D61 [any]

Mostly because I’m not the most competent techie, I’ve been using VLC between my PC and iPhone, for moving “books” around on devices that are very out of date.

Converted all my Bitcoin to Beefcoin and THINGS ARE GOING GREAT!

Supply and demand curves, babyeee!

Nothing in the article supports that.

Also, nothing in the article specifies if the production capacity in Russia is from running the same factories longer or adding new factories. The former could increase defective munitions being produced and the later would probably show about the same level of defectives as production at lower rates.

Also, artillery shells and their fuses are two different things. Nothing in the article says anything about the fuse production, it might be assumed in the article and I’m just being pedantic, or it might an intentional oversight. Pretty sure its the fuses that are normally the problem when an artillery shell doesn’t explode when its supposed to.

A gift card with just a few cents left on it.

Not to mention that the price of necessities doesn’t scale with your income.

A person making 100,000 a year and a person making 10,000 a year pay the same rate for things like bread and water and electricity.

There are things that are safe but not effective.

There are things that are effective but not safe.

There are things that are neither safe nor effective.

For example: There was some drug to stop morning sickness (im lazy and not going to look up the drug’s name) that was really effective but absolutely turned out to not be safe as it caused all sorts of birth defects in the developing fetus.

Give people options in case one doesn’t work for them.

make a backup

Pffftt… coward.

/s

Promised a friend that I’d visit them.

Flew across the country to spend a few weeks hanging out.

Got food poisoning at one of the layover food shacks.

I had a blast… literally (from my ass) and figuratively (hanging out with a buddy). It was a lot of fun and horribly uncomfortable/embarrassing the entire time.

This has made imports into the country expensive and could be a trend that only gets worse: that’s if rising US protectionism continues to prop up the greenback.

Honestly curious, what do they import besides raw materials and fuel that would cause any real problems in China?

Fear of US sanctions first triggered this pattern among central banks, after witnessing how the West applied dollar restrictions on Russia in 2022.

HAH.

Lower supply with a stable demand means an increase in profits. Doesn’t matter what decreases the supply. I tell you what.

Depends on what you get to vote on, who gets to vote, if their votes count, etc.

A more democratic system could have done something like, we’ll test run Brexit for a few years, make an assessment, and then allow everybody to vote again to continue Brexiting or roll it back. But that’s not going to happen because … well… representative democracy is authoritarian by design. Nobody is going to put a “Roll Back Brexit” question on a ballot who championed a pro-Brexit stance and will fight any attempt to give the people a chance to vote again (heck, they’ll probably fight tooth and nail to keep any useful assessments of the effects of Brexit from being pushed into the public sphere to help voters make informed decisions as well).

Representative Democracies are, by definition, authoritarian. A small number of people are elected, democratically, to make the decisions for the majority.

Is the decision to end slavery a majority decision? Then it’s democratic.

With the contradiction being that the people who were pro slavery could just decide, “Nah, we’re not going to end slavery”, and continue to do slavery. Which I’m pretty sure is generally how that went in the USA.

Yes.

But slavery was also authoritarian.

Any situation where there is a power imbalance that can be enforced through physical or psychological means that somebody doesn’t agree with is authoritarian. Employer/employee? Authoritarian. Parent/infant? Authoritarian. Bank/bank customer? Authoritarian. Doctor/patient? Authoritarian.

Probably the only reasonable definition of authoritarian would be something like, “To be ruled/governed by an authority.” I’ve decided that Bill over there gets to be in charge of things, they’re the authority. I don’t always agree with the decisions they make but they’re in charge. Which seems like it would overlap a bit with the idea of democratic centralism.

“Hello” is probably the best answer but I find myself having a knee jerk “but it seems too informal to use in a work setting” that I will need to get over.

Pretty sure nobody has any real idea how to send text correspondence anymore.

Like, I work in a building 10+ miles away from my boss and often communication is done through text, email, occasionally by voice, but almost never in person.

Every time I send a work email to my boss/coworkers, I find myself staring at the screen wondering…“Wait, is there any particular way to start these things? ‘Dear So-n-So’ is really weird. ‘First/Last Name’ seems fine unless I’m sending the email to multiple people, which happens pretty regularly. Would just jump straight into the body of the text, but that seems… wrong somehow… and potentially confusing if an email address is not something that is human readable or mixed in with a list of email addresses.”

Eventually I just bang something out and figure, whatever, its not like 90% of my emails seem to get read by anybody anyways.

Report by “Safeguard Defenders” formerly “China Action”… website here if you want to see a bunch of “HOLY SHIT CHINA BAD” stuff…

Human rights NGO Safeguard Defenders first revealed in 2022 that China operates more than 120 illegal police offices in 53 countries around the world, including around 50 in the EU.

Wasn’t this deemed super false? Those “police offices” were just outreach centers for Chinese nationals needing help filling out paperwork or being tracked down to remind them to fill out paperwork?

China in just one year as part of a special campaign in which the threat of collective punishment was also used as a means of persuasion.

Nowhere in the article does it source any of these claims. Doesn’t even link to the “report”

…Chinese indiciduals who…

heheh… misspelled “individuals”…

From the Safeguard Defenders website where the .pdf for the report is located. The first two sentences reframes things differently from the EuroNews linked article.

Just around Christmas last year, China’s global hunt for “fugitives” hit a new milestone. Since its launch in 2014 as part of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, 10,000 are claimed to have been successfully returned from over 120 countries around the globe under Sky Net (and junior partner Fox Hunt) operations…

Its not JUST Chinese citizens, its people that that the Chinese government is claiming have broken the law and fled the country.

Also… the EuroNews article says the report is 169 pages long, the .pdf from Safeguard Defenders is only 69 pages long.

I mean… sure, if you want to make an argument about how the Chinese government may or may not be following extradition treaties/laws to have people accused of criminal activity brought back to the country to stand trial, you can make that argument. Framing it as “Chinese government kidnaps citizens traveling abroad!!!” is wildly inaccurate.

It is now required that a camera is always pointing at that carving… waiting to take a snap of the next lightening strike. I don’t care how long it takes.

Three missiles hit three vehicles directly that were spaced hundreds of meters apart. Nothing on purpose about that, nope, not at all.