Yes. Ukraine had a chance in 2022 because Putin sent a very small force assuming that he could convince Putin to agree to the peace deal where they'd stop killing Ukrainians in Donbass. And it would have worked if NATO hadn't offered to send all the money and weapons Ukraine wanted to keep the war going.

Ukraine then pushed the Russians back because the Ukrainian military outnumbered the Russian forces and suddenly they had Starlink for communications, US intelligence data to tell when where the Russians were, and all the weapons they could eat. But once they failed to push the Russians out of Ukraine it was just a matter of time for Putin to build up the available forces and ramp up weapons production. There was no way to win after that other than for NATO to send in troops, and no NATO government wants to do that.

Now either NATO will send in troops or Ukraine is going to get a much, much worse deal than they were offered in 2022 and it may not longer even exist as a viable country. Particularly if Putin takes Odessa as well and cuts rump Ukraine off from the Black Sea entirely.

> And that means you vote for politicians who'll do it. If you're American that means a Democrat.

You mean, like the Microsoft anti-trust case which was filed in 2001 when both President and House were Republicans and the Senate was 50:50?

Has there been any anti-trust case against big business since then? Maybe the Democrats did something but I can't remember anything like that offhand.

At this point, expecting elections to do anything just makes you look incredibly naive. It's clear that the only thing the vast majority of populations care about is grift.

> The thing is, there's money to be made in AI, LOTS of money

Sure, just about everyone is losing money pushing "AI", but they'll make it up on volume.

Billionaires own the government.

If they push for UBI it will be so they can easily separate the useless eaters from the productive people they need, and then they'll be sending Terminators around to everyone who claims UBI.

Because billionaires are totally going to hand out vast amounts of money so people who don't make money for them can sit around at home watching pr0n.

UBI cultists love to talk about how evil the rich are while also claiming that the rich will pay them to do nothing productive. Because billionaires are such lovely, caring people.

There are some pretty good AI songs out there. Lots of really bad ones, but people who know what they're doing can now easily make the songs they want to hear.

I know someone who was a moderately-successful musician in the 90s (some Top 40 songs at the time) and now makes his own songs with AI after being out of music completely for twenty years. You could kind of tell the early ones were AI-generated but the later ones not really.

Sure, but in most cases their music is still owned by the label they signed their souls to. Who can license it to anyone they want to turn into AI slop.

Historically, musicians signed bad deals because the music labels were gatekeepers and if they wanted to have the success of a big popular band they had to sell their souls to get it.

Now musicians can make a decent living without having to sign their soul away. But thirty years ago there wasn't a lot of choice for most people.

Sending all your files to Microsoft is now supposed to be a security feature.

"Security" is now a codeword for "we're going to steal all your shit for your own good, and you will pay us for it."

I just set one up for my mother-in-law. Setup worked great until Windows Update couldn't install an update and couldn't not install an update, so I had to reinstall Windows to fix it. Then I copied over all the old files and went to back it up with Clonezilla and discovered that Microsoft had turned on disk encryption by default so now I have to figure out how to turn that off because I don't want her to lose all her data at some point in the future when something breaks and expect me to figure out a way to decrypt it.

I thought Windows was malware, but it seems to be progressing to Ransomware.

"It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds

(Ironically applies well to Joss Whedon himself. Kind of wonder if one of the show writers was thinking about Joss when they wrote that...)

The only single-source point of failure is me.

The next Star Wars movie will be told in Stormtrooper vlog posts interspersed with 'look at my new armor' and 'here's how I apply my Stormtrooper makeup' videos from Foxtrot Squad.

Many of the Bigfoot and Stormtrooper vlogs on Youtube are more entertaining than the Hollywood movies I've watched in the last few years.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)