Certainly, trading the promise of future fuel for dollars right now has a bunch of uses.

Russia is currently importing gasoline, due to domestic shortages caused by the war.

Even if the US could buy it’s way out, I don’t think Russia has enough to sell

Definitely crooked.

But cooked? Not holding my breath.

So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes?

They’re routinely the victims of them. Lottery winners are a scam target rich environment. North of 5% of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years, far above the national average.

You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off

Utterly clueless if you believe the advent of online banking was Peter Thiel’s idea. I seriously doubt you understand how banks form or function.

Some gained wealth legitimately

Nobody gets truly rich by playing within the rules. Show me a billionaire and I’ll show you a list of crimes.

That’s been the Jeff Bezos gambit for nearly a decade. He’s still an absolute POS and we all know it.

The smart ones are the ones we have never heard of.

Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

Billionaire: “We paid some college kids to build a robot that doesn’t immediately tip over when it tries to move.”

Internet Slacktivist: “Black Mirror! Terminator! The Matrix! It’s game over, man! We’re all gonna die!”

I do kinda think there’s a through-line between people into horoscopes and people who never want to make a decision.

because like half of all women are into astrology

In the same way that half of all men are into video games, sure.

they get really really angry with you if you don’t take them seriously when they start lecturing you about it

I’ve definitely had girls explain it to me. And I’ve stepped in it when I teased one too hard, because she just read me as an obnoxious prick (which… in my early 20s… she wasn’t wrong).

But I see astrology get the same treatment as veganism. You mention, in passing, that you’re into a thing. People line up around the block to heckle you and argue with you and scream slurs at you. And for some reason this doesn’t really change you opinion on The Thing You’re Into. It just changes your opinion on dating or on talking to anyone outside your insulated The Thing community.

Dated a girl and, while we were walking through the park, she points up at the sky. “Oh look, Chemtrails”. I absolutely bust up laughing, because I assume I’ve accidentally stepped into a relationship with a conspiracy theorist. She looks incredibly confused. I explain what chemtrails are. She gets even more confused. We whip out our phones for a minute. She says, “Omg I meant contrails”

She’s a lawyer at a white shoe firm now and makes, like, twice as much as I do in IT. Also, absolutely incredible in the sack.

He thought he could be a social media influencer for the Russian conservative pundit class.

Guess not.

Nonsense. Just move to Alberta.

All the racists and incel roughnecks and insane police violence and systematic rape of first nations peoples. You just don’t have a risk of being pushed into the Ukraine meat grinder.

Boomers

Puts on reading glasses

Black Rock

having a tantrum

Is reminding you of the questionable history of Apollo Global a tantrum?

What they lack in technology they make up for in brutality.

That’s how surveillance works

It absolutely is a national security issue!

Tell it to Volkswagen

That is until you consider Tik Tok

Wasn’t the big concern with TikTok entirely around how people were talking about the Palestine Genocide while US controlled social media had effectively blacked it out?

China is undoubtedly the worst followed by the US and Russia.

I doubt it. Russia doesn’t have the infrastructure or the manpower to compete with a modern surveillance state. And the US doesn’t operate alone, it’s part of the Five Eyes network, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Nevermind NISRF.

Part of what makes the US network horrifying is how many other countries are blithely along for the ride.

DON’T CRITICIZE CHINA

We put a machine with a radio in a room and the radio continued to try and function.

This is why we cannot import low priced, high quality foreign made electric engines.

if any other countries product was doing that, you’d have a fit

Why? It’s the same tired story, used to scare people who know nothing about communications technology. It’s all about making “Buy American” a national security issue.

If Brazil or Italy or even the dreaded Russia was being accused of this, why wouldn’t we stare sideways?

its doing the exact opposite of what was promised

I mean, remind me again why I’m trusting autos.yahoo.com on their reporting? Isn’t Yahoo a subsidiary of Apollo Global Management, a company with deep ties to the Epstein human trafficking cartel?

they do not connect to the internet. yet, they still attempt to connect to Chinese servers

Via dialup?