I’m guessing you or the AI chatbot you may have asked are talking about the total US household wealth as reported in this Reuters article. That’s where I see the $180 trillion number.

What’s your source for this?

How do you define wealth? Physical stuff? Money in your bank account? GDP measures everything that someone pays money for.

This is not even close to being true. Elon Musk’s net worth is $850 billion. In order for that to be 1 in 200 of all wealth in the US, it would mean US wealth would have to be $170 trillion. For comparison, the World Bank estimates the entire world’s GDP in 2024 to be $111 trillion.

He, in fact, owns a much larger share than 1 in 200. Though it’s also obvious to anyone watching that most of this money is fake and comes from the fact that he holds a lot of assets which have extremely inflated valuations (i.e. are a bubble with no underlying economic justification).

The definitionition of “American” is pretty flexible. If you move here, live here, and want to consider yourself an American, then you are an American. Some loud zealots may say otherwise (typical in any country) but most Americans literally do not think about this at all.

I’m pretty sure all cultures adapt and learn from other cultures. That’s just how human culture develops. Vietnamese takes on French favourites resulted in bahn mi and Vietnamese coffee, both of which are very good. Poor Hongkongers wanting to eat like Brits resulted in Hong Kong’s famously weird “Cha chaan teng” food and Hong Kong-style milk tea. And, of course, Europeans went crazy over Mesoamerican chocolate and created a cornucopia of confectionery products made from the cacao bean.

Well, colonialism did bring tomatoes and potatoes to Europe.

I think the joke is that Americans like to adopt foods or cooking techniques from other cultures, then change them to fit local tastes. This is how a lot of “traditional American” foods came to be. There is also a stereotype that American cultural practices (gastronomy included) are “not real” or that American culture as a concept doesn’t exist because it comes as a fusion of cultural practices from other countries. The meme is poking fun at people who may hold that belief.

People also have a habit of describing the American versions of things to be “not real”, even if it never really claims to be. For example, fettuccine Alfredo in the US is an adaptation of fettuccini al burro (a real Italian dish), but is described as “not real Italian food” because it isn’t actually eaten in Italy. Or that orange chicken is “not real Chinese food” because it isn’t eaten in China. Which, to be fair, is true, but most American diners are aware that Panda Express, Olive Garden, and Taco Bell aren’t accurate representations of food eaten in China, Italy, or Mexico. They’re Americanised versions of food inspired by Chinese, Italian, and Mexican cuisine.

Americans associate the orange colour with cheese so it’s more cultural than practical. Other than the fact that some cheese being orange and some not being orange helps tell apart different varieties. For example, bright orange cheese is usually young cheeses that are used to make sauce or for sandwiches. Duller orange cheeses or slightly brown ones are expected to have a more sophisticated flavour (e.g. aged longer or smoked).

This is false, due to contaminants our air is legally considered dairy in Europe, and thus the average American actually consumes twice this quantity daily

America really has a litigation culture, not because people are particularly fond of lawsuits, but because problems which are generally solved by legislative enactments or actions by regulatory bodies in other countries, aren’t in the US, and thus the only way to find out who is right is to go to court.

I’m guessing what you’re suggesting is that Google’s proposal is the same as requiring all packages be signed and accompanied by an Extended Validation or Oragnisation Validation X.509 certificate.

While that would technically work, the problem with using the existing PKI is that it’s still very expensive to get EV/OV certificates. And the most common of these certs (those for TLS purposes) will soon only last 47 days which is, to put it mildly, would be a pain in the ass to use for package-signing.

“Management” like there are ever more than 2 people working at a 7-Eleven

Wikipedia relies on people reading it and realising “Wait, that’s wrong…” to fix inaccuracies.

Recently some PR company was caught taking money to whitewash the Wikipedia pages of their clients. The more people that are looking at the pages, the more likely it is that someone will realise they are being manipulated maliciously.

It really does depend on what you’re looking for. You can “replace” US Treasuries with comparatively safe assets like British gilts or bonds from large, stable EU countries like France or Germany, but these will be denominated in GBP or EUR respectively, not USD, so they’re not a drop-in replacement. The EU itself also plans to issue some joint debt to pay for Ukraine-related expenses, so that might also be available depending on how they do it.

As for stocks and ETFs, there is the Euronext 100, but a cursory web search didn’t reveal any ETFs that track it. I’m sure there probably is one, but I just didn’t find it.

That being said, the Euronext 100 isn’t a replacement for American indexes like the S&P 500 though. The liquidity on the European side is lower (and for EUR securities in general), and because the American stock market in general performs better than the European stock market, you would give up a lot of financial gain. If you invested $1,000 into an S&P 500 index fund on 1 January 2010, that would now be worth $6,111. But if you instead invested 1 000€ into a Euronext 100 index fund on the same date, it would only be worth 2 548€ today. Even if you cut it off before the AI-led growth in the American stock market, the S&P 500 still would have outperformed the Euronext 100 by nearly double.

Even if you do not use Google, if you don’t have something like uBlock Origin (which I highly recommend), you’ll still see advertisements on other sites which are served by Google.

Yeah, this is unfortunately why, immediately after the election, there was a surge of posts on Lemmy and elsewhere telling transgender people to rush a passport application or renewal while Biden was still in office. Basically within weeks of Trump assuming power, dealing with the federal government has been Hell on earth for transgender people.

They have a database of trans people. If you were ever issued a passport with an F gender marker, they would know you changed it.

If you try to renew, you’ll get the passport back with two holes punched in it with a letter telling you to apply again with an F gender marker.

Edit: Some transgender people have been issued the passport anyway with the gender they were assigned at birth. This causes problems because your appearance would not match the gender stated on the passport and thus would subject you to additional scrutiny at checkpoints. That’s not even mentioning the countries where being transgender is just illegal, although I don’t imagine you have many plans to visit those places.

It’s a good theory but it isn’t true. Google doesn’t show it to anyone.

Google says it doesn’t sell your personal info to third parties. While you would be well within your reason to suspect this isn’t true, it is actually legally relevant because it means, as a consequence, Google doesn’t provide a “do not sell my personal information” opt-out link which would otherwise be required by California law (where Google is headquartered).