That’s a very particular idea of politics, one usually existing in nations where “fighting for freedom” is not necessary or necessary but ignored.

A man can be killed. Many men can be killed. That process has expenses, which can be calculated.

At the same time rapidly dropping population often leads to democratization, and China has shot itself in the foot with the one child policy.

I’m not doing that, just saying it. There’s no reason to idolize anything. Even idols. Antique Mediterranean was better for being as religiously pluralistic as rural China.

It makes perfect sense, the resistance of having Windows legacy software etc becomes smaller the more of that goes out of use, the resistance of everyone only knowing Windows becomes smaller with nobody even knowing Windows, and the resistance of corporate interests becomes smaller because it’s all in the Web, and the Web has been corrupted and Chrome works on Linux.

So. Listen to me carefully. If Linux domination happens without FreeBSD and Haiku normalization, then things are bad.

OK, so now it’s important to create collegial democratic project government for Linux, and freeze Linus in carbonite as a memorial. Before Linux has become too important, and before Linus lost his marbles to become a geriatric dictator.

Actually in the age of Android I think it’s already too late, but this should be done regardless.

The way I meant it was that using Chinese logograms is not the same as using Chinese language, because a few (from European point of view) different languages are written down using them, some even of other language families.

So in case of Japan and Korea two spinoffs of like 1600 years old formal variant of Chinese language were used.

Which is not the same as Taiwan literally speaking the kinda same language.

Thx, will remember that

Thanks, but I have my very reasonable doubts

So did Japan before they became an independent country.

Wha-ha-ha? If you mean their archaic dead Chinese variant that was mostly used for poetry and feudal prestigious stuff, it may not be a good comparison to mandarin as the main language. Actually many of the kanji pronunciations are how it would sound, or even whole phrases. I speak neither of the three (third being Japanese), just repeating what my sister would say (she studied lost of languages).

So did South Korea.

I think the situation is similar to Japan, except much of their vocabulary is Chinese in origin. But, ahem, the variant is too a very specific dead idiom.

So your argument is flawed.

But not in what you say. Their argument is flawed in the sense that one country is somehow obligated to all be under one state.

(Has a bit of reminiscence with Kremlin goblins thinking that every Russian-speaking area is their slaves and belongs to them.)

I know that one is (was) 100k people, and the other is (still) 23mln people, but this has the “Artsakh has never been part of independent Azerbaijan” vibes.

“The world” doesn’t care for such arguments, only for who is tastier when killed and meat shared.

They also say and substantiate that the casino always wins, but people still go to casinos. More than half would go to casinos if they had enough money and a casino in convenient proximity, probably.

(Yeah, about Bitcoin - that’s the genial idea of using casino tokens as means of normal exchange and as an investment asset. The value attributed to Bitcoin grows faster for those with bigger sums and transfers and in bigger pools and with better information for prediction of its fluctuations. That would be the founders with their sleeper coins, and also not sleeping coins long ago mixed out of possibility to trace them. The result stands.)

So. The computer industry has been turned into a casino. The visitors were first upset, then suspicious, then kinda disoriented, and then got used to it.

Addiction is the source of enormous profits in our world, between drugs, prostitution and gambling. Now the Internet has become part of it.

Which is not an unprecedented change. There were times when drugs (in the form of maryjane and other weeds and various mushrooms and alcohol) were possible to make for anyone and not prosecuted on most of the planet, and not an industry. There were times when prostitution was not an industry, but just a normal situation. There were also times when it didn’t make sense for gambling itself to be an industry (making gambling cards and such was, though).

To good or to ill.

One can clearly see that when these industries are transparent and competitive and legal, they are not harmful. One can also see that it’s very hard to make them transparent and competitive and legal. Transparency hurts cheaters. Competition hurts abusers. Legality hurts people like the competent structures in most countries getting their share.

So, IRL there are “haven” countries with laws legalized for certain things and with proper regulation in place, and the rest where such things serve the previously listed trio.

For the Internet this would be a really sad situation.

So honestly Briar and other multi-transport offline-ready delay-tolerant systems are the future IMHO. But it’s a long evolutionary process.

Personally, I don’t think billionaires should exist. Even the ones that I think have done cool things.

Yeah, it’s in the intersection of two “doubt” points making one “almost sure” point.

First, people getting power get spoiled fast, it’s not possible to resist, it’s as if I could have any girl I like and she’d like me and I knew that, just no chance to avoid a sensory burnout after a few months of, eh, feeling that. The possibility that a person can resist that is very small, people like Aristotle Onassis, maybe.

Second, if one person is worth, say, 12000 times more than another person, it’s important to ask whether they really are, or they can be replaced with like 50 of equals of that another person with proper organization and discipline. The possibility that they really are is almost negligibly small, there are a few people alive for whom one can suggest that and maybe more, but most are like those people we know and love.

I can imagine Gabe Newel being worth 100, maybe 1000 times me for the humanity, purely financially, but something of bigger orders of magnitude seems preposterous. Not even touching upon money affecting our relative legal power balance, where even factor 2 difference is just morally not acceptable.

Not that I’m of any bad opinion of Gabe, Steam is one today’s company that both doesn’t abuse its customers too much and does a lot of work on the positive side.

That includes some bad people too … Well, I dunno how bad, just a certain Larry Ellison still loves working, or so I’ve heard. Or Bill Gates.

Gabe Newell is better than many others, but this is true, the best man on Earth will become an absolute pissbag given power for continuous enough period of time to realize that.

And the best man on Earth is probably some volunteer medic in some African warzone, not a computer programmer and a tech businessman.

Gabe Newell is not a usual CEO though.

I mean, it maybe wasn’t gay, but was definitely a reference to something hellish, depraved, opposed to common morality, weak, like that.

Because back then it clearly meant protest against authority, against hierarchy, against stereotypic masculinity, against war, against evil covered by normalcy.

In some sense it’s an intentional show of vulnerability, that look.

And I’d take that over Kipelov in Russia every day, that moron who doesn’t fucking understand what rock music is.

Ah. Where I work, I do systems integration for b2b in Russia in one niche part. Nothing of that is connected to MIC or whatever, but definitely affects the economy.

I dunno, Java to native code compilers exist. Maybe one can compile Bramble into that with some interface wrapper, and then use it under iOS, but I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

Russians are typically more tech savvy than you would expect.

Well, as someone living in Russia, I don’t really feel this so much

Is “better than Zuck” a valid argument?

Well, that Bitchat thing of his may (after, eh, fixing a lot of it) turn to be not so bad.

Though I went to the Briar site, and apparently it’s not just Briar, but also a framework for virtually everything communications-wise offline-enabled.