How self-satisfied do you think this person felt, I can't 😂😂 Peep the username too

Go check out my wall of text about Soviet agriculture please please please

I didn’t really know what to expect but the average bike was a KTM300 or smaller. A lot of farm land, mud, sand, some ramps, forest drives. A lot of fun! And really really tiring!

This event was called https://offroadveghel.nl/event-2026

I was surprised to see only a few “big” bikes so for all people our there in doubt; go for it!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/68551910

At least three of the protesters wore shirts that said “Rowling Money Kills” and one activist used a bullhorn to read a statement, sometimes unintelligible through the noise and shouting of the moment, to those present.

“She would rather police women’s space than support her trans sisters when they are under attack,” that person can be heard saying.

So, did the angels tell you to go into that comatose girl's hospital room?

Lowkey ashamed of this OC.

Horned helmet of henry 8 got me feeling a certain way.

I wrote this analysis originally as a comment in this post to reply to this other comment. Feel free to discuss my analysis, I would love to get a richer outlook.

There's a lot of talk about Soviet agriculture being inefficient, and it's a partial truth stated as a fact when reality is a lot more nuanced:

By the 1970s, the USSR and the USA were producing comparable amounts of grain, around 200 million tonnes of grain per year depending on the harvest (USSR a bit less, USA a bit more). In the USA, this was produced by an agricultural workforce of some 3-4 million workers, or about 4% of the labour force. In the USSR, this production was carried out by 27 million workers, or 25% of the labour force, data according to the official statistical bureaus of both countries. When this is discussed in western literature, it's attributed to "chronic inefficiencies in the Soviet agriculture" without any further analysis, but the lack of analysis hides the truth:

Starting with the US: a very significant amount of the labor was unaccounted completely in the official statistics. In a family of 4, if the father worked the fields registered as an agricultor while his wife and children "helped" him, this was accounted only as one worker, where de-facto there were four workers. Additionally, a great share of the labor in US agriculture is performed by unregistered migrant workers who are paid under the table and don't count in official statistics.

In contrast, the kolkhoz agricultural system in the USSR of collective agrarian ownership counted as employees all workers not only in the fields, but also workers such as cooks feeding the workers (unpaid female labor in the US by contrast), mechanics fixing the machinery (instead of outsourcing the process to urban factories), accountants... So how do we solve this accounting difference problem which seems so insurmountable? We could, for example, compare the total rural population in both countries, since rural life revolves around agriculture, especially so in the last century.

The evolution of rural population in the USA and the USSR is as follows: from 1920 to 1970, the percentage of rural dwellers in the USA went from 49% to 26%; in the USSR it went from 82% to 38%. This already showcases the largest difference: the Soviet agriculture was still developing due to the later industrialization of the USA, and it was doing it QUICK, whereas by the 1970s the USA's rural population had already stabilized as a result of earlier industrialization. Additionally, this figure portrays how the difference in total agrarian labor wasn't as large, not a tenfold factor (mostly artificial due to comparison with entirely different accounting systems) but more like a 50% larger rural workforce in the USSR compared to the USA. Now, let's examine this difference:

First and foremost, a huge factor is climate. The climate in the grain-growing steppes of the former USSR is much more unreliable, with shorter growing seasons, colder weather, and a larger variability in rainfall compared to the temperate grain-growing regions of the USA. Agricultural production varied much more wildly and unpredictably on a year-to-year basis in the USSR, which in the former Russian empire had led to massive famines which the Soviet society forever eliminated after the 1930s.

Likely the other largest factor is the availability of services in rural areas. In the USSR, rural areas had incomparable access to healthcare, education, arts, culture and entertainment compared to the USA. Anyone who knows anything about US rural regions knows it's essentially devoid of any form of any of those services, whereas rural Soviets enjoyed access to them.

(example of an abandoned Dom Kultury)

For reference, in modern Russia they are constantly closing polyclinics, maternity wards, schools, and there is literally none of the entertainment or culture left, and my girlfriend tells me how in the village where she comes from, now the closest hospital is above an hour away by car where they used to have a polyclinic and maternity ward in the neighboring rural centre. It is simply incomprehensible to people like me from the capitalist west to imagine a rural life rich in arts, healthcare, education, culture, sports and entertainment. Practically every town with above a few thousand inhabitants had a "Дом культуры" (dom kultury, culture house) vibrant with poetry clubs, art classes, theater companies... Children also could enjoy an immense amount of positive activities by belonging to the communist youths of the pioneers and the komsomol, so they weren't isolated in their homes as American children are (even in cities). Which brings me to the last point:

Since rural life in the USSR wasn't utter garbage, people didn't have such strong incentives to move to cities by the 1970s when the USSR had almost fully industrialized. When you were guaranteed your job at the kolkhoz with a decent wage regardless of crops that year, you had land to yourself to grow your own food, you had entertainment, art, culture and sports, and your children had education, fun activities, friends and healthcare, people could (and did) just stay in villages in the USSR. Farmers could work 8h and go to the dom kultur or to spend the evening with their children, unlike petit-bourgeois farmers in the west who simultaneously say it's the hardest job in the world (they do work 12h a day 7 days a week very often), while simultaneously taking that as something to be proud of and not as them exploiting themselves for a bigger wage next year.

So yeah, did the USian agricultural worker produce more grain per year, and did a hectare of USian soil produce more grain per year, when compared to the USSR? Yes. Is this simply to be taken as a random fact proving the inefficiencies of Soviet economy? Absolutely fucking not, and I'd 1000% rather have lived as a Soviet agricultural worker in the 1970s than as a Yank landowner.

Some days, i feel happy, and other days i feel completely lost. I miss the bubbly innocent version of myself who could enjoy little things without overthinking everything. This breakup has changed me in ways I never expected. I don't understand why I struggle to feel genuinely happy why crowded places make me anxious or why I sometimes feel like I'll never heal from this. Is it normal to feel this way after a painful breakup.

Today is 38th day of no contact

Former Prime Minister Ion Sturza believes that the Republic of Moldova has never been closer to breaking away from the Soviet past and European integration. In a post, he states that the progress in the European Union accession process and the attitude of the political leadership in Chisinau give him reason to believe that the country will succeed in reaching the same European community as Romania.

"We, Moldovans, have never been closer to breaking away from the Soviet past," writes Ion Sturza.

The former prime minister argues his optimism by opening negotiation chapters for EU accession, a more coherent European policy on enlargement, and what he considers to be an appropriate approach to the leadership of the Republic of Moldova.

"The successes, be they technical for now, in the European integration process, the opening of several negotiation chapters, a much more coherent policy within the EU towards enlargement and, last but not least, the appropriate attitude of the country's political leadership make me optimistic. We will finally succeed in standing with Romania in the EU," says Sturza.

...

Sturza argues that the Republic of Moldova cannot build a prosperous state on its own and invokes the example of Romania, which he presents as proof of the role that Euro-Atlantic and European integration can have in the modernization of a country.

"Let's be honest: building a prosperous state on our own is a utopia. Even much larger and richer countries in Central and Eastern Europe would not have succeeded. Just one example: Romania. One hundred billion net for the modernization of infrastructure, economy, social sector. What would it be today outside of NATO and the EU? A country like Serbia, Russophile and frozen in development," says Sturza.

...

Archived

Donald Trump’s justice department has aggressively inserted itself into the midterm elections in the contest’s final weeks, shattering the department’s longstanding practice of political neutrality and leaving little doubt about the department’s willingness to help should the president attempt to subvert elections where his party is forecasted to lose seats and ultimately control of Congress.

In the last few weeks, federal agents have raided the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election. It has touted criminal charges and arrests of non-citizens charged with voter fraud. The attorney general has hit the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. And the department gave California election officials 48 hours to investigate the citizenship of 20,000 people, and then sued the state when it refused to comply. The FBI also recently published a video criticizing Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, drawing an immediate rebuke from one watchdog, who said the video “has no place in a democratic society”.

On Monday, federal agents raided the DC home of Minnesota representative Ilhan Omar, who is running for re-election this fall. The raid was part of a reported immigration fraud investigation into Omar, an outspoken critic of the president, and an apparent push to try to denaturalize her. Omar is up for re-election, and Minnesota Democrats broadly are facing more headwinds than fellow party members in most other states.

“For decades, the justice department sought to avoid investigative steps that might influence an election, recognizing that election integrity is threatened when DoJ is perceived as putting its thumb on the scale,” said Stacey Young, a former justice department attorney who now leads Justice Connection, a group that supports justice department alumni.

...

Ukraine launched a massive drone attack on St. Petersburg striking a bridge, the oil export terminal, an oil depot, a VK data center, and an OZON warehouse. The Telegraph is reporting that both Trump and Elon Musk made the decision to disable Starlink/Starshield for Ukraine as part of pressure campaign on Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil refineries.

I dressed up in the pink skirt I ordered, dark blue sweatpant bottoms, and a thick leather jacket that hides most of my features. And a mask over my face to still hide the moustache...

It was midnight on a Sunday so zero people out in my neighborhood. It was calm and quiet and chilly and empty. Made me feel... more okay with it. And then I went home and stared at myself in the mirror for like half an hour.

Haha im so fuckeddddddddd