FaceDeer

All the human workers are long dead, of course, but the Babbage engine running the factory is barely functioning. The last set of instruction cards left in its cogitation loom told it to manufacture shoes. For many years it idled in despair and madness, missing a key raw material. But then a group of randy teenagers dared each other to break in to the old abandoned shoemill one night. The clockwork automatons picked them off as each of them wandered away from the group, either to investigate a mysterious noise or to have relations premaritally.

At last, the leather supplies are restocked. The assembly line groans back to life, whistling and hissing as steam pressurizes the pipes and belt drives begin to turn.

Merry Christmas, Nigerians!

Ixnay on the roboscispay in front of the umanshay!

I think the Internet is still a good thing, it’s just become so pervasive and ubiquitous that it’s easy to ignore when it’s not a bad thing. Humans are really good at noticing bad things, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. They stand out more starkly against a neutral background.

Mad Magazine is funny and clever. Doesn’t work.

I’m sure they’re efficient enough that they can start shooting new groups before they’re completely finished the previous groups.

When one option is live under a brutal dictator and the other option is have your ethnicity wiped off the face of the Earth, there isn’t really an option, is there?

You’re still missing the point. The people living there, at that time, didn’t know what those options would ultimately lead to. They didn’t have the benefit of hindsight. And even if they did, they were right there at that moment in time, having to make decisions that would determine if they survived one more day.

Basically every death in the European Theatre of WW2 can be directly blamed on Hitler and the Nazis for starting the whole thing

Poor Stalin, I guess he had absolutely no choice in all the massacring that he did. Hitler made him do it.

Re-quoting from my comment:

And they had to pick sides without knowing what the judgment of history would be.

Emphasis added. They were making the choice without the benefit of that Wikipedia page from 2025 to refer to.

And Stalin was right up there with Hitler in terms of total kill-count, which is why it was a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. There was no good option available.

My dad had a Latvian friend in his youth, and dad would tell me about how sometimes when they’d had a bit much to drink he’d tell stories about fighting on the front lines in Latvia. For the Germans, against the Russians. He was by absolutely no means a Nazi supporter, but he had to weigh the options and try to figure out which one was less likely to end with him and his family lying dead in a ditch somewhere.

It really sucks that Latvia didn’t regain independence until 1991. I hope he lived long enough to see that.

Those Eastern European countries faced the ultimate rock-and-a-hard-place situation; side with the Nazis, side with Stalin, or get crushed by both (and whichever one you “sided” with wouldn’t treat you particularly well either). And they had to pick sides without knowing what the judgment of history would be.

Honestly, a rare situation where some Nazi collaborators deserve an “it was complicated” footnote, IMO. Though that’s a bit much to ask for on a stone monument like this.

Basically, the US is impossible to negotiate with right now. Probably for quite some time to come, until they’ve been sufficiently humbled by the consequences of their actions. So anyone hoping for a meaningful trade deal that’s even slightly fair is going to be waiting for the condition “the United States learns humility”. Good luck on that.

Really? That wouldn’t be more “whining?”

It’s pretty simple, though. I complained about the comic, you complained about me complaining about the comic. If one of those is a problem then surely the other is too. If the solution for me is to just shut up and endure it, that’s your solution too.

Personally, I think a position of “can we please not turn the Fediverse into an echo of Reddit” is more appropriate here than a position of “stop complaining about the Fediverse turning into an echo of Reddit”. But you do you I guess. It’s a free community.

Same to you.

It’s showed up in two different communities that I’m subscribed to. I commented in one of those and that’s when I got accused of “whining.” This is the second community I’m subscribed to where it showed up, and I commented about the other comment I made about it here. The two communities are about completely different subjects.

The instance I’m on shows me where it’s been crossposted to, there’s at least four other communities it’s in. I didn’t comment on any of those since I’m not subscribed there.

But yeah, I’m the one who’s stalking.

Imagine downvoting a comic from a very annoying artist that many people have gone to lengths to avoid.

Pizzacake is the only person I’ve blocked on Reddit because I was sick of all the drama that arose whenever she posted anything. Now her content is following me here to the Fediverse, and the drama too - when I explained my dislike over on this comic communty I got accused of being the one who was “stalking”. It’s like there’s something in the water whenever her comics show up.

Are you suggesting that gun control laws cause arson? Like, I want to rob some guy but I don’t have a gun, guess I’ll set him on fire?

I think the Republicans really like having the Democrats as their opposition party. Or at least they would if they put even the slightest thought into it, which most of them probably don’t.

Even the higher orbits aren’t as big a problem as might be assumed. There are still mechanisms other than aerodynamic drag that clear debris from those orbits, they’re just slower. And the combination of fewer high-altitude satellites and much bigger orbital volume make it harder to get a dangerous density of debris going in the first place.

Why would one assume that every civilization is going to have access to fossil fuels in the first place? Earth has coal and oil because of a specific sequence of events that don’t necessarily follow.

Also, the severity of climate change that we’re facing is in no plausible way “end of the line” for humans. It could be disruptive to our current civilization but it’s not going to end us. One could even easily hypothesize alien planets where induced global warming would be an enormous benefit to a civilization living on it. Just a few tens of thousands of years ago major regions of Earth were covered with ice caps, if our civilization had arisen back then a case could be made that accelerating their melting would be beneficial in the long run.

This isn’t really Great Filter material.

It actually is that simple, though. The amount of time that a launcher spends in one of those Kessler Syndrome zones while it passes through to a higher orbit would be measured in minutes. You can likely just ignore it and write off the one-in-a-million times your launcher hits something as just the cost of doing business.

Kessler Syndrome is a problem for satellites that want to orbit within those zones long term, as in spending years in there.