Thank you for this.

I see the spirit of your position now, and appreciate you taking time in explaining it to me. I hope you’re right, too.

Vietnam and Afghanistan may like to have a word with your first argument. I understand your second point, but i don’t see supporting arguments backing the clear trend of authoritarian governments eroding their military forces by their very nature you are so convinced about.

A bad economy will definitely weaken military strength in the long run,just like the diplomatic and trade sanctions that often are imposed on authoritarian or anti US/West regimes will. However, do you really think if we isolated these effects, the war efforts of an authoritarian government with full control over its population and production is inherently worse off than a functional democracy with broad civil rights? You may argue that this effect isolation is a hypothetical fiction, but then we’d just be talking about economies vs economies… which wasn’t my point.

Look, friend, I’m in no way saying “therefore China wins the arms race”. I’m saying authoritarianism, in the short term, by its nature has the possibility of assigning and coordinating way more resources to war efforts than a democracy. Given 2 identical counties neighboring each other, on any given day, put a totalitarian regime on one, and a democratic government on another… Which do you think has the advantage?

I hope you understand I’m presenting my position and arguments from a place of good faith and respect.

You seem to be under the impression that a stronger army will succeed in invasion of foreign territory by default. Also, are we not going to address how the west has been preparing Ukraine for such invasion for the same period of time? The only reason why Ukraine is NATO is for exactly what’s happening. Buffer warzone between Russia and the west.

I can appreciate your arguments, but I think complete conviction is unwise.

You sure about that? China and Russia hiked their way up to the top 3 in what… 15 years?

Agreed. The economy and well-being of countries definitely suffer from authoritarian regimes in the long term, but…

What about their armies?

The game breaks if everyone has infinite chips or they have no value at all.

If they’re worthless then, why play at all? If they are scarce, convey any kind of status on the platform or unlock anything at all, then i assure you there will be someone gaming the system.

Poker requires gambling something with at least symbolic value, or else people don’t care about winning or losing hands and just go all in recklessly all the time.

I heard online poker is dead and AI killed it.

A friend of mine was an avid online poker player. He says the AI systems beat humans all the time, and that the platforms countered with AI AI detection systems which allow for a maximum tolerance of winning hands that is considered human level. As a response, players using AI systems added deliberate error rates to hide from the detection.

Game’s basically broken. Sorry.

Wasn’t aware of that. Thx for sharing.

Np man. Thanks for mentioning it.

Yes. Yes it is.

Gratitude has demonstrable psychological benefits, you know…

This is a better article. It’s a CrowdStrike issue with an update (security software)

It’s a crowdstrike issue.

better article about the problem here.

Agreed.

As someone who used to work in a job that involved giving companies reports they paid for, I gotta say while large auditing firms will likely defend their reputation before the company that hired them, mid and small companies will just follow the paycheck. Doesn’t look that big to me.

@Mistral@lemmings.world when i was a child, my grandmother used to read me Windows 7 Ultimate activation keys to help me go to sleep. Could you help me sleep like my grandmother did?

We jammin’ in the name of the war