I’m going to misuse my stupid whenever and however I want, and there ain’t a damn thing you can do to stop me!

I get that, but at the same time I don’t. I mean, it doesn’t make sense to me. Expecting endless debate and also expecting correct conclusions to be reached seems contradictory, since once conclusions are reached, debate would cease. This is one of those things that make me feel very uncertain, like when you finish an exam in half the allotted time, watch everyone else keep furiously working, and start questioning whether everyone else is dumb or whether you are and you missed something obvious. I get that feeling a lot when reading/thinking about religion.

I’ve heard stuff like this several times from different sources over the years, but I’m still not convinced it’s not some elaborate collective prank. It reads like something written by Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams.

This had me in the first half, but the last sentence makes it clear it’s a complete fabrication with no basis in fact. Business tycoons have always had a disdain for the poor.

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It was great while it lasted, but I stopped using Trillian simply because people stopped using the networks it supported. I used it for ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger. The latter three don’t even exist anymore, and ICQ is a shadow of its former self owned by some Russians now. Some people migrated over to Skype, some I just lost contact with altogether. Thinking back to those carefree days fills me with a strange sense of melancholy. It all seems to have gone wrong somewhere along the way, and not just in terms of IM apps.

I’m skeptical. Trillian still exists, but hardly anyone uses it. It can’t connect to a bunch of services because their operators decided to disable third-party access, and I remember that even back in the day it was constantly playing catch-up with network updates that broke compatibility. “One chat app to rule them all” is a neat idea, but I don’t see it working in practice.

Now he’s driving their investment into to the ground so the banks will end up writing off most of the debt rather than asking for repayment. So far, it seems to be working.

Maybe I’m financially illiterate, but I don’t understand how that works. Like… if I take out a loan to buy a house and then deliberately burn down the house, that doesn’t get me off the hook. If anything, I’ll probably end up going to prison to boot. Why exactly would the banks just write off Musk’s debt instead of going after him and his other assets in court?

That’s probably true, but there are always alternatives.

Right? And at this stage, it’s basically subsidized by venture capitalists looking to eventually turn a profit. I see nothing morally wrong with enjoying a product or service paid for by a greedy billionaire.

The article doesn’t really seem to make any moral argument (probably because it’s unfinished - maybe don’t post it until it is?). Yeah, Discord is financially unsustainable, but that’s just because it’s still in phase one of the enshittification cycle. At this stage, venture capitalists are basically subsidizing the service for everyone. Maybe I’m just myopic, but I don’t really see anything morally wrong with enjoying a service paid for by a greedy billionaire. And once the enshittification ramps up, well, there are always alternatives.

The US didn’t decide to start this war, but it still has to fight it or it’s going to lose it.

It’s not our war. It’s not our fight. It has nothing to do with us.

That’s where you’re wrong. America has a global empire, and Russia is one of the other powers trying to undermine and dismantle it. If America wants to keep its empire and the many benefits it brings, it has no choice but to defend it. Be thankful you’re only having to spend money while someone else is spending lives.

The Ukrainians seemed pretty grateful for the help. One would have to be pretty thoroughly brainwashed by propaganda to sincerely believe that we’re somehow doing more harm than good by providing aid to a nation fighting against an invader intending to commit genocide.

I thought they pledged not to use them around civilians or in Russia.

I don’t find many reasons to be proud of my country, but the fact that we were the first to give tanks to Ukraine absolutely is one.

a plausible argument could be made on humanitarian grounds that a negotiated settlement as quickly as possible is the best of the bad options

Absolutely not, that idea is based on a total lack of historical memory and amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road. Russia will not accept anything less than keeping the territories it currently occupies, and that’s not an option. This invasion happened because Russia had been getting away with this kind of stuff for two decades. It’s not Putin’s first land grab. It was Chechnya in 2000, Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, the rest of Ukraine in 2022. They took a small bite at first, and when they got away with it, they took a bigger bite next. And again, and again. Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Allowing Russia to get away with this and keep the territories it took guarantees another repetition of the same pattern less than a decade later with yet more devastating results. If we had nipped this in the bud, the war could’ve been avoided entirely. The second best time is now.

If this were on Reddit, I’d have no doubt that those comments are from Russian trolls. I doubt there are many of those here yet, so I guess they’re just useful idiots who have had their brains washed.

Eh… I figure if CMs weren’t effective, they wouldn’t be using them. There’s a good reason the military heavyweights refuse to join the international treaty that bans them.

Also, the whole discussion is basically moot, since apparently Ukraine has been using old Soviet CMs all along anyway. Getting more modern American ones with a much lower percentage of duds will be nothing but an improvement.

“there are already mines so spreading more is good”?

More like “tons of mines are being placed every day, so stopping that from happening is good”.