Hemingways_Shotgun

And Hitler refused to believe until nearly the end that Operation Barbarossa was a failure.

Can we just skip to the part where Trump and Melania blow their fucking brains out in a bunker, please.

They don’t care. It’s not like those people are human to them, after all.

I feel like beyond the stupidity. Beyond the corruption. Beyond the narcissism and the self-aggrandising, the lying and the greed; it’s never really talked about enough about how he’s just a flat-out asshole he is.

Even if he were just some dude driving a pickup truck to a 9-5 job, his entire demeanour is just one of a mean-spirited shit-heel who would get his teeth kicked in at any bar in any “regular joe” town in the world.

At some point even he has to realize that he’s a joke right?

Like even his syphillitic brain can’t not see what’s right in front of him forever, can it?

To other world leader’s he’s a joke. Someone who they can stroke his ego to get whatever they want, and then ignore him entirely and do whatever they feel like anyway.

“Israel…don’t drop those bombs” Israel had no intention of listening to him. Russia had no intention of listening to him. They make his sense of self importance skyrocket and so they say whatever they need to say to get him to do whatever THEY want him to do, and then don’t listen to him the rest of the time.

Is he really this fucking stupid?

Did his knowledge of the law leave with Elon, too?

I believe OnlyOffice may be problematic from an ethical perspective if I remember correctly because of Russia or something. But it’s FOSS, has a linux desktop version, and its compatibility with Excel has been absolutely rock solid for me.

Advertising isn’t the problem. And before I get my balls cut off, I’ll back away slowly while explaining myself…

We’ve always paid for ads. Back in the old days you paid for a cable subscription and got to watch ads every 15 minutes. That’s not a new phenomenon. Hell, television was designed around the advertising break. The entire one hour series 5 part script model was created with the “cut to ad break” in mind. You think about your CSI:Miami “sunglasses of justice” stinger, or your fourth ad-break plot-twist as the Romulan war bird uncloaks and the music dun-dun-duns into a commercial for cheese-its…

That’s not a problem in and of itself. In fact I kind of miss it when shows were written that way. Heck, Tubi and Pluto TV do it and no one complains about that. And if Netflix wants to add those back into their free tier, more power to 'em.

But advertising is not about getting served a few commercials every fifteen minutes anymore. It’s literally in front of the content, within the content, etc… It’s not about “hey look, it’s an ad break, let’s go refill our 7-up and take a piss”, it’s inlaid with the content, as well as taking up as much, if not MORE time than the actual content itself. and THAT’S part one of the problem.

Part two is the fact that if you’re going to make more money by making me pay for your service AND watch advertisements, you better damn well be giving at least some of that new money to other creatives that are MAKING those advertisements. Make a commercial with actors and actresses; pay them. Hire a writer to create ad-copy, just like we used to do. But if you’re going to charge me AND make me watch lazy shit you made with A.I. slop, than THAT is where I’ll happily take my ship and head onto the high seas.

I’d be perfectly happy to sit through two or three traditional advertisements every fifteen minutes just like we did in the old days. But what I WON’T stand for is watching five minutes of lazy A.I. ads after every five minutes of actual content and be expected to PAY for the service on top of that.

I use Cromite. It’s a more hardened fork of Bromite. Which itself is a hardened fork of Chromium.

The only thing I’ve found so far is that it likes to block the discussion threads on some websites. But other than that I’ve had no issues whatsoever.

It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.

I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.

Even mother nature looked at our present timeline and said “Yeah…fuck it…let’s see how crazy shit can get.”

If you wan’t to use FOSS I get it, I want to. But when it comes to professionnal workflow you sometimes have to put your ego on the side. When I tried to ditch the Adobe Suite, the Free(dom) alternatives didn’t worked for me or the proprietary alternatives were simply better.

Then, I would argue, the alternative isn’t to sign petitions to make the corporate guys make their proprietary stuff available on FOSS operating systems. The alternative is to contribute to the FOSS alternatives in order to make them as good as the proprietary.

I’m not saying that you in particular haven’t contributed (either financially or developmentally). I don’t know you, so this isn’t particularly directed at you.

But in general, the “FOSS isn’t as good as proprietary stuff” crowd has overwhelmingly never actually tried to fund or contribute to the development of the software itself and their complaints amount to “Why isn’t my free thing as good as the thing they make me pay for?”

In which case the answer is “of course it isn’t…you’re telling me the software developed on the evenings and weekends by enthusiasts doing it in the spare time for NO money isn’t as polished as a fully funded business software!? NO WAY!!! I’M SHOOKETH!!!”

The alternative to the (perceived) quality disparity between FOSS and Proprietary isn’t to go begging at the Corporations doorstep; it’s to make the FOSS alternatives good enough to take the throne of “industry standard” away from the corporations.

It’s not impossible…hell, Blender is the poster child for pretty much doing exactly that. It’s not the “industry standard”, but it’s accepted in the industry in ways that GIMP and Inkscape still aren’t. And the reason is because it’s good enough to be there.

True. But I’m going to give America some credit here. When they came in, they came in hard. Two of the hardest beaches in Normandy with the highest losses of any allied force during the landings. Front line in pretty much every major engagement from the moment they entered. I am anti-american in general, and no…I don’t think Germany would have won if they hadn’t gotten involved (the soviets bought our victory at the cost of 11,000,000 casualties…)

They committed more troops than any other country except the soviet union and germany itself. I’ll criticise a LOT of what the United States has become, but I would never ever in a million years claim that they had “barely taken any damage”, and in fact kind of take offence to the statement even though I’m not American.

And the U.S. got all the money to build up their industrial base by the fact that they were they only country able to give out loans to the European nations fighting in the First World War since every european country spent everything they had and then some fighting each other.

World War One represented the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. It was bigger than the economic exploitation by the British Empire of Africa, India and Asia combined. In four years, the U.S. basically held all the cards and (I know this is controversial) only ended up getting involved militarily when it seemed possible that the allies would lose and therefore be unable to pay off their loans.

And you know what…all credit to the Americans; they took that new found wealth and built up the strongest, most powerful industrial base the world had ever seen; an industrial base that, without which, the second world war would have been nearly impossible to win (Russian blood, British Strategy, American Industry…isn’t that the saying?)

It’s what they proceeded to do with that industrial base afterwards that lead us to where we are now.