Որբունի

Even in 2016 when I had mine done it had to be done abroad even though I lived in a country where any consenting adult can ask to be sterilised without legally mandated delays or any nanny state bullshit. I was poor otherwise I could have sued half the urologists in the country because they gave wrong reasons for refusing like me not having children and me being young.

One also scammed me by sending me to a psychiatrist buddy of his who just went on to spend 30 minutes insulting my intelligence for wanting to not bring children into this world. I’m glad I learned the lesson at that age that just because people are doctors it doesn’t mean they’re not disrespectful and/or stupid.

I tried to find an electric shaver that plugs into the wall two years back. I gave up and got one that takes AA batteries (rechargeable ones may be expensive but still cheaper per use than proprietary bullshit)

It’s not the entire country that stops working but there’s indeed a significant reduction. If you don’t have children you’d have to be crazy to take time off work during the school holidays in summer (and also like the heat if you’re going somewhere in France because nowhere has mild temperatures anymore).

The legal minimum for full time jobs is 5 weeks but most people have more since they have jobs where you get extra rest time since you work more than 35h/week. Some affluent French people go skiing 2-3 times a year for a week or two each time and then also take two weeks off in summer, all paid.

I used to have 56 paid days off (that’s 11 weeks because Saturday and Sunday didn’t count) each year because I worked a lot more than the legally mandated hours and I had advantageous time credit for showing up early and leaving late and 4 days extra because I never took time off during school holidays (incentive to keep the shifts fully staffed). The pay was shit but at least I could go on trips all the time. I did end up getting a lot of those days paid instead because I didn’t have enough money to travel all the time and I couldn’t be bothered to stay home.

With this much time off our productivity was still very good, everything was timed and we always went above 100% of targets and long-term projects always done early.

Blue collar work in the USA looks like a scam in comparison: working the same job I would have had less purchasing power (sure the numbers entering your bank account are higher, but the health insurance alone cancels it out), more working hours and a lot less paid leave.

The richest people don’t care about the war, if groceries go up 25% that barely makes a dent. You won’t see the people who are actually suffering from this being tourists.

I’ve never said Spotify is any good.

The carefully curated library on the tracker is a lot of effort that can be destroyed very quickly as evidenced by the fact it has happened before, yet people still use private trackers.

AKA a single point of failure

Classics you don’t even need to pirate there are projects trying to make whatever is public domain available with good formatting like Standard Ebooks.

Top sci-fi maybe try searching prize winners or literary critics as terms, some people have made compilations, otherwise you can make your own compilations and create torrents.

Usenet has many things wrong with it, NNTP is not at all designed for distributing large files, it’s for propagating messages across servers. File integrity checks have to be tacked on for instance, and the few servers still serving binaries are commercial services that are vulnerable to copyright trolls.

France has extremely powerful copyright trolls, restrictive laws, and a culture of oppression by bureaucrats. There’s even a tax on storage mediums that goes to the MAFIAA. what.cd got nuked, RealDebrid got threatened hard enough that they gave in. I wouldn’t spend any money on anything illegal hosted in France.