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the leader and captain of the portugal national team. at 41, the elder of the squad. he has an indescribable, unbelievable career, and despite all of it he still hasn't earned his team's respect. to manage that under these conditions, you have to have a character like a total dick, and that's exactly what ronaldo has pulled off. you're wasting your time debating why the messi crowd hates ronaldo, when the man's own team and his former teammates don't even like him. the freak's only friend is piers morgan. when the captain of one of the world cup's most special squads changes his tune before the tournament, just because his rival won, and says "the world cup isn't a dream, it won't affect my legacy," nobody's going to respect him. and if they hadn't brought in a puppet coach precisely so he'd do this, they wouldn't have even put a guy who says these things and who's washed up in the arab league on the squad in the first place. one of them cries after a match he turned around, saying he was about to let down the team he made champions, while the other, after getting knocked out, talks about himself like he's someone else and says "before cristiano, portugal had no cup, my conscience is clear." you're a disrespectful to everyone, that's why nobody likes you. now get the hell out of here and go slap emojis on the insta posts claiming they rigged the cup for messi.

morocco probably takes it, but what makes football football is teams that are a couple tiers weaker standing up to the strong ones, and sometimes even pulling off the upset. so you can't speak in certainties. i didn't watch canada much, but in the 30 minutes or so i managed to catch during the bosnia match, they flat-out steamrolled bosnia, though of course playing that kind of ball against morocco is a different story. may the better team win.

we're seeing the destructive effects of corporate socialism, in my opinion. the european union's transition to electric wasn't just for the sake of being hippies; the goal was to phase out a problematic energy source that isn't its own and switch to clean energy that can be produced locally. but with everyone saying it's important for the economy, important for politics, vw and other firms were shielded from every kind of hardship, and they went on finding their way in an artificially created market where fierce competition had been eliminated. the electric cars they made just because the eu was pushing them, they made deliberately ugly and weird, because they were losing money on each vehicle they sold. even dieselgate couldn't manage to shake them.

but what happened in the end? just like europe, china too was forced to confront a problematic energy source that wasn't its own, but they didn't have internal combustion car companies they felt they had to protect, and through trial and error they finally ended up making good electric cars. even when vw started to sense that internal combustion was on its way out, it tried to protect its old model. instead of understanding the new thing on its own new terms, it kept trying to save itself with an electric version of the old one. by the time it got to where it could make a decent electric car, its brand had already taken major damage.

what's more, in the new world, customers had learned that led interior lighting and cameras aren't the expensive things vw was used to selling them as. things that were innovative and premium 20 years ago were now basically twenty cents extra. things that were expensive package features in the vw world became freebies in the china world. the system of vw, and really of all the european manufacturers, collapsed, and they did great damage to their brands while trying to protect the old instead of adapting to the new.

purely because of everyone's never-ending "i saw you in my dream" excuse that's been going on for years, i couldn't even bring myself to text the person i saw in my dreams three nights in a row. come up with a new excuse already. as the people who actually have the dreams, our reputation's been reset to zero because of you.

the first player in world cup history to score in 7 consecutive matches. the goat.

a not-so-smart phone that the new commodore company is going to produce...

https://commodore.net/callback/ messaging apps will work, you can say hello, and it has a camera too... no social media, no browser... seems like it could be worth a shot (if it's cheap), but a person gets bored after a while.

if a person describes everyone in their life as bad and themselves as innocent, the next bad character at that table is probably going to be you. walking a path with someone who doesn't take responsibility for themselves and always pins the blame on others is no different from throwing a stone into a bottomless well.

billing the tax system as "the plunder of the people's labor" and trying to mobilize the ordinary citizen's natural discontent toward the state "for his own interests," mr. gatsby is hard at work trying to whip people into a frenzy and incite them to revolt.

first of all, elon musk and a salaried worker are not victims of the same tax regime, let's underline this. the ordinary citizen's income is cut at the source, meaning from their salary, before it even reaches their hands. there's no chance of evasion or avoidance. and because they're forced to consume the bulk of what they earn, they also pay every kind of consumption tax and indirect tax, in full, without exception. they're even exempt from, that is to say left out of, the tax refund system that benefits the rich. the system works in front of them in an utterly transparent and openly merciless way.

musk's fortune, on the other hand, grows through the shares he owns gaining value. the annual billions of dollars of wealth increase, totaling up to a trillion dollars, can stay untaxed because it's counted as "unrealized gains." he can even use this fortune as loan collateral without selling it and effectively spend it. meaning he's one of the people benefiting from the system's greatest advantages.

despite this, the rhetoric he uses places himself in the same position as a minimum-wage worker and creates an illusion of common victims being robbed by the state, the classic "we're in the same boat" line, if you will.

with this content he's using the people's justified grievance against the tax system in order to defend the interests of himself, one of the most advantaged actors in that very tax system. that's why what we see here isn't an ordinary tax critique, it's plutocratic populism.

sentences like "your time doesn't belong to you," "the state is seizing your labor," "your house isn't actually yours" in particular may look deep and philosophical at first glance, but when they come out of the mouth of the richest person in the world they take on a different meaning. these aren't the complaints of the worker, the civil servant, or the small tradesman who feels the tax burden the most heavily; they're the complaints of a billionaire a significant portion of whose fortune grew through the privileges the current tax system offers.

in short, what we see here isn't a plato-esque search for truth but an extremely modern technique of political communication: taking the people's anger toward the system and turning it into a shield for criticisms directed at his own fortune.

the net worth of a man who talks as though he suffers from the same tax woes as the people exceeds the annual budget of some countries. you can't help but say screw off.

it's a matchup between two oil-rich countries... the only difference being that america brings "democracy" to one, while covertly exploiting the other.

the cybertruck has been discussed many times here, but it’s literally an automotive disaster—an absolute mess of a vehicle. (and before anyone asks, no, i don’t have the money to buy one, but hey, it’s free to criticize.)

– the body panels are poorly manufactured and don’t fit together properly, causing them to stick out. the only task required is simple sheet metal bending, and they can’t even manage that. in a well-functioning automotive company, such quality issues would have the quality control team putting the engineers on notice. even cars that people dismiss as “cheap,” have tons of quality control checks. if you fail even one, the quality control team will be right there to hold you accountable.

– the so-called stainless steel used for the vehicle is actually rusting, which is outright fraudulent.

– in whistlindiesel’s video, as mentioned above, the chassis breaks under relatively high stress on the tow hitch. this means the structural integrity of the vehicle is compromised, essentially rendering the truck useless. additionally, in the same video, when you shut the doors firmly, the interior trim not only traps you inside, but also cracks when you try to open the door.

– the truck’s bed volume is ridiculously small compared to other light trucks. they tried to make it look sleek and ended up compromising on practical utility.

– the vehicle is incredibly rigid, meaning in the event of a crash, it’s not the car that will absorb the impact—it’s you. this car ignores modern automotive safety measures, so in an accident, the car remains intact while all the crash energy is directly transferred to you, likely causing severe internal injuries and multiple organ failures. it’s a recipe for a horrifying death.

– the biggest concern for me is the steer-by-wire system. in products like fighter jets, a fully electronic fly-by-wire system is used, but remember, fighter jets are few and not used in populated areas. this car, however, is a "commercial vehicle" meant for everyday use among people. in the event of a malfunction, the steering system is entirely under electronic control, not yours. if there’s a power transmission issue, you could lose all control of the servo motors. a software glitch could cause the vehicle to make unexpected steering inputs, leading to potentially fatal accidents. in a large, three-ton vehicle, the lack of a mechanical failsafe system is terrifying. you can see the steering system locking issue in whistlindiesel’s video as well.

in conclusion, in my opinion, selling this vehicle to the public is a big mistake. the current american vehicles, due to tax incentives in the u.s. automotive sector, are already massive, six-meter-long, three-ton death machines. adding this vehicle, with its numerous safety flaws, only makes things worse. it’s highly likely that, like the chevrolet camaro zl1-1le and many other american cars, the cybertruck will face strict regulations in europe and might even be banned from sale there due to these safety concerns. and rightly so. this vehicle is a huge insult to the 120-year-old automotive industry and to the safety regulations developed to prevent people from dying, all because of elon musk’s social media influence and the tech bros who get swept up in it.