They are supposed to pay it out to families of the soldiers. But they skirt around that by simply not retrieving their dead and wounded from the battlegrounds, and marking the soldiers as unknown/missing, thus deferring the payments indefinitely.

There have been multiple reports of wives/widows trying to find out what happened to their husbands, or at least to collect the money, with the military admin stonewalling them.

Next thing they’ll start rounding up people who wear glasses, like some African dictator a few decades ago.

Can humans even have a real communist society? I suspect it would take a species without any individual self-preservation instinct, or individual greed, so that each member can fully serve the collective.

Well, at least we got something.

And even that is debatable. Japanese surrender came shortly after a quick succession of several events - the first bomb at Hiroshima, Soviet Union declaring war and invading continental Japanese land, the second bomb at Nagasaki, allies completely obliterating Japanese navy, and preparing to invade their home islands, etc.

Many argue that Japan would surrender even without the two nuclear bombs.

Yep, most of my non-tech friends just say “Ads? Oh yeah, I don’t even notice them anymore, I got so used to them.” whenever that topic pops up in a conversation.

Enshittification actually does work, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, all the corporations have all the subtlety of a Sherman tank, so they always go all in on it.

There is nebula.tv which works like that, but it lacks content. I am a subscriber, but I’m running out of interesting content to watch there.

OBviously there is network effect in play here. If Youtube switched to subs-only model tomorrow, they would have much wider content offer from the get-go.

Under the veneer of fantasy parody, Pratchett was able to sneak in surprisingly strong ethics and morality lessons in a very likeable manner. It’s one of many reasons I love the Discworld books - they make me want to be better.

I suspect that the characters Esmerelda Weatherwax and Sam Vimes were in fact Pratchett’s vehicles to convey his own moral values.

“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

(https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1494234-carpe-jugulum)

That was over two years ago. Surely even a mediocre tactician would anticipate something like this happening eventually.

My guess is that Russia simply does not have the means to effectively defend all of its border anymore, and they’ve been praying that the Ukraine’s western benefactors will keep them “on the leash” for as long as possible.

Yep, that’s a more accurate way of putting it. @Pronell@lemmy.world’s phrasing made it sound like some well-organized kanban thing. 🤣

With a topic as sensitive and biased against the victims as this, it’s hard to get accurate data - see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country

As a Slovak person, currently horribly embarrassed for my own proto-fascist government, I wholeheartedly agree. We’ve had our chance, but majority of voters over here are mentally 50 years in the past and brainwashed by Russian disinfo campaigns. We really are gullible idiots.

EDIT: That said, it’s mostly just our government making performative noise for benefit of its voter base. We are not affected nowhere near as much by Ukraine’s current gas block as they want you to believe.

How does it compare to the SkyMap app? I’ve been using that one for years, and am happy with it.

A bit of unfortunate wording there. :) I had to go back and reread it slowly in order to understand what you meant.

If I understand it correctly, they were confident a while ago already that they could return safely, but they’re taking advantage of the situation to do some tests and experiments to learn more about the failure.

(If you disagree, go yell at Scott Manley, I heard it in one of his recent videos.)

An experiment should be opt-in, not opt-out.

All through the same network, I’m afraid. I haven’t felt the need to separate it like that, although it should be doable using docker networks, or maybe on even lower level, via Linux network namespaces.

Alright, so it can do some direct syncs via Garmin API, I didn’t know that. Last time I checked, only manually uploading your gpx files was possible.

Neat, I’ll definitely set this up. Dockerized, of course, my little server already has lot of services on it, got to keep things neatly separated. :)