FWIW going abroad has so far always been voluntary for drafted soldiers in most (all?) NATO countries as long as article 5 is not invoked.
I shyed away from education / officer training because I felt the risk of being sent on peace keeping to the middle east, but 20 years later I see I could safely have done it.
It never ceases to amuse me how ignorant I am in my comments despite my attempts at being smart, wise and fair.
Of course you are right.
That said, this invasion is still a crime and I am utterly fed up by Russian actions in neighboring states, their constant lying, especially after MH17 was shot down, getting more or less away with state sponsored cheating in sports, simulating bombing raids against Swedish power plants etc. We should have seen this coming a long time ago.
(In my defense however, note that from the very start of this, even before the protests in Russia were known to me I think I have not said a bad word about the Russian people, barely a bad word about the men in boots and only after they started aggression and mostly - I hope - just about the leadership.)
My grandfather on my dads side refused military and got away with prison.
My grandfather on ny mothers side served and helped hold the nazis back for a few days in his home country and maybe helped some people get away. He later had to surrender and spent a short time in a POW camp before being released.
I respect both very much but I decided to do as my dad and serve.
It absolutely felt like the right thing to do for me.
Reading this for a second time and sticking to what I said about being ashamed for many of the things the west did I'd also like to remind that Russia hasn't really done much at all in the middle East.
But I can remember stories from my childhood about Russians tying up Afghan fighters and driving over them with tanks to make an example, so again without defending drone strikes on weddings or Abu Ghraib or anything other spectacularly bad I
1.) think it wouldn't have been much better if it was the Russians who went in
2.) think the reason why the Russian government hasn't been involved in more badness in the middle east until recently has not been its peaceful nature but the fact that they have been cash strapped.
Luckily this also favours the defending side somewhat I hope:
From listening to people who grew up with the veterans here in Norway I've learned that:
- Germans were told they came here to protect us against the British so they would - in the beginning of the war - shoot to suppress, not to kill. I guess Russian soldiers coming into Ukraine has been tricked to believe the "peace keeping" nonsense too and had a rude awakening.
- Norwegians however were already mad and shot to kill. I guess this holds true for Ukrainians too. This is natural and we've seen it in Afghanistan, Iraq etc too I think.
- German soldiers would cryingly admit to POWs already at the start of the war that they were absolutely not voluntarily there, they'd just be shot if they refused.
I browsed Ukraine web shops and found at least Spar has an open webshop: https://shop.spar.ua/ . If anyone has an address to order for I'll try ordering some goods for the front line, bunkers or what do I know.
In the longer term I'll do what I already do to China:
I happily pay 20% more for small goods not made in China and in fact I try to avoid buying Chinese.
At the same time I'll happily pay even a bit more for Lithuanian goods after their brave stance the last few months. (Lithuanians, make sure "Made in Lithuania" is visible on everything you ship. You guys rock!)
You are probably downvoted for - voluntarily or involuntarily (I cannot judge) - running the errands of the enemies of the free world by suggesting that it is hopeless while it is absolutely not.
(Why is it not hopeless? Russian forces suffer large losses and their morale is breaking, after all, what sane person wants to shoot their peaceful neigbours and relatives? Russians are already taking to the streets to protest the madness one day into this stupid war, who would have expected such bravery from the already suffering Russian people? Half of the European population is already looking for anything they can do to support Ukraine, ordinary Russians raising up or to make Putin and his closest people suffer. Pro Russian trolls who were previously tolerated since we wanted to hear all sides are now kept down. The list probably goes on.)
Every free human is now at war, and for now, for us it is information warfare.
So lets make sure the madmen get nothing for free. Don't run their errands.
If we did that, Russians wouldn't be reading HN and Twitter now and wouldn't be seeing images of abandoned/destroyed Russian vehicles, captive Russian soldiers, wounded civilians (who likely have Russian relatives). They probably wouldn't know that the tiny Ukrainian air force has downed multiple Russian aircrafts.
They wouldn't see the outpouring of support for the brave souls in Russia who take to the streets to protest the madness.
They wouldn't be able to keep contact with friends, family and ex-colleagues who can provide them with unfiltered (or at least with other filters applied) information.
Good point. In that particular case (first version of ribbon) the file open and save ux was (IMO, IIRC) so awfully bad that I'll be able to give even a modern UX designer the benefit of doubt ;-)
This is my experience with Google Home. Haven't tried others.
It is almost always somewhere between faster and much faster to pull out my phone, switch app, type, than to waken up the device, ask it, wait for an excuse, rephrase my question and wait for it to read it.
That said it shows promise and if I still trusted Google I'd be somewhat enthusiastic :-| (Now I'm mostly scared.)
Since I do not trust them I have it in my office and turn the mic off when I'm not experimenting with it.
Next up: figure out if that mic is actually disabled in hardware if I "turn it off".
@Googlers: a good step forward wrt trust would be to allow the semi paranoid ones like me to turn on the mic on my phone on demand. I can live with the annoyance of tapping some button three times or whatever.
After China and a bunch of other stuff I do not trust you to value your relationship with your customers over your relationship with your bank.
But I really like the Blendle model and would be happy to pay more through them if more relevant content (including blogs in my case) becomes available and easy to access:
It is pay-per-view but reasonably priced and with reasonable (last I checked) refunds if you happen to click on some clickbait.
I also like Spotify but I think Blendle has a better business model, at least for text.
What I like: Authors get paid for the stuff I read. The more I read the more I pay. It doesn't drain my account when I don't use it.
Seems everyone is recommending their preferred feed reader here so I'll mention the one I use as well.
Feedbro is a Firefox extension that lets me subscribe to and read feeds. Multiple layouts/formats.
I use it to subscribe to blogs, github repos etc.
I still miss a feature from the Googlr Desktop Search sidebar where it would autosubscribe/unsubscribe to rss feeds as you browsed around the web. I think it looked at what sites I visited, tried a few entries in the feed and continued/canceled based on if I read them or not.
Ars technica provides full rss - to paying readers. The price is reasonable.
It's a win-win: they probably earn more on each paying customer than on 10 or 20 adblocking users like us. Paying customers get full uncrippled RSS, no ads and no tracking (I think it's tiered though so you might have to pay slightly more to get all these three).
Still there seems to be only a sandbox install. Why can't we have discourse just like stackoverflow just with technical discussions allowed instead of attacked by both mods and the rules.
I shyed away from education / officer training because I felt the risk of being sent on peace keeping to the middle east, but 20 years later I see I could safely have done it.