tsar_bomba

Suicide is not a disease of comfort. Obesity is not a disease of wealth, for food (and junk food) is incredibly inexpensive in the developed world today, likely no more expensive than heavy smoking, alcohol, cocaine or opiates.

These are diseases of overpopulation, loss of freedom and control over one's life and general lack of anything to live for in the future. Mouse utopia comes to mind.

The tragic thing is that those Western countries likely used to be on the same or even better level a few decades ago as Scandinavia and Central Europe today, but they are no more.

By the way, I wouldn't necessarily mention South-Eastern Europe in the same sentence as Central Europe; the Balkans have quite a tradition of being a hotbed of conflict.

And let's not just reduce safety to murders. There is the petty crime too, which I hear is becoming widespread in some problematic areas of big cities in Western Europe. There are social tensions, there are protests with occasional deaths and property damage, there is the radicalization of politics which may lead to all sorts of "interesting" things down the line. There is the "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of speech to counter the former, and yeah, it seems we are now talking about restricting privacy in the name of war on terror, which guarantees further increase in tensions and may enable a slide into totalitarianism in the future.

Remember that when Stalin started, he didn't intend to kill millions of people for fun, he just wanted social justice. The terror "happened" along the way.

Nationalism is drawing borders around preexistent tribalism to keep it contained.

It is exactly violations of those borders which got us wars in Europe. Sometimes for the sake of colonization, sometimes for the sake of unification, sometimes for the sake of ill-conceived peace, and almost always a bad idea in the end.

I'm not even that much optimistic about the future of the EU, to be honest.

Things like guns and drugs are contentious though, because availability in one state of an "open borders" zone enables smuggling into other states, where they might be banned.

One could hope that the system would tend towards overall liberalism, but IME with the EU it's the opposite.

Over recent years, we have got mandatory registration of SIM cards right as an influential neighbor state did the same (official explanation by our government: because of terrorism threat, which is essentially nonexistent here), EU-wide ban on many useful chemicals which have been used in terror attack mostly in Britain and France, and I'm hearing that the Swiss (a Schengen member) are having their own problems with the EU over firearm regulations, even if they aren't an EU state.

It is my understanding that over the years people have developed various software to follow threads and users' comment streams so it is conceivable that some bored zealot took it upon himself to police every single thing you post in real time. Or set up a downvote bot as others suggested. There are some genuine weirdos here.

I haven't been here for a few years (green account again, yay), but at least back then, moderators weren't know for f...ng with anyone like that. Warning, maybe another warning, shadow ban and good bye.

At any rate, posting "@moderators" in the middle of a 4000 comment thread will get you nowhere. There is a contact email at the bottom if you want to ask for investigation.

True in principle, while in the real world the devs didn't even inspect perms on those files or changed them deliberately to fix some access control issue without a second thought. Welcome to embedded software, where the product is ready when it passes the functional tests.

In related news, I have seen at least two proprietary drivers which allowed userspace libraries to program the hardware without any kernel oversight, incuding things like DMA engines. Pointed it out to one vendor; "yeah, we guess it's not ideal, but you know, details of the hardware is our secret sauce and customers demand no binaries in the kernel because reasons, blah blah".

I assume many of those embedded OpenGL implementations may work that way. Anyone with evidence to the contrary?