They were a Stalinist dictatorship throughout the Cold War and built tens of thousands of bunkers around their landscape, spending a large part of their economy on preparing for the inevitable invasion by the capitalist imperialists and/or ideologically degenerate socialists. Then, afterwards, they gave the world Dua Lipa and a few other successful pop artists.

This must be the resistance to tyranny the NRA go on about

Do they use electric pumps as Britain does?

I think that’s meant to be an English-German pun

Being able to set up personally hosted RSS feeds would be useful. If the feeds are fetched periodically, that could also allow archiving of accounts.

Or even if it could provide RSS feeds of accounts, for following in a RSS reader.

Though excellent work!

If it was a bear selling that lamp, none of this would have been necessary.

Good point, but look at the catapults it’ll have for launching fighters. Proper traditional steam catapults with analogue warmth, none of that modern digital rubbish.

Cory Doctorow once gave the hypothetical example of a phone company doing a deal with Domino’s so that every time you called a rival pizzeria, you got “press 1 to be connected to Domino’s or wait 30 seconds to be put through to the number you dialled”

Given that the Republicans just voted to allow Trump to unilaterally wage war in Venezuela, I have my doubts.

Surely that’s when humanity has forgotten how to be selfish and the state withers away, leaving a utopia of fully actualised workers for whom work and play are indistinguishable, both being ways of joyously participating in society.

Godwin’s Law was an artefact of a time when we knew that Nazis were as extinct as Vikings and Mongol hordesmen, and comparing someone to one was dramatic hyperbole. It, of course, no longer applies.

Also, in the age of online communications, when information can be limitlessly copied, it’s impossible for authoritarians to destroy information they disapprove of. It is possible, however, for them to make it difficult to find by flooding the world with vast quantities of plausible-looking alternatives to it, making it hard to identify what is real. Before LLMs, doing this at the sort of scale that would have been effective was prohibitively laborious.

Ariana was a brand name used by a Chinese manufacturer of cheap luggage of the sort you’d find in neighbourhoods with working-class immigrant populations. I once had a backpack of theirs which was the maximum airline carry-on size, which is to say, muy grande.

Isn’t that Donald Trump’s phone background?

He’s probably all for it. More persecution of Jews abroad = more emigration to Israel = more IDF troops and settlers for newly conquered lands. Everyone’s a winner!

I’m sure they just wanted them to wish them all a happy Hanukkah. Right?

Isn’t she some kind of right-wing influencer? The crazy was probably a plus.

I can vouch for Mythic Beasts

In Ottoman Turkey, burglars would set a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back loose in a house they were planning to rob, to check if there was anyone home.