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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: March 23rd, 2025

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  • Well, the answer to your curiosity is there. No need for further wondering, same as you don’t need to wonder wheter the sun will rise tomorrow. We know.

    But you insist on wondering even though the knowledge is already there.

    So why are you still claiming that it’s a “casual statement of curiosity about the future”, when the result is already there?

    The terminology you use and the insistence of ignoring factual knowledge that we have claiming “you are just wondering” or “just curious” or “just asking questions” is identical to the tactics used by conspiracy theorists and antivaxxers.

    If you are persistently acting like a conspiracy theorist and antivaxxer, why are you surprised you are treated like one?






  • I really don’t get why English speakers are so glued to the King James Bible. Most other languages keep re-translating the bible, aiming for more accuracy and more understandable language for modern audiences.

    Pretty much every time I’ve seen anyone actually deal with the King James Bible, they have a set of explanations what this or that thing actually means. It’s the worst possible bible to use for anything.

    And that’s on top of the concept that a 2000+ year old text is supposed to contain all the wisdom ever needed.



  • Ok, lets put it in a way you might understand.

    Let’s say there’s a basic human right to life, liberty and security (Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights). That’s quite basic.

    You say you live in Russia. What good does that right do if your holy leader decides that he doesn’t like what you posted online and sends you to the front in Ukraine or into a Gulag? Are you going to tell the military police that they can’t touch you because you got rights?

    Or lets make it more extreme: Say you live in Gaza. Are you going to tell the IDF that you got rights and thus their bombs and starvation just won’t touch you?

    You are likely from one of the countries with English-derived legal system, where the precedent mechanism literally means that there are non-codified rights outside of the law, which the interpretation of the law has to approximate.

    Nope, I don’t live in a country with English-derived legal system. A law is a law and judges interpret laws and not judges.

    But even in a precedent-based system: Precedent means jack squat if the country’s leadership doesn’t care, as seen by the US.


    I say it once again: Rights, laws, constitutions, all that are fine and dandy, and they are somewhat useful as long as the rule of law is mostly upheld. But:

    • If the leadership doesn’t care about any of that, none of it matters.
    • If laws stop being enforced, they stop mattering. A law that isn’t enforced is a suggestion, nothing more.
    • The same goes for constitutions and constitution-adjacent rules.
    • Rights are never anything more than suggestions. If they are supposed to have any meaning at all, they need to be codified into law.

    Look up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. All 193 member countries of the UN ratified these. And yet there are articles in there that every single of these member countries violate. And having these “rights” means absolutely nothing in real-life terms if there’s no mechanism to enforce them or get any benefit from it.

    As a russian, how much do you e.g. enjoy the “right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association” (Article 20.1) and the “right to freedom of opinion and expression” (Article 19)? How much does “having these rights” help you if you go on the street and protest the war?





  • Actually, dial-up in Germany died 2 years ago: https://www.teltarif.de/internet/by-call/

    And since dial-up just uses a regular phone connection, there’s nothing stopping you from dialing up a dial-up provider from a different country, so dial-up still works in Germany.

    In fact, you can host your own dial-up gateway at any time. All you need is a PC with both a dial-up modem (which are still readily available on places like Amazon or Galaxus) and an internet connection. Set both interfaces to bridge mode and you are your own little dial-up provider.

    In some places this is still used in place of a VPN. Just put a dial-up modem inside the private network, connect it to a phone line and dial-up from the outside to get into the private network. Add a phone number allow-list to prevent access by unauthorized people.

    The technology is ancient and not in wide-spread use anymore, obviously, and hasn’t been in a long time. But that’s the same pretty much anywhere. The main reason why AOL still had the service running (and why German providers did until 2023 too) is because it costs almost nothing to keep the service running for the handful of people who are still paying incredibly expensive internet contracts from the 90s.

    Similar story with analogue telephone lines. In Austria there are only ~4000 customers left who use analogue telephone. But it costs nothing to keep it around and the people running it haven’t updated their phone contracts in 20+ years and thus pay crazy prices.