I can place a pretty hefty bet that this thought has not visited Elmos head.

That’s pretty much it. At first you get slapped on the wrist and if you just treat it as a cost of doing business without any changes you’ll soon find out that it’s not a one time fee, nor that it stays the same. I think with GPDR the maximum (one time) fee was up to 10% of companys turnover (not gross profit). With Apples ~390 billion revenue that would roughly round up to 40 billion per fine.

And even if you have endless supply of money there’s still options to shut the whole business down if it’s deemed illegal. It might be a damn slow process, but if you just stubbornly try to fight it with lawyers and money it just doesn’t work.

US will not succeed in spinning this as something positive if they help Russia occupy part of Europe

On that you’re correct. But what they can at least try to do is make Ukraine look bad or difficult/subborn/whatever after rejecting their “peace offer”.

It’s not that much about choosing a side. Europe has been sleeping on their defences for decaes and should US just pull all their hardware and troops back home tomorrow there’s no immediately available replacements on that. And that’s a sad state for the whole continent. So it’s not about honest opinion but, as everything between countries is, a political question on how badly some countries depend on US defences.

I have no doubt that should US side with Russians it would be widely condemned in global west, but I don’t think global south or China really give a damn. But Europe almost as a whole need to get their shit together really fast and so far, even if the movement seems to be into the right direction, it’s been really slow to show up any actual results.

Well, that is also a possibility, but the end result doesn’t change. Either way it’s possible to spin that so Ukraine would look bad. In the normal sensible world that wouldn’t fly, but with the global circus we’re experiencing it seems like anything goes.

Putin is willing to make a deal with Trump in which he cedes invaded land that he doesn’t actually control?

That might work for him, at least until Russia can build up a few new tanks and artillery units. More likely they make all kinds of outrageous claims and when Ukraine (rightfully) rejects them Russia can claim that Ukraine doesn’t want peace.

Or the fools hope option: Cracks in Russia start to show. Money is tight, there’s no workforce, no resources to cover up any kind of losses on the battlefield and so on, so they’re starting to push on whatever peace treaty they can before the whole country collapses.

In our company we (at least IT department) get to choose our own bags (within reason). I have some generic lenovo backpack they had laying around when I started and it’s decent enough. Maybe a bit smaller side on what I’d like, but it carries my laptop, headset, random cables, power supply, notepad and stuff like that just fine. And it doesn’t have any kind of visible logo on it at all, unless you count the Think® colour scheme on zipper tabs.

And it’s also a security thing. Should someone steal my backpack it does not have any logos to pinpoint which company it belongs unless I’ve left my lanyard in the pocket with my rfid-tag. And of course if you open the laptop it has AD forest name on there, so it’s pretty trivial to figure out, but at least I’m not advertising ‘steal my things if you want access to this company’ everywhere.

I still have a fools hope that generals and other high ranking military people have their feet firmly on the ground, as their whole training, career and often identity necessities. And, at least on my belief, that also means that they won’t lead their military across the ocean to get their ass handed over.

I’m quite confident that US military could defeat their Chinese counterpart on a level field, but fighting across the ocean is a logistical nightmare and even if they could get their boots on the ground against Chinese holding anything there would be nearly impossible and it would have an astronomical price tag. USA might be able to pull that off, but in the long term it would just be another Vietnam, but with far more severe consequences locally.

So, yes, I assume that generals would disobey. And any competent replacement would disobey too. Replacing them with someone who don’t know what they’re doing would just be a disaster for the US of A. It might still happen, but at that point they’d look like the “second strongest army in the world” which is being destroyed on a field in Ukraine and there would be no hope for anyone in the Europe (or maybe globally) who would like to do any meaningful business with the US, so they’d just dig their own grave. pretty much like what Russia is doing right now.

You are of course not wrong with that. But also I tend to believe that high ranking military personnel are pretty practical and rational on their decision making. Getting US military boots on the ground in China would be bigger than Vietnam war scale of operations even to the US army and it would have immense effects on both US army and the country as a whole. The operation would practically mean moving a smaller European country quite literally across the ocean even without any warfare and when the receiving coast is armed to teeth and willing to fight for their land it’s way more difficult.

And for what? Absolutely destroying on whatever respect and trust is left globally? Because there’s no way in hell US army would conquer and keep the whole China. Maybe expand Hong Kong or Taiwan a bit and gain a relatively small area of land for material imports? It just doesn’t make any kind of sense at all.

9/11 retaliaton at least made some sense as US was willing to punish someone for the tradegy and Iraq wars had resources they could actually hold and gain from but with China there’s just no way for US to make any profitable scenario out of open warfare. Anything they might gain from that would be diminishingly small compared to the military effort and expenses they would need to get anything out of that fight.

And that’s what I’m pretty much counting on. No matter how patriotic the generals might be, attacking China just doesn’t make any sense and it doesn’t have any arguments for it beyond the rambling of a demented leader they have. I refuse to believe that the biggest military and logistics might in the world would do that stupid things just because one man said so.

will Americans stop him before he starts more wars?

A really good question. Politically it seems like it’s not going to happen, but I still have (at least naive) hope that the actual US mlitary would not respond on commands should the cheeto order active military operations against China. That would make absolutely no sense in so many ways, no matter how you spin it around, that I’d expect the boots on the ground would just say ‘fuck off’.

But I also tought that the orange clown wouldn’t have a chance on elections either, so we’ll see. And also, I’m across the pond from US, so my information is mostly from European media outlets and social media around here, so take that with suitable grain of salt. I just rather not see the reality where US is fighting China and Europe is left to deal with Russia. Not because we couldn’t handle that, but because that would be just bat shit crazy situation in my lifetime.

The real question is how much US GDP is relying on Chinese materials and products. I honestly have no idea, but I’m sure that it’s more than zero.

And any meaningful investment in to the US, unless you already have manufacturing there, doesn’t seem like a smart move. Tariffs (and policies in general) might change radically before the ink is dry on newspapers reporting latest changes.

Drones have without a doubt changed warfare a ton, but there’s still no fighter jet equivalent on speed and impact power. Situation in Ukraine is a bit different as Ukraine doesn’t have much hardware to spare and Russians seem to be afraid of modern defences and neither of them have real infrastructure in place for fighter jet maintenance close enough to the front lines.

I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.

But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.

Latest versions of maxim are still pretty useful weapons. Not on the field, or drawn with a horse, but if you have a ton of ammunition and mount one in a bunker where you can use water cooling it’s still pretty powerful.

500-850 shots per minute (depending on model) with 7.62mm and with proper cooling you can just keep the trigger pulled and wreak havoc until you ran out of ammunition. Obviously it’s still old, heavy and big, but if you don’t have to carry it around it’s still decent hardware.

Hope he doesn’t change his mind and/or get overruled by then. Stable and predictable global markets are sooooo boring.

Edit: oh… it took 5 hours since I originally commented.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it’s not perfect by any means, but we don’t need another technology for this. And sure, it’s two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.

Here’s a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.

Here’s a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here’s another. I’m not building a comprehensive list, there’s just too many and their impacts vary wildly.

Then there’s the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here’s one example which made into the headlines back then. And here’s a list of similar examples.

“they replaced nuclear with coal”

Go read yourself:

A 2020 study found that lost nuclear electricity production has been replaced primarily by coal-fired production and net electricity imports. The social cost of this shift from nuclear to coal is approximately €3 to €8 billion annually, mostly from the eleven hundred additional deaths associated with exposure to the local air pollution emitted when burning fossil fuels.

And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it’s also radioactive.

Let’s not see which one’s marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that’s actually good for the planet?

That would be really nice. We just don’t have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There’s currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it’s pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.

There’s a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can’t blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn’t build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.

And that doesn’t change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.

And the funny thing is that coal power plants are actually more radioactive to the environment than nuclear power. Sure, accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima change the statistics by quite a lot, but for the absolute majority of nuclear plants they are way less radioactive to the environment than any given coal plant around.

Also there’s not that many severe nuclear disasters in the history. Coal and other organic fuel plants cause far more casualties globally than nuclear ever did. But maybe it’s easier to accept slow death of a lot of people due to cancer and whatever caused by organic fuel power plant emissions than single large spike when nuclear power (very, very rarely) goes wrong.

I totally agree. Setting up an email server is pretty trivial, but setting up a good email server with long lifespan and managing it is another matter. I absolutely recommend doing that, that’s the one front we can take back from the giants if enough people decide to go that route, but it’s not something you should just spin up by following a random youtube tutorial and leave it be.

I do host my own emails, but I’ve been doing that commercially too for a decade or so and make my living as system administrator, so I’ve cut my teeth on this quite a while ago. You need to understand quite a few things, set up backups, clear your IP from various blocklists every now and then, manage the ever growing spam problem, make sure that no malicious actors can access your systems and so on.

It is very much doable and at least I personally enjoy the freedom I have for not relying on anyone else on my communications. Go for it, but be prepared to jump in to the deep end without floats.