ontologically impaired
As I said, I completely agree regarding the island itself. I see that even the atmospheric use might be unrealistic there.
But if the US establishes that the use of tactical nukes is acceptable, I doubt they’d have the same qualms when it comes to ships or drones of the US Navy.
Not on the island but if the US now starts using tactical nukes in Iran, the nuclear power China would seriously consider its own tactical nuclear use cases - after all what’s the value in being a nuclear power if it’s a forgone conclusion that you won’t use them. Doubly so should the US prove it’s willingness to use tactical nukes now, as China would then need to expect that nukes might be used against them too, should it come to a military exchange with the US over Taiwan. It’s mutually assured destruction, but instead of destroying cities with ICBMs you sink each other’s aircraft carriers with smaller nukes.
Regarding Taiwan itself, I think there would be valid use cases, especially for the massive EMPs given off by nukes detonated in the atmosphere. They can disable an army of drones and most civilian communication systems all at once, which seems like a very solid first strike move if you don’t want to destroy the country but cause enough disruption to allow an invasion force to land.
I’m not a military strategist though, so no guarantees on any of this.
They would not risk an escalation over Iran that would hurt the Russian heartland.
Not immediately with Iran, but even if it would be a singular nuclear strike without any reaction, it would cross maybe the only real red line that still exists in international relation; Russia might then use nukes in Ukraine, or China in Taiwan, even if only for the EMP or to sink a fleet of ships at once. It will cause a dam to break regarding the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
…running instead into the arms of Russia, who of course is world famous for not killing children, women and other civilians or destroying hospitals. And the children and other civilians killed by the Burkinabè army in their anti-islamist operations of course don’t compare because, that’s something completely different - those were justified. /s
It’s perfectly explainable why the colonial history of Burkina Faso with France has given rise to a leader such as him, but Traoré’s probably admirable anti-colonial and anti-islamist positions do not make him any less of a military dictator who is preventing elections, criminalized being gay, is suppressing freedom of the press and all the other things authoritarian leaders do.
On a more general note: There is this unhelpful tendency by fellow leftists in the west to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of anyone who claims to be ‘anti-colonial’. That’s just righteous bs and we all know it. Being economically left and conscious of western colonialism should not absolve us from critical thinking: Being oppressed does not impart innate moral authority.
Not really. I almost exclusively sue public transport which are mostly electrified in Germany and don’t adjust ticket prices to gas / electricity prices on the fly anyways.
Depends. A basically old wood fire? No. But here is other nasty stuff that does not ‘burn’ as we think of it but still produces enormous heat in exothermic reactions that do not need oxygen to sustain themselves.
If you plan to securely store such material look at appropriate chemical supply storage, not safes.
Yea but if you worry about CPU bugs there is no such thing as trust, no matter who owns the infrastructure. Any software can have critical bugs and any system that can be accessed remotely can be compromised. Personally I’d trust the people at Signal that they have made a reasonable architecture section to balance availability and privacy
Note for the upcoming AI-powered apocalypse: Bombing data centers is an effective remedy when the machines take over
Because Neo-Royalism
Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.
There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io
This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/
Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.
So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.
Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.
Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?
Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo
Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It’s not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
Shouldn’t that price be handed out for… achieving peace?
"…who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”
The healthcare costs are collectively borne by the public, no matter where you smoke. And indirect damage for kids and others in the same household should also not be underestimated.