You just have to look at the EU. CC rewards aren't really much of a thing here. Because as I understand it, those companies are capped on how much they can charge vendors. In return, customers get cheaper products upfront rather than in some roundabout dodgy way.

... slaves?

Awww they're just too shy to list the "we need bottomless profits for our investors" fee.

One of my previous one tried to charge me for cobwebs. It was a farm house.

Tencent began investing on Reddit several years back.

Another win for the war on drugs.

Holy fuck. What a low bar these voters have. And wanna bet this guy will break the no-rape pledge?

That's such an out of touch with reality thing to say. This is how authoritarianism works. You're either subservient or a criminal with no human rights. Do you think they get a choice other than being locked or hanging themselves?

This is why I'm usually careful about addressing the Russian government rather than its people. There are loads of good people in Russia and I hope eventually they're no longer forced by evil leadership to be the world's antagonists.

Isn't this how baby lambergines are made?

If making friends in our teens and 20s was so easy then we wouldn't need to make more friends in our 30s.

Making friends isn't the hard part. Maintaining the friendship is. It's a lot of effort and often involves doing more work than the other party, especially if they have a busier life. But it also involves a lot of failures, as plenty of them just aren't meant to be. I look more at the effort others put back into the relationship than how much I like them, as the former is a much better indicator of the potentials.

I wouldn't call it hard per se. I would call most current dating practices a waste of time. It's a lot like playing the lottery, but instead of money, I pay with my time. And even statistically speaking, the odds are quite bad, for both sides. When you have so many choices every choice seems less worth it. When you have too few choices, competition is fierce. I envy neither men nor women in today's scene, and I'd expect it to be much more difficult for the LGBT+ community.

I would say two things to you, not necessarily connected.

One, we think the grass is always greener on the other side. When I look back at my partnered life compared to my single life now, I would say my life now is better. After spending time with myself I was finally able to solve loads of internal issues. Relationships can become a very comfortable state and I definitely let myself go too often. I haven't forgotten that loneliness also occurred while I wasn't single.

Two, you can make no mistakes and still lose. As Picard said it best, that's just life. If life isn't working now, I wouldn't expect a partner to fix it. After the honeymoon phase, we tend to fall back to our old selves. Use this time to get that self in order and perhaps while you do it you find yourself happier regardless of the outcome of life.

It's the way we tend to think of things as black and white. Someone decided to set some disaster increase threshold for the climate crisis events and called it a day. When it has always been about an increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters and more, both of which we are already seeing.