yogthos

NATO provoking Russia with constant expansion to Russian borders since the 90s. Don't take my word for it though, here it is from the former head of NATO:

He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.

So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.

https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm

I guess he must be spreading Ruzzian propaganda. 🤣

At no point has there ever been any indication that NATO countries would impact on Russian sovereignty without provocation. Russia doesn’t want more NATO members as it wants to invade and control their neighbours when it wishes.

I literally linked you an article and a policy paper above showing the exact opposite. I love how you ignore the reference I provide you with and just keep spewing propaganda talking points.

Democratically elected? Do you forget that Victor yanukovich had his competition jailed. Yulia Tymoshenko was democratically elected and was pro eu. She then lost a run off to him and he had her jailed.

Zelensky also jails his competition, and even cancelled elections. Yet, according to eurotrolls Ukraine is the pinnacle of democracy. I guess it's not just Ukraine nowadays, Romania cancelled elections when the wrong candidate won and jailed him. So, let's not pretend cancelling elections is something that doesn't happen in European "democracies".

These questions have been answered in detail many time by plenty of people such as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, and many others. Russia's annexation of Crimea was a direct response to the overthrow of the legitimate and democratically elected government by the west. The invasion of Ukraine was a response to NATO provocation. The fact that this was a provocation wasn't even hidden. It was openly discussed in mainstream US media and by US think tanks. A couple of examples for you here

• https://nationalinterest.org/feature/strategy-avoiding-two-front-war-192137
• https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR3000/RR3063/RAND_RR3063.pdf

In fact, entire books have been written on the subject detailing the history of the provocations that led to the conflict.

You’re saying that Russia is a threat, but from a intelligence and misinformation point of view. What makes you think much of the new spending won’t be on that?

What I'm actually saying is that Europe is creating internal political instability and popular revolt against the neoliberal regime through its austerity policies. Meanwhile, Europe's own actions are the reason for the adversarial relationship with Russia. Russia will obviously continue to see Europe as a threat given Europe's openly hostile stance towards Russia, and therefore has every incentive to destabilize Europe in every way possible. Thus, European strategy becomes a self fulfilling prophecy where the actions Europe is taking ensure an adversarial relationship with Russia while destroying the foundation of economic stability that allows current political system to function.

You're just regurgitating propaganda you've memorized instead of actually engaging with the article. Why would they bother spending the effort trying to annex or invade Europe when they can just exploit political instability resulting from the self inflicted harm that militarization will cause? The elephant in the room is that European economy is already suffering, and spending 5% of GDP on NATO is going to require massive austerity. Nationalist parties are already polling sky high across Europe, and this will only further drive their popularity. All these parties are perfectly happy to work with Russia and exist the EU.

Yup, it's frustrating that there's still no process that's easy enough for a non techie to go through easily.

seems that austerity in Canada is all but inevitable

I think that's exactly what's gonna happen in the long run. Right now we're in the hype phase of a new technology, but one the hype dies down we'll start identifying use cases where the tech actually works well. At the same time the tech itself is going to mature, and people will figure out how to work with it effectively.

Raytheon stock goes brrr, Raytheon output not so much.

Yeah basically, a turn key solution where your machine gets wiped and imaged with a Linux distro that does all the basic stuff most people need would be an ideal solution. A good way to look at it would be making sort of a Linux based console for non technical users as opposed to a general purpose computer. Tech people want the latter, but non technical users just want a reliable tool that can reliably handle a few tasks.

I can highly recommend this book for a broad analysis https://redletterspp.com/products/chinas-great-road

The TLDR of it is that economic growth is positively correlated with the increase in the standard of living. A country like China started out with a very low standard of living after the revolution, and the primary goal of the party has been to raise people out of poverty. This necessarily correlates with the rise in consumption.

I agree that you can reach a point where further economic growth may not produce meaningful improvements in the standard of living, but majority of the world is far from that point right now.

Indeed, it kills me how much perfectly hardware is constantly thrown out because Windows refuses to run on it.

I think the trick has to be that somebody who has a bit of technical skill sets the laptop up initially. I did this for my mom a while back, and once I set it up once, it just worked from there on. Non technical users tend to have a fairly small set of things they need to do like check email, browser the web, and play media. Once that's working, they never need to change anything. In fact, they don't want to change anything because they get used to the workflow, and they're comfortable.

It would be great if people set up community centres where people can bring their old laptops, and somebody switches them over to Linux for them.

touche