Look how curved the US-Canadian borders are, and how Ellesmere island is compressed. This clearly isn’t Mercator.

This seems kind of a “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” thing to measure. It makes large centralized conflicts (one war between two states where ten million people die) seem a lot less severe in comparison to decentralized conflicts (ten wars between twenty local groups where one million people die in total).

Starlink has lost over a hundred satellites. Satellite constellations really don’t care about individual failures.

I don’t blame Ukraine, but these weapons will be turned against civilians across the world. Genocide will be a lot more frequent as the soulless murderers they require roll off assembly lines rather than taking painstaking propaganda.

When a Latino person in the US tries to escape a concentration camp, these robots will be there. When the Uyghurs in China outlive their economic usefulness, these robots will be there. When climate change makes the tropics uninhabitable and billions of people try to survive, these robots will be there.

And when there is no longer any point in keeping you alive because you aren’t directly providing a service to trillionaires, these robots will be there.

Fun fact: it is possible for governments to change quickly. Sometimes it even improves matters!

like if you teleported directly from Europe into any given US street nobody would say “hey, that guy is an enemy”. We in the US have a problem, an idiot is driving.

I think that what you find will actually happen is that they will get held at gunpoint by ICE, be unable to show identification, get beaten up for talking back, and get thrown in a concentration camp for a couple months, where if they can’t prove European citizenship in time they get deported to a death camp in El Salvador.

Though to be fair, that’s if they hit the bad luck of being stopped by cops for engaging in the suspicious activity of walking, or ringing the doorbell of a Republican, or ringing the doorbell of someone who calls the cops when someone is at the door with an implausible story asking to use their phone.

Basically they would have to rely on the kindness of strangers to avoid the militarised police and to get in contact with their country’s embassy for extraction. The only benefit over Iran or Russia is that they might speak the language.

NAUO (North Atlantic Union Organisation).

Weaponized insectoid robots are called drones, they’ve already been buzzing around killing people for over a decade.

As for why they aren’t using insectoid/centaur-like frames for infantry models, I’m guessing the training data. There is a decent amount of human motion capture data, and an unfathomable amount of video of humans moving that could be converted into motion tracking data through AI image processing.

As such the AI that runs these robots could be trained on huge amounts of virtual information based on real life scenarios, vastly reducing the time the AI needs to pilot actual robot frames to get any good. That is the primary bottleneck, so it makes sense humanoid robots would appear before centaur ones.

Still, there are undoubtedly parts of the military-industrial complex making centaur robots or different body plans, they’re just not being rolled out in combat scenarios yet.

The hat has a razor blade on the inside that flicks around, like an ice cream scoop.

Please stop trusting corporate media (whether social media or otherwise) when they give the impression that nothing is happening and nobody is fighting for their country. Please stop trusting corporate media saying you’re all useless and incompetent and it isn’t worth trying.

The revolution will not be televised. If you’re American, join some of those “useless protests” and talk to people. You’ll be surprised what is getting done.

Capitalism has ethics. Even if the profit motive were supreme, that would be an ethic. Choosing to be evil is an ethical stance.

But in practice capitalists are always ready to sacrifice their profits and prosperity to maintain hierarchies, and more specifically white supremacy. Capitalists will pay billions to bail out banks so that the banks maintain their hierarchy over the capital of the petit bourgeoisie.

Capitalists will pay trillions to fight wars to destroy a nation’s production capacity to prevent them from becoming socialist egalitarian, or to secure control of oil deposits that will produce mere billions in profits to shore up their dominance over the market.

Capitalists will burn down a low-status corporate department and spend millions on temporary replacements rather than admit their work is necessary. They will work employees to the bone rather than profit off their relaxed creativity.

Capitalist insurance companies will rather waste billions of dollars on birth complications rather than tell doctors to defer to midwives on birth positions. They will rather be in the lurch for millions of dollars of emergency healthcare for the medically bankrupt than provide preventative care.

In capitalism, profit is an excuse for exploitation. If you intend to exploit people and you’re upper class, there are always venture capitalists willing to give your idea a try. If you intend to empower people and have scientific studies to prove it’s profitable, then sadly they just need a couple more studies believe you.

And if you manage to crowdsource the funding to do the profitable empowering thing, inspectors and cops and vandals will come crawling out of the woodwork to tear you down. And if none of that sticks, they will create a competitor to operate at a loss to drive you out of business and restore the capitalist hierarchy.

Glad we agree liberal democracy is not a bulwark against fascism.

In Germany, disapproving of Israel is considered an unacceptably nuanced take on whether the holocaust was bad. That’s literally the legislative basis that feddit’s moderation is required to comply with. Germany, through it’s anti-Nazi and anti-genocide-denial policies, trapped its people in a situation where they are unable to condemn another genocide.

Authoritarian draconic standards are bullshit. Nuance can be used to overdamp the response to wrongdoing, but its absence can also leave responses underdamped, and assholes can selectively overdamp and underdamp responses in specific categories to serve their own interests. (A clear example is how wind turbines need to go through a lot of red tape to address the concerns of everyone in a wide area while meat industry farms can poison people without issue).

If we want justice, we have to be able to fight against these assholes in both directions - reducing the damping of overdamped systems to allow us to fight genocide effectively even when it doesn’t serve the interests of the powerful, while also increasing the damping of underdamped systems to prevent the powerful from oppressing people using fighting genocide as an excuse.

So yes, we do need nuanced takes on “whether genocide is bad”, sometimes. Other times these “nuanced takes” are indeed ploys to hold back appropriate responses. Which is which is going to depend on the specific situation.

In this case, feddit is complying with German law and policy to go to bat for Zionism, so their “nuance” can get fucked.

The Finns would like a word with you.