On many occasions I've read self-soothing wishful thinking messages about my country. In 2022 it was that Russian army is fleeing, all Russian tanks were burned down, and Russian soldiers are deserting from a front lines with a speed of 100,000 persons a day. Here on HN. Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.

Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.

Or just recently someone wrote to me that we are living in the stone age, whatever that means.

On the other hand, I'm happy that West prefers to live in a bubble with no access to real information. And if you try to convey real information, they'll call you "Kremlin bot" or "North Korean bot" or "Chinese bot". It means that less countries will fall prey to neocolonial practices and wars because you cannot wage wars and govern colonies based entirely on misinformation from propaganda your own media creates out of thin air.

There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.

And it's not secure or anonymous at all. At some point you need to buy crypto or sell crypto, or buy some goods with crypto, and at that point you can be easily identified. Happened so many times.

Even here in Russia, under all US sanctions, only a few use crypto. It's so inconvenient that even under pressure of US sanctions it hadn't become more popular.

UnionPay can. They are accepted in many parts of the world, and they are free from US restrictions.

But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).

If tomorrow there would be a war or protests in, say, Burundi. Will Americans stay with Burundi or against it? Or with the country the media will tell them is "good" because their interests align with US interests?

I think answers to all these questions are obvious.

Also, shell_plus has --print-sql option for easy construction and debugging of ORM queries.

Probably should replace the lock but it is so expensive.

If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.

In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.

Although I must admin WD-40 helped me in the past opening an old door lock.

Where do you get your information? From CNN? Can you show an Ukrainian law that allows men to freely cross the border?

But that only about men of age 18-22. Men of age 22-60 still cannot leave the country. And 18-22 couldn't leave the country for three years.

Of course, there should be some exceptions. For example, some people need to go abroad to bring Western supplied munitions, officials can leave to visit other countries, etc.

But almost 100% of the population cannot leave Ukraine under any circumstances.

Also, how and why some "spy" would work both for China and Russia? Two very different countries from every point of view: culturally, economically, and in every other way also.

The only thing in common is that USA wants to destroy both Russia and China and that because of that reason US controlled media (like 90% of media in the world) publish scary fakes about both countries.

Do you know, for example, that China willingly sells huge amounts of drones to Ukraine?

Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands died in ethnical conflicts, hundreds of thousands died from hunger. It was all a huge mistake and I hope we'll never repeat it.