Ukraine is not, "A third world nation...", (and East Europe is not the wasteland far too many Hollywood movies portray).

Ukraine ranks 55th out of 216 nations in nominal GDP and 40th in GDP by parity purchasing power.

Ukraine is also the seventh largest producer of wheat in the world, an active nuclear energy sector with four plants operating 15 reactors placing it 7th in the world for installed nuclear capacity, and an arms manufacturing sector that is 12th in the world, (down from 4th since the initial 2014 conflict).

Third-world my arse.

Considering the vast majority of E.U. gas imports are used for home heating, the U.S.A. profiteering from its L.N.G. is unlikely the case for several reasons:
1. Putin's attacked in the spring; the E.U. will need significantly less gas for the next several months.
2. Germany, the largest consumer of this gas, can (and should) abort its nuclear power shut-down and bring those stations back online.
3. There are already calls to massively increase insulation and heat-pump programs; both are well-understood technologies most developed nations are capable of manufacturing domestically. (IIRC, the U.K. has stated it wants to deploy 600,000 heat pumps over the next 5 years. - I am long on my investments in heat-pump manufacturers.)
4. The U.S.A. is now self-sustaining and does export some of its hydrocarbons, but it also still imports some. In the event it became necessary, the U.S.A. could and would self-sustain but not necessarily have enough excess output to meet E.U. needs, (which would likely drive up prices for US domestic consumers).
5. Canadian conservative parties have indeed recently used this, to call on the Canadian federal government to increase investment in oil-sands and fracking operations, however by the time any new infrastructure is built out, (at least 2 - 5 years), the whole world could have shifted again, creating a huge pile of stranded assets at the tax-payer's feet. (The crazy thing about Canadian oil is, they burn natural gas, a much cleaner fuel, to make enough energy to produce the world's dirtiest oil.)
And for context - I spent a couple years in the Arabian peninsula selling technology for oil & gas exploration and my in-laws are a batch of civil, geo-technical and oil & gas engineers who made their (very comfortable) lives in Alberta's oil patch.
We pay a lot of attention to this stuff. :D

Well, the whole "freezing to death in the dark" thing is a little overblown too. That can be fixed by better building codes heading towards net-zero home designs. In our municipality a family built the first net-zero home in our city, (in BC, Canada). After two weeks away in the winter, they noticed on their energy reports, that the house had been kept at a constant 16C while they were away and the heat hadn't come on - the house was so well-insulated the expelled heat from the fridge/freezer had kept the home from becoming too cold. This was with today's insulation materials. A home insulated in the future with aerogel sheets could become uncomfortably warm from a single candle. Having experienced a heat-dome this past summer that killed around 600 people, the beneficial flip side of net-zero homes is that they keep heat out in the summer, lowering cooling load too.

As someone whose maternal side of the family goes back to the Anglo-Saxon era and whose paternal side goes back as far as the Norman conquest and who spent a significant part of his life living in the U.K., (left in 2015) - who is "foreign"?

The Celts, Bretons, Romans, Jutes, Angles (Ãngli), Saxons, Frisians, Franks, Danes, Normans, Jews, Huguenots (N.B. all from Europe) all make up England's ancestry. Not to mention the French and Belgian groups arrving in WWI, the various Slavic groups who arrived in WWII, like the Poles and Czechs, then the African, Afro-Carribean, Indian and Asian groups who have arrived since then from the former Imperial colonies. (Maybe don't invade people and make them Imperial subjects...)

A crude tally of English words reveals about 40% are Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) and 60% are French (Norman) in origin. Indeed, at numerous points in history, huge swathes of Brition were parts of various European titles and Kingdoms.

At any level, "Foreign" is a silly concept in Britain and England in particular.

A great point about the work ethic of the first wave of the 2004 eastern-European accession migrants was made at the time, (by a Conservative politician - I'm sorry I forget the name) on the BBC's "Question Time". Within the first year, around 400,000 eastern Europeans had come to the U.K. and of that many, after the eligibility waiting period, about 400 had applied for unemployment, (mostly due to poor language skills, or considered too old to be offered employment) - a 0.1% ratio. As he put it, "That means they walked into jobs that at least 400,000 British citizens simply didn't want to do." (N.B. There were ~1.43 million British in unemployment at the time, at least 400,000 of them happily so.)

Post Brexit vote there were numerous "man in the street" interviews, one of which, when asked (by Sky News I recall) why he voted leave said, "To stop the blacks coming here.", when it was pointed out that the E.U. didn't control the U.K.'s immigration from its former African colonies, he simply walked away. A sterling example of the sheer ignorance most British citizens had (and have) of exactly how their own country functions, let alone within the E.U. Then you meet Brits who moved (usually from the north of England) to places like Australia, who say similar things like "We moved here to get away from all the blacks.". (Odd, considering the north of England is the whitest part of the country.)

A retired family friend is a former mayor of an English city and he told us that both city and Westminster governments loved how ignorant the people were of the E.U. as they (the English governments) could leverage that for revenue-raising. The English tabloids often loved to whine about how "The French/Germans/Italians/whoever, were ignoring E.U. directive XYZ, blah, blah, blah.", conveniently failing to mention E.U. directives were to be implemented in-line with each nation's own legal frameworks and constitutional settlements. Our friend said, "We English simply enacted the most draconian interpretations of theses directives so we could fine anyone for anything and use that to raise revenues without raising taxes. When people complained, UK governments could just shrug and say, "It's the E.U., not out fault.", they (the E.U.) were the perfect scapegoat.

Maybe not all down to racism, I'll grant you that, but a lot of bigotry, ignorance, xenophobia and outright stupidity? Definitely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "That's a big Twinkie."

Ditto. Two seconds on a dual-core from 2015. 14 seconds on a bad day when there's an update to download.

Well, the USA for one. did you miss that prolonged battled the USA and EU had over "state aid" to Airbus (and Boeing by different means). If Brexistanis want that oft-touted trade deal with the USA, you can be damn sure things like state aid or nationalisation will be a definite deal-breaker for the Yanks.

They and sites like TripAdvisor have been been sued multiple times in the past and prevail, e.g.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...

they are all sheilded by Section 230 of the CDA:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/1...

Having been a small business owner, I can tell you I wish there was a way to report abusive customers. the number of times my staff have ad to put up with all kinds of abuse, rants and tirades from the the public. Once we even had someone complain about something you couldn't even buy at our business!

Yelp, TripAdvisor, et al, are nothing more than petty little shakedown outfits using clueless member of the public to be their unwitting online thugs, while entire shielded from any sort of accountability or recrimination by the law.

"Diablo Management Group"? Seriously, nobody picked-up on Diablo means Devil?

"Why Mr. Morningstar, I see you have branched out from nightclubs in L.A. to rentals in S.F."
"Deeeetectiiive..."

:D

I'd just like to point out that the USA does not always honour those treaties - the ANZUS treaty is technically in abeyance with New Zealand as the USA refuses to politely abide by New Zealand's non-nuclear laws. (The USA military machine is welcome but it may not be nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed). Also a proportion of population, Nations like Oz and NZ make a greater contribution in terms of either peace-keeping or war-making manpower than the USA.

Debian was the first ever distro I installed - on a 486 DX2 66 with VL-bus graphics. I had to use DPKG for the first time and even compiled the X Window System on it! This was my first task as a new hire at an ISP, "You see that box of old motherboards and parts? You have to build your own PC and put Debian on it." (Having only recently learned of this Linux thing.) The new people started on the lowest-end machines built by themselves from scratch out of leftover parts. As you worked there you got to get upgrades. A a tough baptism but worth it for the valuable experience gained.

25 years eh? Damn, I feel old, (and very nostalgic).

THANK-YOU to the Debian project and every maintainer and contributor over the last 25 years, you have helped change the world.

There is an ultimate economic problem inherent that could possibly lead to collapse of the current economic system:

In general, business seeks to drive all costs to zero. Employment is a cost.
Thus, business will seek to drive employment as close to zero as possible. Problem: Employees=Customers=Taxpayers=Voters=Us.

If there is a rapid decrease in employment, then in the entire consumer-economy (essentially built on short-term lending/consumer debt), there will be massive defaulting on credit (credit-cards, overdrafts, etc.) and shrinking consumer condidence/spending with damage done to business as a result. (So even if you are not directly displaced by AI, large numbers of those who are, may still result in you losing your job or a reduction in your real income over time). Further, the displaced will require either large amounts of training or education, to find new work - but AI may displace that work faster than humans can re-train. Rises in spending to support the unemployed - even as a short-term bridge, are problematic because of reduced levels of tax revenue due to the scale of job losses. This may lead to social unrest, however spending on policing and security will also face the same spending pressures due to reduced tax-take. Place more security in the hands of (cheaper) AI..? Deepen the job losses, rinse, repeat...

On a smaller scale, the mental disconnect between jobs, employees, customers and taxpayers already occurs in the false dicohtomy some businesses make when they go to government for a tax-break/subsidy/handout/corporate welfare, "If you don't, we'll just have to pass the cost on to the consumer.", (which is kind of the point of a proice in the first place). The implied threat being, the consumers are also voters who will punish politicians at the ballot-box for price-rises. Of course the money companies want from Government comes from those same consumers/employees/tax-payers/voters.

Ultimately (if we are to handle this wisely and humanely), Government may have to earn its income from the corporations alone and pay everyone a universal income. Possibly an outcome worthy of Gene Roddenberry's vision. Economically something of a win, in the end, for Marx.

Now, those of a more negatively-minded outlook may also look to the dystopian, mass-extermination memes - the fundamental problem for that is, again, missing the point that customers=people=employees=taxpayers, etc. Mass exterminations would eliminate far too many customers, i.e. the dystopian vision is simply bad for business. Not a lot of point in having a business if you don't have any customers. (A point Rand, with her "Industrialist as God" meme, totally missed the economic fundamental that no industrialist can be a god without customers.) Or, more succinctly, "No man (or his corporation) is an island."