temp-dude-87844

If you subscribe to the point of view that Russia's war on Ukraine isn't actually about Ukraine, but about causing lasting pain in Europe, then this action is perfectly rational for Russia.

It drives the market prices up (anything that spooks market participants will), and creates an ongoing situation that adds pressure on governments to act.

A balanced summary of the lead-up to the First (1988-1994) and Second (2020) Nagorno-Karabakh war.

Note that this is article is NOT about the recent escalation on 2022-09-13 when Azerbaijan attacked inside Armenia's internationally-recognized territory, in territory unrelated to the Nagorno-Karabakh question, clearly well past ridgelines used for the border. Technically the border is "undemarcated", but it's a cheap claim that this is a mere border dispute.

Instead, many of the actions of Azerbaijan since the November 2020 ceasefire agreement have been applications of Salami Slicing and Borderization: occupying chunks of the Republic of Armenia bit by bit, to pressure Armenia for a settlement more favorable to Azerbaijan. Specifically, Azerbaijan wants a route between its mainland and its longstanding exclave Nakhchivan (which borders Turkey).

Article 9 of the 2020 ceasefire agreement provides for such a transport connection, but does not use the word "corridor" in reference to it. This is contrasted with the 'Lachin Corridor', mentioned several times in the ceasefire agreement, which provides a connection between Armenia and the Armenian-ethnicity areas of Nagorno-Karabakh. Since 2021, Azerbaijan has unilaterally begun using the term 'Zangezur Corridor' to refer to their desired connection, anchoring their expectation that its guarantees would be similar to that of the ceasefire-defined 'Lachin Corridor'. Despite several rounds of working groups and mediation, no progress has been made on a solution acceptable to both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has the upper hand, with superior military and economy, less democratic government (top-down leadership), and a better geopolitical situation. And it's been steadily bullying Armenia to get its way.

Two reasons:

- To inconvenience the institutions of the occupier just in that area (Why just there? To avoid removing their incentives to change and to avoid crippling your own companies who provide a service there. If you sanction the occupier fully, they'll double down, perceive it as an escalation, and your own companies will be significantly hurt. They'll find an alternative, and once they do, they won't need your service any longer, so you lose leverage.)

- To frustrate the local populace so that even the milder ones have additional incentives to oppose the occupying regime.

Bigger cities typically regulate taxis and sell licenses to operate to taxi companies, who then employ or contract the drivers.

Uber was always an unlicensed taxi scheme. Their planned business model was to ignore the law to reduce costs, then sell rides below cost until everyone else is out of business.

This should absolutely be litigated to stop the blatant laundering of copyright under the guise of fair use.

Copilot's API is surfacing snippets of work without licensing information attached alongside. It can be shown in discovery that Copilot does access the origin work.

The sooner this is slapped down, the sooner we can avoid addressing the even more troubling question that exists today: is someone who used Copilot to throw together a bunch of code infringing copyright of works where those portions originate?

This is a complex problem with no satisfying conclusions... how could one be violating copyright if they never accessed the 'copied' work to copy? Copyrights aren't patents. Infringement requires copying.

Using Copilot launders the user's awareness of the origin works, yet making the Copilot users liable for widespread "accidental" copying would be troubling.

There are no pipelines that cross the EU's external border that transport crude oil from outside the EU into the EU, except the ones that are fed from Russia.

Before the UK left the EU, there was technically one such pipeline from Norway, but it was mainly used to supply an oil export terminal located in the UK, rather than for importing oil into the UK for domestic consumption.

Europe expects to rely on sea transport to import oil after foregoing use of oil from the Russian pipelines. This is why the landlocked countries of Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia were concerned during the sanction talks, though Hungary's Orban has exaggerated the concern to obstruct sanctions and/or to score dubious Realpolitik points.

Hungary's only alternative is the Adria pipeline that starts at a port in Croatia; it can be used in either direction and has sufficient capacity to meet current demands. Czechia's only alternative is the IKL pipeline that starts at a pipeline junction and tank farm in Vohburg (near Ingolstadt) in Germany. Slovakia's only alternative (if my research is accurate) is to be supplied through Hungary, using the Adria pipeline and a soviet-era connection between Hrkovce and Százhalombatta to be run in reverse mode.

I get why the OSI published this post. They have a vested interest in the conversation and I agree with their points.

But the battle for the narrative has already been lost when people consider this to be a problem with 'open source'. Rather, it's a problem with software that's being given away for reputation brownie points. Here, the author showed exceedingly poor judgment towards users of their software, and this should result in the loss of goodwill and respect towards the author and the forking of their works if the license allows.

Open Source didn't enable this behavior. The author's poor judgement and the author's lack of need to care for the users of one's software is what didn't dissuade this behavior. In this case, it was giveaway software causing harm. In other cases, it's commercial software pushing hamfisted changes users don't want, because the users aren't empowered enough to fight it. The reason commercial software would avoid this particular type of stunt is because it's poor business sense to harm one's direct customers.

So what of Open Source? Open Source allows anyone to review or modify the software that engages in this behavior. So the community can salvage the author's good contributions and better custodians can carry the software forward.

Open Source also allows anyone to discover these cases proactively. Of course, almost nobody does this, because we as an "industry" have gotten used to four troubling trends, and ridicule those who aren't on this "bleeding edge":

* thinking that software that costs $0 to obtain incurs no additional costs

* not auditing our dependencies

* being unconcerned about the sheer quantity of dependencies

* blindly updating dependencies

It's a sad but predictable development that the field of Open Source software has basically merged with the community of authors actively looking to give away software for $0 (for fame or to upsell advanced features). Basically, the Open Source movement was too successful (in its advocacy and in raising the demands of the customers of software), and it has largely subsumed and supplanted the formerly-separate fields of shareware and trialware software.

This development is what truly hurts Open Source: so much software but too little emphasis on (or even demand for) curation, massive imbalance of contributors to users, the decreasing influence programming-language-specific spaces, and increasing dominance of the "move-fast-and-break-things" culture.

The way forward is to achieve stronger curation, more focused maker spaces, tighter (as opposed to larger) communities, and an outreach effort to re-establish the philosophical distinctions between Open Source and freeware.

Just as the article notes, free lots in out-of-the-way towns aren't too attractive because you still have to spend many dozens of thousands of dollars to put on a house on it, and then you live in an out-of-the-way town with few ways to resell. At that point, you could move to the rural fringe of a populous area, and be a lot closer to amenities, entertainment, good schools, healthcare, childcare, shopping, etc.

In dense and popular areas, it's the land prices that contribute to high housing prices. In less popular areas, it's construction prices that dominate the cost.

The cryptocurrency boom, like tulip mania, was always reliant on there being an endless supply of greater fools to which you could eventually offload these strange wares. And, if you were genuinely using this for peer-to-peer payments, and wanted to turn your play-money into cash, you always needed a banc-like party willing to take your deposits. Like in most financial systems, that's where most of the money was made: on money service fees.

Similarly, it's not a surprise that this found an audience among people with fewer options to make it big from more traditional investments (mostly because they lack large amounts of capital they could afford to tie up). Risky investments are attractive precisely because the magnitude of the payoff can be extreme. People who play the lottery think the same way. And, shysters, influencers, and companies peddled this to specific disenchanted or newly-climber demographics on purpose. Surely you've seen ads for when every newfangled phone money management app started a 'crypto' section, like Robinhood or Square's Cash App.

The same conundrum comes up with the medical forms that ask one to self-report any post-partum depression, or any time you can be found mentally unfit (e.g. at your job, like in 2015 Germanwings pilot-murder-suicide) so that the bureaucracy descends to irrevocably alter your life. As a society, we still haven't figured out a way that allows a suicidal person to get their time-out, while ensuring that that intervention won't impair their future.

This essay is a thought-provoking read, because it critically analyzes riots by their characteristics and compatibility with classic Western political thought.

It comes very close to making the assertion that once a demonstration attains 'crowd' characteristics, while that crowd may attempt to self-police, the crowd lacks the ability to effectively and rapidly restrain and disavow actors in the crowd or nearby who escalate the level of violence. Lacking any ability to distinguish the faction affiliation of orderly protesters vs. rioters at the same event, the public will readily attribute any violence committed in the same spatial and temporal context to the protest's organizers.

In my view, this specific risk makes riots an ineffective political tool: once the well-targeted violence begins, it's far too easy for its narrative to be hijacked by hot-blooded people or opportunistic agitators amidst the chaos. If poorly-targeted disorder materializes, the riot loses legitimacy with outgroups, and battle lines are drawn along faction lines.

In contrast, riots can be effective tools of terror and/or revolution. After a successful revolution, the victors often expend considerable effort to justify their actions, as the new order must be seen as normal for it to last and not be perceived as an aberration. (New regimes in coup-prone regions don't bother, because there is no expectation that the regime won't be deposed by another coup later.)

With these risks, why would anyone organize anything but the most carefully branded peaceful protest? With clear leaders, coordinators, security, video cameras, and sophisticated media relations, and ideally vetting and uniforms. Careless assembly is a recipe for hurting the stated cause, unless the goal is martyrdom or victory through superior force.