Nah, that stuff is the Dictatorship Of The Proletariat, which is a supposed way to Communism, rather than Communism itself, and as the “dictatorship” in the name indicates, it’s an authoritarian regime.

The valid criticism of Communism is not that it’s authoritarian is that in over a century all countries who tried to get there took the authoritarian path and not a single one ever left that stage and reached Communism - in other words, Communism seems to be a unachieveable ideal.

Like all Prima Donnas, they’re meant to be admired from a distance…

Even in the Working From Home age, that content is Not Suitable For Work because the blood frequenty rushing away from one’s brain isn’t good for productivity.

Nah, I remember back when Corbyn was the leader of the Labour Party and the BBC gleefully participated in the campaign to slander him, including in a news program having as a background a large picture of him digitally altered to put a Soviet hood on his head.

I also remember countless “two side” discussions hosted by the BBC on things like worker rights or the Environment were they put a professional politician on the side against it facing a total amateur on the side for it.

The BBC’s “two sides” has always been a multi-layered propaganda format, starting by the small detail that any social and political subject which is not ridiculously simple has more than 2 options to interpret and tackle it - in other words, more than 2 sides - and going into the above mentioned point that their supposedly open “giving equal voice to both sides” is actually controlled by their choice of the subject matter, who represents each side and even the interviewer’s take on each side and accompanying materials (a typical example would be them reporting as event as “such and such happened” when the source is IDF versus “According to Hamas such and such happened” when the source is Hamas).

The BBC are very sophisticated in how they do it, but their output is heavily spinned and propagandistic.

Yeah, GoGo need to improve their Linux support since at the moment they seem to just “go along with it” without putting any effort into it

That said, with stuff like Lutris (can only speak of that since I never used Heroic) which can use GoG’s API to access your account and download games and has GoG-specific install scripts, it’s also a reasonably seamless experience to game in Linux from GoG and none of it is tied to a proprietary vendor solution like Steam + Proton, so it’s a lot more flexible and friendly for those who want to do their own tweaking - for example all my games in Lutris run sandboxed using firejail for extra security and blocking network access, but I can’t do that for Steam.

GoG is pretty much a totally open solution (you need not use their API and can just download an offline installer and install it however you see fit) whilst Steam is tracking and controlling your installs, game launching and in some cases game playing, so that means gaming with Steam is much more tightly coupled to both their code and their servers and thus Steam is always going to be more ill-fitted to the traditional hacker ethos in Linux than GoG.

Finally, keep in mind that Steam’s enhanced Linux support is just a natural consequence of their strategy of trying to protect themselves from any Microsoft funny business with Windows by creating their own Windows-independent ecosystem, with Linux being a natural shortcut to do so cheaply.

Funilly enough as somebody who has been using the Internet since being a working class teen in a poor European nation in the early 90s and thus knowing all about pirating, GoG is what made me stop pirating games (and even after they came up with GoG Galaxy I still kept downloading offline installers, plus my purchases in Steam have always been pretty limited in comparison to those in GoG exactly because in Steam my access to install a game can be removed at any time) whilst things like Netflix never stopped my pirating of Movies and TV-Series exactly because it was a streaming service which I would have to pay forever to maintain access to the Films and Series I liked rather than a Film and Series store were I could buy to keep (and, adding to this, during the peak period of VHS tapes and DVDs I actually did buy a lot of physical media).

Anecdotal, I know, but it’s funny that my behaviour over the years almost perfect matches what you describe.

It’s my impression that the epidemic of parasites in American is mainly of the full sized human kind.

I believe it’s called Regulatory Arbitrage - using the time gap between a new technology appearing that allows new ways of doing something which have yet to be Regulated and Lawmakers getting around to regulating it, to run an unregulated (yet legal) business - and indeed as you pointed out it has been the most common business model of the largest startups since at least the 2010s.

I think your most demanding use of databases was in tiny environments with tiny datasets and relaxed performance metrics compared to my own experience in designing systems that include databases.

MySQL and Oracle DB are totally different beasts for totally different needs, even if they’re both relational databases.

Further, the Oracle DB predates MySQL.

MySQL was created exactly because at the time there were either these massive Enterprise Class behemoth expensive databases such as Oracle DB and IBM’s Db2 or stuff like Access and hacked Excel sheets being used as “databases”, so there really wasn’t a proper database for things like inventory systems for small and mid-sized companies - they either used Access which was a joke (didn’t even had Transactions, so prone to get corrupted) or they paid a lot for licenses for the big databases which also required expensive machines to run them on.

One could say that MySQL made a lot of the modern Internet possible because it was Open Source and ran on Linux so you could for free make a dynamic website (say, a small online store) on top of a stack with it at the bottom (and Apache at the top and some custom middle layer in something things like PHP - remember that these were the 90s and Python only became popular later) on a pretty basic Linux server somewhere and that was enough until you got really big. You could do it with Oracle DB at the bottom also, but it was expensive and not really worth it unless you were serving tens or hundred of thousands or requests per minute.

That said, I agree that Oracle DB wasn’t revolutionary, it just worked well with all kinds of loads, even extreme ones, as long as you knew what you were doing.

The point I was making was that the Oracle DB was the only decent product Oracle ever created, not that it was revolutionary.

Historically, the only thing Oracle ever made which was good was their database, and even that is only worth it beyond a certain size of dataset and number of simultaneous requests being served.

In the Racist mind the criticism of how their judgement standards and choices of supporting or not a person or State are different depending on the target person’s race, always ends up interpreted as “an attack on a Race” because Racists cannot even begin to conceive the idea that “All humans and their actions should be judged independently of their Race”.

When a Racist voices criticism of an instance of double-standards depending on Race being used, they are motivated by a desire to attack the Race which benefits from such double standards, so in their minds that must be the reason why other would attack such Race-related double standards and in their Racist minds it’s inconceivable that the criticism could be against any such double standards no matter who benefits and against the entire mental architecture of seeing and judging people as Race-members rather than as human beings,

In the minds of Racists everything everybody says or does about other people is determined by Race, so criticism of Racism itself is invariably seen as an “attack on a Race” in the mind of the Racist.

(Aside from this poster’s response to my post, other examples of what I mean can easily be found in how Trump supporters respond to criticism of their Racist actions - their responses often follow exactly the same pattern as the poster above)

Obviously thanks to their circular logic that “any criticism of Race-based double standards can only be explained as Racism against the Race which benefits from it”, Racists feel no shame about their own Racism, since it justifies itself as a reaction to what they interpret (following said circular logic) as the Racism of critics.

I weep for Germany and all the Germans who are Humanists rather than Racists: it must be hard living surrounded by so many people whose views on their fellow human beings fit the very same architecture of thinking of people as “first and foremost members of Races”, as the Nazi ideology.

Kinda makes me think when I, as an immigrant over there, was a member of the Green Party in Britain before the Leave Referendum: great forward thinking people who were genuinelly good persons who wanted a better world for everybody, all the while the rest of British Society turned out to be mainly composed of dumb racists.

Still today I use the lessons I learned in British politics, since IMHO they were maybe a decade ahead of the rest of Europe in the shift to the Far Right (their version is just posher).

I think that the reaction of most mainstream German politicians to the Israeli-Genocide has made it painfully obvious that they’re deeply Racist, since they justified unwavering support for a regime commiting a Genocide along ethnic lines - were amongst, other things they murdered tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity - by saying that they “unwaveringly” support the ethnicity that said genocidal regime claims to represent: it doesn’t get much more Racist than justifying sending weapons to guys mass murdering children along ethnic lines because the ethnicity of the murderers is one specific ethnicity rather than a different ethnicity.

Not only is the moral distance from “We support Genocidal mass murderers because of their race” to supporting the quasi-Nazi AfD miniscule compared to what it would be if the starting point had instead been “No kind of oppression can be justified by the race of the oppressors”, but even the AfD ideology itself of “The German people should be able to do whatever they want to other ethnicities and nationalities” is morally not that distant from the “This specific race should be able to do whatever they want to other ethnicities and nationalities”.

In summary, the actions that the SPD and CDU/CSU (and even the Greens, for their eternal shame) have been unwaveringly supporting “for the Jewish People” are even more violent than those the AfD have been supporting “for the German people”.

Clearly the German Political class never strayed far from the way of thinking that underpinned NAZISM (they mostly moved a specific ethnicity from the “untermenschen” to the “ubermenschen” column) and hence the distance to get back to the “old” “principles” was always much shorter than their performative anti-Nazism led most people to believe.

I suggest the counter is to stop respecting Intellectual Property for anything registered in the US, not just US Copyright but also Patents and Trademarks.

The US doesn’t actually make much and is hugely dependent on Intellectual Property to extract wealth from other people making stuff.

Nah, there’s inherent dangers in humans eating humans, such as prions.

Best cut the rich into little pieces, feed them to pigs and then eat the pigs.

It’s still 5€ per month.

It’s all bread & circus and they’re cutting down on the bread.

They probably told the bot to combat anti-semitism so the bot ended up combating the propaganda of the very people associating Jewisheness with being pro-Genocide.

I like to think most modern men wouldn’t actually describe an attractivr woman as nothing more than a sex doll.

Might be wrong, though.

As soon as the same rules they want to apply to everybody else are applied to Fascists, they’re immediately convinced they’re victims.

So yeah, as soon as the pretty little Fascist ends up treated as a pussy-with-legs with no upsides for herself (so, not a trade but a taking by people with more power than she has) even though she’s ben part of making sure that legally there is no such thing as sexual harassment, she’ll feel like a victim.