Iran has been "2 weeks" away from having nuclear weapons repeatedly. Each time they get especially close we bomb and/or sabotage them to undo their progress.
Russia is equally a genuine threat to the west. A threat we can easily fix by helping Ukraine bomb them into economic collapse.
If Ukraine loses, Russia will be in a good position to attack the west because they think we're cowards who won't actually respond to, e.g., Estonia getting invaded. Also, it's misleading to say that Ukraine is 1/20th the economy: Ukraine is supported by NATO.
Of course, this is all irrelevant to the discussion around chat control: authoritarians want authority.
> The problem is rule of law, or lack thereof. Rule of law is critical infrastructure.
I agree 100%
> Also, South Africa isn't sub-Saharan Africa.
Indeed. Which made me even less impressed by my example of power outages. South Africa clearly has a massive political problem with corruption; they have the money and technology to keep the power on.
I've done some military charity work in Ukraine, getting donations from people in my community and ensuring that money gets turned into vehicles and equipment reaching soldiers that I personally know in Eastern Ukraine. Just a small "hobby" really, not on a big scale; I'm certainly not a charity professional.
On multiple occasions I've shipped things with the Nova Poshta service to units very close to the front line. In some cases they're getting picked up at Nova Poshta shipping outlets so close to the front lines that FPV drones are a genuine risk.
It just works. Nova Poshta has a nice app. There's complete and accurate tracking, you can easily redirect shipments on the fly to different locations and even different people, and they have package lockers everywhere. The staff are very friendly and go above and beyond to help out. I once showed up at a Kyiv branch with four used truck tires covered with mud, without any packaging, and said I needed to get them to a unit in Sloviansk, a town 20kms from the front lines. They handled everything for me for the equivalent of ~$30 and they showed up the next day.
If Ukraine can manage shipping at scale in the middle of a war, WTF is Africa doing? Why do you have to rely on sketchy shit like trusting random airline passengers getting some extra cash on the side? You can't have a modern economy without good shipping services.
I'm reminded of the time I visited both Kyiv and South Africa in Febuary 2024... Cape Town and Johannesburg had more scheduled blackouts than Kyiv, even with Russia actively trying to destroy the electricity grid. The GDP/capita of South Africa is higher than Ukraine!
Military operations would do that as well. Ukraine is destroying Russia's oil and gas industry right now. Sanctions or not, that oil and gas is becoming unavailable. Either way, preventing innocent Ukrainians being slaughtered with your money will do harm to your economy; continuing to get cheap oil from Russia inevitably pays for evil.
Might as well do whatever is most effective, which is likely to be harsh sanctions followed by military action to fully enforce them.
Besides, one reason why they can be coerced is because these actions aren't clearly illegal. If they are, the employee can just report what they're being asked to do to the police. Workplace safety has been dramatically improved in western countries simply by making many unsafe practices illegal and creating entities to report illegal work to. While this did require criminal charges for some managers and employees, because safety has improved so much, they're really not that common.
I remember when I had workplace safety training as a poorly paid university lab monitor. They made clear that I had potential criminal legal liability if I allowed egregiously unsafe things to happen. So they didn't.
Don't confuse NFT gambling with Bitcoin. The former is a dying craze as the gamblers move onto something else. The latter is at all-time-highs, for the obvious reason that a digital replacement for gold is clearly useful, and Bitcoin is the obvious leader in that market category.
Indeed, for certain use-cases Bitcoin is competing with Christies too: a lot of the fine art market is actually about storing and moving value. Not about the art.
That was probably a sound legal strategy. Selling location data without consent is obviously unethical behavior that should be illegal. A jury is more likely to rule on the basis of that; with a judge maybe there's a chance that a technicality in the law leads to a ruling in their favor.
Anyway, this practice should be criminalized with companies and their employees receiving criminal penalties like jail time.
This isn't a proxy war. Russia is invading Ukraine because they want to invade. That has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else; Russia is not a proxy.
Ukraine has exactly one choice: defend themselves, or be subjugated and killed. There is no diplomatic solution. It's very helpful that Ukraine has outside help. But that doesn't make it a proxy war. Regardless of whether or not Ukraine had outside help, they'd still be fighting.
The fact is that the #1 thing Ukraine is doing right now to win is destroying Russian industry with Ukrainian made weapons. They're doing that themselves. Again, that's not a proxy.
> I sure hope you are right but I wouldn't trust too much the official numbers we are told.
I don't have to trust the official numbers. I've been to Ukraine both before and after the full scale invasion. Yes, there are easily visible differences (like the big increase in the number of men you see with visible war wounds). But this isn't a society in collapse. Not yet. Overall, Ukraine is winning this fight and what they're getting in return for that sacrifice is a future.
> Let's say just a third or half the men between 25 and 55 are dead/badly wounded/traumatized/addicted, it will destroy the next generation and society.
Again, we've been through this before. It simply does not destroy society.
> Just look on much smaller scale at what the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did to the US in the last 20 years. Even the few professionals and volunteers who fought it abroad brought back a lot of problems still clearly visible in today american society.
No. America's biggest problems have nothing to do with veterans. It wasn't a veteran who killed that Ukrainian refugee...
> This is why those type of wars need to be avoided or stopped at all cost.
Do you have a better plan? Russia isn't invading Ukraine out of some religious dispute. They're just war criminals who just want to plunder and steal. Negotiations have been tried over and over before: Russia just violates every agreement ever made. The only solution is to defeat Russia. And the fastest way to do that is to crush Russia's economy... which is exactly what Ukraine is (finally!) doing with their strikes on oil and gas infrastructure.
If you want less harm to be done, help Ukraine win faster.
> What kind of "action" did they see, pushing pencils?
Frontline trench warfare, including getting wounded.
A high % of the young male population saw combat in WW2. What followed was some of the most successful economic growth and society advancement in human history, especially the US. People are more resilient than you'd think, especially when society as a whole has your back.
This isn't Vietnam or Afghanistan. The mission is crystal clear and vital. Every day at 9am all of Ukraine stops to remember the dead. I've seen this first hand. Cars stop, people get out and stand, and they honor what soldiers are doing for them. It makes a big difference.
> Anyway the fact is almost 4 years in Ukraine is probably dead demographically. You can't really reboot a country after having so much of its "fighting age" male population dead.
You should actually look up the facts before making assumptions. Or, for example, actually visit Ukraine. Currently conscription is between ages 25 and 55; mobilization of younger men is not done specifically to ensure the next generation is not depleted, and men of all ages are fighting. You're actually more likely to get called up if you are in your 30's and 40's than if you are younger.
There's about five million males currently in Ukraine in that age range, of which under 100,000 have been killed and under 500,000 wounded. That's just not an existential crisis at all. Germany the country survived WW2, and about half of their male population died in the war.
This matches the on-the-ground reality: I've visited plenty of Ukrainian cities during the war, and there are plenty of males of all ages. Including young males. Any crisis they face is the same birthrate crisis that all developed countries face. And hopefully, the psychology of war will help reverse that --- Israel also has a notably high birthrate.
> Especially because the one who will be left will be deranged, violent and addicted to all sort of things.
I personally know quite a few Ukrainian soldiers who have seen action. They're all well functioning people. Combat when you're on the side of good rather than evil doesn't have the psychological toil people think it does. It's not nothing. But the supermajority of people recover just fine and go on to lead productive lives.
An important part of that is recognizing that Ukraine is up against an irredeemably evil enemy. You were killing orcs, not men.
> making it impossible to reliably delete material
That said, SSD's have improved the situation a lot with TRIM. While previously deleting a file wouldn't actually destroy any data until it was overwritten. With TRIM in most cases for files more than a few KB almost all the data will be physically destroyed soon after TRIM is called. It depends on settings. But that's commonly either immediately, or about once a day (the default on Android).
If you read the forensics literature TRIM has caused them enormous problems by radically reducing the amount of data available.
Not at all. Ukraine had operatives inside Russia. The trucks were not driven in from outside Russia. The system was assembled inside Russia. Also, every single drone had its own pilot: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cq69qnvj6nlo
That's also just one of many operations inside Russia. There's lots of sabotage and assassinations that have been done.
You just can't do operations like that without secure communications.
Installing open source software on phones is becoming more and more difficult. It used to be the case that bootloaders were generally unlocked or unlockable. That is no longer true, including on Android. Google is also planning on banning APKs from unregistered sources soon.
We need end-to-end encryption on phones to have reasonably convenient privacy. We can definitely lose that, and open source software won't help.
Worse, once phones are locked down desktops and laptops can be locked down as well.
Chat control will require client-side AI scanning of all messages, bypassing end-to-end encryption. Since the AI will be an unauditable blackbox, it will make it effectively illegal to have secure end-to-end encryption.
> Even more specifically, a blockchain is for when you want Byzantine fault tolerance, i.e. you don't trust one or more of the actors involved.
Often yes. But also blockchain's can be useful simply for backups and scaling: by cryptographically linking every bit of data together you can be confident that you actually have a complete copy without any errors.
Git is basically a blockchain for this exact reason: starting from a git commit hash, git works backwards, checking that every byte of data is what it should be. Similarly, modern filesystems like btrfs use strong (if not cryptographically strong) hashes for this same reason.
Though in a sense, you're still correct: the "actor" you aren't trusting here is your own computer hardware.
> There is nothing that a Stripe controlled blockchain could offer that a database could not.
One way of thinking about a blockchain is to think of it as a shared datastructure to keep databases in sync. Any time you want to distribute your database over more than just a single central place, in a cryptographically secure way, you're probably going to re-invent a blockchain to do it.
Russia is equally a genuine threat to the west. A threat we can easily fix by helping Ukraine bomb them into economic collapse.