Hegar

This is quite reassuring - if medvedev said it you know there’s no chance it could possibly happen.

Ryan Air: No, it’s the airports that are wrong.

Russia seemed to be planning to open another front on the Ukrainian side of the border here, so this has spiked that, seized the gas line, provided potentially ‘swappable’ territory, embarrassed the kremlin and diverted Russian reinforcements from other fronts.

Right to disconnect laws were first introduced in France in 2017… One critic at the time said: " the French may quickly discover that their most productive workers are routine “lawbreakers” who stay connected during off-hours." … A 2023 Australia Institute study estimated Australian workers on average were doing an extra 5.4 hours of unpaid work per week. … equates to an extra 281 hours’ unpaid work per year. This is estimated to be costing workers an average of AU$11,055 annually.

For employers, productive is just a polite synonym for exploited.

Public protest and unrest is a symptom, your society telling you something is wrong

This is something that the Chinese government actually pays very close attention to. Specific issues - food safety and pollution for example - they allow some protest so they can gauge how strong public sentiment is on the matter. Even when they arrest protest leaders, they’ll often make policy changes in the relevant areas. I’ve heard china scholars talk about how interested the chinese government is in public opinion and the roundabout ways they assess it in a system where it can’t be regularly expressed in open elections.

the appearance of a peaceful society without conflict is not the same thing as a peaceful society without conflict

For sure. I feel like as far as an authoritarian government is concerned though, they are functionally the same. Until suddenly they are not, of course. But again, the resilience of the CCP is due in part to working out what is up for public comment and what is most definitely not.

public unrest is a feature

Again, super agree. But I don’t think of public unrest as political chaos, at least not in the US context. The inability of the government to perform it’s most basic functions without brutally pointless culture wars, the myriad ways to gum up the works and prevent action, the increasing politicization of the public service, the willingness of so many to act contrary to the government’s own interests - that’s the sort of stuff I think of as All American political chaos.

I could definitely believe that some weibo users are very interested in Biden’s stepping down. Xi’s decision to stay on passed the original term limit was quite controversial even among some of his supporters. Stepping aside when the moment requires it is the hallmark of that paragon of Confucian virtue, the Duke of Zhou.

But no one in the world “envies” our political chaos. We’ve done real damage to the global reputation of democracy and given example after example for the world’s autocrats to point to when they argue that democracy is self defeating.

Not on normal courtyard/community exercise

That’s almost certainly a backronym. There aren’t enough records of its use to say for certain, but nonce probably shares an etymology with “nancy” as in nancy boy, or possibly with “ponce” as in perfumed ponce.

But when you give fame and wealth to known child rapists like van de Velde, trump, or others who regularly appears in epstein’s flight logs, they can use that fame and wealth to attract more victims and cover up their actions.

There’s a difference between having a livelihood and being granted access to the power that nationwide recognition gives you.