I’m in the UK, and I work with a LOT of Americans already, so know this first hand:

• You fuckers are always in for a culture shock when you realise that everywhere isn’t like London. You seem to either expect London or Harry Potter Land, but when you end up somewhere like Bristol, Leeds, or Birmingham the frame of reference just dies and you see the wheels turning in your head trying to make sense of it all.
• Weirdly, you seem to really like our supermarkets. They’re a lot smaller than yours, meal deals are a novelty that never gets old, and paying the price on the tag is the greatest thing ever.
• You love our bread, and our chocolate is like crack to you. You’d think that you’d moved to France or something…
• Butter on bread will fuck you up. You use Mayo all the time, but we use butter/spread, and it messes with your minds.
• You quickly learn that Europe is a continent, and that cultures across the continent are very different to one another. You also learn that no one knows US history that well, or that we had a war with you (since we have basically had a war with everyone at some point).
• The drinking culture is a really interesting one. Some love it, some hate it. It’s a staple of British life
• We get paid a lot less than you do, but your money will go much further because you’re not spending it on healthcare. You’ll also get taxed a lot, but ultimately you’ll earn enough to be comfortable, and a comfortable life in the UK is nice.

To answer your question, you’re more than welcome here, and it’s much easier to get a visa to the UK for you than for us to go to the US. Expect some people to give you shit for Trump, but give them shit back for Brexit and electing the Tories for 15 years.

Because none of those points matter to the average user.

IMO this is why the Democrats need to start work on the next election candidate yesterday.

When I say Democrats, I say those that want a progressive leader rather than another “safe” career politician. Find a candidate that is willing to stand, create a section of the Democrats (or back the Democratic Socialists of America), and do everything to empower this person towards running.

I know that many will say “buh actually there won’t be more elections because Trump evil”. Trump isn’t lasting a third term, nor is he actually going to follow through on half of the shit he says he’ll do. He’s a loose cannon, and he’s already doing shit that’s pissing off the GOP that want Project 2025. Like with the last Trump presidency, the GOP think they control the White House, but in reality it’s demantia-ridden Trump.

Focus on getting someone in that can spend eight years after fixing what Trump has done.

I don’t see him lasting his full term. Dude’s old, is incredibly unhealthy, and has enough power-mad people around him that the first sign of weakness will probably be enough for medical intervention and Vance becoming president. Becoming president AGAIN at his age is possibly the dumbest thing he can do for his health.

I’ve told this story a few times now, but I never get sick of it.

Back in 2011 I left a startup that got acquired. On my last day we had a Christmas Party with our parent company, and we got to speaking to one guy that was on his own. After a few drinks, he blurted out that he had worked there for maybe 12 years, but at least 5-6 of those he was “unassigned”. When we asked what that meant, he said that his manager left and he was never assigned to a new team. He badged in every day, and after doing maybe 6 months of busy work and asking “wtf am I doing” to no answer from his department or HR he just came in to do his own stuff or play Unreal Tournament. He had yearly reviews with the head of department, and these were just high-level goal meetings where they reviewed the department, asked what he wanted, and left at that. Each year he was getting between a 2-5% pay rise, and outside of badging in he was only ever judged on his department output.

I always wonder what happened to that guy. The company is quite large and is still going strong, so he’s probably still there. I won’t name them, but another thing I loved about them was that they didn’t really know where to put Software Engineers, so they just assigned them to Marketing and gave each engineer a marketing budget to personally use - around £10k each. The best part? Everyone in marketing knew it was bullshit, but they pushed everyone to spend it because otherwise their budget would go down. Some highlights were a trip to Toronto to buy some books, a full team trip to Amsterdam to go to a React conference and live in basically 5-star accommodation, and renting a hotel lobby to quickly burn some money on interviewing interns. I think they actually have a tech department now, but I know many people I worked with that stayed for close to a decade because the WLB and perks were just too good to ignore.

Easy.

1. No one outside of the fediverse bubble gives a fuck about federation. It solves a problem no one has, and offers no real solutions to problems users have.

2. Mastodon offers nothing on the Twitter experience outside of “but it’s federated”

After close to two decades of programming, C# is still the best language I’ve used. While some of the newer features seem a bit weird, I’d say it’s one of the few languages that has never got in the way and has just let me write code that made sense. Even with all the improvements Java has made over the years it’s still nowhere near as good as what C# was like maybe 15 years ago.

The same goes for everyone’s other “fav” language, Python. Ruby has been a better beginner scripting language than Python for many years, and while Rails is definitely a ghetto, as a language Ruby is great at teaching great programming fundamentals.

I’m not gay, but the idea of outing ANYONE in the LGBTQIA+ community has long been a cardinal sin, enough so that it destroys careers and forces them to be almost globally shunned. I would imagine that for many there is a deep-set conflict between outing someone that has wronged them, and not outing someone that would likely want to be accepted elsewhere where they don’t need to pretend to be something they aren’t.

You cannot compare newly-formed countries with those that have CENTURIES of history behind them, and their own geopolitical goals over that time. The point still stands that no one outside of the US cares about their constitution or political system, and to say it does shows an incredible level of ignorance of world politics outside of US borders. Even countries like Australia with their own constitution maintain theirs to be as invisible to society as possible, and amend when needed without fuss.

Populism won’t disappear, ever. What I firmly dispute is that US politics has any stronghold over the rest of the world in terms of populism. Ultimately, populism is a world problem, and was a problem well before Trump even decided to have a go at politics. Brexit largely predicted that Trump would find power before others did, and populism largely found its way into the UK back in 2008 with Cameron. In France, you could argue the NF paved the way decades ago. The point is that Trump and the US did not dictate this - if anything they’re late to the party and hold zero influence in immigration based populism.

I think a lot of your comment boils down to a few things that Americans need to accept:

• Americans don’t care about policy. They like sound bites, and Trump gives those for days.
• People vote against their interests in the name for change, even if it negatively affects people like them (but importantly, not them)
• America is a deeply racist and misogynistic country.
• Playing it safe doesn’t win elections in America, but minorities only win if the other choice is uninspired.

Where I disagree is that it was a toss-up. Harris has performed worse than Hillary, which is wild considering how deeply unpopular she was. Frankly, before she ran it was obvious how disliked she was.

While I get it, I still find it weird that so many British people, including card-carrying members of Labour and British journalists volunteered to campaign for a foreign politician. It’s a damaging look in hindsight, and is likely why the US-UK relationship will be dead under Trump, as opposed to tight back in 2016.

With that said, he’s not wrong. The US is absolutely not ready for this, and it’ll take decades of education and a rebuilding of the Democrats to claw back from this.

…I have no idea what you’re talking about.

No one outside of the US gives a fuck about the US constitution. Many countries have their own constitution, and many of these countries have a history that goes back many centuries before America was a thing.

Yes, Trump has likely fucked it all up for anyone that isn’t rich or white, but no, this won’t usher in a new era of right-wing politics again. Many countries have either flirted with populism for decades already, or have got over their populist turn from pre-Trump and voted moderates in.

From the perspective of Europe, Trump ripping shit up is likely only going to result in a more united Europe, because they’ll need to pick up the pieces for climate change and NATO. Trump enforcing tariffs on European countries will harm exports while bolstering European trade, and might even go as far as to push countries like the UK that are largely Eurosceptics into aligning with those near their borders. This isn’t 2016, and with more at stake now I can see Trump either toning down his rhetoric, or isolating his country from his closest allies.

Yeah, the person above isn’t being accurate at all.

While here in the UK we rely heavily on the US for control of Trident, the US dropping NATO support would just require additional defence spending and closer alignment with Europe. If Trump is bought by Russia, Putin would see this as a Very Bad Thing, and would want to keep the US in the fold because even with the US NATO would likely steamroll Russia.

The Trump dynamic is somewhat problematic, should it fester elsewhere in Europe. Globalisation was an important trait to maintain for the US, whereas most populist movements move towards buying local or supporting national interests above all else. Europe is largely self-sufficient, even in defence, so Trump would probably cut off huge numbers of imports/exports just to prop up Elon’s shitty cars.

Oh boy, I’ve seen a few:

• At a startup, one dude had obviously lied about his credentials. He was hired as a writer, but couldn’t write shit. He spent the entire day hitting on women and bitching about how his ex wanted support for a child he wasn’t convinced was his. He was fired about 3 days in…

• When I was a student, I worked at a sports store. One girl there was, let’s say, packing in the chest compartment. She was also about 17, maybe 18. Most people were nice enough to not hit on her, but one day the security guard (who was maybe late thirties at the youngest) made a comment to me to say “I would absolutely destroy her back door, you know?” (but slightly more graphic). I told management, and she was brought in. She broke down, and went over all the off-hand comments he’d made to her. The manager immediately walked out, told him he was fired, and apologised to her.

• An old employer hired this guy who was a Microsoft MVP nominee. The guy was one of those types that could talk brilliantly, but couldn’t take criticism. He listened to me, as I was senior, but ignored anything from managers or people at his level. To cut a long story short (I could write a book on this guy, and it would be hilarious) he lied about a project he worked on solo for six months. After checking in on his work we found he had bypassed our PR system and had been accepting all of his own requests, so no one has verified his code. It was an absolute mess. It cost the company a quarter of a million, for a project that should have brought in £50k. We later found out he was a nominee because he was so active on some Microsoft support forums, and mostly got that through posting “yeah I had the same problem” or from supplying easy or wrong answers. That loophole was closed shortly after…

Non-American here, trying to understand.

Are these prices after insurance? If you have insurance through work, and you’ve paid a premium for “good” insurance (assuming you can do that for your family), are you still paying insane amounts for medicine and hospital care?

I’m British, and I’d say that this was probably my first time acknowledging what college is like in America. We can legally drink at 18, but we’ve usually got a year or so of drinking behind us already, so university for us is basically just studying between drinking sessions at a time when it’s legal (and encouraged).

Van Wilder seemed absolutely wild to me, especially the idea of dorms outside of a first year, and all the events that US colleges have for people. The basketball scene especially is wild, because university sports are (again) an excuse to drink with people that like playing basketball. It kinda seemed amazing to me, but yeah, being an older guy around students would be my idea of hell nowadays…

I say this as someone in big tech, AI is pushed because it’s an easy lie to keep big companies viewed as innovating to shareholders. I say this knowing that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have contributed significantly to AI research in the last few years alongside the obvious contributions of OpenAI - the goal isn’t groundbreaking AI work, but to act as a smoke-screen to show that nothing else has been delivered.

Google has lost ground in advertising, and is losing customers on many of their services. Amazon is losing ground in cloud computing and in retail. Apple has stagnated with recent poor releases. Microsoft has made ground in cloud, but has struggled in advertising, Xbox, Office, and Windows. They use GenAI to keep their stock price high, otherwise they’d drop like a sack of shit because shareholders would say “what the fuck have you even done in the last half a decade?”

Van Wilder

Soundtrack is incredible, it’s one of Tara Reid’s best roles, the cast is absolutely stacked, and IMO it’s basically Deadpool without the costume. It’s Ryan Reynolds best movie to date, and if he doesn’t return for a second (the sequel doesn’t exist) his career afterwards is ultimately pointless.

There was an article back when Brexit happened that stated something few people believed at the time - this will likely result in Trump winning the GOP nomination and securing the white house.

It’s exactly the same again. The elite don’t see the problem, so working class people vote for the destructive option as it harms those in power as much as it harms them.

It’s quite simple, and aligns with why he got in in the first place.

The economy and cost of living is still in the toilet. Trump is a protest vote because competent public servants have failed to even acknowledge that everything costs 2-3x what it did a decade ago. Sad to say, but most people don’t give a fuck about LGBTQIA+ rights, Israel, Ukraine, or anything outside of this.

Call it apathy if you want, but it’s ultimately a failure of moderates to acknowledge a better social net for people (I.e. left policies) or propping an economy by improving lives for regular people so their money goes further.