They turned away from the Soviets because the Soviets only wanted them to be an agricultural nation, and wouldn't allow them to develop their own industry.

When the powers that be refuse to invest in themselves and demand that external providers must be used, it does make you wonder...

All those people who paid half a mil on education must appear useful at the expense of us all!

If something can't be monitored with minimal effort, it only serves to enrich the legal/accountancy/hr/admin priest caste.

The amount of labour wasted on moving numbers around numbers is staggering.

edit: Between the government and businesses, VAT costs 5% in admin fees to raise. In a modern world where most transactions are digital, is this a great use of resources?

If it's verboten, then I'm guessing:

All Arabs back to the Arabian peninsula? "Latin Americans" back to Europe? The removal of 98% of the USA, Australia, etc? Malagasy back to Madagascar?

Sounds very genocidal... At least half of the world's population uprooted at least :/

Are the Andaman Islands, Kaliningrad, Midway, Ogaden, Balochistan, Xinjiang all loot under the auspices of empire?

What about the Galapagos? Svalbard? Falklands? All loot? Looted from who?

The word's thrown around a lot, it'd be nice to have a definition for once.

Or is it only the 'English' who should be confined to certain geogrpahical parameters?

I'm English and live in another nation. I'm guessing me and my family should go 'home'?

>DRIVERS LICENSES AND FACE PICS! GET THE FUCK IN HERE BEFORE THEY SHUT IT DOWN!

>Tea App uploads all user verification submissions to this public firebase storage bucket with the prefix "attachments/": [link, now offline]

>Yes, if you sent Tea App your face and drivers license, they doxxed you publicly! No authentication, no nothing. It's a public bucket. I have written a Python script which scrapes the bucket and downloads all the images, page by page, so you can see if you're in it: [pastebin link]

>The censoring in picrel was added by me. The images in the bucket are raw and uncensored. Nice "anonymous" app. This is what happens when you entrust your personal information to a bunch of vibe-coding DEI hires.

>I won't be replying to this or making any more threads about it. I did my part, God bless you all. Regards, anon

Being so careless with people's personal data should be a major crime, tbh. If I manipulated thousands of people to let me scan their passports and various other bits of personal info, then just left the copies around the city for people to find, I'd be prosecuted, and rightfully so.

Not sure if I feel honoured or guilty by being able to set his plans back a day or 2 by introducing him to the local nightlife...

If a company is taking £billion out of a nation's spending power, and doing so with nefarious practices, that's what should be fined.

If bankruptcy is a worry, then comapnies shouldn't fly so close to the sun when adopting immoral practices.

Income is the only reliable thing you can tax. Trying to calculate profit for international companies is an absolute joke which is massively inefficient. Why an Earth should governments employ entire teams to second guess internal bookkeeping?

If you want to take a billion from a nation's citizens, better be sure you're providing a legal service. I mean, are drug dealers punished on profit?

Basiclaly an app where you can travel a city on a hex grid (h3) and learn about it/receive recommendations on things to do. Different activities and landmarks are hooked into language learning games, which when completed, add phrases/words to a flashcard deck for future study.

I try to buy 'locally made' products because I respect the story of their company, and their efforts to build up some type of community.

If I had a choice between 'made here' or 'made there' at the checkout stage, then I'd probably think it's a bit of a scam.

I think 'locally made' is a business choice, not a product choice.

I always like to give this Welsh jeans firm as an example: https://hiutdenim.co.uk/ (sorry if it's advertising, I've no connection to them).

Just wanted to be left alone tbh ;/

Was the one thing which ended my couple of years without Google, as my banking apps started banning my phones fingerprint for being insecure.

Seems like in a major part of '''Pax Americana''' is needing to use a Google or Apple fingerprint to participate in society. Makes you laugh when people whinge about China.

I still struggle to see what phones at 10x the price actually provide.

Easy to convince at least 10% of the users to sign in to their browser with a verified credit card to 'protect the children', and governments around the world would give you full support.

At that point, would be trivial for them to track browsing habits, and then to start offering personalised assistants which save you time and eventually cost money.

Pretty sure you could save money throuh having a huge botnet of computers to tap into, and a huge amount of data to help cache and standardise common requests.

Why not get the user to pay the energy and processing bill for subsequent rounds?

Being able to track the habits of 3.5 billion users at source is probably quite useful, too.

I actually wonder what the price tag is for that, lol.