In combat conditions Pi can reach 4 and E can reach 3. Maul halten und weiter dienen, all that.

OK. I might be thinking too much into this, but the metric system is good for practical use, but bad for didactic purposes. Some things which could use understanding are “automated” with the metric system.

So making Pi a variable is … fine. Maybe it’s some different geometry where it is.

Normies have learned a few buzzwords.

WTF I just read.

Especially their statement that they could not reconcile moderation with free speech,

The way I’d reconcile them would be when everyone can override moderation for what they themselves want to see, but without that the common default is applied.

That would be what we’d see in Fediverse projects if people were acting in good faith, too.

I dunno, somehow the best approaches I can imagine are those that existed in Usenet before it went out of use for discussions. Except for news servers having to store too much, and for spam protection happening after it gets posted, bad results. So probably things like group membership and post limits and such from today would be useful.

But in general Usenet was the way. I won’t change my mind, because a few different systems converged on models similar to Usenet, that being itself, Fidonet, Frost and FMS in Freenet, boards in Retroshare, even frankly places like Reddit and Lemmy.

We need a Usenet 2.0, with some precautions from it turning into a place for bots and pirates, like the old one. IMHO. It can even use Fediverse identities (but preferably not, identities should be cryptographic and untied from instances ; or maybe an instance would only be needed when an identity is created and posted into the network, but then it can be banned\removed on that instance all they want, it’ll be fully usable).

That’s interesting. Makes a bit of a connection to Putin and Russian current regime.

They are mostly children of party bureaucrats, with some mafia and special services seasoning added. That includes Putin himself, people painting him as ex-intelligence or his KGB past as something big miss the point, he had a minor role, he was a kid from a party family and he was sent to GDR because foreign postings were prestigious.

So they have this inferiority complex to make themselves seem real mafia and special services.

I wonder if Putin’s hate for Ukraine is a result of its organized crime not treating him as anything interesting. Same with Georgia, it was once the center of the organized crime in the ex-Soviet space, and Saakashvili didn’t end that as much as people think.

We want a centrally planned economy,

Oh, so you want real serfdom. Where you have a dossier passed between your employers as if you were a resource. Trade unions being state-controlled and acting in the interest of your employer. Nice.

we want universal healthcare,

Teeth being torn out without anesthetics, doctors prescribing donkey piss, people finding the rare good doctors via acquaintances and ties for important operations, because otherwise you might not survive that. Oh yes.

we want federally funded infrastructure projects,

Suppose that’s fine.

and we’re gonna take that money from the wealthy.

Just remember that the most important part of ownership is deciding how the money is used, and you are giving this to non-elected bureaucrats if you want central planning.

Nah, should think a bit more.

A hint - “Soviet system” doesn’t mean the USSR’s system, and it can be good if designed very carefully.

And that’s also what Trump crowd promises their voter base.

The issue is how they are going to achieve that. The Soviet way was very inefficient, led to many unprofitable plants in the system and budget holes being closed with selling fossil resources to “capitalist” countries. And eventually tanked the USSR.

Succeeding in creating such industries in the first place and making them work is more likely with Soviet approaches. But making that a stable, efficient system is just impossible with Soviet approaches.

So they have to spend enormous funds at creating humongous processes and plants and logistics, and then prevent those owning said processes and plants and logistics from creating a bureaucratic-political deadlock which USSR was usually in. Any change would reduce some party’s power and increase another’s, so most ministries would oppose any change of status quo, and that is why all Soviet attempts at creating, say, a country-wide computer network to increase production and planning efficiency, or at optimizing military industries, or at standardization were killed.

USSR could have personal computers common enough, and not clones of Western successful designs, except clones were the only thing that wouldn’t cause such a deadlock. Domestic designs meant some ministry losing to some other.

There was a de-facto college ruling the country, with every party in that college having a veto right. Better than today’s Russia, of course.

Same even with fossil fuels export dependency, frankly - big companies today are not so different from USSR in terms of internal structure, yet they are efficient enough. It’s just that such a way of getting value would be, again, less likely to cause deadlocks.

The more intelligent (thus requiring standardization and competition, not just controlling land or oil and gas reserves) always lost to the more basic (sell something abroad, or choose a foreign design and clone it).

It’s a bit similar to how Byzantine empire killed itself, actually. Inviting foreign power to help in internal affairs became normalized. They didn’t even feel, apparently, slow and steady conquest by Turks whose help they’d employ against each other.

Something not falling apart into tasty pieces in your hands is nice enough. In that sense.

Say, KFC and BK are something you can’t eat while walking. In my experience at least.

Yes, I missed that part, meant more the “working all your life on the same plant” thing.

The USSR didn’t have any limits to choosing an employment

You were distributed to a place by the state after finishing your education. If you left that place too soon, you’d be frowned upon and that’d be mirrored in your labor book (USSR had such a document, basically a dossier documenting your whole history of employment with characteristics, you could get such a “flattering” characteristic by a superior not liking you that you’d never be accepted to a good place after, and you couldn’t refuse or lose a record in your labor book).

and people weren’t forced to work anywhere.

Being unemployed for too long was literally, seriously, illegal in the USSR. Google for “тунеядство”.

People with something really bad in their labor books (say, dissidents) or some other necessary documents (being German after the war, being Jewish in a wrong period of time) had problems finding a place that would accept them, and would sometimes be prosecuted for being unemployed (that was usually informal employment, because you still had to eat something).

But in general yes, some kind of employment was always possible. Dying from hunger or being homeless was almost ruled out. Most of the population lived in some sort of “acceptable poverty” - conditions very bad by US measure, but with the previous correction. That’s sort of one good thing that most people from ex-USSR agree on.

Seems that they want to repeat the USSR of 70s, just capitalist and without the revolution and industrialization and mass repressions preceding stages, and rather right-wing.

Maybe they want that to avoid the same fate due to avoiding state capitalism and overregulation combined with politics inside the bureaucratic machine. If they are moderately smart.

Or maybe they just want to repeat the same track with modern technologies. Then it’ll suck.

That’d be the humanity.

Any system without wide popular involvement turns into shit.

Wide popular involvement requires simplicity and small number of levels, and ability to ruin and rebuild any part of the state apparatus quickly. So it’s limiting, but those limits are liberating, one can say.

At the same time there are no good systems for that wide popular involvement, one would have to pick between Switzerland and the idealized Soviet system, neither is perfectly functional.

I mean, I doubt he’d refuse her offering to SLAM him, I think there was no such offer.

Franco sort of was nicer.

Spanish (that be what, Galician, Castillian, Catalonian, Basque, Andalusian?) people between themselves are as different as “German and Austrian”. Actually the difference between Bavaria and Austria is in history and nation lore, not in dialects. Roughly. Of course there is dialectal difference too.

I guess you could say “Spanish and Occitan” for the comparison to be right.

OK, after “nordic and sweden” I looked for that “/s” and found it, sorry.

I disagree, they have nice things, except with recipes designed to cause thirst.

Ah. I see. I have some remnants of irrational sympathy to Boers after reading Boussenard’s book for stupid boys in my childhood.

But yep, encouraging Afrikaners to come somewhere in bunches seems to be a red flag.

I think you’d have a pretty steep uphill argument to say that this administration is not a white supremacist (and misogynist) movement at its core.

Maybe you are right, it’s just hard to believe something to be that simple, all other cases I’ve seen have a saner core, just evil.

I’ve heard that you have a huge demographic of black christians there, so abortion restrictions would also mean more black babies. Same for pornography.

Immigration restrictions - a lot of people from “white” countries were immigrating too, so not sure.

I don’t think it’s that. It’s making more bullshit laws, because a law really puts pressure only at those not in power. Creating plenty of tooling to jail and suppress opponents.

And also some people might genuinely think porn is harmful and they’re sorta right, if you have proper sexual education and available contraception, porn is harmful and it’s better to reduce age of consent (so that teenagers doing teenage things wouldn’t fear getting jailed) and limit porn (it affects one’s brain similarly to other addictions). A bit like in Iceland maybe?

Dunno what “white culture” is, seems to be some American delusion. From here it seems you have in general the same culture, whatever the skin color. Even ebony slang, IIRC, is similar to how rural white people speak in some states south. I may be wrong, haven’t made the Columbus excursion yet.

The “GOP senator pegged by pink furries while his tradwife is being handled by caring black gentlemen” new trend?

“Step…”? “Schoolgirl”? “Interracial”? “Incest”? “Cuckold”? Something about police?

Or what?

I know it’s the reserve hole for Russia, must be all the criminal culture.

I think Goauld can control their metabolism sufficiently to be immune