thriftwy

https://shkrobius.livejournal.com/401292.html offers a fascinating narrative rooted in cell biology

I will address some of your concerns.

Karl Marx was European. His publisher was European. His early adopters were Europeans. The evidence that Europe cannot be communist is not there. Soviet Union is a pinnacle of socialist achievement. It is possible that your communism will have mass starvation and hoe strikes breaking skulls phase which is not followed by space exploration and nuclear power phase.

You are miserable now, let's asusme. People were miserable under socialism (not all of them, but the vibe was off). We can't rule out you will be happy under socialism, but no facts support that even indirectly. It will require a leap of faith.

P.S. I was replying to much longer, non-tautological and less-borderline-racist version of your comment.

I glimpsed last years of Soviet Union and it was pretty meh.

I remember seeing anything in the street (a payphone or a playground for kids) and assumed it will only degrade because as a general principle, things in the streets are unmaintained.

You could say that Soviet Union was bad specimen of socialism because of these stupid Russians?

Except, Russia actually got 100% out of socialism with our space exploration, passenger planes and nuclear stations. It's just that 100% of socialism is worse than your average capitalist dystopia.

Hello! This is Moscow calling. What are you doing with these planes of yours now? Can you pass them under the table for an unspecified amount? Regards £ wishes!

As a matter of fact, I didn't.

https://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!"

Это к вопросу о эпицикле Оракла-Нвидии.

I wonder if you can load a font from base64 string like you can with images. Then, one may write a pure js library which generates such font from a set of rules on the fly. Catered to a specific use case.

killing political dissidents

That's a funny perspective. USSR just before that time mostly killed communist apparatus members¥ and with them innocent people. In such an environment, there naturally won't be too many dissidents, so I don't think they registered.

They did kill a lot of supposed sympathiers of pre-Soviet Russia, though.

¥ As they say, internal competition is the most fierce one.

I wonder how the price of solar panels work WRT mortgage: Is there any government- or bank-approved formula for how much solar panels on a house cost?

Otherwise why not sell them for $9.99 along with the house?

I never said that Telegram was censorship resistant, it just does not take proactive steps to delete or restrict content it doesn't like.

I can't remember a single instance where Tg will take down a channel that is too concerning for FSB.

After all, Telegram is a worldwide platform and you can directly read Ukrainian news feeds there if you wish so. What would a concerning channel make compared to that?

YouTube was constantly blocking Russian channels and striking down videos, whereas I only remember Telegram banning a single channel in three years, due to a direct US sanctions hit.

It can even go both ways: nothing prevents Telegram to be blocked in Russia, as well as being used to harvest potentially life threatening info about Russian citizens at the same time.

Same for YouTube. If it gets blocked for good, does not mean you can't go to jail for speaking out while on YouTube.

The obvious take away at the moment is to think twice what you write anywhere in the Internet, as well as to avoid doing things with such dire consequences, or at least not bragging about them anywhere on the net.

For one, perhaps because Telegram does not take sides and does not take down Russian content.

Perhaps because they had some agreement in the end, perhaps because they simply couldn't.

In any case, it is now vital information infrastructure in ways YouTube isn't. Even though YouTube definitelt is critical. It's not just an amusement source.

Telegram is not blocked and is often the main channel through which people get their news.

Whatever stuff you want to see, you may consume there.

Indeed, news on the web are going the way of newspapers.

Russian domestic alternatives grew just fine without any blocking. Blocking stuff just angers people and teaches them to use VPN.

Those for whom these odds increase faster are at huge disadvantage whereas those for whom it increases slower are at huge advantage. As you can imagine it is variative.

Of course I should have said "those who can bear healthy children late in their lives".

Evolution at the moment tremendously favors these who can bear children late in their lives. That implies being in full health longer as well.

That would surely manifest in a few generations, sans some big civilization collapse. Or artificial uterus, for sure.

They've basically lost the market to Zoom due to their failure to have a single stable offering when COVID hit.

I hope they're happy with the zoo they have.

Water has huge thermal inertia. Laptops don't. They may freeze quite quickly. Something to bear in mind for the future.

supply-choked Australia and Canada

Made me chuckle as I would imagine these two should be least concern real estate supply-wise along with Russia.

"First, a deficit of oil. Then, a deficit of sand."

A nationalistic history is always a mythology

For smaller nations.

Larger nations receive too much scrutiny to get away with having fake history.

Then again, they have more resources to try and tweak the history as a science...

Looks like a good time to check out these ISS - MKAD 19th km marshrutkas' timetable.

You can only pull it off if the game is real nice, though. Or if it's real good at milking you.

Some movies can also sell you some merchandise and a poster and perhaps a second go to cinema. More important, they can also sell IP rights to make a game out of it.

And people seem to forget that The Witcher is, first and foremost, a great book series.

The target for AAA is also moving fast so they're not catching their breath.

I do enjoy some games, but it seems I was never into AAA titles or their 90s equivalents.

After all, HoMM3 HotA got an update just this year.

Дорогой Мартин Алексеевич![1]

1. https://languagehat.com/sorokins-norma/

The problem is that they are competing with TV series and books. Why pay $200 for a game when that buys a year of premium Netflix subscription or smth like that? Or ten e-books? Only huge hits will be sellable that way.

Also, imagine what world looked like when books were as hot sell as games two decades ago. Any books, really, were inifinitely sellable because they provided a dozen hours of mild entertainment and often were the only option.

Most games do not give you near-endless dynamic content anymore. Gone are the days of Master of Magic/Orion. Most "single player" games are basically interactive movies. There's maybe 20 hours of content and that's that. 40 if you are slow. But it is not as great as a good movie, which are also scarce.

Even if there's randomly generated world (roguelike-like), you can usually see all the content in the first 20 hours or so. Sometimes faster than that. Even if the game was amazing, there's no reason to play it once you've figured out ins and outs.

For some reason people keep paying for that stuff, incidentally I've never enjoyed it and only recognized that fact in my 30s - I've never played these most popular genres at all!

That's just the regions with best economics getting treats of Baumol's effect[1]

Countries with mediocre economies often afford child care and gamedev without much trouble, since their productivity is also mediocre hence their wages and spendings don't run off.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect

I am arguing that doping never had anything to do with the issue and it was a political lash at Russia from the start. A successful attempt to use the built influence to smear the olympic shirt.

If your due process sucked, tough shit, don't fall for it next time, deal with the fallout on case to case basis. What you certainly should not do is to accuse a whole country of breaking your wee little rules, and try to punish that whole country. It is an lasting insult and a serious international escalation. It is not even remotely in proportion with the weight of IOC in the grand scheme of things.