Mega Man 3 doesn't just have Top Man, but also Hard Man.

Looks a lot like MultiMC at first glance (it's a fork of it apparently). What are the differences, should I switch between the two?

I have no idea what f-droid is

As a history fact, Iranian Azerbaijan (which includes the provinces of East Azerbaijan, West Azerbaijan and Ardebil, sometimes Zanjan province is also included for being majority Azeri) is the OG Azerbaijan, with the modern country of Azerbaijan having historically referred to by other names:

The name Azerbaijan was first adopted for the area of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan by the government of Musavat in 1918, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, when the independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was established. Until then, the designation had been used exclusively to identify the adjacent region of contemporary northwestern Iran, while the area of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was formerly referred to as Arran and Shirvan. On that basis Iran protested the newly adopted country name.

As a Mega Man fan (Inafune was the steward of the franchise until he left), I apologise.

For me it's the Nintendo 3DS. Still have my white original 3DS from 11 years ago, jailbreaked it a year ago. I also played on my niece's DS as a kid, moslty Mario Kart DS, New Super Mario Bros. and Mario 64 DS. And Mega Man Star Force, the most impactful game in my life, is a DS game that I played on my 3DS. I'm very fond of the DS aesthetic.

The 3DS has plenty of good games on its own, but it can also play DS and GBA games natively, each with huge game libraries and lots of amazing titles. It can emulate NES, SNES and even Genesis pretty well too. The default UI is very pleasant and calming, it has a charm like the Wii and WiiU that became completely lost in the Switch. And the homebrew scene is super lively and still evolving.

I also just love the DS/3DS as a concept: it's the size of a smartphone and the clamshell design is unique. With stuff like a camera, internet access and other function, it was like a prototypical smartphone in some ways. I want to see a modern take on the DS with a good camera, bigger screens and better hardware, so that it could replace a smartphone.

It of course can't handle more modern consoles, but for retro gaming it's great. And if the screens are too small you can always emulate on a pc or laptop. And it beats the Switch in pocketability.

Consumer Price Index, month-on-month change in percentage points

Blue: Russia

Green: European Union

Red: United States

Uh, a median wage will always have 50 percent of people above and below it, because that's how a median is defined: as the middle of a number sequence.

I think you meant the average wage, which is ~$60,000 in the US and in Russia it's $15,000 (nominal) or $41,333 (PPP*). For reference, the average income for Poland is $21,000 (nominal) or $49,000 (PPP*). Two-thirds of Americans earn below $60,000. Russia's income inequality is similar to that in the US: both seem to have a Gini coefficient around 0.4. Therefore, we can assume that it's a similar distribution in Russia, aka two-thirds earning below $15,000 (nominal) or $41,333 (PPP*). (*2022 PPP values from OECD)

Taxation also affects things. An NYT article mentions this (April 27, 2024):

Most Russians pay income tax at a flat rate of 13 percent, significantly lower than what taxpayers in the United States and Western Europe typically pay. In an interview in March, Mr. Putin said he planned to introduce a new progressive tax scale in part to alleviate poverty, a popular message among many Russians who support increasing taxes on the country’s rich, which have historically been low. The article is about the government looking to raise the tax rate to 15 percent for people earning above $10,000 (nominal).

Using official statistics, consumer prices in Russia since February 2022 have risen by 20-21% in total. For the same time period it's 14% in the European Union and 10% in the United States. This is similar to their inflation rates for 2022+2023. If I add up month-on-month CPI increases for the period by hand, it's 56% for Russia, 18% for the EU, and 40% for the US. I don't know where that discrepancy comes from, did I do something wrong? I used Consumer Price Index data from Tradingeconomics.com

Finally there's incomes. Wage growth in the EU and US is on average similar to their inflation rates. But in Russia it's 36%, significantly higher than the inflation rate of 21%. Of course there's the matter of how that growth is distributed, but at a first glance it suggests that not as many Russians suffer from the higher prices as the high inflation rate would suggest, though this will vary by region.

Wouldn't that relatively low price be offset by Russian salaries being way lower than American ones? Even the median salary in Moscow, where the creator lives, is significantly lower. Recent figures on purchasing power in Russia only go back to 2022, where $1 is equivalent to approx. 30 rub. (source: OECD) That would make the "true" price of that wedge of cheese $6.67

My mother is Russian and has some contacts and family in Russia. She went to Saint Petersburg last year for personal matters. She often talks about how little the ruble is worth and things being more expensive. Is she exagerrating?

Also, the author mostly writes about fashion and other frivolous stuff that rich people are interested in. No wonder that people living paycheck-to-paycheck weren't mentioned at all.

He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off. Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.

One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number.

The first quote sounds like religion: sacrifice everything in the here and now and you may enter heaven. The second quote just describes "passive income" schemes that depend on paying less taxes and the stock market, which is highly speculative and relies on actual labourers to do the work that makes these companies so valuable as they claim.

The article mentions three "tomes" of the FIRE movement: one by a former astrophysicist, another one by a software developer. Jobs paying above $100,000 are most common, which is just 6 percent of the US population.

My interpretation of the FIRE movement is that it is an attempt to revive the "American Dream" by telling you to live an ultra-minimalist lifestyle and "hustle" for in most cases more than a decade, and relying on the stock market and tax breaks instead of actually producing things with your own labour. It feels like an ultra-charged version of the capitalist mindset, realising the boot on workers but only caring about saving yourself. It's the ending to 'Ready, Player, One'.

The last point reminds me of notions of "my religion tells me to be racist or homophobic". Like, if your "homeland" (your homeland will always exist as a land, separate of whether or not there's a "Jewish state" there) can only exist through ethnic cleansing, I'd argue it's right to ask Jews to denounce it, AS WELL AS all non-Jews who support it, because most Zionists are not Jewish.

In the 2000 years or so since the Bar Kokhba revolt, Zionism has only existed for the last 200 years. This is like Dutch racists appealing to tradition to defend our blackface helpers, when Sinterklaas didn't have any helper(s) at all for centuries.

Also, I accidentally read "Eden Yadegar" as "Eren Yaeger" lol

Today's "Did you know?" also has this:

And a previous one felt like propaganda, like "Did you know... Russia bad?":

This is what the linked article on "Palestinian press" says about it:

Ottoman period (1908–1916)

Three of Palestine's leading newspapers of the pre-World War I era were Al-Quds (Jerusalem) established by Jurji Habib Hanania in Jerusalem in September 1908; Al-Karmil (Carmel after Mount Carmel) in Haifa by Najib Nassar in December 1908; and Falastin (Palestine) by the cousins Issa El-Issa and Yousef El-Issa in Jaffa in January 1911. These three newspapers voiced Arab aspirations and were all published by Palestinian Christians, showing the early role they played in Arab nationalism. In particular, Al-Karmil and Falastin were opposed to Zionism. It was in this early period that the terms "Palestine" and "Palestinians" were being increasingly used by the press.

These early Arab Palestinian newspapers saw Ottoman Jews as loyal subjects to the empire, but condemned Zionism, and grew fearful of it due to the waves of European Jewish immigrants to Palestine, who built settlements relying on Jewish labor and excluded Arab ones. Thus, Arab editors began a public awareness campaign, warning that once the Zionist project was fulfilled, the Arab majority and their lands in Palestine would be lost. A common theme in the press of this early period is a criticism directed towards the European Jewish immigrants who failed to integrate, or bother learning Arabic. The Arab editors preferred to raise the issue to the public's attention rather than the Ottoman authorities, so that the public can be active in preventing land sales to Jews, which caused Arab peasants' eviction, and their subsequent loss of work.

The readership of the newspapers in this early period was limited, but it had been expanding. Literacy rates were relatively low; however, social centers where created, such as libraries, the town cafe and the village guesthouse, where men would read aloud articles from newspapers and engage in political discussions. "Newspaper breaks" used to take place in some factories. There was also recorded instances of newspapers sending a copy of their newspaper to villages in the surrounding areas, namely Falastin. Articles from Falastin and Al-Karmil were often reprinted in other local papers and national ones in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo.

It's ultimately a nothing-burger, which makes its featuring on "Did you know?" even more confusing. I couldn't find who nominated it and why, it seems too fresh to be archived so far.

A little more on Ilan Ramon: he was also a veteran of the Yom Kippur War, and was one of the pilots for an Israeli air strike against an Iraqi nuclear power plant in 1981. Israel believed Saddam Hussein wanted to make nuclear weapons for war with Israel, and it may or may not have been his intent, but according to Iraqi nuclear scientists, Iraq's nuclear program simply became covert after that and the attack made Saddam more determined, so it might have made things worse.

This gets to the heart of the issue with Israel's responses to threats: it is hot-headed, it reminds me of characters that say "fuck the rules, gotta do what needs to be done", and it often makes things worse. First, Israel invaded Lebanon, because the PLO launched attacks from there. The PLO then moved their HQ to Tunisia. Then, after a killing of Israelis on a yacht in Cyprus, Israel bombed their HQ in Tunisia, killing civilians, which led to antisemitic attacks against what remained of the Jewish community in Tunisia, including an officer shooting up a synagogue. All in the name of keeping Jews safe.

Israel is playing whack-a-mole, it keeps creating new moles to whack, because its very existence, only possible through ethnic cleansing, prevents peace in the region.

Of the six American astronauts that were on board, all but one (Kalpana Chawla) became astronauts via a career in the US military (Navy or Air Force).

Astronauts are widely viewed as highly commendable. Being reminded of the links to the MIC (Cape Canaveral is now Space Force Base Cape Canaveral), has honestly been a little dispiriting for me. Same holds true for the Soviet and Chinese space programs, though membership in their militaries is more palatable, obviously.

There are still plenty of people who become astronauts by being excellent scientists, but the military is the most common career path, and I find it a little saddening.

I have a feeling that no one here has read the full article. The most I have seen is "by the fourth word I knew it was a loser".

While most of the article is indeed dedicated to "works [that] tend to be of the techno-futurist variety", a significant portion of the article is dedicated to voices ciritical of this type of optimism:

To emphasize a cheerier one, examples tend to be cherry picked or gently massaged. A section in Ritchie’s book argues, correctly, that deaths from extreme weather events are fewer than they were in the past. But this section all but ignores the fact that extreme weather events are becoming more severe and more frequent, a trend that will continue even if harmful emissions are slowed. And it ignores any deaths from extreme heat, which Ritchie attributed, in conversation, to the insufficiency of the data.

The journalist Jeff Goodell has studied that data. The title of his recent book, “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet,” suggests a more sober perspective. (In conversation, he described himself as broadly bullish about the climate crisis, which came as a surprise.) He wanted to use his storytelling, he said, not necessarily to inspire hope or even anger, but to communicate what the planet faces. “Because you can’t talk about solutions until you understand the scope and scale,” he said. He is also skeptical, he said, of much of the sunny, solutions-minded messaging.

“It makes it feel like climate change is like a broken leg, “ he said. “With a broken leg, you’re in a cast for six or eight weeks. You suffer some pain, then you go back into your old life.” He doesn’t believe that’s the case here.

“We’re not going to fix this,” he said. “It’s going to be how do we manage to live in this new world.”

Another excerpt:

Can a better future arrive without political intervention? Fisher doesn’t think so. Her book, “Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action,” which she describes as a “data driven manifesto,” posits a world in which climate shocks become so great that they spur mass protest and force government and industry to transition to clean energy. “It’s the most realistically hopeful way to think about where we get to the other side of the climate crisis,” she said.

That realism imagines a future of food scarcity, water scarcity, climate-spurred migration and increasing incidences of extreme weather. Fisher also predicts some level of mass death. “There’s no question that there are going to be lives lost,” she said. “Already lives are being lost.” Which may not sound especially optimistic. But Fisher’s research has taught her to believe in, as she terms it, “people power.” She has found that people who have had a visceral experience of climate change are more likely to be angry and active rather than doomy and depressed.

“The whole point of apocalyptic optimism is being optimistic in a way that actually helps get us somewhere,” she said. “It’s not shiny and rosy and like cotton candy. It’s a bitter pill. But here we are and we can still do something.” In this sense, hope is a spur, a prod, an uncomfortable goad. And imagining a better future is a brave and even necessary act.

My takeaway is that it does try to investigate the question at least, and not as an endorsement of that "techno-futurist" optimism. But more than anything, it pulls up different voices and then does the whole "who knows who is right?" that is so prevalent in Western journalism trying to be neutral.

I feel like people in this instance are jumping to conclusions based off first impressions and presumptions. Presumptions that happened to be incorrect this time. This may come across as me defending the NYT as a whole to some, which isn't my intention. I just find it disappointing when people are making points that are brought up in the article itself and those are made by all the others as well. No one has talked about the critical voices mentioned, and how right or wrong they are, which could be an interesting discussion. Instead people are all rehashing the familiar talking points against the techno-optimism stuff (which are valid!), and it all feels kinda stale.