CSTO is dead in the water, Russia has officially denied military aid to member states at war. Kazakhstan is warming up to China and the EU. Russia lost more than 2000 tanks. A sizeable portion of its navy is defunct. It has had to mobilize conscripts. No matter how they put nice numbers out, it does cost Russian society a lot. Even if you don’t count anything else, even by conservative estimates, 50000 Russian men are dead.

Saying that the war barely cost anything to Russia is an affront to their memory. Those are 50000 people with families, dreams, kids who will never see them again because Russia apparently needs a “sphere of influence”.

Also, the EU is not in recession, Germany is by some counts, other states are doing fine. The war is not in the top 3 discussed issues in my EU country right now, it comes right after farmer subsidies, housing prices and whether we can all continue working from home.

Also, just to put it in perspective, Russia’s economy is around the same size as Italy’s. It can grow a lot until it will be a match for Germany, let alone the EU or the US.

Wouldn’t mind it TBH, but probs wouldn’t buy it for real money.

As someone who did the alternative at one point, you’ve made the right choice.

Usually there are ad hoc marketplaces like even Facebook (blech), but even the thing I linked up there where there are a bunch of sysadmins looking for a quick buck by selling EOL stuff.

Try looking for it as if you were trying to buy used furniture.

The long and short is that ad companies own the internet now.

Doing something like that would be feasible until the app developers don’t counter it, and then it devolves into an arms race, but the OS you’re developing for and the browser is owned by an ad company.

It would be the Manifest V3 situation on steroids.

Man, China is not even siding with Russia. China is against the West, it’s just looking to gain as much as it can from the situation.

It’s as likely to annex Siberia as help.

the largest military power barring itself

Don’t make me laugh. China easily is a more competent and dangerous military power than Russia. Russia is maybe on par with Iran, though Iran has the fact that they are not embroiled in a war of attrition with a minor neighbour with no way out going for them.

Ironically Russia has shit both for quantity and quality of military production. I mean imported French tank optics? Hand assembled fighter jets? Whatever the fuck the Kuznetsov is?

Russia spends around 9% of its GDP on its military, if the EU did the same, the result would dwarf the US. No point in doing it though as Russia is not a threat to the EU militarily. Maybe as much as Syria is, if they implode and cause a refugee crisis.

Same is true for Russia. Except US corporate ghouls are already lining up to rebuild Ukraine. Who will do that for Russia? China? Don’t make me laugh.

Nah, Russia attacked because they think they are still the Soviet Union instead of the world’s number two gas station (behind the OPEC) in a world where oil is losing its importance.

Russia felt threatened in its sphere of influence by the fact that Ukrainian internal events made it align more with the west.

The reason the war didn’t end yet is that no one wants to deal with Russia collapsing again. The oh-so-crucial weapons shipments are mostly stuff from the last century, and a bunch of stuff the West wants to battle-test.

Again, Russia exists because the West and China allows it. It will cease to exist when they demand it. Russia is not a superpower with an own sphere of influence, and would do better to accept that before more people get killed for its false delusions of grandeur.

So buses and sidewalks and bikes are not reasonable, but this thing somehow is.

I want the Fediverse to succeed, this is not the first, last or even worst time centralised social media was weaponised against people.

That person needs som serious therapy and time away from the Internet, and the Internet needs time away from the turtle.

Also MAC addresses are trivial to change to the point where Windows had a privacy feature to connect to random wifis with random MAC addressed turned on by default. IDK if it still does that.

The thing I don’t understand around it is that the people who are making the argument “trans people shouldn’t be able to participate in sports” are usually also people who are not interested in the sport at all. As in are they upset because someone on the telly told them to, but they really don’t care about the sport except in this very niche aspect which impacts a very slight minority of participants. I mean would half the US public be very interested in the deep technicalities of competitive high-school running?

Same with HRT. Why do I even have to know about it? It’s a niche medical treatment for a comparatively small amount of people suffering from some very specific conditions. I can barely understand what the difference is between ibuprofen and paracetamol, and I’m sure most people are even less informed. Why is it not the sole interest of people affected by gender dysphoria (IDK if I’m even spelling or saying it right, sorry for my ignorance), and their doctors?

The thing that actually grinds my gears is that this culture war stuff takes over places and trans people have to get defensive over their existence, and a forum on fricking Bionicle gets full of trans memes. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re a trans person, or a Zulu, or IDK what niche minority, and you’ve made a Bionicle that uniquely represents you, I’m going to upvote that shit so hard since it’s frickin awesome. But having the whole place be full of low effort “trans people are people” memes is about as funny or interesting as having the whole place full of “the sky is blue” memes.

People are getting outraged about what some socially disadvantaged minority is doing with their lives instead of actually contributing to society, because some idiotic grifter TV host told them to. Fucking lemmings.

I think the thing is that even if we do (and we will), you can always just move to another community discussing the same thing.

I see all the people wanting “meta-communities” so that they can subscribe to the one thing, but it really seems nice to have a range of small communities covering the same topic. Less chance of your favourite thing being gatekept by a random powertrip.

Better have a smorgasbord of different apps, it’s great if we can get a decent competition going.

Mobile platforms need an effective way to block data hoovers. There is a reason everything is an app now and that is that mobile platforms aren’t safe.

uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation

This is peak corporate-speak. Is this real or satire?

The only thing I haven’t seen AI take on successfully yet is liability. Who do you sue if your accountant AI loses a bunch of money?

I have seen huge corps buy stuff and employ a lot of people just to have scapegoats.

I mean every community moderates itself, if you don’t like what one of them does, you cut it out of your feed.

It sounds exciting, imagine if mods would have to compete for shares of a topic instead of a group gatekeeping a big community.