Well, thx, but I already have a couple of noname Chinese cables with braided cover (to avoid breaking) which seem to be as good as anything else I’ve touched, and were kinda cheap.

No strategy was involved in buying them, though, so I’ll remember you advice.

“This shit” was said in the context of a society exactly opposite to anglosphere, where being “poor” is an indulgence for violating every moral rule, every promise, every obligation and every law.

More than that, it was said about the exact people who are, relatively speaking, not poor, rather almost privileged, but are hateful and envious of everyone actually doing useful work, and consider corruption good because in their opinion a bureaucracy worker stealing something entrusted to them is “a respected in the society person collecting rent from their position” or something like that.

The profession of a schoolteacher in Russia pays shit, which is why 3 kinds of people want that - those who are too dumb for other work, those who are idealistic, and those who want to feel that they are important and powerful (power over children) even more than to be paid well.

There are more people of the 2nd kind than you think, but those were of the 3rd undoubtedly. 1st kind is almost extinct - it’s not hard to find a job that pays better, if you don’t want power over children.

I think it’s clear how the 3rd kind intersects with sympathies to sociopathic behavior, and sympathies for corruption and organized crime.

EDIT: Oh, I just realized you thought they were bootlickers and hateful of poor people in this memory of mine. No, they considered that BS to be good for poor people. Basically hateful of capitalism most when it’s many small businesses honestly competing, but thinking oligopoly and state capitalism would be better. They considered me to be on the side of some “rich” people who hurt the poor. While big company owners and such were not, because they are apparently doing lots of charity etc and are respected people. So the “rich” they’d hate would be the “middle class”, not the “boss class”.

Judges are not supposed to work for the majority. They are supposed to work for justice.

Justice in most cases means opposing political power (formal in this case).

Thus they should be selected in some way radically different from how political power is formed.

Sortition is one way, if you don’t want some entrenched faction reproducing itself. Would be better than US too. But still sortition from the pool of qualified people, that is, judges, and not just every random bloke who applies, of course.

I mean, Australians won’t care a lot after Europeans have scraped their continent

OK, where I live the price difference is not the same.

and you know it will charge your phone at the fastest speed it’s capable of

Are you really advocating for buying an Apple-branded USB-C cable?

That’s not surprising, but if that doesn’t change, things won’t get better.

You don’t want oligarchy and she’s on oligarchy’s side. Please remember what made Trump win the first time.

I don’t expect her to improve things at all. Only compared to what would happen if Trump would win.

It’s just hard to trust them. So - buying an Apple laptop to install Linux there? Doesn’t seem to make much sense, though Linus Torvalds seems to be of a different opinion.

anticommunist propaganda

As if that was needed to show how communists do things.

people feel like they’re getting fucked, and Trump offers a clear, simple narrative of who is fucking them

Correct.

Kamala comes across more as representing the political establishment, and her messaging doesn’t tap into that dissatisfaction or contrarian nature

Not only that’s correct, but she’s still your enemy. It’s just a situation where one has to choose what’s worse. From my point of view far from USA - Trump is immediately worse. But that doesn’t mean Harris is going to radically improve things.

It’s sad you have no third strong grassroots movement, but that seems to be the case in every shitty election.

Russia, when it supposedly had those, first was choosing between Yeltsin and his “kinda democrats, but with that smell” and “red-brown” communists with Stalin pics and swastikas, second between Putin and senile communists, the third one was between thinly masqueraded Putin and rich city kids, and then it kinda lost meaning. Trump is kinda similar to the “red-brown” side in the first example.

One can find many such example.

He says that fear is a bigger motivator than love.

He’s correct in a sense you may not notice.

Those voters fear Harris and what she represents, and love some idea of what GOP could in theory represent.

So the fact that Trump is shit means less for them as it’s on the side they love, while Harris being stronger makes them even more afraid.

That is, the best strategy for Dems to insure victory would be to successfully present Trump as having a potential to win to his own voters. Then they would care about him being a felon and such.

I don’t get why even use their “blessed” hardware.

When I was at school, a few things made me want it:

1. Apple was still kinda fine back then, playing nice with FOSS community;

2. I had good memories from using QuickTime under Windows 2000;

3. I’ve been Jobswashed by a few books for kids saying how innovative he was;

4. I had a PSP, it was really cool to use for listening to music, playing games, reading books in the Web (over wi-fi) and even Skype, and I thought iPhones seem kinda similar;

5. I was possessed by imitated (was bored, wanted to feel something real and heroic) romantic feelings and real (bright hair, greenish-gray eyes, warm smile, subtle voice, and at that moment she seemed intelligent and nice ; turned out not as honest though) sexual desire of one girl who had an iPhone, a perfect product placement, one can say;

6. Apple’s UIs back then seemed very usable, only later I actually tried them and realized that even Windows makes me less furious;

7. It still wasn’t today’s Apple, they seemed trustworthy.

None of this applies today.

I dunno what that was, but I got a cup of something transparent and not tasty once at BK. Don’t think I felt too bad, maybe cause I stopped drinking that immediately.

OK, punch tape it is then.

It’s baffling, you can do a lot of tasks with a compact version of PDP-11 (there were two Soviet clones, I don’t remember which of them is which - one was a proper one, and could be used as a terminal server too, another had the monitor board simplified, IIRC, making it more of a normal PC of that time, just with PDP-11 CSA and the OS was RTX-11 in essence, but reverse-engineered and localized and with hardware drivers for those machines).

(I know it’s a different period and they had floppies.)

Why do we need such enormously complex fragile things? We rely on them so much that if, say, a “global thermonuclear war” really happens, with following hunger, movements of population, rapid climate changes, - our civilization is profoundly fucked.

Magnetic tape?

Tape backups, baby.

No, I don’t have a library of those. I don’t even have a tape drive.

Russia, the social group - eh, schoolteachers

Their views were in general along the lines that there are poor people and there are rich people. Poor people owe nobody nothing (including respect to property rights, personal space, privacy and so on), and are owed everything. Rich people vice versa, it’s them paying with rights for their asocial riches.

Now who’s poor is not absolute, it’s who owns less than deserved, and what’s deserved is big for their friends and similar-minded people. And who’s rich is the same, but owning more than deserved, and if they don’t like you, you deserve less.

It’s the kind of people who love Stalin.

Oh, we are being enthusiastic about the state boot again.

I mean, since corps are already using it to their ends, then it’d be probably a good thing to stomp them right back with that boot.

But I’d like a clean humanist solution more.

That’d involve, for example, commissioning a FOSS P2P post-Web system which would replace Google’s and Facebook’s and others’ services. A few dozens of nation states, not poorest on Earth, could do that.

That system would be simpler and cheaper than their missiles and jet planes and drones, while so tremendously useful to kill once and for all this particular threat.

Like those Locutus and ghost keys things, which are not a working thing yet, but very promising.

There is an opinion that this is what allows corporate and other power to exist legally. Otherwise it’d just all go Al Capone again, not vanish nor diminish.