To be fair they were against the entire world. At the time there was a generalised policy idea pushed by American economists that by enriching a nation it will naturally tend towards a stable democracy. The people most shouting against this were among the poorest and they were dismissed on similar grounds.

Buying Russian gas, investing in Russia, and China, and the middle east, all of this was seen as a way to enrich the people. With riches comes education, with education comes resistance against autocracy. That was the theory anyway.

And it was only a theory.

It's easy to point the finger at Merkel, if you ignore literally everyone else in the world. But the reality was this was effectively western world policy. Merkel's gas policy just happened to seal the largest monetary deal.

That it yadeyaddering a WHOLE lot of history. Europe wasn't so much a kept woman as much as she was married off unwillingly due to a war. Much of the continent was devastated not just by the way, but by the terms agreed to by the losing team. E.g. limiting the amount of armoury, the dismantling of industry, the resulting economic disaster that followed. A "beaten woman" may be a more apt description.

There's a reason LULUCF is included in climate change estimates around the world: deforestation and the use of land is a huge emission source. It's easy to be quick to dismiss Australia's efforts, but the reality is LULUCF's inclusion should be applauded because Australia had a fucking horrendous historical track record on deforestation, and despite still being very bad it's encouraging to see the rate reduce since 2008. Excluding it as a source of emissions doesn't help anyone even if the accounting can be a bit more questionable than direct emissions.

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

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.

Because monopolies and oligopolies exist only to make the maximum amount of money, and the maximum amount of money is achieved by stuffing the global catalogue with global appeal. For that you still look to the USA movie industry, despite the fact they produce less movies per year than Australia on a per capita basis.

Australia seems to understand that a healthy market is maintained through regulation. Many Slashdotters on the other hand haven't seen what an economics textbook actually looks like. If they ever peaked into one, they'd realise what a horror show a truly free market is.

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.

You're so clever showing the world your ignorance. Australia used to have one of the largest film industries in the world. Even now on a per capita basis they release more local movies than the USA does with an average of one movie every 3-4 days. The local series industry is also quite massive though America has them beat on a per capita basis there.

I can't completely fault your ignorance, you're probably a Netflix subscriber and only know what Netflix chooses to show you, and guess what, they will preference making movie deals for general world wide audiences rather than your local content.

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.

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.

Not really. Those who need the lesson the most are the ones that actually used them against people for fun. The lesson they learned last time was that nuclear weapons can be used against people for fun, profit and draining the earth of its natural resources and life sustaining capacity.

It can be many things at once. Israel was awarded the vast majority of arable land and stole/occupied the Golan Heights specifically for its water resources. They continually destroy Palestinian cisterns and irrigation systems. They're occupying/stealing new parts of Syria and Lebanon for the same purpose. Water is very much a scarce resource they hoard as well as use as a weapon.

Israel is actively using access to water as a weapon though, they have been since their inception in 1948

in the old it's not physics or chemistry that will doom humanity but economics, aptly called the dismal science

Here in Canada we were able to stay on track with our targets until our neighbour and former friend the USA threw us under the bus while at the same time shooting themselves in the foot.

I'm not sure if you can call the actions of the American government "economics." I certainly don't.

My experience is that you have to double check everything any model tells you. They don't "think" or understand. I find them most useful as a search engine when I'm not knowledgeable enough to know the specific terms I'm looking for. Also, they're good if you just want to generate text, but aren't too concerned with the specifics. With image generation, even nanobanana, they have never given me anything remotely usable as they have extremely strong attractors towards producing images that already exist. I typically am more interested in the subject of an image than the composition and they've proven incapable of creating a unique subject.