costs are driven by scarcity. At least for the things like energy, food, and shelter I mentioned. Nobody is hording corn or fertilizer. Its expensive because the supplies are down.

Nobody is charging more for electricity because they pushing it all into some secret battery some place (or pumped reservoir for that matter), nor are they idling their generation facilities. They are charging more because more people want to use more of it then can be produced and delivered reliably. Now i do believe we could have much cheaper energy. That supposes winding the clock way back and making policy choices that would have favored the production gas, and oil fired generating plants, more domestic pipelines, and more domestic oil refining facility.

As it is now US crude is artificially cheap because we can't move it where it is needed, and Obama energy and environmental policy that have prevented building the power plants to burn it. It sad really the public suffers with inflationary pressure and cost of living problems while had we let the market work, those $100 a barrel prices in the mid 2000s would have resulted in 'drill baby drill' and building out generating capacity - instead we got the Paris accords...

Can we just stop with this post scarcity nonsense.

We are not in some post scarcity utopia. We are rapidly running out of real-estate. Yes we can build up but many was not meant to live in endless concrete jungle, most people don't really want to, but the consequence of unbound population growth (which does seem to be slowing, for reasons of scarcity) would be ecological collapse as we take to much away from the remaining natural spaces.

The cost of energy is also going up. Wind and Solar don't actually lower costs, if they did they the oil majors would be building them at the same time they develop fields. you can't make money on window and solar without major tax subsides and fake "green" programs, where because you are in a "green industry" you get side step the impact studies and mitigation requirements any other commercial activity would be required to support/execute/subjected to, whales and birds be damned. - Energy will either continue to increase in cost until someone can make money in wind or we will develop new Fossil resources, but those will also be more costly as the recovery complexity only goes up as we deplete them.

The costs of food continues to rise, yes yes distribution not production problem, blah blah blah.. Might be/likely is true about being able to feed everyone for quite sometime by reducing waste vs output growth, but right now there is no *viable* plan to reduce waste on that scale, and the costs of production are rising, inputs like chemical fertilizer are not getting cheaper and they wont.

As bizarre as it seems we are circling back around the scarcity being about basic needs like food and shelter, because advanced manufacturing has made what ancient man saw as luxury very abundant. In most of the USA $15 will put a very powerful computer and communications platform in the palm of your hand, but it will barely feed you a week at the grocery store - (think homemade pancakes from scratch for two meals, and canned veg/beans for dinners). We have luxury poverty, where people can get some very nice things, but yet can't afford the most basic things they need. Why because there is real scarcity under those basic things.

The answer to most of this, is actually reset the international systems. Every nation/region needs to find away to sustainability produce enough food for their own population. Nations that are net importers of food or have net emigration should be subjected to heavy trade, travel, and monetary, sanctions by other nations. That will force them to fix their economic balance and focus on the right kinds of production. It will also re-balance more developed nations. There are lot of people that just are not fit to work in high-tech, and there are not enough jobs in 'trades' and ditch digging to provide a long term outlet. We actually need economics that allow workers to earn a living wage for 'low-complexity' activities like seamstress, and basic furniture jointing etc; put another way we need enough protectionism to that the domestic appetite for basic household items is satisfied primarily from domestic sources. - Capitalism at the domestic scale will work well for organizing that, after all it did in the past. Capitalism applied at the globalscale, with nationalistic actors looking to game the system will continue to fail.

Wow -

So because someone happens to be winning life's lottery for the moment, they deserve to be killed...

This is the folks is the prevailing thinking on the left. You don't have to do anything, have done any specific harm to anyone. if you have more than they do and are doing anything other then using it to mobilize against anyone else who also happens to have more than them you are target!

If you disagree with them on what is good for people or what love or agÃpi mean, you also automatically deserve death!

This is who they are! It is what drives them. When you see the opinions of Drinkypoo, AmiMojo, or rsilvergun, on here, this is their underlying thesis for everything they say. Just be aware, while no human is garbage these people are actively seeking to be so, always!

And icons that aren't as recognizable, and black text on a dark grey background, where unless the brightness is all the way up, the average person can't read it, and...

The number of things Apple did wrong in this design is so staggering that nothing short of setting fire to it will fix the problem. Someone designed it to be pretty with apparently absolutely no thought given to making it actually be readable or usable.

If this were the first time Apple had done something like this, it would be bad, but Apple has done things like this previously on multiple occasions. It's time to bring back the human interface design experts that made their technology great prior to about 2003 and pay them to be the people who say "no" to all the graphics designers who think they know human interface design.

Depends on whether you think they will launch them knowing that it means annihilation rather than mere regime change. It's a huge gamble.

Not even slightly. America has nuclear-capable cruise missiles with a range of up to 1550 miles. There is not a single target anywhere in Russia that could not be reached by those missiles when fired from out in the ocean.

Either the cruise missiles are capable of evading Russia's air defense systems and taking out the silos or they aren't. If they are detected first (and realistically, they would be flying for probably multiple hours, so the odds of not being detected are rather poor), nothing else matters, because the nuclear missiles are either going to launch or they aren't. Flying for a hundred extra miles over a neighboring country on its way to such a target would neither make it easier for Russia to detect nor cost it a critical bit of extra range.

The way you take out the nuclear launch sites suddenly would likely involve sabotage from the inside and/or compromising computer systems, not missiles from a neighboring country.

That's a fair point.

I mean, they're not useless to NATO. When you need more planes quickly and Russia is willing to sell them cheaply, it doesn't matter if they would be outclassed in a dogfight with an F-35, because you're not going to be fighting against those anyway.

They're still way, way behind.

Define successfully. A few hundred Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from subs off the coast, and the war with Ukraine would have been over years ago. Russia's military tech is decades behind at this point, and although they might get off a lucky shot or two, they are hopelessly outmatched by NATO.

Their war with Ukraine made this obvious to the general public, but you can bet the spooks at various three-letter agencies knew it many years earlier, if not decades.

The only real threat Russia poses comes from the possibility that they would decide to launch nuclear ICBMs to destroy the entire world as a final act of spite. Were it not for that, they would be a total paper tiger from a military perspective.

If your definition of "successful" is "regime change" or "destroyed all military targets", yeah, they could have successfully attacked Russia long ago. The only definition of success that they probably can't achieve is taking out all of Russia's nuclear launch sites before they can launch.

Clearly. If NATO wanted to attack Russia, they could have done it ten thousand times by now.

To be clear, NATO likely *is* attacking Russia's *political power* because of the way Russia has repeatedly abused that power, but NATO is not attacking Russia's land, people, military, or buildings. And NATO would stop doing that if Russia would stop threatening its neighbors.

I'm not saying the military action was handled well, but the fact that even Russia, with its long history of defending dictators who mass murder civilians, said that Libya's government was doing something bad is quite telling. And there's still hope that Libya might end up with a stable, reasonable government at some point.

The thing is, you're going to have chaos almost any time a totalitarian regime falls. Gaddafi wasn't going to live forever, and it wouldn't matter if he died from natural causes or from Arab Spring. The power vacuum would still have probably been bad. Russia is going to see the same thing when Putin eventually dies.

No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.

Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.

That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet subscription. That jumps to almost 50% by 2000 so the uptake was pretty fast but a lot of us older Slashdot posters probably grew up in a bit of tech bubble, at ~1/5 of the population being 'online' it would be easy for an adolescent or young adult to not really be aware others were not sharing their experience.

I think 'the information super highway' lives a little more dominantly in the media of the period (1992-1995) then it actually did in most of the populations lives because it was such a huge area of commercial growth and the people who were using it outside 'the office' were the affluent, which always have driven our later 20th century American cultural conversation.

Recall how big a deal 'Cyber Monday' was, that was because people would shop online at the office, because they did not have access to do so at home! Long rant but i think for most people the Internet became a day to day feature of their lives more in the 1997-2000 span then in the 1994-97 span.

At least we can stop reading endless articles by people who think they are a hell of a lot more insightful than they actually are about how "1984 is not a howto guide" and move on to "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - wasn't supposed to represent aspirational social, environmental, and technological targets.

The good news is it should keep both the read to much environmental fiction and read to much AI fictions occupied for sometime and have them fighting over literary terf.

It will be a nice change of pace around here.

The United Nations overwhelmingly said it was justified, and more to the point, was authorized by the U.N. Security Council, and one of the two resolutions was unanimous; the other had 5 abstentions (the usual suspects). The United Nations overwhelmingly said Russia's invasion of Ukraine was unjustified. These are not the same.

Afghanistan provided material support to and knowingly harbored a terrorist organization that hijacked aircraft and flew them into the World Trade Center, killing thousands of Americans.

A rational person would say that it has been in their interests for many years. Russia has continually attacked its neighbors on so many occasions that I've lost count. And Russia's tendency to buddy up with the most tyrannical world leaders and support them against international punishment for crimes against humanity has made the world a far worse place on an ongoing basis almost continuously since World War II.

The world would almost certainly be better off if Russia's current leadership were buried under a ton of rocket rubble. Yet the U.S. has not attacked. Do you honestly believe that it is because they haven't brought Ukraine into NATO, and because that extra 200 miles compared with Finland is an insurmountable distance? Do you honestly believe that if NATO decided to go to war with Russia, Finland wouldn't have helped even before they joined NATO? Or Türkiye, or Georgia, or Azerbaijan, or any of the other dozen countries bordering Russia that pretend to be friends with Russia out of fear, but actually hate Russia's government and would love to dance while watching it burn?

Tell me you're not serious. Russia isn't afraid of NATO attacking it. Russia just recognizes that every country that joins NATO is one more country that it can't bully into doing what it wants them to do. Russia recognizes that it won't be able to put puppet governments in NATO countries, because the elections will be monitored more closely. Russia recognizes that it won't have the level of regional power that it currently enjoys because of its aggressive, bullying, almost sociopathically militaristic behavior towards its neighbors.

Again, if Russia is doing nothing wrong, Russia has no reason to fear NATO. The problem is that Russia is pretty much always doing something wrong. And that's the real issue here. The last time the U.S. invaded one of its neighbors was 1846 to 1848. In that same time, Russia in one of its various incarnations has probably done so triple-digit times.

And to the extent that Russia does fear NATO because of a genuine belief that NATO is going to invade, that's just because its what they would do in their place. In other words, it's irrational, and represents Russia's gross failure to understand the rest of the world, coupled with a naïve belief that everyone else would act like them if they could.

Let's see:

• Serbia: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Kosovo: Stopping mass genocide (on my list of reasons above).
• Libya: Enforcing UN no-fly zone mandate (peacekeeping, on my list of reasons above).
• Afghanistan: Defensive/retaliation for a direct attack on the United States (on my list of reasons above).
• Iraq: Not a NATO mission. The only actual NATO-authorized action in Iraq was providing training for Iraq's security forces *after* the 2003 mission.

Care to try again?

In comparison with Russia, yes, it's tiny. Russia's military was somewhere around 3 million including reservists, versus 980k for Ukraine. And Russia has almost five times the population, which means almost five times as many people who could potentially be conscripted.

The part you're conveniently omitting is that the number is that low only because so many of them died. Russia has *lost* over a million troops since the war began three years ago. The fact that only 150k were in the battlefield at any given time only makes that number more shocking, because it means they sent wave after wave of people to be slaughtered.

Put another way, Russia has already *lost* more troops than Ukraine ever had.

I maintain my original statement.

Ah, but here's the thing. NATO is a defensive organization. In approximately every NATO military action, either the legitimate ousted leadership of a country asked for NATO's help, NATO was acting defensively, NATO was acting to stop mass genocide, or NATO was providing peacekeeping forces to stabilize a region. NATO is not a military force that goes out and attacks other countries unprovoked, and it never has been.

So the only reason Russia should consider NATO expansion to be a threat is if they intend to attack their neighbors and subjugate them.

So are you saying that Russia is dangerous to all the countries around it and can't be trusted to follow international law and stay the f**k out of neighboring countries' sovereign territory?