ShadowPouncer

Every now and then, I try to browser without an ad blocker.

That generally lasts until I encounter something that’s bad enough that I don’t really have a choice, and then I turn it back on.

The page needs to actually function. It needs to be possible to click on something and actually be clicking on the thing that you’re intending to.

And it can not have stuff that blinks in a manner that causes a segment of the population (which includes me at times, but not 100% of the time) significant neurological problems.

That last one has been the driving force behind stuff getting reenabled a fair bit.

Oh, and if it’s ads on video content, they need to be at least vaguely reasonable in regards to interruptions and length. Youtube is way past that at this point.

On the contrary, Russia using nuclear weapons would do a great deal.

It would ensure that every sane nation on the planet start working to remove the very real threat of Russia using nuclear weapons in other settings.

Depending on exactly how it was taken, that could pretty easily mean almost anything from a long range, decade long effort by most of the world to slowly strangle Russia with sanctions, without any exceptions, to an immediate set of strikes on every single known Russian location with nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, ‘known location’ is going to include a lot of places that are only ‘known’ at whatever the equivalent is for various countries of top secret, code word classified material, known only to a very small select few.

It would definitely include every single Russian nuclear submarine that any country on earth has a lock on.

It’s pretty much impossible to say how likely that immediate strike would be under those conditions, in large part because the world at large has no idea how much of Russia’s nuclear arsenal has been located with enough precision to carry out such an attack, let alone how much is believed to be known with such precision.

I really, really hope that we don’t go there, because that would be the kickoff for World War 3, without any question.

The only question would be how many Russian nuclear weapons would get launched before their launch platforms were eliminated.

Practically speaking, I sure as hell wouldn’t bet on the number being 0. But others very well might.

I definitely wouldn’t bet on it being anywhere close to the number of weapons that Russia claims to have ready to launch. Intelligence and strike capabilities are far better than that. Even assuming that every single launch platform actually works the way it’s supposed to.

But Russia doing something that even had the potential to lead to a world wide nuclear exchange would most definitely result in actions far greater than anything we have seen so far.

I would argue that we are, as a planetary civilization, almost past the point where a war of that sort is even possible.

On the other hand, if China were to ever shun NK, I would bet that their government would likely collapse in less than a decade.

Sadly, China has a ton of reasons to want to prevent that, one of the bigger ones being the border with NK where many, many refugees would try to cross into China.

I could however see, someday, China agreeing to a massive backroom deal on a scale that would be unprecedented:

China abruptly works to ensure a complete collapse of the NK government, without any NK nuclear weapons either coming into play or any NK nuclear weapons going missing (except to China itself, if it wants them).

And SK along with a good chunk of the Western world agrees to immediately conduct one of the largest humanitarian missions in history, to ensure that nobody is fleeing NK into China unless they have tons of assets and they want to avoid repercussions for their actions.

There are, sadly, a lot of reasons why China wouldn’t want the western powers capable of pulling that off to have control of territory that close to China though.

SK would be their safest bet, but SK doesn’t have the resources to pull of that kind of a humanitarian effort.

And the chances that someone like the US wouldn’t take the chance to plop a military base in what is currently NK seems awfully slim.

The big cost to doing it yourself is maintenance.

There is, for a lot of people, a fairly large amount of value in never having to worry about hardware dying. If it does, that’s someone else’s problem, and it will be fixed, as far as you are concerned, rapidly and without any interaction with you.

How much any given person values that is going to vary wildly, but it means that you don’t risk having stuff go down at a moment when you can’t do anything about it. Maybe you’re on vacation, and you don’t have any hands that can do anything. Maybe you’re sick, or just extremely busy that week.

You’re not wrong that this comes at a fairly substantial monetary cost, but it is wrong to say that this isn’t, in many cases, a cost that people are more than willing to pay in exchange for the benefit.

Mastodon absolutely does have a weakness of making it more difficult to find people that you want to follow based on what you have already engaged with.

And from a purely user perspective, that is a weakness.

But it’s also a very distinct choice. Because having enough data to be able to meaningfully make such recommendations means having a central database of every user interaction by every user.

And it also means making choices and value judgements which, almost by definition, can not be value neutral.

If the creators of the algorithm are good, they will actually be aware of the choices and value judgements being made, if not, well… They will still be making them, just not in nearly as educated of a way.

On the whole, I really hope that we eventually come up with answers to these problems that make it possible for a user to make those choices, and to have the amount of recommendations that they want, while somehow not having anyone have the huge database of user interactions. I’m not sure if that’s even possible, most especially if you assume that there will be entities on the fediverse that are fudging their data to get recommended in ways that other users don’t want.

But it sure would be interesting to try.

I think that it matters a great deal.

One side wants entire groups to not exist. We have seen that play out, time after time after time. We have seen that carried to the point of concentration camps, and the systematic extermination of entire groups of people.

We know where that road ends, and it ends is more blood than anyone should have the slightest desire to ever see spilled in their lifetime.

The other side might not be perfect, but it isn’t out to exterminate people.

That’s not a small difference. It’s not a subtle difference. It’s the difference between one side thinking that the holocaust didn’t go far enough, didn’t succeed enough, and the other side seeing it as an absolutely horrific event, something so horrible that it should never be allowed to happen again.

And make no mistake, when the far right is literally copying propaganda from the Nazis, and they are, they damn well know what they are doing.