Are people in Ukrainian controlled territories free to protest against forced conscription and withdrawal of passports? No, they will get put into prison, and given a choice to join the military or serve a long sentence.

Sanctions have not succeeded in lessening support or creating regime change. They are a siege warfare tactic, and a way of inflicting suffering upon the masses of people. There’s plenty of books on the topic, I’d recommend Sanctions as War, edited by Stuart Davis and Immanuel Ness.

I wish. Min wage in some parts of China provides a similar purchasing power as I have making more than 4x the min wage in the US. I would actually be able to afford a house in my lifetime if that were true.

In fact, when losing a war miserably, one should expect to make concessions to the winning side. This delusional belief that losers can dictate term terms will result in the death of every Ukrainian man of fighting age.

You don’t ask the loser what they want to stop the war. You go to the side that’s winning and say, “what would it take to get you to stop?”. Either Zelensky is a fool or he’s so posturing for more western money, because he has really no leverage and so his insistence on continuing the war is costing hundreds of thousands of lives. Support domestically for the war has collapsed, tens of thousands have fled the country, tens of thousands more dodge the draft. Everyone willing to fight in this war has already done so, they’re literally arresting people for draft dodging and telling them go to prison or join the military and we’ll absolve you of the “crime” of not wanting to fight a losing war. Is this just a collapse in western understanding of war after so long without a major one? Or is it just selfishness on the part of the west who cares more about “hurting Russia” than it does about irradiating Ukraine and destroying an entire generation of people? Or is it just idiocy on the part of Ukrainian leadership, who keep getting removed for not wanting to continue sending their men to die?

I swam naked in the fountain at our towns courthouse as a child, and it was fine. You’re weird and creepy.

There is historical record in the west going back to at least WWII acknowledging that area as Chinese territorial waters. Just because you only follow news cycles while they’re hot, doesn’t mean all of history prior to now stops existing.

Yep that’s the one I saw there I think. Drone goes into a little kiosk and then you pick it up from the claim window thing.

I like Chinas drone delivery model, you can look up videos of it online.

Several hundred attempts.

Here it’s like $100-140/oz, but quality fell massively after legalization. Like, really, genuinely, the worst chronic from before legalization is better than all but the best after.

It’s not every day for everyone, but I used video calling every day to talk to my foreign spouse, and to talk to my little brothers when I was overseas. It’s pretty amazing overall.

I used to be extremely critical of China And the CCP. Used to post publicly on my Facebook and other social media about them. I just got back in April from China after deprogramming myself from decades of Sinophobia, and I had absolutely no issues.

Basically all big tech companies have three letter spooks in their upper ranks. They’re all compromised and you should treat them as such.

Sure it is buddy. Keep rejecting the truth in favor of what the party tells you, works out so well. It is after all their most important demand.

All Chinese companies, public or private, are required to have worker democracy. They have better required benefits than I do in the US, including maternity care, sick time, overtime pay, and a lower retirement age. If you support not trading with the US and India at all, I will acknowledge your consistency, but it seems to me that it’s likely you’re operating off of outdated information.

No, usually it’s buy the hype sell the news.

Leaders in the US have wanted to use them multiple times an had to be talked down by cooler heads.

I’ve been using Mozilla products for going on 20 years on my windows PCs, and other than websites arbitrarily deciding they don’t work on non chrome browsers, I’ve rarely had issues.

Today at work someone posted in the it slack channel complaining that chrome has auto restarted three times got mandatory updates in the last day wondering if he could get it stopped because it was messing with his work. I’m just over here using the same Firefox instance for months at a time, and even when I have to restart my whole computer it perfectly pulls up my previous session, even distributing the windows across their previous monitors. I never really liked chrome, idk how it caught on so much with people. I’d legit rather use pre-chromium edge, at least it was fast.