607 karma · joined October 2, 2013
A lot of commenters have mentioned New Belgrade municipality of Belgrade, and it is a great example of this. The exterior is very often quite well though out — lots of space, lots of trees and parks, playgrounds (looked at from the ground there's hardly any of the oppressive concrete feeling often associated with brutalism), general living affordances like schools, public services integrated into complexes... But on the inside, even ignoring long term issues of maintenance stemming from broader social issues, things are dysfunctional, ugly and generally of poor quality. It's a byproduct of cost cutting commonly associated with these types of projects. But just like with apartments in Soviet Brezhnevkas and even some Khrushchyovkas, when renovated with care and attention the apartments are just fine for what they are.
And it's not just a feature of Cold War socialist brutalism. In Trieste for example there is a somewhat (in)famous Rozzol Melara building[1][2]. As an idea it's great, the complex has everything for day to day living, a post office, a supermarket, an elementary school, a kindergarden, even a small medical facility, all connected with tunnel bridges or roofed passageways (except the small chapel) so you're never exposed to the elements when going somewhere inside the complex. But it seems as though the architects thought about how can we make this cheap but practical and then got the practical part completely wrong. For example, the passageways and tunnel floors are completely covered with anti-slip rubber matting, but the problem is these passageways are almost too practical and inviting so people end up using them to take their dogs out for walking, and so the result is rubber covered with sticky, dried dog piss (sometimes even poop) every 5 to 10 meters in all directions. You can imagine how this smells, encased in concrete and glass during the summer in a moist coastal city. The terrace views from higher apartments on the side overlooking the city and the sea are beautiful though, so you get some satisfaction if you live in one of those.
[1]: https://www.greyscape.com/architects/rozzol-melara-trieste/ [2]: http://architectuul.com/architecture/rozzol-melara-complex
* Lowest spec 14 inch MBP (16/512 GB) 2349€
* 15 inch XPS, i9, 16/512 GB, RTX 3050 Ti, maxed out screen (with Windows Home, heh) - 2849€, this computer is a joke compared to what we can expect from even the cheapest 14 MBP
* For a bit more fairer comparison, an XPS 17, i9 16/512 GB, RTX 3060, maxed screen (still with Windows Home) - 3549€, but even this probably can't hold a candle to the cheapest 14 MBP
For reference, an almost maxed out 16 MBP (4 TB disk, instead of 8) is 5559€, a maxed out 17 inch XPS 4999€. I think Apple has been more than fair with prices in this case. These machines are usually bought as tools, a business expense, it's not much in the grand scheme of things.
“Another high priority for the incoming government should be cybersecurity, Schmidt said. He said disclosures from WikiLeaks and insiders like former NSA analyst Edward Snowden will become ever easier.
"An obvious thing that the next president should do is have a division that audits the security of the data of our citizens," Schmidt said.”
You complained about Thiel, but here we are, just two days in and we have Schmidt, one of the top Clinton people, already recommending his services to Trump's administration in suppressing whistleblowers. A nice game of spot the fascist we have here.
For a lot of innocent people outside the US, ironically for a lot of Muslims, HRC's status quo was literally lethal. As someone outside the US, who finds Trump's views unacceptable, and is in Europe, and in no direct danger of US induced violence, I can tell you this: he was not the candidate who enjoyed practically unanimous support of the US industry of death (the so called defense industry), and the whole state military and political neocon apparatus, all the while announcing to try real hard to get in an open confrontation with the other nuclear superpower. In that regard, I am somewhat relieved, and despite what the media might be telling you, a lot of other people are.
I upvoted this comment of yours because it seemed kind of unfair to me for it to be downvoted, and I don't like people being told what they can or can't do, but the gist of what you're trying to argue is complete nonsense. GCM dependence is a complete non-issue in context, and to say that because Telegram doesn't have that dependency it is safer from US intelligence is so over the top ridiculous. Signal-the-app has it's problems, and a fair share of questionable decisions, but GCM and Play Store are not among those.
That Moxie acts with contempt toward people on GitHub issues is true. It is also true that most of those people (in exchanges I have read) are complete ignorants who wouldn't know security if it hit them on the head, yet insist and yell with noble indignation that they're correct. The kind of people who were thought that more FOSS = more security is an axiom and go from there. Since he gets tons of that, I kinda understand why he might act like that. I understand, but do not condone, it's extremely off putting. In the end, one of Signal-the-app's biggest problems is that it's mostly criticized by unreasonable people.
I guess that settles it.
P.S. Your family did not grow up “under communism” unless they grew up in Ukrainian Free Territory[1] or Catalan and Aragon countryside during the Spanish Civil War[2], which are the two only socio-economic entities in modern history to reasonably approximate communism. What your family grew up in is state socialist Bolshevik dictatorship. If you're going to get all worked up about ideological wars, you should at least learn what these words mean, instead of blindly reproduce vulgar, politically illiterate Cold War obfuscations.