It was a joke. Jokes tend to be “a bit of a stretch”. 🙄

Can it, though? :)

My condolences, and welcome!

I would guess the manpower drain of their costly Ukraine war has a larger effect than the sanctions. They are simply running out of people to work on stuff, throughout the country.

So, you turn to vodka. Again.

I must be doing something wrong with my 15 years old Debian installation, then.

Nukes. That’s the only reason Russia is still even on the map.

They are supposed to pay it out to families of the soldiers. But they skirt around that by simply not retrieving their dead and wounded from the battlegrounds, and marking the soldiers as unknown/missing, thus deferring the payments indefinitely.

There have been multiple reports of wives/widows trying to find out what happened to their husbands, or at least to collect the money, with the military admin stonewalling them.

Next thing they’ll start rounding up people who wear glasses, like some African dictator a few decades ago.

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.

I’m quite new to OSM mapping myself, but I found following flow working for me - while out, I create a note via Street Complete reminding me to add something (stairs, bench, wastebin), maybe take a photo and attach it to the note for reference, and later, when I get home, I add the thing in openstreetmap.org editor. Last step is to “resolve” the note I created.

I only tried this once or twice a few days ago, I’m still not sure it’s a good idea, maybe it’s discouraged to “spam” notes like this, and also I don’t know how long the attached photos stay hosted, increasing hosting costs to whoever pays the bills.

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)

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. 🤣