All that is to say central planning has historically proven to be less than efficent and continues to do so.

It is still a huge leap to suggest they are on the brink of economic collapse. For example man us cities have pretty acute housing shortage / affordability crisis, would you claim the US economy is on the brink of collapse based on that? or even those cities and regions?

As to EVs so they over produced them.. Does it matter, if the government subsides pay for it, and they don't create system problems by slowing or halting future production, which they don't have to because the government can just subsidize retolling those factories to do something else to consume the inputs, it does not have to domino or snowball the way capital destruction often does in market economies. - Sure it will be drag on the economy over all, because the inefficiency and waste will have to be made up for with taxes etc, but then our government manages to light a lot of money on fire doing stupid projects that nobody needs or cares about too, as well as fighting foreign wars.

China built a bunch of cars nobody will drive and apartment blocks few will occupy. Its not good economics but the idea it is ruinous seems farcical; at least on the surface without real numbers to back it up and the CCP will never make real numbers availible. I say all this as someone who thinks the best thing that could happen to the world would be the collapse of the CCP but hope and wishful thinking does not make it so.

Modern Russia is absolutely socialist. Heck they national healthcare baked into their constitution.

It may also be 'autocratic' in practice if not form but it absolutely is socialist.

It needed to be "fixed" but not necessarily on anyone's time table besides the ffmepg volunteers, or alternatively given it is an issue with specific coded and not the core of the encoder or something, it is up to people that build and ship ffmpeg with they projects to disable that codec and rebuild and push an update.

If Google is paying or providing support infrastructure, hosting, etc they don't get a say in feature / fix priority. Just because 'security' gets added to the strings that constitute a bug report in a FOSS application should not suddenly mean that it becomes the most critical task, nor should it place some obligation on the authors to provide a fix at all.

The FOSS projects really need to learn to respond with "Look this is a hobby, and as a craftsman I take pride in my work, and i am trying to write clean, secure, correct code. However my priorities features and fixes that I care most about and other contributors sending high quality pulls care about, and those might not be yours, even if you think it they impact security. If you want determine how we spend our time directly, many of us are willing accept contract work."

FOSS projects need to reject this notion that just because a cabal of mostly commercial ISVs slap a CVE on something, they owe the world a patch even if it means losing sleep or skipping their camping trip to work on hobby they did not plan to make time for that month or three!

Pseudo-official drug agencies, like the FDA in the US or the newly proposed African Medicines Agency (AMA), act as gatekeepers of death, not guardians of health. By enforcing a "safe *and effective*" mandate, they block patients from accessing existing, potentially life-saving medicines unless they're backed by billion-dollar clinical trials. This isn't about safety; it's about entrenching a monopoly for pharmaceutical giants.

The "safety" obsession already stifles innovation, but demanding proof of effectiveness at scale crushes smaller players entirely. Only mega-corporations can afford the $2-3 billion and 10-15 years required for FDA approval. As economist Milton Friedman warned "The FDA has done a great deal of harm by preventing people from obtaining drugs that would have saved their lives... The harm done by the FDA is not in the drugs that are banned, but in the lives that are lost because the drugs are not available."

In the 1980s, the FDA delayed approval of Misoprostol (a cheap ulcer drug) for use in medical abortions by over a decade; despite its proven safety and efficacy in other countries. During that time, thousands of women in the US resorted to illegal, dangerous procedures. The delay wasn't about science; it was about bureaucratic "caution" (safety cultism) and political pressure. The same pattern repeats globally: the proposed AMA risks mirroring this by harmonizing Africa's 54+ regulatory systems into one slow, centralized bottleneck: delaying generics and off-patent drugs that could treat malaria or HIV today.

Lawsuits, reputation, and market competition already punish bad actors. We don't need new rule-makers to "protect" us by pricing medicine out of reach and ensuring only Big Pharma profits. True healthcare freedom means patients and doctors, not agencies, decide what risks are worth taking.

CoC's are for censors and people more concerned about their virtue-signaling image than getting code written. They are a way for lazy-minded political people to shoehorn their issues into places they don't belong. Project leaders already can kick out people for bad behavior. There is no need to codify what woke gender categories are "protected" by your trendy Rust project. That's simply a political distraction akin to bringing Gideon bibles to a computer swap meet.

In general the more "complete" the CoC is for any software project, the bigger douchebags you are dealing with and the lower the probability is that anyone is actually coding anything.

NeuroDIVERSE! Gotta add that to my list of marginalized victims bingo sheet. Will it ever end?

I agree, in the 2000's cities like New York were doing great. Michael Bloomberg was amazing. Arnold Schwarzenegger was awesome for California. Massachusetts also had republican governors during that time as well. Everything was pretty great, all around. TODAY though? CA cities are dumps, the 'punching game' is a thing in NY, and MA has the most expensive everything... Things can regress when stats stop being reported...

You never had any brothers or cousins doing double suplexes to each other after watching WWF? Your anecdotal evidence is discounted by mine. And since mine is real I think I have a case.

And WWF wrestling as well. My cousins would destroy each other playing WWF. Where'd they get THAT idea? Oh right... TV.

PS5 if only for the incredible controller.

False (I think) - Can you remember when the baby from Dinosaurs was responsible for causing a kid to wack someone in the head with a frying pan in real life? It was in the news back in the 90s... Most people can tease out fiction, but half of us have IQ's below 100 and can't.

D&D players usually role play as heroes... Rock and Roll, i don't think is as degenerate as your average rap music but I can see your point. And I DO think RAP is where this brand of degeneracy began back in the 90's.

What pushes some demographics to participate in street take overs, twerking on police cars, looting stores in cities, robbing from walmart, target, and pushing people onto subway tracks then? Just the larger urban culture? Where do people get the idea that that is fun/acceptable? It's got to come from somewhere, rap music is a big suspect, but video games like GTA make it much more 'real'. I don't think it's coming from rampant reading of books...

I bet a lot of kids idolize Franklin. He's the 'every man' protagonist as far as I can tell.

Crime stats look great when big cities don't report them.
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05...

It is a fact, undeniable, that cities are inundated with crime. Also a fact that democrat cities don't report it.