Denys Nykula

It seems the disagreement boils down to what position is far-left and what is moderate. It’s worth remembering that there was far-left opposition (against Russian nationalism in particular) to Bolsheviks inside the party, whom they purged in early years, labeling them bourgeois, and tried hard to suppress them from reappearing. The Bolsheviks also got popular by paying lip service to a much different agenda than they implemented, becoming in practice extremely conservative and repressing worker self-government attempts. So I wouldn’t call them far-left, a term that I’d reserve for anarchists and council communists.

Does fare-free also mean tracking-free, or is there still a requirement for a smart card or a phone, with fines for those not carrying one? In Kyiv, the fare tracking application collects history forever, without a retention policy and with a requirement for confirming every cash payment with a full name and phone number, which means municipal IT employees can see where any phone owner was going at any hour today, last month or five years ago. I really hope somewhere in the world systems like these are going away rather than proliferate, actively supported both by municipal government and by local transit rider organization insisting that cash should be banned and riders should start paying a bigger percentage of the fare while taxes go somewhere else.

BTW the demand for bigger screens and bigger resolutions is something I don’t easily understand. I notice some difference between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 on a desktop, but the difference from further increase is of so little use for me I’d classify it as a form of bloat. If anything, I now habitually switch to downloading 480p and 720p instead of higher definition by default because it saves me traffic and battery power, and fits much more on a single disk easy to back up.

Rather than a facsimile, I’d just call the LibreOffice ribbon a distant cousin because they’re both office applications. The ribbon does slightly ease the friction of getting people to try LibreOffice, but like with the Windows UI and KDE Plasma, the similarities are surface-level and there are tons of differences. It’d be cool if public education taught people the UI of the commons first, not of the Microsoft defaults.

Chinese investment in renewables so far means they grow renewables while also growing coal. Between 80 and 100 gigawatts of coal production were added in 2025. Unfortunately, coal and gas production is steadily increasing worldwide. Contrast G7 trying to improve own living standard by reducing fossil usage locally, with G20 trying to fast-forward economic growth by any means available. Wind and solar grow fast, but they add to total production, rather than phase out fossils, almost everywhere outside EU. Source is the same, just a different page: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-production-by-source

Global North can’t pretend to be green itself while still externalizing harmful production and growing trade with countries ruled by people who don’t care about resource depletion and the planet remaining livable. I think there’s no alternative to focusing on producing locally (adhering to own democratic regulations, labor union negotiations etc) while implementing degrowth policies, both helping other countries do likewise and putting pressure on them to do so through trade measures.

Many thanks for such a detailed answer. I agree that blocs and federations are a good thing, and hope to see Asian, South-Eastern Asian, African, and South-American alliances similar to EU form around democratic values. I also hope that they don’t turn into rival fortresses with armed borders and migration restrictions between them. As someone from former USSR (Ukraine), I’m quite sure that Russia on its own, without Chinese government assistance, especially technologic, wouldn’t at their current economic state be able to wage war and suppress internal movements to democratize and/or truly federalize (in the North, particularly); but I read, admittedly not extensively, about Chinese history and recognize how dangerous it is not to have strong allies when empires are nearby - without strong allies, it’s a must to have mostly autarkic production and strength in numbers.

Plushies rock.

Excellent to hear! Schools, prisons, hospitals, army - anywhere people who don’t eat animals might end up, we mustn’t be discriminated against.

Since you’re Chinese American, I have a question that’s doubly offensive but I’m actually interested in hearing your opinion. Should borders the size of China and the U.S. continue to exist at all? IMO one president or central government can’t legitimately represent hundreds of millions of people.

He takes a jab at the Brits for not enough diversity distribution, but where there’s diversity in his country, he leads with a policy of relocation and deportation… https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/world/europe/denmark-housing.html I wonder if that’s the kind of distribution policy he’s saying the UK should also achieve.

Reading reviews on Google Maps in private browsing mode also got blocked for me.

Do they attack more often or has the police started to take the right wing more seriously and track more cases? Here they still do absolutely nothing, usually blaming the assaulted person for what they call provoking veterans, or redirecting the person through an infinite bureaucratic maze.