Stop making vertical territories. Just stop it. If it’s a long skinny shape on a map, it shouldn’t exist.

And Russia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia

Which one of these is Israel?

To a prior PM, it would be in extremely bad taste. But this bitch is nakedly fascist.

each ‘incident’ can v easily have been explained

You hear this from serial sexual harassers all the time. Every individual incident has plausible deniability. It’s the trend line that eventually catches up with you.

your type are to tightly wound up

My type being… big budget advertisers on YouTube?

There’s a reason we say we have a “Special Relationship” with the UK and not Spain.

So, one big juxtaposition is between Spain and the UK.

Both have access to natural gas reserves in the Atlantic. Both have enormous wind resources, due to their large coastlines. One of them has a government focused on keeping the retail price of energy low. Another has a government focused on keeping the profit generated by energy providers high.

The UK is seeing a surge in energy prices that has nothing to do with their actual supply of energy. They’re just pegging the retail price to the global spot price, because of decades of deregulation and rent-seeking. And because entrenched private interests hate competition, the roll-out of new energy supplies has been curtailed by a government incentivized to do nothing and allow the private sector to price gouge.

Spain’s real triumph is not simply its investment in domestic energy infrastructure but it’s socialist public policy with regard to energy pricing and distribution. The political rewards in keeping prices low has a knock-on effect of incentivizing the development of rapid new build-out in low-cost infrastructure.

Russian Politician: “We’re going to implement a nationwide psychological health care system [evil]”

Russian Treasury: “That’s going to cost money”

Russian Politician: “Just tell psychologists to do it for free.”

Russian Professional Association: “Now nobody wants to be a psychologist.”

Russian Politician: whispering to state security service

sound of Russian Professional Association getting thrown out a window

Incidentally…

Russia has an estimated population of 146.0 million as of 1 January 2025, down from 147.2 million recorded in the 2021 census. It is the most populous country in Europe, and the ninth-most populous country in the world. Russia has a population density of 8.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (22 inhabitants/mi2), with its overall life expectancy being 73 years (68 years for males and 79 years for females) as of 2023. The total fertility rate across Russia was estimated to be 1.37 children born per woman as of 2025, which is in line with the European average but below the replacement rate of 2.1.

By the end of 2024, the natural decline of the Russian population amounted to 596.2 thousand people, according to published data from Rosstat. Compared to the end of 2023, the indicator increased by 20.4% (from 495.3 thousand). However, this decline is offset by massive immigration, particularly from Central Asia.

This isn’t a real problem, it’s a meme problem. The country is at a historical peak of population, has ample neighboring nations with people eager to immigrate, and is experiencing a slight lull largely driven by the poor wartime economic performance.

And scratch the surface of any of these concerns. What you’ll discover isn’t a fear of population decline, it is a fear of ethnic Caucasian family lines experiencing a decline. Very specifically, the children and grandchildren of the kleptocrats running the country.

hed did a bad thing that one time

Far more than the one time. He had a whole routine about exploiting overseas labor to perform humiliating stunts.

It’s the same picture. Just ask anyone in Istanbul

I just feel old and stupid. I naively thought there could be something this time but they are all the same. I hate that I fell for it and couldn’t control myself.

I mean, what’s past is past. Absolutely no reason to feel bad because of a drunken hook-up. The stringing-along and ghosting seems more like a him problem than a you problem. More likely than not, this guy is just as insecure and flaky as he appears in hindsight.

It fucking sucks that we’ve got so many lemons in the dating pool. Your story is one I’ve heard a dozen different women of all different ages and experiences reiterate. A guy turns on the charm, you get swept off your feet, then he’s back to business as usual the next day and you realize he’s just a normal POS.

But we’ve got an urge for companionship, so we all keep putting ourselves out there. The struggle is real. Know that even if you’re lonely, you’re not alone. Lots of people feel this way and nothing you’re doing is bad or wrong, even if it feels frustrating.

One Night flings are rough precisely because you build a deep bond very quickly with someone who - in the long term - wasn’t going to work out. I’m not going to say “don’t do that” because people are horny and fucking is fun. But you can’t beat yourself up afterwards, because mixing guilt and horniness is miserable and ruins the fun part of fucking. Then you’re just left with this hollow urge divorced from the joy of sex.

I can say that finding love among friends (at least in my experience) tends to be more fruitful than trying to find friendship among lovers. Dragging someone out on a date a few times isn’t just about counting the encounters before hooking up, it’s about building a list of things you like to do together that you can do when you’re not naked.

And sometimes just going out and doing things you like to do, and meeting other people who do things you like to do, is the best way to find a long-term companion.

And if that’s going to parties and clubs - because you plan to keep clubbing straight through your retirement years - that’s great. But if you’re a golfer or a painter or a board game enthusiast or a mall rat, you gotta go find big groups of people doing this kind of thing and date from there. Cause the people you meet at bars are, more often than not, the kind of people who want to be at the bar for the rest of their lives.

Trump’s Pentagon insisted on a go-it-alone approach to Iran at the outset. This wasn’t NATO’s choice it was Hegseth’s choice.

Even fucking Chimp-in-Chief Bush Jr had the decency to assemble the “Coalition of the Willing” in Iraq. Rubio couldn’t be bothered to get the fucking Turks and Saudis on board, and they’ve hated Iran since the Ottoman Empire fell.

Absolutely bonkers to talk about this as some kind of NATO failure to comply when the treaty was never invoked to begin with. Doubly so, when you consider how many NATO bases are still ultimately being used by US forces to get hardware into position.

Ilya Remeslo sends Telegram post

A Pro-Kremlin Blogger

The regime could collapse any minute now.

If you want to pirate Brave Browser, I don’t think anyone will mind.

And why does it seem like they all hate Pewdiepie?

He took a fascist turn during Trump 1 and never really recovered his image. Got into a bunch of weird exploitative shit, not unlike Mr Beast. The most notable being when he tested the Fiverr service and paid five dollars to get Indian freelance actors to laugh and show a sign saying ‘Death to all Jews’.

After that, he started getting deplatformed and his following fell off considerably. So, like a bunch of other has-been YouTube starlets, he decided to get even more edgy and reactionary, further poisoning his image. It’s the same death spiral Russell Brand and Rob Schneider fell down.

I just don’t think they care about that as much as making money.

:-/

That’s Tankie Talk.

Iran has historically been a friendly trade partner with France.

By contrast, its straight up open season on any country in North Africa. Macron practically lead the charge when it came time to carpet bomb Libya. And he was all on board in the overthrow of the Syrian government.

If facebook stayed with just a few ads, that would not make value for the shareholders.

Artificial scarcity is its own driver of revenue. At that point, you’re not competing for space on the screen, you’re competing for number of people who see your content. “Do you want 5000 views or 50,000? Do you want them to see this once? Ten times in a month? Daily? That’ll cost you extra.”

The value of an ad has diminishing returns. One billboard on the side of the road attracts your eye. Ten in a big messy cluster get ignored.

Facebook could have leveraged this to command higher rates for their ad content, rather than trying to engage on sheer volume. Now the website is down the same rabbit hole as Yahoo.

It’s not the ceos who are the reason for all this. It’s that all this causes boards to chose ceos that operate this way.

The Founders trade out shares to partners who then occupy the board. Normally, one of the Founders is the original CEO, because they have a controlling stack in the firm. New board members are introduced by the founders and often have a personal relationship with them. And with stock swaps, the CEO of one company can sit on the board of another. Michael Dell sits on Broadcomm’s board for this very reason.

Tesla’s board is a classic example of this incestuous back-scratching. Robyn Denholm moved from CFO of Juniper Networks - a major supplier for Tesla - to the audit committee chair of Tesla (and yehaw, what a job that must have been, given their shady business practices). She also is an operating partner at Blackbird Ventures, a venture capital firm which is a major investor in xAI, another of Musk’s pet startups.

Once you climb to the top of these hierarchies (or you start getting into seriously investing in any of them) you start noticing these circular networks of leadership and trade. The Oracle / OpenAI / Nvidia circuit is another great example.

As for AI. They don’t care about replacing humans.

The very real and explicit and demonstrated belief among these tech billionaires is that they can automate away the need for humans - both as labor and as clients. They’re building (or, at least, trying to build) a financial closed loop.

😂 It’s between 2000 and 5000

The displaced are between 200,000 and 800,000.

Since when do we care about the aggressors in a conflict?

When the aggressor is Russian or Chinese.

The Russian march across Eastern Europe involved much more than raw manpower. Soviet Tanks were a force to be reconned with. Their use of artillery was inspired. Georgy Zhukov was a genius field marshal and outmaneuvered the fascist armies both retreating and advancing. He did not just win on numbers.

That said, you’ll find quite a few Cold Warriors who took the view - after the dust had settled - that Europe would have been far better united under a German military dictatorship than bifricated between NATO and the Soviet Union.