They are supposed to pay it out to families of the soldiers. But they skirt around that by simply not retrieving their dead and wounded from the battlegrounds, and marking the soldiers as unknown/missing, thus deferring the payments indefinitely.

There have been multiple reports of wives/widows trying to find out what happened to their husbands, or at least to collect the money, with the military admin stonewalling them.

Next thing they’ll start rounding up people who wear glasses, like some African dictator a few decades ago.

Can humans even have a real communist society? I suspect it would take a species without any individual self-preservation instinct, or individual greed, so that each member can fully serve the collective.

Well, at least we got something.

And even that is debatable. Japanese surrender came shortly after a quick succession of several events - the first bomb at Hiroshima, Soviet Union declaring war and invading continental Japanese land, the second bomb at Nagasaki, allies completely obliterating Japanese navy, and preparing to invade their home islands, etc.

Many argue that Japan would surrender even without the two nuclear bombs.

Under the veneer of fantasy parody, Pratchett was able to sneak in surprisingly strong ethics and morality lessons in a very likeable manner. It’s one of many reasons I love the Discworld books - they make me want to be better.

I suspect that the characters Esmerelda Weatherwax and Sam Vimes were in fact Pratchett’s vehicles to convey his own moral values.

“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’

‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’

‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

(https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1494234-carpe-jugulum)

That was over two years ago. Surely even a mediocre tactician would anticipate something like this happening eventually.

My guess is that Russia simply does not have the means to effectively defend all of its border anymore, and they’ve been praying that the Ukraine’s western benefactors will keep them “on the leash” for as long as possible.

Yep, that’s a more accurate way of putting it. @[email protected]’s phrasing made it sound like some well-organized kanban thing. 🤣

With a topic as sensitive and biased against the victims as this, it’s hard to get accurate data - see https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/rape-statistics-by-country

As a Slovak person, currently horribly embarrassed for my own proto-fascist government, I wholeheartedly agree. We’ve had our chance, but majority of voters over here are mentally 50 years in the past and brainwashed by Russian disinfo campaigns. We really are gullible idiots.

EDIT: That said, it’s mostly just our government making performative noise for benefit of its voter base. We are not affected nowhere near as much by Ukraine’s current gas block as they want you to believe.

All through the same network, I’m afraid. I haven’t felt the need to separate it like that, although it should be doable using docker networks, or maybe on even lower level, via Linux network namespaces.

Alright, so it can do some direct syncs via Garmin API, I didn’t know that. Last time I checked, only manually uploading your gpx files was possible.

Neat, I’ll definitely set this up. Dockerized, of course, my little server already has lot of services on it, got to keep things neatly separated. :)

So, what do you think of the Garmin intergration? I have had Fittrackee in my sights for a good while now, and the only thimg holding me back from trying it is that I donk know how painful (or painless) the activity upload/sync from my Garmin watch will be.

I just use my own custom built docker images and have a few aliases set up for different “instances”, e.g. one for banking, one for tis eshop, one for that eshop, etc. Each with its own firefox data dir and own downloads subfolder. Plus an alias to launch a temporary clean instance that gets discarded after it exits.

As a longtime Debian Stable user, I can attest that gaming on it works just fine, whether via Proton or natively.

It was rough at the first half year or so after Steam Linux client launched where system libraries were simply too old and one had to smuggle in libc from Ubuntu, but that got solved by the next Debian release, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since. :)

Of course, I wouldn’t recommend Debian for a gaming system for a newbie. It’s just what I’ve been using as my daily driver for decades, so I did not want to switch to something else just for something as unimportant as gaming.

Same here. I keep shaking my head in disbelief when I read all this “you need this custom niche distro if you want nvidia without problems” posts, and then look at my totally uncustomized Debian Stable PC, on which I’ve been playing modern games for many years now. :)

Really, the only trouble I’ve had was not Nvidia related at all - in the very beginning when Steam Linux client was released, Debian had too old glibc, and I had to resort to LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LD_PRELOAD tricks with glibc snatched from an Ubuntu package. But next Debian release fixed even that, and it’s been smooth sailing ever since.

Yep, Mastodon takes some effort to get going. You need to find people who are interesting for you yourself, in order to seed your feed with interesting stuff. And it goes much smoother if you also interact yourself, which is where many lurkers, used to Twitter and its algorithm feeding them content, hit a wall. It’s just a completely different world in there.

I’m on Debian stable, and until this month’s 12.0 release, I’ve had to make do with older nvidia drivers. But I pretty much only felt it by not being able to play one or two games (A Plague Tale: Requiem and demo of the new System Shock remake, there may have been one more that I do not remember anymore).

But as I still have dozens of games on backlog, it was not a big deal, I can wait.

Other than that, I’m a very happy Debian user of almost two decades now.