Samsung does too, the aim is office workers in European + USA, which gets a new phone sponsored every few years

You’re sure it’s not Harry Potter and the Goblet of fire?

I don’t think things will improve until they have got worse still.

Shit won’t improve before people kill oligarchs. We’ve not seen a peasant correction in Europe since the French revolution.

It creates a single point of failure, which is one of the key reasons for why darkweb/tor arrests tends to happen in waves. As the law enforcement agencies, tends to get a treasure trove of data whenever they hit and loot the main server of a marketplace

Well, all of our politicians are and that’s the problem

And Google sheets let’s you use JavaScript (alright google script, but the fuck is the difference?), if you’re a hobbyist you won’t hit your limit.

If you’re living in Calc/Sheets, then I can see some money saved by switching and rewriting to Python

Microsoft has also swapped to a subscription based licencing for Office, which used to be a lifetime one time fee.

So when people get new products and can’t find their licencing key, and realise office now costs as much per year as it used to cost for a lifetime. Yeah people look elsewhere

Nuclear is still the most expensive power source, while wind turbines are one of the cheapest per MWH produced.

Half a decade ago I was fully pro nuclear, but battery technology have developed to a point we’re almost capable of using it as a base loader; There’s an added power grid capacity requirement for battery farm baseloading, but there’s ideas of how to solve this. By having batteries sitting locally at the largest power generating sites, with a switch to determine whether batteries should be filled or power should be pushed to the grid

At that point I might not really care if the function name or a variable name is different

At least clean it up so it’s maintainable, introducing tech debt is a long term impact

I can run a compiler.

Then I can run it again, and the output will be the same.

I can run a LLM prompt.

Then I can run it again, and the output should be the same. The unpredictability is what makes the tech great - Nobody in decision making actually understands this, but the goal is not for identical outputs. Just like me and you, don’t respond to the same question in the same way every time

What are you talking about? The DPR requested Russian military assistance. If the DPR was legitimate and had the right to defend itself, then Russia sending troops in at their request was legitimate.

That has nothing to do with the full scale war. They’re two different conflicts.

I don’t believe countries have an inherent right to defend themselves, and if I did then I would say that the DPR had the same right.

It’s not the Donbas war I’m questioning, there’s a reasoning chain that’s understandable. Both geopolitically, strategically and culturally.

It’s the full scale invasion of 2022 I’m questioning. There’s no chain of thought leading to that invasion, other than greed and lust for blood by Putin and his inner circles. The nationalists were not in power by the time they began their invasion. They had already gained control of the region, Donbas, that wanted to be Russian.

There’s just no way to argue the full scale invasion should ever have started.

Somehow, the extreme anti-war stance of not supporting even “defensive” wars makes me a bloodthirsty warmonger

Your endgame argument is national states shouldn’t exist, but today they do. As long as they do exist, national governments should be able to defend against other nations attempt to gain control over them. Because if we do assume, at one point we get a global government and abolish the national states. Then it’s whoever carries the most power (that’s war machines), that’ll be able to decide the values of such a government. And by extend shape the culture that’ll impact everyone.

But that’s two different funding mechanics.

Defined benefit, buys bonds. So the government wants to build a metro in Sydney, borrow the money and own 100%.

Defined contribution, buys ownership. So the government wants to build a metro in Sydney, sells 40% ownership to fund the building phase.

example, I think China is more democratic than the US.

Both countries are a clusterfuck from a democratic/people decides perspective. The way both countries are ruled is quite similar. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Because my metric for the level of ‘democracy’ in a nation is how closely that nations policies match the will of its people and how happy the people are with its policies

This is really hard to gauge for China specifically, because there’s as you noted no electorally elected officials.

Furthermore it’s an authoritarian leadership, known to punish dissidents. It’s a very complex topic to go into who benefits and who don’t, from the current Chinese policies. Chinas economy is as much, if not more, dependent on gig labour as the US is. The gig labourers are not in better conditions in China, than they are in the US.

It’s not unheard of that parents pay for their adult children’s medicine, because the only income their child could get was from a poorly paid delivery gig.

There’s an issue globally with the elites having grown more greedy, especially in the past four decades. I think one of US, UK, China or Russia is going to see their elite lose power and fall to a popular uprising. Before any other oligarchical society, at which all oligarchs are going to give crumbs back to the people.

Just like European royal houses gave more wealth and power to their commoners as a response to the French revolution.

XiJinpingStanAccount honestly sounds like a parody handle, I’d expect the likelyhood of such a user to actually favour Xi Jinping rather low.

Personally I don’t understand why we’d want less democracy, instead of more of it. Citizens assemblies is the logical move, for anyone wanting more power to the people - But I guess my views are closer to anarchist movements than anything, I don’t want to alter everything. I just want to kill intergenerational wealth.

So that was a lot of words to say nothing.

Do you think Russia is in a right to invade Ukraine?

It’s the most clear cut conflict in the world at the moment, anyone supporting Putin’s aggression has lost themselves to propaganda. Ukraine unfortunately didn’t get enough support early on, this conflict could had cost half the lives lost to date.

It’s miles apart to be against an aggressive occupational force with no clear goals, and not support a country’s right to defend itself.

It’s ultimately a global market. But every defined benefits plan active, adds to demand for bonds. Lowering the yield.

Defined contribution schemes are bad for the people selling bonds, e.g. people buying homes, governments and mega corps

So they’ll drop from inflated to fairly priced?

Bind yields are up and will continue to increase, because countries are moving from defined benefit- to contribution based- pension scheme’s.

Which makes bonds and the guaranteed returns a less interesting investment vehicle. The big pension market under transition right now is the Netherlands, but it’s a general trend across the globe that countries have been moving from defined benefit to contribution based schemes.

Another key difference, the Railway mania was powered by commoners investing. Not just a few rich bozos and enormous enterprises putting their money into it, as it is with AI