It just so happens that under Russian rule, Russian rulers will be making profit instead of Ukrainian rulers.

I think we’re missing a couple of nuances here, no? Although it’s a stretch to call them nuance. The way Ukrainian rulers have been making money has been through privatization. And because there’s so much privatization we need to look at who owns Ukraine’s economy. It’s only escalated since Russia invaded, with national assets being sold off to foreign private sectors so cheaply that one has to wonder why they did it when the gains are a drop in the bucket compared to the direct aid they’ve been getting from Western public sectors.

If Ukraine emerges from this conflict with its own sovereignty, it’ll be sovereignty over a flag, a presidential palace and a state framework that protects foreign companies’ investments from hungry Ukrainians.

Yes that’s my plan. I’m definitely smart enough to be one. I just need to wait for the right opportunity.

The founding fathers, in their infinite wisdom, designed the three branches of the government of the United States of America to have a series of checks and balances to protect their fragile republic from threats such as this. Now we all get to see it in action:

The Judicial branch has ruled that Google is an illegal monopoly and should be broken up, but it doesn’t have the power to do so directly, it has to advise the Legislative and Executive branches to do it. However, the 4th and 5th branches of government - the CIA and the Lobbies - both want Google to remain intact. The CIA finds Google’s tech dominance extremely useful, and the Lobbies’ patrons make a lot of money from it.

So, the Judicial branch advises the Legislative and Executive branches what they should do, but before they do anything the CIA and the Lobbies review the advice and then tell the Legislative and Executive branches what they will do, which in this case will probably be some massive (small for Google) fines.

See? Checks and balances! The different moving parts all working together to ensure that the Government serves the people it was created to serve.

👆👆 This

Over the past several years Alipay and Wechat pay have gone from nowhere to everywhere in Hong Kong, and though I’ve gotten used to them for payments, my West-trained brain just kind of blanks out all of the other stuff in them as visual noise. But when I do open up one of those sub-apps out of idle curiousity, there’s nothing but benefits in there. It was a full year before I tapped on the icon called ‘bill payment’ and found I can use Alipay to pay for literally all my bills - utilities, services, everything except the Western parts of my life like Netflix and Xbox Game Pass. And it’s not like the banking systems’ autopay services where you give up control and let the (London-owned) bank and service decide whether you pay or not - if a subscription service decides you have to sit on hold for an hour to cancel your subscription manually through a phone call, you can just stiff them instead: the app will side with you, and the subscription is de facto cancelled unless they want to explain in small claims court why they have such a user-unfriendly unsubscribe procedure.

Anyway that’s a long-winded way of saying that despite the wild bazaar vibe you get from those apps, they’re also extremely regulated in the public interest. The Government lets Alipay and Wechat make a fortune just by running those platforms on the understanding that if they step even a little out of line and leverage that privilege against the public, they’re done. And that includes transaction fees.

Meanwhile Paypal is streamlined spotlessly but they take a fat chunk in transaction fees compared to the *checks notes* zero transaction fees that I’ve paid on Alipay. No transaction fees ever.

It’s a plague. So many of my students play it, and it’s very hard to compete with it in terms of appealing to young children. Their business model for content makes Roblox a theme park of free games for kids who don’t need to go to mum and dad for money or installation permission every time they want to try something new.

Especially when the user experience is constantly guiding users who don’t know better to do exactly that

The Democrats knew this was going to happen. There’s no way they couldn’t. And I don’t mean Democrat supporters, many of whom were vehement that Biden was fine like so many anecdotes in this thread recount. I mean the Democrat leadership, who manage his campaign and more than likely manage his presidency. Unlike the public, they have access to him. They have his medical records, the reports of his doctors and caregivers, everything. There’s no way they didn’t know this would happen if he debated.

They might start seeding support for a different candidate into their supporter’s discourse after this, but they will have been planning for this outcome long ago. And when a left-leaning (left from a US Overton window) news platform hosts a debate that shows him up that badly and then publishes commentary like this, you have to wonder if that caused friction with the DNC or if they assented to it.

As the party starts singling out a replacement, the question I hope people start asking is why they didn’t replace Biden earlier? Did they need to wait until the urgency of imminent elections made their new candidate more palatable? And if they don’t replace Biden, why are they letting Trump win?

He gives lots of reasons, but if one of them isn’t “oil-producing countries are starting to escape US hegemony and your gas-guzzling motor industry is on borrowed time” then I don’t think he’s really appealing to the US government’s interests.

Or it’s a glimpse at Rom’s Dengist arc

The kicker is that Rom eventually becomes Grand Nagus and starts transforming Ferengi society.

The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene,

I love that scene. It’s so authentic: hearing a white American describe his successful living arrangement as literal communism but saying it’s not communism, and a black American correcting him. 100 years of Red Scare and minority struggle captured in a few lines of dialogue.

That’s not just research, molten salt heliostats are in active use already.

How’d that work out for Australia and Gough Whitlam trying to close Pine Gap?

It doesn’t matter what the people outside China think. The people inside China - on both sides of the Taiwan strait - think Taiwan is part of China. They all call themselves Chinese except the tiny minority that speak with American accents. There are indigenous ethnic minorities on Taiwan whose ancestors were not part of China, but they didn’t call themselves ‘Taiwan’ because that’s a Chinese word.

isn’t there a single candidate that thinks more about the humans than for the money.

Yes, plenty.

Any of them that will be allowed anywhere near power?

No, none.

Conscious and Conscience are different things (but understandably easy to conflate)

It’s funny, so run with it.

11M views. 11M well-informed Westerners casually parroting this arrogance.

Now I wonder how many of those responsibly-up-to-date Westerners have seen the videos about how weong this one was?

The border and migration controls are something socialist states do to protect workers and their economies. The “your family will starve if you fuck up” or “our laws are inhumane and we don’t care; if you care you’re fired” are absolutely propaganda.

I just started. It’s beautiful. Can’t comment on the narrative yet.