dense African Great Lakes region. The white patch in southern Africa is the Kalahari, another desert.

The ger in Nigeria is more like “jeer”. Exact vowels vary a lot across the language, but Germany isn’t exactly the same as Jeermany in American English or Nigerian English, and I’m pretty sure not in RP either.

Thanks! Hopefully people can pick out the Sahara themselves, while the red blob in west Africa would be mostly Nigeria.

Same story in both of the Americas, at least. Few people live in the Canadian arctic or the Amazon, plenty live in the New York or Sao Paolo area.

Asia has those mega-population spots, but the empty part is also bigger. With it sitting in front of me the mega-population spots still probably win. Non-Russia Europe is the same size and rough shape as India, but as a “continent” it’s pretty dense. while Australia and of course Antarctica are emptier.

I would have to go looking too. But, the article makes it clear it’s an umbrella anti-gay law.

The actual answer to that question, is that they’re going to just ignore the parts that don’t make sense, because there’s no rule of law anyway. Written laws serve as something more like campaign promises, in an authoritarian state.

Yeah, if he was able to make the military do that, he probably would have the first time he mentioned it. Instead we got TACO.

Unbelievably plausible.

Yeah, Niger is desert, basically. There’s a bit of sahel at one end, and of course oases, but it’s not a populous place, because of course it isn’t.

1/10 of German density is actually impressive as hell, and probably why they’re poor even by African standards. Australia might be a better geographic parallel, at 3.7.

If you look at Nigeria, the story is different, and some of the small West African states are going to be even more crowded. Africa as a whole is probably comparable to the next (edit: major) continent. You’re averaging over a lot of very different places, once you get to that scale.

Lemmy is only for complaining. /s

There’s things that are slightly futuristic, like lightbulbs that don’t really burn out and barely need power to run, or antidepressants that don’t completely fuck you up. But yeah, in the 1970s they’d kind of maxxed out what’s physically possible with a lot of technologies, while they were still projecting linear growth like they’d seen over previous decades.

Now I’m curious how high gas prices got in the 70’s oil crises, in 2026 dollars. Uhhh… looks like it was comparable to now, actually.

OP did, then edited it out.

And now edited the rest out, too.

Neat, a first-hand source! What else should we know about Niger, beyond the statistics?

Besides having nothing to do with Niger, which is a totally different situation, the first bit is understandable. A kid needs a house and stability much more than an adult does. Here, there’s not really council houses for kids, either.

And no, it’s not migrant’s fault. Stop reading the Sun or the Daily Mail or whatever.

Going more by Occam’s razor, and a bit of Hanlon’s: They copy-pasted every queer term they could find, and dumped it into the gay-bad bill. The junta may or may not have known what asexual even is.

It’s an islamic country, which also has evangelical missionary influence, and positions itself as anti-Western (when tolerance is highly associated with the West), so that’s a great way to win political points. Now, poorly written laws like that would be a problem… if they had rule of law and working courts in the first place, which they don’t.