This careful response seems sensible at first blush. After all, maybe in 5 years things will be better for Venezuelans! On the other hand, maybe not. In my heart of hearts I believe the odds are not great, but in lieu of a time machine, I think we can do no better than call it 50:50 odds.
In the meantime, though, this action is already having effects beyond the US and Venezuela. Withholding judgement until this conflict has fully played out carries with it an implicitly permission for similar actions in other places and situations. After all, maybe those will be for the better too!
That's why I oppose this action. Not in support the Maduro regime, which in my view has little to nothing that's worth defending, but because of the precedent that it sets for future events. This is hardly the first time a nation has had its sovereignty violated by a stronger power, and I'm not so naive to believe that it will be the last if only enough people spoke out. But at the same time, I strongly believe that accepting it as something that's inevitable (or even good) will only make it happen more often.
It looks quite literally and "falling out of window" had been repeated many times in this thread. I believe the original meme predates 2022 and stems from this event: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mikehayes/russian-lawye...
If you can read Russian you can find that it was an accident during a house renovation with a whole bunch of people present and the person was airlifted to the hospital.
Now this is rebranded into "oligarchs" not giving money to Putin and being thrown out of the windows of their apartments. None of the people on the list is a billionaire and if a manager of a company falling out of the window constitutes some kind of dictatorship then how about this:
Journalists have a long and storied history of standing up for free and independent journalism, and they're right to!. However, they have a rather more spotty record (with highs and lows) of standing up for other fundamental requirements for a well-functioning liberal democracy.
So one possible (admittedly uncharitable) take is that they were OK with all those other things because those things didn't hurt them, and might've helped them. They're not OK with this change not because it makes things worse, but because it makes things worse /for them/.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. We naturally always try to paint the "enemy" as an unhinged maniac ready to unless destruction on the entire world at a whim, but in reality I don't think this is pretty much ever the case. A population with the industrial and intellectual capability to develop a nuke in the first place is going to have grander ambitions than going out in a blaze of glory. I think even ultra-fundamentalists like the Taliban mostly just want to build up their own little vision of a utopia.
I think a part of the reason North Korea plays crazy is because they have to. If the US didn't think they'd push the big red button, then we'd invade them in a heart-beat. Mutually assured destruction only works when you believe the other guy will push the button. So you need the bomb and then you also need to make sure everybody thinks you're willing to actually use it.
Sorry for the repetition but I'm just going to repeat this every time it comes up. Maybe some day I'll make it a bot.
North Korea has enough conventional rocket artillery within range of Seoul to level the city. This is how Kim was able to run his nuclear program to completion in the first place. It also hasn't changed.
Over the past half century, a lot of women went from housewife to part-time worker, resulting in more hours worked per adult citizen and household, but fewer per labor participant. The same is true if labor participation in general went up, which between 2012 and 2022 it did, by about 5pp: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1166044/employment-rate-...
That's not the kind of progress described by the mchanson.
> Russia violated Turkey’s airspace only once, the jet was shot down immediately, and, save to say, Putin was on the phone with Ankara to prevent an all out escalation with a NATO member that can trigger article 5 at any time for self defense after an apparent aggression. Turned out, no more airspace violations happened again.
I was on the same page as you for a long time, but aggressively defending your airspace also increases risk of collateral damage, leading to, for example, your military shooting down Azeri passenger jets. Or Malaysian ones. Or Iranian ones (to name one not committed by Russia).
I believe (with zero supporting evidence) that Blizzard implemented level scaling reluctantly, in order to better facilitate ad-hoc group play. Unfortunately, they kind of screwed it up.
When you move around in the overworld, you sometimes run into another player. They're fighting some enemies, you jump in to help (or vice versa) and it's amazing. Those are some of my favourite moments in the game, and the only reason it works is because of the level scaling. Even if my character is only level 10 and theirs is level 40, we can fight the same enemies and have roughly equal impact, because for me those enemies are level 10, and for them those same enemies are level 40! It's really clever, and I think they felt the sense of progression was an necessary sacrifice to enable that kind of improvised cooperative play.
"But ordinary, you said they screwed it up!" Yeah, they did. Because what happens when the enemies are dead? You continue towards your quest, and they continue towards theirs, and poof, you're all alone again. These brief moments are tantalizingly close to true pick-up experience: you start playing, meet a few people, team up, and have a blast together for an hour or so, just like you could in Diablo 2.
Oh, and even if you do happen to have the same quest, unless you took the relatively scary step of formally inviting them to your (1-person) party, the moment you enter a dungeon, you each get your own instance, and you're torn apart.
And finally, there's no global chat, so the only real way you have of communicating with people you meet prior to inviting them to a party is a Hearthstone-style emote wheel. There are at least 3 quests that require you to use the emote wheel, so they really wanted you to know it's there and to learn to use it, but in practice no one does and it's useless.
Taken together, it just barely doesn't work and it's really unfortunate. And counterintuitively those brief moments of comradery make the game feel more lonely than if you never met anyone at all. Because time and again, you're confronted with the fact that people are out there! Having fun, kicking ass, taking names. Just... you know, not with you.
The only thing I can't quite figure out is why they didn't attempt to 'matchmake' players of similar levels together. There are literally millions of people playing Diablo 4 at any one time, surely there's someone who's doing the same quest at about the same level as me? Why don't I meet those people? Or maybe the odds just don't work out, even at that scale.
It is worth pointing out that einpoklum's point is not merely academic: Stallman is old enough that he really did get introduced to computers and programming and software through corporate and university mainframes, and not through personal machines like (I assume) most of us.
The decline of the early open hacker culture in favour of corporate proprietary software during the 70s deeply informed the idea behind Free Software.
In the meantime, though, this action is already having effects beyond the US and Venezuela. Withholding judgement until this conflict has fully played out carries with it an implicitly permission for similar actions in other places and situations. After all, maybe those will be for the better too!
That's why I oppose this action. Not in support the Maduro regime, which in my view has little to nothing that's worth defending, but because of the precedent that it sets for future events. This is hardly the first time a nation has had its sovereignty violated by a stronger power, and I'm not so naive to believe that it will be the last if only enough people spoke out. But at the same time, I strongly believe that accepting it as something that's inevitable (or even good) will only make it happen more often.
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