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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 27th, 2025

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  • It only means “we have this bunch of people that we say are ‘the enemy’, but we keep the definition vague so that it can be anyone or any group that is convenient for us to use, as per the fascist playbook.” The purpose is to channel hate and people’s frustrations into a movement for their own purposes, and it doesn’t matter to fascists (or neofascists, or pseudo-fascists, etc) if it’s actually built on nothing.

    “Woke” meant something, and there was the “anti-woke” people, and the right took advantage of that hate, twisted and muddled it into basically a meaningless but convenient tool today.


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    11 days ago

    I meant to reply after looking into Withings but I forgot about it. Thank you for sharing about Withings!

    Withings looks good. Privacy policy (iirc) lists all of the third party services it uses that may hold customer data, and not many of them are from the US either (and when they do, it’s meant for US customers). Didn’t sound like they share much with these services either.

    It’s a bit of a shame that you need a subscription for the health and fitness improvement stuff (via Withings+), but it does look like you get all the regular metrics with just having the watch.

    I do wonder if those data can be exported without having to go through Apple Health or Health Connect, but I guess I’m not gonna holding my breath there.




  • Using Germany as an example to argue against PR is disingenuous on many levels. It shows a lack of understanding of how things work, what things are meant for, and also a blatant disregard of Germany’s history.

    1. You’re essentially asking for an electoral system to keep extremists at bay, when no such system exists because it is simply impossible for any system to do that. Trying to use an electoral system for such a purpose is operating at the wrong level if you want to keep extreme views in check.
    2. Germany has a unique history with far-left ideologies, how it got dismantled, and how the East and West reunified. If you look at the current state of old East Germany, you’ll see that the prosperity of the West did not flow into the East; their living conditions are bad, amenities lacklustre, there’s not enough jobs around and they don’t pay well, and the Western population can easily buy up their lands and properties just due to how much disparity there is in terms of wealth. And if you look at the electoral map and results of the last election, you’ll see that both far-left and far-right parties have a strong hold on old East Germany. This is the failure of the German government at truly unifying both sides of the old Germany. And if anything, I’d even argue that it’s a successful example of PR at work, as far as being a system goes.
    3. Keeping or adopting any kind of Winner-Takes-All system will simply further divide us and keep voters feeling disenfranchised, believing that voting brings no effective change, all for no good reason.

    An electoral system is not political. It’s the framework of which you exercise democracy.

    Trying to make frameworks, which are meant to surface all voices, suppress certain ones is, frankly, barking up the wrong tree.


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    14 days ago

    I can’t say I’ve found much about Polar’s status as a company, but there seems to be a few Reddit posts talking about some kind of financial woe at the company. Hadn’t seen info about its ownership tho, or if there’s been changes.

    And yeah, someone else mentioned Suunto, and I did find out that it’s now Chinese-owned, by what seems to be originally a XiaoMi subsidiary.





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    14 days ago

    Oof, the privacy on the Suuntos isn’t great apparently, or at least their privacy policy isn’t. Your health data gets sent all the way to China it seems. If I assume Suunto Oy is still Finnish (it does have a Finnish address), all their affiliates listed in their privacy policy are Chinese.

    Digging further, they’ve apparently been sold to Liesheng in 2022. Liesheng used to be known as “Blue Mi”, ie a subsidiary of XiaoMi, which was created to focus on vital tracking.



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    14 days ago

    Thanks for sharing! 2 months of battery life sounds amazing!

    It’s a bit unfortunate that 28% of their products are manufactured in China, and, I haven’t checked, idk how transparent are they wrt this info on their product. But I will keep an eye out!




  • “Let us not submit to the vile doctrine of the 19th century that every enterprise must justify in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income… why should we not add in every substantial city the dignity of an ancient university or a European capital… an ample theatre, a concert hall, a dance fall, a gallery, cafés and so forth.

    “Assuredly we can afford this and much more… We are immeasurably richer than our predecessors. It is not evident that some sophistry, some fallacy, governs our collective action if we are forced to be so much meaner than they in the embellishments of life.”

    This is such a nice quote! I love this! At the same time, I feel a tinge of sadness, that this sort of sentiment is still just a sentiment that’s not widespread, and there are lots of people “submit(ted) to the vile doctrine of the 19th century that every enterprise must justify in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income…“ Heck! We have major political parties that are working exactly for that doctrine!


  • Way to blow a good lead and give your opponents ammo, and especially at an opponent that’s trying to grab onto every possible thing that could be an ammo.

    Edit: And I also wanna say, man I just can’t with the CPC. Their rhetoric sucks, their role as the opposition is juvenile af (just look at this childish comeback!), and their entire existence feels like they just pull Canadian politics down to the sandpit and make people fight like dumb kids who don’t know and can’t act better.



  • I’ve definitely heard of irrational hatred towards the Libs from South Asians, but not so much from those of Chinese descent, but tbf my real life circle isn’t that big and we don’t really talk about politics. As an immigrant myself from a similar demographic (am Southeast Asian), I have to say that I don’t understand this rightward shift in voting sentiments. Is it cause they’ve never been under Harper, or never heard of what things were like under him? (I’ve only been here since Trudeau) The Cons never came across as being friendly to non-Whites, and that should already be a warning sign.

    But afaik, a good number of the Chinese that I know of are generally supportive of being tough on crime and see Canada as being unsafe, especially the older generation. They praise China for having strong police presence and for its seemingly lower crime rate, and then says things like, “It’ll never be like that in Canada. And to think that we came here because it used to be bad there and was much safer here.” One that I’ve talked to said that he supports the CPC for being tough on crime (allegedly I would say, but nonetheless), and support scaling back immigration even further to hopefully bring back how Canadians used to be much more friendlier (he sees the large increase in new immigrants as a reason why Canadians have become less friendly overall). Perhaps to these people, they would rather trade being possibly oppressed for a chance of having lower crime rate? Idk how that’s more assuring from a safety standpoint but it makes sense to them.