With all due respect, a lack of curiosity towards the moral implications of how tech is used in the world is an extremely irresponsible take for anyone working in the tech industry, which is presumably a large cohort here in Hacker News.
If you happen to be part of this cohort, you should absolutely always question the moral implications of any project you work on, and you're in a better position than the average person to fully explore the possible ways tech can be used and abused. I'd argue that should be considered one of the primary purposes of Hacker News.
Far more likely is that we head back to a feudal era where data mining tech is used to identify and eliminate potential rabble-rousers. Once enough production is automated, all remaining have-nots are exterminated.
The weak link is that for “the haves” to have, the “have -nots” are needed. To have or to not is just a comparison, a millionaire needs the poor to be rich and to feel special otherwise when everyone is special nobody is.
If California was apportioned the same as Wyoming, it would have 68 or 69 representatives (depending how you round). Not to play favorites: Texas would have 50 or 51 representatives.
Even if you just count the House of Representatives, smaller states have a per capita advantage.
> Even getting the currently occupied land back is mostly optional.
That's only true in the short term.
If Russia gets out of the war with Ukraine with territory gains, that only serves as incentive to start up again after Russia can regroup. After all, Putin's stated long-term goal is to take the entire country (among others) and restore the USSR.
Of course, taking back the occupied land is also easier said than done, as it would severely weaken Putin domestically to have expended all these resources and lives for nothing. There's no way he can allow that.
There is the issue that Russia tends to attack weak countries. The Baltic countries are small and also something Russia would like to have. But part of NATO.
Ukraine was seen as easy to take over. But that was clearly a wrong assessment.
> "I have said many times that the Russian and Ukrainian people are one nation, in fact. In this sense, all of Ukraine is ours [...] But you know we have an old parable, an old rule: wherever a Russian soldier steps, it is ours."
Also, looking at Russian track record specifically, is Georgia, which was militarily defeated in 2008, part of Russia? Did they formally annex Abkhazia or Transnistria? Does Lukashenko report to Putin?
> For instance, he wouldn't have even got off the ground if free trade hadn't decimated the US manufacturing sector. I won't fault anyone with a blue-collar job for voting for him, because the choice was him vs. some neoliberal.
And I would agree with you for the 2016 election. However, when Trump lost more manufacturing jobs under his first term than were lost under Obama despite all his bluster about saving and restoring said jobs, and his administration's only legislative win was a big tax cut for the wealthy, it's no longer a valid reason to vote for the guy in 2020 or 2024.
And, the joke's on any who did vote for him a second and third time: he's lost even more manufacturing jobs.
The tragedy is if you look at the actual data, manufacturing jobs generally recover under Democrat administrations, and they tend to be lost in significant numbers under Republican administrations. People are more easily swayed by memes and sound bites than actual data, though.
Finland inflicted a serious military victory over ussr, actually had a possibility of Allies joining in Winter War, and fought with ussr in 1941-1945. After all that it got its neutral position, not only by ceding some land, but actively resisting.
Meanwhile Baltic states lost their sovereignty for 50 years.
Finland had an offer from the USSR to swap some land for double the size elsewhere. After the "serious military victory over ussr" it lost that land plus some more for the total of 11% of its area, including its second largest city.
>and fought with ussr in 1941-1945
That is a very hilarious way to say that Finland allied with Nazis and got crushed again.
That’s inaccurate. Amongst NATO countries, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and Turkey have mandatory military service, and Croatia is bringing it back. There’s also non-NATO countries like Austria, Belarus, Cyprus, and Switzerland with mandatory military service.
Of those countries, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania all have borders with Russia. The remainder - the majority of both the NATO countries and of the European states with service generally - do not have a border with Russia.
I've asked Gemini. Interestingly, they were offered over 2x as much territory in exchange for 1.5% of their land. Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't mention that in the Winter War article.
They lost 10-11% after WW2. Which deal was better?
"every male still needs to spend one year of their life"
Not 1 year. Gemini says it's 6-12 months, and several European countries not bordering the big bad fit that criteria.
Who exactly is after Austria, which has conscription, but has been neutral since basically the entire cold war?
Or the famously neutral Switzerland?
"No, it hasn’t."
Top Export Partners (2019)
The total value of Finnish goods exports in 2019 was approximately $72.84 billion.
Imagine the Taiwan copypasta being used against you.
> Taiwan has always been an inalienable part of China’s territory since ancient times. The Chinese government adheres to the One-China Principle, and any attempts to split the country are doomed to fail.
They didn't cede anything there. They continued to claim that Crimea was theirs, with support from the US. Less than a year before Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukraine was openly speaking of all options to retake Crimea which would obviously entail war with Russia. [1] All the while they were actively seeking to join NATO, and Biden was certainly implying it would happen soon.
This certainly contributed to Russia's decision to invade, as they likely saw the future as being a war on their terms, or a war on NATO's terms. And the narrative about aggressor would have likely played out similarly even if Ukraine/Biden had moved to invade Crimea, precisely because nothing was ever conceded.
Frankly, after the Epstein files, I welcome some fire and brimstone to clean things up a bit. (Of course, you probably think Epstein was a Russian agent)
It would be great if the general public were willing and capable of reading the scientific papers which represent the research in question. However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
This absolutely deserves criticism and even derision.
> However, in practice, virtually everyone who says "do your own research" is referring to skimming over a collection of Facebook posts, X posts, and podcasts.
Kinda hard to blame them for that when they were being lied to so obviously by official sources, about so many things; and when social and traditional media were censoring 'alternative' perspectives (many which later proved entirely correct) on a scale of hundreds of millions of posts.
No, we didn't all have the biology savvy to read and understand Daszak's paper ... But lots of people did have that knowledge - and either didn't speak up, or were censored into oblivion, or had literal actual death threats levelled at them.
Lots of institutions which had a duty to speak up didn't; not just about that, not just about the lableak theory, not just about the funding of GOF research [0], not just about how the virus behaved (animal reservoirs, natural immunity etc), and not just about the ways the vaccines were lied about.
Many of the institutions which did speak up, again, were censored into oblivion [1]; rendered irrelevant by the 'requests' of a Biden admin which was simultaneously threatening every major social media company with monopoly investigations. That's documented fact now, but it was blindingly obvious at the time too.
In context, any research was better than believing whatever you were told to believe; no matter how it changed from one week to the next. And I respect the people who tried, even if they didn't do it very well, better than the people who kept their mouths shut and did what they were told without any independent thought. And I even respect those people more than those who actively derided anyone who questioned authority even the slightest bit.
Well, it is called a "living wage", not to be confused with "poverty wage" or "subsistence wage".
I've always taken "living wage" to be the wage required to live in reasonable comfort. You won't be owning any yachts or eating caviar, but you should also not be living paycheck to paycheck unless you're acting irresponsibly with your money.
If you're sharing a house or apartment with one or more roommates for reasons other than romance or saving up for a place of your own, to my mind, that's not a "living wage" - it's mere survival. Whether we believe minimum wage should barely let you scrape by or live more comfortably shouldn't confuse the fact that in many places, it doesn't even meet what's considered "poverty wage" (e.g., it doesn't in my local area).
If you happen to be part of this cohort, you should absolutely always question the moral implications of any project you work on, and you're in a better position than the average person to fully explore the possible ways tech can be used and abused. I'd argue that should be considered one of the primary purposes of Hacker News.
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