7.7 million people have left the country since Maduro came to power, the largest refugee crisis in the Americas. Polls show that in a free and fair election, Maduro would have struggled to stay in the double digits. Colectivos actively worked to interrupt the opposition’s recent primary election via armed disruption of voting. Whatever that book is basing its research on, Maduro simply no longer represents the vast majority of Venezuelans and the Venezuelan diaspora.

I wonder what changed in the last 8 years.

The video shows easily hundreds, and it’s clear there is a larger crowd behind them.

Maduro didn’t win. He’s wildly unpopular. More than 40% of Venezuelans have said they will consider emigrating if he clings to power. Even rigging the election ahead of time by kicking other candidates off the ballot for made up reasons wasn’t going to be enough. He absolutely cheated and everyone knows it.

There’s a reason that countries started agreeing on a set of laws of war, and it wasn’t the goodness of their hearts. It means if your own soldiers get captured by an enemy working under the same rules, they should ideally be treated with at least a minimal standard of care. But every incident like this or Abu Ghraib weakens those protections and norms.

Sometimes it feels like certain parts of humanity just didn’t really learn all the lessons that they should have from the Holocaust about dehumanizing people.

I don’t want to dig into life too much, just to respect her privacy, but I was very impressed with her response to her so-called father’s bullshit tweet. Nice of her to post it on a competitor to Twitter while she’s at it.

Not if they’re going to disturb the relaxing cat.

Semantic versioning.

Most of the time. I use calendar versioning (calver) for my internal application releases because I work in IT. When the release happens is more consequential than breaking changes. And because it’s IT, changes that break something somewhere are incredibly frequent, so we would constantly be releasing “major” versions that aren’t really major versions at all.

OpenDocument.

Agreed compared to .doc and .docx. And if you’re going to version control it, markdown instead of a binary blob.

For academic documents in STEM fields, I’d love to see a transition from LaTeX to Typst. Much cleaner, better error handling, and it has a web UI if people don’t want to install a massive runtime on their own computer.

Recipes in concrete metric units, preferably mass instead of volume. Recipes come together incredibly quickly when measuring out ingredients can just be dump-tare-dump-tare-dump instead of trying to get sticky ingredients like tahini out of a measuring cup.

More torx screws. There are apparently some uses for phillips, but torx are criminally underused.

Oh? Do you know details on how it’s going to work? All I can find is the BRICS Pay site with a very high level overview. They’re talking a big game, but as of now all that seems to be public is just talk.

Mission Accomplished!

There are lots of details left to hammer out. This is like an announcement that there will be a committee to commission a study to hire a contractor to change a light bulb. The process will likely take a while and may not complete at all.

Yup, a late friend of mine was a lobbyist at the state level for a mental health lobbying group. His daughter has schizophrenia and that was his way to give back in his retirement. Without lobbying, it’s hard for politicians to know when there is a problem they need to fix. They have a small staff and they don’t just magically know when there is a problem. The problem is when a politician either can’t sniff out unethical lobbyists or just doesn’t care.

Maybe the same person who tricked him into buying Twitter, which he seemed to quickly regret.

No, they were harassing them just for being friendly with the West. Exiting the Russian sphere of influence, not joining NATO, was the cardinal sin.

Did you miss the bit where Russia kept harassing Georgia? It was going to invade sooner or later. Russia likes its former colony-neighbors under its thumb.

The August 2008 invasion of Georgia was just the culmination of years of Russian provocations towards Georgia. Georgia’s leaders knew Russia was itching for a fight. As for Ukraine, many Ukrainians realized that if they ever adopted a more pro-Western stance then Russia would invade. I’ve heard one account of Ukrainians fighting in the Georgia-Russia War because “we’re next.”

They could have waited or tried to make a deal with the new government. They did neither and immediately invaded without making an attempt at an arrangement.

Why did Russia invade Georgia?

Are you trying to get me to say NATO? Because that conflict far predates NATO involvement.

Bullshit. Crimea was invaded mere days after the change of power in 2014, far before anyone of note was seriously talking about Ukraine joining NATO. Support for separatists elsewhere soon followed. It was about Russia exerting a “sphere of influence” that it felt entitled to. The Russian leadership can’t seem to get that countries are joining NATO because of Russian imperialism, past and present.

I’m going to say the same thing that I said about the Polish incident. That incident only happened because Russia chose to attack Ukraine in an area directly bordering on another country. Izmail is also right across the border. I’ll wait on more dependable sources for an investigation, and I’m certainly not agitating for an escalation on NATO’s side. At the same time, if Russia’s bombing campaign ultimately results in foreseeable casualties outside of the country, I put the blame on Russia. Ukraine has the right to defend itself.