its always, a few Asian countries, and white western countries.

It’s a dead heat between FIFA and the IOC as to which organisation can appear the most deplorable. Any autocratic regime can buy these fuckers. We need to take sport back from the criminals.

“The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” —Olympic Values per the IOC website.

That statement seems close to the opposite of what Russia is doing to Ukraine right now.

Missed it by thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat much

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[removed]

Apple? Meet Orange.

Putin’s rise to power and corruption should be a lesson to us all. We need to elect Zelenskys and ignore idiots with hardline policies on crap like immigration.

If we don’t maintain an honest and open government and functional justice system, then there is no justice at all.

A lot of the rich in the world are corrupt, I hope now we’ll be paying a lot more attention to the rich and their transactions. Maybe next time, we’ll notice things like cheques going from imperialist warlord to president 🇷🇺 🇺🇸 …

But... what if they are decoy tools?

See, the thing is, repeatedly threatening the US Government and entire country of the United States is not a particularly good strategy to encourage Americans to bend to your will, China. In fact, it’s nearly certain to have the opposite effect.

It appears China possesses a pathetically deficient understanding of Americans and American culture.

If you're referring to Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka you may want to look into it a bit, because that was not an asset seizure - and never could be as it wasn't part of the terms of the loan.

Hambantota was conceived as a way to shore up electoral support for the then Prime Minister. Columbo Port manages quite nicely; there was no pressing need for a second port. The Chinese failed to understand this as the concept of needing to bribe voters is unfamiliar to them. Funny, that.

Hambantota Port is now owned by HIPG, a company that consists of 85% shareholder CM Ports (a Chinese company), and 15% Sri Lanka Port Authority (a Sri Lankan government-owned enterprise). Now, an 85/15 split doesn't sound like equity, but the terms of the agreement allow for Sri Lanka to increase it's shareholding, provided they can pay for it. It's not a fantastic deal for Sri Lanka but it did allow them to avoid defaulting on the loan. The lesson for both China and Sri Lanka is that investing in white elephants is bad business. HIPG have continued to develop Hambantota Port so there's an outside chance it may be profitable one day.

I can dig up the white paper analysis written by Sri Lankan academics (unaffiliated with either the Chinese or Sri Lankan governments) if you're interested in the details.

Edit: Found the briefing paper. It's 33 pages but you can skip to the summary on page 32.

Many aspects of global civilization will be inescapable de-linked.

HaHa yeah, the video demonstrations would be quite something. :D

The future of AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEzhxP-pdos

I know Russia has a lot of food exports, especially wheat , but Russia is still a net importer of food... with all the sanctions their food supply should be having some serious issues. Do they actually have the food to trade for arms or are they gonna just starve their people?

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 54%. (I'm a bot)

> The Information's report also contains the potentially staggering thirdhand allegation that Google stooped so low as to train Bard using data from OpenAI's ChatGPT, scraped from a website called ShareGPT. A former Google AI researcher reportedly spoke out against using that data, according to the publication.

> According to The Information's reporting, a Google AI engineer named Jacob Devlin left Google to immediately join its rival OpenAI after attempting to warn Google not to use that ChatGPT data because it would violate OpenAI's terms of service, and that its answers would look too similar.

> Update March 30th, 2:02PM ET: Google would not answer a follow-up question about whether it had previously used ChatGPT data form Bard, only that Bard "Isn't trained on data from ChatGPT or ShareGPT.".

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Google^#1 data^#2 Bard^#3 ChatGPT^#4 train^#5

Careful, don’t cut yourself with that edge

>China has a group of peoples in their country that work as slaves to produce goods and work on farms.

What does that have to do with anything though? (The US uses prison slave labor too, though on a smaller scale).

>They also allow slavery within their trade agreements of their “belt and road” plans.

The US does as well. Every country does. Every couple months another major report comes out that the majority of cocoa plantations, cobalt mines, and commercial fishing vessels in the world are using slave labor, and no one does anything. Welcome to globalization, dude. The massive purchasing power of developed-world consumers meets the desperate poverty, lawlessness, and weak human rights of the Third World.

https://gravityfalls.fandom.com/wiki/Paper_Jam_Dipper

I can't believe you need to explain it to people in 2023.

Right cause all those other religions are having updates

It wasn’t really a security flaw but a misconfiguration. Glad nobody seems to have exploited it before it was patched.

Go be a dragon in someone elses existence

Ah, its greatest hearing the so-called champion of democracy deciding that its $$ that talks, and that people mean nothing. I suppose that is pretty much American democracy in a nutshell.

But even if we can go buy your measure of money is king:

https://www.silkroadbriefing.com/news/2023/03/27/the-brics-has-overtaken-the-g7-in-global-gdp

BRICS has overtaken the G7 is GDP. SA is still standing in the side of global support.

Belarus Oblast