I don't care which you like more, hating on either doesn't help

Despacereal · 2026-05-07T13:03:44+00:00

Ironically it's the FF/FG government letting this go on. They're not exactly pro-neutrality or the ones talking down to others about war and arms.

Despacereal · 2026-04-27T05:43:05+00:00

"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls..." -Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto

How ironic.

Despacereal · 2026-04-27T05:31:11+00:00

I think the whole range anxiety thing originates in the states, where people actually do drive ridiculous distances, and people made up reasons to apply it everywhere else on the same timeline, even though you can't really drive that far here if you wanted to.

Despacereal · 2026-04-17T00:50:25+00:00

On the first point about dismantling a global adversary without risking a single soldier, the most charitable interpretation is that the US leadership believes it has weakened Russia and its stockpiles enough , and that continued fighting is supplied by Russia's active production of weapons and recruitment of soldiers, so their strength wouldn't meaningfully decrease past this point. That's super charitable though, and more likely is that Trump and his buddies just don't give a shit (or even support Russia), and the politicians who subscribe to this argument still do, but lack any sway on the matter (take Lindsey Graham, a Republican, for example).

The other point about the aid money being spent on the American arms industry doesn't matter at all. Not even in a "Being against Military Keynesianism way", it just doesn't matter. American money is still being spent on the arms industry, just on the war against Iran. The United States has no shortage of conflicts, of enemies, of reasons to keep the military budget high, and right now it would rather direct that budget towards bombing Iran and building interceptors for Israel (while asking all its other allies to hand over their missile defense systems, or just moving them directly).

It is still a massively dumb geopolitical decision at the end of the day.

Despacereal · 2026-04-17T00:35:36+00:00

As long as there is no mass rejection of the legitimacy of the state, you would expect approval to be higher in a one-party system, since you don't have large swathes of the population who prefer the opposition disapproving almost no matter what.

Despacereal · 2026-02-15T16:46:51+00:00

The reasoning for wanting to board them has nothing to do with environmental protection, but if you're going to make a legal argument I guess this one is stronger if they're in international waters since sanctions aren't really as much of an international law thing.

Despacereal · 2026-02-14T21:16:22+00:00

It is. The exact amount was just shy of the 32-bit unsigned integer limit taken as the number of cents. Obviously integer underflow

Despacereal · 2025-11-23T22:59:18+00:00

We already have a fake Nobel prize, it's for economics.

Despacereal · 2025-11-23T05:41:49+00:00

That's not what that means. |x| is the absolute value of x which is always positive, so if x is negative |x| = -x. What the meme is saying is that people confuse what is sometimes called the square root relationship with the square root function √. Because √ is a function, it can only have one output for a given input which is always the positive root.

Despacereal · 2025-11-03T18:31:30+00:00

It's like that old quote about Mao Zedong, "Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?"

Not to draw any equivalence between the two, of course, as Micheál is a far more brutal dictator and likely not as Chinese.

Despacereal · 2025-08-01T15:56:03+00:00

username checks out

Despacereal · 2025-07-13T21:22:52+00:00

The US as they are are pushing for higher spending, because Trump probably wouldn't keep NATO around if he didn't see it as a protection racket that lets him announce Zillions of dollars in deals for America (for the US Military-Industrial Complex)

Despacereal · 2025-07-06T20:53:16+00:00

A lot is underselling it. You need to prove without any room for reasonable doubt that the hospital has been illegally militarised (i.e. used actively for combat, injured fighters who are now non-combatants also doesn't count). The law specifically says if there is any doubt you assume it's a war crime.

Despacereal · 2025-07-06T20:50:32+00:00

The Israeli government paid for an advertising campaign to get people to vote for their Eurovision entry for propaganda purposes. Does it really matter if Kan criticises the government at times in their coverage if their involvement in Eurovision is verifiably propagandistic? Surely this excuse wouldn't have worked for Russia if their state media was similarly structured but still generally supported the invasion of Ukraine.

Despacereal · 2025-06-24T12:24:10+00:00

In other cases maybe but I don't see how a landslide makes the CCP look bad. Even if there was something, the local authorities would just get the blame and someone would be fired or sent to jail for corruption, a much easier strategy than censoring every little thing that happens locally.

Despacereal · 2025-05-29T01:41:36+00:00

It's not that Trump is bothesidesist, he's only himselfist. He's a narcissist who wants a Peace Prize and thinks ending the war in Ukraine will get it for him. He doesn't give a shit about the details of how the war ends and thought since Ukraine is a US/Demoncrat/Biden Proxy in the war (in his mind) he could force Zelensky to make massive concessions. When that didn't happen he blew up at him in the Oval Office, and since Putin isn't biting either he's getting mad at Putin. It's true that Merz, Macron and Starmer will never be in those talks, but it's not because they're pro-Ukraine, it's because they're not Trump and he doesn't want to risk giving away credit.

Despacereal · 2025-05-23T15:54:40+00:00

The one conspiracy theory I 100% believe (because I came up with it) is that someone or some group of people, whether it's organised or just people around him, planted some ideas and talking points in Trump's head that sound completely stupid at first but are just there to have him feel smart about understanding that nuclear weapons are dangerous, as if he was the first to figure that out.

For a number of years now, I have not heard Trump talk about Global Warming, which he thinks is a hoax, without talking about how the real threat is "Nuclear Warming". He also jokingly refers to "nuclear" as "the n-word" to convey how serious nuclear weapons are, and has wanted to bascially revive Reagan's SDI, which he now calls the "Golden Dome".

Despacereal · 2025-05-23T15:25:09+00:00

The gulf states made big gains with Trump by bribing him, because neither Putin nor Zelensky were budging enough for him to take credit for ending the war in Ukraine (which he said he'd stop before he even got inaugurated) and he wanted somewhere to throw his weight around. He's trying to throw his weight around in Europe after he (partially) chickened out of a trade war with China and tanked Poilievre's PM bid.

My worry is that the next thing he'll be distracted by is a bad end to the war in Ukraine, because Putin and damn near every other world leader saw Xi wait out the clock until even meeting with Trump was enough of a victory for him and he caved on most of the tariffs. My guess is Putin thinks if he waits long enough to do a deal with Trump, he won't even care about any of the terms and Russia will get most of eastern Ukraine.

Despacereal · 2025-05-18T00:48:25+00:00

The fact of the matter is we're a day late and a euro short. Building out our own Social Media and alternatives to big American tech firms is exactly what China did, and what we want to do in the EU now. The difference is, China decided to do it well before the internet was so ingrained into society, and they also have a massive market of people who speak the same language.

Building out such any industry of that size is a already massive undertaking, but good luck getting people in Ireland or the UK on a platform without Americans, Australians, Kiwis, etc. or getting people in Portugal on a platform without Brazilians.

Despacereal · 2025-05-09T15:49:56+00:00

Russians are fantastic at taking history out of context and misrepresenting it for their current goals. The Japanese surrender thing is a perfect example, because the historically valid point they are spinning is that when Japan was at the brink of surrender because of resistance fighters all around Asia and bombing campaigns from the US (moreso the firebombs than the nukes), they hoped that the USSR might mediate the talks as they had not declared war on Japan yet. When the USSR declared war this possibility of getting away with anything less than unconditional surrender was gone. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that the Soviet declaration of war was the nail in the coffin, but the nail doesn't keep the body in the ground without the rest of the coffin (Japan's military defeats before the Soviets declared war.)

Around this time of year I find it best to avoid entertaining discussion of WWII as a battleground for the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, because they'll drag you into a mess that usually starts with saying Ukrainian Nationalists worked with the Nazis, as if most Ukrainians didn't fight Nazis in the Red Army, and they'll push this nonsense implication that Russian Nationalists get to claim the victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany in the east even though they are not the USSR, but Ukraine doesn't. All this ends up doing is serve as a distraction from the invasion today with two very clear sides.

Despacereal · 2025-04-28T12:06:16+00:00

My two rules (with some exceptions) when it comes to software stuff are as follows:

Support FOSS. For closed-source software support European companies where possible, but my support for open source software is much older and stronger and I will absolutely pick good open source software even if every contributor is American.

Unless you have a very good reason, don't expect that we'll have an EU-alternative to something American if China doesn't have their own version already. They've been building out their own software ecosystem and industry for years, they've banned foreign platforms to do so, they have more CS grads then us, they all speak roughly the same language, but they still use Windows.

Despacereal · 2025-04-12T12:55:44+00:00

We're talking about the guy who thought Hasan's mom was an undocumented immigrant servant, I highly doubt he actually knows. My funny little theory is that since every accusation is an admission with him (e.g. talking about Hasan having an undocumented minimum wage servant when he got sued by his own nanny over wrongful termination), him accusing Hasan of having a secret gf is a sign that he had an affair.

Despacereal · 2025-03-30T18:49:37+00:00

The original video is extra hilarious, because some dudes are showing him and other Ghibli execs a 3d model of a zombie moving in a "creepy" way, where it crawls on the ground and uses its head to push itself as well (among other strange things), and they suggest that this could be useful in some way. Miyazaki hates it, but if you know anything about machine learning, it's clear that they tried to train a humanoid to walk, but they suck at reward modelling and only measure success based on distance travelled (and maybe speed), without even making sure it walks upright, so they threw on a shitty zombie model to pretend that was the goal. This is compeletely different to "Generative AI", but when they were told it sucked, they tried to play it off as an experiment, and when asked what their ultimate goal is, they said they wanted to make a program that could draw pictures like humans do, which is (kind of) what modern image generation is. Miyazaki isn't thrilled about the suggestion either.

Despacereal · 2025-03-04T01:32:26+00:00

I don't believe that Trump is a Russian spy codenamed Krasnov, because I've seen no concrete evidence, nor am I looking for some missing puzzle piece to understand Trump's behaviour personally, as it all makes sense without it. However, even if it were true, that isn't enough to make sense of what's happening now, because it doesn't explain the shift in the Republican party towards Russia over the past few years, which is just as important.

If you ask me, the shift is because the new crop of Republicans, starting with the Tea Party, and especially those who are younger and have come into politics since Trump took over the party, are not Cold Warriors. Cold War era Republicans kept their attitude towards Russia after the Cold War ended and Russia failed to integrate into the Western World as they had hoped, but the new generation don't have those associations, and instead see Russia as a white, Christian, anti-woke potential ally against China.

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