I can’t believe It’s not TheOnion.com.

Elon Musk reminds me of a demented Elon Musk. :)

After leaving him, she can just make money by having someone ghost-write a “My Life With an Orange” book for her and selling that.

Can humans even have a real communist society? I suspect it would take a species without any individual self-preservation instinct, or individual greed, so that each member can fully serve the collective.

Well, at least we got something.

And even that is debatable. Japanese surrender came shortly after a quick succession of several events - the first bomb at Hiroshima, Soviet Union declaring war and invading continental Japanese land, the second bomb at Nagasaki, allies completely obliterating Japanese navy, and preparing to invade their home islands, etc.

Many argue that Japan would surrender even without the two nuclear bombs.

Yep, most of my non-tech friends just say “Ads? Oh yeah, I don’t even notice them anymore, I got so used to them.” whenever that topic pops up in a conversation.

Enshittification actually does work, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, all the corporations have all the subtlety of a Sherman tank, so they always go all in on it.

There is nebula.tv which works like that, but it lacks content. I am a subscriber, but I’m running out of interesting content to watch there.

OBviously there is network effect in play here. If Youtube switched to subs-only model tomorrow, they would have much wider content offer from the get-go.

Sure you can - the response was “let it spread, it hits blue states more than red states”.

I really don’t know, it’s just something that I scrolled past on social media, perhaps it was just a joke/troll post. I’m kind of sorry I even brought it up here.

EDIT: I think I’m remembering this https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-conservative-village/, and the porn actress thing must have been some joke someone on the internet came up with to mock it.

Wasn’t there an ad a few months back, put out by the Russians, claiming the same thing - a sanctuary for westerners who want to keep traditional values? I remember it because it had some supposedly well-known Russian porn actress in it, acting as a pure smiling maiden or something like that…

Under the veneer of fantasy parody, Pratchett was able to sneak in surprisingly strong ethics and morality lessons in a very likeable manner. It’s one of many reasons I love the Discworld books - they make me want to be better.

I suspect that the characters Esmerelda Weatherwax and Sam Vimes were in fact Pratchett’s vehicles to convey his own moral values.

“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

(https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1494234-carpe-jugulum)

I mean, we’ve had a solution to this decades ago - multicast. It would have been perfect exactly for this kind of one-to-many TV-like broadcast.

Too bad greedy ISPs and ISVs killed anything that isn’t HTTP, so smart people had to scramble and find alternate sub-par solutions.

That was over two years ago. Surely even a mediocre tactician would anticipate something like this happening eventually.

My guess is that Russia simply does not have the means to effectively defend all of its border anymore, and they’ve been praying that the Ukraine’s western benefactors will keep them “on the leash” for as long as possible.

Yep, that’s a more accurate way of putting it. @[email protected]’s phrasing made it sound like some well-organized kanban thing. 🤣

With a topic as sensitive and biased against the victims as this, it’s hard to get accurate data - see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country

As a Slovak person, currently horribly embarrassed for my own proto-fascist government, I wholeheartedly agree. We’ve had our chance, but majority of voters over here are mentally 50 years in the past and brainwashed by Russian disinfo campaigns. We really are gullible idiots.

EDIT: That said, it’s mostly just our government making performative noise for benefit of its voter base. We are not affected nowhere near as much by Ukraine’s current gas block as they want you to believe.

A bit of unfortunate wording there. :) I had to go back and reread it slowly in order to understand what you meant.