Every time I hear this sentiment expressed I wonder about the speaker's familiarity with history and economics. The labor theory of value is almost a thousand years old and has been pretty thoroughly discredited for nearly the same amount of time. History is full of artisans who discovered just how much they overestimated the value of their skill only after someone came along and found a way to do the same thing more efficiently. I wonder how many tears were shed for the buggy whip craftsmen? The argument that this is different because this is art doesn't work either, because the endeavor's value is regularly quantified in USD - despite attempts to frame it as a non-commercial, almost spiritual, activity.
The pipeline was voluntarily disused by the Germans, not under sanction. Whoever blew up the pipeline (come-on, it was obviously the US) attacked critical infrastructure co-owned by Germany, Russia, and some minority interests. That would seem a little ungrateful, wouldn't it, directly attacking your sponsors? The US, on the other hand, has a long list of incentives for doing so.
That is what happens when doctors and scientists play politics. A minority of them actively supported the agenda through disinformation, but the vast majority of them sat quietly and offered no pushback - presumably out of fear for being blacklisted. I remember one testifying before Congress that he knew there were clear indications pointing to gain of function tampering, but said nothing because it might influence the upcoming election... Any attempt to garner sympathy from the public, who as a result were coerced into deciding between taking an experimental drug or being fired, will be fruitless.
> The discrete GPU on w520 is indeed better than the integrated GPU in ivy bridge but still hopelessly outdated for pretty much any graphics intensive task today... Btw X220 can be modded to have a 2K 16:10 display
I just replaced my long suffering w520 for the daily driver... with an HP z840. Yes, I intentionally stick with old business-class hardware. I rarely used it as a laptop though - it lived on the docking station and the displayport happily pumped out 4k at 29.xxx hz. No, it couldn't handle modern-ish FPS at that resolution - but it could handle the strategy/rpg games I occasionally play and I never felt constrained with the hardware video decoder. As far as mods - you can definitely hotrod a w520. The CPU is socketed, and my memory is hazy - but I remember it being very easy to exceed the stock thermals with a non-stock CPU. RAM is socketed, and exceeding the spec capacity/clock is pretty common. Various bios mods are out there. For the really adventurous, undervolting isn't that hard - because the board schematics and logic diagrams have been floating around forever.
heh, well at least you're honest about the asspats. If health is the primary motivation, and you haven't researched it for yourself - you might want to. Do you remember the food pyramid, and how that was the consensus position - until it got exposed for being total BS? Or how regularly eggs, wine, and cholesterol flip between being good for you one decade and bad the next? These people cannot be relied upon.
> I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products.
You suspect wrong, and you demonstrated why. How do you know that someone is a vegetarian? They'll tell you almost immediately, either explicitly or by bring up vegetarian adjacent issues. These products facilitate that.
> I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal...
So you know better than basically everyone who lived and died since forever? Before you launch into the talking point wherein humans evolve beyond needing to eat other animals, can you think of another fundamental part of the human experience that we evolved out of in the last several thousand years? Probably not, which makes this kind of wishful thinking unlikely to work out well. This reminds me of that Australian kid who was so deranged by environmentalist fearmongering, specifically that we were going to run out of drinking water, that he died from dehydration.
lol, no it isn't - there are a lot of existing foods that certainly don't taste good but they are supposedly "good for you". It seems odd to even have to point out that such a tradeoff exists. The point is that up to now that calculation was a personal one, and food processors had to calibrate between those two things (and price, to a smaller degree). Now there is this collective dimension being promoted, which could dramatically alter the calculus - to the point where celebrities are now being recruited to get people to eat bugs... Most are less likely to choose the objectively inferior "I'm doing my part!" option when the effort goes unrecognized, that is why early EV offerings looked so ridiculous. Manufactures found that normal looking electric cars didn't sell as well as designs that informed onlookers that you were "doing the right thing".
So not because it tastes good, but for asspats. Maybe they should take a page from the EV market and stop trying to ape the normal offering? Their customers want to be seen "helping" - so the product has to draw attention to itself by being a weird color or shape.
You are mixing up who is the factotum here - Ukraine is the one taking marching orders. Also, the other silly things your mother said to you when you and your sibling fought don't apply in real adult life. There does exist the legal concept of "menacing" and it does justify an overmatched demolishing.
You know that the RAND Corporation published the blueprint for this in 2019 - titled "Extending Russia", right? 8 of the first 10 measures have been implemented (items such as "Exploit tensions in the South Caucasus"). So the more sensible question is: why is the US doing this, and why would Russia just idly wait for the "Provide lethal aid to Ukraine" measure to be fully executed?
Short answer: the US is more interested in destroying the German economy than Russia's, and starting a protracted war with Russia through a Ukrainian proxy is how that is being done. It is amazing how happily the EU wrecked its economic prospects for at least two generations, to the exclusive benefit of US industry. Russia's actions here are totally rational, not only that but they provided ample warning for years about NATO expansion into Ukraine being an actual red line (as opposed to a lot of the red lines declared by the WH).
None of that "plan" or "test" actually needs to release any sulfur dioxide, especially because they don't seem to be doing any kind of measurements of the substance once released. Pretending this is anything but an intentional act of provocation isn't "pretty open about exactly what they're doing". This is really all somebody needs to read to know what is going on:
> Luke Iseman, a serial inventor and the former director of hardware at Y Combinator, believed all of that research was not happening fast enough. So he started tinkering with releasing sulfur dioxide particles into the atmosphere with balloons, raised venture capital to fund the startup, and brought on co-founder Andrew Song to manage sales.