China and Vietnam still has a VAT tax system based off of the Soviet system as well

Oh, I agree, and I wasn’t disputing that Google is a scummy IDF supporting company.

I was just saying that the research wasn’t Tel Aviv University’s. He was just a contributor to the project.

This research didn’t come from there. Arar is a traveling PhD student who contributed to the research team while studying in the United States, the research is entirely google’s.

Still leaves a bad taste in your my though.

Their source is Mike Benz… on the Tucker Carlson podcast?

Really pulling out the irrefutable sources I see.

True, but that’s not displayed as inherent to the Soviets or even unreasonable to a degree. The German brutality is talked about and displayed frequently, and the actions of the Soviets are displayed as a righteous anger in response to an invasion and suffering at the hands of an incredibly evil enemy. War is hell, and I feel that the game demonstrated the brutality of the conflict well. The US and Japan also shown engaging in that same brutality in the Pacific Campaign, so its not something unique to the Soviet missions.

Even then, moments like the one you talk about are rare, and preceded by a lot of context. For example, the scene where the group of SS soldiers attempt to surrender and you have the option to burn or shoot them, comes directly after an entire mission of that SS unit fighting savagely and repeatedly killing captured or surrendered Soviet troops, and then only surrendering because they attempted to escape into the metro system but were cut off and surrounded.

Or even the scene at the beginning of “Their land, their blood”, where Rheznov gives you the option of shooting the Germans bleeding out on the floor, comes after those same Germans beat you, a captured soldier, senseless, and were preparing to execute you. Which they were only prevented in doing because of the Red Army’s arrival.

To answer your question, Call of Duty 2 is alright. You’ll run into some tropes here or there, but nothing egregious. Mainly stuff along the lines of your officer giving you potatoes to use for throwing practice instead of training grenades. The game is a simple, fun, arcade shooter.

Call of Duty 1 is much much worse and I would stay away from it, mainly because its very unpolished and not fun.

The USSR did not actually kill retreating men in the field. Blocking detachments were mainly made up of the worst soldiers in a unit and were primarily used to round up malingerers and send them back to the front. There were also roughly 100-250 men in each blocking detachment, and each group was expected to enforce no-retreat orders on a regiment of roughly 40,000-50,000 men. The primary politcal goal of blocking detachments was to persuade officers from ordering panicked retreats in order to prevent the front line from collapsing. If individual units needed to fall back, they would be allowed to.

If a solider was suspected of serious desertion, they would be arrested and tried under court martial, not shot on the spot.

The only caveat to this is that Penal troops were followed by armed NKVD officers which would kill them on the spot for attempting to either surrender to the Germans, or escape from captivity.

Early in the war, Germany overran many Soviet divisions and their armament stockpiles leaving many troops without ammunition and oftentimes even rifles. This led to many Soviet divisions that survived the initial invasion being woefully under-equipped and significantly weaker then they appeared on paper; which in turn, led to further military disasters, notably around Minsk and Kiev.

However, by the start of the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, these logistical failures had been fixed for months and no longer plagued Soviet front line units. In fact, the Southern front had an overabundance of weapons and ammunition, and a severe lack of manpower due to the fighting around Leningrad and Moscow sucking up all available reserves.

What you are looking for is Call of Duty: World at War. You have two campaigns, one being American and focused on the Pacific, and the second being Soviet and focused on the Eastern Front.

From what I remember, there is very little, if any, historical revisionism or state department propaganda, so you won’t run into something along the lines of the Soviets randomly committing war crimes to show how “barbaric” they are or other garbage similar to that. The American campaign also doesn’t just hype America up to be this unstoppable war machine that was single-handedly responsible for winning WW2.

Every so often I’ll go back and replay the game due to how incredibly cathartic they make mowing down droves of Nazis. Storming the Reichstag is definitely my favorite part by far from both campaigns. Just watching the Nazi Eagle get hit with a rocket before tumbling down from the rafters and crushing the SS men taking cover behind Hitler’s podium is amazing. Not to mention the ending scene itself.

The automation is because it’s always been a felony not to register, same as it is in virtually every country with mandatory service, so to avoid the horrifically needless societal effects that come from giving someone a felony for a random crime, they simply automated it.

Basically what they did with social security years ago. Used to also be a crime to not sign up by a certain age, so they just started immediately registering all children at birth.

I really loved the Professor Layton series. They were technically very impressive for the limited hardware of the DS. Fully voiced and animated cutscenes, with a deep and immersive story, loaded to the brim with interesting mini games and side games so fleshed out they could be their own standalone titles.

I also loved Steel Diver, never been able to find anything like it!

It’s a predatory practice, but that feels like it’s more on the consumer at that point. If you blow your money on pointless stuff like that, or forget to cancel your subscriptions, then you are not responsible with your money.

Do people not check their bank statements at the end of the month?

What idiot is using all of those services simultaneously though? At that point you either pirate or choose one or two services to use for the month. You can’t watch them all at once anyway. If you’re buying all of them, then that’s on you at that point.

Eh, me too, but not for 100+ dollars.

How is it more expensive? I pirate everything myself, but even if I got one or two streaming services it would be at most 20-35 dollars. The cheapest cable plans were easily 75+ with any of the good bundles easily going for 125 or more.

The death of cable was a long time coming. A truly awful service. Though the thing that replaced it isn’t much better.

Hell no, I do not miss trying to watch a movie and having every 15 minutes be interrupted by 10 minutes of ads. Plus there really never was anything good to watch.

I’m really confused. Why would they need to buy that data from AT&T and why was it assumed they didn’t already have this data? Would they not automatically have it when the call is transmitted through cell towers and satellites which are owned by the government?

Also why is location data such a sticking point? Your phone has to bounce off the nearest tower to make a call to begin with, which makes it relatively obvious where you and the call receiver are.

Why would it be assumed that they didn’t already have all this data? Companies collect all of what’s listed in order to charge you for your phone usage, and then they have to store that information for a period of several years, which the government could easily access.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the clarification!

I did want to say that when I meant “secure”, I didn’t mean it was impregnable or somehow superior to modern protections, but secure in the sense that on a closed system with minimal points of entry and no internet access; a system like Windows 95 at a nuclear plant has its obsolescence work to its advantage. Similar to how Russia, the US, and China all still operate their nuclear triad on analog technology and haven’t updated their technology since the late 50s.

There also is the problem of programs being specially designed and tailor made to an OS with virtually no way to update them unless the entire program is designed again from the ground up. Something that can take tens of millions of dollars and months of time, not to mention the difficulty of the switch over process.

So it essentially becomes an “If it’s not broken, why fix it situation”.

The 737 MAX is an abysmal failure in that regard though. It should have never been allowed to fly in the condition that it was launched.

The 747 was designed and entered production in 1968, so you don’t really have a choice in changing how it’s electronics work. Unless you gut the entire plane, but you can’t just recall all 747’s from their airlines, so at that point it would just be more economical to design a new plane. Which Boeing has hilariously tried and failed at.

Isn’t that also pretty normal? It’s the same thing with almost all modern nuclear plants running on Windows 95, hospitals running on Windows Vista, and financial firms using Excel 2012; older systems are more stable and secure, with the programs that they support being supported and designed only for that old OS. Plus what critical updates are there really to add to a basic flight computer? I feel like that’s one of the things you want to be as simple as possible if anything.

But beyond those things, profit motive is obviously the best way to organize productive forces. Definitely…

Sorry dong, I’ve only played the more popular spin off, Animal Neutral.