You mean you’d pay the same amount for a house as a landlord pays? But you can do that now, why don’t you?
Has nobody ever informed you that growing demand leads to price growth only if supply grows slower? But if prices grow, then supply does also grow faster. These are feedback loops.
Which means that what a house costs now it would cost still, after a short transient process.
“Suck all supply”, my ass. You mean that you’d buy that house for 1/10 of what the landlord has paid for it, because it’d just be there, like a mushroom after rain? It wouldn’t get built, dummy, cause it wouldn’t be worth the money.
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
Russia’s military budget in size is sufficient for anything Russia would need defense-wise (and even aggression-wise, TBF) to a full extent. It’s just that most of the money was being stolen through all these years. It’s rotten to the bone.
About glory days - USSR’s military was really something “second best” somewhere in the 50s, when it was a system built for some actual overarching doctrine.
With every year passing Soviet bureaucracy was more and more entangling itself into a knot of financing and prestige and cabinet power struggles, so by 80s it would have like 4-8 simultaneously produced and operated models of tanks, with similar technology and details etc, but similar wouldn’t mean interchangeable, in fact there would be almost no interchangeable details between them. It was similar in any other area. Standardization (which Commies love to present as planned economy’s advantage) was a farce.
The bureaucratic system responsible for every part of the system would fight tooth and nail for some external benefits and provide some external service, soldiers and students would be used on harvest campaigns and housing construction, and the main purpose would be cemented, never reevaluated (I mean, everything changes in 5 years in real world in any area, and the Soviet doctrine has not evolved much between Korea and Afghanistan), and in fact lost.
Which is why, say, Soviet personnel carriers wouldn’t protect against anything. Their purpose was to move fast, be amphibious, be hermetic, be cheap to produce. Cause the plan was that after all the boom-boom stops in the Global Thermonuclear War, one would need to move infantry over burnt irradiated land, fast.
It really was in planning and function a bit like the Galactic Empire, be it the Azimov’s one or the Star Wars one.
Ukraine’s being yellow is just wrong. It doesn’t really matter if it’s fair, but with the ongoing war and the effects of it on the society and its attitudes towards press the color should be orange.
Well, there’s less bias typical for UK-funded sources than usual. At least Azerbaijan is not the same color as Armenia (thought the UK seem to have made a 180-degree turn on that conflict in the last couple of weeks, while keeping the same “formal""legal” position).
Ah, that’s OT, about Russia - it would be purple on that map even before 2008.
I don’t think it’s whataboutism to point out that a worse criminal you are fine with, and a smaller one not, because the latter kills “blue-eyed Europeans” and all that.
You can’t just discard observations that you are a hypocritical bag of piss with that one word, “whataboutism”. And it only refers to somebody defending their own crimes. Most of real whataboutism I see in social media comes from Turks and Westerners defending Turks.
Other than that, if somebody says that and you don’t, I don’t care if they’re a tankie. Turkey is worse than a Stalinist dictatorship, and I have priorities.
No, it doesn’t really, they just don’t want to do anything. Everything happening in Ukraine started happening much later than Turkey happened.
And about NATO design not conceiving of something - when Turkey was admitted to NATO, there were people still alive who saw not their parents and grandparents, but their children and grandchildren killed before their eyes in 1915-1921.
It was conceived that if somebody really wanted to get rid of that thing, then it’d be possible to make a shortcut on paperwork with all the military power. 1952, remember. But then again, it was 1952, you know, colonial powers still being that and not caring much about genocides of brown people. So nobody would see Turkey’s current behavior as a problem.
If you support the side opposite to Russia, be it Ukraine or NATO, you sort of support Turkey, cause of the context of alliances and relations. Turkey is in NATO and Turkey is friendly with Ukraine.
Point is, we’re not talking about B/Turkey.
We actually are doing that right now. If you don’t want to, you can leave this conversation. That’s the way conversations work.
And B/Turkey being bad doesn’t mean that A/Russia is excused from their terrible behavior.
Yes, it isn’t. You seem to imply that I said it is. I haven’t.
And (gasp!) Just because I oppose A/Russia doesn’t mean I support B/Turkey.
Not in general. But in our specific situation you sort of do through that opposing side being Turkey’s friend more than Russia itself.
The entire argument is bad faith and lacking any logic or critical thinking.
On all sides.
Now, about bad faith - if people like you yelling “whataboutism” can prevent a conversation on a certain subject, then it’s not really whataboutism. If they can do that without preventing that conversation from happening, then maybe it is. “Whataboutism” is not a basic concept. Once we turn to logic instead of some list of common fallacies, we don’t need it (and also logic beats any such shortcut).
About rogue member states not being thought of when NATO was being created - when NATO was being created, even France and UK were more likely to behave like “rogue member states” and they did in some little known cases (Biafra, for example, or the Suez crisis). And Turkey was full-blown fascist (well, it didn’t stop being that at any point since then till now, just Westerners conveniently assumed that it changed like Japan, say, one my relative in the US from Jewish side is just in complete denial that it hasn’t as it wasn’t civilized by bombs, while at the same time uneasy with my cousins going to Germany).
About NATO having its hands tied against Turkey due to Ukraine - if A happened before B, you can’t justify A with B. So you can’t justify Turkey getting away with everything it does by Russia vs Ukraine taking all the attention.
This particular kind of Nazi collaborators is actually all the rage now, since Western public has found THE conflict of our age in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, immediately conveniently forgetting all other conflicts and genocides going on where every Western power has consistently shat its pants. I’m pleasantly surprised that there is, in fact, outrage at this.
In Russian-speaking (those supposedly liberal) parts of Reddit everybody would be justifying this memorial. Cause most of people you’d consider liberal in Russia and Ukraine are in fact disgusted with Putin etc mostly because of weakness and lack of development and corruption.
Not because of any crimes, plenty of them support ethnic cleansing (say, supporting Russian central government against Chechnya is not cool anymore among them, but for most it was like 10 years ago) and even military aggression (say, Azeri aggression against Artsakh). They just want those things to look cool, and Putin’s empire of decay, theft, incompetence and general despair is not what they’d like to see.
You know, a bit like people from Hungary/Poland/Baltics just love to say that Soviets were “worse than Nazis”, and have that slightly hidden irritation at being reminded that there are Jewish people in the room.
Shouldn’t this be as simple as spraying something inflammable at the cloth and lighting it up? One needs a sprayer, a couple of canisters of gas (maybe diesel is better, though, cause gasoline evaporates too fast, various dangers due to it), and matches.
They also willingly participated in mass murders of civilian population (Jewish and Polish). By “free and independent” the narrative also stuffs this.
So no, whoever put that there knew very well whom they are celebrating. They are just fine with ethnic cleansing for some perceived benefit of their nation.
Which can be shortened to “a memorial to Nazi collaborators”, which is the title.
This is about one particular unit with history of war crimes. Different national legions of Wehrmacht and even Waffen SS have different record. I’m aware of some not so bad.
but I can understand some Ukrainians considering them to be freedom fighters against the Soviets, especially in 2023
I can agree that some “forest brothers” in1960s really were freedom fighters. But these guys - sure as hell not.
Nice to see somebody who likes Eco`s definition, but that’d be circular logic - his Ur-Fascism criteria were a result of optimization based on a selection of axiomatically fascist regimes, Stalin’s explicitly included. (Sorry for this sentence being clumsy)
Also Stalin’s regime became much more fascist in the middle of war and immediately after it. As an attempt to counter the “national liberation” offering of Nazis, with their national legions etc. So all the republics’ anthems are quite pretentious and proud, and Soviet propaganda in the middle of war also turned to nationalism from just revolution and communism and globalism.
About your invitation - well, 3 and 6 are actually not so easy for me. I’d say these were present before Stalin, as in 3 would be basic Bolshevism, and 6 would be basic Marxism. 14 - see my first paragraph, it was (for Orwell) first and foremost inspired by USSR, and while Nazis or Italian fascists also had distinct public language (Klemperer’s Lingua Tertii Imperii comes to mind), they never went as far.
I can’t say anything about Graeco-Catholic or just Catholic Ukrainians in the USA, but most Ukrainians from ex-USSR I’ve met celebrate both. They’re just kinda modest with the Nazi part, but they are fine with it, and see it as something naughty all big boys have done, not to boast about, but important. They do have a problem as a nation.
It is stuff like this that is fueling the propaganda of Russian’s invasion as an attempt to de-nazify Ukraine.
Wanted to say that nah, that’s not really a working mechanism… But suppose some people buy it. What even then, we should just whitewash crimes because recognizing them may strengthen propaganda in some particular case?
Yeah, I meant that it’s a truism, it’s not adding new information. I’m clumsy with words, sorry.
One person (similar for me to the one described as “hell on earth” in the Disco Elysium game) also advised me long ago to read “Homo Ludens” by Johan Huizinga, it approaches (not as the main subject, just in the end a bit, it was written in the 30s) the similarity between various fascist (including Stalin’s) regimes from another direction - sublimation of games, as in imagining and playing and then abandoning games which involve fighting and loss. In addition to manifestations of the 30s noted by the author, one can also look at today’s more militant and generally inhumane societies and see that they have consistent traits in relation to fantasy and sci-fi literature, and fairy tales, and anime and so on, and also that their representatives are often unable to honorably accept defeat in sports.
Your sentiment is not, in fact, new. It existed back then as well.
millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear
Started good…
Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.
…And then you wrote this. I see contradiction.
I’m really sorry to piss on your little eco-statement here, but climate change fears are relevant for decadent rich societies only. Most of the actual humanity is still more concerned with poverty, illiteracy, hunger, epidemics and genocide.
But I agree that those threats are hollow now, because people who’d never actually fulfill them are voicing them. Mostly thieves from the Russian “elite”.
In 1984 the threat would be voiced by bureaucratic leaders of a block occupying large part of the globe which was more or less designed from the ground up for playing “Global Thermonuclear War”, you can see than even in the way Soviet military in its every component was being developed starting from the 50s. Those leaders were not even that corrupt, usually (well, such famous Politburo members as Boris Yeltsin and Heydar Aliyev obviously were, but still), what they owned officially and unofficially is upper middle class level, in Western terms.
Only Russia is not a friend for India and China. Its capabilities are not sufficient to be one anymore. It’s just begging them to make some appearance of friendship for cheap resources and various concessions which can not go on forever.
The USSR is still breaking up. Russian state as it exists now is not sustainable. It was a complete nightmare in the 90s, yes, and was apparently becoming better in the 00s and even 10s, but now we will see what is going to transpire inside Russia after cessation of hostilities with Ukraine, and that is not yet a thing.
I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...
Common for everybody learning a language in an educational institution without RL practice. Immersion, of course, is the best way to learn a language, - gives good results even if you didn’t know it at all before being, eh, immersed.
oilets in India (and probably rest of Asia) are at ground level, with two porcelain blocks on either side to keep your feet on (the blocks are set into the ground and have a rough top; neither you nor they will slip). Most hotels will also have western toilets.
Also this was the most common kind in the USSR.
“Western” seats are something more luxury, may or may not (EDIT: back then, not now, though I haven’t been in really depressive parts) be present even in apartment bathrooms.
The Linux community is full of elitist assholes who think they’re special because they have the ability to install an OS.
I personally was elitist because of having a different taste which made me wish to use something open, more personal and more customizable. Do not mix us, please.
Honestly, I wish our governments would pump money and resources into open source operating systems so that we’re not all bound to one OS under the complete control of one company.
Corruption likes one or few big private companies to supply stuff. So it’s maybe better that governments don’t finance these things at all.
Intel and AMD seem to be doing just fine, it’s always Nvidia…
Well, on the other side of things - Nvidia has an official proprietary driver for FreeBSD.
This occurs because some platforms sell real phone numbers that haven’t been registered on Telegram(or other platforms require phone number or email to register), as well as email addresses....
Associating phone numbers with IM identities is awfully stupid. The good old “register with just login\password, confirm with any email” was fine, and I remember people complaining about sites which required email confirmation, it felt disrespectful and spam-inducing.
Now, mobile phone numbers - that’s literally the way to inform everybody offended by your opinions or just interested about your everything, at least of the “necessary for a successful murder” kind.
A security researcher has found it’s possible to reveal a Skype app user’s IP address without the target needing to even click a link. Microsoft said the vulnerability does not need immediate attention.
Most of social media has been like this for me since forever, same with RL groups I don’t choose, like school or university, frankly.
Their intention is to value a separate person with their statement as little as possible (in extremes as little as themselves). Your comment isn’t supposed to be considered an individual thought, it’s supposed to go into predetermined classification, using some key words.
People with little brain power would simply feel themselves bad without such classification. While with it they can deceive themselves that their “yeah sure we believe you lol” is equivalent to a proper expression of your thought materialized in words.
Other than that, reading texts is a rare pastime for some.
So the Russia-Ukrainan war is like a big Nazi infight.
Seems about right. Both also have their most, eh, enthusiastic volunteer units cosplaying Nazis in symbolic. Though Ukrainians less so - first, they were doing that since 2014, second, they have a full mobilization, so neo-Nazi units, while still existent, were much less likely to preserve their character.
Actually, there have been very disturbing videos from both Russians and Ukrainians, featuring gruesome deaths of people quite definitely unarmed and taken PoW. Mostly from Russians, but not every one.
Technically he is right with the latter, and there are minorities which get official status and lots of love from Ukraine’s government, like Crimean Tatars (less native to Crimea than Greeks and Armenians, despite the name), and there are those who get less of that (Greeks, Armenians, also Poles and Hungarians). I mean, Russian and Ukrainians policies on minorities are kinda similar.
Not that funny really. A Nazi is a person following a certain ideology, which takes only one level of generalization to imagine a Jewish Nazi being Nazi to Germans, Poles and Frenchmen. One level is not that much.
And references to German Conservative symbols are kinda popular among Ukrainian nationalists. Poverty and shitty education through the years of independence do that. Not much different from Russia itself or many other former Soviet republics (somehow European, of course, it’s hard to imagine a Nazi Uzbek or Tajik, but Tajik nationalists love Achaemenid empire and Samanid kingdom very much) or even former Warsaw Pact countries.
'This is egregious': Sisters shocked when Toronto landlord raises rent to $9,500 a month (toronto.ctvnews.ca)
The landlord had told them he wanted to raise the rent to $3,500 and when they complained he decided to raise it to $9,500....
It either runs on Linux or refund (lemmy.ml)
Legendary PC developer says Denuvo is “a punishment to the consumer” (www.pcgamesn.com)
Quote from the article: “The inclusion of intrusive DRM softwares [sic] like Denuvo is a choice that yields an unfair punishment on the consumer,” Running With Scissors says. “Respect the consumer, make a game they want to play, and you will never feel the need to fight piracy. The gaming industry deserves a better future,...
The Russians Bolted 1950s Naval Guns To Armored Tractors—And Produced Nearly Useless Combat Vehicles (www.forbes.com)
It’s apparent the Frankenstein’s monster of a combat vehicle is even less than the sum of its crude components.
Russian Anti-War Activist Sentenced To Six Years In Prison For Internet Posts (www.rferl.org)
For 30 years, a memorial to Nazi collaborators sat largely unnoticed just outside Philadelphia. Now it’s drawing outrage. (www.inquirer.com)
Threats, insults, and Kremlin 'robots': How Russian diplomacy died under Putin (www.bbc.com)
Russia’s diplomats were once a key part of President Putin’s foreign policy strategy. But that has all changed....
What's a skill that's taken for granted where you live, but is often missing in people moving there from abroad?
I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some...
Robotic dog-mounted rifles are now a thing thanks to US Army (interestingengineering.com)
Biological rule (sh.itjust.works)
Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google (www.theverge.com)
The end of the Googleverse (www.theverge.com)
Users report being banned on Telegram despite never using it (cybernews.com)
This occurs because some platforms sell real phone numbers that haven’t been registered on Telegram(or other platforms require phone number or email to register), as well as email addresses....
Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype. Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It (www.404media.co)
A security researcher has found it’s possible to reveal a Skype app user’s IP address without the target needing to even click a link. Microsoft said the vulnerability does not need immediate attention.
Has anyone else noticed a sudden lack of reading comprehension skills?
Just as the title asks I’ve noticed a very sharp increase in people just straight up not comprehending what they’re reading....
Russian soldier admits proudly his comrades were killing POWs (euromaidanpress.com)