Depends on which option would serve better to advance the plot

This is my surprised face.

From what I’ve read, Japan’s work ethic has been more about presenteeism than productivity for a while. While long hours are the norm, it’s more important to be seen to be working than to be productive, so you don’t leave before the boss does, but you do spend a large amount of that time staring out the window or otherwise idling.

Before Milton Friedman and his colleagues popularised the term “trickle-down”, it was known as “horse and sparrow economics”, in reference to the distribution of oats.

They should at least outlaw the exclusive deals with venues and artists which they use to crush the competition.

Except perhaps in the UK, where there’s a Labour government who are triangulating rightwards Blair-fashion, but who (if recent local elections are anything to go by) look likely to be replaced with a far-right populist party that’s actually a private company controlled by donors.

The Coalition has been a stable political entity for generations, and is structurally more like a party with two formalised factions and centres of power than like two parties temporarily cooperating. (In Queensland, they have even merged into one party.)

The ALP are hardly Whitlam-style socialists, but they’re somewhat more progressive than UK Labour, in that they at least purport to be progressive, rather than banking their capital, rewarding donors and distracting the public with culture wars inherited from the Tories.

Mind you, they do most of that when the Greens hold their feet to the fire. With Labor having a lower house majority, it will depend on the Senate to force them to do the right thing.

Israeli security industry: builds virtual CPUs out of memory overflows in image libraries to crack open iPhones, can McGyver data across air gaps by writing to RAM in a pattern that generates radio frequencies

also Israeli security industry: sells an app that archives Signal messages by emailing them in plain text

Next, he’ll write the foreword to a new edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, now reclassified for the Inspirational/Self-Help/Business section.

His real name is Adam, which is as Hebrew as they come

The good news is that the shutdown in Chinese container shipping will give them plenty of time to grind through Duolingo

That’s to keep in touch with his handlers in Moscow

The rich will have actual human teachers, but the poor will be trained by AI. The result will be language diverging into two Eloi/Morlock-style subpopulations.

Though given that people acquire language from their peers, and invent what they need, Poorish will have a bland, almost mechanical formal register, and a lot of incomprehensible-to-outsiders slang about actual life stuff.

If Putler had any sense, he’d spend a fraction of his military budget on making nicotine patches available for free to his orcs. That would pay for itself in no time.

They’ve got gigs scheduled in the Schengen Zone. Which is bold, given that Germany has a policy of blacklisting people from the area for the kinds of statements they’ve publicly made.

Possibly not, but it may take you longer to return to the nitrogen cycle

Because you don’t use Typescript/JS perhaps?

Not quite. The US economy is a large, slow-moving mass, and even with the chaos-monkey-in-chief doing his worst there will be meaningful economic activity: food will be grown, wages and rent paid, other goods manufactured even if only for local use. Crypto, meanwhile, has no connections to the world other than a fringe of payments which, for various reasons, cannot be made by other, vastly more efficient means. A scenario where the two are equally stable would look like a zombie apocalypse or similar.

The mainstream conservatives (i.e. those within the Overton window of what’s acceptable in mainstream society, or not open Nazis/KKK) have the big corporate networks. Those Nazis who are too Nazi for Elon Musk have their own instances which everybody else fediblocks from orbit just to be sure, where they can run around, sieg-heil and shout racial slurs all day to their hearts’ content. Which leaves those to the left of the centre-right, who are divided between the tankie-triad instances (full of people who think that Stalin did nothing wrong and Putin’s OK too) and the rest (which ranges from liberals to ancoms).