This careful response seems sensible at first blush. After all, maybe in 5 years things will be better for Venezuelans! On the other hand, maybe not. In my heart of hearts I believe the odds are not great, but in lieu of a time machine, I think we can do no better than call it 50:50 odds.
In the meantime, though, this action is already having effects beyond the US and Venezuela. Withholding judgement until this conflict has fully played out carries with it an implicitly permission for similar actions in other places and situations. After all, maybe those will be for the better too!
That's why I oppose this action. Not in support the Maduro regime, which in my view has little to nothing that's worth defending, but because of the precedent that it sets for future events. This is hardly the first time a nation has had its sovereignty violated by a stronger power, and I'm not so naive to believe that it will be the last if only enough people spoke out. But at the same time, I strongly believe that accepting it as something that's inevitable (or even good) will only make it happen more often.
Journalists have a long and storied history of standing up for free and independent journalism, and they're right to!. However, they have a rather more spotty record (with highs and lows) of standing up for other fundamental requirements for a well-functioning liberal democracy.
So one possible (admittedly uncharitable) take is that they were OK with all those other things because those things didn't hurt them, and might've helped them. They're not OK with this change not because it makes things worse, but because it makes things worse /for them/.
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
> Russia violated Turkey’s airspace only once, the jet was shot down immediately, and, save to say, Putin was on the phone with Ankara to prevent an all out escalation with a NATO member that can trigger article 5 at any time for self defense after an apparent aggression. Turned out, no more airspace violations happened again.
I was on the same page as you for a long time, but aggressively defending your airspace also increases risk of collateral damage, leading to, for example, your military shooting down Azeri passenger jets. Or Malaysian ones. Or Iranian ones (to name one not committed by Russia).
I believe (with zero supporting evidence) that Blizzard implemented level scaling reluctantly, in order to better facilitate ad-hoc group play. Unfortunately, they kind of screwed it up.
When you move around in the overworld, you sometimes run into another player. They're fighting some enemies, you jump in to help (or vice versa) and it's amazing. Those are some of my favourite moments in the game, and the only reason it works is because of the level scaling. Even if my character is only level 10 and theirs is level 40, we can fight the same enemies and have roughly equal impact, because for me those enemies are level 10, and for them those same enemies are level 40! It's really clever, and I think they felt the sense of progression was an necessary sacrifice to enable that kind of improvised cooperative play.
"But ordinary, you said they screwed it up!" Yeah, they did. Because what happens when the enemies are dead? You continue towards your quest, and they continue towards theirs, and poof, you're all alone again. These brief moments are tantalizingly close to true pick-up experience: you start playing, meet a few people, team up, and have a blast together for an hour or so, just like you could in Diablo 2.
Oh, and even if you do happen to have the same quest, unless you took the relatively scary step of formally inviting them to your (1-person) party, the moment you enter a dungeon, you each get your own instance, and you're torn apart.
And finally, there's no global chat, so the only real way you have of communicating with people you meet prior to inviting them to a party is a Hearthstone-style emote wheel. There are at least 3 quests that require you to use the emote wheel, so they really wanted you to know it's there and to learn to use it, but in practice no one does and it's useless.
Taken together, it just barely doesn't work and it's really unfortunate. And counterintuitively those brief moments of comradery make the game feel more lonely than if you never met anyone at all. Because time and again, you're confronted with the fact that people are out there! Having fun, kicking ass, taking names. Just... you know, not with you.
The only thing I can't quite figure out is why they didn't attempt to 'matchmake' players of similar levels together. There are literally millions of people playing Diablo 4 at any one time, surely there's someone who's doing the same quest at about the same level as me? Why don't I meet those people? Or maybe the odds just don't work out, even at that scale.
It is worth pointing out that einpoklum's point is not merely academic: Stallman is old enough that he really did get introduced to computers and programming and software through corporate and university mainframes, and not through personal machines like (I assume) most of us.
The decline of the early open hacker culture in favour of corporate proprietary software during the 70s deeply informed the idea behind Free Software.
I've been using SingleFile for a couple of months now, to auto-save every page I visit, and it works well. It's exactly as simple as it needs to be. My only real complaints are that it can be slow on large pages and that it pollutes your download history (every auto-save shows up as a download), both of which I suspect are due to limitations in the extension API.
I've been looking for something like this for a while now, to store all pages I visit into a personal archive, but all the options I found either involved setting up a proxy and MITMing all your requests (too much effort to set up) or saved to a format I could not easily access.
So far, SingleFile looks like a perfect fit, thanks!
When, say, 100000 people are out on the street protesting something (anything), and 5 of them throw a chair through a window, then yes, I would prefer the media to focus on the 99995 who engaged in peaceful protest. Those 5 do not just discredit themselves, but in the eyes of the people who weren't there, they discredit the entire protest. By focusing on a handful of black bloc anarchists rather than the overwhelmingly peaceful majority, the media intentionally or unintentionally aids those in power.
Tourists do not commonly suffer from PTSD and a host of other mental problems. There are real, valid reasons why you don't just dump them in a random suburb and let them fend for themselves.
Incidentally, insulting people is not conducive to healthy debate. Please consider whether calling your opponent (or their actions) racist will increase our ability to persuade them to change their position, or just make them entrench their position (even against more persuasive arguments).
It's undoubtable that surveillance is becoming harder now
I disagree, that's very doubtable. Modern law enforcement has access to an amount of information that exceeds that available in any other era in human history, by an order of magnitude, both in breadth and in depth. The surveillance programs revealed by Snowden and the remote sabotage of Iranian nuclear faclities are but two examples. Surveillance in the developed democratic countries we both (I assume) live in is broader and is done with less oversight than at any point in the 20th century, and not just on the Internet, either. In addition, while I don't want to go quite as far as to state that the trend is clearly upward, I'm also not convinced it's clearly downward; the recent law passed in the UK is evidence enough to discard that notion.
Even if we encrypted all our communication today, there are still weak points in our system that governments can and do exploit when a clear need arises. On the technical side, 0-day exploits are not cheap, but well within the budgets of the law enforcement agencies we depend on to protect us from real threats. And on the legal (and not so legal) side, Certificate authoritities can be compelled to hand over the keys required to compromise secure communications.
Finally, even if we're indeed "Going Dark", as the spokespeople of law enforcement agencies would have us believe, then that can only be true relative to the last decade. As far as I'm concerned, that's a return to the right balance, not a decline into an age of death and despair, where evildoers can commit crime at will, without fear of repercussion.
To add to qb45's reply, that kind of a manipulation does not remain hidden. And when it inevitably comes out, the very people you've been trying to convince will be angered by your dishonesty ("I thought I was talking to a real person!"), and be even less willing to reconsider their position. No one likes being deceived.
So, by all means, consider breaking the rules. And then don't, please.
Or, conversely: with one "dev password" for all machines.