I have the feeling that there will be no redemption arc for those ones and the repenting would be for show before a court of public opinion.
I'm going to be to the point here, if you guys over there don't start to heavily push and organise, and I said it already, you're one Reichstag fire away from something very bad, and from my point of view, there is probably one kristallnacht pending in the mix.
This is not a hyperbole and if someone wonders why this has relevance to the discussions, in this case most of the people around here are blue team, and it does feel like the red team has already taken anything that wasn't attached and now taking the time to take what's bolted on...
I guess the silver lining of all this, is in their hubris, they forgot the bread and games motto, so they're might still be a chance to turn things around somewhat... But the window is closing at an impressive speed.
I'm an Australian. We have a guy called Clive Palmer, who has formed a party called (no joke) the "Trumpet of Patriots". It's certain nobody will vote for him. The opposition leader married himself to MAGA (and close to Trump) and now it appears like this will prevent him from winning.
Given this context, if you are not directly in the US or directly a US company, it makes a lot of sense to start to question your future ability as well as future costs for access to US controlled systems.
Well, with every conspiracy theories thriving on this day and age with access to technology and information at one fingertips. If you add that now the US administration effectively spewing bullshit every few minutes.
The best example of this was an arguement I had a little while ago where I was talking about self driving and I was mentioning that I have a hard time trusting any system relying only on cameras, to which I was being told that I didn't understand how machine learning works and obviously they were correct and I was wrong and every car would be self driving within 5 years. All of these things could easily be verified independently.
Suffice to say that I am not sure that the "bullshit-radar" is that adaptive...
Mind you, this is not limited to the particular issue at hand but I think those situations needs to be highlighted, because we get fooled easily by authoritative delivery...
Language models are closing the gaps that still remain at an amazing rate. There are still a few gaps, but if we consider what has happened just in the last year, and extrapolated 2-3 years out....
Honestly this seems to be a really short sighted view, none of the people that got arrested there really had reasonable grounds to be arrested, although I guess that legally they are "in the clear", but I am no expert, and this is high profile only because of the situation is absolutely absurd, and we are only two months in.
How many cases are not reported and as bad as this or worse? Am I willing to be gambling this?
In the history of the Alliance there is only a single country that invoked article 5, and it was the US with 9/11 that lead to the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Australia, Italy, New Zealand to send resources and troops to help with Afghanistan.
And managed to get people involved in Iraq namely United Kingdom, Australia, Poland.
And this situation was way worse and way less called for than the Ukrainians defending themselves...
EDIT/NB: I listed just the major contributors, some other countries participated in different ways and at different levels, but still this is important to mention here...
It is a fact, that NATO Article 5 doesn't guarantee anything regardless of other countries' response to USA triggering it, just as it is a fact, that the Budapest Memorandum was mischaracterized in this thread and that both the Europe and USA did help Ukraine. Should we not go where the facts are?
If you're about that the USA should continue helping Ukraine, then I did not question this point of view at all. Pointing out factual errors is not equal to taking a stance.
The implication that I read from what your wrote suggested that the US could offer "assistance" or sit it out, which is not an acceptable stance to hold, by history and the assistance that was provided in need.
Friendship among nations sometimes involves transactions that transcend the pure material considerations, and this shift in alignment is not desirable by anyone.
That's what I meant by "let's not go there".
But I see that basically we are in agreement and I also agree that article 5 interpretation could be dicey.
The hard truth is that they have no clue about what they are cutting and they mainly do not care because the initiative is not to make things better it is to break a currently working system in favour of God knows what.
Every step taken by the current administration has undermined the safety and current position of the US both domestically and on the international stage. The only people that I see profiting from the current situation are Russia and then China.
Regardless of opinions on Diversity Equity and Inclusion, one has to look at the current situation with pragmatism:
Firing all probatory employees is just insane.
Firing the people responsible of your nuclear Arsenal is insane
Firing competent workers because of their skin colour or they do not have the genitalia you prefer is insane.
Sending an emai, on the weekend, requesting 5 accomplishment or risk getting fired is insane.
Let's see it from a different perspective, let's say you have a large company operating on international scale with many stakeholders, you get a consultant tasked with streamlining and optimising operation. Within less than a month, they start arbitrarily firing people based on aggregated numbers from random collection of papers lying around in the office. Would you trust the fact that they would streamline and make things run better or would you assume they just started slashing left and right to justify "optimising". You can tell by my phrasing what my opinion is on the matter but there is no way that you can optimise, let alone understand, those agencies inner working and essential moving parts within less than a month...
Now I will refrain from making any political/legality statements, but from a pure practical standpoint it is, to put it mildly, nuts.
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