Anomandaris @ Anomandaris @kbin.social

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5

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91

Joined

2 yr. ago

I believe it ensures a much much sooner end, yes, but exactly when depends on who wins.

If Putin wins his authority will be significantly weakened, his army will be significantly weakened, and it's likely he'd have to pull more of them away to ensure his leadership and security even after Wagner is defeated.

If Wagner wins the army will likely be immediately recalled out of Ukraine, they will want to confirm the army's submission to new rule and ensure no counter coup attempts, but also it would be very easy to blame Putin for everything and win popularity with the Russian people by bringing back soldiers who would likely have died pointlessly.

Crimea, however, may be a point of contention, depending on the opinions of the winners.

There have been a bunch of mixed reports, I think it's tough to say exactly what's true. I saw one person suggesting that given Wagner's numbers in Africa it's likely there's really only half that number there. But there have also been reports of Russian military and intelligence personnel switched to support Wagner.

As someone else said, I think for most people it's just a matter of wait and see what shakes out.

I imagine you've probably heard this a few times as well, but give the books a try instead, I read them first and now I can't watch the show.

Can you imagine what would have happened during WW2 if that had passed? There were a number of Americans sympathetic towards the Nazis, and a much larger number of Americans sympathetic towards the Allies, but not sympathetic enough to risk the lives of their sons, fathers, and husbands. I struggle to see a world where a national vote would have resulted in a large enough majority.

I imagine it would have extended the war by at least another five years. I do think the Nazis would still have lost eventually, as they struggle to maintain control over the entirety of Europe whilst also trying to destroy the UK and Russia. But it would likely have been a Pyrrhic victory, leaving both victors almost completely decimated too.

Only if that's what you wanted it to be.

When I wrote it, I saw WW2 as the hard times, and the generation that won is as the strong people. Those people who forged a number of social reforms, social safety nets, and technological innovations after the war. Yes, I know things were far from perfect then either, but that generation did a lot of good.

Correspondingly, the weak people are the greedy, ultra capitalist boomers taking advantage of those schemes and then repealing them. The weak people are the ultra nationalist, anti-LGBT bigots too small minded to accept differences and grasping to traits like their skin colour for superiority because they don't have the will or strength of mind to actually accomplish anything. The weak people are those not strong enough to stick to any moral or ethical code, too scared of the world to do the right thing so instead they lash out.

It's those weak people driving populist politics, enabling corporate greed, fueling the Russian war effort. All of which is coming together to create results like this article.

That's a reasonable response, but the other guy's concerns are absolutely not meritless. Tech platforms demonstrating and offering up these kinds of currencies or tokens do explicitly talk about ideas such as limiting certain currencies from being spent on certain things, or enabling/disabling from a central authority.

China is already rolling out this type of currency albeit with limited success, and while I haven't heard anything about the e-CNY being tied to their social credit system, or punishments being inflicted in the shape of limiting access to funds, it's absolutely a possible option.

Hard times create strong people.
Strong people create good times.
Good times create weak people.
And, weak people create hard times.

While you have absolutely made some good points here, particularly psychologically, there is a good reason these larger corporations and entities came in to existence and then became so effective.

As much as we are typically tribal animals rather than herd, we can't ignore the simple facts of economies of scale and de-duplication of effort. The Fediverse will need to use more hardware than reddit would to support the same number of users as they spread across instances, and the admins of the various instances are all having to do the same kinds of setup, troubleshooting, scaling tasks as their communities grow, that reddit only had to do once.

You're right that it's a bigger issue, but it's also a little more complex than your comment presents, I think.

Even though you've done some nice work here, I'm reluctant to take those figures, particularly the change percentages, at face value.

There are colossal numbers of bots submitting posts and comments which metrics like this can't identify, which dilutes the real numbers. Of course bots would not be able to post to private subs, but it's less clear how much of the remaining traffic is human and how much is bots posting to empty subreddits as per the dead internet theory.

Firstly I'd like to mention The Lost Fleet series by John G Hemry. It's military sci-fi, as a part of the plot it discusses two forms of FTL travel, jump drives allowing you to FTL between adjoining stars, and the later invention of hypernet gates allowing direct travel from one star to another. It talks extensively about how certain star systems fared after hypernet gates made it unnecessary to travel through them to reach higher value systems.

Some star systems were only inhabited as a means of supporting various cargo haulers, transporters, and warships that must pass through those stars. As pass-through travel waned we saw declining economies, civilians abandoned as extraction costs would have affected profit margins, increased societal unrest and rebellion as a result of being cut off from the central authority, and various other legal and illegal activities.

It illustrated how truly huge space is, and how difficult communication, transportation, and protection could be out among the stars.

I'd also like to provide an honorable mention to Malazan - Book of the Fallen, even though it's high fantasy.

This is because it not only goes in to significant detail regarding the magic system used, but also talks several times about the societal stagnation that comes about as a result of reliance on magic, and the reduced need to invent, discover, and innovate. The lack of science, and the implications of that, being the point here.

I think you do have to be careful here though. If you're too permissive you allow bigotry, but if you're too restrictive you cut off honest, good faith debate and create echo chamber silos where beliefs are never challenged.

Bigotry should never be accepted but that means non-discriminatory opinions, especially ones you disagree with, should be allowed.

And power mods too. No point moving to the Fediverse just to have all the content moderated and censored by 8 or 10 power trippy losers.