askchapo

I was pre-covid, but rn I can't conceive of a world where I'm actually about to cut these vampires a check

It seems like there's no way that Biden can make any negotiation with Russia seem like a win to his base so if he wins it's almost an automatic 4 more years of war. But if Trump wins he could make most of the concessions that Russia wants and still sell it as "the best deal" to his fans. Is a trump win the best hope for shortening war?

Disclaimer: I would never vote for trump, I also won't vote for Biden, I'm also in a state that always goes one way so it doesn't matter at all.

I wasn't in the US for the Syrian Civil War. Why was there so much hate and vitriol for President Assad? It's like every American politician wanted him gone, but by regional standards he's pretty innocuous (I think he was like an eye doctor before he more or less inherited his presidency).

I wanted to know if Hexbear logs ip addresses. Does it?

I know its from the Big Bang Theory and its used in context with capitalist techbros, but what is is definition? (Edit)

How can you tell romantic and platonic love apart? What does it mean to fall in love with someone?

I think a material difference between Iraq (v2 anyway) and Ukraine is that they can keep doing the "well Russia was the aggressor" thing indefinitely even if the reality is more complicated.

also yes obviously some libs are still stubborn about Iraq, the worst ones, but for the most part its generally agreed that the Iraq War was a bad thing.

For me it's Dragon Ball Z, that was a pretty fucked up show tbh.

Like holy shit, all the characters are terrible people except maybe Gohan and Trunks.

I will focus on Estonia, as that's where I grew up, but I assume this topic is also very relevant to the other Baltic nations.

For my whole life, I have heard horrible stories about Soviet occupiers. I have yet to meet a single person in real life who actually believed in communism or socialism, despite being raised in Soviet times and spending a lot of their childhood learning about Lenin, Stalin, etc.

I always knew that there are people out there (especially in other ex-soviet countries) who remember the USSR fondly, but I always assumed that this was more about nationalism than anything else, like "oh man it sure was great when we had a powerful military and a strong presence on the world stage". It has been a serious culture shock to discover that the leaders of the Soviet union actually seem to have believed in the project, and that elsewhere in the union, the people seem to have believed in it as well! It really gives me a new perspective on Soviet nostalgia.

Meanwhile in the Baltic countries, and especially in Estonia, all age groups, including the very elderly, treat our Soviet past as an extremely dark time in our history. Just take a look at Estonia here compared to other nations: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/06/29/in-russia-nostalgia-for-soviet-union-and-positive-feelings-about-stalin/

When discussing this with older people, or when I hear Soviet times discussed in general, I always hear statements like:

• Almost everybody had family members or friends deported or killed (a part of the Estonian population was deported early in the occupation under the guise of being kulaks and nationalists, except the vast majority were women and children)
• People lost their ancestral homes and were forced into tiny apartments shared with other families
• There were constant shortages of food - you had to know somebody in the party or somebody working in a shop to get any actual variety in your meals
• In general, everything was super corrupt, being "well-connected" meant you had a much easier life
• Our culture was being deleted, we were not allowed to sing our songs, discuss a lot of our history, etc
• People felt that they had lost their dignity and were not treated in a humane way

Conversely, I have not really heard many (or really any that I can remember) positive statements.

So this is something I have been thinking about for the past few days, and it's not a topic that I can generally find a lot previous unbiased discussions on online (I guess because at the end of the day, the Baltic nations are absolutely tiny).

So: what actually went wrong? Why did communist ideology not manage to take root within the minds of the Baltic people? Maybe others here have some interesting perspectives.

One thought I have had myself:

Estonia was never a colonial power, we were in fact serfs, with other nations like Sweden, Denmark and Russia taking turns at ruling us. So when the Soviet union marched in with their army, the Estonian people only saw it as another exploitative ruler, with no interest in hearing anything about socialism. Nevertheless, this doesn't really explain why several generations growing up in the Soviet union never learned to appreciate socialism.

I thought of this question because someone joked about double-dipping their hands in the chocolate fountain at Golden Corral and boy did that invoke one of my least favorite paying-for-college memories.

Yes, someone did dip his hands into the chocolate fountain at the Golden Corral. Worse, he was a repeat offender, a man that was at least in his 30s if not older slurping it off of his fingers and all, sometimes while making eye contact with me or my coworkers. Worse, there was no enforced rule against doing so, at least at my location, so my manager just told me to let him do it, don't make a big deal out of it, and hope he doesn't bother anyone else.

That same manager once insisted on me making the place extra clean a little before Christmas, so they insisted that I use double the amount of cleaning bleach in the same bucket. I explained that's not how cleaning works or how OSHA compliance works. I got a write-up. I said that wasn't an offense that qualified for a write-up, and what they said was "thanks for the tip, I'll find something that is. Your word against mine."

That same manager punched me out early without telling me, because the place wasn't perfect enough before I left over an hour late, missing my family waiting to pick me up outside by that long to go out to do holiday stuff. I did call that in on the supposedly anonymous tip line later, but you can guess what happens when an anonymous tip about wage theft is called in on a manager that already knows who would call in that tip in a "right to work" situation.

That same manager was fired a week later for embezzlement, and not the cool kind. They were writing up and firing people for months for money missing from the register. I found out when collecting my last check and noticed someone new.

For me the easiest tell is the up front, unprompted, and unsolicited declaration of nonpoliticalness. When someone takes the time and expends the breath to announce how nonpolitical they are, what follows is almost always a rant about how everything/everyone else is too political these days, and that of course leads into something between status quo advocacy and outright reactionary/regressive sentiments for some fabled time before those wicked politics were visible to the nonpolitical ranter.

People that are hostile to service workers. Some just want to take some ideological stand against tipping when the service worker doesn't really have a choice and needs those tips to survive in the current unjust system in a way where ideological purity gestures toward that service worker just look like being a greedy and sanctimonious asshole. The worst of such people will actually declare, shamelessly, that they believe that service workers don't deserve a living wage. The implications of that are worthy.

I may get shit for this, but I'll say it anyway: this hair and beard combo, seen on living people. I have yet to meet anyone in person with that look that wasn't a chud.

(If one of you is a comrade with that look, I am sorry in advance for the prejudice and if I ever meet you in person I will atone by buying you a drink or something.)

I’m in a small-ish org. There are about 60 members total, but only 10 are actually active in any way. There are another 15-20 or so who are semi-regulars, or who will sometimes attend meetings, or sometimes attend demonstrations or actions etc with us.

It’s gotten really bad over the past few years as people have sort of started fading away. People are flaky, and it routinely takes several weeks to get an answer or an update from some members for even trivial things.

Several of us have tried doing social activities of all kinds, but they always end up the same.

This gets really embarrassing when we try to do things with other groups and can’t muster the numbers to be effective.

We’ve tried to do outreach to members to see what’s going on, and we just get the same explanation - I’m busy.

Has anyone here faced something similar? Any tips to get us out of this rut?

they used to have an on-call maintenance person that could unlock your apartment, but then a couple of years ago the leasing office that ran three buildings got bought by a bigger property management company that runs thousands

My household was a minor affair, we had little candles in the shape of the WTC on the dining room table. We would thank George Bush for the Patriot Act and then light the candles. We had to be good, because George Bush was always watching us with the Patriot Act, but if we were good, we'd get little pilot's wings pins.

The rich kids in my neighborhood had more elaborate plans. They had full on model WTC towers. If they were good, there would be RC planes under the towers on 9/11 morning. They were always showing me the cool videos when they destroyed the towers.

I do not know what it is. There is fire? Rich people? Please explain.

At first I thought I'd follow along the MIT OCW 6.0001 course, but it's like eight years old and on a far outdated version of Python and Anaconda. When I tried to install the software as per the syllabus's instructions, I found the download links were dead. I had to spend a few hours going through archives to get the required Anaconda 4.1.1 and Python 3.5 only for it to not even work upon installing. When I tried opening the Anaconda navigator, the logo would pop up, it would say initializing, and then it would just crash before it could launch. Referring back to the syllabus was of no help because the instructions there were literally as brief as "Install Anaconda and Python 3.5 via the installer".

I wasn't able to troubleshoot any of this because all the google results for this question were full of jargon I sure as shit won't be able to understand until I finish the course in the first place. I have no idea what an IDE is, what a pip is, what a spyder is, what a path variable is, or why one would want to use the command prompt.

I was actually able to successfully install the newest versions, but I can't use these for the course because I'm an absolute beginner who has no frame of reference for what differences are actually going to be important.

Now I'm in the process of looking elsewhere. Problem is, I can't find anything like the MIT OCW course. I really loved the videos of actual lectures and the fact that I didn't have to enroll or sign in to anything. There exist a lot of Python tutorials on the internet, but I was hoping to also get an introduction to computer science in general because I need to learn the fundamentals of the subject. I'd like to have a deeper understanding than one would get by just learning a computer language without any of the theory behind it.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a more recent curriculum? Ideally I'd love it to have lecture videos, but I'll be content with just problem sets and a good textbook if it's up to date and has a robust step by step guide for setting up.

Just some nice clearing the air of ambiguities. Do not doxx yourself.

For instance, Lea CrossCode (my pfp) is my lofty transition goal, and that's one part of the reason I'm so attached to her as a character.

My partner keeps trying to read it and they keep stopping and reading me passages and then looking up actual historical fact and going wtf, this book is nonsense? Does it get better?

I don't know I haven't read it. I told them I'd ask here. Does it get better? Is it anti communist propaganda or is the ridiculous anti communist screed that starts this book serious off just setup for something better?

Thanks for all the good answers I showed them the whole thread and they said a lot of what you all said is in line with their understanding. So basically the first bit is a caricature of the bad parts of early Chinese communism and then that gets better but it turns misogynist instead. Fun series. They'll continue to read because we have a lot of family and friends who LOVE the book and they want to understand why but it's helpful to have the lens on it

I get that the rule-of-thumb for talking to cops is that you should have a lawyer present. But like, what if it's small shit? Hypothetically, what if I witness a hit and run and the cop is asking me what I saw? Should I really insist that I have a lawyer present?

Sorry if this question sounds really dumb, but I've always been playing this situation out in my mind. My feeling has always just to say what I saw, like tell the cop "it was a grey Mazda SUV". Should I tell the cop that I'll make a statement in the station with my lawyer present?

Also what if there's currently a crime in progress, like a shooting or something? I guess that's unlikely, and that cops are useless.

Yes I know about the probable alts.