"No, you don’t get to simply dismiss the oppression of Communism with a “I understand”. As if the death toll demanded by that ideology is dismissible with some shitty retort given on the ass-end of a customer support line."

Empirically, we do. You can feel however you want about it; but it's a trivial matter of historical record that, say, Vietnam, had trade relations pick up from the 1990s on; and full PNTR status in late 2006 leading in to WTO membership in 2007(both under noted woke liberal commie George W. Bush); and that's a nominally communist state directly continuous with the one we lost an unpleasant war to whose human rights record continues to be pretty tepid at best.

We do enjoy decrying the horrors of communism; but we'll 100% pick up an abjectly shit foreign policy pal if we think that they will be useful. During the cold war that normally meant any right wing dictatorship that liked us more than Moscow; now that Soviets aren't a huge deal you can still have "socialist republic" in your nation's full name so long as your resources are cool or your labor force is cheap and docile.

Cuba is really something of a weird outlier. Militarily unthreatening, not huge on strategic resources but some agricultural products we enjoy and by all accounts a pleasant vacation spot that (like a lot of pleasant vacation spots with dubious local governments) generally keeps things civil with tourists, even from unfriendly nations, so long as the tourists keep things apolitical and do tourist stuff. Normally that's the sort of place we'd absolutely do some business with.

Hurricanes aren't "bad" for any power generation. Power generation needs to take into account environmental effects in their design. That is all. That applies to solar, wind, gas, coal, nuclear, or whatever.

The shoddy way you may choose to put your solar panels on your roof probably won't withstand a hurricane. That doesn't mean solar isn't suitable for an area that gets hit by hurricanes, it just means you did a shit design and installation job. Same for wind.

It doesn't need to be a default belief. We have direct evidence showing that the executives in this case are in fact very much idiots. MS went on an insane spending spree acquiring studio after studio without any plan beyond "We bought Minecraft and that made money, so this should work."

If this were a case of a single acquisition and a single layoff we may not need to blame executives. But it is a pattern that has repeated over and over again for a few years now, so at what point do we stop blaming what were very successful studios when they were running themselves for not making "all the money", and start blaming executives who seem to be able to not make any success from their acquisitions?

A lot of it comes down to Cuban immigrants to the US skewing pretty sharply anti-present-government and being a voting bloc very much worth picking up. Basically mandatory in Florida; and helpful if less vital in a fair number of other states. They aren't necessarily rabidly single issue and trivial to pick up (especially for the purposes of primaries where there's generally more than one candidate promising disproportionate hostility to Cuba); but they do make being weirdly hostile to Cuba specifically more electorally rewarding than it would otherwise be.

This is not to imply any particular support for their administration on my part; but it's patently obvious that we are far chummier with rather worse people all the time without much caring about it; and we have no general policy against dealing with states that style themselves communist but make themselves useful market participants(even ones like Vietnam, where the history is rather less pleasant than with Cuba, we treat as totally normal manufacturing locations). It's hard to see much incentive beyond internal voter signaling for our rigid adherence to cold war freakout rather than just trying to shuffle Cuba into the same box as other Caribbean tourism-and-a-bit-of-agriculture-and-fisheries locations that we view as more or less powerless playground locations but don't put lots of time into actively fucking with.

No one is getting arrested because they are looking for cool secrets. Urban explorers are urban explorers, they simply like exploring things. There's a whole group of people who see the decay of civilisation as a hobby to look at. And based on the video I saw, this campus has a LOT to offer those people.

We organised such events not only before Facebook, but also before email, and we do so now also without Facebook or email (also please NEVER put invites of large groups in CC, it's a major breach of privacy. The BCC field exists for that reason.)

No. Facebook has useful edge cases. That's not what people hate about it. Mind you those useful edge cases can easily be replaced by a service that isn't as objectively bad for society. I fully support your idea to use an alternate event management platform (and there are many out there, you can do a bit of research to find one that doesn't force people to have a Facebook account like literally most events...).

No one here is judging Facebook based on its events management. But thankfully it's been a good decade since I've needed to use it.

Oh that I agree with, the US should definitely take action. I thought you were talking about Europe. That said nothing is perfect. The EU would do well to pass unified gambling laws. Right now it's every nation for itself and there are still plenty of places in Europe where prediction markets are unregulated.

Actually I've seen that. Yes humans do work in different ways. That's almost a bit worse than it is better. But definitely plenty of people have a freeze reaction and very much do just stop dumbfounded when something isn't working for them.

By the way Waymos don't do this either. They by default treat intersections with lights out the way you legally should: an all-way-stop. The problem is they get confused by other drivers who don't. It's a very real issue that is a problem caused by your second point: Humans fucking suck at co-ordinating. I've seen lights in in America, it's a shitshow. I've seen lights out in other countries too, in the Netherlands and Germany it's not, because the road markings determine the exact traffic order when the lights are out (which is why you see stop, giveway, and priority signs next to traffic lights).

Waymo can improve there's no doubt about it. But a large part of the problem isn't them, it's people.

Cuba gets slammed by a lot of hurricanes, which are bad for both solar panels and wind turbines.

Plus this only blocks Youtubes adverts - these days you often have to wade through the content creators own ads, at least one for the “sponsor of this video”, and then at least one for the content creators own Patreon or equivalent merch site

Just timed a 9 minute video I was watching while browsing this story - 3 minutes of content creators ads, 6 minutes of content.

And theres no way around the content creators ads even if you do become a Patreon.

What lack of judgement? This wasn't a joke, or an obvious joke. It was a data handling error. The police handled it without escalation, and after a quick conversation everything was over, no one was arrested, or even taken to a police station.

Slashdot: A place where people complain that police don't follow up on crime, and complain when police follow up on crime. A place where people complain that police a militarised psychos who shoot innocents (worth complaining about) and equally complain when they handle a case professionally and without incident.

Get a fucking grip.

Guns drawn != guns pointed. And in the case in question the guns weren't even drawn.

Get a grip buddy.

Yeah I agree with you. You need to do actual research.

The military implications are obvious. Think Ukraine. If you suspect the enemy is trying to infiltrate on a dark night along several kilometers of frontline, you light up the scene while launching a bunch of low-cost FPV drones, and those infiltrators are about to have a bad day.

You *can* spot infiltrators in the dark with IR cameras, but it requires much more expensive drones and isn't usually as effective, hence the preference for night operations. Plus, there's IR camouflage, with varying degrees of success. But it usually makes you stand out like a sore thumb under illumination (you're basically wearing a tent).

Well this kind of thing happens. :-) Have a great weekend.