> :cball-russia: Hey, you remember Cold War? That was good time. > :cball-belarus: Is shame we cannot have Cold War 2 > :cball-russia: Now you give me idea there, Vlad

The BRICSbucks debate is heating up, likely fueled by funded segments and videos. I've been trying to think about it from both sides... and I don't think it's nearly as big as people think. To start, every one of these countries is still trading for anything they need from countries that aren't even in their sphere of interaction, in dollars. You're not going to see Indonesia switch to using BRICSbucks to buy what they need from Sweden, even though Indonesia buys about $20,000 worth of goods from Sweden each year. Multiply that by the number of countries halfway around the world from any given country, and you have a baseline that isn't going away even if they find ways to get energy commodities without dollars. Plus, a new currency built on a coalition of nations not closely-aligned doesn't have the potential to become a reserve currency because its stability will come into question in the face of any questionable member of that nation affecting its reputation. It is to say, if Russia's rubel or India's rupee were enough to be a reserve currency, they would do it themselves without the aid of other economic powers, but those decisions are made on current-state politics, not tomorrow's politics. If anything, BRICSbucks is a better security against nuclear war than anything else, because now it's China and India's responsibility to calm Russia the fuck down. On the other side of it, the dollar IS declining. That decline will happen but nothing in what we're seeing indicates that it will collapse (much to my chagrin). We've had a multipolar world before; in fact, for the past 120 years a multipolar world was the norm and the current unipolar experience is far more recent than people attribute. This isn't the first time Russia has done this, at all, and they usually get their way for a period of time before someone in the Army defects with a large enough unit to kill the current leader.

a rant about the difference between "so small and simple it can't possibly have any bugs" and "so big and complex it can't possibly have any bugs". --- I am more infuriated by Terraform's marketing than makes sense. "Infrastructure as Code" is such a lie; Terraform is not turing-complete and it's a worse JSON with variables and object permanence on a level that is downright frustrating. If you're so able to predict the required infrastructure you will need in the future about a project being first deployed, then perhaps it makes sense, but that workspace and module names are unchangeable once the first plan is applied is a constraint that turns a filesystem into a minefield. I don't care if Hachicorp has convinced every Fortune 200 company to use it; it's a perfect example of what happens when all that exists is "so large and complex it can't possibly have any mistakes." Learning Terraform isn't learning what a Resource Group, Provisioner, Provider, and Data Source are; but that's what their docs seem to imply. No, learning Terraform is learning the core Provider modules for your environment as well as the modules created by your company in the past to accomplish goals. Versioning built in appears like a good feature until you realise that Terraform steals the source of truth from even the environment itself by concealing from you the parts of the host network you use but don't necessarily know because it's impossible to know all of AWS or Azure. It's absolutely insane that I can deploy highly-available networks using tiny bash scripts for web sites hosted by internet friends that support 20,000 users a day, with 4GB RAM on each of the servers in different DCs and a shared minio backend for S3-style file-serving, but these corporations somehow need 128GB of RAM to execute an overblown dependency-management engine in the cloud to create a stateful implementation of their desired infrastructure that will cause nothing but headaches once something needs to change.

laser-induced plasma channel weapons are a human right.

> mom can we have project bluebeam > we have project bluebeam at home > project bluebeam at home:

> "They're not buying the aliens stories, quick, tell them that Obama is gay" > :blobcatnerd: We already knew.

If you go by how he talks about his son, Vivek's creating a dynasty.

terraform is not "infrastructure as code", it's npm but controlled by an even uglier JSON.

> "Barbie is the white woman's Black Panther."

> Mr. President, a second Barbie has hit the World Trade Center.

today: "I'm an order 66 denier, isn't that edgy? 5 years from now: "Dude, you know the Order 66 stuff is just Jedi propaganda right? The whole prequel trilogy is just that; the actors did a really good job of making you hate them. 'I love sand'? Brilliance."

So German's just a pidgin of English now, right?

> mo deen rants for 2 hours > grabs gun off wall > security guard draws weapon > abee-a-bee-a-bee-a that's all folks!

🎶 UNDERSTANDABLE! Understandable, yes it's perfectly understandable 🎶

today

brb adding the ifunny waterstamp back to memes

youtube.com/watch?v=rOqa-vHWLEo I'm transfixed.