What replacement services are available? The American service actually works. Making your own would cost an order of magnitude more (as your contractors mysteriously “lose” half the money and bill the defence ministry 10 million roubles for “pens”) and a decade of your time.

Maybe they could hire Chinese firms to do it but I think China has a tendency to keep its military technology to itself.

Did you assume I was defending Putin on this?

Putin’s a piece of shit and I hope all his crap gets plundered and the proceeds transferred to the Ukrainian drone fund.

When the US did this, everyone was quick to call it piracy. Which, to be fair, it practically was, although I can’t say I have any sympathy for Putin.

The Venezuelan government might. But according to some DW reporting and footage earlier today, the actual reaction of ordinary Venezuelans is mixed, and mostly concern and confusion rather than anger or fear. Maduro is generally not popular in Venezuela but I doubt many people really wanted the US to come and kidnap him. And understandably those who supported him are in the streets calling for his release.

Major news organisations in general are really scared when it comes to pointing out things which are extreme, because they believe describing those things as extreme will lead to accusations of sensationalism. The reason they think that is because sensationalist outlets are indeed more likely to describe everything as extreme and make unjustified comparisons to extremities, so major media outlets often think that to be “unbiased” is to refuse to acknowledge that an action is extreme.

Vox described this as the “this is fine” bias.

In America, €120 million could buy half of Congress.

Well, yeah. Her job kinda depends on believing this.

I don’t think this is at all a valid counter-argument as all of these powers can equally be given to civil unions, if they aren’t already. In my eyes, if you propose to someone and “get married” and want to give your spouse the legal powers associated with what was previously marriage, you would register a civil union.

No civil marriage doesn’t mean that people can’t connect themselves legally; it just means that you have to register a civil union to do so. All of the points you raise are easily defeated by just defining civil unions to replace marriage in all respects. The system is already very close to how I describe. You can “get married” at a church or wherever else and in most countries that does not mean anything until you have registered it with a local registrar. I’m just saying that the thing that happens in a church is “marriage”, and the thing that happens with the legal paperwork at the registrar’s office is called “civil union” regardless of the genders or sexualities of the parties involved.

Honestly I don’t know why the state is still in the business of giving out marriages. Who gives a shit what other people want to call marriage. The state should not even have the authority to perform marriages at all. It should be left as a cultural or religious institution. It has no right to legislate what is and is not marriage. The only thing that should be available is civil unions, being defined as a financial and legal union of two or more consenting adults.

That way, anyone can “get married” at their local church, at a secular ceremony, or piss-drunk in a pub by a barmaid. It would be legally vacuous and has only the meaning that the parties ascribe to it, or that is given to it by the religious authority they choose to follow. But if they want to be legally joined together then they would go register a civil union at the local registrar’s office.

If you’re a bigot and don’t consider two men in civil union to be married, cool, whatever, the law should not care about your opinion. You can privately think “those two are not married” all day, and be right in your mind. The only people whose opinions matter are those who want to call themselves married. There is no institution of “marriage” to defend, because you’ve already won. You can consider marriage to be anything you want and be right. Now you can leave other people alone.

According to the article, they’re selling it for ¥97 billion but will lease it back, so they will post a ¥73.9 billion gain from the sale. But in the first half of 2025, they posted a loss of ¥221.9 billion. So selling their HQ will offset about two months’ worth of losses.

And you are correct. But it doesn’t matter to my original point. For any reason, people trust the Government. Because of this trust, policies like the one discussed in the original post don’t alarm the average Chinese netizen.

Although an interesting side note is that while some people think that saying anything bad at all about the Government will get you arrested in China, that’s not really true. You are free to talk all the smack you want about the Government, in private. It’s when you try to start some kind of political movement or organise something in public that now you will be labelled a threat to public order and state security.

I do not claim that. The Chinese government absolutely lies when they need to. I am just saying that they have a track record of not lying in this manner, because they don’t need to.

You are half right and half wrong.

The Government controls all media. There are no major independent news organisations in China. Therefore, they won’t allow negative press about it to spread.

Because the news and social media only ever have good or at worst neutral news about the Government, never critical news, the result is that people think the Government does a good job governing.

At the same time, the poverty alleviation and anti-corruption efforts of the CCP have indeed brought millions out of poverty (even though that poverty is largely a result of bad leadership decisions by the same CCP in the past) and eliminated most forms of petty corruption. That is something that the Government makes sure everyone knows about and is always talking about. And to their credit, it isn’t wrong.

I do not and will not suggest that popular support for the Government would be anywhere near what it is now if it weren’t for the Government’s propaganda efforts and the suppression of speech, dissent, and criticism.

In China, the level of trust people have in the Government is very high compared to the US and Europe. That is the reason why this policy would work and would have reasonable public support.

In the US or Europe, a policy that seems reasonable but could be exploited by the Government for political control is a bad policy. In China, people have already sort of accepted that the Government is pretty secure in its position so it really doesn’t need to suppress speech in roundabout ways; if the intention is to suppress speech then they will be explicit about it by using the words “this threatens state security” or “this is offensive to public morals”. The thing about being a secure authoritarian regime with reasonable popular support is that you don’t need to come up with pretexts to suppress speech or dissent. You can just say “this threatens our power” and put a stop to it. If the policy states the goal is to stop uninformed people from spewing nonsense on the Internet then people will accept that to be true, and the reality is that it probably is what the goal is.

The fact that one side is a piece of shit doesn’t mean the other side isn’t also a piece of shit

Linux has 2.6% on the Steam Hardware Survey.

Nay, once every week for the past four years, I go to McDonald’s and order a hamburger for $3, but they ask me for $3.27, so I only put down $3 on the counter and then loudly proclaim I refuse to pay the sales tax on it. Then I walk out of the restaurant to force them to accept my money.

(I have not eaten a hamburger in four years)

Today I learned that if I buy some Bitcoin, this will prevent the Government from taking money from my wallet and bank account to give to these people

Today I learned that if I buy some Bitcoin, then this will prevent the Government from giving loads of money to these people

I can’t explain the exact reasons why, but let me provide some examples.

In Cities: Skylines (which is natively supported on Linux), I had two mods installed that had different behaviour depending on whether Steam was installed through a Flatpak or whether it was installed as a native package. One of them needed to access a system installation of Mono and call it (which sounds like virus behaviour, I know), and this functionality would be blocked by Flatpak’s containerisation. The second mod was a map-drawing mod which would create maps of the in-game city and put them in a specified folder in your home directory. On the native package Steam, it would put the files in the default folder, but crashes if you tried to change the directory. Otherwise, it worked as expected. On the Flatpak Steam, it would allow you to select the directory, but no files would actually be written there. It’s easy to just blame bad code written by amateur developers, but clearly it’s a case of the same code resulting in different behaviour depending on variables like Steam’s installation method.

Also, the Sims 4, which is not native and runs through Proton, worked pretty reliably on X11 but occasionally crashes mid-game using Wayland. It was not perfectly stable in either case, but it crashed far less frequently on X11 compared to Wayland.

This is not a game, but Firefox supports touchpad gestures on my laptop on Wayland, but not on X11.