Trump’s government has made the US a village idiot - and if the idiot gets into a fight with the whole village, the idiot will have more bruises.

Why he does that - I don’t pretend to understand.

Yes. Every country on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea has recently left the land mine ban.

Unlike Ukraine, we don’t have hundreds of kilometers of space for a strategic retreat. So if signs start indicating that an invasion might come, border areas will have mine fields.

If it comforts anyone: many modern land mines have electronic detonators. They can be designed to become inert after a set amount of time, or when their battery runs out of juice. Old models had mechanical / piezo detonators, and could survive decades in the right conditions.

A more detailed description:

Provided a card stack system, the dynamic balance of liking vs. skipping tends to stabilize into a state where men like everyone reasonably cute (“to get more chances”). This is also caused by their inability search for a conversation partner in a rational manner, because it’s a card stack system. Often enough, all the information you have is a photo, age and city.

This causes women to experience a saturation of likes: everyone likes them. This causes them to be extremely picky about who they like back.

The result: unbalance. Dating sites view women as a “resource” to attract men, and men as customers to be scammed out of money to actually show their profile to someone, once in a while.

Society is borked in many ways, and dating sites often reinforce this with their policies.

The Wikipedia article about online dating tells that typical (I assume: card stack, like / dislike) dating sites cause different genders to adopt different strategies:

Men liked a large proportion of the profiles they viewed, but received returning likes only 0.6% of the time; women were much more selective but received matches 10% of the time. Men received matches at a much slower rate than women. Once they received a match, women were far more likely than men to send a message, 21% compared to 7%, but they took more time before doing so.

By sending out questionnaires to frequent Tinder users, the researchers discovered that the reason why men tended to like a large proportion of the women they saw was to increase their chances of getting a match. This led to a feedback loop in which men liked more and more of the profiles they saw while women could afford to be even more selective in liking profiles because of a greater probability of a match.[15]

P.S.

My biggest peeve is that the monopolist Match Group (runs Tinder, bought and ruined OkCupid, etc) and its nearest competitor Bumble have both adopted a card stack system that makes searching impossible. They also won’t display any statistics to a user about the number of people who saw their profile - keeping their customer in perfect darkness.

In most fields of life, a customer would not be satisfied with this kind of shit. A company advertising their product would demand instant feedback about the number and profile of people who viewed their ad, where they came from, how long they browsed, etc.

Basically, we are all getting scammed by a few monopolists, who are actively ruining people’s ability to find partners. I would support a politician who promises to let the best university in the country to build a non-profit dating site.

Note for medical accuracy: often, renal failure can be compensated for with dialysis and life prolonged until a transplant is found.

After a trauma like a car crash, there might be other issues that prevent some treatment, however.

Basically, despite the headline, I will say that I hope she lives and finds a donor.

Obvious possibilities:

• he was suspected of espionage and arrested (we don’t know whether he did anything), for some reason it hasn’t been disclosed (it should be disclosed)
• he disappeared on his own, officials are trying to understand what he knew or accomplished

The university de-listing him seems particularly interesting. Clearly they were told something that the public wasn’t told.

Not really.

The only veteran with weight here is Petro Poroshenko, the president who took office after Yanukovich fled, and left office after losing elections to Zelensky.

Sadly, Poroshenko has been harassed quite considerably (charges are being considered, his properties have been sanctioned)… for things he did as a president, did openly, and at that moment, did for the benefit of Ukraine. One of those deeds was buying coal from Russian-occupied territories - until coal could be obtained from other places.

To me, the accusations against him have seemed more than a bit unfair - a man who did what he could in 2014 has been held against today’s standards and found wanting. It is natural that Trumpists would seek out Poroshenko and try to talk him over to their side. Him being pissed off, he might not reject their advances.

Former President Petro Poroshenko, the de facto leader of Ukraine’s opposition, said following the scuffle that he wouldn’t criticize Zelensky “because this is not what the country needs now.”

Following his team’s reported meetings with members of the Trump administration, the former president changed his tune and lashed out at his successor.

He criticized Zelensky for the sanctions imposed on him and said that Zelensky is the “unfortunate leader of the team who moves the nation to dictatorship.”

However, on the background of today’s Ukraine, the person with the biggest amount of support - ex-commander of the armed forces Zaluzhny - has probably not been approached, or has rejected them.

I probably don’t know the correct term in English. It’s a product for starting a fire in a wood-fired stove or campfire. A rectanglular block of wood fiber soaked in oil.

It wouldn’t help. The thing that gives you lift is the mass of displaced air. Difference from the (lack of) mass of the lifting gas is minimal.

The headline is mistaken. I checked out an article with photos from the scene.

The limousine was authentic. The place was nice, a few blocks from the FSB headquarters.

But there was no “tremendous explosion” - the car just burnt. Every house had its windows intact, the car itself had its windows intact while burning, etc.

Explanations: technical malfunction, passer-by with fire cubes and a lighter.

Threatening to throw a tantrum if one’s opponents gang up, is only an admission of vulnerability and an invitation for opponents to gang up quicker.

Besides, the EU has already held consultations with China (which got a tariff raise last month) about how to adapt to the situation. Both have previously used response strategies aimed at Trump’s support bases. They’ll do it without hesitation.

And if Trump is going to enact “far larger” tariffs against every big trade partner, he’ll knock the US economy into a recession.

A note about dating apps: most of them aren’t better than this. Their interest is keeping the user clicking, paying for services and coming back. If you find the right person for yourself, you will do none of that. So they:

• build awful card stack systems with no search function
• build superficial profile systems with no metadata about personality, habits or world views

…and of course, with such systems, people fail to find suitable partners. They come back and pay, but society suffers, because someone needs to make money.

I would vote for a politician who would promise that the ministry of health and social security will order a publicly funded dating site that’s built by scientists, with data privacy managed by the leading university in the country.

Tha’s a new thing for me.

I wish they had detailed how the removal of glycans is accomplished. Alas, Wikipedia doesn’t even have an article about “glycoengieering”, which would likely be the term for this method.

Edit: oh, I also mistunderstood. I started thinking that it accomplishes removal of glycans from the invading virus, but instead it’s only removal of glycans from the vaccine, exposing more of the virus, leading to more diverse antibodies. Which is far more doable, and not a big technical novelty. But apparently, quite useful. :)

Summary:

• a journalist was invited
• half an hour before the first takeoff, the takeoff times of planes, drones and cruise missiles were shared
• it was mentioned that an individual terrorist is on sight and his location known

Sadly, none of them will be jailed, like a lay person would be for disclosing military secrets.

However, I would advocate for punishing them with having a mandatory nanny appointed to oversee them for 4 years.

It would be great if the number was 30%, but 20% is enough to wedge a company out of its position on the market. If they persist, this will work.

Travel advise: prepare for a trip to the US like you’d prepare for a trip to Russia or China. (Note: being an anarchist who thinks Putin, Xi and Trump don’t deserve a separate rope for each, I wouldn’t consider a visit.)

Don’t bring your real computing device. Bring an empty device from which you can VPN to a system that actually has your data.

If you need to bring an encrypted device, consider the possibility that authorities will attempt to coerce you into unlocking it (and will cause you great disruption and indignity if you won’t). You might be safer bringing a concealed + encrypted microSD card and a device loaded with an OS intended to be searched. If the data matters, make sure you cannot unlock your device under coercion.

(Trivial method: send your friend in the US a snailmail letter. Ask them to keep the letter until your arrival. Into the letter, steganographically embed the OTP key material to obtain the passphrase to decrypt your device. Now to decrypt the device, three things will be needed: your cooperation and knowledge, the device, and the letter. And you can deny that the letter contains anything.)

Edit: upgraded advise - mail your local contact an encrypted MicroSD card. Cross the border with a Raspberry Pi in factory packaging, or buy it locally (they’re still permitted, despite their widespread use by anarchists).