I’m not saying they have easy choices. Or good choices. But they do choose. We all do. I’d even say life is all about making small, imperfect choices.

Around 100 have joined non-Russian institutes in order to continue their physics research work with Europe’s particle-physics laboratory.

Not exactly “completely out of your control”, I’d say.

Yes.

On 18 June 2020, the Russian government lifted its ban on Telegram after it agreed to “help with extremism investigations”.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/telegram-russia-ban-lift-messaging-app-encryption-download-a9573181.html

Which means KGB has full access to all messages.

No, I meant an accessory as in:

An accessory is a person who assists, but does not actually participate, in the commission of a crime.

Of course we cannot. I agree with you that nobody is born evil or a criminal (even psychopaths are not guaranteed to become serial killers).

By all means, if not for propaganda, we would live in a very different world.

But the unfortunate fact is that they did consume enough of that propaganda to do nothing, or worse, follow the orders.

Yes, they are not criminals by nature, but what they do is crime or at least they are an accessory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accessory_(legal_term)

the answer is - it doesn’t matter. the biggest learning from the nazi germany was that you don’t need the entire population of a country to be homicidal psychopaths. all you need is a small group of those psychopaths, control or media, propaganda and you get a perfectly functioning system where normal everyday folks go to their normal everyday jobs.

just those jobs are in gestapo. or in maintenance of gas chambers. or making food for the equally confused soldiers.

of course, we should avoid civilian casualties as much as we can (but apparently russian army is not required) but the system needs to be stopped.

russia has cancer. chemoterapy is not a pleasant procedure that affects both ill and healthy cells. the alternative is, unfortunately, to allow that cancer to spread to the entire planet.

I believe the trick to avoid getting encircled is withdrawing before one gets encircled

Ukraine doesn’t need that land. russia cannot afford not defending that land. The moment it gets too “expensive” for Ukraine, they withdraw. But that will only happen after russia invests heavily into actually recovering their territory.

It’s like in chess when a knight is attacking two pieces at the same time. The one on defense can only choose a smaller loss.

Which is a win for Ukraine.

Don’t tell anyone, but I suspect it’s a pc with a GPU. Maybe even a hard drive. Wild!

thank you. came to the comments to say exactly this.

cloud could be cheap, but it’s a lot of work, or at least attention. people get disappointed with the costs, paradoxically, because cloud is easy and, as you put, versatile. and often between any two options allowing to do the same thing, the easier one will be more expensive.

the biggest irony of the cloud is that many companies it seems, just like different species evolved into crabs, discover that all they need is a couple of own servers in a managed hosting environment, a CDN and outlook.