The fact they made it possible is impressive in itself. Sure it’s not competitive for the latest games or such, but society is more and more reliant on smartphones, so having a local option is valuable in itself.

It’s a bit like countries making their own planes instead of buying the F-35, which is better and cheaper. They looked stupid at the time, until Trump came back and it turned out strategic autonomy had value.

As for the price, probably it is due to small production ; but also simply underlines how we got used to not paying the “true” price of things, by moving production to places with cheaper costs & labor.

You’re missing their point, they’re saying from the point of view of those in power millionaires are middle class.

Although there are some that distinguish a “managerial class” that is in-between the middle class and the billionaires : people like CEOs and such, with net worth in the tens of millions but who are not those who benefit the most from the system and are culturally distinct. I think it’s a useful concept personally, as their interests aren’t necessarily the same as the owner class but they still have a lot of political power.

Loads of fossil power use gas turbines that do not involve steam :x

Right, I should make myself clearer. I’m no expert in economics, I just try to build a reasoning based on what I know.

The context of his statement is that Russia is outproducing the West in ammunition, specifically artillery shells. Earlier he states Russia is producing 4 millions shell a year compared to .5 for the US. So without qualification, the statement implies Russians are somehow 80x superior as they produce 8 times more with an economy a tenth the size.

I feel he should have qualified his statement to improve reader understanding:

• in general domestic production for domestic consumption should be compared using PPP, in which the Russian economy is “merely” a fourth of that of the USA (hence my PPP comment)
• the sanctions Russia is under distort the nominal picture since they restrict trade
• weapons production is hard to put a number to, since they are very “custom” goods that can’t be easily compared or traded, and even moreso for Russia which has a huge domestic arms industry
  • granted, that last point is is much more true of things like fighter jets than artillery shells
  • still though, there is some Western focus on quality over quantity that also explains the discrepancy (or at least there was before countries realized their entire inventory wouldn’t last more than months in Ukraine)

Because he didn’t provide this context to the number he is giving, I thought that either he wanted to misled or he was not sufficiently informed, and assumed the more charitable option.

My (probably incomplete) understanding is: phones have a GNSS chip (such as GPS, Galileo, or Glonass), but getting location from that takes a long time and a lot of battery. So they estimate location based on other information such as what cell tower they are connected to and the list of available wi-fi networks. This requires a database with all that info, which Google built through its Street View cars.

So the location provider is a service to which your phone sends all the info it has and which replies with an estimate of your location; which means it handles a lot of sensitive data.

The Russian economy is less than a tenth the size of the United States or the European Union

I wish I had the self-confidence to pontificate on Russian domestic arms production while apparently being unaware of something as basic as purchasing-power-parity adjusted measurements.

You don’t need a selfie there, just use the Gimp.

Lol this is brillant

I wonder the same, my theory is that this gesture is used both as a loyalty test and a way to further polarize society.

Making this gesture draws clear lines in society: those who say it was fine, those who say it wasn’t, those who don’t take a stance (ie the media calling it a “controversial gesture” or similar). So Musk & al now have a clearer idea of who stand where. It also cleaves those “for” and those “against” further away, solidifying their base.

Another explanation is this is part of the normalization of extreme rethoric and symbols. I doubt he could have gotten away with it ten years ago; who knows what they’ll be able to do and say in 2035?

Yet another possibility, he did it on a whim and the neo-nazis like Bannon are now seizing the opportunity. It’s unclear how planned this was and how intentional the consequences were.

(And all might be true at once)

I certainly could have made myself clearer to begin with.

The way I read it, this post complains about “wokization” more than enshittification.

Else why would it point out “African or Indian last names”, reviews using the word “brave”, or “books about Trump gathering dust”? Those are all right-wing memes.

This greentext is literally just right-wingers convincing each other their already-held stereotypes are true.

it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship.

It didn’t “end” with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today’s strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn’t be replaced in a day.