It doesn’t happen at the docks. They get loaded into shipping containers on trucks and on freight trains, so by the time it gets to the ship, it’s well hidden. And they don’t get on a ship bound for Russia either. The destination is more likely China or the Baltics.

Docks don’t have time to x-ray everything so some always get through, especially the ones where well-practised crime has generated authentic looking documentation for what’s supposed to be in the container.

Now who’s talking about morals?

Classic whataboutism.

I’m willing to admit that our system is run by absolute cretins who have only themselves and their own best interests at heart and if we had any balls we’d do away with the lot of them.

Dare you say the same?

Prediction: This won’t happen in the next 50 years. And it will be at least 100 if Reform or someone like them wins any election before then.

Best case scenario, the UK might manage to negotiate itself into the sort of relationship Europe has with Norway or Switzerland, basically done underhand without the public getting to vote on anything. Except elections, of course.

So, how much do you think it would cost to bribe the security at their meeting location?

Understandable. That’s the sort of cowed mentality you have to take when you don’t want to invoke the ire of an authoritarian government.

Heaven forfend you might have an independent thought.

Careful now. Whoever won the civil war would be China, so “China” would have won no matter what.

The question here is how well people who aren’t ethnically Han Chinese, people who don’t speak Mandarin as a first language, and people who have ideologies that compete with the government’s own would be treated if the other side won it, because the China that won the civil war isn’t particularly nice to a lot of those people.

A tar-and-feathering of offending parties would be cathartic for sure, so I’m not against your sentiment, but the word you’re looking for is probably “vicious”.

(“Viscous” means thick and goopy. Possibly also sticky. Thus, tar.)

Many of these services won’t accept a static image, which is all that site provides.

People who are racist against Chinese are very unlikely not to also be racist against Taiwanese. Therefore, ironically, something both the CCP and racists agree on is that there’s no difference between the two peoples.

However, they’re both wrong. One group cares too much and the other too little, but still both wrong.

Taiwan has a right to self-determination and no infiltration, subterfuge, threats, coercion or - if you prefer - pleading from Beijing or anywhere else ought to change that.

Although if I were given a time machine, I’d prevent the whole split in the first place and protect the native Formosans… but you probably wouldn’t like the China that would exist if I were allowed to meddle like that either.

The question is: If Putin is somehow moved out of the way, will someone with the same ideals and desire to continue current policy simply replace him?

That is, is he the puppet master, or merely a puppet of something greater?

Which is not to say that efforts to remove him aren’t worth a try. You don’t know for sure you’re dealing with a hydra until you chop off one of its heads.

The Nobel committee should invent “The Special Nobel Prize for Very Special People” and award it to him.

Then when he’s out of office, award the same thing to Obama.

indigenous folks get their land back

Uh… That’d be the whole continent. Are you going to tell the other continents about a sudden influx of hundreds of millions of repatriations or shall I?

A constant, unwinnable arms race against unauthorised bots is now inevitable.

I assume they’ve considered this and expect they now have everlasting proof to take to investors and stockholders that they’re “doing something” to increase revenue and/or provide exclusive data for LLM training.

Huh. I guess it’s possible it’s always been a thing in my WM and I thought I set it up. I do like to fiddle with the keybinds to do funky things. And lots of things carry over between machines and reinstalls if you move your entire home directory around like I do, so it’s easy to forget what’s original and what’s not.

Now that I think about it, maybe the change I made was to add Alt-Enter as an alternative for Alt-F11 as a carry-over from DOS prompts in the old days, and Alt-F11 was already there.

Anyway, if it solves your problem, that’s all that matters!

Minecraft scales with window size. Try using your window manager’s full-screen option rather than Minecraft’s own.

I used to have to do this on an old computer because, for a while at least, I found that Minecraft’s full screen didn’t play nice with vsync, and I got screen-tearing, but windowed mode had no such problems. The problem resolved itself either due to a Minecraft upgrade or something in the graphics driver, X11 or the kernel finally got patched. Still not sure which.

When you use the WM’s full-screen, Minecraft (or at least older Minecrafts) will still think it’s in windowed mode. Newer Minecrafts seem to be wiser to the trick, but you shouldn’t have any such trouble.

Anyway, I used to bind Alt-F11 in the system keybinds (actually I still do, just in case) and used that rather than regular F11 to toggle mode.

Tangentially, I also have a keybind that moves the Cinnamon panel to the top of the screen. For a while, the trick didn’t work and I had to run Minecraft maximised. Having the panel at the bottom under the game’s UI was a distraction. At the top I could tune it out along with the window’s title bar. I found that having the panel auto-hide, which misbehaved, or just disabling it outright, were too much of an inconvenience, hence figuring out a hack that moved the panel.

That situation didn’t last long. Maybe a point revision or two of Minecraft, and that was definitely well after 1.12.

Sasha, we can see Vladimir’s palm when he opens your mouth.

It would be a shame if that apartment caught fire right after the old woman’s possessions were retrieved from it.

I would not put it past the nutjobs (of any country) to pass a law that requires that each and every person* ensures their own replacement if not also surplus to that effect to make up for those that can’t. Or won’t.

* of course, by that point they might have created propaganda if not also a law about who or what counts as a person, because they only want more of those, not anyone who might be classified as less than one.

If Russia had the weapons, troops and skill to start taking on other European countries, they’d apply those in Ukraine to finish the job, so this threat must be a potential intelligence, technical and FUD offensive… which Europe should already have been on guard for, because that sort of thing has always been #1 in Putin’s playbook.

This reads like a tacit admission that European governments have let their attention lapse, nearly drove into a metaphorical ditch, and now they’re wagging their fingers reminding everyone else not to let theirs lapse.

… in which case, absolute clown show.

I don’t know about that. Europe is white majority so it could well split the right-wing on how acceptable immigration is from those places.

It could even be popcorn-worthy if they start tearing themselves apart over it.

A man can dream, right?