It sounds like you believe that the Russian practice of setting up buffer states was a US lie.

Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and errrrm East Germany. They might have a different opinion on Russian peacefulness, and for at least some of us, there was a reason that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was set up.

Europe is pretty clear - they don't like us. Maybe Europe should consider rejuvenating the Warsaw pact, or more accurately the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance. Sounds like a much nicer deal.

The Unix and Linux equivalents just do not have the tools needed to scale the way the Windows active directory tools do. There's no reason why those tools couldn't be built but it's a classic catch-22 where there isn't enough demand so nobody's going to spend the money but there will never be enough demand because the tools aren't there so it can't get anywhere.

I think that if you ever do see Linux on the desktop in Mass it'll be because Europe does it in order to get away from Microsoft because of rising international tensions. Basically you need nation states to step in for national security reasons because businesses aren't going to do it especially with Microsoft's typical antitrust violations hanging over their heads like a sword of Damocles.

You might be able to turn that around if America and other countries would strictly enforce antitrust law but that's just not in the cards. So regular market forces and competition are basically useless here because they have been completely undermined and eliminated

Awesome. I'm with you - the US should;d get out of Europe today, and if you become buffer states for Russia, I believe that is exactly what EU citizens want. You deserve it, and get your Cyrillic dictionary out.

I mean - what should the USA protect countries that hate us? In fact, rathe than fight a war with Russia, why don't you just surrender peacefully and then you will be happy. I'm with you - US pull out of all Europe, and let what happens happen.

Well, as the EU becomes buffer states of Russia, will the US need to help? It is apparent that the EU and its citizens believe that the US is a backwater country, full of fat stupid people who are the most evil humans on th planet. We are treated every day to EU supremacy, where any topic about Rooshia or China gets turned into our fault or a whataboutism within a few posts.

You will come a buffer state, and you will be happier, because the US will leave you alone. You won!, You are no longer under the heels of the worst country on earth. I suggest learning Cyrillic, you'll need it.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

Europe is still dependent on Russian oil and gas especially during winter. This was by design it was supposed to create an interdependency that would moderate Russia's extremism and eventually lead to them becoming a proper Democratic state. It didn't work because dictators go really fucking crazy especially in their old age. Dictators are often extremely incompetent at everything except violence and holding power.

And they implicate Trump in pedophilia and child rape. We learned that from the Epstein file leaks we already have.

We all had a good laugh about Jeffrey Epstein talking about Donald Trump giving Clinton a blowjob but that was obviously just an exaggeration for a fact. The real takeaway is that Jeffrey Epstein knew that Trump had compromat in the hands of Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

It's painfully obvious that Epstein didn't kill himself. He had a ton of leverage against the president of the United States and would have been expecting to get a pardon out of that.

I don't think the details are relevant the takeaway here is that the ruling elites fuck kids a lot and we have to decide whether or not that's a problem or not.

Because there's a whole shitload of people who take the attitude of "if there's grass on the field play ball" which is exactly as disgusting as it sounds. And some of those people are probably family members of ours.

Because there is no Central authority for open source software it's basically impossible to get good administrative tools for it.

So for example it becomes really really hard to enforce document labeling for different classes of document at different security levels for your company.

This is before we talk about the mess that is active directory equivalence under linux.

I don't really see any solution. Maybe if Microsoft wasn't able to do all the antitrust violations so that a company could come along and build up Linux into something but every time anyone tries to that all gets shut down by buyouts and mergers and other nasty little tricks.

Reruns of Home and Away. Check.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

Xi is absolute dictator of China now. So they can easily quell any social unrest with violence.

That's why you're seeing this now. It's because the elites of China have control of the situation whereas before they didn't

Stepped in and prevented companies from automating factory jobs in order to prevent social unrest. Now that Xi is an absolute dictator they're not as concerned as they used to be and they are moving to automate.

I've said it before but if you Google you will find an article about how 70% of middle class jobs in America got taken by automation since 1980.

Automation has devoured the middle class. We can't do anything about it because there really isn't a solution.

Nobody is going to redistribute wealth because that feels bad. If you take money from me to give it to somebody else that just feels awful and if you do it to somebody who's rich most people think you're going to do it to them next. It doesn't help that there is a shitload of propaganda reinforcing these ideas.

How many people here are chomping at the bit to had more means testing to government programs? It's basically lizard brain. It doesn't feel fair that you have to go to work and somebody else doesn't.

That's another major problem we are going to have a huge disparity where you have people we need to do work and people who we just don't have any work for. We are going to have tens of millions of basically useless people.

Traditionally when this happens it's accompanied by food shortages but technology has solved that. So now the work itself is the limited resource.

I really don't know any solution and I think we're just going to have a giant world war eventually going nuclear possibly or even probably wiping out our species. Happy to be proven wrong though.

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!

Maybe don't quote where the guy says you should punch trans girls in the balls... I'm just saying.

There is no equivocating here. The man called for violence. The fact that he wanted cops to come and do the violence first doesn't change the fact that he said that when the cops won't come and do the violence you should do the violence yourself. This is classic stochastic terrorism.

America does this too and our police will arrest you for it. The difference is they won't charge you with a speech crime because it's tough to make those stick.

Instead they'll do a little bit of extra investigation and odds are they will find something they can charge you with conspiracy to commit such and such with.

This is becoming a major problem because the people at the FBI and other agencies in charge of finding violent lunatics and getting them arrested before they do violent lunatic things are currently spending all their time arresting illegal immigrants. Arrests for crimes unrelated to immigration have dropped from 44,000 per year to 11,000 per year. Meanwhile 3/4ths of the immigrants being arrested for deportation do not have any criminal record and the majority of the ones with the criminal record have minor things like traffic infractions...

This is important and relevant to the discussion here because we have devoted resources that would normally be catching potential shooters and cr violent crazy people and getting those guys under control to non-violent immigrants. Meanwhile if your goal is to deport immigrants Trump is doing less of that because he's incompetent. One of the dirty little things the Democrats don't like to talk about is that Joe Biden and Barack Obama deported more illegal immigrants than Trump has ever during the same time frames...

Like it or not you need to keep your crazies under control. You can do that however you want but if you don't do it you're going to get a large increase in mass shooting incidents. You can't keep letting people encourage acts of violence in countries with little or no mental health services without consequences