I don’t think you’ll want to risk prison time, especially when you risk being locked up alongside MS-13 gang members.

Trump has agreed a deal with Nayib Bukele that will effectively allow him to deport illegal immigrants of any nationality to El Salvador and transfer US prisoners to their facilities.

And based on the deal Trump is doing with Bukele, there’s a chance you could end up getting thrown into an El Salvadorian prison and locked up with MS-13 gangbangers.

I wish I was joking…

He did a second one that seemed far more coordinated in terms of its posture.

That is undeniably a Nazi salute. I’m actually more surprised he didn’t yell “HEIL DONALD” too

Mastodon just sucks as a user experience. Your average Joe doesn’t give a fuck about federation, yet it’s the whole Fediverse crap that harms the UX.

I made the mistake of signing up to a smaller Mastodon instance. Place was virtually empty aside from the lead admin (bit of a pretentious asshole) and a few other guys, and if you decide to browse the All Instances view, you’re flooded with posts from hentai reposting bots. And when I saw the #loli hashtag in one of those posts I immediately noped out.

Threads is still in a really bad state well over a year later. Meta still haven’t implemented hashtags and trending topics (even Mastodon has these), and my feed is full of thirst traps.

Bluesky has it all, and was created by Twitter’s original founders.

A mutual friend of ours got into an argument with him because he made some new friends at his local pub and was buying pints for them left, right and centre. He took serious offence to the suggestion that they were using him for his money (he got about £120k in inheritance after his mum died) and cut both of us off, even though I never said anything to him.

I don’t want to elaborate on his backstory but he had a lot of mental health problems and past trauma. After a lot of bad things happened a few years ago, he decided that he was done with life and vowed not to outlive his cats. Have tried to talk him out of it but he’s set on ending his own life after his cats pass away.

I presume he’s still alive, but I can’t get in touch with him as he nuked his phone number and blocked me on all socials.

I’ve heard Iraqi Kurdistan is a nice place to visit and is relatively safe compared to the rest of the country.

This is actually a very good and nuanced reply.

We’re going through similar problems in Britain. There are a lot of people from deprived communities that suffered during the seventies (Winter of Discontent, high inflation), had their manufacturing/mining jobs and access to social housing dismantled under Margaret Thatcher during the eighties, were ignored by successive leaders (John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown), then suffered through austerity at the hands of David Cameron.

Meanwhile, the media had been pushing tonnes of hatred towards immigrants and to nobody’s surprise, hate crimes against Muslims and Eastern Europeans have skyrocketed. Things are so bad that we voted to leave the European Union in 2016, voted in a corrupt Tory government that pulled us out of the bloc in 2020, and given the trend of our most recent election, it’s becoming increasingly likely that we are going to vote in a far-right government by 2029 or earlier.

Everyone would likely defederate from them, much in the same way that you all rushed to close the shutters upon Threads.

I also don’t ever see this happening, unless Spez fucks up with Reddit so badly that it sparks a mass user exodus, much in the same way that Digg v4 sank any hopes of Kevin Rose remaining a successful tech entrepreneur.

I have a hypothesis that all the good people with a moral compass left Reddit in disgust over the API changes, and effectively being forced into using the official Reddit app. What remains of Reddit are the sociopathic assholes.

Disclaimer: I work in accountancy (Commercial Finance) but my advice should be taken with a pinch of salt.

1. Diversify your investments. Have savings across multiple bank accounts so that the unlikely event where one bank fails doesn’t wipe out your financial wealth., and overall don’t put your eggs in one basket.

2. Currently, the best ROI/passive income you’ll get is from corporate bonds. A cursory glance at the Hargreaves Lansdown website shows me quite a few corporate bonds and gilts that have a voucher rate (% return each year) of over 8 percent. Do bear in mind that a bond is a loan instrument where the ROI is based on both the maturity date (the date you get paid back plus interest) and the overall risk of the debt.

3. Another good option is to invest in high dividend yield shares or ETFs. These can offer superior returns on investment to the interest you’d get from a savings account.

4. Avoid day trading or swing trading unless you 100% absolutely know what the fuck you’re doing. Unlike what many YouTube ‘gurus’ claim, making a living off the stock market requires a high amount of starting capital to see any kind of tangible ROI, plus sophisticated stock trading software and knowledge on how to exploit trends.

5. Same goes for penny stocks (i.e. the FTSE AIM All Share market.) You can make some rookie gains from it. Many of the companies listed on this index are oil/gas/mineral exploratory firms that are likely not going to see any kind of profit unless they strike it big, find a new oil well, lithium mine, etc and get the necessary contracts and investment to extract those resources. They’re penny stocks for a reason.

6. Side hustles. For example, I have two friends that are karaoke DJs and they get gigs where bars pay them to host nights. Bookkeeping is another one, but you really are going to have a lot of competition in that respect, and you will probably need the right qualifications to do it.

7. Screw crypto. At best cryptocurrencies are speculative assets that are scarce and expensive because the very nature of how their blockchains were designed make it take exponentially more effort to mine a new coin. At worst, they’re used to launder criminal proceeds (Monero is a good example of one where the blockchain is encrypted.) NFTs are even worse.

Nothing. I theorize that the good people who looked at Spez with disgust left Reddit. I’d rather not have the power tripping cucks who made Reddit bad come here

A couple of years ago i would say that a month of tinder gold or whatever isn’t the worst idea ever. Right now it totally is. It still probably maybe helps, but it’s just not worth the money. You can swipe more and get seen more and that might still be true, but your subscription doesn’t change the fact that the women you like get thousands of likes and you just go under or are lucky as fuck

I think it’s more like the online dating space has been enshittified by one company buying out most of its competition and then jacking up prices. Hinge are owned by Match Group, who also own Match.com, Tinder, POF, Okcupid, The League and a few others. All of these are now overglorified Tinder clones that adopted the same ‘swipe left/right to match’ formula.

Also I suspect there may be some kind of shadowban on my account. Apparently this is a thing frequently mentioned on /r/SwipeHelper, /r/HingeApp and /r/OnlineDating, and the only way people have gotten past it is fully deleting their accounts, waiting a few months and then registering afresh. If that is the case and my profile is being obfuscated for whatever reason (maybe because I recently reactivated it after going dormant), then that would make Hinge X blatant false advertising.

If i were you i would shoot my shot at karaoke, and just do dating apps on the side

I mean… I would, but I don’t really approach women that I find attractive (mainly fear of rejection, or worse, or I know for a fact that they’re not single), and the only attention I seem to get is from gay guys and the occasional lady old enough to be my grandma. As I’m not into either, it can make me uncomfortable at times.

The main group chat I’m in mainly consists of middle-aged men and women. I’m also friends with two DJs who host evenings at various pubs which I often attend. Some of our regulars either already are professional singers, or have the talent to be.

I wouldn’t exactly say I’m a good singer and when people say I’ve got a good voice, I feel like they’re either being nice, or they’re drunk and easily impressed. I’ve definitely improved compared to when I first started doing this, to the point where I don’t quite hate the sound of my own voice anymore and there are some go-to songs that I can sing somewhat well. I really do want to take professional singing lessons and improve my voice to the point where I could be like a siren. Maybe that would have been a better investment than a dating app.

Probably the best compliment I got was when I went to a Central Bristol pub for a Christmas karaoke eve. The place was packed and about half the pub was cordoned off for a pre-booked work Christmas party. I sung Poison Arrow by ABC (one of my go-to songs) and on a part of the second verse which I legitimately belted out loudly, I audibly heard one of the guys in the work crowd go “Fuck me…” in astonishment. I left that place soon after, both because they were inundated with requests, and to get away from an Aussie lady who I met previously, she was living in a homeless shelter and was spending her eves scrounging off other guys in that place.

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Unless they pull off some kind of paramilitary overthrow of the German government (and last time I checked their co-leaders didn’t have an army of brownshirts to do their bidding) I cannot see Alternative fur Deutschland taking power in Germany. They actually lost vote share and support from other far right European parties when they spouted borderline Nazi views recently.

Reassemblement National on the other hand… Macron was stupid to call a snap parliamentary election, and if Marine Le Pen can make it to 2027 without being driven out by political scandal, she’ll probably be the next French President.

I’d have to say winter.

Spring is horrendous when it comes to pollen allergies and gets really bad around April.

Summer is similarly bad for hayfever sufferers, but also too hot and peak season for wasps and hornets.

Autumn can be nice but that’s overshadowed by being born in the same month as a lot of birthdays fall on (yes, a lot of people fuck during the Christmas holidays.) plus September is the one month that’s very restricted in terms of me taking time off because we have to prep the year-end accounts at work.

Winter on the other hand… It’s cold, it gets dark early, it can be pretty quiet, and there is nothing that beats the feeling of eating a turkey roast feast on Christmas Day, or going to a Christmas market and drinking mulled wine.

Petrol Bastard.

They call themselves ‘Tesco Value Prodigy’, yet when I see them put out tracks like these, I’m surprised they don’t have much of a following.

Wrong Impression - Natalie Imbruglia

Two Become One - Spice Girls

C’est La Vie - B*Witched

Ain’t No Mountain High Enough - Diana Ross

I have a friend who worked his ass off as a teenager and had founded a moderately successful IT business from the back of his garage. He sold his share of the firm at 21 and walked away with a seven digit bank balance.

He’s one of those self-proclaimed alpha males who did a lot of stuff like playing video games a lot, martial arts (black belt in two martial arts), gym, partying, etc. He would also still work from time to time, not out of necessity but rather boredom

Unfortunately age and a nasty case of long COVID caught up with him, so he’s mainly going back into IT.

Windows 3.1, 98SE, XP, 7, 8.1, 10 and now 11.

I did once use Ubuntu for a few weeks but this was after someone at school goaded me into acquiring a copy of Norton PartitionMagic to try and merge two awkwardly partitioned drives on my computer, which then nuked my C:\ partition. I didn’t have a backup copy of Windows XP to reinstall from so I had to go open source.

Needless to say, we didn’t remain friends after that.