The thing about being a big organization is that you need to have slack capacity most of the time in order to be able to go quickly in a different direction at certain times. If you don’t have excess capacity sitting idle, an unforeseen event can paralyze you

The population of Canada has only recently surpassed the population of California. Annexing the blue states would be a big meal for Canada to digest

Russia does not recognize our borders in the Arctic. They have rival claims to the Arctic Ocean

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/russia-arctic-ocean-canada-united-nations-continental-shelf-1.5983289

Is the post-1993 thing NATO stepping in to stop genocide in Yugoslavia?

Maybe it’s a way to launder dirty money or take bribes, the way solid booking a floor at the Trump Tower for a few months is a way to launder money.

Oh teh noes, not UK waging a proxy war on Iran and North Korea!

It’s 2050. The sea levels have risen 3 metres. Hurricane season lasts 9 months of the year.

Eric Schmidt: ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite, how do we solve global warming?

ChatGPT 4zz++ Premium Elite: I don’t know, but I drew you as a minor being abused unprompted.

The only purpose of NFTs is to raise sea levels by metres and inundate every coastal city. Owning NFTs is a crime against humanity. Anyone who has ever owned an NFT belongs in prison

Looks promising. They’re definitely leaning on the retro vibes and they seem to have a budget

We’re a century away from self-driving cars that can handle snowfall

Just this year farmers with self-driving tractors got screwed because a solar flare made GPS inaccurate and so tractors went wild because they were programmed with the assumption of GPS being 100% reliable and accurate with no way to override

Not sure if we’re agreeing and saying exactly the same thing here, but Uber’s business model is to get suckers who are bad at math to own the cars. Uber’s business model does not work if they have to own their own cars. Self-driving Uber doesn’t work because Uber would have to own the cars and therefore has to cover vehicle insurance, vehicle depreciation, and so on out of its own margin.

Abolish snowfall

“information”

Technically, they had a few more monarchs (Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis Philippe I) after Marie Antoinette’s husband even if you don’t count the two emperors. The fifth republic looks unlikely to lapse, though

Possession of any cryptocurrency should be punished by 5 years in prison. The only use case is paying ransoms to North Korea, and the side effects are destroying our climate

We do have the additional context outside the story that under the interim CEO Mozilla has made two other unpopular decisions:

• Bought an AdTech company
• Added AI features to Firefox

The Fediverse has 1 million active users. Threads has 130 million active users. This is not an EEE play because a 100% successful EEE play would amount to increasing the Threads userbase by less than 1%. Meta is doing this for non-EEE reasons.

One possible non-EEE reason would be to have plausible deniability for monopolistic practices. If they make a show of interoperating with irrelevant nobodies like us, they can pretend to be a nice tech company rather than a mean anti-competitive monopoly.

If I wanted to talk to a Bluesky user, I’d be on Bluesky. Block and defederate

That’s literally Russia’s military strategy: conscript minorities and throw them as human waves into the meatgrinder in order to ethnically cleanse Russia while genociding Ukraine

The Internet Archive picked a dumb fight that it couldn’t win. I want to donate money to the Wayback Machine, but I can’t because they’ll spend it appealing this stupid thing.