No, it's common practice now, not just for those who has been imprisoned for years but for fresh convicts too - they are offered draft instead of imprisonment right after conviction.

So, do something about it?

Who?

I was born in USSR and it collapsed when I was seven so my memories of it were at the very end when things were tough and scarce. I remember school books that were still about Lenin and Stalin, and we would write essays about Labor day parades and red hammer-and-sickle flags during our English classes, it sounded funny even for us first graders.

Yet, whatever little was available was cheap, we would have deficit problems but not financial ones unless you were trying to buy something that was smuggled into the country, like jeans.

We would take flights to Kazakhstan where my grandma lived, no borders no visas obviously. They lived on their own land there and were much better off in terms of food availability (Google USSR deficit to see what stores looked like).

Then we reached the point when food stamps had to be distributed and it was outright scary. I remember standing by our front door crying, because my mom gave me a bread stamp and sent me to get some bread, and I lost the stamp on the way and couldn't bring myself to go back home. Eventually I was absent long enough for her to start worrying and she opened the door to go out and found me there sobbing.

From my experience I found that people who are fine with authoritarianism for various reasons are the ones that want to be relieved from decision making and responsibility. It makes their life easier when they are given directions rather than thinking for themselves. Not all of them reach this point voluntarily, sometimes life just forces them into it.

It makes me sad in ways I cannot put into words but I'm happy to witness such an amazing achievement of science and determination.

"Hours later, Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, tried to mitigate the damage. In a post on X, she shifted attention to Mr. Musk’s apology for associating himself with antisemitism and appealed to advertisers to return.

“X is enabling an information independence that is uncomfortable for some people,” Ms. Yaccarino wrote. “X is standing at a unique and amazing intersection of Free Speech and Main Street — and the X community is powerful and here to welcome you.”

It's called information independence y'all, look it up. Kinda like alternative facts but better.

I thought you were talking about age...

When I had my first job as a receptionist, our fax still printed on thermal paper rolls and we had a particularly bright customer fax us a 50 page contract. I was almost in tears as I watched a newly replaced very expensive roll getting wasted in minutes. I called my supervisor to vent and he walked to my desk with a sharpie, wrote IMCOMPLETE across the roll and said "fax it back to them". They were calling us back in less than a minute screeching on the phone to stop transmission.