Reminder that Musk has fathered a dozen children. Welfare queen.

You know, considering most christian religions’ stance on sexual freedom, that might actually get me sent to hell.

Is it a sin to have sex with your wife?

People feel that their quality of life is going downhill and the propagandists presented an easy scapegoat to distract from the rich.

Lots of these predictions were actually quite horrible. e.g. flying cars would be so much worse than regular cars in so many ways.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We definitely got a lot of social progress from technology, but it’s plain to see that social media gets massively abused for reactionary propaganda (not entirely unlike radio and print have been abused to further authoritarian ideologies in early 20th century). IME, in recent years people have been getting MORE cold and brutal, more willing to assault random people for being the wrong sexual orientation, they started assaulting EMTs, firefighters and train employees in significant numbers, and people have been outright murdered for telling them that they should wear a mask.

And every appliance becoming “smart” seems to further the corporate desire for planned obsolescence and making people unable to repair their belongings, along with massively increasing security risks and possibilities for mass surveillance.

IMO, we’re moving backwards right now, with significant risk of losing the progress of the last 50 years.

Good luck ignoring social media nowadays. Whether you use them or not, you live in a society that does use them and you are impacted by its consequences.

And good luck trying to buy a new television that isn’t “smart”. Even cars are getting like that.

Yeah, and the amish aren’t exactly a positive example in terms of personal freedom, especially for women and queer people. Though those were never their goals anyway, so a more modern luddite community might be nicer to live in.

Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/‘go back to the past’ movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it’s older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we’re definitely getting into the flashier stuff). And remember that the cyberpunk genre paints the future as bleak, in terms of how the common people live most cyberpunk worlds are clear downgrades compared to the actual 1980s.

And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.

I don’t expect people even in border villages of Czechia, Slovakia or Hungary to speak German

German is actually a fairly popular foreign language in countries east of Germany: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Foreign_language_learning_statistics#Upper_secondary_education

Though learning a second or third language in school is probably not quite what OP envisions here, and there’s a big difference between getting language lessons in school and actually being able to speak that language (shoutout to my Spanish lessons in school, I should probably have picked French instead).

Or is it more if you lived even like 500 meters of a border do you learn the language of the country your in?

That tends to be how it’s done. States tend to be rather protective of their official language, and it’s generally impractical to send your children to school in a different country. Being somewhat proficient in the other country’s language is quite common, but to truly be bilingual you pretty much need to be some kind of ethnic or religious minority.

Also depends a lot on the relationship between the countries and languages; some borders are easier to cross, and some languages easier to learn.

I made a shell script titled “update”, it updates system packages, flatpaks and python packages. Too many lines for an alias for my tastes.

Vivec?

Don’t most people have Whatsapp? It’s certainly harder to spy on the content of your messages, it’s just a matter of how much issue you have with giving Meta your metadata.

and even Microsoft

(x) doubt

They had decades to consider Microsoft a liability. Why start doing something about it now?