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___zero__cool___ t1_izfl02e wrote

Reply to comment by TheCheeseDevil in Thursdaily by TheCheeseDevil

I was repeating the same wording used in the article I had been reading. It was a total mischaracterization of Whelan’s service record and discharge type. Thanks for correcting me on that.

Also homie would have had to really steal some shit to get booted out in 2008. That was when I was in, in the middle of the Iraq troop surge, then a year and a half later shit in Marjah popped off hard. They were waiving wild tats, prior convictions, all sorts of stuff that would get you laughed out of a recruiters office now.

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___zero__cool___ t1_izeno3n wrote

Reply to comment by sweetTtawney in Thursdaily by TheCheeseDevil

I’m happy that a US citizen is no longer being held in the Russian prison system. That said, we traded a Russian arms dealer for her, and we got her out before negotiating a release for retired U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, who has been imprisoned in Russia for FOUR YEARS. I’m disappointed in our priorities here.

Edit - After reading a bit more, Russia initiated the negotiations and it was only going to be a one to one swap of Brittney for Viktor Bout.

> The ambassador said he believed the Russians "had in mind a particular deal in this case, because Brittney Griner is such a celebrity, so popular in the United States — popular, I might add, among basketball fans and others in Russia. Brittney's case really dominated the discussion and the focus."

So the basic timeline here is that Brittney Griner had a contract to play basketball in Russia, Russia invaded Ukraine, the entire world sanctioned Russia, Brittney chose to travel to a sanctioned country (one well known for imprisoning US citizens) to play basketball, Brittney was imprisoned for a vape pen she forgot in her luggage, and finally Brittney was traded for an arms dealer with the nickname “The Merchant of Death” at a time when Russia is running out of arms so badly they’re trading with North Korea for munitions.

If it wasn’t the vape pen it would have been something else. Russia has wanted Viktor Bout back since he was arrested a decade ago. Once again, I’m extremely happy she’s no longer imprisoned in Russia, but she made a decision to go to Russia when almost any other rational person wouldn’t, and that decision directly led to her being used as leverage against the US Government.

I guess I get the feeling that she’s going to get the whole welcome home publicity circuit deal that Jessica Lynch got back in 2003, but I personally think she needs to just fade into obscurity and live her life. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what kind of attitude she has about all this, it’s not fair of me to judge her before she’s even finished debriefing with secret squirrel.

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___zero__cool___ t1_ixd7exc wrote

Yes, probably.

The federated models used by the Matrix protocol and the ActivityPub protocol used by Mastodon are really cool, but they both suffer from the same issue. Very techie power users will utilize the projects but never reach the critical mass of users to be relevant for a social network. Case in point, I first looked in to Matrix and Mastodon back in 2017 or so but it’s taken Twitter imploding in 2022 for even the more tech inclined general public to hear about it.

Other option is less tech inclined users just signing up on a server and ceding control over all their data to some arbitrary server owner. Both have tons of issues.

That’s why I’m super excited to see what Jack Dorsey and his former Twitter team come up with for BlueSky, since it’s built on top of the Matrix protocol. I’m really curious to see if they can keep the things that attracted the techies in the first place, while streamlining the usability for everyone.

Edit - This is why I love Signal. They took something that was only used by a dwindling amount of tech nerds and people buying drugs on dark net markets (PGP public key encryption), and made it as easy to use as Messenger or WhatsApp.

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___zero__cool___ t1_ixd4og0 wrote

Most of them will have a “local” feed, which is a feed of posts just made to that server, then a global feed which is posts made to all federated servers. You can follow anyone on any server. Usernames are like @Charlesinrichmond@server1.com or @__zero_cool__@server2.com. What will be really interesting is to see how BlueSky implements the Matrix protocol, since there are already a ton on bridge integrations that allow Matrix servers to interact with IRC, Sack, Discord, Twitter, email, SMS etc.

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___zero__cool___ t1_ixd2ry8 wrote

Yo, OP is not exactly beating around the bush with their other posts, they’re as straightforward and candid about what they want as can be. Why do you think they’d suddenly try the subterfuge route? Is it really that surprising that even though people like getting dicked down, they might just want a chill meal on Thanksgiving?

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