The Ukrainian army should just drop leaflets written in Korean that say “defect and we will feed you” I’m sure they’d all drop their weapons and run across no man’s land.

That is weird and doesn’t make sense.

Nope, I stay in the slow lane, unless my exit is in the left lane of course.

I leave enough room for me to have time to react and give the person behind me enough time to react to my breaking. Because most people drive way too close to avoid a rear-end collision if I have to slam my breaks for an emergency. Sometimes that means I’m 4, 5 or 6 car lengths away from the car in front of me, but that has the added benefit of pissing off tailgators who will almost immediately choose to pass me which works out great for me. The less space the person behind gives, the more space I leave between me and the person in front.

In my experience, slowing down to just below the speed limit will usually irritate these tailgators enough to shake them off. Your mileage may vary though.

I always imagined that it was due to a higher level of computer literacy amongst the consumer population. An hour after a corpo releases a new piece of tech under a subscription model, the software has been cracked and pirated all over the net.

Exactly this. we try to prevent cyberattacks as much as we can, but at a certain point, they’re impossible to perfectly defend against without also totally locking down our users and making it impossible for them to do their jobs. so then the game becomes one of containing the amount of damage an attack can do.

Security is restriction. our job is to balance our users’ ability to perform their jobs with acceptable levels of risk.

As an IT guy, I’d love to give software devs full admin rights to their computer to troubleshoot and install anything as they see fit, it would save me a lot of time out of my day. But I can’t trust everyone in the organization not to click suspicious links or open obvious phishing emails that invite ransomware into the organization that can sink a company overnight.

I talked to some friends after the debate who claim to be independent and they said they still thought they both were terrible. I don’t understand how anyone could equate Harris with Trump, especially after Jan 6

What do you mean? Caturday is every week between Friday and Sunday.

Here’s a short list of key policies and initiatives associated with Kamala Harris:

1. Healthcare: Advocates for expanding access to affordable healthcare, including support for the Affordable Care Act and efforts to lower prescription drug prices.

2. Climate Change: Supports aggressive action on climate change, including rejoining the Paris Agreement and investing in clean energy jobs.

3. Criminal Justice Reform: Focuses on reforming the criminal justice system, including ending mass incarceration, addressing racial disparities, and promoting police accountability.

4. Economic Equality: Promotes policies aimed at reducing income inequality, such as raising the minimum wage, supporting small businesses, and investing in education and job training.

5. Immigration Reform: Advocates for comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and protecting DACA recipients.

6. Gun Control: Supports measures to reduce gun violence, including universal background checks and banning assault weapons.

7. Women’s Rights: Champions reproductive rights and policies aimed at addressing gender-based violence and discrimination.

Here’s trumps policies: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

The taco is just an objectively inferior vessel for transporting food to your mouth. It has two whole open sides that are level with it’s base and it’s open to the air all across the top. It wouldn’t matter what you put on top. It will still spill out. You have to turn your head 90 degrees horizontal to eat a damn taco. Burritos are superior.

Buoyant green is plankton! Buoyant green is plankton!

I disagree with your point that private organizations dont go against the status quo in the US. I can’t turn on any news agency in the States without seeing headlines about where the US government is failing. and which political party is blamed for said failure depends on the bias of the news agency.

I 100% agree that news agencies are biased to their business elites in the US, but the foreign policy bias you mention is more related to that news agencies’ particular politcal leanings.

I find it hard to believe that the business elites that own news agencies are trying to sway the american peoples view of china because they feel they are losing some petty competition to make more money. We’ve seen the global opinion of china fall greatly since 2008, mostly due to how china is treating its people through strict surveilance, its attempt to control its neighbors, its use of wolfe warrior diplomacy, and increase aggression on the global stage.

You make fair and valid points, but the propaganda the US government creates does not stand alone in the american media sphere. We have the freedom to explore other ideas on the internet or purchase movies, tv shows, music, and articles from all around the world with little to no censorship. Thus, american propaganda influence faces more competition than its chinese counterpart.

Can it really be called propaganda if the information doesn’t come from the US government? China’s news outlets are state owned. America has NPR and PBS, which are not particularly popular compared to privately owned news outlets in the US.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_media_in_China#:~:text=Media in China is strictly,all controlled by the CCP.

The crux of my issue with the soviet system is that the highest echelons of the government had no oversight and were in no way beholden to the people at the lowest echelons. You’re right that democracy is a sliding scale, and I think a good form of government will allow dissenting opinions to take hold if they reflect the will of the people. I think it is very telling that you can have a communist party in the Kaiser’s germany, but not have a liberal/democratic party in Lenin’s Russia.

After some more digging, I conscede that you’re right on this point. I misremember that. they were not forced to participate.

I think political systems affect development, although geography plays a big role in that as well. How a country uses its available resources is predominantly determined by its economic and political system.

They gave you a ballet with only a party member candidate on it which you’d simply drop in the ballet box in front of everyone, and if you wanted to vote for an independent, you had to go behind a curtain and write it in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Soviet_Union

“However, in practice, before 1989, voters could vote against candidates preselected by the Communist Party only by spoiling their ballots, whereas votes for the party candidates could be cast simply by submitting a blank ballot.”

I wouldn’t call that democratic in nature.

I’m comparing political systems, not nations. If we’re talking about the WW1 era, then I’d say the soviets still had it worse as they went through a war, invasion, then a civil war, and famine and consequent brutal dictatorship. But the germans made it out quite well off, given they basically started the war with their unequal treaties and rapid militarization. Despite this, the treaty of Versailles was relatively lenient compared to what happened Austria-hungry.

It was not democratic. It was a single party system in which the party selected a candidate, (after some research I learned this part is false), and the populace was forced to vote for said candidate under threat of imprisonment.

If the people wanted to oust a candidate they didn’t like, they’d have to coordinate with everyone in secret to cooperatively abstain from voting for the candidate so he would lose his job and the party would select a new candidate.