No kidding. If the Ukrainians ever claw back the parts of the Donbas that seceded in 2014, the place is gonna make The Troubles look like a schoolyard fight and will give the Yugoslav wars a run for their money.

Ukraine was ruled from Russia for centuries before WW1. Russian civilization traces its history to Kiev a millennium ago. The roots are deep and intertwined. Enough so, for enough people, that the resentment can be ignored.

Yes I know this website is known to the state of California to cause cancer. I don't care.

Just like I don't care about every other horseshit popup, tooltip, or banner that the IT-tards or their lawyers seem intent on placing in between me and my objective.

Software is built on the binary: it works flawlessly or else it's broken and it's *your* fault that it is.

They believed it because a lot of them remember when Russia and (Russophone) Ukraine were one and the same country; saw that Ukraine's government was just as crooked as theirs (but considerably more cash-strapped); and had a continuing suspicion that Ukrainian independence was as much a Western-imposed project as it was an actual grass-roots sentiment.

The cultural and linguistic blinders are real, man. I fucking spent the first seven years of my life in Kiev and the only Ukranian I ever remember hearing was from the occasional street vendor or school cafeteria worker. I honestly had no idea these people were there in any kinds of numbers, let alone that they thought of themselves as a distinct nation.

Now imagine living your whole childhood and most of your adult life in the imperial capital where Ukraine was just a borderland province, one of many, that obviously aspires to be a part of the slavic brotherhood. Of course it's unsuprising they thought the Ukrainians would fold like paper.

That was the only plausible avenue for success. Ukraine is clearly too big for the Russians to swallow. Unfortunately Russia is also too big for the Ukrainians to fight off.

Sure. Let's lose the last bit of heavy industry we have left to slave labor in Xinjiang. Totally worth it for that carbon footprint.

Fun fact. The iOS on my work phone upgraded itself and helpfully notified me it wouldn't charge the phone when I plugged it in. It would first check to see if the electricity in the area was sufficiently renewable before starting to charge. Because being green is more important than charging the phone when I fucking plug it in.

Sequels can be well-written. Original stories can be poorly written. Perhaps the flops are a sign of pervasive bad writing?

Last good film I saw was Kpop Demon Hunters. The last one before that? Would have to be maybe the 2015 Bond film, or mabe Passengers or Zootopia? Either way a decade plus gap.

Kinda explains the hype about the kpop cartoon. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't my first thought of what Great Cinema should be. The fact that it was just better than ok but developed a huge fanbase overnight says the drought was real. The people hungered for good movies for so long they glommed on to the first thing in a decade that wasn't bad.

And without those market distortions, EVs found their natural niche: rich man toys. Sometimes also the rich man's trophy wife is permitted to drive it.

In the presence of European market manipulation, it is not surprising EVs continue to be the less bad choise. European fuel taxes and lack of emissions standards mean the alternative to an EV is a cramped little econobox that belches diesel fumes like an old tractor.

Well...yes. And there are other difficulties.

Unlike everyone's favorite go-to analogy of space and the space economy as the next settlement of the New World...the settlers of the Virginia colony could disembark and start planting cash crops; they didn't need to bring their own water and oxygen.

Unless someone finds pure gold or platinum (or a similarly valuable equivalent) at most a few dozen feet below the lunar dust, space will never be economically self-sustaining. It will be a (much) more expensive version of a south pole research outpost. Manned by a rotating (or semi-permanent) crew of specialists doing stuff for a small number of government or philanthropic clients that could easily be called a vanity project.

Colonization it will not be.

Make driver's ed mandatory and drill it into the kids to turn off their high beams when they're not alone on the road.

Maybe make cooking class mandatory too. Might put a dent into the kids these days going broke over $30 food deliveries for a $4 meal if prepared at home.

You know, interactions with websites are admittedly a squishy thing in terms of separation mutable from immutable http get requests, but I'll bet dollars to donuts you can block all post requests and solve a lot of these problems.

Or, you know, instead of choosing websites at random, maybe the highly paid "ai researcher" in charge of running the test can maybe screen them himself?

As with most cases of $scary_computer_story, the problem is squarely between the desk and the chair.

I'm sure someone at one point sent a newt into orbit...on purpose even...

If H1B were really about skilled foreigners filling gaps that can't be filled otherwise, their salaries would be high relative to US citizens.

In a free market, your salary is proportional to how hard it is to replace you:

Push buttons like a trained seal? Peanuts.

Know where to place the the thousand dollar chalk mark? Mid six figures easy.

So what do H1Bs at Microsoft make?

If these links
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=h1b+...
are to be believed, kinda average for a software engineer. Maybe even a little low. Boston area under 160k.

Not the stereotypical monkey pushing a button, but not exactly top flight talent either.

You're right. Maybe not so much for us, but it certainly did much more to educate our adversaries not to fuck with us.

The watermark is in the pseudorandom number generator that makes the words, genius. You can copy it in purple crayon and it will still show up if the text is long enough.

Unless they get some serious competition they can just up the price of their launches and close that revenue hole at their own leisure.

Alternatively they can shut down their production line tomorrow and reconstitute it next year. Because they own almlst all of it.

I wouldn't pit too much stock in prognosticating either way.