The word has been associated with the worst kind of involuntary celibate people for a very long time. It’s a defining characteristic to many people when they use that term.
Internet conversations have no payoff. Your reputation among rude strangers does not matter. You don’t need to be right. If the conversation itself is not pleasant, you can just walk away.
So when I stop enjoying the engagement, I leave. I don’t try to get the last word; I just stop reading halfway through the message and close the tab.
I don’t think it’s a bot thing. Traffic is down for everyone and especially smaller independent websites. This year has been really rough for some websites.
Google and AI companies will continue to plunder the web. Websites - especially small independent ones - will see further traffic losses to AI summaries of their content.
Treating reading as a pleasant time instead of a goal is what got me reading again. School almost completely killed my desire to read by assigning and measuring it. I read what feels right at a pace that feels right for as long as it feels right.
The last thing I want is for my pastimes to be quantified and judged by another weird offshoot of the hustle culture.
I read the same story from Anthony Beevor’s book about the battle of Berlin, although I think it was a different chemical. The Red Army seemed to have a drinking problem.
Life in Soviet/Russian armies is grim. Many of the recruits come from remote regions so poor that they lack fridges, washing machines and even toilets (today as well [2], hence all the looting in Ukraine [3]). Broken-down equipment - either because it was crap from the factory or because someone along the chain sold off parts and fuel on the black market -, substandard equipment, shoddy living conditions, and on top of all of that (which would turn most Western soldiers into alcoholics already) come brutal hazing rituals [1] that traumatise those who manage to survive it (there's tens of thousands of incidents a year, and as late as 2006 hundreds of deaths a year), and the meatwave battle strategy that both past and current leadership have embraced.
No wonder that the Russian / Soviet / Russian army has always been associated with alcoholism, most of them self-medicate with it (or whatever other drugs they can get their hands on). And it's also no surprise given the traumatisation that many of the Russian soldiers act completely depraved on the battlefield - why not rape, torture and kill for fun, when you're probably not going to survive the war long enough to get held accountable?
To be fair it’s hard to reconcile with them being paid relatively high wages due to manpower shortages (since they are generally reluctant to send conscripts into Ukraine).
The Chinese twist always seems a bit forced to me. I have been spied upon my entire life by American companies and by the American government. I do not live in America.
It’s weird to compare the potential threat of Chinese spying to the ongoing reality of American spying.
I’m not validating the automatic anti-China sentiment you can sometimes get in these discussions, but there is a major difference between the two. If you live in any mainstream European, or for simplicity’s sake, ‘Western’ country, regardless of your feelings towards U.S. intelligence gathering, these are political allies who share intelligence as a matter of course anyway. China is an actively hostile power who just recently penetrated the domestic U.S. phone network.
Obviously skepticism on this topic is a generally good thing, but I think nihilism to the point that one thinks the U.S. is no different to China, Russia or North Korea is neither accurate nor particularly helpful.
As an individual I am more concerned about the spying that is effectively hostile to me personally. As a Westerner, I am fairly certain that this will be Western spying. I would expect a Chinese person to be more concerned with Chinese spying for the same reason.
Political allies or not, the US has been caught spying on us just the same.[0] US companies constantly spy on EU citizens and use the data they illegally collect to influence our habits. While I don't fear a military conflict with the United States, there is an ongoing threat of having our elections, our culture, and our purchasing habits influenced by US businesses.
I'm not saying that the US is no different from China. I am saying that unlike the Chinese threat, the threat of spying from the US government and US businesses has been going on for a while already.
I measure the wait times at the Berlin immigration office. This makes the residence permit application process a lot more predictable.
It's not super complex. A Django backend and a VueJS frontend. The small innovation is using localstorage to save a modification key, so that people can update their existing feedback without dealing with emails and logins. I also email people a reminder to update their feedback after 2 and 6 months, since people tend to forget to do that.
It's working pretty well. We gathered more feedback in a month than we'd normally do in a year or two. It's immensely useful in support to my residence permit application guides.
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