Yeah, alright, fair enough, food security I think can legitimately be counted as objective quality of life

What is “quality of life”? I would argue it hasn’t really gone up a great deal since the 90s.

It’s way more realistic since… They do in fact make the macbooks already…

Well you can run doom on Linux, so obviously yeah

Firstly, pasteurisation is most definitely a process.

Secondly, it’s very unlikely you are buying milk which has only been pasteurised, it has very likely at least also been homogenised, after being mixed from various different sources in order to produce a mill standardised fat & milk solids. The vast majority of the time rather than just being blended, it has been centrifugally separated into fractions that are then recombined in order to create a standard product.

None of this is really bad, btw, but it is 100% processing.

Damn… That’s harsh

With Windows if you don’t have a tpm you have to get a whole new computer lol

Nah, that stuff is made from soft wheat, not durum. I’m not in the USA, it was early evening when I wrote that comment ;)

ACT will never be as popular as AfD, they are simply not relatable to normal people on that way. They would have to dramatically overhaul their image, not saying it’s impossible, but definitely not happening in two elections. They have been treated as clowns by the media and they occupy a particularly niche spot in politics. To relate it to German politics, they are actually more like the FDP, and their role has been to work together with the CDU who promotes them for Wahlkreis votes in the areas with the richest people, to make sure they take a few extra seats in case they come in under the threshold, which happens regularly. So they are seen as the party of the financial elite, and they often do the dirty work of the centre right party when they don’t want to smear their own image. Historically their brand of extremism has been financial, not openly racial, and it would take a huge PR operation to get poor people to vote for them, even if they bait them with racism.

NZ First, the centre populist party is much more likely to take that role of the and shift to the right, but they are hugely centred around the cult of personality of their leader, who is 80 years old now. They are pretty likely to fall apart when he retires or dies since nobody knows who any of the other.

Additionally, poor White New Zealanders are simply not quite as racist towards Māori as White Germans are towards Muslim immigrants. They live closely together in the same communities and always have, and that makes a difference.

A truly popular right extreme party emerging in Aotearoa is absolutely a threat that I am taking seriously, but I think due to the specific conditions it would have to be a fresh young party like the AfD that captures the imagination of the youth. It will probably be an American style illiberal conspiracy troll fascist type movement, not European style fascism, we are simply too removed from that cultural context. It would probably have to include Māori to some degree, and play on anti immigrant / China sentiment. We saw that in our anti-covid-restrictions protests, a certain branch of Māori nationalism was very involved in that, and it was very important for their “legitimacy” even when the protests included hardcore racists too.

What do you mean? This government sucks, but a right extremist party which only got 8% of the vote pushing forward a racist bill is business as usual everywhere in the world…

Wtf is wrong with that “spaghetti”? Why is it that colour? Is that actually some kind of east Asian noodle?

Don’t get me wrong I still think it’s dumb

It’s probably not the best idea but it’s considerably less stupid than those, seeing as they managed to actually build one

Just a little joke about the challenging moment the stock market is currently experiencing.

That statement, out of context, is fairly accurate. OP is just not in the group they think they are.

Haha, what’s $4k in the sp500 gonna do? I guess having $3k in the sp500 is better than nothing…

No, just extracting the maximum possible amount of profit, it’s the American way. And 2k is the low end.

That’s the problem with being influenced by both British and American English. We have both senses in New Zealand English too, although I think the US one is slowly winning out and the British one might one day fall out of use.

This has been an ongoing linguistic war for nearly a century

So after over a century of people using it that way some other people got a stick up their butt about it, cool. Doesn’t make it wrong.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/literally

That’s one of it’s senses, yes, but how many of those definitions are the opposite of figurative?