Yes, that Hattori. He was named after an elf from Witcher 3. And the sword guy from Kill Bill.

Friendly reminder to all Americans that while a year and some weeks ago was a really bad time to challenge the Democratic party establishment (because in the case of Harris vs Trump, Harris would’ve been preferable, but that went to shit anyway), now is an excellent time to challenge the Democratic party. Vote 3rd party in local elections and even midterms, primary every god damn old guard Dem you can find, and make sure that the entire party knows how disappointed their constituents are and why.

Maybe it’ll work, or maybe democracy is too far gone in the US. But in the years between presidential elections is the only really good time to challenge the party.

Either way the world is watching because for a bunch of shitty reasons the entire world is dependent on the US in a lot of ways.

Unfortunately that border town is likely to be in my country. Narva is chock full of Russian speakers.

If the joke arrived safely, it looks like it wasn’t a Nissan. Perhaps it had an Aisin transmission?

I’ll be quite honest, Walmart’s bottom line would be the least of my worries personally

Exactly how I’ve felt for a while now. Nissan hasn’t been doing the R&D investments they should’ve been doing, for decades now. The first and second gen Leafs were their last real contributions to the automotive industry. The first one because it made EVs more mainstream, and the second because it made actually EVs more affordable.

Nissan already gets transmissions for the Z and hopefully some other vehicles from Mercedes. Nissan’s partner Renault uses Mercedes small diesel engines.

What they should do now is badge-engineer a low-end Mercedes like the GLA, GLB, or their electric equivalents, and sell it for less than Mercedes does. If Mercedes is willing. Do what Toyota did with the new Supras and BMW, except do it with the Skyline and Mercedes, the M256 inline 6 is a pretty decent engine for power.

Of course they could look to some other manufacturer for help too, doesn’t have to be Mercedes, but Mercedes knows how to make cars and they have a working relationship already. But they need a GOOD car that they don’t need to invest tons of R&D into, to boost their reputation and income for a while.

Nissan, at least here in Europe, only makes uninspiring crossovers and not one of them is better than the uninspiring crossovers made by their competitors.

In some markets they have their big-ass SUV, the Armada/Patrol, but the latest generation of that came out this year or last year depending on market and it lost the V8 (already no appeal to the type of people who would’ve bought them). Now the twin turbo V6 supposedly has great drivability characteristics, but is barely any more fuel efficient than the V8 behemoth that came before it… And of course the V8 sounded good.

In August this year they cancelled their only “cool” car, the Nissan GT-R which hadn’t had a true second generation, only facelifts, over 18 years of production.

Someone I knew, had either a 2016 or 2018 Qashqai, I forgot the exact year. After more than one engine repair, they decided it wasn’t worth repairing anymore. This was about 2-3 years ago. The car barely had kilometers on it. I’ve owned numerous cars over 15 years old and even over 20 years old with multiple times the mileage, which gave me less problems, and I’m talking about cars from manufacturers reputed for building problematic cars. Audi, BMW, etc…

The new Leaf has better specs on paper than the old ones, but it looks really cheap inside and why the hell do we have yet another front-wheel drive “SUV”? I think even Hyundai and Kia EVs feel more premium at this point, and it’s not like the Leaf is much cheaper. The Ariya has good specs on paper, but looks less practical than the Ioniq 5 and my god, why is everything a capacitive touch button on a flat surface? Just make real buttons ffs.

There’s not a single Nissan I’d buy right now that’s available for me on the market. The Z is cool, but not available in Europe unlike its predecessors. The GT-R was a dream car for me as a teenager, but now that I could even start approaching GT-R affordability territory in a few years if my ex hadn’t ruined everything for me financially, it’s being discontinued. Maybe I’ll own a second-hand one in 10 years, unless they start going up in price like R34s. Even the Navara, which actually wasn’t the absolute worst pick-up truck, has been discontinued.

Nissan’s just fumbled everything. I know there’s a place for uninspiring crossovers. Hell, SUVs saved Porsche. But Porsche knew how to make an SUV fast, comfortable and able to off-road well. Nissan just knows how to make a crossover that looks like shit, has no power, isn’t comfortable, breaks down fairly early compared to even European rivals, let alone the other Japanese companies… I think their ONLY saving grace is that X-Trail is not too bad off road? Unless the latest generation changed that too. And the kicker? None of these vehicles are cheap anymore. The prices of every manufacturer have gone up, so at this point Nissan’s not a lot cheaper than some entry-level Škoda that (and it pains me to say this, because I hate Škodas) is a much nicer vehicle.

Can he promote work from home? Maybe for city employees. But what can he do about private companies that are paying for expensive Manhattan offices for the prestige and don’t want them to be empty?

last year around 1.2 billion people were smoking that were of adult age (18), vs in 2000, it was 1.38 billion. (source WHO)

I think we have more adults alive now than we did in 2000 though. It’s a slight decline in % of smokers.

this really tells me that smoking still isn’t going anywhere in this world

That’s true

if smoking is still going to be so prevalent, despite countries smacking warnings and such on packaging, what do we do for harm reduction that the current products available don’t solve?

Limit the amount of nicotine, tar, etc, per cigarette.

For most smokers, one single cigarette is what they consume at once on a smoke break at work. Most people don’t smoke 5 in a row. If they get less of the bad shit per cigarette, they get less of it per day.

I’d also recommend super high cigarette prices, but that just leads to more smuggling. There’s a balance to be found there too.

The magazine style shit is obvious fake. The AI stuff is much easier to pass off as truly being the person that the face belongs to. To do that level of realism used to require a lot of work and even then it was just photos, now you can do videos.

It’s still going to get passed around by people who don’t know that’s not what you look like naked.

There’s literally discord servers for sharing nudes of women people don’t like. It’s disgusting.

Unfortunately it still happens in a lot of places, I’m just hoping it’s not as common here as the comment above described. Kinda sucks to raise a child in a society where groping is deemed acceptable.

Technically true, but sexual assault on men is even more underreported than sexual assault on women. We can’t let other men know we’re weak. Same goes for non-sexual assault. Two exes have been regularly violent to me and I just kept going because I’m not admitting in public that a woman is beating me. I just took it “like a man”, knowing full well I could knock them the fuck out, but choosing not to hit back.

So we really don’t know how much sexual violence is perpertrated against men by women. After all, men always want it, so we can not be raped by women. Unless it’s a particularly fugly woman maybe?

My point is, toxic masculinity and all that. We don’t know how much is being hidden.

If I’m reading the edit correctly, cappucino is saying that women being harrassed is a real problem in Mexico and that Morena is fucked up enough to use it as a distraction from other serious issues.

Edit; they’re also blaming the party, not her specifically. Reading up on her, I think she’s OK. The party seems corrupt though.

I have the same question because I believe that person is not a loaf of bread¹so I also question whether they live in Estonia. I like to think we’re better than that here nowadays (30 years ago might have been different, 90s were hell).

¹ Eesti leib means Estonian bread in, well, Estonian

Unfortunately yes.

I do hope they’ll realize that concrete policy proposals are such a huge part of what won here, not just Mamdani’s ideology or personality. The interview where he was asked about the bus plan being feasible was amazing, he had examples and numbers to back it up. It wasn’t just an “it would be cool” idea.

Oh I agree. But if you’re on your phone and think of something, even shitty memes are hard to make. On the computer it’s different.

Sometimes bringing people hope is more important than whether you get everything done or even just half. When people have hope, more progressive politicians may get their chances.

Well I’m hoping that what Mamdani can prove to the democratic party is that charismatic young leaders with progressive ideas are the way forward. Maybe then a certain monitor brand can get the 2028 presidential election nomination.

Part of me still wants to live and work in the US, NYC in particular. Ain’t gonna happen in this current state of things though. First you guys need a new president, then a huge lack of software engineers and then the country would be ready to receive me lol

But even that aside - some European conservative parties are just mirroring the republican party. I think if they lose power, our conservatives will also lose confidence and pull a bit to the left.