Discrimination - what you practice in selectively reading and choosing articles - is not the same as censorship at all. Discrimination is personal. Censorship stops other people from seeing things.

Pocketbook has far worse service and are not easily available in the US. Their use of flat bezels means that any small fall or bump will destroy the screen too.

The bezels of the Kobo are the reason I opted to jailbreak a Kindle instead of buying a Kobo. For me, they're far too distracting to see and feel

I appreciate the aesthetic of flat bezels, but I find cases more annoying than bezels so I go for bezels to avoid needing to buy a new reader every 6 months to a year. My flat-bezeled Onyx Boox and Pocketbook readers have proven much more fragile than my fully-bezeled Kobos and old Kindle.

While I do like Plato, it's got a lot of bugs and design issues... It can't handle epubs without chapters/really large chapters, it is noticeably worse on battery life than KOreader or the stock firmware, the amount of time taken to load the dictionary is proportional to the number of dictionaries, etc.

How could you possibly think those are the only LATAM countries the US has interfered with? We have been intimately involved in every government and every election in the Caribbean, Central, and South America for generations. Just this year there has been interference in Honduras, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia, Argentina, etc.

I mean.. attempted interference for sure. But since Cuba is still communist, I don't think we should overplay the US' might. And given how South Korea and Japan looks today compared to North Korea, I would be hesitant to draw any clear moral lessons.

The habit to blame the US/Europe/Jews for everything bad in the world and give a total pass to any other ethnic/political group for their transgressions seems pretty lazy at best, and actively dangerous at worst.

> The habit to blame the US/Europe/Jews for everything bad in the world and give a total pass to any other ethnic/political group for their transgressions seems pretty lazy at best, and actively dangerous at worst.

I'm not sure who you're arguing with in your head, but that kind of strawman should stay there rather than being brought into a public forum. Nobody has made any claims even remotely similar to those.

You are replying to a thread where I quoted:

> and not the fact that the US has spent 150+ years destabilizing that part of the world.

That's pretty clearly the same thing.

No, the Monroe Doctrine has been US policy for 200 years. Everybody learns about it in school and everyone knows what it means. That doesn't mean we

> blame the US/Europe/Jews for everything bad in the world and give a total pass to any other ethnic/political group for their transgressions

Europeans other than the Spanish and Portuguese have little relevance to Latin America, especially in a modern context. Jews haven't been mentioned by anyone. Would you care to elaborate?

Attacking a country's people because the government is a dictatorship makes no sense. Especially when we were just fine with the brutal dictatorship that preceded the one we hate, because that one was capital-friendly and didn't try to give white man's money to brown people.

I mean, if your argument is that sanctions never work and are useless, then that's a position that we can argue, but I guess that means you also would support lifting all sanctions against Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, etc?

Sanctions don't never work, but they certainly must be used judiciously. They can and will be anticipated and countered, as Russia has shown. Their overuse has pushed the intended victims into a trading bloc rather than isolating them. I want a competent and effective government, even if it's one that kills innocent people for profit and destroys democracy in other countries. Instead we just get sanctions that do nothing and evil for profit.

> [Sanctions] can and will be anticipated and countered, as Russia has shown.

How have they shown that? I think they've showed that they won't stop the war, but that's not at all the same as anticipating or countering the sanctions. Since they couldn't anticipate the war lasting longer than a week I think we can safely say they didn't anticipate having an ongoing war AND sanctions.

Due to the sanctions, Russia has shifted its economic focus away from the West. This has given BRICS a massive boost. BRICS+ now controls over 40% of global GDP and over half of global oil exports. I don't know how much the sanctions are affecting people's everyday lives in Russia itself. In 2023, there were newspaper articles here in Germany about how we are still importing Russian oil, just not directly from Russia, but indirectly via India.

I'd argue there's few Americans I flat out couldn't understand, even if it sounds like they're putting their words through a blender. And I say that having lived all over the country, Northeast, Midwest, West, and deep South. Accents can be thick but they're largely intelligible. Unlike, say, the Scots.

Especially compared to a language like German. I took 5 years of German and still didn't have a damn clue what anyone was saying if they were talking in dialect.

Well, he has been looking like he's going to invade Venezuala for a little while now. If they do a Syria-esque takeover of the oil-producing regions there could possibly be cheaper gas for wherever that gas would get shipped.

Don't hold your breath. Those fields need investment.

Hybrids are useful for people without garages though - the total market is much larger than for EVs, which are pretty exclusively a product for homeowners, and usually not the only vehicle either. EVs will always be a niche unless the charging infrastructure problem is solved.

I agree with your overall point (and I'm pretty confident improved infrastructure will fix the problem for non-homeowners... eventually), but I didn't understand this part:

> usually not the only vehicle either

It doesn't seem like EV or not would make a difference for whether to have more than one vehicle? My wife and I have shared one car, first ICE and now EV, for more than a decade and it didn't make a difference in our habits.

There's no real reason with modern EVs unless you really love road trips, but I feel like I very rarely meet or hear of EV owners who don't own more than one vehicle. That's probably less of a thing now that most new EVs have decent range.

I'd guess it's due to some kind of imprinting during childhood, similar to taste. The widespread prevalence of irrational phobias and methods for curing them certainly suggest to my untrained eye a learned behavior rather than innate.

Spider-fear has never been triggered by fictional spiders for me. Very few works ever bother getting the face and body right though. 8 legs alone are not scary for me, the fangs and eyes and color patterns and the sneaky movement and webs are scary.

I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.