Are you ok?

I take it the first link is older, the second one is newer?

I’m not American and I wonder if this stuff will ever cease to be in the news, I find it annoying to no end at this point (and can only guess how annoying it is to Americans who are actually affected by this). Biden might cancel some, even a lot of debt now, but within ten years you’ll just end up with a new generation of people in debt. So, is there anything being done about, or politicians even vaguely suggesting some more systematic fix for this shitshow?

And yet you’ve created this very Lemmy instance we’re posting on. Curious.

Tbh these really are low-usage features, I didn’t know about any of them, aside from the snoovatars that I’ve always found stupid. So I don’t think anyone could be pushed away from the site because of this.

OTOH, if they’re low-usage, why remove them? Do they spend too much bandwidth, CPU, whatever??

Even though they could just make their own Lemmy communities, or ask to be appointed as mods of existing ones…

It has custom user-made themes that are dark mode, so it probably has dozens of dark modes.

Umm… return to tradition, I guess??

A fun detail: this was written by a woman, priestess Enheduanna, the first writer that we know of by name.

Hell, a lot of the time I just go directly to Sci-Hub / Anna’s Archive because it’s literally faster than searching for my university and logging in.

This hasn’t been reported on much, but I actually checked what that “competition” really was, back when the image won the prize. It was some local festival in Bumfucknowhere, USA, which among various other events (sport events, food tasting, that sort of stuff) included an art competition. I doubt the jury was made up of highly experienced art critics.

And besides, people should trust their own eyes. If you like the picture, you like it, and if you don’t, you don’t. Appealing to the critics as a source of objective artistic judgment is naive, and I say that as someone who has published some art criticism myself.

I mean all of that is true, but, speaking as someone from Croatia - we don’t follow safety standards and regulations here anyway even with native workers, the quality of the bridge would definitely not be any better had Croats built it, and I doubt there even is the adequate workforce and know-how within Croatia that would be needed for such a massive and complex job. I would unironically expect the deadlines to be breached by several years had the job been given to a local company. We also aren’t a rich country by European standards, so the price was probably a crucial factor.

In case you’re worrying about general Chinese influence on Croatian politics, that’s not really a problem, our govt is strongly pro-EU (for better and for worse), as well as much of the population.