Good science is boring, good politics is boring, good espionage is boring, good journalism is boring, good history is boring, good banking is boring, good business is boring. Entertainment serves us this pop view of the world…

But wikipedia is more valuable than all the LLM slop machines combined.

You need ground rules and objectives to reach any desired result. E.g. a court, an academic conference, a comedy club, etc. Online discussions would have to happen under very specific constraints and reach enough interested and qualified people to produce meaningful content…

The US and China are not equivalent in this. The UK is not neutral ground like Brazil or India where I agree that both need to be equally represented as opposite poles to balance.

Because it’s already built and the UK depends on the US militarily. China should not be given a chance to do the same.

PS: but it’s very easy, China can ask Moscow to build one there and I’m sure they’ll agree.

Just no more mega-embassies. That’s all, everyone knows what it means, it’s bad enough when a friend does it.

What duplicity? If you are not my ally, why should I let you do whatever you want on my turf? It makes no sense. You just sound like a 5-year-old trying to “it’s not fair” guilt people into allowing you to build another mega-embassy, which you already admitted is a bad thing for an ally to do, so it will be worse for an adversary.

So? The only person talking about the USA is you.

China is not the UK’s ally, so they should not act like they are. Maybe Moscow or Pyongyang will let the build a mega-embassy.

So they’re just going to use GitHub as a code training dataset? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

The issue for me is that musicated poetry has to be good poetry in first place. Generally, the voice even if good just interferes with the music unless it is a choir. Plus I’ve always had a hard time parsing lyrics by ear… I’d never considered cross-culture universality.

Just make it an official extension ffs…

russia annexed part of another country, in Europe, nobody was going to accept that long-term. Some probably thought they could buy time for putin to die or some political change to happen in order to deal with someone less fanatic. Merkel knew him well and she probably heard him rant at length about all his pet hates, she knew what she was dealing with. But boys will be boys.

PS: compare this

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/leaked-putin-remarks-on-ukraine-enrage-russia/ (putin threatening to invade Kiev in 2014)

with

https://www.newsweek.com/putin-reveals-why-he-didnt-launch-full-invasion-ukraine-2014-1788767 (putin says in 2023 he wanted to capture land “peacefully”)

So the best the EU could do was buy time to rearm Ukraine against invasion, keep things from escalating, and “hope” on the side that they change their mind through economic cooperation: https://www.eureporter.co/world/2014/10/01/letter-from-president-barroso-to-president-putin-2/

russia had plenty of room for deescalation and to save face before they decided to go all in in 2022 and annex country unilaterally again. After that, there was no point pretending anyone took Minsk seriously anymore.

russians yelling about Minsk is funny, they do 10x as much, 10x worse and then complain that we didn’t take their bullshit promises at face value…it’s a very bad vatnik talking point. We know what russia has been doing for decades, but we thought they were misunderstood, but now it is clear that they should be dealt with the same contempt that they have for us.

I never talked about Minsk, that’s just mitigation after the fire started to spread. I talked about her 30 years of Ostpolitik, including 16 during her chancellorship.

For that, first you need to solve a major problem posed by globalized capital to any government (also salary/regulatory arbitrage and bribes), which is, you need to get the stuff that they stashed away in a tax haven or even in a hostile country.

Well, yea, in hindsight, we should have had a far more muscled approach with them, especially since 2007. But I don’t know what you mean by destroy their society. Their society is already fucked.

🎉 Congrats!🥳 You finally made it to 1Bn credits, do you want to make any charitable donations? No? Then right this way, we have a huge reception prepared for you, sir: 🔪

Like the ascension of the Sonmis (in Cloud Atlas)

True, that’s actually better: heavy taxation and redistribution to services, grants to small businesses, UBI :)

Make bankers boring and frugal again.

Our objective (at least in the EU) is not to destroy russian society, since they live next to us. Our objective is to protect ourselves from their attacks and let them drown in their own shit, if they keep insisting in living like that.

e.g. sanctions are not there just to punish them, they are to try to defund their attacks against us.

PS: We in the EU (e.g. Merkel) used to think that by helping them rebuild their society and building commercial ties and goodwill after the USSR they would become reliable partners that grew their pride in being constructive (hence why we didn’t want to spend on defense). But they’d rather make a mess and use those ties to undermine us so…fuck 'em.

PPS: the danger that seems to be looming is that it seems that both China and the US want to turn russia into the EU’s Pakistan, the same way Pakistan is a nuclear-armed failed state used to fuck with India and keep it under control.