He and his buddies also seem to have raped the fitness trainer, and then forced him to admit it on video.

What’s a BC?

Oh for sure. No question there. I don’t see it having this kind of outcome either. I do believe there’s a possibility that the Trump administration thought of it this way however.

By their own citizens who they convinced Russia thirsts for their blood and homes.

If I was Putin, I wouldn’t agree to such a ceasefire. Denazification is a must at this point, along with all the other demands. If the nazis are left running whatever is left from Ukraine, in 10-20 years, this whole thing will be repeated again. We’ve seen how Syria turned out.

There’s this theory circulating that the whole thing was a trap for Ukraine and Europeans to say they agree to a ceasefire, and that they await Putin’s response. And if Putin responds “sure, and here’s my conditions” (which he did), and US says “sure, let’s talk about doing that”, then the Ukrainians and Europeans can’t back out without being seen as the unreasonable ones.

It is. Taller = More for many people. When we are children, we actually think tall and thin = more than short and wide. We lack the logical skill to figure out that 2 glasses of such shapes hold equal volumes of water.

Even though this skill develops later in life, many people are still subconsciously wired to think tall = more. Therefore tall = better.

There’s other things at play here, like stacking more cans per shelf, which makes it look like it’s squeezing the competition => better.

Greek civil war 1945-1949: 150 000 dead communists in battles, executions and pogroms. Followed by 30 more years of repression, including the use of brutal concentration camps, whose sole purpose was to either kill you or break you.. All under the supervision of the CIA.

Can’t wait for the “no iphone AI in communism” memes 30 years from now.

More of an observation that most successful revolutions or protests so far in history, where we have data for, had at least this many people.

When I learned of this, it was used to make a point that 1% of a country is actually quite a lot of people when they get together.

There’s an anecdotal statistic going around historian circles, that if a revolution gets 1% of the country’s population to participate in some capacity, then it succeeds.

Abattoir is just the french word for slaughterhouse, and it means the exact same thing. But point taken.

The article says there’s a narrow corridor which is about 0.5-1 km wide. This means the Ukrainians are in operational encirclement.

Russians usually leave a small corridor open like this, because they’ve observed that Ukrainian high command dislikes retreating and insists on sending reinforcements and supplies, as they order units to hold to the last man. At the same time, they try to sneak out heavy equipment and elite units. Both resupplies and shuffling of troops/equipment along this narrow path are usually easy targets for UAVs, missiles and air strikes. That’s when they inflict the highest losses. This also softens the units caught in the pocket and makes capturing them easier and less dangerous.

What makes you feel sad?

WTF?

It also angers me at the end where the owner feigns ignorance, when clearly this culture permeated the whole abattoir. This wasn’t one or two workers being sadistic. At that scale, it was everybody.

Part of the problem is that the DRC has been unstable for decades (thanks to colonialism), and the area there is huge, hilly/mountainous (especially near the border with Rwanda) and heavily forested, making it really difficult to actually control it against an enemy force. Add to that the many other rebel groups DRC has to contend with, and the distances to cover in order to redeploy troops, they’ll be lucky to get back what they lost.

Kivu (the disputed province) is known to be really mineral-rich with gemstones and rare earth minerals, so I can guess that the driver behind the conflict is, yet again, Europeans and Americans trying to secure cheap resources.

I’m sure this is a very simplistic take, but from what I’ve read this is an ongoing struggle between the Tutsi and the Hutu peoples. Colonial powers used the Tutsi to suppress the larger Hutu population. This created societal divisions and hatred that still exists to this day and manifests in different violent incidents in many countries in the area.

Rwanda wants to take over the Congolese region that borders it, using this wider racial conflict as an excuse. There’s been (mostly guerilla) battles taking place in that area for close to 3 decades now. Recently, some Congolese villages and towns were handed over to Rwandan forces by elements of the Congolese army, though the Congolese say this “hand-over” was staged after Rwandan-backed rebels actually took over these towns, and now the Congolese army is fighting to to take those back.

I don’t know enough to judge what exactly is true and isn’t true. It seems that the UN chronically considers Rwanda to be the aggressor in this conflict.

You get paid 100 dollars a day.

You produce work that your boss sells for 700 dollars a day

Materials, electricity, transport, etc, for the work you produce, cost your boss 200 dollars a day.

So your boss pays 300 dollars to get 700 dollars. Your work is worth more, but you get paid less for it. You get paid 100 to produce work worth 500 (your wage + profit).

In many cases you are not even paid enough to afford buying what you produce.

This is a simplistic example but it demonstrates the basic idea. Things cost money to produce. Then capitalists “add” something extra to that cost, and sell the product. The capitalist profit wasn’t really something added extra. It was removed from the wage the worker pays. Which is why the first thing bosses look to do when cutting costs/looking for more profits (which is always) is not to renegotiate the price of electricity, fuel, or material costs. No, instead they ask you to work extra hours for less money, they offer you a low wage when they hire you (if you’ve been interviewed and hired before, you know that feeling that you’ve been somehow cheated), they lower your wage while crying about the economy, they fire you to hire some other poor bastard who is desperate to take a lower wage.

Burnt pies and shitty cookies are not realistic examples to refute the labour theory of value. Consider what happens in reality? If you worked at a bakery and you constantly burnt pies, there’s several possibilities, but they all lead to one outcome: your boss is unhappy because your accidents are cutting into his profits. Therefore, the value of the pie for your boss is still the same as it always was, whether it’s perfect or burnt. This value is the materials cost + labour + expected profit. They’ll still try to sell it at the same price, probably by hiding it among good pies, and some customers will still buy it because they don’t know any better.

That’s not to say that the price of things can’t be changed. But it’s still intrinsically tied to the cost of labour that went to produce it. When the capitalist makes a decision to change the price, they will almost never lower it below their material cost and their labour cost.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s all about mass production. In many cases the capitalist expects that their workers will make mistakes. They factor that in their profit calculations, and set the price accordingly. When you buy pies, a portion of the price makes up for the lost labour and materials put into creating failed pies.

I wouldn’t say AI (or pattern-replicating models resembling AI) is flawed. It’s a great tool for saving time and automating certain processes.

The problem is the myriad of grifters who appeared, mostly in the West, trying to sell it as a cure-all snake oil.

For instance, there’s a massive push in the EU to insert AI in education, but with little regard or planning on how to do it effectively. It would be a great tool if we were to feed AI with our curriculi, then ask it to update it to current knowledge (e.g. in science), come up with suggestions for better delivery of certain topics, eliminate time wasted on erroneous, repeating, or useless topics and improve our schedules for other topics (e.g. teaching Romeo and Juliet in Languages, and at the same time go through the history of 1400s Venice in History). These things could be done using commitees over a 5 year period. Or they could be done by AI in a day. Instead though, we get to have handsomely-paid private contractors organize days-long training sessions over how to use AI to draw a picture, because it might make a presentation to students slightly more exciting.

There’s a saying where I come from: “To find justice, make a problem”. If you don’t speak up, nothing will ever get resolved to your satisfaction. Being polite and friendly is one thing. Don’t let it get in the way of your well-being.