jantin @ jantin @lemmy.world

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8

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151

Joined

2 yr. ago

China does not have one road anymore. Once Russia invaded Ukraine the entire project collapsed. It is not possible to run the rail from China to Poland (there already was a functioning hub for China-EU railway transport in central Poland before the war) without crossing Ukraine or Russia and Belarus. And all three of these countries are kinda off-limit for who-know-how long. Meanwhile the West kinda soured on the Chinese products and offshoring so once the war is over there will be no more incentive to resume large-scale operations of the belt and road.

One which you won't be able to unlearn: "Kid" as a word for a child derives from a word "kid" which meant young goat. We're literally calling human children "goat children" and it's not even mocking.

The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning "boy" or "guy" - "kille" is a shortened "killing" - young goat.

"Poultry" though

I'll take the bait:

• wireless communications can be and are disrupted in several different ways in a warzone. Targeting cell towers, active jamming, interception of messages are all huge concerns and all are solved with Starlink
• wired communications are useless on frontlines for (I hope) obvious reasons
• Quite a lot of the fighting happens in relatively sparsely populated countryside
• And even if we assume cell range is everywhere on land... there's none at sea.
• All of it and more is solved by Starlink. While Russians learned how to interfere with it eventually, for some time it was near-invincible comms and still brings huge value.

Buuut... In the end Musk gave UA such a wide access to Starlink because the US and UA authorities paid for it a fat coin and most likely followed the payment with an offer he could not refuse. Until China or Russia eventually launch their own internet constellations, the US has a massive edge over literally anyone else and can grant this edge to anyone without it being controversial. Unlike sending military gear which took a while to become reality and was a delicate diplomatic matter, sending a truckload of receivers with access keys taped on them is basic shopping for UA and just a blip in export statistic for the US

Not just that, but if he'd kill EV industry in the US the country would quickly get flooded by Chinese cars and batteries.

Science, both pompous universities and R&D

I am from a country in Europe where "hunters" are the slapstick version of rich, douchey deep state. Tons of politicians, religious figures, business people are hunting for hobby and I wouldn't bat an eye if they did it in compliance to law, common sense and rules of wildlife management. But they do not and are famous for:

• blatant poaching
• corrupting local forest management to allow for excessive shootings
• the corruption at one point has reached the country parliament and a country-wide green light was given to cull boars because several sick ones were found in one region.
• running events which have nothing to do with traditional hunting, nothing to do with wildlife management, but are instead shooting rows with random animals ran across a yard and being shot. Then their children (often as young as 7-8 yo) get to pose for instagram pics with fresh, bloody carcasses.
• shooting people (both themselves and innocent mushroom pickers) and then getting acquitted after saying "I thought that was a boar" (the phrase is a meme now, but it still works in courts from time to time)
• handling firearms in a way that would get any other person in jail (including neglecting psych checks, wrong storage, littering forests with lead ammo)

...all of which was announced via social media, which implies that despite shortages of food and water the people there have constant access to the Internet. Cyberpunk is now. Unless a thunder from the thunderstorm fries a cell tower nearby of course.

I laugh my ass off reading this and thinking of all the old, privileged, annoying, self-important hunter clubs who boast endlessly about their vital ecological mission and benefits of eating game. Stuff your fat faces with cessium and I'll just stand here and hope for as painful a consequence as possible.

Yeah, then they get bolder and force full-screen ads in the middle of a film and then exhausted subscribers (the three that will be left) will force a co cession from the corporate to have the ads blocked together instead of randomly popping up... Oh wait...

It's not fucking endemic, words have meanings. For endemic you need steady, predictable number of infections and we don't have that. With covid we have rampant mutations and wave after wave of poorly tracked upticks. "Endemic" became a buzzword excuse to drop restrictions and get people to spend money and work on-site again and has nothing to do with the actual epidemiology of covid.

And for fucks sake even if I agreed that the "endemic" status is debatable one thing is not: COVID is worse at each reinfection in an individual, the persistent damage is cumulative (did you know you can have long covid on top of a previous long covid?).

And uh oh I didn't catch a flu in years. Yes, flu is bad too. It leaves lingering symptopms too. But how many people catch it two or three times within 2 years? Yeah, not many. With covid no one bats an eye that someone went through 3 bouts of potentially deadly, potentially disabling disease within 2 years. We're going to face massive healthcare problems a few years on, problems which are preventable with basic precautions... But no one takes these precautions because eNdEmIc.

No, I just like delusional conspiracy theories about diabolic capitalists. A kind of a competition if the reality can out-insane off-the-rails tinfoil. For now I don't feel like I'm winning.

as a capitalist I'd be worried to hand over my profit-producing assets to another capitalist, who has delusions that he is a caesar of the world's most important empire (this applies both to Xi and to Trump, mind you, probably that's why Koch brother has recently announced a multimillion fund to prevent Trump presidency)

I'm starting to think this is according to plan. Tinfoil hat of course and a heavy one at that... But in the long-ish run reducing life expectancy will bring massive savings on whatever remains of pension systems and in the care industry.

Wait so americans wanted to solve trade imbalance with China, that is overreliance on import from China and indirectly reliance on the Chinese influence... By selling out control over American companies? Capitalists are dumb.

It is solved long ago, the tech exists and is quite common in a big part of Europe

But Poland didn't implement it, still runs on 1990s tech and so every now and then a bored kid will shoot the radio-stop and stop a train or two for lulz. Now apparently FSB managed to pull together a team and coordinate several radio-stops, that's why it was a problem.

His mom certainly is despite everything

All governments and most media suggested and practice that. This is the gamble thdt is being currently executed and I'm giving a lot of good faith when interpreting it as an epidemiological gamble and not as a semi-deliberate eugenics campaign.

Against a Dark Background from Banks is good too, much less space travel, a very adventurous plot and worldbuilding which is dense but doesn't overtake the book.

The gamble is:

1. drop any precautions, let everyone contract and survive covid, maybe (just maybe) in the future reinfections will be rarer and milder.

But on the other side...

2. COVID is known to leave long-term and poorly understood health problems in a lot of people (ca 10% with any form of long covid, ca 2% disabled after covid).

So we roll the dice and hope the hypothesis 1) is a net gain over the fact 2). That if we sacrifice well-being of 10% of population (in this case children), a larger percentage will be better off in the future.

As far as things go now I'm not too optimistic.