Ohhh elections, so the plan is to get bogged down in a low-intensity border conflict and then say “oh no, we can’t do the voting in the middle of a war!”

Is that a ploy from Russians who are too cheap to bribe three juntas at the same time and want to consolidate assets?

No, we can’t. But we can make sure the development of automation of pleasurable tasks is as horrendously traumatising as possible. <~~ the probably actual mindset of some ai ceos and maybe devs.

Oh yes, as someone somewhere said:

“The safest border of Russia is the western one because NATO guards it”.

In Poland it’s “hybrid attack”. Devious, disgusting dehumanisation which makes even otherwise smart or kind people cheer for forces literally letting people freeze to death in forests. Rebrand helpless, misguided refugees as “Russia’s hybrid weapon” and you can get away with any atrocity.

With one notable exception: report, inform and spread news about Swedish metalworker union strike against Tesla.

Eh, 2022-3 wars are just as horrifying, they just happen on a smaller scale. Look up what was going on in the Bucha town, what are living conditions in Gaza, how many people were forced to leave homes in African and Asian civil wars… The scale of minefields in Ukraine, etc.

The fucking hubris of man. Antarctica should be off-limits for everyone except science teams. Yet here we go, the most important of the importants (not really, but I guess he feels like that) goes for a fieldtrip polluting the place just like any other cruise ship. And for what? A fucking publicity stunt. The message he sent is “this whole planet including this one extremely unhospitable, legally uninhabitable piece of ice is our playground. It’s no big deal to just pack up and randomly drop by Antarctica en route to Dubai.” Mate, this way of thinking is what brought us to where we are now. You’re not helping.

Euthanasia will be legalised and normalised sooner than we expwct

Head of a fox

Maybe because producing music costs pennies compared to producing movies and then people are much likely to listen to the same few tracks for days on end, than they are to watch the same movie for days on end. Music studios may not be too jealous about access because they want to let people listen to their essentially free library in as many places as possible. Movie studios are tens of millions in the red for their big productions and don’t want to share incomes too widely.

The technology of loan risk assessment? Yes, it exists worldwide, all banks are doing it. But there is a wide chasm between

“when I show up asking for a loan bank will xray all my previous financial history and craft its offer from that” in Europe (at least my country) and

“credit score is a houshold term, people employ lifehacks to improve it and you’re screwed if it’s bad because half of everything runs on credit”.

To add a bit more and a few clarifications:

At current rate it is not possible for Ukraine to actually, seriously lose the war. Even if UA was forced to start peace talks today they would remain a sovereign state, badly beaten and poor, but with immense will to ally themselves with the West, and the West won’t object (too much).

So for a Slovakian politician there is little to no risk in becoming a putin simp since there is no way Russia can credibly threaten him within the next 5 years. The very same mentality Orban is most likely having - Hungary is sheltered behind Carpathian mountains so there is no actual risk of russian boots on the ground. All the cash and dirty tricks from putin without much fear of his aggression, what’s not to like.

Fico must have gotten some sweet deals from the east and also there are all the suspicions around him that make him look like a plain mafia boss - and if there is one massive difference between russia and the EU it’s that russians don’t ask unpleasant questions and don’t bother too much with all this “rule of law” thingy.

It’s too early to call russia’s collapse and I would not underestimate the country’s resilience to isolation. “Best we can do” is a regime change, but there is zero viable political forces which would be willing to maintain long-term peace. At least in Central Europe the thinking is “russians lost this one, and badly, but round two is coming, if not in 5 years then in ten”.

This is not wrong, but from the European perspective… Public healthcare is not better when it comes to work conditions.

We will not. If anything COVID taught me people will actively fight against anything that minimally hurts their comfort and entrenched vision of reality.

This time we were taken by surprise and governments were surprisingly quick to act and impose things and we were lucky to have a 90%ready tech developed precisely for this kind of event (mRNA vaccines were in late stage of development in 2020, they just speeded up finishing touches, trials and roll-out).

In 2023 the general vibe is " we know that lockdowns, mask mandates, travel bans were the right thing to do, but we also know we won’t let them happen again". So it’s better to stay quiet, do nothing and act surprised when the next pandemic hits. Except this time those in power will know that mitigation won’t float and societies will happily sacrifice the old and the weak on the altar of economy.

On an unrelated note, “climate mitigation” will probably never happen.

Blah blah blah

Rats know they’re losing so they want to give farewell gifts to their cronies before leaving and punish the poors for not voting Tory.

Also helps to harm economy and national redources as much as possible so that the next administration fails to do anything and Tories can return in a further election cycle.

The endgame sounds scary, classic enshittification scheme but deployed to authentication and security: make it flashy and smooth at start, get adoption (this time it’s different b/c it’s not the masses that need convincing, but website operators), hold the entire internet hostage by threatening to pull the plug on the mode of access to everything. Also more obvious and coming sooner: exploit your handle on the tech to disable Passkeys to someone who “violates ToS” of Google services by, idk, running adblock or logging in with Firefox.

Read up (or listen to podcasts) on the earliest history of Judaism. It’s genuinely fascinating history. Lesson learned is that they were making things up to suit circumstance since Yehovah became the big thing and probably longer. What protestants did and what Catholics think about considering doing now it’s just the newest developments in the long line.

Did it? I somehow stopped seeing updates after the constitution referndum failed and capitalist and pinochetan cronies got elected into the council drafting the next version of the constitution.

Well, to my European eyes it’s not strange at all. These are some extreme takes but that’s how freedom of expression and press work. My European country has a politician with decades-long career who routinely claims democracy is a bad system, that women should not be allowed to vote etc. Luckily for us the man has near-zero actual power, but still, we can’t jail him for talking even if what he says is horrifying.