Haven’t watched it yet, but I suspect it comes down to punching up vs. punching down, correct?

That app is a special kind of inhuman torture.

I know this might sound a little condescending, but why are you torturing yourself by not using an adblocker?

There is a difference between a war and a conflict. Hamas did not start this conflict, but they started this war.

The only waste food is food that has become inedible.

Yup. I recall how the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs published new guidelines for digging mass graves in late 2021. One of many pieces of evidence pointing towards genocidal intent. Bucha at the latest should have made Putin’s goals in Ukraine more than clear to anyone.

You know there are massive differences between the war that Russia started and the war that Hamas started.

Dictators need the support of their citizens as well. None of them have truly unlimited power.

Every single one of them has to keep people both afraid and happy enough to maintain control. This includes various domestic interest groups (from peasants to members of the military) as well as influential individuals (a small number of key cadres, media figures, intellectuals and generals), in addition to foreign powers. It’s a constant and highly dangerous balancing act, because if there is one thing that is exceptionally rare among autocratic regimes, it’s a peaceful transition of power. No “president for life” wants to share the fate of Muammar Gaddafi.

You people have been shouting that he’s a dictator

Yes, because he is one. Nobody in their right mind would deny this.

since your owners told you to hate Russians.

This is ridiculous. So people in the free West are slaves now? And no, we don’t hate Russians, just Putin, his cronies, his soldiers who murder and rape their way through Ukraine - and his lap dogs who are busy regurgitating primitive “russophobia” propaganda talking points, either for free or in the vain hope that they don’t get sent in the meat grinder.

Yes! I remember experiments with similar projectors and interfaces like this device going back at least as far as the early 2010s. Would be fun to mess with.

Isn’t “soft launch” the usual term for this?

Yup, although my impression is that a significant part of it is spread by people who agree with the disinformation they are posting here. Then again, if a user behaves exactly like a paid troll, it doesn’t really matter to me whether or not they might actually be doing it for free. The damage is the same.

Interesting. I wasn’t logged in, so I didn’t know.

Bit late, isn’t it? I had already forgotten all about it and I don’t think I’m the only one.

Last time I checked, those had been made inaccessible before the recent hacking attacks.

I would recommend turning the brightness down to near zero. Combine this with Dark Reader for websites (Firefox) and using a white or grey on black night reader mode in ebook reader apps. At first, the display will appear almost unreadable, but your eyes will quickly adjust.

There’s a reason I said “so far”. I’m open to the idea that there might be newer and better systems in the future. So far though, they haven’t been invented yet.

I would recommend “spending” about 6 GB on a 1080p x265 encoding of a movie, if you can. The quality is much better, good enough to be viewed up close on a large screen, unless there’s a large amount of high frequency detail, like in recent animated or very CGI-heavy movies - or unless it’s an older film with strong film grain and/or large mass scenes (think Lawrence of Arabia). Those do benefit from higher bitrates and resolutions, even if your screen isn’t 4K.

… or gulagware.

In the real world, communism also suffered from the mandated growth problem, as well as a long list of other issues that some people still like to pretend solely exist under capitalism and some serious problems that are exclusive to this system. Yes, it is actually bad, with and without Cold War propaganda making it sound both worse and better than it actually was. It failed everywhere for a reason.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t real issues with capitalism as well. So far, the best system we’ve come up with as a species is heavily regulated capitalism with strong social safety nets. Not perfect, but nothing is on this rock.

Especially if you’re fine with the low image quality of streaming services. Equivalent video files aren’t particularly big.