It was mainly the USSR's doing. China managed to switch to state capitalism. I guess we'll see how that works out for them.

> But they had to buy the materials for that balloon after the Stasi had found the remains of their previous attempt

The repressive state apparatus was moving too slow. Maybe they hoped there won't be a second attempt after the first one failed, maybe it wasn't promptly reported to the appartchikhs and handled internally by the Stasi to avoid backlash.

> Putting young men into fresh uniforms to march in synchrony

A security circus and a waste of time. Look at the Korean People's Army. Their main areas of expertise are marching in synchrony, digging trenches, construction and agriculture.

> wouldn’t even allow location services on her phone to put exif data in photos

This should be standard practice, I do it as well. Not East German but East European. We had our own Stasi that would terrorize youths for listening to Western music of Radio Free Europe.

Yeah everyone suffered that side of things for sure. I'd rather have location recorded but not leaked out to whoever sold me the phone personally. I don't sync any files to the cloud already.

In Europe they have an issue with the economic refugees from Muslim countries. And in Denmark has the counter example of Sweden where they cause trouble. That's why the far right gets people's votes. Of course, all they do is point to the migrants. The far right won't be solving any issues, it will just create new ones.

Why you feel the need to discuss a "far right" in Europe while US tech leadership is performing roman salutes in front of live cameras?

Muslim refugees are not responsible for Epstein, Greenland, US import duties, US ignoring Minsk agreement or Facebook actively supporting fake news with engineering resources embedded into political campaigns. The vast majority of muslim refugees integrates extremely well and perform shitty jobs that help our society, all while being traumatized from wars they were born into.

The social media accounts of the "far right" sit in st. petersburg propaganda mills and their advertisement account managers sit in san francisco. Workers at US-tech companies are responsible for the unchecked bombardment of our citizens with propaganda and fake news.

Are you suggesting that the AfD is not popular?

> Workers at US-tech companies are responsible for the unchecked bombardment of our citizens with propaganda and fake news.

They're also responsible for the propaganda and fake news targeting the center and the left. It just works most effectively to drive people right because of.... widely-distributed personality quirks, shall we say. It's not clear this dynamic would disappear if social media disappeared, but I do think it would slow down.

Dreadful weather but otherwise a nice country.

Yeah, he also hoped to rent Venice for his wedding, but he had to move the venue because people got annoyed. They'll probably also get fed up with him shoving his cloud down their throats. He could then move on to mining asteroids using robots, who won't be unionizing.

I'm obviously not going to show my id to Zuckerberg's website or any porn sites, casinos because I don't trust those bastards. They're also not the police, so they lack the proper autoritah to request my an id.

I think the point of the comment you are answering to is that in Switzerland, they are building a system where you can prove your age without telling who you are to the website, and without telling which website you visit to your government.

The government might not know which website exactly, but the fact that you are looking to verify your age is in itself a datum that you might not want the government to know. "Palata was either looking at porn or buying drugs in January 2026" is probably not something you want the government to know, even if the specifics are obscure.

Unless your e-ID app automatically requests 20 age verification tokens for everybody, whether they use them or not.

How are you going to farm the UUID for each user? Or are the IDs sequential?

Not a fan of Cloudfare but why should it be responsible for providing pro bono services to the Italian government during the winter olympics?

If one gets drunk at the pub and threatens the staff after being served free drinks, they get thrown out. Why should this be any different?

In Spain they also have similar laws made specifically for UEFA and the broadcasters' mafia.

The services aren't pro bono if they're only offered in exchange for getting a law modified.

And if you offer people free stuff and then turn around and demand something in return, they're going to get upset and like you less than if you had never offered the free stuff in the first place.

There was no exchange implied... before this sentence. Cloudflare might well be justified in feeling that the other side altered the deal, so to speak.

Unsurprising. In his first mandate he withdrew the US from the TPP after 7 years of negotiation and the Iran nuclear deal (JOPA), the TTIP negotiations.