I guess the hit piece is just the title OP put on the post.

Once again ordinary people in the West are saved from affordable, low-pollution living, and Western companies are saved from having to compete.

I thought about that, but it would affect iPhone users from outside Russia who are traveling in Russia, and Apple probably wouldn’t want that.

I misunderstood and my comment wasn’t well considered. It was even dumb.

20% is still better than 30%. Less momentum in the movement; more chance of discouraging others from pursuing it.

I agree with you that there’s no need to pretend fascists have a valid point. But those who would reason with them fail to understand that fascists are beyond caring whether they have a valid point or not. They are simply determined to have things their way. While we try to educate fascists about where they’re mistaken, they will smirk and load their guns. To them it’s funny that others are so stuck on argument when you can just use violence to get what you want. They see this attachment to argument as weakness and stupidity, and they know what to do with the weak and stupid.

That said, whether banning the party would help depends on how committed their voters are to the fascist cause, and I’m not familiar with the scene in Germany. Maybe if there are many who are just disgruntled but not particularly committed, putting obstacles in the party’s way could buy time to turn them away. But people get sucked in quickly because fascist groups know how to make people feel they belong, pander to their egos, and rapidly program their prejudices while persuading them everyone else is lying. It has cultish aspects, so there has to be a plan for how to deprogram people from a cult.

It would be a single point of failure for many apps in case the curators of F-Droid were dishonest or hacked. They could insert bad things into lots of packages without having to change the public source code. But it also becomes the only point where malware or backdoors could be inserted that way, instead of having to trust every single developer to build honestly off the source code, which we’d have to do if they just stuck prebuilt binaries up there. I don’t know how rational I’m being, but it makes me trust F-Droid apps more that they build each one themselves.

The U.S. company — whose phones are still sold in Russian stores despite the firm officially leaving the market due to the invasion of Ukraine…

Apple taking a brave stand as ever.

Edit: This was not the smartest comment.

Nintendo once again treats its fans with contempt and hostility. It’s not a good look.

Hey, Israel just needs a little living space.

You know what they meant by the first one. The second one is about people not being interested in dumb products like the Logitech AI mouse. Corporations are all jamming AI into their products and marketing materials not because users like it (they don’t) but because they hope it will attract investors. So AI is more interesting to investors than to people who don’t want it in their mouse.

In any country with public healthcare, there is a problem with how to afford to care for the elderly when the population contains more elderly people needing expensive healthcare than working people paying the taxes that fund it. This seems like a problem that extends beyond capitalism’s growth-seeking. It’s an issue of how to achieve stability.

This is why employers are ageist. They want naive employees.

Qobuz is good: reasonably priced, you get the best quality audio (actual high resolution, not the MQA nonsense Tides was doing), a good catalogue and a decent UI, and it pays the artists a bit more than Spotify and others. Spotify is still a bit better for recommendations and automatic playlists.

Right-wingers reach for these religious or moralistic justifications and laws, but Putin is probably just noticing, like many other countries, that their economy is screwed if their birth rates continue to decline. And yet the planet is screwed if we continue to increase. As climate change eats away at the habitable areas of the planet, the obvious thing is for habitable countries with declining birth rates to accept many immigrants from places climate causes people to flee from. This will help those people and help the receiving country’s economy. Unfortunately the right wing is also too wrapped up in xenophobia to accept this solution. They’d rather double down on controlling women.

Biden didn’t seem to mention that Israel has conducted more than a thousand air strikes on Lebanon in two days, killing many hundreds, possibly thousands by now:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjd5x1mnj2yo

Are all of those thousand air strikes “justice”?

That’ll give Netanyahu the perfect excuse to continue slaughtering thousands of civilians.

This article is from 2018.

That sounds like Trump accepts Putin’s line that this war was the fault of Ukraine and NATO.

And I specifically mentioned the USA because that’s the country where OpenAI operates and where the events in the article take place, so if someone asks why it’s so easy for OpenAI to go from being a nonprofit to a for-profit company (this was the issue I was responding to, not some general question about whether money has influence around the world), it’s the laws of the USA that are relevant, not the laws of other countries.