"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.

"Trump has been taking out the vassal states (or allies) of China one by one."

Bullshit, la Presidenta has been taking out targets of opportunity because he thinks he will get political gain out of doing it. Venezuela was easy, they were looking the other way when their dictator got stolen. And la Presidenta left the dictator's regime in place to continue to terrorize its people. China will have no trouble funding the new government which is the same as the old government.

Iran is just sheer stupidity. All the experts said precisely what Iran would do and Iran did precisely that. Unfortunately for la Presidenta, he and his rodent, Hegseth, fired all the experts or at least the ones willing to give truthful advice. Now we have an even more virulent regime in Iran, but la Presidenta did unify its people. Before this, they wanted to see the regime's heads on pikes. Now they want to see his head on a pike.

And if that dumbass wanted to screw China, he'd screw Russia which is now getting into bed with China, N. Korea is just icing for the Great Putini. Now Putin has his bitch in the Oval Office, Israel is an outcast, and the U.S. economy is headed down the rat hole with the rest of la Presidenta's "businesses".

...facial recognition will alert shop owners when a compulsive buyer enters, so that he/she can be approached at once by shopping assistants.

What shopping assistants? They got rid of all of them which incidentally along with a bunch of other "cost saving" measures made shoplifting much easier.

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Fascist Recognition in UK will Soon Instantly Alert Administrators About Undesirables Undesired by the State

Right, it is a short step from that to Blacks and other minorities being banned.

make no mistake, this technology will be deployed against ALL offenders

Haha no. It's just deployed against random people for no discernible, preventable or transparent reason. Bugs? Yeah no shopping for you. Shitty algorithm? Say hello to the police (also no shopping for you). Etc...

at the very least, to avoid misunderstandings, users of this technology should post bonds payable to people that are falsely accused and accosted by law enforcement.

Yes. Automated slander is still slander even if you got an algorithm to do it. And accusing someone of shoplifting is 100% slander especially if it causes harm which being thrown out of a shop very much is.

I see, so you welcome a Nazi state.

Let me guess, you're related to, or possibly are, this guy?

Indeed. And a few that are not offenders at all and against quite a few misidentified people since this tech is _unreliable_.

As with most bullies, Trump only picks fights with countries (and people, companies, institutions, etc...) he thinks he can easily push around (or will bribe him to go away) -- he miscalculated, and/or was lead astray by Netanyahu, with Iran. He also doesn't respect those who cave easily.

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.