Depends of which currency you’re talking about. Brazilian Reais ? Sure. Minimum wage here is R$ 18k/yr, so that would be about 4x that. US Dollars ? Pretty hard, unless you’re on executive levels.

But… Cost of living here is much lower than in US. Take food for example. A Discord friend from Colorado showed me a picture of a carton of eggs… US$ 7.50 for a dozen. Here in Brazil for that price you could buy around 50 or 60 eggs. Buying or renting a home is way cheaper too, fuel costs are lower, because our cars can run on Ethanol, which is 40% cheaper that Gasoline, we don’t have to spend money on heating or heavy winter clothes (except for the 3 southern states, but it still cheaper than northern US. The coldest those states get around 25F).

Sure, electronics and cars are a bit more expensive, same for some luxury goods. But even with those things costing more, with wages close to the equivalent of US$ 30k, you can have a standard of living that in the US would require closer to US$ 100k.

I see more and more people moving to Bluesky, which means Xitter is becoming less and less relevant by the day. Except for nazi shitheads, that is.

Yup. Thanks to those controls and a federal program called “My home, My life” that I managed to buy a condo on a nice neighborhood for around $50k. By coincidence, it’s across the street from the labour union founded by our current president, Lula. Sometimes he visits the place to make speeches, so I get to see him :-)

Here in Brazil you can, but we have ways to curb real estate speculation, the government can force owners to rent or sell properties that are idle, this helps keep the prices under control. On top of that, mortgages for ones first home is strictly regulated, especially in terms of how much interest can be charged.

Replace the cat in the commics by a Siamese and you get my sweet little Marceline.

It’s a political move. By harassing one of USs largest corporations, the CCP hopes Sundar Pichai will call the morons in charge to complain and ask for concessions.

Currency. Paper money that has high acceptance internationally, like US Dollars or Euros, both can be easily traded by local currency pretty much anywhere in the world.

Activision certainly won’t. They’re owned by the same Microsoft that just bribed the Orangutan in Chief: https://web.archive.org/web/20250112043306/https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/3281096/microsoft-1-million-trump-inauguration/

There’s zero chance they’ll risk Melon lashing back at them because of a stupid game.

Well, they bought Occulus, so I don’t credit the VR innovations to Meta, they just added the data collecting “innovation” on top of it.

This is solid evidence for the inability of large corporations to actually innovate. They either copy smaller competitors or release crap that people don’t need and never asked for, like “AI”.