"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

Hubris is the word.

The CEO Stockton Rush, just off the top of my head:

• Fired his own director of marine operations for formally reporting “numerous issues that posed serious safety concerns". These included that the viewport was only rated to 1,300 meters, the carbon fiber hull had flaws which gave it the potential to fail, and that the hull integrity monitoring systems installed in response "might only provide 'milliseconds' of warning before a catastrophic implosion".
• Refused to submit to an industry certification process for the sub, despite being warned in an open letter with dozens of signatories that failing to do so risked "negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic)".
• Denounced the laws regulating submarine tourism as having "needlessly prioritized passenger safety over commercial innovation".

Upvote for a sincere question. Here's the wiki article on its use as a fascistic pro-war symbol. Kazakhs are unhappy with it because they too are a country that Russia makes territorial claims against and are thus largely opposed to the war and its symbols.

The brutal reality is that Putin's Russia embodies everything the Trump Republicans dream of for America: a boundlessly corrupt, white supremacist, ethnonationalist fascist state whose oligarchs possess limitless power so long as they obey The President.

They call themselves the "party of Reagan", while they trip over themselves to sell the geopolitical future of Europe down the river to Moscow...

The monthly prices users pay per maid are according to race, the website states – with employers charged less for the services of a black maid. “Filipinas AED3,500 ($952)/month” and “Africans AED2,700 ($735)/month,” it states

The website states that Filipina maids require a bedroom of their own to sleep in, while African maids do not.

Nobody does racist slavery quite like the Gulf Arab countries, do they? I don't know which is more grim, that or the disclaimer:

“Zero legal liability. Maid stays on our visa, so you’ll never have to worry about any legal consequences. If anything goes wrong (eg runaway maid, pregnancy), we’re responsible to deal with any lawsuits or visits to police stations, not you.”

IE, you can sexually abuse your underpaid migrant worker without fear of legal consequences, and the employer can then revoke their visa. What a great service! /s

This article has confirmation from the GUR, Ukrainian military intelligence, that Kadyrov is critically ill. There are no exact details on what he has other than that it's related to a chronic health condition, potentially kidney failure given his facial swelling. It's also long been reported that he's an addict.

I also call attention to the fact that Kadyrov allegedly had his personal physician executed in suspicion that the latter was poisoning him. It would truly be poetic justice if denying himself that medical treatment in a fit of paranoia precipitated this (hopefully terminal) episode.

Well, it's a good thing that the Bad Foreigners are to blame for the issue — otherwise the Kremlin might be forced to engage in critical thinking over the implications of their incessant agitprop for the stability in minority regions, and we can't have that.

Speculation runs that Dimi has been told by the Tsar that if he acts like the tough guy he isn't with enough bravado, he'll be allowed to sit in the big boys' chair and pretend to be president again.

It seems implausible in the short term, but if statements like these are in any way reflective of long term strategic goals, or even official rhetoric, it's still ominous. Of course, given the fact it's state TV, it could be the General purely reciting the party line to give the public the impression that the war is going vastly better than it really is. But it also reminds me of what were purported to be strategic planning documents leaked by FSB sources early in the war, from when Russia still believed they'd take Kyiv in three days. It described a plan to conquer the country in weeks, then present their army on the Polish border as a fait accompli and declare a no-fly zone over the Baltics as an ultimatum to NATO.

Whether that's true or not, subsequent events showed that the ZSRF was incapable of even that plan, as you say. But the very level of disparity between nominal and actual capabilities that led Moscow to believe such a thing was possible to begin with certainly doesn't speak to their ability to make accurate estimations of what their forces are capable of.

He's pretty involved in the deep sea submersible community by all accounts, supposedly he's dived to the Titanic site 33 times and been involved in the design of some of the vessels used.

More recent updates from RU state media report 4 damaged, so a nominal pricetag of $200m USD in hardware — though it may be less to repair, depending on the degree of damage. A great success, in any event.

Also known as stalkerware or spouseware, these kinds of phone monitoring apps are often planted by someone — such as spouses or domestic partners — with physical access to a person’s phone, without their consent or knowledge.

Man. The fact that stalkerware is used so often on people's domestic partners that they call it "spouseware" is pretty fuckin' bleak.

"Chinese officials visibly nervous at the outpouring of public praise for dead leader [who they had sidelined and demoted]."

"Great Patriotic War" is the fine conceit of historical revisionism that lets the Russians neatly overlook the unpleasant little detail that WW II started with the Soviets fighting as cobelligerents with Nazi Germany to invade Poland.

Found an article (in Georgian) with a photo.

Yes, and the watermark on the video is "total Ulan-Ude", which is a town in Buryatia, so it fits.

Русский, no — Российский, yes.

@ChrisO_wiki@mastodon.social is a researcher who posts a lot of interesting stories sourced from RU news & social media relating to the home front — corruption, treatment of troops and casualties, protests by soldiers and their relatives, etc.

Here is a bypass.

Potemkin military.