Black soldier flies are also harmless and a fun insect to have around. Completely clueless for personal space, will bump into and land on you to rest and investigate what you are.

And that is valid.

I have never subscribed any of these streaming services. The pressure from friends was intense but at the end of the day I simply felt no need and even less appeal to it.

Nowadays, I hear those same friends how expensive it has become to keep all of these services to follow their interests and how the catalogue has been degrading.

I sincerely do not care.

My main concern is the general population. I have nothing against north koreans but I seriously dislike North Korea as a totalitaria authoritarian regime.

I accept the information and background advanced but in no way it justifies why the regime brutalizes, today, their population, while heavily indoctrinating their citizens and keeping them fearful of any outside contact.

We have this tactic very well document and it was used during WW2 to develop an irrational fear towards the Ally troops. The regimes then did not wanted whatever survivors to try to surrender and reach peace; it wanted for everyone to die. Glory in death. That is the proceeding of a cult, not a culture.

Even if a popular hero was necessary at the beggining to raly the people and gain momentum to push back, it does not justify enshrinning such a person and have their power bestowed by proxy, indefinitely. NK is the only necrocracy on the planet. The original president is still the president; his descendents govern in his representation. The dead have no word or will.

Regarding the US action post war, I was stating what it was. End of WW2, the US is heavily industrialized, solvent, militarily capable and became a pivotal figure for the resolution of the war. The great majority of the world is in shambles and wanting to lick wounds and heal. The US take the opportunity to expand their reach and influence on every possible front. It is not correct, under any light, but it was a logical outcome and one nobody really had the power to deny.

Then we get the Cold War and what the world got was just a more or less open display of menaces. Nobody really wanted peace or made strives to achieve it. The USSR turned into a brutally repressive regime; Stalin had countless people killed because he could, out of paranoia. It was meant to establish a regime of terror and ciment uncontested power. China took to that same book and so many other nations. Why have they opted to brutalized their people at some point? What justified it?

It’s more than obvious at this point that we will not reach any point of contact between our views and that is fine.

At no point in this entire exchange I got an understandable explaination of why a regime (several, to take a broader stroke) decided at some point, after having suffered and endured, successfully, an aggression, that brutalizing their people was the way to go.

And I just remembered this: the main foreign investor in NK is South Korea, that builds factories there, within the constraints the international blockade on the country allows for it. In the same sense that it is China and South Korea the main customers for food exports from NK. Food that is badly needed for their own population and often produced and harvested through forced prison labour, like the factory work.

They want nuclear weapons for the sake of deterr foreign threats? Fine. Have them, keep them, enjoy them. May the missiles rust in peace and to peaces in their silos. But why can’t they spare just a little bit of money to actually improve the quality of life in the country? Truly live by their words and actually elevate the people? Can we agree that is desirable and would mean a great deal to every nation that is currently taking them as bad actors?

Have a nice one. We’re bound to cross paths and disagree with each other somewhere in the future again. See yuou then.

I do not care the least about american history and how it is taught in schools.

My own country had its gripe with US machinations, which resulted in the outbreak of several bloody wars because USSR was already doing ground work to create upheavel. The then fascist government opted to try and choke out the independence feelings and many died for that decision, leading to several present day countries being severely late to reach higher civilizational goals.

The same goals North Korea should be striving for instead of developing and maintaining the regime it currently has and will retain indefinitely unless a stroke of fate eliminates the “royal” family.

The rulling family and the better viewed are completely above the rest of the people, which they alledgely serve in order to achieve a strong and better nations. Kids get to be privately schooled in very expensive establishments in Switzerland Source: I have know people in the country working in “invisible” positions, the everybody pretends they are not there. Meanwhile, back in the home country, education is best akin to indoctrination.

Every country in the world teaches children under the most favourable light but only a few actively prevent them from learning more and go beyond what they were originally taught. North Korea is amongst this selected few.

And are we to just automatically discredit all NK defectors? The ONG’s are likewise untrusworthy? They are all collaborators? Poor choice of word; usually, it’s much easily used by the totalitarian side. The country also makes no effort to hide it is a closed nation. Tourism there is not a hot industry and many people going there, with no political afilliation, report the constraints they face while visiting. Close supervision, official guides, a lot of restricted areas, no pictures. People from my country have been there; we are not on the radar for bad PR. Funny as it may be, we still maintain our own communist party and they still get voted to parliament and get to criticize the slew of idiotic governments we’ve been having and push back on the rise of the far right nationalists. I’m supposed to not give credit to people I personally know?

Totalitarianism is totalitarianism. Doesn’t matter in which colour it dresses. Nobody can claim clean hands. The NK regime is barbaric and there are numerous evidences and testimonies on what that country is and how it functions.

The US took a while to take off the mask but they are no better; in fact, in my understanding they catching up on what the other brutal regimes have been doing for more nearly 80 years.

Denying the famines China inflicted on its population because of badly thought through policies is idiotic; the 70’s and 80’s were with those and are very well documented. Denying the brutality of the USSR is laughable. Denying the brutality of the NK regime is ludicrous.

If the goal of all of these regimes is to elevate the people, then do it. Venezuela had a golden opportunity and instead fell for a con artist that seized power from the previous lawfully elected president while witholding the information he was already deceased. The country was on a rising tick, with lawful elections, industrial development and quality of life improving. Then they get a smooth talking dictactor that took the country under the guise of socialism.

Turning back to the original point: NK is a bad faith actor. What is stopping them to reach out and strike open talks for peace? One side has to be bigger and reach forward. Why not them? Why keep an armed standoff that benefits nothing and no one besides a chosen few?

I’ll grant you all of what you said but I have to have an answer to a question: at what point is it legitimate for one figure to turn himself and his family in near demigods in order to take hold of a nation struggling against an invading foreign power and proceed to establish a totalitarian authoritarian regime that lasts to this day and whose acts of violence and brutal control onto the people are very well documented?

The US took their opportunity to take control of whatever was within reach. It was an obvious consequence. The nations of the world were on it’s knees, while the US were highly industrialized, militarily capable and economically strong. It was obviously a wrong thing to do but who had the means to oppose it? And the will, after a long war? Even more with the nuclear menace looming?

Has if the other part of the equation hasn’t been ready to move into the southern part of the peninsula for decades.

The largest number of placed artilery in the world is aimed at Seoul and projections have been made that a few volleys would be enough to nearly raze the city. If an invasion could be done with no concern for retaliation, it most probably would already been done.

The current state of affairs is kept by standing threats, not will to advance to true peace.

North Korea regime is well documented as the most entrenched, closed and secretive totalitarian regime in the world. Testimonies from people that managed to escape the territory are plentiful and grisly.

Where is the line where it is collectively said that such a nation is not a good faith agent?

Why not? To my knowledge, the 3€ surcharge is applied by category, not item. So, if you’re buying electronic components, you pay 3€, once.

I’m not a hobbyist but in Portugal Robert Mauser is a big player. Then there are the specialty shops, as you mention.

The little seems to be having a life changing revelation. Or staring into the abyss. Maybe both.

Does the aftermath results in tenderness and asking for attention or violence and menaces?

Regardless of how you interpret my sentence, it holds what I meant: humans crave closeness.

As someone who truly enjoys being alone and left alone, I think it was a lost opportunity not trying to be a ligh house keeper or something of the like.

I find extremely interesting your underlining of that were only three women on board. It shouts how much humans crave for closeness when isolated.

Considering the speed at which society and entertainment is changing and being produced, at some point it ceases to be “unlawful” to become legitimate preservation.

I’ve noticed an uptick on reruns of old series and films, especially late seventies, eighties and nineties. On films, I’m seeing even earlier production, going back to the sixties, and even of minor cinema like italian, spanish and french.

I have no illusions that these older productions are probably cheaper to license than current day productions, but recent production gets aired once, maybe twice, and is just gone.

Some will argue this is due solely to most not having rewatching value, others that it is predicated on the shorter attention span audiences have nowadays. Other arguments exist.

Regardless of those, not seeing current series being re-run, for me, is a sign that there is no interest keeping those works around.

It would be extremely satisfying if somewhere in the future some of those productions had to be rescued from private copies, as it has happened before with others.

That can not be comfortable

Start an example?

Considering consumer laws are pretty good in Europe and jurisprudence tends to set example in the euro-space, it may cause other countries to do the exact same thing.

The company may appeal. It may even win. But the bad publicity hurts. And if they lose, it gets even worse, as it will have to pay what it is being demanded.

Or not pay and get fines on top of that.

Months ago someone shared a link to a study by a swedish or norwish institute where they had done those calculations.

Our species will top around the 11bn and slowly fall back to the 9,5/10bn, with optimist expectations. Lower numbers would be in 8/8,5bn.

Biggest problem? Resource sharing. We are able to feed our species two fold and then some. Just eliminating bad commercial practices and food waste, would nearly double the available food, as is.

Before, it was the rise of living standards cutting the birth rate down. Now, with poverty, inequality and automation on the rise, people have another reason to not raise families.

Our species will shrink and fast. Faster than anyone expects. Korea, Japan, Italy, even my country, are showing fast signs of aging.

What will they try to do? Conscript women’s uterus like Russia is, supposedly, debating? Even China is doing the math and the numbers are not good.

We owe nothing to governments. They are our servants. People forgot about that. Allowed megalomaniac interests to takeover our lives.

Will things get grimmer? Yes. No doubt about it. But I hope I will live to see things get better.

Considering how lopsided the distribution of resource consumption is, I’ll label this as skewed.

No worries. Somewhere, somehow, the solution awaits.

Sorry to inform you that besides filling my hard drive with unnecessary clutter, my printer remains as was.

Now… How do I purge my system from all this?

bash simply returns a command not found message when invoking gutenprint-printer-app

I haven’t installed the GUI

The printer remains as is, faulty

I’ve installed the gutenprint driver but my specific printer is not listed as a supported model. Testing it as I write this but with no particular hopes…

edit: and no, it still prints one sheet at a time, no duplex, and it botching the image printing quality