Keeping it practical, I’d like to know the basics about every regionally important city in the world. Capitals should be easy, I probably have most of them down already, and I have a few ideas about how to compile a list of the rest.

And spies on you relentlessly through your pocket with multiple sensors and a constant network connection; don’t forget that.

“I guess I’ll change the system to remove the spyware?”

“Yeah it’s actually going to work totally differently from a PC, and be a lot harder to modify - impossible without refounding the silicon on some models.”

FairCar when?

In a scripting language, is there an advantage to no garbage collection? (I honestly don’t know)

Someone else also pointed out to me, when I made a similar suggestion, that ability to partially fail but keep going is desirable in a web context. I don’t know, maybe there’s some way to make Rust do that more automatically than C. Python seems the be the standard for general-purpose scripting, which is why I mentioned it.

I guess you’re right. It’s not Vienna, but it’s not Kyiv either.

Do you think housing would come out worse in Poland than places like Russia or Turkey if it was measured correctly?

Poland did come across as a hard-to-exist-in eastern country on this map as well. The numbers would of course be different, but I’m not sure the pattern would be.

I think the premise is a bit off, although it might just be your choice of wording. Only a very small subset of people at at any time tend to get away with violence, and it’s not necessarily the most aggressive ones. Stick up a convenience store and see how well that goes for you.

Violence seems likely to always be a part of life, at least in the background.

That would be better, although I’d guess it would look similar in the end.

Once again, Portugal is so far west it underflows into eastern Europe.

X to doubt.

About the “hurting the economy” part. Replacing more stuff = more economy is a well-known economics fallacy and they should know better.

TIL about Ford. I mean, I knew about Henry, but not that they’re still around being rich.

Hmm. The Wikipedia article mentions a French essay as the origin of the idea.

I’m not sure what you mean by this. nations either chose or didn’t firmly choose a side, but lumping together all the ones that didn’t choose together is categorisation. The non-aligned movement was there too but it didn’t include the whole third world.

Invent a new internet where you can script pages directly in Python or TypeScript.

Otherwise, you get to enjoy a silly toy language from the 90’s.

K.

Here’s me getting instabanned for saying billionaires aren’t very communist, to someone confused as to why OP would say they are.

So much for calm, polite discussion.

I know what you’re thinking, that’s just tone policing, but it was in OP and is the whole reason I bothered with this thread. Usually Hexbear and friends are against actual conversation as a concept. Like other things mentioned, I’ve experienced that first-hand.

Use whatever tone you want, I may just decide not to talk to you, since digital turd flinging is a waste of my time.

You asked if there was anything you said that I disputed. Now you’re complaining that I “ignored” some of your points. Why? That just means that I didn’t see anything to dispute. Usually, I don’t take issue with people, you know, not disagreeing with me.

Ah, so you agree. See, only mentioning what you disagree with was unclear. Maybe you’re afraid to say it explicitly, because you’ll get banned, because “NK is great” is the actual party line.

One of my earliest childhood memories is dressing up as the “great hero” Robert E. Lee to give a presentation on the Civil War, or as we called it, “The War Between the States,” or, if we were feeling cheeky, “The War of Northern Aggression.”

So, that’s racist - and exactly what I was guessing you meant - but it doesn’t say anything about the quality of what you learned about math and reading. I think it’s out of touch that you’d compare a racist school in America to conditions in the third world. Where I have family.

And that’s not even touching on the implication that everyone in DPRK must be some illiterate backwards savage.

Oh no, the elites go to the best schools.

My sense of the Cold War examples is that they happened in places that were on a kind of knife’s edge already. Like Chile - there was an existing underfunded, previously influential and endogamous military that didn’t need to much encouragement to take down Allende, electoral mandate be damned. They managed to gain influence across a lot of Latin America at the time, but there’s no comparable place now. In modern places like with unstable governments, the US has been losing ground this decade, as opposed to running the show.

If the US was secretly replacing otherwise-stable governments all over the world, it would take vast numbers of people all over and be much too hard to perfectly to cover up. France’s program in north Africa ended up an open secret, for example. You don’t need it to explain anything either; so, it’s not supported by Occam’s razor. And obviously, how could I falsify that idea? This is when it starts feeling like arguing against a conspiracy theory. Every thing you can say against it gets twisted into evidence for a successful coverup.

There’s been open interventions like Iraq and Libya, and legitimate controversy about them, but neither of those guys were remotely elected (which is what I was asking about). Intervening in the sense of throwing their weight around in lesser ways definitely happens, both in secret and in open, but China is also notorious for it, and has even taken a couple swings at Canada deep in the US sphere.

But the fact remains that the foreign policy of the US has remained fairly stable across multiple administrations from both parties, which essentially amounts to saying “promoting freedom and democracy” but in actuality promoting expanding military power around the world and expanding economic power as a result of that military presence at just about any cost.

My point there was just that a lot of the decision makers believe they’re doing something noble (and the rest just want to get re-elected). At least in my country, which is culturally very close to the US, foreign policy isn’t a deliberately self-serving enterprise. (Although the fascist/“far-right populist” movement obviously goes in exactly that direction, and claims it’s a virtue)

I don’t agree at all that it’s always BS.

The first example I was thinking of there is Venezuela. Conditions in the nation are really bad, there’s been mass migration out of it, and it’s not hard to find a Venezuelan that hates Maduro and friends. He can say it’s the CIA planting people, but even if you agree that none of the situation is actually his fault, it’s not the CIA - people do blame the current government. Same story during the Arab Spring. Really, dictators will usually say an enemy manufactured any civil unrest, and the US is the obvious choice for some of them. Others blame local rivals, and historically Jews were popular.

Also, Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela, which goes back to the knife’s edge thing. The US appears to be gearing up for an open armed invasion to dislodge him, because just the considerable public support for the opposition and whatever clandestine programs weren’t enough.

A 2021 review of the existing literature found that foreign interventions since World War II tend overwhelmingly to fail to achieve their purported objectives.[100]

Interesting, I might have to read that. In my head the banana republic coups worked like half the time, but maybe that’s just because nobody talks about the failed ones.

No.

plus Western corporations with large presences around the world, still extracting wealth to this day.

Not as much as you’d think, honestly.

Western wealth comes from other Western wealth, for the most part. Solid institutions, high education rates and lots of capital, which allows all kinds of complicated industries to exist that don’t elsewhere. That got started on colonialism and slavery, but it doesn’t need it to exist now.

For things like resources, there are corrupt deals that get funneled through places like Saychelles, but if you look at the actual savings that come out of it on the Western end it’s like pennies. They’re really screwing the global poor for nothing. Meanwhile, the low-end manufacturing jobs are popular because they tend to pay better than anything else available, and are arguably lighter work than going out in the fields; nobody’s really losing there.

The West cares about human rights and democracy mostly for propaganda

I’m also involved in politics. There’s legit ideology there, just like there was legit ideology in the Soviet Union.

Although the far right is a different beast, obviously. These days the US is a lot like a second China, from a Canadian perspective.

The West has overthrown democratically-elected governments and installed human-rights violating dictators plenty of times, up until recently

What are you thinking of there? I can’t really come up with anything past the 80’s. Some leaders will blame the West for their own domestic protesters, but it’s always BS. If the US couldn’t find one guy for that long they certainly can’t whip up an entire nation.

To the rest, I’ll say we both know the earlier history, and I’d probably agree the West needs taking down a peg circa 1920. The Cold War is a bit murkier, because the USSR liked a good puppet or intervention as well.

Ah, SDF must have been down at the time and I was on the alt.

You’re right, that is ruder than I remembered, because I said “nonsense”, although I’d still argue that’s mild, and the point was to clarify what was going on to someone confused. The dude was indeed a Dengist - that’s not a derogatory term.

It’s a cliche because it’s an obvious problem with the claim, regardless of how much spin and quote mining is put into it. I learned something from this ban, because Dengism used to be a fringe position within Western socialism. Not so on Lemmy.

I’m gonna go back through some of my other testy exchanges just to make sure I’m not crazy. Pro-NK, pro-China, pro-Russia, pro-Assad. Pol Pot has been been kicked around too, although not directly to me. I will have to pick through the waves of insults and rude gifs that always come with a visit from Hexbear.