It is a "private project" that is deliberately designed to comply with Russian censorship laws. So it doesn't matter if the work is done by people who are nominally independent from the Russian govt - they're still explicitly following the government script on what's allowed to be true today.

I grew up there and saw it firsthand. It sucked.

USSR was the worthwhile successor of the travesty that was the Russian Empire. Lest we forget, we're talking here about a country that was an absolute monarchy until 1905, and which treated the majority of its own citizens as literal slaves, to be sold at will, until 1861.

In fact, you can go back all the way to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and Ivan III and see how the underlying state ideology evolved into totalitarian conservative collectivism of the USSR. The tragedy of Russia is that competing projects that contested the lands of the disintegrated Kievan Rus - namely, Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Novgorod Republic - lost to Moscow. Things would have looked very different indeed if GDL ended up being the dominant one.

That would be mooching off public infrastructure. Since the guy is a known right-wing troll, he doesn't get to do that.

Just drop him off in the wilderness somewhere in Alaska. He can live off the land, freely and proudly.

Kids of today are adults of tomorrow. Our society needs them to continue functioning.

"Seen and not heard" is a very good way to fuck their head up just as bad as yours clearly is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is not part of the Russian Pravda network, despite the name (which simply means "Ukrainian truth" in Ukrainian). That paper is actually owned by a Czech company whose owner Tomá Fiala participated in both the 2014 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, and presently supports a pro-EU center-right liberal party "Holos". It's also one of the most popular Ukrainian online media outlets.

Which neighbors do you anticipate Ukraine invading?

It is true simply because of relative population sizes. Russia isn't conscripting prisoners so much so as using them as mercenaries, trading pardons for service. Most of Russian military in Ukraine right now are contract soldiers of various kinds (mostly official military, some PMCs etc). They haven't really had any more significant mobilization waves in many months, unlike Ukraine.

The reason why Russia prefers that over actual conscription is because it helps maintain high popular support for the war with relatively little effort. But if push comes to shove and they ramp forced mobilization up to the same level as Ukraine - which they absolutely can do - they can put a lot more bodies on the front line.

Race obviously exists so long as people take it into consideration in whatever way. But that is a socially constructed definition of race, which is especially obvious when you compare the definitions across countries. E.g. people that count as "black" in US would often be white elsewhere; conversely, people who are considered "white" in US, such as e.g. the actual indigenous people of Caucasus, are considered racially inferior in countries like Russia.

Race doesn't meaningfully exist as a biological construct, however. Genetic clustering is a thing, but the resulting clusters depend a lot on your exact criteria (since there are so many genetic features that can be picked for that purpose).

iOS already has Chrome with ability to sync everything. Sure, it uses WebKit rather than Blink, but I very much doubt that most users actually care about that when deciding which browser to use. Nevertheless, Safari is doing great on iOS.

How many innocent people are you okay with executing as a side effect? Someone who's imprisoned can be set free and at least monetarily compensated for wrongful imprisonment if needed, but you can't revive a dead man.

A primary dwelling gives you power over your own life, not over others'.

In general, the equivalence you're trying to build up here is just blatantly laughable. Yes, the amount of power actually matters when deciding such things. So, yes, there is, in fact, a cut-off point past which it is ethical for the rest of society to collectively say, "no, you don't get to possess that much power over us". We can debate where that point is, but if there's one thing on which I'm sure there's pervasive consensus among people who broadly believe that such a point exists, it's that people like Musk are not even remotely in the neighborhood of anything reasonable.

Capitalism functions just fine, since owners of capital can continue to extract economic rent from their employees even with zero competition and with a political dictatorship.

What dies, rather, is the free market. Which turns out to be that crucial thing without which any economic system sucks immensely (and, conversely, market socialism is far superior to the traditional centralized approach).

Only because the middle class keeps insisting that they are temporarily embarrassed billionaires and not the (somewhat more educated) proles that they are.

If they are a billionaire, their "savings" is someone else's stolen labor (because that someone was paid less than fair value of goods they created or services they performed).