Tons of people use VPNs for region restricted services like Netflix
I was going to criticize your choice of units there, but after thinking about it some I decided this was probably correct and that my criticisms were in the wrong. Touche, you win again.
If I were a media corporation, I would make a post like this to dissuade people from using a VPN
There’s no need. They’re using one of a half-dozen obscure commercial services that mapped out all the exit point IP addresses and have blocked them half a decade ago.
Clemens benefited from being popular long before the advent of Poe’s Law. If he were alive today, they’d be posting meme pictures with his face photoshopped to be 50% of its original size and making fun of the fact that he wasn’t married until age 35.
Sarcasm is only recognized within in-groups. The modern world is far too large for any in-group to span even some large chunk of that.
Afaik most people just use them for torrents.
It’s the only thing they could be useful for. While obviously commercial services are insufficient protection against state-level actors if you were Alquaeda (does anyone believe that the US intelligence agencies don’t have undersea fiber taps everywhere?), it’s even insufficient for the purposes of run-of-the-mill whackjobs making bomb threats. A few years ago some jackass was doing those to get out of final exams at some US university. The FBI got him within a half-hour.
How is that possible if these places “don’t keep logs”?
So, even routine criminal activities can’t be safely conducted via commercial VPN.
Privacy nutcases are shit out of luck too. Ever tried to access your bank account with VPN? They go absolutely apeshit if their shitty GeoIP library thinks you’re trying to look at it from Romania. Same with Facebook. Google’s barely usable, unless you like putting in a captcha every 10 seconds.
Still useful for torrents, but that could change. We’re less than 5 years away from either legislation forcing VPNs to do the sort of tracking the copyright maximalists would love, or these commercial VPN services voluntarily doing so. Basically, by the time the hoi polloi became aware that VPNs were useful, that was already turning out to no longer be true.
They likely would not only choose to act differently based on lessons learned, but they would have to.
Why? Why would they have to act differently? What would force this to be so? What if, for instance, they considered that the projected failure of their state 100 years after the founding to just be the price of utopia, and did everything the same way? What if they considered it a fluke, some extremely slight random chance that toppled their government? Like, I dunno, the misspoken utterings of a dumbass East German propaganda minister who should have kept his mouth shut or better yet “lost his job” a year prior?
There’s no reason to suppose they’d have to do things differently. It might even be unreasonable to think they would, given human nature and our propensity for trying the same thing over and over, hoping that it will work “this time”.
Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything?
That wasn’t true Marxism. We can know whether or not it’s true Marxism by whether it works or not, and since it didn’t work, obviously it wasn’t true Marxism.
will they do anything different than the dictators of the soviet union?
The saintly leaders of the Soviet Union were not dictators, but merely custodians of the people’s own will.
another mass murder seems to be perfectly fine!
Do not believe the western propaganda. The places he supposedly committed mass murder in do not even exist in reality. Go check a Russian map. This never-never land called Ukraine isn’t even real, but a fiction of western imperialists dreamt up to slander the great Russian people and by extension Marxism (or possibly vice versa).
It doesn’t leave it up the capitalists to “do the right thing”. My god, we’d be extinct as a species were that the case.
It leaves it up to them to be greedy. Which I’m sure you’ll agree is something they’re at least passingly competent at. Why is greed important here? Because if there is a shortage, greedy people can earn obscene profits providing the goods in shortage. The more goods they have, the more than obscenely earn. If they don’t have enough, they are compelled to get more… as efficiently as possible.
This mechanism isn’t without its bizarre failure modes. Take fishing, for instance. As some fish or another becomes rarer, its scarcity causes prices to rise… so instead of doing the right thing and letting populations recover, the temptation becomes ever more irresistible. Don’t let capitalism get anywhere near wildlife preservation, or if you do, study the implications (and perverse incentives) carefully first.
There is a conflict of interest between making profits and providing necessities.
There is very little conflict there. You make x profits if you sell y goods. If you sell 100y goods, you make 100x profits. And so on. Sometimes it’s not even linear, so the larger you scale the more you profit per unit.
This is why even the poor in such countries are often obese. Capitalism could be said to over-provide more often than it under-provides.
I think it’s a more fundamental economic behavior. Humans are pretty good at teasing out the truth about shortages, anecdotal/gossip communication exchange ferrets it out. Then people do what people do during a shortage… they hoard. It’d be dumb not to hoard. But collectively, that means the shortage is exacerbated not reduced.
The correct solution isn’t “abolish capitalism”, it’s “abolish shortages”. Capitalism is pretty good at doing the latter, given a chance. The tricky part is when the product is food, as economies can’t really wait on the sort of turnaround time it requires.
It’s important to keep in mind that USSR never had a chance to develop peacefully.
This isn’t about assigning blame, not for me. Yes, they did get a shit deal. Hobbled at first by the sort of royalty/nobility like out of some fucked up fairy tale right until and even into the 20th century, then almost nonstop warfare. For all the lack of fighting, even the cold war was nearly as bad.
Though I am not generally sympathetic to communism, I wince to think what might have happen if they had no developed nuclear weapons. But that cost dearly.
They had a shit hand.
If USSR could’ve devoted all the effort that was put into keeping up with the west militarily into domestic development, amazing things could’ve been achieved.
Possibly. Or they could have squandered it. Even if a person accepts that communism and marxism is a legitimate political ideology and in the right circumstances can flourish, it can also fail… and fail without any deliberate sabotage or harsh misfortune.
The funny thought is that, had they succeeded peacefully, that might have been most threatening of all.
Russia’s problem has never been “figuring out how”. It is a nation full of world-class scientists and geniuses.
Russia’s problem (and the USSR before it) has always been to manufacture goods in the quantity and quality needed for mass produced consumer goods and a robust economy. They’ve never seemed to be able to do that.
The good news is that one problem solves the other. Who will be able to afford to fly on jets they can’t maintain when their economy finishes imploding?
US geopolitical position is being eroded,
So are mountains. I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for those or US geopolitics to be ground down to sand grains though.
And it isn’t even clear what, when that day comes, you will have won. Woohoo, the US is weak, the US isn’t in charge! Yay! There is no more USSR in such a picture, it lost first. If you’re expecting some resurgence of communism at that point, I think you will be disappointed. It makes it sound like you were always more against something than for something.
I mean, what do you have? China? I think the “People’s” army showed how much for the people it was back in 1989. Cuba? Castro croaked. So have all the true believers. It’s probably the closest to being the last real holdout.
US could expect the same kind of economic bullying directed against it that it’s been using to attack its enemies.
It could. I don’t find this prediction implausible. Given what you know about China, does that make you happy somehow? It’s about as communist as the Russian Federation is, though I guess that’s easier to pretend untrue, given that the regime change was a little quieter.
If true socialism/marxism/communism did try to rise up somewhere near China, how do you think they’d react to it? Seems to be that they are at least as much your enemy as mine. I don’t suggest that makes us friends, but in other threads you don’t seem dumb or delusional… China’s bad for pretty much everyone who’s not a billionaire or high-ranking in the party.
innocence cannot be assumed and must be proven.
If a criminal goes to trial, he may well have to prove innocence, because (despite this being acknowledged as wrong and unjust), if he fails to do so he may be found guilty.
And punished.
Who will punish the US? It does not need to prove innocence, because you, and I, and everyone else has no leverage over it.
The truth of the matter is, on this one topic, hardly no one seriously believes that they were engineering biological weapons 250 miles away from the Russian border for shits and giggles. Those who are pro-Russian or at least anti-US would do well to focus on more credible propaganda. This stuff doesn’t pass the smell test. This allegation can be dismissed without comment, and that is what their response has been.
What is it trying to hide when the US Embassy in Ukraine deleted all relevant documents on its website?
Your other questions are legitimate, but does this one even need to be asked? The same thing they always delete/shred/burn when an embassy is about to (or has the potential to) fall into foreign hands… the identity of CIA agents and assets. It’s not exactly a secret that this is the point of it.
“Assets” not necessarily being spies, sometimes these are people who once talked to an agent (even unwittingly). And, it’s even possible to intelligently speculate on why that’s sensitive… if you know who they’ve talked to, you can make smart guesses why they were talking to them. Wouldn’t want the Russians to know who they were interested in.
If the US wants to prove its innocence
But it doesn’t. There are two explanations, and I won’t give an opinion on which is worse. The first is that it’s not innocent. The second is that even though it is innocent of the specific allegations, it has (and has had) the attitude that it doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone. Which is factually true, because there exist few mechanisms to hold the government of the US to account.
Where is the guy with the spear supposed to leave to, to let that poor little medved alone? They can’t pick up the borders of Ukraine and drag them off to the Iberian peninsula.