After making a secret deal with them to partition Europe. They didn't come around on principle, it's just that Hitler eventually decided to invade Russia too.
And after winning the war, Stalin proceeded to kill millions for good measure.
Stalin did the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact to (successfully!) buy time and breathing room for the inevitable Nazi assault after his numerous entreaties to Western/Allied powers were rebuffed.
That's one interpretation, another interpretation is that Stalin was expecting Hitler to struggle in France for years get worn down like in WW1 and then Stalin would attack and make whole Europe a satellite to USSR.
France buckled in months and Wehrmacht then attacked Red army which did not have setup defense positions because they themselves were preparing to attack...
That pact started the Eastern campaign of the Nazis. You could argue that it also bought time for the Nazis, as they could gain territory without worrying much about resistance from the Soviets.
I'm not really inclined to do too much Monday morning quarterbacking of the USSR's defeat of Nazi Germany. I'm especially not inclined to give it the time of day when it's coming from Westerners who never say a peep about their own countries having given Hitler territory and financing.
The two tend to go hand-in-hand because communism - in its most popular formulations anyway - encourages consolidation of power in the state, "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and all.
To clarify what I meant, Marxism and its descendants (Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Juche, etc.) are the most “popular” forms of communism. By which I mean: they’re what was implemented in most (all?) countries that had communists seize power - the USSR, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and so on. In university we read Marx, not Bakunin; in Canada we have a Marxism-Leninism party, not an anarcho-communist party. Etc.
If you’re asking the latter question in good faith, I’d encourage you to consult Wikipedia; it has good articles on both the term “proletariat” and Marx’s phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Marx argued the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was an essential part of the transition to "true communism". I think it's fair to say that if X is an essential part of actualizing Y, X "goes hand-in-hand" with Y, regardless of whether or not Y itself when fully actualized (if that's possible) means to incorporate X.
Let’s be clear, I am not advocating for this. Just stating that communism doesn’t recognize a state, not even of the proletariat.
I’m not advocating for this transition. I’m on the side of peace and pacifism. I see no man as above me, or below me. Marx may be right but who really wants to try and test it? History has shown that regimes who try, fail. Those who stop short and just be all dictatorships, end up destroying their own. So, I guess cheers (champagne glasses) to the sinking ship.
About the most important tenet of communism is collectivism. When you attempt collectivization on a national level, there's always a significant portion of the population who doesn't want to play along and wants to keep doing their own thing. That's the end of the road for your political system unless you do a bit of mass murder, which is why every "successful" communist state resorted to that.
So yes, of course, no political ideology has "let's murder millions of people" as its founding principle. But some political systems require it.
or you let them be hermits that they are. No need to murder people. If they don't fit in with the collectivism then they are shunned from society. Much like social media.
It's important to remember the Anti-Comintern Pact started as an anti-communist agreement between Germany and Japan. Look what that did.
Authoritarianism. And there's a huge argument to be made that communist states were and are corrupted not by their principles but by the pressure capitalist states place on them.
And to be clear so I don't get dogpiled and dox'd for this later. I don't think that excuses the blood that was shed. I do not think a state has a right to terrorize it's populace into submission, regardless of the ideological motivations for doing so.
No human being has the right to determine if another human being should live or die. That's not power. That's not authority. That's cowardice. Sadly we have ideologies and religions that think otherwise.
In principle I agree with you but the "pressure" you mentioned means my view on this is sort of like Bjarne Stroustrup's take on programming languages: there are political systems that people complain about suppressing dissent & interference in their nascent stages, and ones that nobody lives under.
Just like Stroustrup's formulation, this can become a cover for unnecessary and mistaken excesses, but I don't necessarily think that's inevitable.
I'd like to see that argument. Russia pre-WWII and Mao's China don't seem to me to have much capitalist pressure against them, yet Stalin and Mao killed millions. Stalin's purges were internal, against people who were on his bad side. Now, you could say that maybe Western spies agitated, but there's no way that Western agitation would account for millions of people. Furthermore, in 1930, the Communist system was widely seen as successful, since initial food production in the USSR was strongly up. Mao's deaths were incompetence (famine: killing sparrows, resulting in sparrows not eating insects the next year; famine: misallocation of resources, causing starvation in Sichuan when enough food existed elsewhere; Cultural Revolution: Mao's reaction to losing his grip on power). I think China was so poor that it realistically did not interact with the rest of the world, but in WWII, the US actually helped the Communists.
Every other Communist state that I am aware of also killed millions in internal purges: Cambodia and N. Korea, notably. I'm actually not sure what happened with Vietnam and Cuba. I'm not sure if contemporary Venezuela counts as Communist, but I am under the impression that there was killing or at least persecution of internal political enemies. I don't see how US sanctions have anything to do with how one treats political enemies.
I guess Eastern Europe might be an exception, but I think that is because Communist states were imposed with external force, not revolution from within, and the population mostly capitulated. However, I believe that political opposition was still likely to be deadly.
Since Communist states seem to be highly correlated with killing internal enemies, it seems like a feature of the system, not a response to external pressure, particularly since the largest two did not have serious external pressure at the time.
> Update 18 December 2025: We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working.
It’s great that it has been resolved, but I’m still baffled by a number of things:
1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account?
2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you drum up a ton of press?
3) Should companies be restricted from growing too large where they can’t support their customers?
In my personal and professional experience, banks are the only companies that seem to actually know how to handle these issues appropriately when it comes to fraud or access. Rather than move to outright banning the account, there are intermediate steps that can be taken. Personal example, my Facebook account was recently banned because a hacker accessed my account uploaded a bad ID when FB requested an ID verification. Despite the request coming from a country I have never visited and would likely be on any high-risk list, my 20 year old account was banned literally overnight without having any recourse. There’s no number or even any email to use. Maybe I can see if the Register will write it up… (I do have all the info from my Facebook account download to show how it was compromised, and any internal support should have been able to see the same… if they cared.)
Banks can’t legally just take your money and lock you out permanently. There are some actual regulations. Plus they have a proper handle on your actual human identity, which means you ought to always have a route to going somewhere in person and proving you’re the rightful owner of your money.
“Online” accounts have zero regulatory requirements, plus many of them aren’t necessarily directly paid-for, so they frame themselves as doing you a favor by letting you have it in the first place. And they usually don’t have a route to prove identity because they don’t record a legal identity (passport/SSN/etc) to begin with (not that that was an issue here, of course - in this case Apple didn’t dispute that they were the owner, just asserted that they were some kind of criminal.)
What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion. For most online services, your account can be in one of two states: Totally good and "banned for life". There's no warning, no investigative period, no concept of scale (was the fraud $10 or $10,000?), no way to serve your time and come back if you actually were bad. It's just instant, silent BAN HAMMER.
As someone who worked in fraud, sometimes the $10 transaction is primer for 10k transaction that will really cost the company. When you don't know what's going on, you don't give a shit about end user and primary objective is prevent the company from losing money, shut it down and sort it out is easiest way.
Furthermore, without physical presence where you could sit down with someone, this becomes more difficult to deal with. Truth is, Apple should have option where someone could go to Apple Store, verify ID and talk to someone with power but they don't want to spend that money so here we are.
>What I want to know is why does it always have to go straight from 0 to 100? There's seemingly no concept of proportion.
Because anything else would require them to spend resources to examine your case and claims more deeply (to find the appropriate level of response), and they don't want to spend them, plus they don't care.
At the scale these companies operate and the number of actual scammers they block because of their 0 - 100 policies, I can see how they got there. I bet all of us have had the luck (?) of out card being blocked because someone out there was able to get a hold of the credentials. Collateral damage like this, as devastating as it is to the individual, is probably a drop in the bucket for the company.
I'm not excusing this. What happened here shouldn't happen, and there should be quick resolutions and explanations available to the aggrieved parties.
It's not just corporate policy, it's regulatory requirements in the US.
You must block financial activity, and you must not communicate any details to the customer, upon reasonable suspicion of money laundering activity. There's a process and a prescribed timeline for getting things resolved. There is no penalty for a false positive, but there are large penalties for false negatives.
Having watched hundreds of these things happen, all of the details point squarely to an AML problem. For closed loop gift card programs, the merchant, program manager, issuing bank, and possibly the seller all get involved. It takes time.
This doesn't require shutting off a user's access to their data though -- just preventing financial activity. Apple might not have adequately fine-grained permissions around account suspension to support this, and obviously they should fix that!
AML and fraud are different, and the regulatory requirements you're talking about are only one requirement for banks to follow.. they have additional, internal policies of their own that may affect account and money access. If Apple isn't following a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), then the actions are their own, and the policies are their own.
This is true, but potential money laundering is a UAR, and the issuing bank decides whether to turn that into a SAR (merchants do not file SARs, although at Apple's scale, the conversation between merchant and bank is continuous and both sides will have fraud and AML experts at every step).
The decision to create the SAR will depend on the outputs of the multi-party investigation, which is the thing that takes time and causes visible issues for consumers.
When money is concerned, any kind of suspected money laundering / fraud investigation generally requires you to pause that account until the check is complete. What happens afterwards will be down to the results of the investigation.
It's also unlikely there are just those two states. For many services there will be a number of factors involved, but it's purposely opaque to make it harder to circumvent.
My experience with YouTube was different. Two or three times, up to around five years ago, I got an email from them stating I'd done something wrong — used protected music/content etc. — and that this notification wasn't a strike but I should contact them and explain why they were wrong to put a hold on the video and they'd withdraw the notice. I did so and they then responded that the email was erroneous, all good.
Well for banks your account is usually tied to a local brick-and-mortar agency, where it's definitely someone's problem if a customer comes in and refuses to leave. It's one of the reasons I'll never go with fully online banks.
> Banks [...] will face meaningful consequences for getting this wrong with any regularity
That's false, unfortunately. There's amazing levels of discretion that banks enjoy and minimal accountability to end users. The CFPB (in the USA, anyway) was a countermeasure but has been recently weakened.
More important than "well-regulated" is that a bank account is very clearly tied to a single geographic jurisdiction where the bank's headquarters, as well as all its branches and employees, are located.
Apple would be much harder to regulate, as it wouldn't even be clear what jurisdictions should be involve in the process, and what a "change of jurisdiction" would entail. It would also create the opportunity for fraudsters to choose the jurisdiction which gives them the most consumer protections but has the loosest identity verification requirements.
> 1) Why would redeeming a bad gift card result in a complete shut-down of the account?
Because they assume you stole the gift card and are therefore a criminal. As to why they're making the assumption that you are the criminal, not the actual criminal who successfully redeemed the gift card first, you've got me. Since either situation is possible.
> 2) Why is it seemingly impossible to get any support now unless you drum up a ton of press?
I'm as infuriated as you are.
> 3) Should companies be restricted from growing too large where they can’t support their customers?
Size has nothing to do with it. Plenty of small companies ignore their customers too. So I don't think this is the right solution.
> In my personal and professional experience, banks are the only companies that seem to actually know how to handle these issues appropriately when it comes to fraud or access.
There are plenty of horror stories with banks too. I'm not sure they're that much better at all.
I know the headline you're referencing, but "only digital ecosystem"? I'm pretty sure accounts getting blocked is an issue with all of them. So I don't know what point you're trying to make. It's certainly not like Google is known to be any better.
Google's digital ecosystem doesn't doctrinally prevent owners from installing software or reflashing bricked hardware. Their OEM might, but iOS is the only smartphone ecosystem I've seen that enforces it universally.
But hey, at least Apple's universal lockout capability is able to deter theft! Every non-negotiable backdoor has a silver lining.
I feel like you're conflating three things -- software installation, account closure and disabled hardware.
Software installation has nothing to do with account closure, so I don't know why you're bringing it up.
Account closure doesn't disable your devices. You can set them up with a new account.
And if devices are disabled due to theft and can't be reflashed for sale on the black market, that is a good thing. I haven't heard any reports of people's legitimately purchased devices being disabled due to theft.
Clearly you have things you don't like about Apple, but I don't see what they have to do with the subject at hand, which is account closure.
Still, with Point 1) I wonder what exactly was happening.
To think straight away "suspected fraud/criminal activity" for merely entering a voucher code a second time?
As a sane person I would expect a mere popup saying "Voucher code was already redeemed. try another one" Nothing more.
The ONLY other thing I can currently think of why Apple straight away went to "criminal" would be that the brick and mortar store failed to activate the card when they sold it.
You know, someone shoplifts such a card thinking they got it made. Even though you'd think everybody should know that the code you scratch of that card is only active after the clerk at the register did his thing.
If Apple then receives this voucher code that they must have in their databases but it has a big "not activated flag" next to it, THEN I could start to believe why they would lock down the account that tried to redeem, it.
And even then it seems iffy. Because how should I as the consumer know if the clerk did everything right with the activation?
I'm not defending Apple here. But I think the logic is, if you rightfully bought the card then nobody but you should be able to activate it. So the first person activating it is legit, and a second person attempting to activate it is necessarily trying to engage in fraud, having stolen it from a trash can or something.
But this breaks down for the reasons described, that thieves get the code before you do and manage to spend it first once the cashier activates it but before you get home and actually use it.
So maybe that's new and Apple hasn't updated their scam detection logic? It's the only thing I can think of.
>.As to why they're making the assumption that you are the criminal, not the actual criminal who successfully redeemed the gift card first, you've got me. Since either situation is possible.
Why the fuck couldn't it just be that you forgot and tried to redeem twice?
Just reject the card and be done with it, no action required.
On the subject of (1) I wonder if a complication in this specific case might be a variant of the clbuttic Scunthorpe problem that the last name on the account that redeemed a bad gift card included the word "Butt" and an algorithm or underpaid reviewer (or both) flagged it also as a suspiciously named account.
(2) and (3) remain great questions without enough good answers.
Meh. When I see Developer Terminal I’m thinking more Mac OS Terminal where I live out my days and nights than Bloomberg’s Terminal.
I know Bloomberg’s is iconic in the financial world but that’s a different persona.
Also, before the responses to me start to pile up, yes: I am aware of the UNIX underpinnings that NextOS/MacOS relies on for Terminal and the influences thereafter.
You can quite often get a $300 yearly sub to O'Reilly, they run a discount ~4 times a year.
That said, like a lot of other content subscriptions, it can be quite anxiety inducing to make it seem like you're getting your money's worth. I've gotten the sub via my work, and I think the labs and videos are quite good, plus the occasional opportunities to do live-chats with the authors. But you have to sift through a lot of content and dedicate a lot of hours to use them. For most folks, I think buying a few technical books a year as needed would be a much better use of time and money.
Also check if you're in education at any level. Most university libraries subscribe to what used to be Safari and you can SSO the full (enormous) catalogue. I didn't realize this for quite a long time as it's not widely advertised. There are ton of books that aren't the traditional animal-drawing tech titles, including Manning, as well as some lecture series.
But the app is pretty kludgey and it's way more locked down than other publishers who will give you chapter PDFs.
At least it's a good way to skim books to see if they're worth buying a physical copy.
But there was no care in the images, which made me skeptical of the content. The free chapters are also poorly written. It reads like he dictated the content and didn't do a single review pass on it. The Docker Compose chapter especially is very light on details and doesn't explain how to use the various features and what tradeoffs or issues you may encounter. Like the AI images, the whole product feels rushed and haphazard and lacking in quality.
> We want to express our deep gratitude to the many cohorts of maintainers who have contributed to Bundler and RubyGems over the past two decades. Ruby tooling would not be what it is today without their dedication and leadership. Their work laid much of the foundation we are building on today, and we are committed to carrying that legacy forward with the same spirit of *openness and collaboration*
- The bolded part doesn’t track with locking out the entire team without notice or explanation.
- “Thanks for the hard work, the adults will take it from here” rarely works out.
We just finished implementing Iceberg on top of a large set of Parquet files, stored in S3. It’s a neat idea to be able to turn a lot of data files into a SQL database, but I absolutely understand the pain and confusion the author writes, especially around how it handles metadata. It creates a lot of those files and makes a large mess of the directory. Some queries that I know would return a single parquet file take up to 30 seconds.
I don’t think we’ll scrap it and there are certainly ways to speed up the problematic aspects of querying the catalog, but I’m also rooting for DuckLake to make it a lot more approachable by not completely shying away from the database as an idea.
Very cool project! Going to try having it on a separate monitor this week and watch it develop. In case other folks were looking for the download link (and code!), it’s here: https://github.com/JonathanCRH/Undiscovered_Worlds_Classic
