Yes, and it’s about stereotypes and perception more than reality, haven’t been to any.

Well, I’ve said A so I should say B. Here it is: the UK feels, from Russian perspective, a more “normal” country than USA or Commonwealth nations.

It’s simply a robbery of those companies and the investment. More subtle than vouchers during 90s Russia privatization, but similar.

In the Russian 90s there were those vouchers, but people who received them, 1) didn’t know what they cost, 2) had too small a value on their hands to do anything with those, 3) were in hard enough conditions to be compelled to sell them to buyers. And here’s the thing, the buyers to start were those most known and profiting. It’s the network effect we know and love, right here.

Here 1) people hold those companies various actions\stocks\whatnot, I’m not financially literate enough, 2) do not possess any voice in corporate decisions really, these are too big, 3) the companies themselves are investing in a huge-huge bubble. Those inflating the bubble, that is, the C-suites and such, don’t know when it’ll burst naturally, but they can know when it’ll burst if they create a bubble burst situation deliberately. In case of a natural bubble burst people knowing it’s a bubble will win as much as the perpetrators, defeating the purpose. In case of an intentional bubble burst they won’t.

I might be wrong with this doom talk.

If I’m wrong and it’s caused by normal market expectations, then they are likely preparing for a lot of totalitarianism and genocide in the coming years, and I mean a lot, that’s the only kind of global development to be expected to warrant such investment.

And, of course, the latter is not ruled out if it’s an intentional bubble anyway.

It’s not just the British, it’s all “core western” nations honestly. USA most of all, it is of course funny that a British regulator tries to do that with an American company, that doesn’t happen often.

They demand fulfillment of their laws regardless of jurisdiction when the other side is weaker, and ignore laws of others even if firmly inside those others’ jurisdiction. And that’s so normalized that nobody even thinks about it except for such funny moments.

There are honestly worse things.

All of Mediterranean border and migration matters are resolved in this way, there are “coast guard” military organizations on the African shores with their own small concentration camps for those attempting to illegally migrate to Europe (not nice, of course, but doesn’t warrant such conditions) which in reality are funded by Italian and French governments and really report to them and act in their interest. I think I’ve read a few articles describing those.

It’s not been so long since France enforced its laws on much of the African continent. Due to malicious and incompetent jerks in its top, it has lost much of that. And I hope it’ll lose everything colonial, French Guyana included.

I’ve read just yesterday about British troops and Kenya in the context of a murder, which was pretty known in that regiment, with all the circumstance, and the perpetrator is a vet living in UK just fine with family and all, and more than 10 years after the British have formally started some kind of investigation, and it will apparently go on for a couple more decades. It’s literal mockery of the victim’s family, and it’s normal for Europeans in such cases.

Hell, even western policy on Armenia is not a result of some rules, it’s a result of one European politician with connections having their ass torn by bandits in Armenia in 2012. They are taking revenge for that. They think thousands of honorable decent men dead are worth less than one criminal’s torn ass. That a whole nation with its history is worth less than that. That they have right to think and act like that.

If you want Europeans (and Americans, and Australians, and Canadians, and so on) to learn honor, you need to have that whole imperial bunch thoroughly defeated by Chinese, or by India, or by them all together, or whatever.

Otherwise it’s simply unnatural for humans to know their borders. While the empire (in the British and French, not in the Roman, nor in Chinese, nor in Japanese, nor in Russian, nor even in Spanish meaning) is still alive, it will morally decay further and further.

And you know what’s the funniest? Growing up in Russia I thought I’m smarter than people around me for thinking that the general sense of what I just wrote is all propaganda. LOL. Soviet and Russian propaganda softened that reality, if anything, they had and have to somehow justify dealing with those nations. Modern Russian propaganda didn’t stop that too, they are just adding some delusions on the side.

One can have segregation and cheap colored abused labor without slavery, like most of the British empire after it went out of fashion. And one can rob, abuse and genocide natives with a formal truce in place.

Those pesky colonials just didn’t understand nuance.

So, while I don’t know anything real about the UK, having been there once, it surely felt and feels from their people in the interwebs that you are right.

No, I mean US military too, if you also look at budget to personnel ratio and the tasks it’s supposed to cover.

But yes, US military is much less like the western movies PR and more like a normal military, compared to European ones (even France), just with such funding that one can be certain that most of that is going to perpetually feed various mafia-oligarch-deepstate freeloaders.

I mean, “the west” includes Turkey, South Korea, and even Israel, so of course.

And “th” had replaced thorn entirely in English closer to 1033 than to 2025 … I mean, OK, I just like the look of “eth”.

Its customers want their sheeple base to only use computers via full MITM of a networked (or at least with undecipherable functionality, like a local LLM) agent, that predicts what you want from what you say, so that god forbid you’d never do direct computation.

I mean, an LLM model is literally a program whose logic is hidden in weights. A way to thoroughly obfuscate functionality.

And those customers you might consider smart, with such power, but in fact just like with everything else they are not, just in the right place in the structures of power to have their wishes tried first.

I’ll repeat, they are not as smart as one would expect. But if your asshole gets torn while playing superhero, it’s your problem and of those who did it. If their asshole gets torn while playing superhero, it’s a problem of everyone in the street, town, district, country, continent, ethnicity, maybe even statistical bucket of those who did it.

And they do think they are some sort of superheroes.

Though when the AI bubble bursts, and we’ll have plenty of cheap hardware suited for this technology, who says there won’t be plenty of more specific applications and even toolkits based on LLMs? And then they’ll get their wish, not in the sense of agents, but in the sense of programs far more resistant to reverse-engineering than normal binaries being popularized.

Not even talking about the scenario where all that cheap hardware is bought by parties which can use it to their normal goals, unlike most real commercial activity. That is, by nation states with their surveillance needs.

So perhaps those people are smart enough.

OK, maybe it’s just another BAD psychosis.

I’ve only seen it in vendor integration manuals, do you over the pond really use that?

I have a conspiracy theory this was intentional, about the greatest library. The system that happened was intentionally built to end like this.

The mechanisms that led it to this point were simple and easily predictable (which is why they were not present in previous concepts, like NLS and Xanadu and such dream systems), and follow from the fundamental structure. Mechanisms solving these flaws also emerged early enough - siloed services and search engines. Companies providing the main offerings to solve these flaws followed in a few years. And they are still here.

See, this has been built up in like 30 years, right? Then surely much of the material will enter a better built system (reverse links, transparent identities, delay-tolerant, versioned, global and message-oriented, not connection-oriented, and so on)?

Yes, but less because of reliance on the wrong system. It was a trap to siphon the most effort. There will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in a global networked system. Just like there will be no similar explosion of enthusiasm in communism as there was during 20s’ USSR.

It’s what secret services do, among other things - encourage underground activities to control those and detect participants and make the effort go in a predictable direction. Similar to preventive activation of mines.

Some things’ only good media would be preserved in the main medium used for their reading and reproduction, but the main medium became, say, some scan stored in some Internet service not caring about it. So they will vanish.

At the same time - the road from first printed Bibles to the French revolution to printing millions of student books on math, for example, took a long time. But also, with the speed information travels, we might expect new wonderful things in the following decades which won’t all be dystopian. Of course we should also prepare for bloodshed.

Yeah, and in the rest of the world where copyright is enforced, it’s first of all enforced against things like doujinshi. That’s the main financial force behind it. Japan just preserved saner rules for domestic culturally important industry, screwing the potential new ones.

OK, it’s not like they had much choice, US and Berne Convention style copyright was spread almost by threat of sanctions when it was a new thing.

Well, various kinds of internal (to one country or to one supply chain) standards would emerge just because you need some standard. Farther removed from conflict is good, but USA became half the world GDP before WWI. In the time which is perceived like something between now and the cinematographic wild west.

Bases - yes, and in the late XIX century US was already playing the colonial game, which certainly helped its economy.

Standards - not sure really about your example, sizes - maybe (but a lot of ISO things are from British and French local standards), but 45deg is, as you might notice, not a random angle. Some things are naturally optimal.

The funniest historical parallel is that USA’s own power was collected by being to Europe what China is now. That overseas area of cheap hands.

Some positions where you put “thorn” are supposed to be filled with “eth”.

They are still talking in that “intellectual property domination” and “intelligent jobs” tone. A lot of the supposedly new and liberal globalization was about global segregation.

And even many people on Lemmy don’t get that the western militaries’ PR is the same - small forces, technical superiority, organization and logistics are supposed to be equal to Russian or maybe Turkish standing armies of hundreds thousands of people with mass training and mass-produced cheap weaponry.

That’s why they can’t even decide on trying to shoot down jets violating their air space, protected by such superior and organized forces.

i swear they think all people except themselves are NPCs

That’s the famed western thinking in general. I’ve only seen one western movie where ridicule at that even reminisces the real perception by non-westerners, it’s “Romancing the stone”.

Marc Twain described that for Americans, that was in a time when USA was simultaneously a weird overseas industrializing village and half the world GDP. So then it could be explained by such a contrast. Now - I don’t know.

They can, it’s an article out of the air.

I’m not talking about technical things, just that IRL on regulated frequencies one can do something because people using it for bullshit are legally prosecuted. Depends on wavelength, of course.

But OK, now I think I get what you are talking about.

For those who ran their own mail servers it already did, via the +something notation.

Unfortunately the industry and the Internet in general went the other way.

EDIT: Oh, you mean temporary address. Easy. You have tracker nodes and receipt nodes. You publish on all tracker nodes you know your receipt node (by temporary address) every time you generate a temporary address. So those mailing you find it on trackers and post there. On that receipt node your temporary address is associated with some secret, allowing you to retrieve your incoming mail. The easiest way is that the temporary address is a pubkey and to confirm ownership you just need to sign a request for mail, or maybe it’ll be encrypted with it and no good for anyone else. Or both.