Bruncvik

I remember when it didn't have a dash. Until people started making fun of the old URL...

I was permabanned from r/worldnews for this, due to racism, so I'm risking the same here. But there is a theory among armchair historians--which I tend to agree with--that Russians had been targets of regressive selective breeding for the past 450 years. Those who display any kind of individualism or independence (mainly educated, intellectuals, etc) have been selectively eliminated from the gene pool: via exile (best case scenario), or through prisons, labour camps or executions. After centuries of this, the share of independently thinking Russians in Russia is far lower than that of native population in Western European countries.

This is very prominent in science and technology: many of the top inventors weren't ethnic Russians, but were born or had ancestry in countries that have been under Russian dictate (and regressive evolution) for a much shorter time period. Sergei Korolev, the father of Russian space program was ethnic Hungarian. Russia "boasts" only 15 Nobel laureates in STEM fields since 1917, and only one of them (Nikolay Semyonov) was an ethnic Russian who wasn't in exile.

All this helps to explain why Russians are so passive in the face of authority. It also points at the fallacy of thinking that we can push them towards accepting western civilization and democracy in the short term. It will take a very long time and a lot of effort to bring them to the moral ideal of Western Europe.

I work for a company with over 150k employees and 50B in annual revenues. My developers need a software tool, which was already identified as critical for our development. Instead of getting about 20 user licenses, each of which costs about $400 per year, and which would cover all our needs, the responsible manager, in his infinite wisdom, got one license, so that users register with it only when they need that tool. We even had a shared spreadsheet as a wait list. The software provider caught on after a few months, and cut us off. The manager got a good rating in his KPI for saving money with his initial decision, and the software provider was blamed for ending our license. Office politics as usual.

Games with the highest replay value for me:

• Civilization 4
• Heroes of Might and Magic III
• Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri
• TES3: Morrowind
• SimCity 2000

Freezer bags, 4 slices per bag, in a freezer. That way I can take out only as much bread as I can eat before it gets moldy.

My wife shops on Temu regularly. She doesn't trust them, so she uses one-time cards. Most of what she buys are single-use items: party accessories, crafts for kids, etc. The exceptions were solar lights, which are surprisingly durable, vastly outlasting those we got locally or Amazon. Speaking of Amazon, we used to shop there a lot but almost completely stopped. 90% of goods are just rebranded Temu products, and the "premium" selection can be found cheaper in the nanufacturers' or speciality stores. Amazon is currently positioned very poorly, with competition pressuring them both from top end and junk. Looks like Amazon as a retailer is heading back to its origin, with books being the only reasonable deal there.

Nope. It was a small manga story. I still remember it all too well, but couldn't find it based on my search strings. Humanity is all the better for this story to fade away.

This made me uncomfortaba. Almost to the level of that old comics where a guy absorbs little boys through his penis.

Discovery Plus. Reality show garbage; not worth even those five quid per month. I subscribed when they acquired streaming rights for Eurosport, and tried to find anything that would be at least marginally entertaining without rotting my brain. I failed. When they lost Eurosport, I immediately cancelled my subscription.

I'm a Product Owner, and my job literally is to participate in meetings, so that my engineers don't have to. You want to talk to one of them? Sorry, you have to talk to me, and I'll talk to them on their own time.

In the past, however, there was one time I almost quit. We had an engineering lead with a serious case of Dunning-Kruger syndrome. Good with Javascript, which made him think he was an expert in everything, from c# to aws, and especially in system architecture. He could sell himself and his work really well, though, so the management always took his word for gospel. Got two developers, who had the audacity to tell him how stupid his architecture was, fired. Tried to get me fired, and it turned into a competition of who can outlast whom. Eventually it became too much for me, so I started interviewing elsewhere, when suddenly he was reassigned elsewhere within the company. I decided to stay mainly due to career growth (and to pay my mortgage), and I hear that he's been doing his usual mess in his new position, while my team is now far happier and more productive.

E-cards. I got at least some cards for my birthday...

To switch to the timeline where Harambe was not killed.