Blemgo

What would be your motivator to pay human artists? Why sign any?

I mean, the internet has given artists a way to spread their works and profit off them without any major record labels. So what artists will lose by that are exploitative companies whose only benefit is that your music will be sold by major retailers as physical CDs or Downloads.

They took the code of Scratch 3 and claim to have made some improvements on it to make it run faster alongside some other improvements (such as rising the maximum framerate to 60 from Scratch's 30). However, there doesn't seem to be any proof that this is the case, so it could perform exactly like Scratch 3 without any improvements.

What is an actual bonus is that this software offers actual installation files, whereas normal Scratch 3 is only available through a browser and by downloading it from the App/Play/Windows store. It's nice to be able to not use these storefronts because a) it means that you have a little more control over the software you use and b) you can use Scratch 3 offline on Linux as well with this.

I just checked it out. Apparently it is a fork of Scratch and supposedly applies some optimisation to it, which I would take with a grain of salt without any benchmarks.

I think the biggest advantage is the proper offline mode, as Scratch 3 doesn't have classic installation files (and therefore no Mac and Linux installations).

Yes, after the reign of Stalin, where Khrushchev took over, the USSR deescalated the Cold War, yet it was the actions taken by Stalin's regime that let the conflict start to begin with, with the USSR not retreating from Iran as the other Allied Forces did, the threat of force in the Turkish Straits crisis, comparing Churchill to Adolf Hitler and breaking the Yalta Agreement by meddling with the 1947 Polish elections.

Also, the article seems to be paywalled, so I have to see when I get around to reading it.

It might be that my comparison wasn't the most accurate, since my main insight in the USSR is through the DDR, which was mainly a pawn in the face off between the superpowers at that time, and thus was a hotspot for tensions around that time. And I do believe that the wealth disparity wasn't as extreme as in capitalist countries, yet it says little about what the actual average living conditions were compared to other countries. Also, corruption doesn't always have a wealth disparity as a result. After all, people can also get corrupt due to self-preservation, which I think is most evident under Stalin's later rule, after his wife committed suicide.

Yet I can't really agree that it was "killed off" during its downfall, as I have my doubts that it would have survived much longer than it did without its subnations separating from it. The only way I could imagine it surviving would have been if they "licked their own wounds" after the war, so to speak, recuperate from their losses instead of its rapid militarisation that it gone through to keep up with the USA in order to win a dick measuring contest.

I am not so sure if the dissolution was really avoidable. I like to use the DDR as a comparison, as it does resemble the USSR post-war pretty well, due to the USSR pretty much dismantling factories in their occupation zone to compensate their own losses only to stop that as they realized the other occupation forces were strengthening their own zones and so reverting their course, leaving the then formed DDR in a similar state as the government that spawned in.

During the time of its existence, the DDR suffered from supply shortages to the point where the Trabant, the most driven car in the DDR had a chassis made out cotton-based thermoset. Yet at the same time government paranoia was at it's peak, where the MfS (the East German equivalent of the KGB) coerced and blackmailed citizen to aid in the espionage and recruit them as informants against their neighbours, just to collect as much information on their citizen as possible in case they are suspected to be traitors as more and more people tried to flee the extreme poverty they had to live with. Yet the party was riddled with corruption, as the last generation of DDR politicians realized as the old ones resigned and allowed a new wave to take the lead, seeing the actual numbers of the debt of the government and the state of the country had to face with, even though the older generation of politicians were initially against Gorbachev's Perestroika plan.

I think this level of hidden debt, corruption and paranoia/secrecy was the reason why Gorbachev claimed that the Chernobyl disaster caused the downfall of USSR, as it was the epitome of what plagued the whole nation ever since the war. Nobody wanted to speak out the truth for their fear of their status or even their lives, as they either get painted as a saboteur or gets silenced by those who would be targeted as well if the truth came out. Getting rid of that issue would be nothing less of a government dissolution, because no one could be really trusted.

And even then, editing out unwanted mutations can still stifle society as a whole and may be morally the wrong choice. For example, what about eradicating autism due to the immense pain these individuals receive due to our society? Is it better to change our society to accommodate people afflicted with it or wipe out the genes responsible for it if it is easier? And if we choose the latter, where is the cutoff point? Can we even tell when we crossed that line, where our drive to improve ourselves ended being done out of mercy and began to be about creating the model citizen?

Though this solution also seems to be very flawed, doesn't it? You basically trust another company to manage your child's smartphone and granting it full access to it. Furthermore, that doesn't stop predators, as they could still arrange meetups with their unknowing victims. And even if it captures text messages, kids would be discouraged to use their phone due to their fear of their parents disproving of their friends or their communication to them. Instead, they'd more likely learn the use of "burner phones" by getting a factory-reset phone and using that one instead.

It's the sort of ham-fisted attempt expected by parents that blame their kids for their mistakes instead of their parenting.

Could you explain how it doesn't undermine your argument?

I think the term you are looking for is "Deep Net", although it originally meant websites that weren't indexed by web searches.

Not only that, but they are crucial for network security. VPNs allow all network traffic (with a few necessary exceptions) to be routed through the company's network and benefit from its security measures, mainly monitoring traffic for suspicious and malicious behaviour. Without it, finding compromised PCs is much harder and enforcing company policies regarding web use would be impossible outside the office.

One company that I can recommend is Withings. They do have an companion app, but a lot of devices do work on their own, and when not, they work with Google Fit or HomeAssistant, though probably due to that fact the products are pricier.