Yeah my bad, didn't realise he was being held in a prison. The article linked is just a tiny snippet so I was missing context.

I think it's a good point. The hypocrisy and double standards have really come to the fore in the past 3 years.

However, I think it's partially due to a lack of empathy/inability to understand the desperation that drives some parts of the war machine, survive at any cost.

Land mines are a horror of war that bite long after the conflict ends. They are also one of the most cost effective ways of slowing/containing a large scale enemy assault.

Personally, I don't know where I stand on this news, existential threats shift viewpoints drastically.

I think it's fair to say: we should not use landmines, we should wish for other countries to not use them. However, I don't think that they should be demonised. And they should be used as "reasonably" as possible. (E.g. securing a border or military base, not near a residential area). Of course when survival comes into play, soldiers will do what they feel they need to at the end of the day, and who are we to judge from the comfort of our screens?

Everything has a cost. Usually of the same type as what you are buying.

You can usually reword security/stability as a type of freedom. The freedom to have a guaranteed income usually costs some of the freedom to choose where/when/how you work. For example.

You might say that you will pay for the freedom to not have school shootings with the freedom to have free access to guns. You lose one freedom to gain another.

You are correct that to some degree they are antonyms, but I would say that it's freedom vs stability. It's just that security is a type of stability.

If you break them down more mathematically freedom is represented as infinite possible trajectories, which is in other words a very unstable position. In order to increase stability you must reduce the possible trajectories.

He did it twice. And it was very clear.

I would add that I think checking out and joining smaller instances is also a great opportunity. Distributes the user load across servers and being one of fewer voices in an instance means you have a bigger say in who you federate with. You also get to be a third party instance to most of the big drama and don't get judged just for your instance as much

Edit: also, if you like your instance, contribute to it!

Lots of great software already posted, but with some complaints about windows inefficiencies I can't believe no one has posted:

Microsoft PowerToys https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/

Basically, it's a suite of tools that windows devs have made to make their lives easier while working in windows. Some features have made it into actual windows releases over the years, but most not.

It has an always on top, batch rename, customisable window snapping, better search, keyboard key remapper, mouse across multiple devices, colour eyedropper, and many many more.

Absolute must have for anyone that uses windows regularly.

I think the only time martial law can be seen as reasonable is in an outright state of war. And even then, only when it's existential.

It's kind of inherently the antithesis of democratic values.

I'm so annoyed at coverage of these issues and the economy as a whole. Journalists have to use the biggest numbers they can to make people think it's important.

Ok a 64% reduction in profits is not good. But that also means that the company is still profitable and wants to fire the thousands of people, and in so doing harm the local economy, that gave it massive profits for decades.

A 64% reduction in profits cannot be the company making a loss. Yet the article claims that BMW and Mercedes are "also making similar large losses".

Shareholders have been robbing employees blind for decades, and the second it gets a little bit less profitable we have to fire thousands of people?

And yes, I understand there must be some consideration of future proofing costs against a shrinking consumer base, but such drastic measures are solely aimed at preservation of shareholder dividends and value (see Boeing).

https://www.khanacademy.org/

Helped me get through my engineering degree. Absolutely the best maths education I've ever seen.

It's the final positions in the group. bottom to top, 1st to 4th

I've been using the term "post-developed" for a while now, mostly as a crude joke. However, unfortunately I think as time is going on it is becoming more and more apt to describe certain western economies.

Perhaps something along the lines of "when a society shifts from long-term investment to short-term cost saving, it is at risk of becoming a post-developed economy."

So much of the UK's decision making seems centred around how "we are so great" (cough EU is stopping us from achieving our potential cough) rather than "we need to invest to be able to compete."

Even Thatcherism, as toxic and awful as that was, was centred around pushing the economy forward to a new level of (horribly misguided) development.

Of course, I'll caveat that I am severely under-educated on these topics, but it is a running theme I'm starting to see emerge.

This is honestly such a spectacular shitshow. While simultaneously being an incredible work of financial engineering to manufacture these levers and injections of cash. Likely we will see courts involved, and it would be interesting if the nonpayment results in barca retaking ownership of assets that were "sold" last summer. Effectively renewing a "lever" for them.