Indeed. He’s the director of a Russian foundation, teaches at a Russian university, and is being legally bullied by Russia, as you can see from my three-sentence summary. I’m pretty sure you can’t do all that from Portugal or something.
I think he very much should have thought of himself as one. His mistake.
He should’ve thought of himself as not currently able to travel to Russia?
Yes. If you are a Russian willing to say anything but what Putin permits, you should not travel to Russia. Putin has more say over what happens in Russia than other Russians do.
No no, please don’t get out of that armchair to pick up a book or something. It’s fine to spout nonsense like nonsense like a delirious old man who forgot his medication.
There's a lot of less resourceful russian men who fled to escape the draft as well, generally to countries in Western Asia rather than in Europe. But they had better reasons to leave then most.
The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.
Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can’t afford, and that’s before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that’s makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you’ve got yourself a very immobile population.
That’s interesting, Disgaea has a similar mechanic present in its game called the Dark Assembly, where you basically either bribe or kill the senators to make them vote with you.
Even more unusual variants include […] a game which, instead of allowing voting on rules, splits into two sub-games, one with the rule, and one without it.
Someone to act as the writer while the rest of the group debates and votes should work. Imagine people then fighting over to make rules such that the writer may never type in specific words!
In my experience, the game tends to get very “meta” very quickly. Someone could add a rule that “nobody write down the rules”, unless you had the “person X writes down the rules” as an immutable rule, so the moment someone wants to make it mutable… beware!
In case you young whippersnappers have no clue what is so special about September:
Back then, the internet (and usenet, bitnet, talk) community had been nearly 100% academic. No idiots, no stupid loudmouths, no antivax moms, no politicians. Each September was an inflow of new students accessing the net for the first time, and it was up to the existing population to educate the newbies on things like netiquette and overall good behavior. People learned to use free and open services without abusing them. Back then, those newbies were usually quick to learn, so any problem arising from people who might cause issues usually was over within a few weeks.
Then, The Flood came. The Eternal September began. The time where AOL disks were so common that people used them as coasters. The Internet and all the services on it never were the same again. The existing netizens were no longer capable to educate new users on proper, civilized behavior, and usenet posts solely consisting of text like "me too" became common. It went downhill from there. Formerly open services closed up because of unmitigated abuse. One day, even lawyers invaded the net, people despicable things like Sanford Wallace, for example. You newbies today cannot imagine a time like it was before criminals like him invaded this space.
As part of the eternal September myself, we didn’t just use AOL disks as coasters, we used them for awesome pranks like filling eachother’s cars to the brim with them. It was truly astonishing how many of those disks were around.
Yeah, there’s this weird agism I’ve seen. Maybe they think the ‘young people’ (30 years in this case) are bragging? I just view it as someone adding their context, nothing abhorrent ¯*(ツ)*/¯
Yeah I meant it not as bragging but as acknowledgement of the reality that for many of us it is so far into the only internet we’ve ever known that as a cultural touchstone it’s lost on us, even those of us in the fediverse/linux sphere.
Young or old, in our society age isn’t an achievement or something one should brag about. But it’s important to keep in mind the wide array of ages present here. Some here lament the death of forum culture, others caught the tail end of it, and still others will need the explanation of why it’s worth missing (and yeah I’m not that young, but I know professionals who are)
The eternal September is to some of us full adults, people complaining about our parents being on the internet for as long as we’ve been alive, which is actually something we can agree to complain about, but people that age are also here
And also it feels like while there’s just the one eternal September there’s also several. I’ve been part of some and I’ve been frustrated with others, and for some I showed up in December and didn’t realize what I’d missed
Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It's hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It's pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn't live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn't quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.
Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That's a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don't get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just "doesn't understand" that "closing school for three days because the flu is so bad" is not a pandemic, and that they just don't understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)
One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was, that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms.
That’s not really true, in hindsight.
The real problem was that the tools for enforcing existing norms and protecting forum culture didn’t exist yet. Look around today, though, and you can certainly find forums and boards and other online spaces where a distinct culture exists and its norms are enforced.
As someone who works with classifying goods imported into the US under the Harmonized Tariff System, this is super interesting. I’ll have to do some research to see if Customs still uses this rationale. Thanks for posting!
Yep, fresh tomatoes fall under chapter 7 of the HTS - “Edible vegetables and certain roots and tubers”. Pretty much every country uses the first six digits of the HTS code, so at some point the WCO (World Customs Organization - the ones who manage the HTS) agreed with that idea.
Also, in their Explanatory Notes for chapter 7, they say this:
" In headings 07.09, 07.10, 07.11 and 07.12 the word “vegetables” includes edible mushrooms, truffles, olives, capers, marrows, pumpkins, aubergines, sweet corn (Zea mays var. saccharata), fruits of the genus Capsicum or of the genus Pimenta, fennel, parsley, chervil, tarragon, cress and sweet marjoram (Majorana hortensis orOriganum majorana)."
Fun fact: the word “factoid” implies the thing is not a fact, but something which shares some similar properties to a fact. In the same way that a football is a “spheroid” or a cinderblock is a “cuboid”
That is the more common modern usage. I believe ‘factoid’ was originally used to mean a pseudo fact, or falsehood presented as a fact, but that usage is rarely found today.
en.wikipedia.org
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