ssj2marx

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ssj2marx ,

I hate this dunk because it's clearly shown in the original video that the DPRK officer saluted Trump first. The president salutes like fifty Marines every single day, it's not strange for him to reflexively salute someone else without thinking about it.

ssj2marx ,

It was a diplomatic meeting, what were they gonna do? Kidnap the president of the united states?

ssj2marx , (edited )

Most of the ones that do end up regretting it /shrug

This is wrong - it's not that they end up regretting it so much as most of them never want to go to South Korea in the first place.

ssj2marx ,

upgrade their lives to South Korean national

Considering that North Korean defectors are a heavily discriminated against minority in South Korea, this is unlikely to be an attractive offer.

ssj2marx ,

What can “the west” really do to prevent or stop troops from NK being sent to the Ukraine front?

Stop sabotaging peace talks, pressure Ukraine to accept the terms as they exist now before they get worse, lift the sanctions on North Korea in order to incentivize them to integrate with the rest of the world, withdraw US military equipment from South Korea. Kim Jong Un is often presented in American news like a crazy person, but truthfully he (and the rest of the actors in the North Korean state) is a rational actor and the "hermit kingdom" is not an aspirational goal of the DPRK but a state of affairs that has been forced upon them by decades of sanctions and isolation - give them a reason to be neutral, and assurances that they won't be stabbed in the back (as they have been in previous deals with Western countries), and there's a good chance they'll take it.

ssj2marx ,

Ukraine had an opportunity to keep the Donbas by implementing the Minsk Agreements. Zelensky literally ran on the promise of ending the war and implementing the agreements. This path was not chosen by Russia, it was chosen by the Ukrainians, who refused to reconcile with their Russian-speaking minority groups. With every passing day, the deal will only get worse for the Ukrainians, and the sooner they accept the better the deal they will get.

But instead America and Europe are ready to do whatever it takes to throw every single Ukrainian body directly into Russian (and North Korean) artillery.

ssj2marx ,

the worse country in the world to live it

worst* in*

And I dunno about that. North Korea's average soldier age isn't forty-five.

ssj2marx ,

The 18% figure is a biased sample from an anti-DPRK NGO. More comprehensive research into North Korean defectors by Cho Cheon-hyeon for his book Defectors indicate that most North Korean defectors simply want to make money in China, with only about 40% of defectors wanting to go to South Korea.

So I did misremember, but my point still stands on the fact that most of them don't want to defect to South Korea, even before taking into account that even at their 2009 peak defectors were a tiny fraction of a percent of North Korea's population and the existence of them in no way implicates all of North Korean society in secretly wanting to escape.

ssj2marx ,

My point is that if you see people salute you and you salute them back, do it enough times and it will become a reflex. The response to Obama bowing to someone in a culture where bowing is totally normal was equally stupid, but it was conservatives doing it instead of liberals.

ssj2marx ,

The average age of Ukrainian soldiers fighting Russia is 43-45. Ukraine is almost certainly the worst developed country to live in right now.

Plus, North Korea may be poor by western standards, but they have a lot of comforts that many third world countries lack, so even if you discount my example they're still not the worst by a wide margin.

ssj2marx ,

I remember having the Extigy, and having problems getting it work properly with basically every single game I owned.

ssj2marx ,

I can't think of a better endorsement, tbh.

ssj2marx ,

I guess the idea is that it's an entire imac but in a VR form factor, trouble was they didn't have anywhere near the app support that you would need to make that idea work

ssj2marx ,

I used to fix radios, does that count as IT? I would mostly just swap cards since everything's digitized now but every now and then I would get something old and have to jury rig it because the parts haven't been manufactured in over ten years.

Before that I worked at Target, before that I was in theatre, and I'm currently back in school.

ssj2marx ,

I gotta wonder, the more this kind of stuff picks up steam the more risky Chinese companies are going to view investing in American exports. When, if ever, do we reach the tipping point where Chinese companies currently selling things that simply aren't produced in America anymore stop sending them because the risk is too high?

ssj2marx ,

Well one is talking about a personal buyer choosing to buy a $200 HDMI cable that cost $0.50 to manufacture and spent $5 on marketing, and the other is talking about Chinese companies investing millions of dollars into shipping goods across the Pacific potentially deciding that the risk of their deliveries not being able to be made is more than the gains of selling them in that particular country, so they're not related concepts at all.

ssj2marx ,

Bethesda announced that players could download a new series of missions for a group known as the Track Alliance. The problem is that The Vulture is the second mission in the Tracker Alliance, and it costs $7 to buy. But it'll actually cost players $10 because they must purchase 1,000 Starfield creation credits to afford it.

So they put the first mission out for free, but it turns out the first mission was a fucking advertisement. I remember being super pissed when Dragon Age pulled this shit.

And of course they pull the classic cost-obfuscation trick because it would just be far too convenient to just be able to buy a DLC for actual money and then download it.

ssj2marx ,

This week in "simulations trying to mimic reality end up showing why the socialists are right"

ssj2marx ,

The western world's quality of life requires endemic poverty in most of the rest of the world to be sustained. That poverty is created by western financial institutions and western militaries, which have built and enforce a global system of unequal exchange, where the trade systems between western and nonwestern countries are favorable to the western ones, to the tune of siphoning trillions of dollars from the nonwestern world every year.

It's really very simple. If capitalism worked, why hasn't it worked for the hundreds of countries that have done it for the past century in central and south america, africa, and asia?

ssj2marx ,

It really depends on the government keeping corruption under control, keeping monopolies from forming, keeping regulatory capture from occurring.

So, Capitalism's success depends on the government preventing Capitalism from doing the things that it always inevitably does? Great system you've got there.

ssj2marx ,

But it looks cool and that's totally worth buying into a proprietary ecosystem and getting something incompatible with 99% of bike parts.

ssj2marx ,

I would love a Kei truck, but I don't live in a state where you can legally have one. That said I really think that if a Japanese manufacturer brought a barebones electric Kei to the American market they could make a killing because "people who want a truck but not a massive truck" is a totally unserved market segment.

ssj2marx ,

People will say, "but then how could a website like YouTube exit at all?"

To which I say that we should retvrn to sharing funny videos via long email chains.

ssj2marx , (edited )

Sometime before the end of this decade I think we're going to see the opposite - regulation that makes blocking ads illegal in the same way the DMCA makes cracking copyright protection illegal. They'll package it with some kind of anti-CP thing and then call all the people who oppose the bill pedos.

ssj2marx ,

I've got no problem paying money for a service that's worth it. I still buy games on Steam even though I know how to pirate them because Valve's service is so goddamn convenient it beats piracy in many ways.

Netflix used to be that good, and when YouTube Red rolled out I bought a year of it. But things have deteriorated significantly since then and the price has only gone up.

ssj2marx ,

Yeah I haven't had harmful application on my computer in over a decade. I feel like you really have to go out of your way to get one these days (not including spyware that you download intentionally, like Windows 11).

ssj2marx ,

School computers back then were a wild west. I remember having Starcraft on the school shared drive and playing it in homeroom.

ssj2marx ,

This isn't a huge deal yet but I suspect that if it becomes a huge deal we might see companies start trying to verify their oldest accounts.

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