So your definition of neocolonialism boils down to 'has trade and diplomatic relations with the US and France'?

And isn't that quite offensive against the African states? You imply that they could not have created an intranational community without centering it around Western powers, no?

How, in your opinion, is ECOWAS a tool for neocolonialism?

Even if you don't get a job immediately, with a 25h week you should have a lot of time to upskill and get yourself employable.

There are a lot of free resources for anything from programming, MS Office (seriously, Excel will get you a job), languages, and even science (though probably more as a setup for any kind of degree).

Question is, what business model would you support?

Ads are the thing that pay for a lot of services most people use in daily lives. Imagine you needed a paid subscription for your email, your search engine, browser, social media account(s)...

Lemmy is fun and all, but eventually it will need to expand and pay for server costs and so on. Yes, perhaps it will be carried by enthusiastic community members, but that's just a higher paid subscription for a few rather than many.

I agree fully with you that the level of commercialisation is beyond crazy by now, and many developments do not have the user in mind. But that's not on the business model itself, but the companies' decisions.

They don't say that. They said the extent of closures was inappropriate for the severity of the pandemic and the role of schools.

And Germany did quite well during COVID, per capita deaths are far lower than, for example, in the US, UK, Italy, or France.

Not sure about other countries, but at least in Europe we had quite a few comments, including by health officials, that the school closures should not have been done and upheld to the extent that they were.

And I agree, the impact on learning and children's mental health was not justified by the real or potential dangers of the pandemic imho

Edit: One comment from the German Health Minister here, describing prolonged school closures as a mistake

You are right, the spot exchange rate at a given point in time is random and tells you nothing (nothing!) about the strength of a currency (or economy). Japan is a great example.

What, however, does indicate a weakening or economic downturn is the uncontrolled depreciation of a currency, which errodes savings, threatens foreign debt paybacks, and makes imports more expensive

The Yen is relatively stable for decades at its spot. The Rubel is sliding against monetary and fiscal efforts, which indicates deeper macroeconomic issues.

In all fairness, FPTP did create one of the oldest, most successful democracies that ever existed on the planet. Now, I'm not saying it shouldn't be reformed (it should be), but calling it a straight up terrible no good isn't right either

Better question at this point would be 'how many world wars have they seen already?'

YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD

What the actual fuck

'hey man, what date is it today?' 'well it's the 15th of 2023, August'

I'm sure not everyone will agree, but honestly, I kind of stopped caring too much. I've been using Instagram, Google, Android, Apple, and many other service providers for years and none seems to know a lot about me based on the stuff I see being advertised to me.

None of them seem to have figured out what languages I speak (I get a lot of language courses for English and German, but I'm native in both), what my education level is (I get a lot of 'study your bachelor or master here or there or online' despite having two master's degrees), where I really live (lots of British stuff always, but I live out of Europe), or what my hobbies are (lots of mobile games that I wouldn't touch with a stick).

Yeah, it seems they get the basics (I'm male, below 35, I am interested in educational stuff), but that could be anyone... And if I can use their services for tree for them to put me in a category with some 10M others, I'm kinda okay