I do not recall ever having accused you of having your own party. I merely stated that you are very much a proud member of a party. The statement of "your party" does not indicate ownership, but rather membership.

What privilege are you accusing me of accusing you of having?

You regularly accuse me of being a member of an established party. I could provide cases of you doing so but you won't read them.

I never accused you of accusing me of having any power within a party, though you have in that wonderful snippet of nonsense again indicated that you believe me to be a part of a party.

Considering most of your "isms" are based on peculiar new meanings of (generally root) words, I have no idea what you might be trying to accuse me of there. I would love for you to tell me what "statism" means to you, but I don't have any reason to expect that you will do so.

I like pumped storage:

o Lovely water recreation areas - swimmable, boatable, fishable
o So while it costs land, it returns most of that land for public use
o Fish and other aquacritter habitat
o excellent control of recovery rate
o doesn't significantly wear out (and if you were to make it underground, won't even evaporate... expensive, but...)
o easy maintenance
o highly scenic
o No red-hot nothing, no batteries, works fine unless it freezes (so in higher latitudes... not good.) ...there's lots of pumped storage already (~104 GW). More. More! MOAR!

I *also* like this idea for pumped transport:

Imagine a C shape that is almost closed -- just a few feet short of meeting at the ends. It's an almost circular canal. From one end of the C, you pump water into the other end of the C (and add any replacement volume required by evaporation.) This creates a current that operates the entire length of the C. Now, put two of these next to each other. Pump the second one in the opposite direction. Put cranes (or locks) at the ends, so that transport platforms can be moved from one direction to the other. Cost? Initially, Pumps, cranes, canal, transport platforms. In operation: pump energy (solar, please) and evaporation refill. Unless you roof it. :) Length? very, very amazingly long, and if roofed, even longer.

Air pressure. Gravity. Water. Make it work for us. :)

It's also the case(not just in Africa; but across jurisdictions) that if 'Oh, sure, just put it in the safe deposit box' is a sound strategy, your banking system is probably sufficiently un-doomed that bitcoins are mostly a hobby.

As best I can tell, 'credit check' either has, or is rapidly, mutating into a polite euphemism for 'background check with slight additional emphasis on personal finances'.

It's one thing that somebody might want a credit check if they are loaning me money; but anyone who won't STFU about it(or does; but then runs one anyway) if you offer to pay in cash or a suitably-blessed transfer from a reputable bank is either running directly from a script or interested in something other than credit-worthiness.

Why would you nuke an ID with a negative balance on it?

Even assuming arbitrary malice, it's just not efficient. A debt that the debtor can't afford to pay is a debt you don't get to collect.

In legally and organizationally primitive contexts, like premodern governments or Big Vinny's extralegal lending operation, you do see unproductive means used(debtor's prisons, kneecapping, death); because there simply isn't a way of keeping a debtor on the hook otherwise. In some premodern society where you can move a few towns over and nobody's ever heard of you, playing collections agent is unrewarding. If the loan was extended off the books and doesn't legally exist, your ability to get it paid back by anything other than extralegal means is similarly curtailed.

The ideal situation, for the lender, is one where the target's earning capacity is not impaired, so they'll be able to pay as much as possible; but where they find it either impossible or undesirable to just walk away from the situation. In the case of debt peonage, the debtors are usually at approximately slave levels of human capital investment anyway, so punitive measures don't reduce their(already miserable) earning capacity much; but in almost all cases of better qualified debtors, you really want to touch them as little as possible; but make it impossible to walk away from the debt.

A nice, functional, modern bureaucracy is perfect for that. Without a valid ID that correlates to a suitable history of references, educational credentials, clean criminal record, etc. your life gets a hell of a lot more difficult, and probably poorer, even if you can evade any formal state action against impersonation/non-documented-persons. This provides a considerable incentive to remain at the table; and makes it relatively hard to escape your past. Why shove somebody who owes you money out of that place(where they can still hold a job and make payments, and have a lot to lose if they try to fake their own death or something) and into the underground economy, where they'll probably earn next to nothing and have much less interaction with formalized institutions?

The ability to keep tabs on people across time and place, without necessarily imprisoning or killing them, is about the biggest advance in history for anyone looking to profit from credit.

> If you cannot even trust the platform, then how does your logic work?

The logic works fine. Platforms can work fine too. Society, however, doesn't. So that part is up to you.

> Can't trust cell phone cameras. By definition it's a camera attached to a communications device. It's designed to share that photo.

Exactly right. Buy a DSLR if you require discretion in photography. Ensure it does not have network connectivity (some do... Canon 6D, for instance.) If you take an image with a cellphone camera, be aware before you ever shoot it that you can have no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever. It goes further than that, too. When using a smartphone, again be aware you have no reasonable expectation of privacy whatsoever with regard to texts, voice conversations, video conversations, email, your location, billing, logging and so one for every service the phone provides you (or others) with.

> Can't trust storing it on a PC as PCs are connected to the Internet in the overwhelming majority of instances.

No. If you want to store something that requires discretion, then you require a non-network connected PC. There's no inherent need to connect a PC to a network. Just because you can, doesn't mean you have to. Nor is there a need to construct a PC with bluetooth, wifi and so on. Nor is there a need to leave a PC in a generally accessible location and/or condition. These are all user choices. Make them wrongly, and your security is compromised. But they are not inevitabilities. There's a lesson here: just because others do something in some particular manner does not mean that you have to do so.

> Then there's the whole point of a picture, looking it at it. Typically that means more than just the picture-taker looking at it

Again, no. This is also user choice. You are responsible for the consequences of your choices, and for knowing the things you need to know to make those choices well. The key here is to be informed enough to make the most correct choices. "It's typical" is not a metric that binds anyone in any way. If you embrace such a thing, you either choose to do so or you are so ignorant that you know no better, in which case anyone who trusts you with data that requires discretion is making a serious mistake.

The images I have taken or otherwise created that I have *decided* you may see are here. The ones I have *decided* you may not have access to, you will never, ever see, barring use of military levels of force. These conditions were quite literally trivial to instantiate and maintain. Think, choose, easy implementation, all done.

> For all we know, none of these women's accounts were compromised. Their boyfriends, husbands, ex-boyfriends, ex-husbands, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends accounts could have been, or those people could have shared the photos with others, and their accounts were compromised.

The issue isn't account centric. It is behavior centric. You must identify data that needs protection; you must identify the trustworthy in regard to both persons and systems; you must control distribution; you must employ discretion and ensure that your knowledge is up to the task of seeing all these things through. If you cannot do these things, you are (at the very least) a potential victim of your own limitations. And you should probably fix that. :)

Some soap and water will take care of that.

To be fair, there's the good Cloud and the bad Cloud.

No. There isn't. There's good use of cloud and bad use of cloud. If it's not a problem for random people, business entities, criminals and governments to have access to your data, then cloud storage can be convenient and harmless. Using cloud for storage of anything personal, proprietary, secret or dangerous is outright stupid. Marketing bullshit aside, you are putting your data in multiple-someone-else's hands and you have *zero* control over where it goes from there. There is no assurance of security whatsoever. There never has been. It is extremely unlikely there ever will be.

These truths extend to your own use of storage. Storing information on your boot drive can expose it to others if the machine ever needs repair and you cannot do the work yourself and you let the machine out the door with the boot drive and/or backup drives still installed. Connecting a machine with information on any attached storage device to the Internet creates a risk constructed of a very long list of possible errors whose genesis can be traced to the author(s) of your operating system and/or your own security procedures. Allowing others physical access to your machine can expose your data. Even the possibility of physical access to your machine, regardless of your authorization, can do so.

Most people don't understand security, and have not learned to be discrete, and are very poor evaluators of who, and what, are actually trustworthy. Unfortunately, this creates a situation where the gullible fall into the trap set by marketers claiming things like cloud storage are "safe." We can't fix this without specific education on the matter, and with a school system that can't even graduate people who can read and write well, the required understanding of secure data handling will almost certainly remain in the realm of the sophisticated technical person. And the clouds will continue to precipitate data the owners wanted to remain undistributed to many places it wasn't expected to go.

What it comes down to is, if you don't want naked pictures of yourself to end up for all the world to see, don't take naked pictures of yourself. Famous or not, just don't do it.

No. What it comes down to is who, and what, are trustworthy. Cloud services are not trustworthy. Some people are not trustworthy. This doesn't just apply to images; it applies to financial information (banks are not trustworthy), to your behavior in public (those other people at parties are not trustworthy) and so on.

There's no need to give up intimate entertainment. You just need to learn to be discrete, and this means very carefully evaluating who, and what, are trustworthy. I will grant that in the face of all the cloud propaganda, the social networking tsunami, the government's drive to list everyone and everything, and people's innate tendency to gossip, this may no longer be obvious, but discretion is, in fact, one of the key characteristics of a mature and healthy personality.

If you don't want something repeated, don't say it. If you don't want it shared, don't share it. But you can still do it. From there, the advisability of "doing it" becomes a question of one's morals and ethics -- and perhaps the law. While the law is often completely wrongheaded, we must always remember the amount of power in the system's hands.

Discretion: That's what is at the core of all of this. Not self-censorship.

Oddly, neither does anyone else.

It's too bad that Valve is too incompetent to open config files and the like read-only, so that this doesn't happen. What year is it, anyway? Also, if your client isn't already in offline mode, then you get to sit around holding your dick for minutes until Steam times out.

"BTW, these protests were even covered by BBC."

I'm actually beginning to understand what's wrong with someone like you to be so susceptible to propaganda like that fed to you by RT. It seems that if the media covers something then it must be backing up that of your preferred propaganda outlet, that the BBC was covering it because it agreed with RT, rather than the reality of the situation that the BBC covered it because it appears to be neutral.

If you recognised the latter you'd also note that the BBC has in the last week unearthed a lot of evidence about a full fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine, so tell me, if "the BBC covered it" is evidence of it must be as I believe, then how does Russia's now demonstrable invasion of Ukraine as reported by the BBC fit in?

"So how about the overwhelming majority of the citizens choosing independence in a referendum? Is it any more valid than a poll?"

Well both referendums were verifiably rigged, the Crimea one where the real results were accidentally posted publicly coupled with impossible numbers (120%+ turnout in one area relative to the actual amount of people living there) and the local Donetsk one where we have video evidence of people voting multiple times. As we have evidence that neither is trustworthy then no they're not more valid than polls where we have actual data available (as in the original City.am mentioned poll etc.).

"There are many thousands rebels now fighting the Ukrainian army. And winning. I think it's your sense of proportion that is off."

No, there were a bunch of Russian irregulars fighting the Ukrainian army with a bunch of actual genuine Ukrainian-Russians who want independence from Ukraine, and they were losing. Now there is a full batallion of Russian regulars and the Russians are winning. Who'd have thought? a full blown Russian invasion can defeat the Ukrainian military? There's a reason the Russians are having secret ceremonies for their military dead back home, and why tanks only operated by the Russian military are in Ukraine - because the actual full blown Russian military is now in Ukraine.

"Do you claim to know situation any better?"

Yes, absolutely, because the anecdote of a pro-Russian individual does still not somehow override the thoughts and opinions of the majority that are widely publicised. You seem to feel that as someone who lived in the Ukraine you have authority, okay, if that's so, then why does the City.am poll which was also carried out by Ukrainians not have authority over you given that it was a more widespread study in neutral times? Just because you claim to be Ukrainian, why should I listen to you when you show a demonstrable inability for objectivity other other Ukrainians and Russians who tell a more well evidenced story?

"There is no plurality in Ukrainian media. It's all controlled by Kiev. All the opposition channels are blocked. But that's OK, censorship is fine if it's pro-European. Right?"

I don't know what opposition you're referring to? I know that a wide range of Ukrainian voices have their say in Ukraine whether it's the old pro-Yanukovych channels, whether it's those who are pro-Tymoschenko, or whether it's the numerous miner's associations, or whether it's the far-right. You seem to think opposition = Russia Today, Moscow's propaganda outlet, but that's false. What you're actually saying is that Ukraine should fight the propaganda war with one hand tied behind it's back - it should broadcast Russia Today to it's citizens, but in Russia it's okay for Moscow to deny all opposition, whether external (as RT is to Ukraine) or internal. Long story short, the only censorship you hate and the only censorship that matters is censorship of Putin's propaganda. Do I support censorship, even of propaganda? Not really, but to pretend the Ukrainian media is somehow more biased than the Russian is insanely comical. Even journalists agree putting Ukraine at 127 and Russia at 148 and this was tainted by the Yanukovych era censorship so Ukraine will likely be even higher now!:

http://rsf.org/index2014/en-in...

"And except the EU. And China. And the US. Well, on the plus side, Nigeria probably did leave Ukraine the fuck alone."

Ah, so you share Putin's paranoia that the Ukrainian revolution happened because of the West, rather than the actual fact of the matter than for the third fucking time the Ukrainians tried to make it clear to Russia that they do not want to be part of Russia because it's simply a fucking shithole and their neighbours have grown more prosperous since fleeing it's grasp and so they want part of that too. Good one, I mean, obviously most people would choose end up living in a corrupt shithole over a prosperous future wouldn't they? Actually, don't answer that, because you're obviously the type of idiot that would.

Out of interest, you said you lived in Ukraine until June this year, where do you live now? Russia by any chance?

So why do you get that privilege but I do not? You insist that I am part of an established party while demanding that I view you otherwise.

"No, because they are biased and/or simply fabricated."

Whereas a handful of protestors standing in front of a Ukrainian APC couldn't possibly be? It's obvious that wide scale polls are fabricated but small scale actions aren't? This is your problem - you have lost all sense of proportionality and rationality.

"So just like the Maidan uprising?"

You still really struggled with scale don't you? I know humans have an inherent problem imagining large numbers, but most people are capable of telling the difference between tens and hundreds, and hundreds of thousands. It seems you are not.

"Ya ne veru v eto. Seychas Kramatorsk controliruetsa vojakami is kieva, tak chto zhiteli boyatsa za svoi zhizni i govorat to, chto nuzhno. Ili ischezaut. Pokazat video togo, kak pravij sektor izbivaet ludej?"

You love Putin and believe everything he says? Why am I not surprised. Oh wait, you think that posting something in Russian somehow makes your argument more valid, silly me, there was me thinking you'd understand why anecdotes were meaningless as a measure of determining the will of the majority.

"Nobody kicked rebels out, they simply pulled orderly out. They didn't have strength to hold an extended front line back then."

Nice story. Shame it's false. Mariupol is a heavily populated city of just under half a million. If the rebels had popular support then how could the Ukrainian military drive them out so easily? How come there were only tens of casualties involved when their self-proclaimed HQ there was surrounded and attacked? Again, you seem to struggle with scale - a handful of people, numbering in the tens, in a city of almost half a million highlights how utterly isolated their viewpoint was. If they generally had support there as you're suggesting then there'd be far more than only a few tens of people there.

"So the main goal of democratic Ukraine is to be just as bad as Russia?"

How is having plurality of viewpoints as bad as having one viewpoint? I'll try again as you don't seem to grasp it: in Ukraine there are many viewpoints ranging across all aspects of the spectrum from far right, to right, to centre right, to centre, to centre left, to left, to far left - all of these are represented politically in the Ukrainian media. What's finally been banned however is Russia's propaganda channel- that doesn't decrease the overall plurality of the media beyond eliminating Russian propaganda (if you want Russian fact, without the propaganda, you can still get it). Contrast this to Russia where media plurality has been decimated such that many views that don't align exactly with Putin's have been silenced.

If Putin had just left Ukraine be, it would be well on it's way to being a modern democratic Eastern European nation like Poland - it came from the exact same background they did of being controlled by the USSR, the only thing that's different is that it's large border with Russia means it's the one nation above all others that Russia has desperately tried to hold on to.

Look I get it, you're from a pro-Russian background, and you love Russia, that's fine. Most Ukrainians no longer do however, most Ukrainians just want to be left the fuck alone to grow their country in a way that all their neighbours except Russia have - they've recognised that the Russian way just does not work. They've looked at what their neighbours have done in the last 20 years and and they want to follow in the footsteps of Poland, Czech republic, Slovakia, Lithuania, Latvia in becoming modern increasingly prosperous nations. I'm sorry that democracy has spoken and wants something you do not, but it is what it is- Russians can always go and live in Russia, but Ukrainians only have Ukraine - that's not for you to take away from them.