As someone who currently lives in Poland, I hope this will be a wakeup call for Western Europe, which has so far been living a medieval dream of "the aggressor is far away and there are countries between us and the aggressor, so we can carry on as usual". That used to be a valid assumption several hundred years ago, but now no longer holds.
I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger. And I really hope the EU will stop funding the Russian military machine. Not everyone realizes this, but just in October 2025, the five largest EU importers of Russian fossil fuels paid Russia nearly 1 billion €. ONE BILLION EUR per month. Compare that to the military aid we are sending to Ukraine. (source: https://energyandcleanair.org/october-2025-monthly-analysis-...)
As I understand, if Europe stopped buying Russian natural gas, it would have to buy it at much higher prices elsewhere, which would raise things like electricity cost, logistics cost, which in turn might make voters unhappy and vote out the current government. That's the weakness of EU, it's made of many countries which put their interests first and have a democratic system.
Furthermore, there are suspicious things happening, like appointing former German chancellor for a Gazprom directors board [1]. Was he appointed for his exceptional skills and expertise, or for some other reason?
For comparison, Russia has no such problems; due to centralization and localization of economy, the prices and rouble value are kept under control; due to more authoritarian style of governing, nobody complains when utility bill raises every year, and sometimes twice a year. Russia also had tax increases for couple years straight, and again, nobody complained, unlike Europeans which tend to change the government every time they become unhappy with something. And obviously, West has no means to bribe or corrupt Russian leadership or finance any political movements.
It disheartens me to see how Polish opinion on the EU has been systematically dismantled, not sure if it's mostly Russian propaganda but EU skepticism is growing a lot over there, given that Poland is right at the footsteps of Russia it does not bode well it's starting to turn on the EU...
Guess who else is very much interested in that happening.....
"Leaked files ‘show US wants to persuade four nations to leave EU’
The countries seen as targets to follow Brexit are Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland, according to leaked details of the US national security strategy"
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/us-meg...
I definitely hope it will, but you know, the further remote from Russia the safer and less interested they can afford to be. Because the cyber war is here, there's lots of messages with "Russia is not my enemy" on the Romanian Facebook as well. This even when Putty's goon just said they're at war with Europe.
The Netherlands (population 18 million) has an annual budget of 350 billion.
Russia is in reality a poor country.
The strategy of the Netherlands is to just keep the war going by sending money. The reality is that we're actually WINNING but some people don't want that.
>>I hope the lukewarm support for Ukraine will become at least a bit stronger
As a Pole, I think the nation as a whole doesn't recognize that we are already at war. By any estimate, Russia already uses thousands of people online to post false information about both the war and Ukrainians in Poland, trying to incite hatred towards them so that Polish support for them goes down, and so far it has been working. Just go to a comment section on any news article or(if you're brave) Facebook, it's dare I say infested with brand new accounts whose entire posting history is just "get those ukrainian vermins out of this country" or the variations of. The governments office that was meant to investigate and combat this had....2 employees until very recently. Our response to this is not just inadequate, we are literally being "attacked"(not in a physical sense) by another nation and we do very little about it. And it appears to be working too - outright xenophobia and actual physical violence against Ukrainians is up on the raise in Poland, and political stance of "you know maybe Putin isn't such a bad guy" is coming out of the fringes and entering public conversation too. For a country such as Poland which has suffered first hand at the hands of Russians, this is an insane position to take.
Well, in video land there is patent pools. For example, you pay nominal fee to download specs from iso/ice 14496-12 to learn the details about BMFF and then pay mpeg-la a couple of dollars per device of it uses an AVC / h264 decoder.
These are open standards, but mpeg-la tries to recoup some of the research costs from "freeloaders".
Open source implementations like ffmpeg are a bit of a grey area,here
For now at least - for H.264 AVC, the patents are expired in most countries and most of the final US patents that may apply to AVC High profile will expire in the first half of 2026 [1].
Except in Brazil, where there are even MPEG-4 patents still in effect (expiring later in 2026) and the H.264 patents will last until the early 2030s, I think because of a rule that gave 10 years extra but is now changed but not retrospective for these patents [2].
I've had the same idea, but with no property tax on ownership of a single dwelling place.
If the burden is lessened to have your own place, hopefully we could see less homeless on the street or living in cars when times are tough.
However if you have more than one, then you pay significant property tax on all of them. I would hope that could free up more places for more people getting a home.
But of course if you earn more than $180k a year, I guess you could afford some property tax.
I am also thinking foreign ownership of property should be taxed heavily. I know that is not popular, but honestly if you not living full time in the country then you are effectively taking up a spot for someone who needs a place to live.
That sounds like it would penalize renting in favor of homeownership. I'm not in support of that, renting offers people flexibility and is not inherently worse than owning.
Cherry are more expensive than the rest but honestly I didn’t love the feeling of their keys. To be fair I was after a particular feel of very clicky keys.
For longevity I don’t feel the need to really differentiate between 100,000 actuations and like 500,000. Both are long enough and I don’t mind replacing the switches in a few years because let’s face it, it can be fun to try some of the new stuff and switching things up.
Your comment is the first one after many to talk any sense.
I recently had an encounter with a sight impaired person that had less than 10% left of his eyesight, and his exact words were "dark mode makes my experience easier".
Since meeting him, everything I do when it comes to UI, I try to be more mindful.
They'll change their tune soon enough when the coin slows down.
Myself and many I know go to pubs/bars alone, have a drink and talk with a complete stranger or just sit people watching while decompressing after a long week.
Russia withdraws to pre-2014 borders.
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