It’s an acquired taste.

I played a mod that turned Escape from Tarkov into a singleplayer game a few years ago (never played it online myself); a PvE mode has since been officially released, but I haven’t looked into it. The tension and intensity of it, the risk/reward to every move you make combined with the pretty high realism do make for an interesting package. Incursion Red River really impressed me for pretty much the same reasons, even in the relatively early state that it was in when I last tried it out. I lost any interest in online gaming a long time ago, so I only care about PvE.

My favorite has to be Witchfire though, thanks to its fantasy steampunk setting and immensely satisfying combat that reminds me of the original Painkiller (which makes sense - both are from Poland), but it’s way more polished in every way (no pun intended). It is admittedly much easier than the above two and needs more content, but what’s there is already very impressive and - in my eyes at least - a neat introduction to the genre, especially if you don’t care for modern military stuff. Witchfire is also one of the best-looking games out there right now, both in terms of tech and art style.

No, it’s not that simple.

Of course they can shoot down Western planes in a war. The question is how consistently and how many losses they would suffer in return. At the moment, everything looks like the Chinese air force is extremely poorly trained and, obviously, very inexperienced from top to bottom, which puts them at a significant disadvantage, even if we assumed - which I don’t think is likely - that their equipment is competitive with the West. There’s a reason they are trying to bribe experienced Western pilots to get some infusion of institutional knowledge.

Sorry, aber das ist mehr als nur zu dünn.

realistisch betrachtet wurde der feminismus doch sowieso nur vorangetrieben damit den oberen klassen mehr arbeitskräfte zur verfügung stehen.

Das war meines Wissens nach eher der Plan im Ostblock. Hast du Belege dafür, dass dahinter im Westen eine gezielte Kampagne der Industriellen steckt?

Yup. Recording TV shows and movies aired on TV was far more common than copying tapes. No copy protection to worry about (although there were some attempts to prevent fast-forwarding over ad segments, IIRC) and you only needed a single tape mechanism instead of two.

Gilt laut Funkanlagengesetz wohl nur für versteckte Kameras, die auch per Funk Bildmaterial übertragen können.

War ein wenig knifflig zu finden (weil das ursprünglich unter ein anderes Gesetz fiel), aber hier wird es gut erklärt:

https://www.it-recht-kanzlei.de/spionagekamera-verkauf-recht.html

Wow, that’s oldschool. I haven’t even thought about IRC for at least 15 years. How actively is this still being used in general?

It’s explained in the article, with examples. Which specific aspect(s) of this explanation do you need help with?

I recall some findings from a consumer watchdog on goods from Shein. They found kids toys (including biting toys for infants) with thousands of times the legally permitted amount of toxic substances. There was a necklace that was made of over 80% cadmium. This is beyond negligence and crosses into chemical warfare territory.

Is that a thing in Canada?

Good point.

You likely already have a smartphone, so why not just get a controller that plugs directly into its USB-C port? Then load up whichever emulator you want. Chances are, your phone is considerably faster than most emulation handhelds anyway.

You can talk to me directly instead of behind my back, you know?

I’m not ignoring the international division of labor. Every country is part of it and every country has been part of it in the past, including Socialist ones.

I have a hunch you took this personally. Nah, I must be hallucinating.

socialists are even worse than capitalist

Their historic record is considerably worse. I don’t even need to bring up gulags, mass starvation and the abysmal living and human rights conditions of every Socialist regime throughout history to support this point (but it doesn’t hurt).

This does not mean that pure capitalism is fine either (I used to consider myself a smug and enlightened centrist - can you tell?), but it tends to work the best with a fair bit of socialism injected in key areas (social safety net, high taxes on wealth, strong regulations and institutions, robust democratic decision making, lots of economic freedom and high social mobility), as in the Nordic model, which is arguably the best thing humans have come up with so far.

extremely inefficient chip production collapsed Soviet Union economy

I didn’t say that, but it was definitely a strongly contributing factor. I mentioned East Germany in particular, since it spent a fortune on setting up a competitive chip industry to achieve parity with Western and Japanese companies, but failed. The debacle that was their infamous 1 MBit chip, which cost 1 Billion Ostmark to develop (at a time when the country was struggling with high debts it owed to West Germany), but never achieved more than 20% yields in pre-production and was never production-ready illustrates just how hopeless the endeavor was. By the time the chip was in said pre-production state, Japan was already producing 4 MBit chips en masse, at economic yields, of course. I can’t find the numbers on how much of the state budget went into this, but it was a considerable portion, at the cost of everything else. Literally their hail Mary.

Ironically, these investments did pay off in the long run, just not for them: The area where the East German government concentrated its chip production is now known as the German silicon valley. Investments into education and research in particular laid the groundwork for the current and very competitive market-driven chip industry and other IT companies that have settled there.

current-day tech giants as desperate today in attempt to save “their economic system” as Soviet Union and East Germany were in '70s and '80s?

No. Current-day tech giants are in search of something that promises them more perpetual growth in a finite world, where almost all viable technological niches are already saturated. Smartphones are a solved issue: Everyone has settled on glass rectangles with high-res touchscreens, the hardware and software for them is so mature that even ten year old devices are still sufficient today. Gimmicks like foldables are expected to remain fringe. Same with conventional PCs and laptops: Times when a device was obsolete after four years or sooner are long over. Cloud services and virtualization have similarly reached their peak, to the point that there’s a counter movement back towards local IT.

All of this means that easy avenues for more growth are already clogged up, so after some brief excursions into crypto and NFT, earlier and much smaller bubbles, it’s AI with its promise to replace costly human white collar labor with cheaper software that doesn’t talk back, doesn’t form unions or have uppity ideas about redistributing wealth or getting rid of greedy CEOs. Digital slaves, if you will, ideally as intelligent or more intelligent than humans, but without any ability to shape its own destiny. It’s not happening, of course, just as delusional as trying to automate yourself out of the inherent issues of centrally planned economies, but everyone needs to pretend that it might one day, because their livelihoods depend on it. They have invested too much, are in too deep to pull out, are afraid that if one of them does, the house of cards comes crashing down.

I will not pretend that any of this is particularly insightful, but since you appeared to have struggled with the historic parallels, I thought I’d elaborate on each point a little. I hope this doesn’t cause you any additional pain, but if it does, you should be able to deal with it as a strong, rugged Socialist individual used to hardships in service of a better future. No pain, no glorious workers’ and peasants’ revolution, am I right?

How does a defensive alliance restrict economic systems?

This was extremely obvious even when he announced this ridiculous idea during his campaign. I suspect he knew this, but kept at it to boost his popularity - until he couldn’t do it anymore and had to find a way out.

Given your username and where it’s registered, you will not like the answer, but: Socialists were also notorious for cooking the books to hide their failures, even more so than dirty capitalist pigs. It’s one of the reasons why the system failed: Since everyone at every level was doing it, the already hopelessly out of their depth central planners had no reliable data to work with.

This doesn’t make the AI bubble okay, of course. I’m only writing this, because your smug comment combined with your user name are particularly ironic.

Another thing: Had LLMs like we have them now been available in the '70s and '80s, the likes of East Germany and the Soviet Union would have been all over them in a desperate bid to save their economic system, just like they tried to with computerized planning and automation back then, wasting ridiculous and economically ruinous amounts of resources on extremely inefficient chip production before they collapsed. In a way, current-day tech giants and the corporate world in general are repeating this mistake in a desperate bid to take part in the “next big thing” in order to get out of the stagnation they found themselves in.

Call it history repeating itself or rhyming - either way, I’m noticing some patterns here.

Oder deren Enkelkindern! Sippenhaft für Raubmordkopierer jetzt!

Ich kannte jemanden, der außerhalb von Köln bei einem SEK-Einsatz (er war zufällig im gleichen Döner wie ein islamistischer Terrorist, als der Zugriff erfolgte) brutal auf dem Boden fixiert wurde und ebenfalls nicht atmen konnte. Das ist über 20 Jahre her.

Russia could still strike Germany with medium-range drones and missiles tomorrow, as part of an attack on NATO to test its resolve. Putin believes that NATO is weak, a house of cards that needs little more than a kick in its Eastern Flank and some strikes and/or provocations in its heartland (like Germany) for it to come down. This is very likely a mistaken assumption, but: An attack on NATO is believed to be highly likely within the next few years. Putin is preparing for a war against Europe, hoarding tanks and other equipment instead of sending them directly into Ukraine:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62v63gl8rvo

The above article is from last year, but NATO members have been increasingly warning of an impeding attack, including just a few days ago:

https://www.euractiv.com/news/russia-accused-of-planning-attacks-on-baltic-polish-infrastructure/

While Poland is strong and more than willing to fight, Germany would have to help its Eastern ally, as well as the Baltics and Finland defend themselves against a Russian invasion, which is where, among other things, our tanks come into place. We can’t wait until Russian forces are at the German border, in case Poland falls. Defending Germany would necessitate defending our allies directly. We would also likely be at the receiving end of drone and ballistic missile strikes.