Actually people who don’t live outside have those accents as well. His parents actually moved back when he was 1 or 2 years old. This is really on the lines of the typical accent of people from this subcontinent who are highly educated (via English), well travelled, well read etc.

I have a friend who went to UK and came back after 13 years. Spent most of the time at SOAS. Her accent didn’t change at all. It is what it was when she left at the time of her bachelors. She did masters, PhD, and post doc there (the last one is still ongoing - not sure, some people study a lot).

But I see people coming from America in 3 bloody months and speaking English in American accent.

Simplenote, DayOne, Pocket Casts are already ready to challenge this failure - maybe not in terms of money, Matt. So never say never.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4 this is just an example as he is kinda famous. But you can find more. Here’s two seasoned journos talking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4682YUnN_yQ and this https://www.youtube.com/shorts/TXokRjBVSaA (I don’t like this journo to be honest but it’s another example of very common Indian accent - hers is actually less sophisticated as the previous ones have had kinda more “private school” upbringing).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ha-LoNqOaEk few examples of subcontinent English

It is actually nice when the person has better language proficiency in English. What people often make fun of on the Internet are many who either don’t know how to speak English or don’t know it well, and that’s pretty common and normal for that country of 1.5 billion. If you listen to any seasoned Indian journalist (especially a bit older), you’d hear that faint old English lilt (from the middle of the start of the last century). You will also find that in the way Pakistanis speak English. It’s very similar.

I like most or all of them when the speaker has at least above-average proficiency. Except American. Esp. the one that rolls a lot and for long (probably from the South of the USA, I am not sure). That’s what makes it very hard for me to watch/hear most of the American content.

My favourite, though, is from my home country, which has a very slight tinge of (old) British accent (colonial leftover/hangover) and also the Middle Eastern accent (it’s close to home), again only if the speaker has very good proficiency.

The thing is most of my gold (i.e. ~20% of my portfolio) is as ETFs. Good luck to me using that when civilisation collapses, if it does (I don’t think that’s happening in the shape and form as it sounds from this article). But then it was not likely at all I would be able to safeguard that in the physical gold form either in that perceived atmosphere of tyranny and mayhem, so that’s there.

One could, however, look to reduce or balance (whatever you wanna call it) USD exposure.

There is too concentrated which is bad (mac, win), and there is too fragmented which is bad (that is your Linux/distro universe). In other words, in one world, a single entity controls and is responsible for everything, and in another world, no one is. I am not getting into what is worse or better, rather what is usable for an end user.

And then there’s the tacit wisdom of the FOSS/Linux world savants: “Uh, if something is not done or not available – you can just fork it or raise a PR, can’t you?” completely escaping the fact that almost the entirety of the users of either world are just end users.

Yeah. And before this the world didn’t only consist of USA but we hinged these conversations on USA. I was commenting in that context.

The number of times I have used TikTok in my life is the integer just below 1.

(And now I am getting a sense of what that “other kind” of echo chamber these platforms are becoming as opposed to that kind of echo chamber Twitter etc are)

I mean the damn thing is banned here.

This is relevant for immigrants who are trying to escape poverty, almost with no future in their own countries either for their personal or professional aspirations. I am not a China fan, but when you look at countries around the world, many of which are very poor and underdeveloped but with lots of brilliant, hard-working people with dreams and potential, they would rather go to a place where they have at least some stability, predicted living and working conditions, and a future, rather than to a place where one doesn’t know whether the potential future mayor of New York City, born and brought up in the USA and hence of course a citizen who happens to be the son of a world-famous filmmaker and a well-known academic, will actually be deported or not. I mean that’s a real possibility at this point - let that sink in. (I am not even going for more extreme examples)

I wish things were better, and I wish we didn’t live in a world where China, yes, China – of all the countries, might become a viable alternative for people from the developing or underdeveloped world compared to the USA.

No, I am afraid it’s not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn’t make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.

I would assume that they mean ‘VPN not for anonymity’ when they say that. I agree with you though.

The thing is that 10 min search results in - trust all of them, trust none of them. A lot of folks also have affordability issues. So that makes this issue even more complex. When they turn a bit more “respected” forums they are told to “self host” or are given recommendations that they already knew of but couldn’t afford. So the problem lives on. All this lead to shady and heavy marketing VPNs come to the front.

With the phone number, no; and since there’s no Signal usage without a phone number, well…. Also, I think somewhere on their website (or some place) they talked about burner phones as if it’s a universal phenomena.

Signal has felt “out of place” to me. Odd. It doesn’t fit in, doesn’t make sense if I think a bit farther about it.

I hope something decentralised comes out of Signal protocol minus the need for a phone number.

Because on every occasion – at least in the case of Signal – they tried to switch, it was a far inferior experience for them, and the leadership behind the app/service took such puritanical decisions that it became evident that the ideology was more important than the people those tools were supposed to help/protect. I don’t even bother asking my friends now. In fact, now, for me as well, those (Signal, Matrix, etc.) are just things collecting dust on my spare phone.