FreeFacts

They never had an Empire as the Soviet Union.

But they did. That's why Mao called them social imperialists.

As for NATO, it's to ensure western imperialism stays intact. The US is the main beneficiary, but western Europe participates because they also profit from brutal exploitation of the global south.

That just brings into question how NATO is a threat to Russia then? The only way that would be true is that either a) Russia sees them as imperialist competition, or b) the threat is that Russia can't attack its neighbors without retribution.

Why do you think Russia invaded Ukraine? Like, what is their primary goal. The impetus that drove them to approve the invasion.

Because they want to become a global power once again. That is their dream. They want to be imperialists themselves, but unfortunately for them, they have failed to do so. In the past decades they have poked their noses into Africa and the Middle East, with some success. But simultaneously they have lost their grip on regions they previously considered to be under their imperialist umbrella. It started with Georgia, which they solved with violence. Next it was Ukraine, and then Syria. And then all the unrest in Belarus. They got spooked that their imperialist dream was failing, so they went in to change the regime in Ukraine. But that didn't work out as they planned. And to top that, they also lost their foothold in Syria completely. And now, just recently, they are losing Azerbaijan too.

Secondly, what do you think the functioning role of NATO is?

Honestly, it is to protect US geopolitical interests in Europe. Making Europe depend on the US for its defense. But it is not that bad of a deal for Europe, as it keeps the peace (in "western" Europe).

He titled himself as the chief engineer of SpaceX. And this is no joke.

The protagonist was wrongly imprisoned

The protagonist claimed to have been wrongly imprisoned. That's one of the greatest hooks of the film imo, we the audience want to believe he was innocent, but if looking at the case objectively, he could have been guilty as well. I would even say it was probable. Andy even admits he went to confront his wife, armed and intoxicated, but claims he fell asleep on the driveway, while some other guy went into the house and did the killings. With the same type of bullets his gun used, which also mysteriously disappeared from his possession.

Has a dual citizenship of Finland and the USA, so still a European citizen too.

Valve does nothing to suppress competition (it can't really either)

They at least used to have a rule that publishers can't sell cheaper on other platforms (outside of timed sales that is), meaning that consumers can't get a better price on other storefronts even when those platforms would take a smaller cut. That was very much suppressing the competition as them taking smaller cuts can't transfer into cheaper prices if the publisher also wanted to sell on Steam.

Imagine after 10 more years of cpu/gpu innovations, and chat applications that have actually been designed for information retrieval, how much that is going to transform how we interact with data and information.

LLMs are going to change how we interact with data and information, but not the way you think. The AI-generated spam will ruin the whole concept of internet search completely. Only information that we can trust is going to be human-curated.

I wonder how it is secured, or could anyone with a big enough transmitter reprogram it at will...

I'd like to see ranked choice voting or something similar here, there are some smaller parties I've been voting and it seems they seldom have a chance.

Ranked choice voting would make sense maybe in the presidential elections, but otherwise all elections in Finland are D'Hondt method proportional representation, with open lists. Ranked choice would bring nearly zero benefits, and lots of complication to the vote counting process.

The thing is, what constitutes a living wage is based on the home location, and all other wages reflect to that level. Most of the wages go to the cost of living everywhere, especially to housing. There is the leeching class, landowners, leeching the fruit of labor from the workforce, and in the west they are leeching that much more in pure dollars. The sad thing is that wages increasing in India wouldn't go to increasing the value of life of the workforce, but the landowning leeches of that region.

One hit wonder as a director. And that hit is American Graffiti, not Star Wars.