It’s also strange because I highly doubt Google has manufactured a billion physical units of anything. Most of their consumer hardware is designed and built by partners, including Pixel.
Not anymore. Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen. Mustache man too, suffering humiliating total defeat. What happened to Russia? They killed their czar and got soviets that destroyed most of the legacy of Russian empire. They live in a constant dissonance ever since because their fake red empire was never a system to last, but it introduced enough destruction to kill religion and their ability to perceive world through a rational lens.
>Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
Russia needs to find a new identity. Someone like Navalny might have led it out of the blind alley it was in. I still hope after Putin dies there is some good changes as young people, at least the educated ones, don't share Putin's twisted worldview at all.
No, Navalny was never “the guy”, he’s literally jokingly referred to as “the buterbrod” (sandwich) because of his comments about Crimea (“Crimea is not a sandwich to be passed around” in the context of “returning” Crimea to Ukraine).
“Russian liberalism stops at the border of Ukraine”
You omit the fact that he took those words back and said “Crimea is Ukraine” while being in prison, knowing well it will not make his life (and death) easier
> He and his cohort were sponsored by the West and the West clearly loves Russian people and wish us the best possible future, yeah, we believe.
Why do you not believe this? As someone who identifies as Western, I want for all people's to prosper. I don't think I've ever talked to anyone in Europe or the US who had it out for Russians. All resentment send exclusively be towards nationalists.
For the same reason no one in the West believed Putin when he said expanding NATO was not necessary since Russia was not the enemy anymore. The West still wanted to allow ex Soviet countries to join NATO even if that would cause hostility from Russia. It really is a self fulfilling prophecy caused by mistrust from both sides. It’s always so easy to blame only one side when you’re strongly biased towards one of the sides, but if you look at it from a neutral perspective, clearly both sides behaved in a way as to make the current situation completely unavoidable. And neither is willing to make a change now and will just double down until one side is completely defeated. Russia alone has no chance, but if when shit hits the fan its BRICS friends continue to back it up, we may be heading to something even more disastrous than WWII. I am not optimistic.
Yes it is if it was the case that the whole purpose of the neighborhood watch was to contain me, and breaking into your house was in my view the best defense against allowing you to contain me.
Russia has a history of raping, pillaging, and stealing land from their neighbors with NATO acting as the only (somewhat) successful defense against that so far.
Your idea of ‘containment’ in this sense means you’re defending the equivalent of a gang of serial rapists and murderers entering innocent people’s homes, taking their families hostage, and saying the home is now theirs.
I'm asking seriously: do you really believe that if Ukraine ever joined NATO (which is dubious as they already requested in 2008 but their request was denied), it would actually attack Russia?
The question is whether NATO would attack Russia through Ukraine. And if you don’t think that’s absolutely possible you need to read history books. I think it’s actually very possible it will happen within the next few years, in fact, given the rhetoric coming from the UK, Baltic states and some other EU countries.
So explain why the countries neighboring Russia are building all possible border fortifications, spending large sums of money for something that would make any invasion much more difficult.
> The West still wanted to allow ex Soviet countries to join NATO even if that would cause hostility from Russia.
I find it hard to understand people still use this argument with the straight face. NATO is not an entity that expands itself - individual countries, like Sweden or Finland, request to join it to protect themselves from the situation when Russia attacks them and they have to fight alone like Ukraine. Of course Putin hates that as he cannot fulfill his dream of expanding Russia to the borders of Soviet Union, but this argument doesn't stand any scrutiny.
He was called worse names. Nevrtheless, he did something past Russian heroes did: voluntarily sacrificed his life. He knew Putin will kill him but decided to go back anyway. Yes, you may say it "dumb". But the mere existence of such a strong spirit gives me hope that someone else who actually cares for Russians, for their wellbeing, for their future, can actually undo all this mess Putin got Russia into.
And that was the best thing navalny ever done -- minus one imperialistic russian bastard.
I really hope his loyal beloved wife soon follows his footsteps instead of spreading imperialistic russian propaganda.
Nothing is ever ideal, but centuries of labor laws gets us in the right direction. A 4 day workweek would do wonders while still having plenty of work to be done.
Your statement is also why I fear this supposed promise that "AI will do all the work, society won't need jobs!". I don't think we're getting this post-work utopia that tecunocrats love to promise.
I wish the journalist asked the leading scientists in the field “Before you learned of the Hubble tension, what did you think the odds were of the standard model being correct? And after?”
I think it's still not universal among astronomers that the Hubble tension is real. (Though the tide seems to have shifted in the last two years or so with the median astronomer reluctantly accepting that the Hubble tension is probably real.)
> It has been called one of the least productive Congresses since 1951
Let’s not measure productivity in terms of count of bills passed like measuring output by lines of code.
Healthcare reform, SS reform, fiscal sustainability, electoral reform, climate, immigration, information environment, cybersecurity, how many of these pressing issues have been tackled and solved by congress?
Congress has two parties in ut and one of them is strictly opposed to all of these. The issue is not doing nothing, the issue is large parts of population and their political representation being actively against it.
Talking about it in abstract, to make it sound like the congress ia a monolith where all are ambivalent ... is part of the problem.
Exactly. They raise campaign funds and appear on tv and cross examine industry leaders like Altman and Zuckerberg. Clearly that is not “nothing”. But some worry that is not enough to keep pace with emerging threats and opportunities and that’s given justification for presidents to increasingly fill that gap, to disastrous effect. Some argue that a single strong leader calling the shots via EOs is better than having congress try to get up to speed on complex, emerging matters (ie AI export controls) but I’m unconvinced.
Something 'taking an Act of Congress' (to indicate that it's difficult and time-consuming) is in the lexicon for a reason. It's been true of the US legislative process for that long.
But!
That isn't to say that after the gears grind, Congress doesn't complete important and essential work, even in toxic times.
The nihilism of a blatently false claim that Congress is doing nothing just feeds into 'so let someone else do it' fervor. Untrue memes can be dangerous.
History unfolds without anyone at the helm. It just happens, like a pachinko ball falling down the board. Global economic structures will push the development of AI and they're extremely hard to overwhelm.
for better or worse, decisions with great impact are taken by people in power. this view of history as a pachinko ball may numb us to not question the people in power.
In my high school, without naming any names, the teacher told us all that anyone who changed their results to 9.81m/s^2 was doing science incorrectly. And we were graded on our analysis of the experimental procedure, or something like that.
