Absolutely this. AvE had exactly the same thing happen but Canadian and with tools. Now they’re both just too political for me to put up with sticking around for the technical stuff.

I’m not Australian and I’m not Canadian, so if I’m watching a technical video why do I need to know their political opinions?

I’m in China right now and frequently visit for my job. The concept of privacy in public is indeed very different but it is mostly viewed as for the public good. There are very nice cameras even in the smaller cities that track where you go and when. You will get a fine for crossing the street in Shenzhen through facial recognition. You can also pay for vending machines with your face. There are cameras on most roads with flash to track which vehicles go where and when. To someone from the US it feels incredibly different and invasive, but practically speaking if you respect the laws there is nothing to worry about.

One interesting place this extends to is police surveillance. There is much higher trust of police here than in the US and every interaction I’ve had with them has been excellent, overall far nicer than any I’ve encountered in the US. They’re monitored in public the same as everyone else after all.

So in short what you hear regarding lack of privacy is mostly true, but likely neglects the general mindset around it. Obviously for minorities who speak out against the party it’s pretty problematic, but for most who have political opinions it makes more sense to simply join the party and work within its framework. I’m always surprised how eager people are to discuss politics in China, I originally expected it would be entirely unacceptable to discuss. Also note that in many ways audio is a bigger invasion of privacy than video and we all carry microphones in our pockets at all times even in Western countries.

At least in what they say they certainly recognize this. The middle East as a whole talks about climate change much more than the US in my experience, mostly because to them it is an actual existential threat. Money is money so I’m sure they’ll keep extracting oil while it makes money, but every single middle Eastern economy’s goal has been to diversify from oil for many decades now.

Exactly this. The only annoying part is that it then doesn’t count toward your deductable and out of pocket maximum. It’s crazy how nominally $1k+ medicines become like $30 when you pay without insurance.

New outlook is less functional but much better UI design (it’s just outlook web access after all). Outlook hasn’t changed in forever because so many corporate high ups use it and think they know how it works. They always respond to emails that are already answered because they didn’t see the newer reply in their inbox. I suspect this resistance is why it’s a totally separate program to the old outlook. Yes, there are settings to group threads in outlook, but the interface is still pretty unintuitive and the vast majority of these users don’t change their default settings anyway. In my experience the terrible defaults create more problems than outlook solves. And the server syncing can be really slow at times. Personally, I’m very happy that MS is finally showing some interest to modernize outlook, the more people who use it the easier my job will get.

Also ya the name is stupid. Teams (New) gets me the most. Idk who possibly thought this naming scheme was a good idea.

Firefox mobile isn’t there yet. Passwords will conveniently autofill from your Google account thanks to the Android level implementation of password management, but more importantly it’s resource heavy and bad UI design. Ublock support is nice but some websites just don’t deal with it well. The nightly builds do fix my main problems with the UI but they crash all the time. So there’s hope for the future, but for now it’s not great unless you absolutely need proper browser level ad blocking rather than Blokada.