This may legitimately be one of the most damaging moments in western hegemony moving forward. The one area where BRICS and other non-westerm blocs have not made major strides to dissociate from the west is Linux; even North Korea uses its own Linux distro domestically. A large part of the reason for that is that it’s traditionally been seen as such a stable and generally apolitical kernel that the usual worries about spyware in your firmware isn’t as big of a concern, so China and Russia don’t have major concerns about leveraging the kernel for their domestic industries. Hell, Russian programmers have been massive players in open source development traditionally.

This is fire across the bow for Russia, and you can be sure some bureaucrat in Beijing is taking notes right now.

Even for Western propaganda this is the mother of all nothingburgers. China performed routine wargames in its own territorial waters and sailed a carrier group within 100 miles of its own mainland, and somehow this is worth an article on.

At least they’re not claiming the CPC violated Taiwan’s airspace by flying over their own landmass again.

My guy, if you don’t want to learn malloc just learn Rust instead of making every basic function of 99% of electronics take literal seconds.

The proletariat

I generally lean towards classes with more mechanical complexity, so generally casters/status effect types. The gameplay loop needs to sate my ADHD, so if all I’m doing is smacking something with a sword by left clicking I’m quickly going to get bored and drop it.

*reactions to revolutions that threaten the entire current global order right in the backyard of the major empires not included

If you’re facing a one-front war, you have justification for your defense. If you’re facing a two-front war, either you started some shit or you got tag-teamed by your neighbors, so a toss up whether or not you deserved it.

If you’re facing a seven-front war, it is totally and unequivocally your fault. There has never been a country minding its own business that gets dogpiled to that degree in the modern era.

What exactly is the point of peacekeepers if the second an invading force starts shelling the area they just fuck off? The UN didn’t issue you those rifles for show.

I foresee some of these kicking off a struggle session by accident, but fuck it, we ball.

The actual mechanisms of the Cuban blockade are that any ship/shipping company that trades with Cuba is banned from American ports for the next 6 months. If BRICS is openly inviting Cuba in, that means that a meaningful chunk of the economic bloc’s logistics companies feel comfortable effectively never dealing with the US, which has massive implications for global trade going forward.

Bit aside, what actually is that thing?

With the advent of cheap Chinese high quality cardstock printers, anyone can have a proper Vintage cube for like $150.

You’re presented with a major failing of government like this and then given two options: One party that expresses anti-government sentiment, and another party that currently presides over the agencies that failed and tells you that everything is fine and to not believe your lying eyes when you ask what they’re going to do about the six feet of water in your basement.

Which way do you think people are going to go, and at what point does it no longer matter that the first option is defunding agencies that don’t accomplish anything? The Democrats cannot blame Republicans for voting against their own best interests when they can’t offer a worthwhile material alternative.

If you’re one of the nerds who bother to dive into the quasi-ARG metaplot, it does drive home the point that God is the bad guy and that Lucifer literally did nothing wrong in this universe.

I mean, a brutal dictator overseeing a terminally self-destructive empire full of football-brained Romeaboos with a brain tumor slowly eating away the bit of his mind capable of doing so competently is a pretty appropriate metaphor for Biden. No such similar metaphor for the empire-rejecting anarchist doctor daddy unfortunately.

Evergreen as usual:

It eats the other sea leviathans, so it’s good to let it skitter around untroubled.

President Biden and I do not want to see conflict in the Middle East escalate into a broader regional war. We have been working on a diplomatic solution along the Israel-Lebanon border so that people can safely return home on both sides of that border. Diplomacy remains the best path forward to protect civilians and achieve lasting stability in the region.

…and that is why we’ve handed billions upon billions of dollars worth of military equipment to the side actively committing a genocide, and why I’m putting out a statement condoning the political assassination of one of the people who we would theoretically be working with to create peace in the first place.

Death, and I cannot emphasize this enough, to America.

Gotta love how every Ayn Randian objectivist propaganda piece requires multiple varieties of literal magic to make any sense, and even then is so obviously just wankfuel for them that you feel the need to shower just from reading the plot summary.

Dentist: “Hey, you grind your teeth in your sleep. If you keep doing that, we’ll have to root canal half your mouth.”

Me: “Well, that sounds shit. What can I do about it?”

Dentist: “We can 3D-print you a mouthguard to wear at night. All it takes is scanning your top row of teeth and then producing it, which we can do in-house.”

Me: “Sweet. How much?”

Dentist: “Well, you’re insured, so that comes out to… $1,000.”

Me, fucking around and about to find out: “But I have insurance? This is preventative and the alternative is literally tens of thousands of dollars in expensive, painful surgery. Surely they must cover it.”

Dentist, laughing hard enough to have an aneurysm that their insurance won’t cover: “lol. lmao, even”

is the only summary of what I’d do to insurance executives if ever given even a modicum of political power.