Oh yes, as someone somewhere said:

“The safest border of Russia is the western one because NATO guards it”.

In Poland it’s “hybrid attack”. Devious, disgusting dehumanisation which makes even otherwise smart or kind people cheer for forces literally letting people freeze to death in forests. Rebrand helpless, misguided refugees as “Russia’s hybrid weapon” and you can get away with any atrocity.

With one notable exception: report, inform and spread news about Swedish metalworker union strike against Tesla.

Eh, 2022-3 wars are just as horrifying, they just happen on a smaller scale. Look up what was going on in the Bucha town, what are living conditions in Gaza, how many people were forced to leave homes in African and Asian civil wars… The scale of minefields in Ukraine, etc.

The fucking hubris of man. Antarctica should be off-limits for everyone except science teams. Yet here we go, the most important of the importants (not really, but I guess he feels like that) goes for a fieldtrip polluting the place just like any other cruise ship. And for what? A fucking publicity stunt. The message he sent is “this whole planet including this one extremely unhospitable, legally uninhabitable piece of ice is our playground. It’s no big deal to just pack up and randomly drop by Antarctica en route to Dubai.” Mate, this way of thinking is what brought us to where we are now. You’re not helping.

The endgame sounds scary, classic enshittification scheme but deployed to authentication and security: make it flashy and smooth at start, get adoption (this time it’s different b/c it’s not the masses that need convincing, but website operators), hold the entire internet hostage by threatening to pull the plug on the mode of access to everything. Also more obvious and coming sooner: exploit your handle on the tech to disable Passkeys to someone who “violates ToS” of Google services by, idk, running adblock or logging in with Firefox.

Did it? I somehow stopped seeing updates after the constitution referndum failed and capitalist and pinochetan cronies got elected into the council drafting the next version of the constitution.

Well, to my European eyes it’s not strange at all. These are some extreme takes but that’s how freedom of expression and press work. My European country has a politician with decades-long career who routinely claims democracy is a bad system, that women should not be allowed to vote etc. Luckily for us the man has near-zero actual power, but still, we can’t jail him for talking even if what he says is horrifying.

Huge +1 for Mullvad for their pricing model. 5€/month regardless of “plan” and you can buy as many or as few months as you like. I never feel chained to Mullvad, never worried about subscription running out or getting charged at random moments. Pay 5€, watch whatever you want on the foreign tv websites, forget about vpn for the next 3 months.

I’d prefer them to converge from Baldur’s Gate 3 direction. Cast more or less established voice actors and give them the hype and marketing space usually found among movie/tv stars. “films and games converge” yea, when we treat a 200hour computer game the way we treat a long tv series and acknowledge the actors’ contribution on the same level.

And between Egypt and Ethiopia due to the latter building a dam on Nile

The hubris of thinking that a random driver-exploiting app is some kind of godsend utility and we’ll be scared of losing it.

At this point the old school taxi companies have their apps too, you’re not the cool kid anymore, uber

Amazon

Okay now I’m stretching the OPs idea a little bit, but America is big.

How people live in South America never needing to learn other language than Spanish and plausibly never interacting with a foreign language outside movies. I spent some time in Chile, the place I lived in had a nice janitor. He did not speak English, I only knew a few loose words in Spanish so communication was… peculiar. Only after 2 months of awkward interactions he realised, that I probably am not Spanish native speaker and it hit me.

When your entire life in a continent where everyone speaks flavours of Spanish or Portugese, you can have successful, international career only in Spanish, participate in all kinds of rich culture only in Spanish and all signs and labels are only in Spanish, huge majority of tourists speak Spanish… it is not immediately obvious, that people may not speak Spanish.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not dunking on “dumb spanish speakers”. There are ton of places in Europe where people disregard English, where it’s famously hard to communicate in anything other than the local language, but the fact, that other languages exist is apparent to everyone once they learn to read. Awareness that people actually speak these languages is the most natural knowledge from ground school as we learn that “Germany speaks German. Italy speaks Italian” etc. A perspective which does not involve being in constant proximity to numerous foreign languages felt like something that made no sense to me in the past until I actually came into contact with it.

My experience is from Canada, but Canada is in America so it should count:

• insane amounts of empty space. It’s one thing to know that in America several hours drive doesn’t count as “far away”, another to experience it.
• guns. Not like in “them americans only shoot themselves”, but like in “any hardware store carries full gamut of weapon-adjacent accessories and it’s normal” wtf mates, you can’t keep your murder machines confined to murder machine shops? We manage to do it with porn and sex toys in Europe (at least my part of it), sure you can too with guns?
• malls. We do have malls in Europe. I still don’t get them, but it is a choice to go there. Where I lived in Canada it was the only shopping option. Why not corner shops? These suburbs waste a ton of space, no one has ever thought in a capitalist brain “hey let’s put a shop closer to the people and charge them more because they burn less fuel and waste less time to get here”?
• And a very specific nitpick: calling places “european” like a point of pride while in fact they are rather not. Quebec City and Montreal I think both pride themselves on being “the most europe-like cities in north america” and… they’re not europe-like? Like, ok, the old town is nice, but that’s it.

So this is either a big oil corp spending pennies on theorycrafting some exciting buzzword technosolutions

Or

A big oil corp which figured out that if they want to stay relevant for more than 10 yrs they need to diversify into other energy sources. With all the deserved hate they attract such companies are probably most likely to invent and implement aomething like this at scale.

It doesn’t change the fact that they should be nationalized asap and their decisionmakers jailed.

If I was to guess I’d say it’s the only way they can do anything meaningful. If the goal is to curb google’s monopoly on the internet it would be neat to break it down and apparently search was a case that can be credibly pursued on antitrust grounds. Web integroty hasn’t yet reached its intended scope, even if everyone with minimal knowledge know where it’s going, “everyone sees the writing on the wall” is not a valid ground for legal persecution.

One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.

The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.

“Poultry” though

I’ll take the bait:

• wireless communications can be and are disrupted in several different ways in a warzone. Targeting cell towers, active jamming, interception of messages are all huge concerns and all are solved with Starlink
• wired communications are useless on frontlines for (I hope) obvious reasons
• Quite a lot of the fighting happens in relatively sparsely populated countryside
• And even if we assume cell range is everywhere on land… there’s none at sea.
• All of it and more is solved by Starlink. While Russians learned how to interfere with it eventually, for some time it was near-invincible comms and still brings huge value.

Buuut… In the end Musk gave UA such a wide access to Starlink because the US and UA authorities paid for it a fat coin and most likely followed the payment with an offer he could not refuse. Until China or Russia eventually launch their own internet constellations, the US has a massive edge over literally anyone else and can grant this edge to anyone without it being controversial. Unlike sending military gear which took a while to become reality and was a delicate diplomatic matter, sending a truckload of receivers with access keys taped on them is basic shopping for UA and just a blip in export statistic for the US