My suspicion is that it’s because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they’re not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.

I usually download apk directly to my android devices and install from there, no pc or other device is needed. So your whenever is for me almost never.

So your idea of justice is to heavily sentence people for actions that are not related to the crime that they are being sentenced for. That’s not justice, that’s called vengeance.

And yes, someone defrauding the government should be sentenced less severely than someone who does a violent robbery. Violent robberies can get people killed and even if noone dies or gets wounded, the victims will still be traumatized. None of that can happen with white collar crime against a big organisation. That this difference isn’t obvious to you, should imo be a wake up call for yourself that you need to calm down and take some time to rethink some of the things that you belief.

And Trump does the following: “President Donald Trump signed off on several eyebrow-raising pardons this week, including a man whose daughter donated millions to his PAC and a convicted fraudster he had already freed from prison for a different fraud scheme during his first term”

Trump hands out pardons after blatant corruption & at the start of people’s sentences. Biden did not do that. That you want to portray Biden to be as bad as Trump, shows that apparently your fairness compass is very broken.

And that person who got pardoned after already serving 10 years of his prison sentence … 10 years is already a freaking long time for non violent crime, which also didn’t ruin anyone else’s lives. Sentences have to follow a gradiant along the severity of the crime, if not you end up with a broken system (like the USA one). Prison should be temporary, a chance for correction and rehabilitation, where the person one day gets released with another chance at living a quiet honest life. That you want that man to die in prison … Says a lot about you again.

I looked it up and there was a good rationale based on fairness behind Biden’s pardons. Most of Biden’s pardons also weren’t really pardons, but commutations of sentences: “Context: The thousands pardoned on Friday were “serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today,” Biden’s statement said.” https://www.axios.com/2025/01/17/biden-presidential-pardons-clemency-record Which seems fair and also needed to me. Imagine having 10 years left to serve of your 20 years sentence, while new convicts only receive max 5 years for the same crime.

What Biden did with pardons was completely different from what Trump is doing with them.

Meet the parents:
The filing states that Rodis (the father) “is a former attorney who was convicted of federal conspiracy and wire fraud and was later disbarred following that prosecution for a multi-million-dollar scheme in which he used his law license to deceive vulnerable victims for profit.”

Rodis previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after the scheme, which “defrauded more than 1,500 homeowners of approximately $6 million,” was brought to light, according to the filing.

The filing also included testimony from a director of photography on The Cleaning Lady set, who described Rodis as “pushy and manipulative” and said that he would “frequently encourage and tell the children to hug people on set, including Mr. Busfield.”

The accusers’ mother, LaSalle, has an “equally disturbing history,” the filing states, citing that she “has had multiple civil judgments entered against her for fraudulent and dishonest behavior.” She was sued for “various claims including fraud, conversion, and fraudulent transfer,” including allegedly unlawfully repossessing a Bentley car after selling it and writing bad checks to Las Vegas casinos, according to the filing.

https://people.com/timothy-busfield-lawyers-claim-parents-of-alleged-sex-abuse-victims-have-history-of-fraud-11887859

It looks like a reference to Elon Musk to me. Around the time of his take over of Twitter, Musk claimed that he was a “free speech absolutist”. Once statistics came in, it turned out that Musk’s twitter had a practically 100% compliance rate with censorship requests from authoritarian states, far higher than it was before the take over.

USA conservatives also do frequent calls for violence and claim freedom of speech when called out + then turn around and try to censor other peoples free speech when they don’t like the message. The last bit was especially noticable after Charlie Kirk’s murder. People who quoted Kirk to show what a vile person he was, were harassed and some even lost their jobs.

The slogan for conservative free speech absolutism might as well be “free speech for me, but my rules for thee”.

Public payphones in the streets and emergency phones alongside highways have also been removed (at least in my country). So yeah, our society expects us to have our own phones with us whenever we’re away from home.

The behaviour of ice and the dhs fits the definition of terrorism: “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims”. State terrorism is still terrorism.

Nazi Germany prior to the Reichstag fire was kinda like the usa now: thugs on the street harassing civilians of chosen outgroups without consequences, but the government was still ostensibly obeying laws and not yet mass disappearing people. I think usa republicans aren’t ready yet to have their Reichstag fire moment, but it just seems like a matter of time. Their expansion of ice seems pretty much unopposed & their take over of government agencies + army/navy appears to be progressing steadily as well.

That’s scorn + derision.

The argument was never about the lady, the lady her plight is a story telling device to make this abstract problem more relatable, to make the story more compelling and to get empathy + sympathy from the audience. The same way I tried to use my grandmother’s experience as a story telling device to make you more empathic with people who are differently able than you. These kinds of people exist in every country, you may even know some without knowing it because it’s not exactly written on our faces what our cognitive capabilities are. They deserve our sympathy and help if they want it, but to be scornful towards them is bad imo. I really don’t like victim blaming.

What I’m trying to say is: Keep an open mind, don’t let your prejudices determine your opinions about people, grow some empathy and try to be sympathetic with people’s situations. Scorn is never the right answer.

Yeah, there’s that scorn again that I was talking about. Your derision and scorn towards those that are less able than you demonstrate a lack of empathy and an absence of sympathy. Your “lots of data” is just your prejudices, you’re making sweeping generalizations, not based on knowledge or understanding, but largely based on your preconceived ignorant opinions.

That lady isn’t perfect, but as we can see, neither are you. Nor am I obviously. Cut people some slack, grow some empathy.

What this data also tells you is there is not a single country where 100% of people know how to cook, there will be people like that lady in every country. Some countries will have more as a percentage of the population, others less. Even Poland will have some. Those people deserve empathy, not scorn.

What this data also shows is that going out to eat is unlikely to be the reason for not being able to cook. People in western Europe and especially Spain/Portugal/Italy go out to eat very regularly, often daily, yet these countries rank higher on the cooking map than eastern Europe where people eat out less. That part of your reasoning, is again based on prejudice.

Prejudice, lack of empathy, scorn, I realize that these are negative terms and that you will find them offensive when applied to you, but … they are the correct terms. Your reasoning is based on prejudice. Your attitude towards that woman was scornful. You show a lack of empathy with people who are not like you.

That lady is 1 person, there’s no indication that she’s representative of the USA population as a whole. To see 1 person and then assume that everyone else in her country must be like her, is a very stupid generalization. Your opinion is based on prejudice, not reason. So far you’ve shown a tendency for victim blaming, a lack of empathy towards individuals that are left behind & prejudice towards all US Americans. Should I assume from that that all Poles lack empathy, and are full of prejudices about other people? Of course not, because you’re only 1 person and therefore too small a sample size to make a sweeping generalization like that.

I’m not from the USA, neither was my grandmother. Irregardless of that, even if we were from the USA, my grandmother would have left school decades before the USA education system fell behind that of other Western nations.

My grandmother also read books and a non stupid daily news paper, but she still couldn’t do basic arithmetics. It wasn’t about intellect, sometimes it’s opportunity and exposure, or maybe the unique wrinkles in our brain. There’s all sorts of people, not everyone is able to do the same things, so grow some empathy.

My grandmother was a great cook and also liked to cook, but she still needed my grandfather to do the very basic math to convert the recipe ratios in function of the amount of guests. She wasn’t stupid, she just left school at 13yo to help in the house and the only math that she did after that was counting.

All that to say: It’s not because it’s easy for you, that it’s easy for everyone.

Not just the fed I think. For example, this would also allow republicans to fully take over the fec (currently inoperative because of lack of quorum) and then use it as a weapon against their opponents, in order to win the 2026 elections. All these agencies were independent for a reason, there’s bound to be many more opportunities for abuse of power.

There’s not that many semi independent agencies left that aren’t under control of Trump or one of his cronies I think, the most notable being the fed. If Trump manages to take control of the fed, then trust in the dollar will take a major hit and it’s going to send the markets into a bit of a panic. But that small panic will be nothing compared to the fallout of when Trump actually starts mismanaging the Fed.

Comics might be good, the stories need less words to progress, protecting you somewhat from being bored with the story as you take longer to interpret the words. Jommeke is a classic, but you’ll be able to find many more titles aimed at young children. “strips voor jonge kinderen” or “strips voor beginnende lezers” gave me some good results.

It used to be that the first result to a lot of queries, was a link to the relevant Wikipedia article. But that first result has now been replaced by an ai summary of the relevant Wikipedia article. If people don’t need more info than that summary, they don’t click through. That Ai summary is a layer of abstraction that wouldn’t be able to exist without the source material that it’s now making less viable to exist. Kinda like a parasite.

Usa republicans are such a weird alliance of values. It seems that on one side there’s a bunch of xenophobes who don’t care if someone is a lying corrupt grifter, as long as their skin has the right color and they profess the right racist + misogynist values. And on the other side there’s a bunch of lying corrupt grifters, who don’t care what skin color or sexuality someone has, as long as they’re also lying corrupt grifters.