Special military operation?

Only dozens? HK government getting soft now?

“While imperialist colonizers” is doing a lot of work in the post. In my view, there’s little credit to be given out for offering liberalism to a tiny fraction of the population under your rule. So from a macro standpoint, Wilhelm hardly stands out.

I will give the British some credit for bowing to the inevitability of decolonization many years later, after WWII, with only a little bit kicking and screaming. (France, not so much.)

That’s pretty much the European median for the time.

This is a politically-motivated ruling… Thailand’s judiciary, including its constitutional court is packed with ultra-conservative royalists who deploy the law to take down their political enemies. Conveniently enough, politicians who are friendly to the royalist/military establishment aren’t subject to such scrutiny.

It will be interesting to see how Rwanda manages after Kagame leaves the scene. In the past, he has styled himself after Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, but Lee stepped down and left behind a well functioning civil service and a second generation of political leaders who weren’t hacks. Kagame seems to be avoiding talk about succession plans, which is not a good sign.

Funny thing is, TSMC in Taiwan is considered a premium employer. It offers much better pay and parks than other companies.

People are quick to blame Google for the slow uptake of Jpeg XL, but I don’t think that can be the whole story. Lots of other vendors, including non-commercial free software projects, have also been slow to support it. Gimp for example still only supports it via a plugin.

But if it’s not just a matter of Google being assholes, what’s the actual issue with Jpeg XL uptake? No clue, does anyone know?

Riots caused by court rulings don’t usually topple prime ministers. This feels really weird and off.

That’s wild.

Bangladesh has actually been doing pretty well in the past decade, no? I know there have been concerns about Hasina’s increasing authoritarianism over the years, but the stuff I’ve read indicated that she was actually quite popular, within the context of the country’s incredibly polarized politics.

Having her toppled by a mob like this… while hoping for the best for Bangladesh, I can’t help but feel quite pessimistic for the future of the country. For one thing, there’s the distinct possibility that this is a military coup disguised as a popular insurrection. Hope that’s not the case.

They also pinky-promise that they are not running current psy-ops on many other topics. (Tee hee.)

That’s like telling a starving person that long-term obesity concerns are the real issue.

If this passes, this would have the perverse effect of making China (and maybe to a lesser extent the Middle East) the leading suppliers of open source / open weight AI models…

No, if it was just a matter of having a well developed economy whose fruits are distributed poorly, then their GDP per capita (literally economic output divided by people) would be high.

But it’s not. It’s among the middle-income countries, just below Malaysia. Which seems about right in terms of the quality of life of the average citizen.

Yes. That means Chinese households actually consume less than this graph indicates. In other words, because China’s economy is more manufacturing heavy, this graph makes it look more “developed” than it actually is.

Their economy is literally less developed. Country size has nothing to do with it; India is on track to surpass Japan’s GDP but no one would dispute that it is much less developed than Japan or any other OECD country.

Because they’re still a developing country with a relatively low baseline power supply per capita (half that of the US).

His trips to Europe were two weeks before the debate…

Anyway, I thought they were blaming a cold and/or being over-prepared…

Obviously, there’s a more disturbing background at play here, but churches shouldn’t be untaxed in the first instance. The dude literally said to render unto Caesar, etc. etc.

deleted by creator