Except my crazy relative (just 1, thank dog) also has telegram and feels the urge to forward every damn whackjob conspiracy theory reinterpretation of truth that they find to me and my wife, despite us never replying except to ask them to stop. eg. Cloud seeding, windmills and electric cars are responsible for destroying the atmosphere (not co2 and other greenhouse gases); Bill Gates etc. are spreading microchips through vaccinations; judges ruling that measles doesn't exist; Ukraine is full of nazis; and yes, even regurgitated feelgood fairy tales and random cat pictures from Facebook. So glad they are in a country far far away from me. They "do their own research", of course.

So bloody sad that so many people are in a similar situation of avoiding friends and family for their own sanity (and sometimes safety).

Gosh darn. Thank you!

News next week: $(John Deere)'s HQ relocate to Mar a Lago.

News in a fortnight: Socialist right-to-repair laws under federal review. Texas lawmaker's under investigation.

And, just like in a democracy, they can blame all the problems on the previous leader, and will enact new policies. There won't be any former victories to claim as their own in putin's case, though. It's a hollow shell of a country these days, let alone an empire.

What a waste ... think what russia could have been, had it invested in its own potential.

🤗

Revenue is only one side of the coin. What was left after costs?

Then, consider how much less willing or able some countries would have been to support Ukraine financially, had they needed to subsidize for even more expensive energy in their local economy and/or support more unemployed and working poor. Think how susceptible people are to the waves of propaganda that the russian machine sends to nearly every corner of the world.

It doesn't take a genius to realise that this is complicated.

It takes an idiot to think it's simple, though.

But not Fire tablets (kids profile) or Samsung TV or many others that Plex currently supports.

JellyFin android phone app's UI is a little weird at times, but does work pretty well for me.

...

What I would adore from any app would be an easy way to upload specific content and metadata via SFTP or to blob storage and accessible with auth (basic, token, or cloud) to more easily share it with friends/family/myself without having to host the whole damn library on the Internet or share my home Internet at inconvenient times.

Client-side encryption would be a great addition to that (eg. password required, that adds a key to the key ring). And of course native support in the JellyFin/other apps for this. It could even be made to work with a JS & WASM player.

You want to cut my hair for cheap? No, I am going to stab myself in the eye with the scissors. Haha, you lose.

Seriously though, tariffs can help (as part of a bigger strategy) to develop and protect important industries. You probably want a surgical approach in applying them, though.

If any of this actually happened (unlikely), I'd expect the US to start a very long slide to irrelevance.

25 or so years ago, I learnt Esperanto (my first second language) by chatting on the Internet. I'd have two windows open - one with the IRC client, and the other with a terminal and a shell script that would grep a txt file with consistent formatting. "esp esperantoVerbPrefix/" or "esp noun," or "esp affix-" would typically return the correct result in a split second. Thanks to the simple grammar (that I had quickly memorized), I could hold conversations in near real time as a result.

I wish I could have learnt my other languages as easily.

</story time>

If it doesn't have signatures, it isn't a treaty.

After the USSR disbanded, many former soviet & warsaw pact countries lobbied to join NATO and were eventually accepted. They had experienced russian control, and they never wanted it again.

Relations between russia and the west were relatively good for a while, until putin decided he needed an enemy for his domestic politics. He probably should have chosen china. :-P

With Finland and Sweden, russia now has 10% land border with NATO countries. That is far from encirclement, as they sometimes propagandize.

Why did these countries join now and not earlier? Well, that should be obvious. Domestic opinion changed in their democracies, and neutrality was no longer seen as viable. Once again, existing NATO members welcomed new voluntary members to their ranks. 💪

So now that russia has a longer border with NATO member countries, it must be scared, right?

Wrong, russia is reducing military personnel and equipment along the Finnish border, and sending them to Ukraine instead.

NATO is not the aggressor, but it is a military powerhouse, and only getting stronger.

Welcome to the world of Carrier Grade NAT. 100.64.0.0/10 is reserved for this.

If you are lucky, you also have an IPv6 address. The catch is you need IPv6 on the client-side too.

A VPS or similar running wireguard and a proxy might bridge the gap.

It might also be possible to ask your provider for some port forwarding. Probably not, but check anyway.

Good luck!

A whale, or possibly a bowl of petunias