uralsolo [he/him]

Russia is not an altruistic actor here

Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn’t is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I’ll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.

How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China’s loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they’re “colonizing” anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.

As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren’t placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They’re the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR’s dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.

Broke: Giving someone a pet as a gift.

Woke: Making someone your pet as a gift.

2 years is still insanely short to me. I had a Nexus 6p from 2016-2020, and a Pixel 5 from 2020-present, and frankly the 6p was still pretty fast and satisfying to use when I traded it in so I can’t imagine wtf anyone needs to upgrade more frequently than that.

I don’t remember which Surface I have, but power issues are the biggest bugbear that have followed me with it the entire time I’ve had it. Firstly chargers for the thing are really fucking sketchy - if it’s not in basically perfect, out-of-the-box condition it simply refuses to connect. And even if the little indicator light turns on that doesn’t mean that the bios “sees” it, which is pretty annoying.

Lately it’s been doing this thing where when I try to wake it up from sleep it takes about a full minute to turn the screen on. This wasn’t an issue until like a week ago, I’ve tried updating everything, reverting back to windows/stock settings - nothing.

Nowadays my surface is just a second screen on my desk that I use to run Stremio, because it just can’t handle anything else - and this is after me being pretty positive on it for most of the time I’ve had it. I guess I’ve had it for a few years, but damn if it wasn’t such a compact design I could probably swap out the power supply or something.

I carried a lighter for a while. It worked fine when I put it in my pocket, but the first time I whipped it out for someone it didn’t work at all. They say that that happens to lots of guys but I haven’t carried a lighter since that day.

I mean they could, but they won’t.

I can’t pin it down to just one, but holy shit school shootings and the way we’ve responded to them completely broke whatever part of me thought that our society was still capable of doing things. They keep upping the ante with how horrifying they are too - the high water mark currently is Uvalde, and I think that the next one that shocks the nation will involve the cops (or a “good guy with a gun”) gunning down multiple kids or parents while trying to “help” and our collective response will still be to do nothing.

Me at home: I’ll have some hot wings as a meal.

Me at restaurants: I’ll have some hot wings as an appetizer, and a burger for the meal.

The alternative is my car which sometimes triggers its alarm even though I’m holding the key.

idk why you wouldn’t unless you live in a really cold or cloudy place.

Oh no, don’t leave town. whatever would we do without you beta testing your unworkable hardware on public streets and making the traffic even worse than it was.

doing something you love

I love cooking for family, but I’ve also cooked for Denny’s and a getting through a meal service is something else entirely. There’s a reason cooks in general are one of the most alcoholic professions, and it’s not because they spend most of their day doing something they love.

I’ve used them for about a year, so far no complaints. High speed, high privacy, only a couple things have required me to turn off my vpn to access them.

thinking you’ll get to retire

lmao

I’m not actually an investment genius, I’m just gambling like the rest of them.

This is something I’ve thought was true for a while, but your comment made me go back and look for decent sources and while I found a few articles bemoaning tech in schools I also found a lot of good-looking scientific studies saying that it’s fine or even beneficial, so I deleted my comment.

AFAIK now, the negative outcomes are when it’s home schooling or COVID-era distance learning and the kid is only doing work on an ipad, so the problem isn’t the tech itself it’s the absence of a structured school environment with a teacher.

Haven’t paid for a TV show or a movie in a long time - but I also very rarely watch those.

For stuff I do all the time I do end up paying for the convenience of steam/gog/etc.

deleted by creator

AFAIK it’s just something that hasn’t been tested, but that goes for basically all digital “shrinkwrap contracts” from your iTunes EULA to the license on your github repo. Good luck being the first person to test it if you’re not a major corporation, though.