This means if you lose your device, you can use methods like fingerprint, face, or the screen lock code of your previous device to access WhatsApp's backup.
Another kitchen will take its place; always have. Now, whether you agree or not, the next kitchen is likely to be China.
And not to completely dismiss your point, but like I said in another comment, it's important to decouple from the kitchen that is US to minimise the consequences. I don't want another repeat of the Roaring 20's and the countries too economically intertwined with the US also collapsed when the Great Depression hit. One of those countries who was dragged down the worst was Germany, when American investors pulled out their investments from the country. That severe aftershock gave rise to the Nazis, and the rest is history.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford says the province will “pause” its U.S. advertising campaign on tariffs as of Monday so that trade talks can resume after U.S. President Donald Trump broke off trade negotiations with Canada over the ads.
Why does Doug have to do anything? Donny is an autocrat, right? Can’t he just phone the American broadcaster airing the ads and demand they stop airing it.
Big Strong Men shouldn’t just go crying on their pet social network when another country is being mean. They should be Big enough and Strong enough to deal with it themselves.
Hello, lemmy.world! First time posting here, hope you'll find it somewhat useful.\ \ In an attempt to protect my personal info from data-hungry cloud-infested madness that comes from app stores of various kinds, I decided to establish a routine of scraping health metrics from... myself. This particular example requires manual input, however it proved to be working reliably and much more precise than any other mood journaling app.
You might easily think I’ve lost my mind—and you’d be right. It happened a long time ago and hasn’t let go since, so tracking mood changes via a graph isn’t just a quirk anymore, it’s more of a life necessity.
Gadgetbridge allows automatic SQLite database export to the location you specify.\ \ Navigate to Settings -> Automations -> Auto export database, and from there you can configure the details.\ \ You can put it into a shared Syncthing folder, or something alike, or process it with Termux + Tasker. Personally, I hesitate to send megabytes of data over the wire every couple of minutes, so I rigged up a script that extracts the required metrics (for now its my steps only, the rest does not seem to be accurate) and sends a payload to my queue, where a consumer script later adds it to the DB.
Does gadgetbridge have something like an API? It seems like it should already have something along these lines, since health wearables not having one is what gave birth to gadgetbridge in the first place...
I’ve been experimenting with something similar the last two months. My workflow involves self reported health data via NextCloud forms. The api feeds a sql db that’s modeled using grafana. I also have a python tool in open webui to chat over the data with gpt-oss:20b. Fun project. Happy to hear others are tinkering too.
As Ireland's $1,500-a-month basic income pilot program for creatives nears its end in February, officials have to answer a simple question: Is it worth it?
With four months to go, they say the answer is yes.
Earlier this month, Ireland's government announced its 2026 budget, which includes "a successor to the pilot Basic Income Scheme for the Arts to begin next year" among its expenditures.
Ireland is just one of many places experimenting with guaranteed basic income programs, which provide recurring, unrestricted payments to people in a certain demographic. These programs differ from a universal basic income, which would provide payments for an entire population.
This should be the default for anybody in the world. From there on work if you want more. We are social, economical and technologically capable of doing it. Is the 1% the ones preventing it from happening.
In Switzerland, 77% of the population voted against. Granted, the 1% may have influenced the voters by spending money on campaigns, or even by creating a narrative over decades. And maybe that proposal was too ambitious. But in the end, it was not just the 1% who voted against but 77%. There is still a lot of skepticism against UBI, despite all the positive evidence.
this week’s fediverse news:
[ul]
[li]on how the environment and context in which the fediverse, bluesky and the open social web exist is changing and getting more intertwined with politics [/li]
[li]some thoughts on the recent FediForum keynote by @ben@w
this week's fediverse news:
on how the environment and context in which the fediverse, bluesky and the open social web exist is changing and getting more intertwined with politics
some thoughts on the recent FediForum keynote by @ben@werd.io
new activitypub projects being funded by @nlnet@nlnet.nl
A programming note and context: Fediverse Report will now appear on Friday (instead of Tuesday), for some personal planning reasons as I fit this in with my other work. Fediverse Report will also shift in a slightly different direction, where for the foreseeable future I’ll give more context and thoughts on the shifts in the state of social networks and the open social web. It is becoming increasingly clear that the future of the open social web is getting intertwined with how the Trump administration is (and will) interact with the open social web. The Trump administration is putting an increased focus on Bluesky to troll. Erin Kissane wrote an excellent overview of the situation this week that I highly recommend.
Kissane highlights the risk that the Trump administration will suppress Bluesky in some way, echoing my own writing on the subject. Furthermore, the arrival of the White House social media accounts on Bluesky places Bluesky moderation in a tough position, with no good options to take. For Kissane, that leads her to conclude: “On the individual level, people seeking private social networking may be better off, for now, finding a trustworthy Mastodon server and maintaining their connections with accounts on Bluesky via network bridges.“
I agree with Kissane’s assessment, and for me this also points to how intertwined the futures of the fediverse and the ATmosphere have become. Bluesky is currently top-of-mind for the Trump administration in a way that the fediverse is not, but any potential actions by the administration will impact not only Bluesky, but the fediverse and the wider open social web as well. It is impossible to predict if these second order effects are beneficial or harmful for the fediverse, since that depends strongly on both the details of any action of the administration against Bluesky, as well as how people on Bluesky will respond in practice.
For now, it means that I’m shifting my writing for Fediverse Report to include this larger political context of the open social web.
The News
During the recent FediForum, Ben Werdmuller gave the keynote speech about “why the open social web matters now”, and the keynote and transcript are now available online. Werdmuller makes the point that we’re seeing a shift into authoritarianism in multiple places, with the US being the most high-profile. He points out that the first step towards dealing with the threat is to have open information ecosystem, and that ecosystem is in decline both on social media (with all Big Tech companies capitulating) and in a decay of journalism. Werdmuller makes a distinction here between social media and social networks, where social media is for scale and broadcasting, and social networking are for trust and collaboration.
Werdmuller then describes how social communities can be build, which starts from a private community, that then connects with other peer communities. All these groups have their own secure (encrypted) spaces. This archipelago of connected places ( 🙂 ) can then step into the public network (the fediverse) and share their messages with the broader world.
What stands out to me is how the process described by Werdmuller is pretty much opposite to how development on both the fediverse and the ATmosphere has happened so far. Development on both networks have started from the ‘big world’ social media approach, by creating public microblogging platforms. The assumption seems to be that over time, once there is an initial group of people who use these public network, private networks will emerge. In the case of ATProto this is fairly explicitly visible, the protocol does not support private data currently, and the developers are only now starting to work on this, once the public version of the protocol is deemed to be completed. For ActivityPub and the fediverse there is more possibilities for people to build such private communities, but there has been little interest in building it out. Mastodon does still not support the possibility for local-only posts for example, posts that are only visible to people on the same server, even though community forks of Mastodon (such as glitch-soc) do support local-only posting.
In the keynote, Werdmuller suggests a radically different approach, saying: “For the open social web to thrive, we need to go back to real communities with real-world use cases and solve their problems better than anything else. Not the needs of individuals within them, but of the interconnected communities themselves.” It is important to be specific here, not by helping abstract groups like ‘journalists’ or ‘organisers’, but specific concrete individual communities. Werdmuller urges to be specific in the solutions as well: “Open source or federation are not solutions in themselves. They’re characteristics of a solution. We need to be concretely meeting needs. Not what you think their needs are or what they should be, but what you’ve learned they are from getting to know them deeply.”
NLnet has completed their latest grant round, and with it, there are a number of ActivityPub-related projects that have received a grant. With the latest grant round, NLnet further cements their crucial role in the ecosystem, funding a large number projects and platforms (as well as this newsletter!).
NLnet funds five existing projects for further development:
Microblogging platform GoToSocial gets a grant for performance as well as additional moderation features. GoToSocial also states here that the goal is to get to a 1.0 version at the end of 2026.
Further improvements to the connector that addsActivityPub to CMS platform Drupal.
GoActivityPub is a set of libraries for ActivityPub in Go.
Flohmarkt is a marketplace platform on ActivityPub that people can self host.
NLnet also funds a new project, with Mirlo. Mirlo is an existing platform for artists to sell their music and merch. The grant from NLnet is to add ActivityPub support to Mirlo and to turn it into a federated, self-hostable platform. This makes the platform fairly similar to Bandwagon, which is also a place for artists to sell their music. Both platforms will likely gravitate towards one ‘main’ instance, with the possibility for artists to self-host their Bandwagon or Mirlo instance, that federates with the other platforms. The main part to watch here is if there will be interoperability between Bandwagon and Mirlo. While ActivityPub allows for the possibility of interoperability between different softwares, it does not guarantee it, and it requires active efforts from developers to make it happen. If and how this interoperability will evolve here, with both Bandwagon and Mirlo tapping into a new market of artist music sharing, is worth a keeping an eye on.
Some updates
The Links
A short video explaining ActivityPub Fuzzer, “a program designed to emulate data across the Fediverse to enhance interoperability between social media platforms”.
A reflection on how to name and describe the new type of app of Newsmast, which combines news articles with the fediverse.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! Next week I’ll dive deeper in to the developments regarding open science and the fediverse, with work by Bonfire and connecting ORCIDs with the fediverse.
It's stuck way down at the bottom, but the ActivityPub Fuzzer project looks really interesting. I have accounts across so many different fediverse platforms just for testing piefed interoperability and it is kind of annoying. Being able to simulate different kinds of activities from a range of platforms without managing so many accounts and doing things in a local environment would be a game changer for interop testing.
Looking forward to the public release @darius@friend.camp
China hits out at UK as PM Starmer interfering in £1.5bn Scottish factory
Chinese firm wind turbine firm Mingyang announced in October its plans to build the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturing facility in Ardersier in the Highlands.
However, the proposals may be blocked by the UK Government on national security grounds as experts are concerned that the factory could give China “enormous” power over Scotland and the UK’s electricity grid, posing “an enormous threat” over Mingyang's links to the Chinese Communist Party
Now China hits out over what a spokesman called "absurd, ridiculous, and ignorant 'China threat' fallacies" that could seriously impact how Chinese companies assess the investment environment in the UK
Scotland's government said it will be working in close consultation with the UK government, stating the issues of national security are relevant to be addressed in this particular case
The UK Government has yet to confirm whether it will allow the project to go ahead, saying that “this is one of a number of companies that wants to invest in the UK" and "any decisions made will be consistent with our national security”
[It is noteworthy that the Chinese government has frequently been banning European and other non-Western companies - recently, for example, Nokia and Ericsson - from its domestic markets over national security concerns - exactly for the same reason Beijing now is trying to slam the UK.]
Hi, This is my first post here, pretty intimidating! haha
I shared this on reddit, and one of my community members told me this is a good place to also share it, so here we go!
A couple of months back I have built a checklist/note taking app for myself and called it rwMarkable, posted it on reddit and a lot of people seemed to resonate to it, so I kept adding new features and enjoying the small but very involved community that has built around it.
For anyone who hasn't heard of the project before, here's a quick bullet list of some features:
Checklists: Create task lists with drag & drop reordering, progress bars, and categories. Supports both simple checklists and advanced task projects with Kanban boards and time tracking.
Text Notes: A clean WYSIWYG editor for your notes, powered by TipTap with full Markdown support and codeblock syntax highlighting.
Sharing: Share checklists or notes with other users or publicly with shareable links.
File-Based: No database needed! Everything is stored in simple Markdown and JSON files in a single data directory.
User Management: An admin panel to create and manage user accounts with session tracking.
Customisable: 14+ built-in themes plus easy custom theme support.
API Access: Programmatic access to your checklists and notes via REST API with authentication for various integrations.
OIDC integration: Use any provider to authenticate, follow this tutorial on how to
There have been a lot of requests to change the name due to it sounding a little too close to reMarkable (the tablet - which, btw, i had no idea existed at the time lol) and after getting some amazing community suggestions we landed on jotty.
You can find all the info (and a demo) here: jotty.page/
Let me know what you think, the app is very much still in development and every week new features get added (that said, I really value the simplicity and lightweight nature of it, so I will not add anything that compromises it).
There is no dedicated native mobile app yet (though there is a bounty for it), so the mobile experience happens via a PWA that is decent for browsing and quick editing, but lacks offline support
When the caught up with Mengele, they drugged him, and shipped him back to Israel to stand trial in a wooden box, like he was just inanimate cargo. I'd love to see Trump subjected to that kind of treatment.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The fascist connections really took me by the surprise as foss noob. Makes switching from closed source a quite bit more challenging having to navigate around supporting bad actors.
Navigating around supporting bad actors in the foss community is probably far easier than in the closed, commercial software space, given that all the code, discussion, and money are out in the open.
Also I think the proportion of fascists and bad actors in the foss community is probably lower than elsewhere in the first place, given that the community is based on the free and open sharing of work and knowledge.
I agree with what the commenters say, but it's ridiculous that all the OPs normal responses are downvoted to hell. ok people tell them what they think, but after that they should just scroll further and forget about it.
but it also reminds me of some other reddit posts where I have seen such a weird votes pattern. most top level comments heavily upvoted, plenty responses to those heavily downvoted. at some posts it was obvious vote manipulation, and others called it out too. maybe that is what's happening there too? but just consider this: post has a score of 500, 91% of voters upvoted it. how is it possible then that with few exceptions all OP responses are so heavily downvoted.
FUTO (popularly associated with Immich and Louis Rossman) received some backlash for subverting third-party donor guidelines in the conducting of its grant program
selfh.st should recieve some backlash for subverting the reason for the FUTO backlash in this summary.
The guidelines fuckery is just the decor. The main part of the whole cake is: FUTO platforms a guy that calls himself a fascist and talks racist gibberish.
MinIO is really gutting the open source version. I also found it confusing that all of their docs are for AIStor, which I guess is the same product that was rebranded. I suppose open source is not immune from enshittification.
It's resistant, though, specifically because you can fork it. Don't like where things are going? Like the features of a previous version? Fork that version and run with it.
It does mean extra work for somebody to maintain that forked version, but the option is nonetheless there.
yeah, I adopted it last year and I probably wouldn't have picked it today. I'm glad that despite of that, in the end it's just an S3 compatible storage and, thanks to that, it's not too difficult to replace.
"SaveMyServer – The #1 seller of refurbished servers. Shop top-quality Dell PowerEdge and HP servers with expert support, fast shipping, and great deals!"
Yeah, they're legit. Bought a few servers from them over the years. No major issues, packing was good, reasonable ship time.
Had one case where they sent a different NIC than what was listed. They just shipped me the correct one and told me not to bother sending the old one back.
Stopped buying from them though because I prefer off-the-shelf modern consumer hardware nowadays. The real cost is always power consumption, and I prefer to shell out more money up front in exchange for huge savings on power usage down the line. I can always run over to microcenter and replace a part same-day as opposed to ordering it online and hoping it comes soon.
If you're a home-labber, I'd strongly suggest doing the same. Some of those old enterprise servers just gobble power for not that much compute relative to current day consumer machines.
If I was still buying older servers though, I'd probably be looking at their prices.
This is an interesting take. I prefer the other way around, because of redundancy in things like PSU and raid etc. So your take is really interesting to me. I am rethinking my setups for sure.
I get that, that was also something I used to like about old servers, but let me float a few of the things that I've come to realize through my home-lab career to you:
Raid is perfectly feasible in consumer hardware. If your motherboard doesn't have enough SATA ports, you can always get an HBA or a JBOD to support for more disks. There's really no good reason (that I have heard of) for hardware raid today. Just remember raid is not a backup 😀
There are consumer ATX PSUs with redundancy. However, the only reason for PSU redundancy is when you cannot tolerate downtime due to a PSU or UPS failure, and that redundancy might save you a few hours of uptime over 10+ years in comparison to a non-redundant consumer PSU that you can go out and buy if it fails. When was the last time you had a (reputable) PSU fail on you? What kind of uptime are you targeting? If you don't have an answer for that, 99% is very easy to reach even on consumer gear, and is a strong indicator that you don't need enterprise levels of redundancy. 99% is literally 3 days of downtime per year. Also keep in mind that redundant PSUs are just going to gobble more power and increase operating costs.
KVM features - this was the big one for me. I wanted to be able to perform out-of-band remote maintenance on my servers. Then I took a leap and got a Sipeed NanoKVM, and I haven't looked back. there are plenty of them out there - PiKVM is another reputable one. When buying old enterprise servers, you often have to pay for the remote management license, and that is just another added cost. Not to mention that they lose support pretty quickly, and you end up running out of date software on one of your most critical interfaces to the machine. A NanoKVM, PiKVM, and others aren't built into the machine, so they continue to be supported for much longer.
One other thing that I'll mention and you probably already know - enterprise servers are LOUD - even just a single one can literally sound like a jet engine. That's not a hyperbolae. If this is your first one, don't underestimate it. I had my servers in the basement with decent insulation, I used IPMI to throttle the fans back to 10%, and I could still hear the whine on my first floor when everything is quiet. If you end up having to turn down the fans due to noise, you're going to start having heat issues, and then you're losing out on performance and shortening component lifespan. Noise-proofing a server is non-trivial - you have to allow air flow still, and where there's air flow, there's a path for noise too. My current setups all have 120mm and 140mm fans, and I can barely hear them when I'm working right next to them. My 3D printers are the loud ones in the basement now!
Thank you for all the information. I have had servers now for 7 years already, and honestly I still love them. I run a bit more than just seflhosting home-based applications, but I totally get your point. I am a bit older, and therefor a bit more old-school 😀 I sleep safely to the hum of redundant PSUs and Hardware RAID SSDs, haha.
Especially thank you for PiKVM and NanoKVM. I am looking into that a bit.
I am fully off-grid, so power cost is not that big of a deal, and the servers are far enough away for the noise not to bother me.
I am not against anything you said, honestly. And I got a lot of new info. I am going to say this though: I am still not too convinced on the software RAID thing though. Maybe I am just too stupid, but I have not been able to get this going with the same ease, and have it recover as easily as proper hardware RAID. One day I will take the leap again and try to "get with the times".
Thanks again for all the info! Honestly appreciate it.
What's your general self-hosting setup and what machines are you building for that? I'd like to have HA Proxmox running all the time on three nodes with a low power bill and lots of memory available (like 256GB) but space for memory seems to be difficult to find in a reasonable priced consumer board.
Mainly just the HDD's. I already have a server, but having a bunch of extra drives for cheap is really tempting, especially since I haven't filled out all of the bays
Well then very little of what I said actually applies!
Unless you know the hours on a drive, you might get brand new ones, or you might get ones with 50k hours on them. They may also be from the same batch, which isn't ideal for data durability. If you're ok with all that, then go for it. I generally don't buy used drives because I don't want to take the additional risk.
I'd be surprised if you can't find a better deal on used spinning rust though... the shipping alone is probably half the value on a good chunk of sales from SmS.
Yeah they're fine. TechMikeNY usually has better deals though, at least in my experience. Have bought from them several times both for work and homelab, no complaints.
Find great deals on Dell / HP refurbished and used servers, server parts, hard disk drives, storage and switches at other networking equipment at TechMikeNY. We offer customization options to accommodate your individual needs!
Just wanted to know if any of you got the same issue: everytime there’s a new version of Nextcloud available (package version at download.nextcloud.com/server/…), it’s EXTREMELY slow to download (70KiB/s or less) to the point that my automation just fails miserably to update my current install.
Am I alone here? Is there some kind of official mirrors I’m not aware of that can speed things up?
A Russian fighter and a refueler crossed the EU’s external border Thursday night as the bloc’s leaders discussed their defense plans.
A Russian fighter jet and a refueling aircraft briefly crossed into Lithuanian airspace from the Kaliningrad region on Thursday evening, the Lithuanian Armed Forces said.
Lithuania’s President Gitanas Nausėda condemned what he described as "a cruel violation of international law and territorial sovereignty of Lithuania.”
“We have to react to this,” he wrote on X, posting from Brussels.
The intrusion came as EU leaders in Brussels were discussing ways to strengthen the bloc’s security at Thursday's European Council. For Lithuania, which has seen a growing number of airspace violations in recent months — from fighter jets and drones to balloons — air defense remains a top priority.
Lithuania borders both Kaliningrad which serves as an important Russian military outpost and Belarus which is very friendly with Russia and is happy to let Russian troops and aircraft through.
Well, they do if you count Oblast, but there’s a looong way from there to Russia without flying over another country.
Yet that's exactly what happened. And yes, Kaliningrad Oblast is a part of Russia. Not sure why one would not count that: planes can fly over sea, or start and land right there in Kaliningrad!
The Netherlands is set to get its first openly gay prime minister, Rob Jetten, following strong results in the country's recent election, which saw his party gain 17 seats, and Geert Wilders' far-right party lose 11.
Japan's new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi pledges to boost military spending and deepen US ties amid rising regional tensions.
Japan's new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said she will bolster the country's military spending as tensions rise with China, North Korea and Russia.
In her first major policy speech since taking office Tuesday, Japan's first female leader said the government will increase military spending to 2% of Tokyo's gross domestic product by March—a goal previously set for 2027.
"The free, open and stable international order that we were accustomed to is violently shaken in the face of historic change of power balance and intensifying geopolitical competitions," Takaichi said.
"In the region around Japan, military activities and other actions from our neighbors China, North Korea and Russia are causing grave concerns."
Frankly quite surprised to see this has not been mentioned on Lemmy yet. Have been working on migrating away from Spotify to Navidrome for a while now, but wasn't completely satisfied with the UI of Navidrome. Luckily I stumbled upon this project and having used it for a week or so now i thought it would be a good idea to share it and give the project some love! ❤
I plan on doing a detailed write up of how i went along with migrating to Navidrome as soon as I have all my playlists and discoverability in order, stay tuned 😀
Subsonic Integration: Aonsoku integrates with your Navidrome or Subsonic server, providing you with easy access to your music collection.
Intuitive UI: Modern, clean and user-friendly interface designed to enhance your music listening experience.
Podcast Support: With Aonsoku Podcasts you can easily access, manage, and listen to your favorites podcasts directly within the app. Enjoy advanced search options, customizable filters and seamless listening synchronization to enhance your podcast experience.
Synchronized lyrics: Aonsoku will automatically find a synced lyric from LRCLIB if none is provided by the server.
Unsynchronized lyrics: If your songs have embedded unsynchronized lyrics, Aonsoku is able to show them.
Radio: If your server supports it, listen to radio shows directly within Aonsoku.
Ur welcome! AFAIK no i dont think it can do that atm. If I were you I'd host multiple instances and maybe throw different themes at each instance to tell the difference more easily maybe 😀
Congratulations on developing this beautiful client 🤩 I would love to see a full offline mode to be able to: make individual songs available for offline playing make entire albums available for off...
After setting up Navidrome and being very happy with it apart from the web interface i went looking for a better one so i've looked at a few of these now. Aonsoku does seem to be one of the better ones.
Though i still feel Feishin is currently the most fleshed out and is still getting active development.
It has multi select everywhere, lots of options for sending things to playlists and queues. You can have the playlist docked to the RHS. You can drag stuff around in the queue. Just lots of nice quality of life options.
This tension, of course, is not new. China’s “overcapacity”—the shorthand term for producing more than demand calls for—has long led other governments to complain. In the past, China produced too much steel, coal, cement, and other goods, which crowded out competitors elsewhere and drove global prices to unprofitable lows.
China’s tendency toward overcapacity has traditionally been blamed on a fundamental mismatch in its economy; government subsidies and investment in manufacturing and infrastructure are unusually high compared with those in other advanced economies, and the country’s household consumption as a share of GDP is unusually low. Simply put, China lacks enough domestic demand to soak up what the country’s factories produce, which then causes a glut of exports.
[...]
The real challenge, then, lies [...] in an extraordinary and seemingly uncontrollable surge in supply—one that Beijing is struggling to get its arms around. Since mid‑2024, central government authorities have warned repeatedly about “blind expansion” in solar power, batteries, and EVs. This summer, after a brutal price war in the solar industry saw prices fall around 40 percent year-over-year, Chinese leaders directed officials to tackle overcapacity and “irrational” pricing in key industries, including solar. Shortly thereafter, high-level officials met with industry leaders to collectively urge companies to curb price wars and strengthen industry regulations.
[...]
Unlike earlier bouts of [Chinese] overcapacity, today’s top offenders are private companies, not state-owned enterprises. If Beijing were to step in and force consolidations or shutter factories, it would risk sparking unemployment and potentially stall local growth engines that depend on these industries. Moreover, exports have become one of the few remaining bright spots in otherwise slowing GDP performance. If Beijing were to meaningfully curb production and exports, it could cause significant damage to China’s overall economy.
[...]
By rewarding speed and scale over productivity and differentiation, the internal plumbing of China’s political economy incentivizes businesses to produce too much stuff. Although that has always been the predictable outcome of China’s political and financial system, the dysfunction was kept in check during much of China’s spectacular rise. Changes in the Chinese economy since 2020, however, including the cratering real estate market and a crackdown on private businesses and investments, have compounded the structural incentives that lead to overcapacity.
[...]
China’s tendency to overproduce starts in an unlikely place: the Chinese Communist Party’s performance and promotion system. In the CCP bureaucracy, local officials are evaluated primarily on their ability to deliver growth, employment, and tax revenues. But China’s largest single tax, the value-added tax (VAT), is split evenly between the central government and the local government of the place where a good or service is produced, not the place where it is consumed. Since the system allocates tax revenue to regions based on production, it rewards the decision to build larger industrial bases. Local Chinese officials try to retain as much upstream and downstream activity as they can to expand their tax base.
[...]
This system effectively encourages provincial and municipal leaders [China] to act like industrial investors or venture capitalists. And in many cases, it has produced profound efficiencies. Over the past decade, for instance, Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, has poured about $25 billion of state capital into various struggling companies, including the EV maker Nio and the flat-panel display manufacturer BOE, to great effect. By acting as an early investor and bearing the initial risk, Hefei stimulated about $96 billion in follow-on investment and generated around $9 billion in tax revenues. The Hefei model has since been widely imitated, with other provinces racing to assemble their own industrial clusters.
[...]
Firms rarely close down operations altogether [if they become unprofitable], however, because the state-backed banks prefer to roll over existing loans so that the firms appear solvent on paper. That way, even if those companies are only servicing their interest payments and not generating strong returns, the banks avoid having to book immediate losses—and avoid potentially contributing to the collapse of a large local employer. Credit keeps flowing into these “zombie” sectors and companies with declining productivity even as they are dragging down the broader economy in the long run.
Private firms not chasing government-backed industries, meanwhile, have long struggled to access affordable bank credit, which means they tend to seek capital from costly nonbank channels, such as venture capital, private equity, and initial public offerings. These channels helped fuel much of China’s record growth in the first two decades of the twenty-first century: by October 2020, 217 Chinese companies were listed on major U.S. exchanges with a combined $2.2 trillion market cap, illustrating how deeply private firms tapped global equity markets. Leading venture capital platforms scaled as well. Sequoia’s China arm (now HongShan), for instance, backed hundreds of private firms, including some of China’s most prominent success stories, such as the social media company ByteDance and the transportation platform Didi.
[...]
The price wars are a mere symptom of the overcapacity problem. Beijing can’t hope to make meaningful progress without reengineering the underlying incentive structure that is causing overcapacity. Consider, for example, how the CCP evaluates local officials. At present, cadres are promoted largely based on how much growth they deliver; that means judging them based on how much new factory space they build and how many roads or industrial parks they pave. Such measures favor scale over quality.
[...]
To create a more sustainable model—one that encourages innovation but doesn’t spiral into overcapacity—China will have to undergo an institutional reckoning. The logic of speed over quality, of scale over innovation, and of investment volume over returns is deeply embedded in the system. Reversing that logic means making long-deferred tradeoffs and moving past the structures that once powered China’s incredible rise.
In the past, China produced too much steel, coal, cement, and other goods, which crowded out competitors elsewhere and drove global prices to unprofitable lows
Again doing exactly what capitalist economic theory claims is best, and the capitalists complain they're not playing the game "right."
There's no such single theory. Rather they are using the mechanism that worked in western nations' favor for much of history. The western progress looked like "now we can produce more and better and faster and with less", and the step to "now we are doing intellectual work than nobody else can do, while others produce stuff for us" is not linear.
And the point of global logistics is to help those who produce the most. Like China.
I mean, OK, the point is to control the flow, but the quote basically complains that using that control is expensive. Oops.
For the quote, sure. But dropping the market until it's not profitable for anyone isn't capitalist but has happened a few times there. Capitalism isn't a single theory but most I'm aware argue the market should rebalance (ie. they stop building before this point). Their empty skyscrapers being a prominent visual of this happening
Dumping is a local-optimization tactic. Globally, it makes things worse, but can benefit individual capitalists in their own markets.
And even if it's not profitable in the short run, driving competitors out of business can be quite lucrative once they're bankrupt and you can then start hiking prices without competition.
The objective of dumping is to increase market share in a foreign market by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation where the exporter will be able to unilaterally dictate price and quality of the product.
Sounds like someone didnt read the link they sent, a monopoly is a capitalists dream. It can hurt local enconomies, but that doesn't matter to the capitalist, only governments.
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
Marco Rubio warns Israel not to annex West Bank after Knesset vote in favour
Lorenzo Tondo Jerusalem Thu 23 Oct 2025 05.31 EDT
Although the bill still requires several rounds of approval to become law, its preliminary passage has embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu, who had earlier urged lawmakers to delay its presentation during US vice-president JD Vance’s visit – an effort to preserve the fragile Gaza ceasefire. Washington has repeatedly said that any annexation of the West Bank would cross a red line.
“I will not allow Israel to annex the West Bank,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in September. “It’s not going to happen.”
“I think the president’s made clear that’s not something we can be supportive of right now,” Rubio said of annexation as he boarded his plane for a visit to Israel.
I'm just curious how it got like this. What leverage does Israel have that it's got such a strong hold over USA than any influence it might have in the rest of Europe?
AIPAC managed to get in before they began banning international lobbying.
And if you want to put on a tinfoil hat, I would personally would not be surprised if there is a lot of blackmail involved. with plenty of conspiracies about Epstein being a mossad agent.
Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?
As soon as you leave the big languages, esp. English, Wikipedia can be very problematic for all sorts of reasons. Mostly because of a lack of eyeballs. But it doesn't end with merely badly written/generated content but also with narrative manipulation that - unlike in the English version - remains unchallenged.
Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented "narrative manipulation". For most of history it was normal that there are many competing narratives from interested parties on anything. But such sophistication at making one side's narrative seem impartial, perpetually contested and self-healing has never been achieved before.
It's as if you paint a lake red, it's expensive, and people may get used to it and even believe that's kinda normal, but one can still see that it's just one lake. If you paint the world oceans red, so that it rains red and mists red, that's far more persuasive, and that's what the "collective West" has achieved.
To make a lake painted red seem normal, you need to prevent most of your population from looking at other lakes. But when you've managed to paint the ocean red, you don't need to limit them at all. The fence and the punishment would hurt trust, but without them your and other people looking at the red oceans and rains will think they are also free.
Despite being just one alliance of former and current colonizing powers on this planet.
It's very sad to live in an era of frustration where we can see that it can't reform itself further in humanist direction, than it already has by about year 1988.
Sort of like a planetwide revolutionary situation by Lenin, where the dominating powers can't keep the order the old way (that persuasion still slowly dies), and the dominated can't live the old way. But, as we know, revolutionary situations by Lenin generally don't lead to what one would hope for.
EDIT: Oh, I forgot. The point is that it's actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste. And in the bigger languages articles are sometimes removed for no good reason, say, Hotline\KDX have been butchered simply for being not popular anymore.
Sorry, but English-speaking countries have basically invented “narrative manipulation”.
You have no idea how wrong you are. I could claim it was the roman catholic church and there'd probably still be older examples. More likely, no entity "basically invented" it.
Nothing against you personally, but this is not the edgy take you think it is.
Oh, I forgot. The point is that it’s actually nice sometimes to have alternative pages in smaller languages on niche subjects, explained better to my own taste.
No, the point is that there are countries where people speak these languages and they want to read things in their own language. Sheesh.
"Basically invented" here meant the last huge leap, to having one cluster of narratives perceived as "normal and clean" almost globally. Of course literally not. The roman catholic church didn't have such means.
I wonder if language and other cultural fields are the only areas where Linus's law are impossible to safely apply. Programming seems quite easy by comparison.
Hmm, the law begins with "Given enough eyeballs". So it's explicitly not about small-language Wikipedia sites having too few editors.
It also doesn't talk about finding consensus. "All bugs are shallow" means that someone can see the solution. In software development, that's most often quite easy, especially when it comes to bugfixes. It's rarely difficult to verify whether the solution to a bug works or not. So in most cases if someone finds a solution and it works, that's good enough for everyone.
In cultural fields, that's decidedly not the case.
For most of society's problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much "all" the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
How to make government fair? How to get rid of crime? How to make a good society?
These things have literally been issues since the first humans learned to speak.
That's why Linus' law doesn't really apply here. We all want different things and there's no fix that satisfies all requirements or preferences.
For most of society’s problems, there are hardly any new solutions. We have had the same basic problems for centuries and pretty much “all” the solutions have been proposed decades or centuries ago.
That's because people generally don't know or understand these solutions. One can't raise above separate human's ability to understand any system. And I mean any. Doesn't mean a housewife has to know electrical engineering, but enough people in any group reliant upon any system should have passive knowledge and understanding.
So, thanks to AI translators and such, I can now link kvant.digital/ here.
The very first problem in the very first issue of that journal is very enlightening.
Does it really matter? I think the extreme amount of languages in the world right now is not helping us communicate. I don't view language as a cultural heritage thing, just a communication protocol. And I have moved around a lot in the world, it's very difficult to be constantly adapting to different languages. That causes a societal integration barrier for me.
I think if we had a universal language (note that it wouldn't have to be English) we would be able to understand each other better and have less wars.
PS: I'm not advocating to ban languages or something, just to have a universal one. A bit like what Esperanto tried to achieve. Mutual language means more mutual understanding and thus less "us vs them" underbelly feelings that the fascists thrive on.
Yeah I'm just not really wed to any language. I guess it is also because I have moved around so much. I'm from Holland but I don't consider myself a Dutch person, more like a citizen of the world. I've become too different to fit in in my home country (also because it's become an extreme-right cesspool lately 😢 ). I've spent about half my life elsewhere. And the places I've lived where I spoke the languages I fared noticeably better.
Don't forget that a lot of today's problems center around not understanding each other. The hatred of immigrants for example.
But I know a lot of people do view language as a cultural thing, it's just my point of view.
Languages have their own quirks and characters, representative of the people's cultural values and history, and express ideas not even present in other cultures. As many languages have to be preserved as possible for these reasons.
It's profoundly chauvinistic to think that people who speak other languages don't have the same depth of literary resource as English-speakers because Wikipedia has fewer users.
Books. They're called books. Every nation speaking every language has them.
I understand you're trying to be nice to minority languages, but if you write research papers you either limit your demographic to your own country, or you publish in English (I guess Spanish is pretty world wide as well). If you set out to read a new paper in your field, I doubt you'd pick up something in Mongolian.
Even in Sweden I would write a serious paper in English, so that more of the world could read it. Yes, we have text books for our courses that are in Swedish, but i doubt there are many books covering LLMs being published currently for example.
I'm not "trying to be nice to minority languages", I'm directly pushing back against the chauvinistic idea that the English Wikipedia is so important that those without it are somehow inferior. There is no "doom spiral".
As for scientific papers, it's called a translation. One can write academic literature in one's native langaue and have it translated for more reach. That isnt the case with Wikipedia which is constantly being edited.
I’m not “trying to be nice to minority languages”, I’m directly pushing back against the chauvinistic idea that the English Wikipedia is so important that those without it are somehow inferior. There is no “doom spiral”.
I think you missed the problem described here.
The "doom spiral" is not because of English Wiki, it has nothing to do with anything.
The problem described is that people who don't know a "niche" language try to contribute to a niche Wiki by using machine translation/LLMs.
As per the article:
Virtually every single article had been published by people who did not actually speak the language. Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. But what worried him most was something else: Over time, he had noticed that a growing number of articles appeared to be copy-pasted into Wikipedia by people using machine translators. They were riddled with elementary mistakes—from grammatical blunders to meaningless words to more significant inaccuracies, like an entry that claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants. Other pages sometimes contained random strings of letters spat out by machines that were unable to find suitable Greenlandic words to express themselves.
Now, another problem is Model Collapse (or, well, a similar phenomenon in strictly in terms of language itself).
We now have a bunch of "niche" languages' Wikis containing such errors... that are being used to train machine translators and LLMs to handle these languages. This is contaminating their input data with errors and hallucinations, but since this is the training data, these LLMs consider everything in there as the truth, propagating the errors/hallucinations forward.
I honestly have no clue where you're getting anything chauvinistic here. The problem is imperfect technology being misused by irresponsible people.
Is it even getting misused? Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating. As long as there is transparency so people can judge the results …..
And ai training trusting everything it reads is a larger systemic issue, not limited to this niche.
Perhaps part of the solution is machine readable citations. Maybe a search engine or ai could provide better results if it knew what was human generated vs machine generated. But even then you have huge gaps on one side with untrustworthy humans (like comedy) and on the other side with machine generated facts such as from a database
Is it even getting misused? Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating. As long as there is transparency so people can judge the results
Sure there are limitations. The point still stands: an imperfect machine translation is better than no translation, as long as people understand it is.
Can we afford to allow a high bad deprive people of knowledge just because of the language they speak?
The article complains about the affect on languages of poor machine translations, but the affect of no translations is worse. Yes those Greenlanders should be able to read all of Wikipedia without learning English and even if the project has no human translators
Spreading knowledge via machine translation where there are no human translators available, had to be better than not translating
Have you not read my entire comment...?
One of the Greenlandic Wiki articles "claimed Canada had only 41 inhabitants". What use is a text like that? In what world is learning that Canada has 41 inhabitants better than going to the English version of the article and translating it yourself?
Perhaps part of the solution is machine readable citations
The contents of the citations are already used for training, as long as they're publicly available. That's not the problem. The problem is that LLMs do not understand context well, they are not, well, intelligent.
The "Chinese Room" thought experiment explains it best, I think: imagine you're in a room with writing utensils and a manual. Every now and again a letter falls in to the room through a slit in the wall. Your task is to take the letter and use the manual to write a response. If you see such and such shape, you're supposed to write this and that shape on the reply paper, etc. Once you're done, you throw the letter out through the slit. This goes back and forth.
To the person on the other side of the wall it seems like they're having a conversation with someone fluent in Chinese whereas you're just painting shapes based on what the manual tells you.
LLMs don't understand the prompts - they generate responses based on the probability of certain characters or words or sentences being next to each other when the prompt contains certain characters, words, and sentences. That's all there is.
There was a famous botched experiment where scientists where training an AI model to detect tumours. It got really accurate on the training data so they tested it on new cases gathered more recently. It gave a 100% certainty of a tumour being present if the photograph analysed had a yellow ruler on it, because most photos of tumours in the training data had that ruler for scale.
But even then you have huge gaps on one side with untrustworthy humans (like comedy) and on the other side with machine generated facts such as from a database
"Machine generated facts" are not facts, they're just hallucinations and falsehoods. It is 100% better to NOT have them at all and have to resort to the English wiki, than have them and learn bullshit.
Especially because, again, the contents of the Wikipedia are absolutely being used for training further LLM models. The more errors there are, the worse the models become eventually leading to a collapse of truth. We are already seeing this with whole "research" publications being generated, including "source" material invented on the spot, proving bogus results.
No one is saying those who can't access or reqd English wikipedia is inferior. The issue here is when what is on a non-english wikipedia article is misleading or flat out harmful (like the article says about growing crops), because of juvenile attempts at letting machine translations getting it very wrong. So what Greenland did was shut down its poorly translated and maintained wiki site instead of letting it fester with misinformation. And this issue compounding when LLMs scrape Wikipedia as a source to learn new languages.
The European Commission says the tech giants may have made it hard for researchers to access public data, which could impact research into whether users, including children, are being exposed to harmful content online.
Independent socialist Catherine Connolly’s coolness to Brussels and hostility to Donald Trump put her at odds with the Irish government.
She’s slammed NATO, voted against EU treaties, been accused of offering propaganda boosts for dictators from Russia to Syria — and now she’s on track to become Ireland’s next president.
Catherine Connolly, a former mayor of the western city of Galway who’s spent the past nine years as an opposition socialist lawmaker in Ireland’s parliament, has built a commanding polling lead ahead of Friday’s election versus her only challenger, former government minister Heather Humphreys from the center-ground Fine Gael party.
The latest opinion poll, published Wednesday night, put Connolly on 55.7 percent support compared to Humphreys’ 31.6 percent. Results will be announced Saturday, but the surprisingly fleet-footed 68-year-old Connolly acts and talks like she’s already won.
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Are you saying nothing they advocate for matters at all? No? Then where do you draw the line? Seems like a disingenuous statement. Of course it matters what the opinions of a elected official are.
Sure, it matters what the opinions of an elected official are. But when the elected official in question holds little to no power, then does it really matter what their specific opinion on NATO is, especially when the other candidates are right-wing dipshits? It's good to have a head of state with generally respectable opinions, but in the grand scheme of things, this doesn't matter.
I am not a "lib", the very term "liberal" isn't even used correctly in North America.
This was a very specific answer to specific claims (get rid of the US, stop collaborating with Israel). These are ridiculous statements in context of NATO's primary goal, defence against russian invasions.
Ok, now tell me how "Find a new boogeyman to justify a “defense” organization that has never acted in self-defense." translates to “BATO made putin do it” in your head.
But how could I forgot having America and its attack dog Israel run your "defensive" organization is a fundamental leftist position.
NATO shills are so full of it. Russia is both comically weak, but also such a threat that every country from Turkey to Canada must be a part of it. And must pour shit loads of money into it.
A lot of effort to defend against a country that can't even take a third of a much smaller and weaker neighbour.
Funny as well because the country next door that invaded and occupied Ireland for centuries (and still does a part of it) is in NATO. Russia never threatened Ireland. It's not hard to see why many Irish people reject this sort of militarism.
Russia is a threat to the previous area controlled by URSS . You so stupid if you think Russia is a big risk for the USA and Canada and even Europeen countries like the U.K and France. I also I don't mean that countries not at risk from Russian threat shouldn't support Ukraine .
These are ridiculous statements in context of NATO’s primary goal
They are facts. Opposing NATO doesn't necessary mean not supporting Ukrainians. Countries has signed international conventions that gives right to support the occupied like Ukraine and Gaza without being in NATO.
Do you still trust the USA what the rest of NATO will do if the USA goes full Russian supporter?
NATO is a supporter of Israel which shouldn't has anything to do with the area that they try to protect
A new Palestinian state would need help in disarming Hamas and other terrorist groups, while Israel would need reassurance that it would not have to bear the burden of protecting its citizens alone. And NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer’s openness to a NATO mission in Iraq bodes well both for bolstering a new Iraqi government and for rebuilding Alliance unity.
Look at how Nato can't even condemn Israeli occupation and backing of settlements and violent settlers
The US is a bigger military force (qualitatively and quantitatively) than all other NATO members combined (although UK/France are no slouches and some smaller countries like Poland, Sweden, Finland hold their own). This is a critical issue in holding back the russians.
You denying this (and ignoring that russia is currently occupying 3 non-NATO members, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia), says everything we need to know.
The real irony is that I lean much more towards the Palestinian side, but that doesn't mean I am going to buying into "DATO forced poor putin to invade1!"
I am going to buying into “DATO forced poor putin to invade1!”
You are assuming that I am one of those. I am the one who want all countries to respect international laws and not supporting occupiers whatever it is Ukraine, Palestine or any other not you
You denying this (and ignoring that russia is currently occupying 3 non-NATO members, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia), says everything we need to know.
Read my comments again . I said that the countries that risks to be occupied again by Russia former controlled area . Maldova and Georgia was both part of the URSS and shouldn't be part of Russia or occupied by it again
I dont even care about her politics, but bro looks like she is gonna fall over dead in 20 minutes. Nobody should be allowed to become president of anything at almost 70. Retirement age is 65 for a reason. Just sit back and enjoy your remaining 10 years on the planet and let the people that will actually live to see the results of their work make decisions.
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I agree, good advisor for sure and why not a White House post? But not president or vice. Let him be the guru, but I’m so done with old people in power, even on the left.
The president is a powerless figure head so her opinions dont matter, I am disappointed we couldn't vote Michael D again, atleast he brought his dogs out for meet and greets.
One thing to recognise here is that neither governmental party was able to field a viable candidate against her. FF, the major government partner, had their candidate quit the race after the first debate. FG, the junior partner, nominated a candidate who clearly didn't want to run, due to all the skeletons in her closet the media are now dragging out.
To be fair, however, the government always faces an uphill battle. Our President, despite being largery powerless, had been viewed in the past two decades or so as the moral counterweight to the immoral government. Nominating a former government minister was thus a very tone-deaf decision.
... the repression was not about defending “order and social peace” but about sending a message to imperialism and the multinationals operating in the country that the new government would defend capitalism and guarantee the profits extracted from the exploitation of Peruvian workers.
The repression sends a message to imperialism and the multinationals that the new government will guarantee the profits extracted from the exploitation of Peruvian workers.
KUALA LUMPUR: Hundreds of protestors gathered in Malaysia’s capital on Friday afternoon (Oct 24) to rally against United States President Donald Trump’s attendance of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit.
Pope Leo is literally American, so presumably some US Catholics trust in his leadership and agree. Not all Catholics are like Cardinals Burke and Dolan.
It certainly doesn’t hurt. There are still plenty of Catholics listening to what the Pope says, especially at the Catholic schools and colleges across the country.
the thing is, is that in North America, alot of people are christans now, and follow the bible VERBATIM and dont consult the pope or other religious figures for clarity or, if you could call it this, errata. There's a video going around of some christian dude saying that its christian to say slavery is not wrong, yet this is not true for roman Catholics, there needs to be a hard line drawn between the two, as the former is what is a majority of trumps voter base, the the later find what they do is a bastardizaion.
I mostly agree, although I would say they follow the Bible verbatim™, where in reality they are just following what their local pastor or grandfather is saying the Bible says. Some common things they do take literally such as the Earth being only 6,000 to 10,000 years old, there being a literal Garden of Eden, and a literal Noah’s Ark.
Whatever whacko is trying to say ‘slavery isn’t wrong’ is not a Christian imo.
I feel that many Catholics I know call themselves Catholic first, rather than saying they are Christian and then clarifying that they are Catholic.
Off-topic: I feel a lot of these issues unfortunately came about from Christianity fracturing around the wrong thing. Christianity fractured around people having to do good works to go into heaven, as those leaving the Catholic church thought that faith alone was sufficient. The Catholic church of that time was greedy, they were letting people buy their way into purgatory, so that they could then go into heaven. The original Martin Luther, saw that greediness and called the Catholic church out, but he was calling them out and fractured the church over the wrong reasons imo.
Because they went off the basis of faith being sufficient; it opened the door for “Christians” to be genuinely awful to others since all they had to do was ask God for forgiveness right before they died and it was ‘All Good™’. The Bible calls on Christians to love one another, even people they might call their enemy they are called to love. I feel more of these people need to actually read the words of Jesus, because he is not condoning any of this type of hateful behavior.
the Bank for International Settlements estimates that overseas bank lending in renminbi to borrowers in developing countries rose by $373bn in the four years to the end of March.
“The year 2022 marked a turning point away from dollar- and euro-denominated credit and towards renminbi-denominated credit” to such borrowers, the BIS said.
Taiwan officials reach out to conservative US media
June, Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim, a fluent English speaker and formerly Taiwan's de facto ambassador to the United States, gave an interview to the Shawn Ryan Show, while in May, then Presidential Office spokesperson Lii Wen wrote an op-ed in the conservative Washington Times.
Hi, this is a post for you to rant on your sore points on technology
See I am trying to think of a good project idea one that people actually want solved, is there an app you wished existed, a site u wanted, put it down here and hey what do you know you may just see an ad in some while that now it exists
Israeli airstrikes have targeted multiple areas in eastern and southern Lebanon, claiming to hit Hezbollah targets. Israel has been carrying out regular attacks on Lebanon despite a nearly year-old ceasefire between it and Hezbollah.
The ceasefire includes the requirement of Hezbollah completely withdrawing from southern Lebanon and gives Israel the right to attack them, if they don’t. So this is in accordance with the ceasefire deal.
Lol you think the israelis wouldn't have found a pretext to bomb Lebanon? They repeatedly bombed Syria even though the new leader is a CIA puppet who is desperate to lick Netanyahu's boots.
The ceasfire deal has already been broken multiple times without enforcement actions from any third parties. There is no ceasfire, only a document not being followed.
The semi-emotionless, or at least restrained emotional delivery of the lines always hit me really hard. They never screamed, never cried, but the matter of fact way they said Kharak was burning, and how you needed to hunt down the perpetrators… it was chilling. The emotion was somehow bleached out of the voices, yet so, so, so powerfully deep and present nonetheless… I don’t know how they managed it, but it was incredible.
I agree, that's the genuine beauty of it, their layered performance. We could hear their emotions as much as we could hear them hiding their emotions. Genius
The American think tank Heritage Foundation has published a report calling for a massive buildup of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. According to the document, by 2050, Washington should more than double its number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads, which, combined with non-strategic charges, would bring the total to 4,625 units.
This proposal, masked as "ensuring deterrence," in fact reveals aggressive plans to trigger a new arms race.
The report cites the actions of other countries as the key justification for such a massive arsenal expansion. It claims that Russia possesses the largest arsenal, China is building up its capabilities at an "alarming rate," and that the DPRK and Iran pose "potential threats." Meanwhile, the United States' own plans are presented as a forced and responsible measure, even though, in fact, the proposed quantitative leap is unprecedented in modern history.
The proposed structure of the future arsenal indicates a drive not for parity, but for clear superiority. The plans include:
▪️ Increasing the fleet of Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles. ▪️ Deploying new B-21 Raider strategic bombers. ▪️ Commissioning Columbia-class submarines. ▪️ Massively expanding the fleet of non-strategic nuclear weapons, including cruise missiles and forward-deployed systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.
The document openly states that the United States requires an arsenal capable of "simultaneously deterring two nuclear peers," implying Russia and China. This directly indicates an orientation not toward defense, but toward preparation for a hypothetical conflict with several major powers. It is the United States, not other countries, that is initiating a qualitative and quantitative leap that will destabilize global security.
The publication by the Heritage Foundation, whose analytical materials often form the basis of legislative initiatives in the U.S. Congress, exposes Washington's true intentions. Under the pretext of "responding to threats," the United States is laying the groundwork for an unprecedented buildup of its nuclear might. The plans to increase the arsenal to 4,625 deployed warheads are a telling sign of who is truly the main driver of the new global nuclear arms race.
The world security environment is deteriorating. The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues unabated. Iranian proxies continue to attack Israel. North Korea regularly threatens to incinerate American and allied cities with nuclear weapons.
Further evidence that Christian evangelicals are trying to destroy the planet and proactively create the end of times... because they're fucking deeply mentally ill.
I've actually seen a theory that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the resulting "sword of Damocles" effect from it, has lead to a general shift of society to more YOLO / instant gratification behavior with less regard for the future.
Don't know if there is anything to back it up, but I've seen it a few times.
Just, why? Why? We already have more nukes than anyone except Russia, and even that is just a number at this point. There is no deterrence gain for adding more. None. Even accepting deterrence arguments as valid, we already have far in excess of what's needed. At most, we need to swap some old cores.
What was the "right" number? Given the subjective nature of the process, there can be no single figure. However, over the years, a number of knowledgeable individuals have tried to quantify a minimum nuclear requirement and it is worth considering the results of some of their efforts.
In 1957, Admiral Arleigh Burke, then the chief of naval operations, estimated that 720 warheads aboard 45 Polaris submarines were sufficient to achieve deterrence. This figure took into account the fact that some weapons would not work and that some would be destroyed in a Soviet attack (Burke believed that just 232 warheads were required to destroy the Soviet Union). At the time Burke made this estimate, the U.S. arsenal already held six times as many warheads.
Several years later, in 1960, General Maxwell Taylor, former Army chief of staff and future chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote that "a few hundred reliable and accurate missiles" (armed with a few hundred warheads) and supplemented by a small number of bombers was adequate to deter the Soviet Union. Yet by this time the United States had some 7,000 strategic nuclear warheads.
In 1964, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his "whiz kids" calculated that 400 "equivalent megatons" (megatons weighted to take into account the varying blast effects from warheads of different yields) would be enough to achieve Mutual Assured Destruction and destroy the Soviet Union as a functioning society. At that time, the U.S. arsenal contained 17,000 equivalent megatons, or 17 billion tons of TNT equivalent.
Even if we accept that we have to have these infernal things, we're at least an order of magnitude beyond what we actually need.
This is pure giveaway to nuclear military contractors.
The increase in non-strategic nuclear weapons (regional or battlefield) is an especially scary capability that we intentionally backed away from. Just no.
The concept of needing a massive buildup to counter emerging nuclear powers is just laughable. Do they even look at what they’re writing?
I have to admit that having some number of hypersonic missiles with nuclear warheads may be a good idea
But the missed their opportunity with hypersonic missiles. As those become available worldwide, they increase the chances of an unblockable preemptive attack occurring with no chance for reaction. We don’t need more nuclear weapons (and fewer would be preferable) but they need to be survivable enough to be a valid deterrent
I like how they can't even name China as making more nukes, just "enhanced capabilities" because it's well known that China doesn't mass produce nukes just like every other nuclear power like UK, France, India. Pakistan, etc.
Look how war is evolving in Ukraine. The future of warfare lies in decentralized swarms of little drones, not the power to eradicate entire cities in one shot. In a world war, China would flex it's manufacturing superiority and pivot towards small, precision drones that would overwhelm and destabilize any country's ability to even control a nuclear arsenal. Nukes serve as a vengeance panic button to assert that if we can't win, no life will.
The heritage foundation is scared of the US being overtaken by China because all they understand is power. They will not cede the hegemony to China, as the loss of unchallenged power (in their reckoning) is tantamount to inevitable apocalypse. They want the apocalyptic panic button.
Are we incapable of completely glassing literally every nuclear armed nation's population centers? If not then it's just an expensive and dangerous alternative to diplomacy. If so, it's just an expensive, dangerous, and unhelpful alternative to therapy.
This seems like a cool project. I especially love the UI's similarity to Discord, but it still has a long road ahead to be a viable chat platform IMO.
I've been periodically checking in with ~~Revolt~~ Stoat for about a year now, and personally, the two things that I'm waiting for are: 1. Voice chat - It seems like this is coming, but they had to clean up a bunch or tech debt first 2. Federation - Self-hosted chat is great, but not being able to talk to other servers is incredibly limiting for a social tool. AFAIK they're not planning on implementing this. This is likely a deal-breaker for a lot of folks.
I'm currently running Matrix synapse, and while matrix is kinda a messy ecosystem, it's really hard to compete with its maturity and adoption in the FOSS / Self-Hosted space.
Also, not super important, but this blog post reads like it's AI generated.
i honestly think that if revolt had federation, then it would be the obvious choice for me, but alas. personally i'm still hopeful for polyproto getting off the ground, but the boring realistic choice for the time being is probably something like XMPP + mumble
i think for my purposes i'm fine with hosting that through a separate service, so instead of XMPP + mumble i would run polyproto + mumble (or some other voip solution, screen sharing seems to be a decent way away in mumble)
but (as i understand it), polyproto isn't a chat protocol per se, but more a protocol for federated message authentication. as an application of this protocol, they're building polyproto-chat, which is a chat protocol. in theory, one could then also build a polyproto-voice so you can use the same account for both chatting and voice calls. i still think this is pretty far away, considering how young polyproto is, which is why my current vision is chat and voice as two separate services (which i also prefer because i imagine it makes the technology simpler and hosting easier)
What resources, suggestions, and support can those of us who are already here provide to potential newcomers? And what can we do to prepare for – and encourage – a potential influx?
Media Revolution's Media Liberation Day on November 5 is encouraging people to liberate themselves from malignant corporate media to explore decentralized social networks. It's a great opportunity to bring people to fedi ...
I would say the main thing is being nice and letting people explore, and providing spaces/communities for people to come back and ask questions when they have them. When people bring up issues or suggest things that they want to see, we shouldn't crap on what they prefer their online experience to be (ex. preferred algorithms, content they want to block, etc.)
Resources wise, we created this guide and I like to link these two particular pages for fediverse/lemmy. I feel that they help give a high level overview of how things work:
That would probably help. Do you want to become a mod on !newcomers@piefed.zip ? If yes, should I appoint @otter@piefed.ca ? Cross platform moderation can probably be a bit finicky
As a digital comms and usability professional, I'd suggest you do some testing and refinement of these materials. I commend your efforts but these are not something I would ever hand out to a 50yr old volunteer if I want them to sign up to use a fedi community instead of FB
"When you want to send an email, you don't need to use the same email provider as the person you're sending it to." is not a helpful thing for a newbie (though I understand why you have included it)... This sort of content indicates the gulf between the (user's) mental model and the (system designer's) conceptual design is too great.
I have students who can help you with this stuff for free. If you're interested, DM me.
I think engaging with people on a human level rather than giving unsolicited advice on how to use fediverse to every new face around could be a place to start. Half the time I see a new user here they seem to get flooded with technical advice that, while well-meaning, is somewhat off-putting.
A simple "Welcome! Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions about how to make the most of your time here" is plenty for most people. And if they do ask questions, go wild.
Is there a good community in which newcommers can ask basic questions, like a fedi help desk community/no stupid questions fedi edition? I feel like that could be useful to point people to. Edit: Blaze linked !newcomers@piefed.zip in another comment.
Probably just by having fun in your own communities and in general. When people see a group of people laughing and posting memes its naturally a place they want to lurk and join in on. I think the worst part we can do is give long winded explanations of federation. Best just keep it simple and tell them to join a generic server
I would tweak that a hair and tell people just to make an account somewhere and observe for a bit. Lemmy can have some very distinct groups that reside on very specific instances. Or not. It's a "pick your adventure" kind of scenario, IMHO.
It took about six months or so for me to settle into .ca after bouncing around a bit. It's not really a pain to switch instances, but I personally like my chat history in one spot and I like the concept of a 'home instance'.
Depending on your client and your settings, your feed could have a bias that leans in the direction of the posts on your home instance, so that is something of note. Not saying that is bad or good, it just is what it is.
Observe while participating is what I meant. The intent is to give a person a heads up that cliques still exist on Lemmy and it may take a bit to understand them. In my case, I found the first instance I wouldn't participate on when I was classified as a fascist baby killer for some reason. (Some instances hadn't been mostly defederated back then.)
Do some usability testing and improvement - Recruit volunteer UX / usability professionals to run studies with users and recommend usability improvements. - Be prepared for some critical feedback. - Organise and prioritise the feedback - Recruit some volunteer UI designers, graphic designers and devs with experience of working with UXers to refine and implement the usability fixes
Provide more user-friendly onboarding, signup, sign-in, password management etc. The barriers are very high even for those of us with good tech confidence.
Provide better approaches and platforms for small groups (volunteer organisations, hobby and interest groups and neighbourhoods) to replace Facebook Groups and similar.
Gain more experience of working with non-tech users, e.g. volunteer at your local library, seniors' IT classes, to understand the challenges that 80% of users would face in using fedi products and gain some insights into how to resolve those issues
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said she is seeking a balance between alleviating economic stress and pursuing Ottawa's security and human rights priorities.
Just three years after Canada called China a “disruptive global power,” Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand says Canada now views Beijing as a strategic partner in a dangerous world.
“We must be nuanced in our diplomacy. We must stress our concerns relating to security and public safety on the one hand, and we must seek to build additional supply chains on the other. That is pragmatism,” she said.
A much welcomed change given the US has tanked multiple parts of our economy within less than 9 months of this presidency. And strategic partnership is the right approach. We could also use this as leverage in our negotiations with the US. That is if negotiations resume after the abrupt bullshit Mango Mussolini pulled today.
We can't trust any negotiations we make with him long term anyways.
Quite frankly, in the absolute best case scenario, we have to hunker down, diversify trade, bolster our support systems, and hope to high heavens that our neighbours start back taking their lithium.
...even after Ottawa emulated American restrictions on Chinese vehicles.
Those restrictions were not just about "emulating American restrictions"...they were also about protecting the Canadian automotive industry from trying to compete with cheap Chinese imports flooding the Canadian market. And at a time when our manufacturing industry is being hit hard by US tariffs, we need those restrictions more than ever.
Part of what Carney promised on the campaign trail was to continue to develop Canada's internal automotive manufacturing supply chains...which include all the necessary materials and components for our own EV's, right down to the battery technology.
Currently, everything is still in the investment and developmental stages, but the framework is there. Canada has all the rare earth elements to rival Chinese production...we just need to invest in the infrastructure to fully process them. This will take time and money.
Which is why allowing Chinese companies to enter our market at this stage, would derail the entire process. Why make the long-term investment in Canadian made products, when China can supply them for a fraction of the cost, right now? Our own capabilities would die before they have the chance to even get off the ground...and we would become dependent on China, right after declaring independence from the US.
All true, however the consumers of the finished battery cells would be North American EV production, because there's large scale battery production in the rest of the world. Maybe the EU could import some. Or maybe they'll just want raw material for their battery factories. But on our end, as far as I'm aware everyone of the auto manufacturers here is cancelling or scaling down their Canadian EV plans. The EV landscape in the US doesn't look good either with Trump actively working to undermine them. Point being that without considering the Chinese EVs, the investments that haven't been cancelled yet, already are at risk. I expect investors being fickle as they are, especially during uncertainty and downturns, to cancel further supply chain investments, unless our gov't steps in. And I think our gov't should step in but less to prop them up and more to buy these projects and put them under a crown corp that develops these resources. That still leaves us with the problem of what to put those batteries in. Chinese EVs built here could fulfill that role. Any such work should start early so that it can be operational by the time the batt supply chain is up. As for direct imports, those would compete with ICE vehicles built in NA. That poses a risk to Canadian auto manufacturing since we only build ICE. But we do have a problem with auto prices the rest of the economy so the gov't has to consider that risk vs the risk of layoffs. For example the price of the F-150 used across the construction industry is a cost for the tradespeople working in it. Finally if we consider the worst case scenario where we get mass layoffs due to Trump's actions, then the high vehicle price problem would become more significant for a lot of people who have their incomes slashed. That's where cheaper direct imports could help dampen the impact on our car-dependent economy. If I were Carney, I'd probably model these scenarios and if here's a benefit, set appropriate taxes/quotas on these EVs to achieve it, and change it as needed to match the rest of the economic context. As for new factories, I'd start those yesterday.
Yeah, if the multi-polarity comes true, there will likely be several blocks (the EU, Mercosur, others) that will cooperate closely, while trusted partnerships will remain only among trusted countries (such as among democratic countries worldwide). Within these partnerships there could be free trade, between them, however, we'll likely see some sort of tit-for-tat economy - do trade where it fits and where it has no impact on our core interests regarding economy and security.
Canada's "strategic partnership" with China will be one of these tit-for-tat partnerships, but the country's future lies in collaborations with the EU, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and other democracies.
U.S. President Donald Trump says he is terminating all trade negotiations with Canada over an advertisement by the Ontario government that uses the late U.S. president Ronald Reagan's own words to send an anti-tariff message to American audiences.
In a late-night post to his Truth Social platform, Trump attacked the ad, which he attributed to Canada rather than Ontario, as fraudulent and fake.
"TARIFFS ARE VERY IMPORTANT TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY, AND ECONOMY, OF THE U.S.A." Trump wrote. "Based on their egregious behavior, ALL TRADE NEGOTIATIONS WITH CANADA ARE HEREBY TERMINATED."
Donald Trump said he had terminated all U.S. trade negotiations with Canada.
Trump said he was doing so because of an allegedly “fake” advertisement that Canada was airing that features former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs.
Doug Ford, the premier of the Ontario province in Canada, recently said the province would spend $75 million on ads to run in the United States featuring Reagan criticizing tariffs
President Trump claimed Canada ran an ad featuring former President Ronald Reagan talking about tariffs to influence a pending U.S. Supreme Court case.
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The king had his feelings hurt and he has no one to blame but himself.
He signed a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada during his first term which he isn't honoring anymore. And then he is annoyed that people are feeling angry at his shenanigans.
Oh no, Canada doesn't get to negotiate with the most dishonest and malicious administration in US history. What a terrible loss. I'm sure there was going to be a major breakthrough any minute now if not for this. Fucking loser.
So Trump'd seen the ad three days prior to his supposed late night melt down. And he's again making large, market disruptive comments on a Friday, which will likely get toned down by Monday/Tuesday.
This just smells like more market manipulation on behalf of wealthy backers that want to fleece people further.
that's the beautiful part about trump with all this, the idiot is so far gone and stupid that anyone even remotely smart/logical has to hedge on the assumption he actually carries through with whatever bullshit he says.
the wolves are running the show right now, and they have plenty of lambs and pigs to choose from
your not going to get anything from negotiating with trump, it should be perfectly clear now how this idiot and those behind him operate. "negotiate" and you just open yourself up to another shakedown later on
maybe seeing a video of their jesus saying tariffs with allies are stupid is what some idiots in america need to wakeup
New Copilot and agentic experiences make powerful AI easy on Windows 11
Today, we’re taking an exciting step forward with a new wave of updates that make every Windows 11 PC an AI PC – with Copilot at the center of it al
With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. [1]
Does anybody actually believe that 68% of consumers use or even want Copilot? But they included a source for this very generous assertion at the bottom of the page:
[1] Based on Microsoft-commissioned online study of U.S. consumers ages 13 years of age or older conducted by Edelman DXI and Assembly, 1,000 participants, July 2025.
Oh yeah, that's compelling: US consumers, 13 years old and older. An entire thousand of them!
So the only question I have left is which junior high principal Microsoft "compensated" for this survey, and what happened to the 320 summer school attendees who said fuck you, no anyway.
Yeah, I’d believe it. Outside of anti-AI circlejerks people like AI, especially ones like ChatGPT, and especially if it is available right at their fingertips. It’s quickly becoming a part of everyday life and processes.
The anti-AI people need to start accepting that today and every day after it is going be the day that AI plays the smallest part in humanity’s future. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s never going back in. The sooner they can accept that and let go of the hate and see it for what it is - a useful tool to help you - the better and less angry their lives will be.
How useful is it really? I constantly hear about it being wrong and I’m not so stupid that I can’t handle a search through Wikipedia on my own.
Why should accept this thing that is of such little benefit to my life? Why should I accept this thing that is constantly wrong? Why should I accept this thing that just allows uncreative and insecure people to fill the internet full of garbage?
If you need AI as it is to help you do things then I pity you greatly.
Ok but we know that it’s very often wrong and tries too hard to make you feel good instead of actually giving correct answers. It makes up reasons for made-up sayings, often struggles with math, and has a whole host of other issues while acting fully confident in its infallibility. We have several studies that seem to show that its use is having a negative affect on ohr critical thinking skills as well. After all that it doesn’t even provide a service that’s worth anything even if it didn’t come with all those downsides. Using a search engine just isn’t that difficult and AI “art” is a goddamn cancer.
It’s terrible for us and we don’t even need it! No, fuck “AI”. We have a big enough problem with people trying to find the easy way out to such a degree that they refuse to learn how anything works and slapping a big “do it for me” button on everything is just insane. I’m not saying that everything needs to difficult but we are so averse to even the slightest challenge that it leaves us with nothing but a complete lack of basic skills and an assload of insecurity.
AI is a tool. It’s not a person, it’s not a be-all-end-all of anything. Just like a person can use excel and come up with the wrong numbers, people can use AI and come up with the wrong answer.
Just like with every tool, there are people who can’t use them properly, there are people who are good enough to get modest results, and there are people who are experts at their craft who can do amazing things with them. AI is no different.
If you want a calculator, use a calculator - not AI. Use the right tool for the job and you’ll get the best result.
Studies can be made to say anything, and I know the ones you are talking about - they’re bogus.
Except that anyone who can use it properly can also just do the job without it, and the amount of damage it is doing because it’s freely available to everyone is insane.
You’re completely ignoring all my arguments. This sorta makes sense since your original reply was very “just ignore the bad stuff and it’s good!” but you’re going to have to address those things. I meanc, you did say “they’re bogus” and then not elaborate at all, but I’m assuming that if you have the energy to continuing writing comments then you would also have the energy to do the far more efficient thing and show me why those studies are bogus, right?
No I'm not, I addressed them. LLMs not being able to do maths/spelling is a known shortcoming. Anyone using it to do that is literally using it wrong. The studies you talk about were ridiculous, I know the ones you're talking about. Of course people that don't learn something won't know how to do it, for example - but the fact that they can do it with AI is a positive. Obviously getting AI to write an essay means that the person will feel less "proud" of their work, as one of the studies said - but that's not a "bad" thing. Just like how people don't need to learn how to hunt and gather anymore doesn't mean that it's a bad thing - the world as it is, and as it always will be from here on out, means we don't need to know that unless we want to do it.
Again - AI is a tool, and idiots being able to use it to great effect doesn't mean that the tool is bad. If anything that's a showing of how good the tool is.
Those studies aren’t about them feeling less proud, they’re about the degradation of critical thinking skills.
I have repeatedly said that isn’t worth anything largely because it doesn’t do anything I can’t do with relative ease. Why do you think it’s so great? What do you honestly use it for?
As one example I built an MCP server that lets LLMs access a reporting database, and made a Copilot Agent and integrated it into Teams, so now the entire business can ask a chat bot questions, using natural language in teams, about business data. It can run reports for them on demand, pulling in new columns/tables. It can identify when there might be something wrong as it also reads from our logs.
These people don’t know databases. They don’t know how to read debug/error logs.
I also use GitHub copilot.
But sure, it can’t be of any help to anyone ever lol
I’ll take your word for it to not just be saying “no” but I still have to wonder why it needs “AI” and if people are going to build up a reliance on it to the point where they start to not be able to find that info on their own. I mean, hell, like you say they already can’t handle the databases so why are they even fucking around in there anyway/why aren’t they learning how to use them if they’re so important for their jobs?
Because in teams you could type (or say) "how many customers are still awaiting their refunds for their services that were cancelled last week?" and it will go and do its little AI magic and respond with the answer.
people are going to build up a reliance on it to the point where they start to not be able to find that info on their own
But they can never find it on their own - it's in a database, they have to use some tool to get it. Why can't that tool be AI?
they already can’t handle the databases so why are they even fucking around in there anyway
They're not! That's the point. This way it gives them access to information that they would usually have to put in a support ticket, or run multiple reports and then try and compile them together, for example, to get. Now they can just ask a bot in teams a question and they get the answer.
why aren’t they learning how to use them if they’re so important for their jobs?
Because their job isn't to access the production database.
TankovayaDiviziya
in reply to Lee Duna • • •Ann Archy
in reply to TankovayaDiviziya • • •TankovayaDiviziya
in reply to Ann Archy • • •Another kitchen will take its place; always have. Now, whether you agree or not, the next kitchen is likely to be China.
And not to completely dismiss your point, but like I said in another comment, it's important to decouple from the kitchen that is US to minimise the consequences. I don't want another repeat of the Roaring 20's and the countries too economically intertwined with the US also collapsed when the Great Depression hit. One of those countries who was dragged down the worst was Germany, when American investors pulled out their investments from the country. That severe aftershock gave rise to the Nazis, and the rest is history.
Ann Archy
in reply to TankovayaDiviziya • • •