> Now, I am not going around giving my real email out to random sites, though, although even that doesn’t strike me as particularly dangerous.
I am fanatically following my rule "one email per website". Obviously, they all route to the same inbox. Initial motivation was to see who leaks my address and simply block it. However, the separation helped me out tremendously more than I ever expected (at the very least I believe so).
I'm originally from a country with a highly oppressive regime. Years ago I signed up for financial support to a political opposition leader. Things weren't as bad and it felt safe enough at the time. They had my email, of course.
Eventually opposition systems were compromised, and the full donor list became public. The regime's response: they cross-referenced it against emails registered on government services. For quite a few whose addresses matched, police officers paid a visit — looking for grounds to fine them, pressure them, etc.
My alias for that site existed nowhere else. No match, no visit. Definitely an experience I was more than happy to avoid.
> Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.
I believe this is the legacy of leaders like Saddam. They build a very messy future for their countries. Whenever such a leader is gone, somebody has to take over power. Dictators tend to concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. Forced removal of such a leader might accelerate and / or destabilize power transition. Which might end up in a very messy scenario.
Absolute power transition worked well with monarchy in the past, cause everybody knew who would be the next guy, there were rules and procedures. With dictatorship often times there are no rules. So power transition might turn into a complete chaos even with a natural death of a dictator.
iqair has pretty sparse coverage, especially in developing areas. A lot of places with really shitty air do not hit the top simply cause the service is effectively blind in those places.
However, I regularly see a lot of Balkan cities hitting the top 10. Sarajevo was #1 quite a few times. Not sure whether it's really worse than Delhi or Beijing, but sometimes it's really really bad. Like, if you imagine the most smoky bar you ever visited, where you see nothing but the cigarette smoke and can't breath. That's how you feel on the street.
I don't trust LLM enough to handle the maintenance of all the abstraction buried in react / similar library. I caught some of the LLMs taking nasty shortcuts (e.g. removing test constraints or validations in order to make the test green). Multiple times. Which completely breaks trust.
And if I have to closely supervise every single change, I don't believe my development process will be any better. If not worse.
Let alone new engineers who join the team and all of a sudden have to deal with a unique solution layer which doesn't exist anywhere else.
Fortunately nobody was aggressive to me. It was vice versa to a point which made me deeply uncomfortable. Once people learned that I am originally from Russia (even though I am not Russian and I don't live there for many years), people in e.g. Algeria or Tunis or some SE Asia countries were shouting Russian politician names with approval. Some of them tried to lecture me on politics there, assuming I fully approve government actions. Eventually I simply stopped mentioning my origin whenever it was possible, cause I really have no desire to go into same discussion over and over again. And people won't listen anyway.
> Their opinion of our politics is generally separate from how they treat me personally, and I do the same for people of other nationalities.
That is such a sane thing to do. I was always astonished and sad how often strangers in foreign countries instantly link my origin to the actions of the people in power. As if this is completely under my control and with no doubt I support and approve whatever they do.
Not sure how much sarcasm did you put in this comment, but banning from entering other countries and disconnecting from visa / mc only hurts. Here's why.
I am originally from Russia and I do not support the war my country has started. I moved to another country because of that. And I face all the fun consequences from two nice restrictions above. Some of my former neighbors or acquaintances who decided to stay in the country or even support the invasion face no issues. They don't visit other countries and don't need international cards.
Which means both these things primary target people who most likely do not support the shit which is happening. Is that the goal?
>What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?
That's where High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina comes into play. This is external guy appointed by the EU (US also was participating in the appointment in the beginning, but they withdrew themselves from the process quite a few years ago). This guy has the power to fire any (like ANY) politician in the country. And the permission to overrule or enforce any law.
This guy is probably controlled by EU and can't turn into dictatorship mode, but you never know. At the very least two times presidents were fired due to political disagreement.
EU considered to discontinue this practice, but local people encouraged EU to leave things as is. Cause nobody trusts politicians and the systems is still pretty corrupt.
Anyway, whatever decision presidents have to make, all 3 must agree. That's why a lot of controversial topics are hanging for eternity (e.g. recognition of Kosovo).
When country was trying to choose a national flags, all the parts couldn't find the agreement for a long time. That's why High Representative just approved his own version nobody really liked. So today if you visit the country, you will find Serbian flag in the parts where Serbs live and Croatian flags in the part with Croats. Actual country flag normally is in the parts where majority is Bosnian.
In no way this is a good example of such a system, but I still find Bosnia and Herzegovina political system absolutely hilarious. After Dayton peace agreement the literally put ethnicity requirement for presidents to Constitution as a hard rule. One Bosnian, one Serb and one Croatian. And yes, the country is ran by 3 presidents at the same time. So there is no longer a competition whether the main guy in the country will be theirs or ours.
There were two guys: a Roma and a Jew in BiH who also wanted to take the president office. However according to Constitution they didn't have a chance. So they went to EU Human Rights Court to look for a justice. The court told the country it's kinda racist to have a rule like that and they should change it. This was like 15 years ago. Guess whether the rule has changed since then. (Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina for more details).
PS. If you find 3 presidents not fascinating enough, then google for High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This reminds me how back in my school days I was not allowed to use the internet to prepare research on some random topics (e g. history essay). It was the late 90s when the internet started to spread. Anyway teachers forced us to use offline libraries only.
Later in the university I was studying engineering. And we were forced to prepare all the technical drawings manually in the first year of study. Like literally with pencil and ruler. Even though computer graphics were widely used and we're de facto standard.
Personally I don't believe hardcore ban will help with any sort of thing. It won't stop the progress either. It's much better to help people learn how to use things instead of forcing them to deal with "old school" stuff only.
This has to be about people who pushes the button. Not about the people who invents the technology. Otherwise you might want to stop all the kitchen knifes production, cause people occasionally use those to kill each other.
- They would never hurt a fly. Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic covered the Hague trial for military crimes in Bosnia war. The book made me rethink how I view the war in general and what motivates people to do absolute evil things.
- A primate memoir by Sapolsky. I can't stress enough how interesting, witty and overwhelming this book is. One of the rare reads I couldn't stop reading until the very end.
- Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. Even though sometimes it might be felt like a boulevard novel, it gave me absolutely fantastic insight and the atmosphere of Italian Naples in the 1960-1970s.
> he was under orders to shoot the plane down and now they’re trying to cover it up
I highly doubt that's the case. Even though Russia went full evil mode a while ago, it's not that reckless (yet). I don't foresee any sane explanation for this kind of order. I believe a mistake and/or miscommunication is more likely to be the root cause. Sadly it'd be quite naive to expect a thorough publicly available investigation summary from Russian side. You are right here.
Unlike Xi, Putin and his propaganda machine has literally threatened to use the nuclear power if they have to. Multiple times.
Yes, it is considered as a bluff. And most likely it is. However so was all the military "exercises" before the invasion to Ukraine in 2022. Only a few really believed it, unfortunately it actually happened.
The war affects everyone. Some people die, some suffer because they are under shelling or occupation, some suffer cause their loved one die. But those outside war zone suffer as well. Due to broken food chains, crazy economic inflation and general political instability. For sure it's as bad as when you're dead because of the random shell hitting your home, but still.
When a man with a nuclear button savagely kills his opponent just because he can, this creates instability inside the country. And increases chances, that once he dies (which eventually will happen), some radical guy might overtake the power and who knows what happens next.
I understand that a lot of events in the world might have potential global effect, but only few of them might hit as bad.
I already posted this in another thread here. This particular change is not because isolationism. Most likely.
Russian government added Hetzner to the list of companies who must move their infrastructure within Russian borders in order to operate with Russian citizens. Few years ago they introduced a law on how companies have to process personal data. (It is kinda similar to GDPR, but the government might abuse it in the way to get access to data government needs). Obviously Hetzner doesn't want to create infrastructure on Russian soil. It was quite risky even before the war.
You can find the full list of "lucky" companies in here -- https://236-fz.rkn.gov.ru/agents/list (sorry, it's in Russian, but google translate should help you out).
There is nothing to do with intelligence. They got on radar of Russian government. Which wanted Hetzner to follow Russian law and move all Russian data to Russia in order to operate with Russian citizens. Means literally Russian government expects companies to open data centers within borders and keep all the data inside the country (they even issued a law for that). Obviously Hetzner doesn't want to do so.
You can find the full list of "lucky" companies in here -- https://236-fz.rkn.gov.ru/agents/list (sorry, it's in Russian, but google translate should help you out).
This is all fun until you talk to someone who is absolutely brainwashed or alien to a peaceful behavior.
Do you really want to lose the debate to flat earth advocate?
Do you want to lose a debate to a war aggressor supporter?
Do you want to lose a debate to a serial killer?
I bet you don't.
PS. Maybe I didn't get something right, but I suffered a lot in conversations with close relatives who are denying that killing other people is bad in the light of ongoing war in Ukraine :(
I am fanatically following my rule "one email per website". Obviously, they all route to the same inbox. Initial motivation was to see who leaks my address and simply block it. However, the separation helped me out tremendously more than I ever expected (at the very least I believe so).
I'm originally from a country with a highly oppressive regime. Years ago I signed up for financial support to a political opposition leader. Things weren't as bad and it felt safe enough at the time. They had my email, of course.
Eventually opposition systems were compromised, and the full donor list became public. The regime's response: they cross-referenced it against emails registered on government services. For quite a few whose addresses matched, police officers paid a visit — looking for grounds to fine them, pressure them, etc.
My alias for that site existed nowhere else. No match, no visit. Definitely an experience I was more than happy to avoid.