rottingleaf

It's possible and not so hard, just too boring for people to do automatically (EDIT: I meant - as part of usual work), and also bureaucrats have a very different MO, one that you need a commercial company infected by that culture for.

Also governments steal money. It's obvious they do. Both in legal ways, when some secretary has salary disproportional to the work they are doing and the need for it at all, and in illegal ones (just for the fun of it).

It's about power and dealing with people of their culture.

The state is interested in less dependence from big corps, but its officials are interested in more dependence, because that means huge contracts with little transparency and lots of time to hide things that don't look nice.

I already knew, it was compulsive

With my ADHD just cutting on sugar seems to be the best diet change in my life period. I mean, of course there's sugar in lots of things, but at least not putting it into tea and not eating Snickers improves everything.

That would be try to attract people outside of social media, not try to divert them inside social media where you'll waste energy

it necessarily widens the debate-space from an unopposed confident statement to a dialogue that the onlooker can take into consideration while making their own decision.

That part would be right if we weren't talking about social media, which are designed to neuter this effect.

So who debates in good faith and how often?

he goal isn’t to sway the fanatics, it’s to publicly quash their arguments. To sway curious onlookers away from fanaticism before they become fanatics themselves.

Friendly reminder that the above is what I answered first.

Sorry, but this is a load of bollocks. It's you putting yourself above some "gullible people" and still using debate skills to deceive them, just in some "good" direction. Maybe you are really right, but they believe you for the wrong reasons, and the process itself doesn't reinforce that you are right in any way.

Personally, I don’t get why people don’t mind doing a search to find where windows hid some particular setting 3 submenus deep, but lose their fucking mind over the thought of doing a search to double check which command they need.

Because they like to believe that the former is how smart computer users do things.

And even Slackware was straightforward 20 year ago

Still is.

and one of the first things Zalensky did was crack down on that.

Rather replace Russia-dependent corruption with more generalized corruption.

for freedom and democracy. Supposedly what the alliance exists for.

What? It's been founded by a bunch of colonial nations (not ex-colonial at that point) still from time to time fighting colonial wars with war crimes and such. It has Turkey of all genocidal bastards as an important member.

The only reason for its existence was accumulating power. Well, as with all alliances.

Of course, kinda motivated by USSR redesigning its ground forces for capturing large parts of the world after they've been nuked. I'm not joking, that's the reason ex-Soviet militaries so terribly suck at actually fighting - they are sort of a different mechanism, more like huge mobile garrisons to deploy in wastelands. Their analog of western ground forces was, say, VDV in Russia ; which is why despite nominally having the narrow function of paradropped assault troops, they've been used for every kind of thing important.

But corruption is present in all countries, including the NATO members, so that’d be a bit hypocritical,

Yes, and also weird.

I don’t think the decision was ever on the table.

Yes, when after 2 years of war and hundreds of thousands dead they meet and sign something about "discussing help to Ukraine" in case fighting gets more intensive by not clear which criterion - it means Ukraine is not becoming a member.

About "irreversible path" - they've said such things about Georgia too. Ivanishvili's party is not good, but there's been plenty of time before they started acting like now.

For my argument it's sufficient that they are very much not the same.

This is similar to saying that a big company leading in some area can be benevolent and do good things. Yes, it can, like DEC, Sun, at some point even IBM. Doesn't prove the statement that every social institution and mechanism out there must be replaced by markets.