You have to be stupid to even become a cop these people don’t understand optics, they’re true believers

I so badly miss playing TF2 in the first few years it came out, still back in days when custom servers were king and you’d make friends with other random people who always played on the same servers. Games just don’t feel like that anymore smh

I love Lorde so much, this album blew my mind back when it came out

Liberals can’t make any media about resistance to exploitation that doesn’t do both sides bad.

Played Assassin’s Creed Mirage recently and the whole time the game was trying to make me think the rebels who wanted to free all of the slaves are actually kinda bad because they do violence sometimes. It’s not relevant to the main story really at all but they still shoehorn it in at every opportunity. Good luck convincing me that former slaves who want to kill their masters aren’t based.

Typing this out took me back to 2022 2011, when the Ukraine Libya movie was being presented as going well for them,

I am also limited in my understanding but I think there is a lot of animosity towards Assad government in Syria and also other places such as Lebanon and Gaza due to his perceived and verifiable inaction assisting the resistance. Other specific reasons for animosity I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak on but I’m aware they exist so it isn’t unsurprising to hear that some or many Syrian people are happy that he is gone.

I think, and really I am trying to grapple with stuff and learn about things as well so I’m not too sure, but I think biggest issue with Assad gov being toppled is that firstly and most importantly it will once again bring great instability and surely violence to the Syrian people, but will also greatly reduce the capacity for Hezbollah to be resupplied who I understand are in a pretty critical state after hot war with the Zionists. In addition to that you have factors such as Russian footholds in the region being compromised which I’m sure will be abused by US/zionist forces in ways I have not yet thought of.

It remains to be seen what HTS does and how things play out with the other factions but I do not see any way that this is a good thing. I find it hard to believe that HTS are not aligned with the americans/zionists, but hopefully at least they are reasonable with the Syrian people and as few suffer as possible.

Good point as a general rule of thumb nothing works on a bus ever, and the longer the bus trip is the more shit doesnt work

If this is actually the guy and he actually waved at CCTV camera like this, sheesh

hope GOG never changes, they introduced me to so many classic PC games that were before my time that id otherwise never have gotten to play

I feel like the differences are negligible if you aren’t hardline about it. The complaints I have seen people make are fair but I definitely don’t think they detract from the game in a substantial way. Majora’s Mask is one of my all time favorite games and I’ve also played the original dozens of times and nothing about the 3DS version was an issue for me.

Civ 6 is good but as a life long civ player I can’t recommend it in good conscious without all of the expansions and DLC, it just isnt a complete game without that stuff. Not sure if netflix includes that but even then for free its a fun enough game to play around with, though if you know your civ you would quickly see how much is missing without the additional content

probably more reliable than hitting up anyone in my contacts honestly

I hope I am soon blessed by the presence of the robotic drug selling good boy

Scary how many men take a woman not interacting with them with active disgust or disdain to mean they’re flirting and advances are welcome

Completely agree with what you have said, I guess my fear is that the compradors will influence economic policy in these countries to a degree that will undermine the dedollarization initiative at least in the short term. I’m totally with you in thinking that long term its against the material interests of BRICS nations to do this but I guess I have been taken off guard by some recent developments in this area and it has made me doubtful. Perhaps also the bad news this week in Syria and such has just put in a pessimistic mood.

I like to think that your analysis of the situation is the case but I’m becoming increasingly doubtful about the commitment of BRICS nations to overthrow the special privilege of the US Dollar. From my perspective too many of the parties involved rely on USD trade for their wealth and status. It seems to me like too many players in this alliance are economically bound by USD and are not interested at least right now in trading off short term material gains for potential bigger gains in the future by subverting USD trade.

It appears to me that the gains in multipolar non USD trade have been offset by the US Fed play to raise interest rates to suck dollars into treasury assets and then flood them back out into periphery economies since 2022 or so. I still have much to learn about MMT and economics in general but I’m certainly not as optimistic now about dedollarization now as I was 2-3 years ago.

That being said I think the overall trend of periphery economies orienting around China is right, and I think it will come down to that nations economic policy as the driving factor of whether or not BRICS can succeed in their stated objectives and tear down the USD dominated global economy.

Really good analysis here, I have more to say about this but just based off of your analysis I sadly think that the third option is the most likely. To me deployment of NATO troops seems like a way for the west to freeze the conflict as is and come back to it in a few years. As it stands Russia is making consistent gains in the Ukraine and I think your assessment of their unwillingness to directly strike NATO assets is correct, so to me the deployment of “peace keepers” seems like NATOs best bet to halt things at the current line of engagement. This seems possible to me considering the rhetoric this week especially from Zelinsky himself about possibly negotiating on the basis of Russia controlling territories that have had referendums with a plan to retake them in the future.

Specific pet peeve of mine for the transit in my city is building a Bus Rapid Transit line right along the path of an already existing network of rail lines which are under-utilized by the rail company, at a cost comparable to building a whole new LRT line, through an area of the city which used to be empty marshland that was conveniently purchased and started development by a friend of the mayor when the BRT line did rather than along one of the actual main corridors of the city, to a part of a the city that was already the best serviced by existing transit rather than one of the parts that are impossible to navigate without a car, in a city where we get a huge amount of annual snowfall and have a ridiculous deficit of road maintenance already (BRT route being another road that has to be plowed and maintained vs trains where u kinda can just put a plow on the front), while you are constantly litigating with the transit driver union and refuse to pay even close to an acceptable wage while simultaneously complaining that pre-covid service cannot be restored due to lack of drivers, and then proceeding to mostly abandon or stall any of the other proposed transit expansion in the city for almost a decade.

Outside of that specific example it really bothers me when people stand directly in front of the doors of a subway or tram car waiting to get on. Not only is it stupid and illogical if you want to actually get on the train but everywhere has ample arrows and signs indicating where you should stand to wait to get on so as to allow other people off.

Milel should be paying attention I can easily see him seeing the same fate in coming years

Hell yea I love the KHL updates please never stop.

I’ve relatively recently gotten back into watching hockey (NHL sadly) and I’ve been thinking how awesome it would be if there could be club competition between the NHL and KHL (maybe other leagues also im not knowledgeable enough) similar to how Champions League works in football. I caught a couple KHL games in the bar last time I was in eastern europe and I swear the level of play isn’t much different from NHL, I bet it would be a blast to see NHL teams face off against KHL teams in some kind of cup tournament.

Obviously the political climate rn is not conducive to this, but hopefully one day in the future this could happen.