I mean, easily catching fire is a thing since German tanks in WWII, so yes.

Well. Imagine we’re talking 1920s, Trotsky, plants and steamers and autarky.

In this paradigm having plants able to assemble something is necessary. Even if on dotations.

Because you need plants that can be repurposed to, I dunno, assemble lots of FPV drones or something.

Also iPhones and such are too complex, but something useful they might be able to produce in the USA.

I’m not a big enough SW fan in general to spend my precious little reading time on SW comics and books.

Yeah, well, your first paragraph reads so impressed that I’m certain you haven’t read at least X-Wing books (all my favorite, Stackpole’s ones are sometimes too comfortable, Allston’s ones are sometimes cringe in technical and logical regards), the Thrawn trilogy (the part of the EU usually recommended first) and the Death Star (to compare the old and the new). I liked Andor, once again, and I would like it without Disney’s dark years, but those things were very good and deep too.

I’m sure there’s lots of merit in them, but not for me when there’s so much else to read in far more interesting universes.

To each their own.

Prequels are weird, not bad. What people criticize about them can be said about Babylon V even more, but I haven’t seen many people calling it a bad show.

I’m not impartial - I’ve grown on “prequel EU” as much as on “original EU”, but started with the former, trying to really interpret Jedi philosophy and such. My brain is not agile enough to separate pieces of EU and their closest movies by now.

But there’s that moment that with prequels the EU and the movies were being created simultaneously, there were official layers of canon and Lucas himself would even refer to EU. So - I don’t know. Maybe as self-contained movies they are bad. Their aesthetic gave me a lot, their emotion feels more real than Andor’s second season (its first season is better though), their music.

With more automation wouldn’t it possibly cost less than this? On Taiwan the balance between automation and human labor is due to their costs of labor and automation.

In any case more expensive than on Taiwan, though.

If US cost of labor drops sharply due to a few bubbles exploding, or a few nukes explode somewhere causing harm to world economy, then having such plants already in place might be retrospectively considered a wise decision.

Consumer hardware is now being used in wars on scale, changing all balances. So I think everybody is going to do what Trump is doing. Keep complex processes inside if they have the knowledge and ability, and try to gain knowledge and ability if they don’t.

I don’t think it’s bad. Socialists will finally see a situation which their ideology fits best. Industrial specialties, even worker-level ones, teach people to think in a way making idiotic websites in some modern framework doesn’t.

All that, of course, is sometime after the hellish hell we’re going to see making us work to achieve it.

Dunno, the languages seemed AI-generated based on French and German, or something like that.

Would make them similar to Mando’a, so no complaints, not the first time in Star Wars.

But - for me it’s good because it resembles the old EU.

So if you have little acquaintance with the old EU and liked Andor - I recommend delving into it.

Eh, we’ve had books involving characters like Mon Mothma, Garm Bel Iblis, Wedge Antilles, Tycho Selchu, Korran Horn and many others. We’ve also had comic books. We’ve had the “Death Star” novel, the previous version, so to say, of how those plans got out initially. The EU path involved a few hops at each of which the rebels were barely able to slip it further, with a few very lucky coincidences. Ending in the transmission to Tantive IV. Except the Rogue one moment with Vader literally having seen the ship and tried to board it, IIRC, was kinda inconsistent with how they talk in the 1977 movie, as if it’s still perfectly plausible that Tantive IV has nothing to do with the plans.

I appreciate Rogue One for trying to tread the same path, leading to a good story and maybe more good stories with the same approach, but its not the first on it.

KotOR II is mature. Last of the Jedi books are mature. X-Wing books … vary, some are very stupid, but some are very good.

SW EU is kinda big, words like “best” shouldn’t be thrown lightly.

But yes, even with the old stuff being so burnt into my brain I can’t be impartial, I accept Andor is real Star Wars and it’s good.

It’s obviously inspired by quite a few EU books and comics. Which are not worse.

(One thing I like about it, it manages to pretend Disney sequels just didn’t happen, and makes looking directly at Disney SW things optional. And makes a lot of EU references.)

Maybe if you mean on screen, then yes. I still think it’s not better than 1977 and 1980.

I agree, but sometimes one can encounter trekkies and other dubious types pretending it’s better than prequels or even OT, that is too much.

BTW, I want an unpopular advice - where to you legally get these shows as seamlessly as torrenting?

Suppose I’m a Linux or FreeBSD user, and don’t like too many steps being required due to being autistic and thus easily irritated.

Because with Andor specifically would really want to pay for it.

You hear the sound of your own brain asking for fuel to actually function.

It’s full self-driving, doesn’t need roads. Put into wrong car.

Eh, well, I’m not a communist, actually I lean to the ancap side, but you also don’t know much about communism.

Living in the USSR wasn’t nice, but it was a kinda functioning state and society. Less evil than today’s Russia, and led by less evil people. And it was an honest attempt at building something good, that failed due to architectural faults and deadlocks eventually.

There’s a difference between intentional evil and evil by mistake. USSR’s the latter, today’s Russia’s the former.

take over large parts of europe and replace their populations with russians

I’d need sources for something like that. There’s one “large part of Europe”, namely a piece of East Prussia now called Kaliningrad Oblast, where that happened.

The rest of East Prussia was ethnically cleansed in favor of Lithuanians and Poles. Both nations don’t seem eager to fix that, and you don’t seem eager to mention that.

And other areas were ethnically cleansed of Germans, Hungarians in favor of Poles, Czechs, Romanians.

There was also a mutual “population exchange” between Western Ukraine and Poland, where Poles were resettled from Ukraine to western areas of Poland cleansed from Germans, and Ukrainians from Poland were resettled to Ukraine. Ethnic cleansing as well.

Except for the first and the last things mentioned, those weren’t initiated by the USSR. Like the name “Benes decrees” kinda hints, being literally connected to Czechoslovakia, but in fact sometimes used for all of those crimes in Eastern Europe after the war.

Commies are literally palette swapped nazis.

No. In the USSR itself after Stalin they loved to low-key compare Stalin’s USSR to Nazi Germany, doesn’t make it true.

The kind of people who’d want Stalin back were a rarity, it seems, in the USSR itself after his death, unlike now in Russia. It was common knowledge, confirmed by party assemblies and many people being let out of prisons and rehabilitated, that repressions happened and were terrible, and that they shouldn’t happen again. It was also common knowledge, confirmed by official ideology as if that were needed, that war is terrible and no sane person wants war, and starting a war is unthinkable.

And even Stalin’s USSR wasn’t as similar to Nazi Germany as you think.

After Stalin it was the same leftist ideology, about workers having jobs and food on table, peaceful united humanity reaching for the stars, civilization and knowledge. Just with a memory of trauma and a belief in planning and centralism.

During Stalin it was about heroics and sacrifices made to have the same somewhere in far future, but that first a powerful socialist state should be built to demonstrate the advantages of socialism, and for that a lot of things could be considered necessary.

Before Stalin it was the same leftist ideology with too much trust into its success.

Sacrifices and heroics are typical for fascism, but not similar otherwise at all.

The whole fucking point is that this wasn’t

that specific group of people

, it was much bigger in scale. Before thinking you’re being ironic or calling others names you might want to check such things.

Where I live plastic straws are still everywhere.

Nickname checks out ; I think I’ve read it can be dangerous if you ingest it in specific situations, but mostly not.

Agreed.

I think there was for KDE (there’s almost everything for KDE).

Do they have a Tcl/Tk runtime in Apple-land?

I suppose that would solve the lack of many applications, by writing scripts good enough.

Found that no, but there are browser ones, so - sort of a variant.

That’d be bad, always hurts the elites negligibly and the rest substantially.

Veto right suspension is better. At least we’ll see which other EU states will use that veto.

Hungary is simply the poorest and weakest and least valued of Putin’s friends inside, which is why it’s taking all the hate. We may see Germany or Austria or Belgium or Italy using that veto.