Marginalia and Million Short have their own index as far as I know. Fireball is another one being independent from both Google and Bing.

The new Crypto AI game named DogeX allows you to become a Russian troll!

You can look at the thread. The initial one got a lot of replies from a “Vladimir Putin” saying “You should kill yourself NOW!”. The Git commit is even worse, with the a lot of insults. Not what usually happens on that kind of places, not that they are always kind and lovely.

Like not risking his lifelyhood to fight US and EU sanctions against a genocidal regime?

Because there are both US and EU laws preventing code from countries deemed a threat. Torvalds is paid by the Ameircan Linux Foundation, which has to work under US law and he himself is an EU citizen. Also a lot of other developers are from those countries and if they do not comply, they could get into some pretty bad legal trouble.

So it pretty much boils down to kick out the Russians or kick out all US and EU citizens and well we see Linus choice.

They are planning to buy or maybe just electricity from a new reactor type, which has never been built, starting 2030, when conventional nuclear power plants, with known technology take twice as long to built.

So if they stop the project in 18months, it has just been a waste of money.

You can however Switch to some open source software without having to go full Linux. Introducing Libre Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and so forth can be done in Windows. Software Not working one Linux is often a big problem for switching.

$7trillion is three times the GDP if Brazil. It is bigger then the US federal budget. Seriously it is insane.

RT is not bannd, but sanctioned due to being fully owned by the Russian government. The content they produce is not illegal, but US companies are not allowed to work with them. Stripe just wants to avoid problems and bsas them, due to Blinken claiming they are connected. That does not have to be true, but it pretty much gurantees legal trouble for Stripe, if they keep them as clients.

But also they are clearly professionals. Most employees having worked for Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Venezuelan state media is a clear sign. It also makes a direct connection to RT much more likely. So I get why Stripe wants to get far away from this.

Moving away from Office and Windows and so forth is a nightmare for any larger company. If you use specialized software, it might very well only run on Windows or only have an integration into Office. Even if you could, you then have to retrain staff to use Libre Office, Linux and other alternatives. You also will have problems converting, changing servers and so forth.

So companies just do not switch. That is how Microsoft makes money. They really do not care that much about private users. That is only usefull so people can use their products.

China has been waiving no intrest loans, which can not be repaid. Debt restructuring inckuding forgiving loans is part of a debt trap too.

Beijing, which has come under criticism for its lending practices to poorer nations, accounts for almost 40% of the bilateral and private-creditor debt that the world’s poorest countries need to service this year, according to the World Bank. It has helped forge recent debt-relief agreements, participating in the Group of 20 suspension of repayments during the pandemic.

(From the Bloomberg article) The amount is certainly right and already working with the Western lenders as well.

The AlJazeera opinion piece you linked shows pretty well, what it means. After all the IMF adjustment programs were how the West was able to exploit the South. China is starting to take part in that exact process.

Obviously those are just loans. Do you seriously believe they sign documents named “debt traps”?

https://nation.africa/oped/opinion/Kenya-must-avoid-China-debt-trap-or-fall-into-Sri-Lanka-pit/440808-4551200-kv7y59/index.html

https://www.news24.com/fin24/Economy/South-Africa/da-demands-details-of-r370bn-chinese-loan-warns-of-debt-trap-20180916

For example, but that took me a minute to find. Just asking for proof does not work, when the other site is unable to argue its case beyond “I looked into it”. Not even an unsourced explanation of how Cowbee came to the cconclusion. Only that it is supposed to be “obvious”.

I doubt I get a reply from Cowbee due to that.

So you consider North Korea or Eritrea to be better then the US? Seriously?

Can you proof China is not debt traping poor countries?

It is very easy to call the US the worst country, when you ignore the bad other countries commit.

China is currently debt trapping most of Africa. They pretty much appointed the current dictator of Zimbawe for example.

The way I look at good and bad is on a scale. Whenever a country makes the life for the average human better in terms of material well being, but also political freedom, that is a good thing. Whenever they make those things worse then it is bad.

A huge reason the US is the country doing so many bad things, is that nearly nobody else can. Any large scale war between two countries in recent times had the US being the agressor or the US intervening massivly. Iraq was done after invading Kuwait and Russia despute having nukes and a resilient economy is not liking it either.

So we have to look at what countries choose to do with the power they have and the US is not the worst in that metric.

Looking at the countries currently trying to replace the US none of them are better. Russia an Iran are pretty obvious. China is already working hard on enslaving the poorest countries in the world. For most of the rest the US Empire falling apart, just means local dictators continue their rule.

Add to that the violence of the conflicts and I gurantee you very few will celebrate that collapse.

Empires breaking up tends to be extremely violent. Just look at what happened during the collapse of the European empires.

Also what replaces them is not necessarily better. Not all evil comes from the US. Other countries are perfectly able of horrible stuff as well.

Oil companies usually do not, but electricity companies do. The problem is that oil companies are great in geology, drilling and chemistry. Geothermal is a similar skill set and chemistry can be used in other products, but the first is small business and the other not renewable nexessarily.

Just to say it the Lower Saxony example is not quite correct. The situation is that they started using Solaris a Unix system in the 90s in the tax department. When Solaris was no longer really developed, they opted to switch to Linux, as it was easier to migrate. However to unify German states tax departments, the previous state government opted to move to Windows. However the migration has so far failed. Mainyl due to the systems never having been designed for Windows in the first place. The other large user of Linux in Lower Saxony is the police and although they migrated from Windows to save some money, they too had problems migrating back as it was just too difficult.

That is just the reality of it. Software is sticky and once you migrate it often stays. Even when politicans do not like that.