Fins

Same thing -- people calling for odious thing Y (whgich, unlike odious thing X doesn't get them kicked out of Twitter) would not care to go to Gab with its tiny number of users. Of course Gab would court those who might actually be interested in joining.

Not to say that Gab isn't a cesspool, and Mr. Torba, when he shows up here, appears to be a rather unpleasant character, but Gab being full of bad people is a function not only of Gab being bad by definition, but also of bigger players' policies as well.

According to their hipster in chief though, actually doing ethnic cleansing is perfectly fine though, if you are Burmese... That's rather hypocritical -- either ban all nazis, or don't pretend that you are not picking sides. And speaking of sides, if you ban nazis but not the equially murderous communists then I don't see how you can claim any high moral ground. And I haven't heard of any communist purges in the social media platforms.

Even if this were what was originally said... both groups as so large that at the edges there really is no much difference. Antifa may not5 like nazis, but only because both are competing for the same ecological niche.

The problem is that Twitter's definition of "nazis" basically is "anyone we don't like, which isn't exactly useful for the overall benefit of humanity. Sort of like how FB recently said that they are going to deplatform white supremacists. Why not all supremacists, while you're at it, or don't pretend that you are doing something for any kind of greater good...

Frankly, if you look you can find people equally odious on Twitter as well. but if only people leaning in one direction get deplatformed there, of course they will congregate on a platform where they do not get deplatformed. Both end up as self-perpetuating filter bubbles (although Twitter might be slightly better just because its older and larger).

Believing RT to say anything truthful about anything Ukrainian would be rather naive.

Uh, is this a real article, or one of those AI-generated ones used to show that you can publish anything as long as you add enough quasi-progressive verbiage to it?

Oh, they had enough troops for Manchuria, but of course at that time what happened there wasn't all that important to the mainland, and USSR had little in the way of ability to get there anyway.

What Zhukov had shown at Khalkhin Gol, just as against Germans, was that with a significant advantage in manpower and equipment (double the manpower, 7 times the tanks) Soviets can actually beat up someone.

You can't really move a massive invasion force on wooden rafts. Unless they would've asked form some D-Day leftovers, it's just not very feasible.

That's something that Soviets very much want the world to believe, but they have never had shown how they could even possibly get their troops anywhere near Japanese mainland, what with Russian/Soviet/Russian navy historically being more dangerous to people who serve there than any enemy. And whatever happened in Manchuria or Korea didn't really concern Japan by that point anyway.

Not really. Getting anything useful from the archives is still like pulling teeth, and quite a few documents still have not been declassified. Solzhenitsin only had access to his own experience and interviewing very few people (obviously, this research was not exactly looked upon with approval). But he was also the first to make note of it.

I mean specifically repressed through the state apparatus, not lacking Internet access. Of course there are different degrees of that repression here, from being executed on the spot, to dying of hunger and overwork, all the way down to being relocated 101+ kilometers from a big city.

I would very much count victims of Holodomor (as well as of less known famines in Central Asia etc.) and Great Leap -- it does not matter to the dying if the State actively wanted to kill them, or just did not care the least bit if they die or not. And there are studies from real historians that conditions in Soviet labor camps, during peace time, were worse than in Nazi extermination camps (I am not sure if there are English copies online, but certainly Russian ones are accessible).

Absolute numbers may not mean all that much (although as far as exterminating their own citizenry, communist Khmer Rouge have no equals) but it is still important to remember and never forget -- it's not a competition who is more evil, it's about making sure that evil does not get repeated.

USSR of Khrushchev and beyond -- it's also place where workers demonstrating for decent pay and food for their children were fired upon by the army, slight liberalization efforts in satellite countries were crushed with tanks, dissidents had their brains fried in psychiatric hospitals, etc. etc. Sure, it was much better than Reich in the 30s-40s, or USSR itself in the same period, but it is also an apples to oranges comparison. Had Reich been contained instead of defeated, chances are it would have evolved into something similar by then as well. But Soviet apologia usually does not make a distinction anyway.

It's pretty hard to get objective and accurate count here; unlike Nazis, Soviets (and I imagine Chinese et al) did not keep meticulous accounting even of people specifically executed, let alone of those keeling over in prison camps despite technically being only sentenced to imprisonment). Solzhenitsyn himself said, at least initially, that his numbers are extremely approximate, based on what personal research he could do and that he hopes future historians will do better.

Having said that, 60 million killed in USSR alone would seem highly suspicious. 60 million repressed sounds quite feasible. And as Stalin would acknowledge (death of one is a tragedy, death of millions is statistics), in a way it doesn't really matter -- communists killed as many, if not significantly more, people as Nazis, but because they usually did it to their own population, and weren't defeated by an invading army, they escaped anything resembling Nuremberg Tribunal, and to this day Nazi defenders keep quiet in decent society, but Soviet apologia is pretty rampant.

What's wrong with being anti-Soviet?

But isn't this what the original proposal in this thread was? Setting an upper limit for how much an individual can hold?

Apart from technical difficulties in determining if someone is still running the company, or just pretending to, what would the upside be from implementing something like that, apart form making those who like counting money in other peoples' pockets happy?

It is grasping at the straws indeed, to try to come up with any kind of justification for a scheme like this. Esp. when it would be pretty obvious to anyone who bothers to check, that people with that kind of "money" do not have it as cash they got as a salary, but rather as assets (stock). Do you propose taxing unrealized gains? Or simply confiscating assets when they appreciate "too much"?

The only positive I can see here is that this will kill SV for good. Unfortunately it will also kill most real innovation as well.

And that 90% was effective, not marginal rate? Talk about being daft...

It wasn't any better before.

Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.

Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.

From some family experiences, whatever intelligence services reported to Party bosses, if it did not agree with the Party dogma, it would be ignored.

Besides, they lived much better than the average Soviet citizen (degree of inequality was far greater than that between a ghetto dweller and Zuck), and that's what they wanted to preserve.

Ummm, no. We absolutely don't. We decide how much one has to pay in taxes, absolutely not how much one can keep in total. Proposal in this thread is for that latter.

Arguing old and tired Soviet propaganda tropes of imperialism, theft et al is not even interesting at this point, but it would be interesting to see an example of when and where there were a society that did a forceful redistribution of wealth of this degree and managed to produce "things that they need" and made "society as a whole" better.

This would have been far more interesting if it were showing inflows (and outflows, I guess) rather than a static percentage. As is it just shows that in, say, Chicago you still can afford it without being an educated millennial doing "computer stuff", and Mountain View you can't.

45 thousand should be enough for everyone. You can send the excess to me.

And of course you are the one who should decide how much every person is allowed to have?

Of course, every lefty believes that he will be the one standing in the guard tower, not the one inside the gulag. In practice it usually works out another way.

Are you seriously suggesting that "look-tap-read your name-tap" is quicker, safer, or more convenient than "press one button, which always works the same way and is not going to move, or change in any way, just because Elon needed more screen room for fart jokes"? Honestly, this stretches any belief.

Granted, I can see that Mercedes implementation is stupid -- of course you want it to work before you managed to squeeze in and start it, but that's a Mercedes problem, not an advantage of the touchscreen (which, of course, you also can only reach once you got inside). FWIW, on my 2011 car this is not a problem, button is in the door and works whether the engine is on or not.

Right, right. And also I am shorting 27 thimgamajillions of Tesla stock, of course.

You can't show (least of all on some fanboy Youtube video) that AutoPilot had prevented a crash, compared to a normal person just driving a car. A Tesla crashing into a firetruck -- that you can show.

What you could show would be crash statistics over a significant population of similar cars, in similar conditions, driving on similar roads. These statistics don't seem to show any safety benefit to Tesla, but believers will believe.

As long as it doesn't have a start button either, it might even be safe enough for other people on the road.

Can you (or anyone, really) show that there were, or were not, any lives saved? That there were people killed is quite easy to show, but showing that there were crashes prevented... that does not even seem provable.

People die all the time, but when they get in the car, they generally do not agree to be beta testers for an FSD system that one day might be as safe as human driver. Or not.

If you were were to believe Russia's patriotic propaganda, they won pretty much everything and anything. This seems to have come straight from the same cookbook.

That you can get from any number of other makes, except that they do not slam you into firetrucks, and don't call it self-driving when it obviously isn't.