There is a tension between the concepts of self-determination and territorial integrity that makes the question not so obvious. However the concept of territorial integrity has advantages for weaker nations. If self-determination were absolute then for example the U.S. could get any territory it wanted by using its immense wealth to buy off local residents. I'm sure there are some villages along the Russian border who would be happy to see their land turned into a U.S. military base in exchange for U.S. passports and big piles of money.
>If self-determination were absolute then for example the U.S. could get any territory it wanted by using its immense wealth to buy off local residents.
I mean, yeah. Thats how panama was born for example. Colombia was kinda mad about it at the time but of all the things the US gets shit for its not even in the top 10.
The US also tried to do something similar (and failed) to Kaliningrad. Only Russia objected.
Theres a pretty long history of the US doing this and nobody really minding.
>I'm sure there are some villages along the Russian border who would be happy to see their land turned into a U.S. military base in exchange for U.S. passports and big piles of money.
I wouldnt be so sure. Argentina tried the same thing with the falklanders and it didnt work. Likewise Trump with Greenland.
Villages also wouldnt survive if they were severed economically.
Crimea wasnt bought, anyway. It's just 90% ethnically Russian and objected vociferously to the maidan.
The U.S.'s historical strategy has been to find or create some credible faction wherever it wanted to meddle and then support it using any means necessary, ethical or otherwise, and coerce other countries to go along with it. In purely internal matters such as against the Native American populations it sometimes bothered with some fig leaf legal cover but other times it would just take what it wanted in the most brutal ways possible. I don't think it's ever actually fairly bought off a population though, so that's not really the same thing.
You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries? How often can these votes be held? Do they require international observation?
>You framed your earlier comment as being about democracy without qualifications. I'm wondering how far you'd go with that. Is every border territory only a 50.1% vote away from changing countries?
I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.
>How often can these votes be held?
Not sure if theres a clear answer to that. If enough of the population wants a vote i guess there should be one.
If there is one and 90% arent voting for the status quo there clearly needed to be one.
>Do they require international observation?
Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
If observers are absent and theres no evidence of fraud or coercion though thats not a good enough reason to reject a vote, especially when the result isnt close.
In crimea i find the "international observers" argument especially disingenuous though. The two sides were "referendum without western observers" (Russia) and "no referendum at all, ever" (Kyiv/West).
Ive heard hundreds if not thousands of people reject the idea that the crimean referendum was valid because of a lack of western observers. Not a single one of them rejected kyiv's position that there shouldnt be a referendum at all.
> I dont know if 50.0% deserves to be the threshold but whatever the threshold is Im damn sure it's below 90%.
The normal legality is that a state is governed by a national constitution that requires some supermajority to make major changes. Participating in a government formed by that constitution implies consent to it. If Ukrainian Crimea wanted to leave Ukraine then they could have looked for national support according to both regular and constitutional law. If they couldn't get the national votes then that's all there is to it. Democracy in action.
There are areas in the U.S. that heavily favor one party or the other, including rural border counties that went for Trump well over 80% in 2020. If one of these counties voted to secede after Biden won, that vote would simply have been illegal under laws they themselves had previously consented to. If prior to the secession vote some other country had sent passports and then troops to seize government buildings and "secure fair elections" or whatever, that would have been both ridiculous and hostile.
> Ideally. I'd love to see international observers in all elections. Would be great if e.g. Venezuelan election observers got to monitor US elections.
Venezuelans or most anyone else are free to come into the U.S. and observe voting stations from the outside like any other private person who isn't actively casting a vote, and conduct whatever exit polls they can convince people to take.
Even if you accept that votes can be taken by anybody and whenever, yes, you need international observer. Otherwise the vote will go the direction of whoever can coerce the locals the hardest. That's not democracy, that's not "the will of the people", that's a sham.
Gallup asked crimeans were asked if they believed it was a sham and 90% said no.
85% agreed with the result.
Russia didnt run that poll. We did. No troops were standing behind the answerers. It agreed entirely with the result of the referendum.
If we hypothesize coercion or fraud in crimea the poll would have disagreed with the results. It didnt.
Coming up with ever thinner pretexts for rejecting the result of this referendum is simply a rejection of democracy - that thing we are supposed to be fighting for.
I'm reading that Graeber book now, it's good. I enjoyed his Debt book too.
I recommend "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson as a specific attempt to answer the question "what do we need to make work to prevent a catastrophic extinction event for our species." Whether what KSR describes is actually realistic is something you'll have to decide for yourself.
Do you know of any specific problems with CentOS Stream? It seems like it just moves slightly faster than RHEL but ends up in the same place except for the tiny chance of an issue that isn't caught in pre-release testing. It sounds much more stable than Fedora, maybe as stable as Ubuntu LTS.
OP, you can also get RHEL for free as an individual if you're just planning to use it on a handful of systems and you're willing to make a Red Hat account and log into those systems with that account. You would have to use an account for a paid version of RHEL anyway.
> tiny chance of an issue that isn't caught in pre-release testing. It sounds much more stable than Fedora, maybe as stable as Ubuntu LTS.
CentOS Stream is the pre-release testing for RHEL.
> OP, you can also get RHEL for free as an individual if you're just planning to use it on a handful of systems and you're willing to make a Red Hat account and log into those systems with that account. You would have to use an account for a paid version of RHEL anyway.
But why go through all this trouble? Alma, Rocky, and even Oracle give you an exactly functionally equivalent distro without having to deal with the hassle of accounts or subscriptions.
Red Hat says they do a lot of testing before anything goes into CentOS Stream. That's what I meant by pre-release testing. Since the changes are intended for RHEL they're already carefully reviewing and cherry-picking everything from upstream anyway. This is a lot different from for example Debian where you have volunteers merging random snapshots from upstream into unstable, and then if that doesn't crash unstable for a week or so it's automatically moved to testing.
CentOS Stream is not for everyone and I don't know what OP's criteria are, but since they're considering Debian and Fedora and are willing to pay for RHEL then their criteria probably allows for CentOS Stream. Alma and Rocky seem okay if you're willing to trust relatively new distros, and Oracle Linux seems okay if you're willing to trust Oracle. They're all valid options depending on your needs.
Some backstory: Luc Besson directed "The Professional" (1994). His second wife was Maïwenn Le Besco, who was the model, but not the voice, for the Diva in "The Fifth Element" (1997), also directed by Besson. Maïwenn and Besson started dating when she was 15 and he was 31, they were married in 1992 when she was 16, and she had his child in January 1993. She later claimed that their relationship inspired "The Professional." They divorced in 1997 after Besson, 38, became involved with and then married "The Fifth Element" star Milla Jovovich, 21. Later in 2018 Besson was accused of rape by several women, though he denied the accusations and they were never proven in court.
I'm not sure whether the fact that the director of a movie with a pedophilic subtext was himself involved in an only-slightly-less pedophilic relationship in real life makes the movie itself less ethical to make or to watch, though it certainly doesn't make it any better. Maybe I'm saying that I'm skeptical that a creator who does some immoral thing can make a creation about that same thing with the context and discretion necessary not to glorify it.
Flagging goes both ways. There's a flagged post in this account's short history where I pushed back on a transphobic comment. Now various comments up from mine and down another branch are all flagged. Transphobic and anti-transphobic comments are all flagged to oblivion.
Probably the hope is that there are more nice people than not-nice people so on the whole the not-nice comments will disappear. From that one experience though it looks like it's at least as much about who's fastest to flag.
For sure flagging goes both ways on political/ideological flamewars. How could it be otherwise? That's not what HN is for.
The thing to do with egregious comments is not to feed them by replying, but to flag them (and in particularly bad cases, to email hn@ycombinator.com to make sure we see it).
Windows executables can be signed, and Homebrew formulae are theoretically reviewed and check a hash when they download binaries. With curl | bash, maybe the download fails partway through, or a hacker has replaced the executable on the server or the URL in the copy/paste instructions with a homograph spoof, or the site serves malware when it detects a curl agent.
Most music services that sell music sell it DRM-free, so even if it's not MP3 to begin with, you can buy it, download it, and then convert it to MP3 or any other format with something like ffmpeg.
Also, the vast majority of physical music CDs have no DRM and can be ripped to whatever format you want. This is more inconvenient but can be much cheaper than buying digitally especially if you are looking for popular music.
I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed.
Having more female game devs is like having more Australian game devs who know when it's summer there. A big difference though is that unlike Australia which has less than 0.5% of the world's population concentrated in one area, women are over 50% of the world's population and are evenly distributed. You can have a lot of games without Australia but almost every game with people in it needs to have women or you'll be telling a strange story. Imagine a situation where most games have scenes in Australia but most game devs don't know it's summer in January there. That's a problem.
Where it can get mixed up is that a lot of "knowing the seasons" as a woman is knowing stuff that makes men uncomfortable. A female game dev making a realistic female character can introduce everyday factual experiences about things like sexual harassment, birth control, or feminine hygiene, and some male players might say she's trying to make an activist game and she can reply, no, this is just my life. It would be like getting mad at an Australian game dev for always going on about summer in January as if it's their fault the sun spends a lot of time in the sky around that time.
(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
>I see from your name and profile that you're from Australia. Suppose you play a game set in Australia and there's a scene where you have snow in January. The first game you play like that you might just laugh, but if every game you play has snow in January in Australia you would probably get annoyed.
If you want a concrete example of that, A lot of media that features Australian characters are played by Americans doing bad Paul Hogan impressions. It's dumb, but didn't make me want to play Borderlands or COD instead of Overwatch or BioShock (with that damn 0126 code too - who does this!?)
>(This is leaving aside the economic argument that developer jobs tend to be good and therefore desirable, and it should be suspicious when any particular demographic is dramatically underrepresented in a field with mostly good jobs.)
Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
> If you want a concrete example of that, A lot of media that features Australian characters are played by Americans doing bad Paul Hogan impressions. It's dumb, but didn't make me want to play Borderlands or COD instead of Overwatch or BioShock (with that damn 0126 code too - who does this!?)
Wrong weather and bad accents are pretty tame, I agree. Actual portrayals of women in games have been much worse. The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" YouTube series by Feminist Frequency goes over a lot of these. Fortunately the industry has gotten better and games are now expected to include realistic female characters. That can be a tough ask for male game devs though. Most men couldn't accurately describe shopping for a pair of pants as a woman, let alone something more complex.
> Gamedev jobs are mostly terrible, with low pay, immense amounts of unpaid overtime and chronic, stressful "crunch time". I don't know why men stay in the industry, let alone women.
Nevertheless there are many women in much worse jobs who would take all of those terrible game dev jobs in a second if they could. The fact that they haven't suggests some systemic problem.
>Wrong weather and bad accents are pretty tame, I agree.
Tell that to all the people complaining about yellowface/Apu. It's genuinely on an "Ahh, I am honourable Chinese man, my family is honour" level.
>The "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" YouTube series by Feminist Frequency goes over a lot of these.
Wow, using Anita Sarkeesian - widely derided for being out of touch and over-intellectual - as a source and expecting to change minds.
>Most men couldn't accurately describe shopping for a pair of pants as a woman, let alone something more complex.
Seriously? Men complaining about going clothes shopping with their wives is goes back to the days of bad 1950s stand-up.
>Nevertheless there are many women in much worse jobs who would take all of those terrible game dev jobs in a second if they could. The fact that they haven't suggests some systemic problem.
I'm being serious here - child care, admin or even retail are much, much better jobs from the point of view of living a balanced life and providing for your family than anything in games dev.
> Tell that to all the people complaining about yellowface/Apu. It's genuinely on an "Ahh, I am honourable Chinese man, my family is honour" level.
I was referring to your Paul Hogan impression comment which I thought you meant was not a big deal to you. I can understand that a racist "yellowface/Apu" accent would be much more offensive.
> Wow, using Anita Sarkeesian - widely derided for being out of touch and over-intellectual - as a source and expecting to change minds.
I was using the series as a reference for tropes much more offensive than a Paul Hogan impression. If you don't want to listen at Anita Sarkeesian for some reason, you can find a list of tropes at https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebVideo/FeministFreq... with examples linked from there.
> Seriously? Men complaining about going clothes shopping with their wives is goes back to the days of bad 1950s stand-up.
I wasn't talking about complaining but instead describing the literal process. Where to go, shopping etiquette, dressing room etiquette, cost, fit, fashion. Plus the emotional context: some women find shopping very upsetting for reasons men might struggle to understand, let alone portray accurately in fiction.
> I'm being serious here - child care, admin or even retail are much, much better jobs from the point of view of living a balanced life and providing for your family than anything in games dev.
I was thinking of home health care workers. Over 3 million in the U.S., mostly women, average age in their 40s, median wage around 30k USD per year, taking care of sick or elderly people including physically moving them and cleaning up after them, sometimes living in the patient's home. I find it hard to agree that this job would better than being a game dev, but in any case you only need a high school diploma to do it so most game devs who want to change adult diapers in the middle of the night for much less pay and for their entire working life should be able to make the jump pretty easily.
Men have throughout history had the strangest ideas about women despite, as you said, having sisters and so on. I agree that is weird.
Of course a willing male game dev could research anything necessary to portraying women accurately. Or, alternately, you could hire female game devs or at least some consultants and get on with actually making the game.
To be clear: I'm not agreeing with you. I don't think "most men" would fail at the task you mentioned.
I also think that men can generally tell if a female character is realistic, it's just not what they're going for in a game and the market responds to that.
Same with those romantic pulp novels people read on vacation. Regardless whether they're written by men or women, the men there are always hilariously unrealistic. This is by design.
I'm not sure if we're disagreeing or just talking past each other. Most men could probably describe shopping for clothes as a woman in a literal sense, if that's what you mean. They probably couldn't connect with the experience like for example in this comedy article: https://reductress.com/post/why-i-shop-small-and-in-places-t.... If we still disagree then I'm not sure how to resolve it since it's a thought experiment anyway.
You make an interesting point about unrealistic depictions. In a way it's even harder for a man to write an unrealistic man that appeals to female readers than to just write accurately. I'm reminded of this comic: https://www.shortpacked.com/comic/false-equivalence. Of course male authors can learn to do it.
It's obvious to me that if you want to depict women accurately in art, or as you pointed out create art for women, then it would be helpful to have more women involved in the process. If anyone is seriously arguing that a typical man can write women and for women as well as a typical woman can so it's okay that most game devs are men then I'm not sure what to say. Agree to disagree.
