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In our new era of great-power competition, it’s important to identity the competitors. But it has always been easier to speak about the great powers than to define them. Disagreement over great-power status, and especially over which power is the “greatest,” characterizes today’s system, as it did in times past. There is neither a commonly accepted definition of what constitutes a great power, nor any consensus over such basic questions as how many powers there are.

Nevertheless, we can distinguish the great powers by a set of common characteristics, which reveal that there are only four great powers that exist today—and they are not necessarily the ones you would expect.

Study because it opens doors. Knowledge is your ticket to new opportunities. Whether it's landing your dream job, travelling the world, or just being able to hold your own in any conversation, the more you know, the further you can go.

Study because it builds discipline. Setting aside time to study teaches you valuable skills like time management and self-discipline. These habits will serve you well in all areas of life, long after you’ve closed the textbooks.

Study because you want to improve yourself. Self-improvement isn't just about hitting the gym or eating right. It's about feeding your mind and growing as a person. Each study session is a step towards a better, more informed you.

Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery 173. This distorted view of the human person is reflected today in various forms of servitude directly linked to the digital economy. Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people. A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. Furthermore, criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods and profiling techniques in order to recruit, control and transport victims of trafficking — very often minors — reducing men and women to “data” to be tracked and “packages” to be moved around within the same digital circuits that support much of the global economy. This reality deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time. It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.

I don't know what to do, there's so much I wanna do and there's so much fear of losing it again that I don't know what to do...

I wonder if the world can survive a week without the internet while we endure months of it not working, not that I blame anyone but the Islamic Republic.

Yes the war happened but the dictatorship in my country made sure that we suffer more through it, they can blame America and whatever but the truth it this dictatorship (the Islamic Republic) is the one to blame, millions of Iranians losing their jobs, their lives, their happiness, the connection to their families because of what they did with the internet, they damage they've done to all those who planned for their future by trying to even escape this dictatorship, the damage to the school systems, billions of money spent to shut people up so that they can write their own narrative and unfortunately from what I'm seeing the world believed them.However,t that's not surprising, given that we didn't have the chance to tell the truth from the starte.

Little inky paw print bookmarks I'm working on as part of my scriptorium cat collection! Based off the picture on the right of a 15th century manuscript.

so now there’s an epidemic of afghan males trafficking their daughters (and it’s always only daughters) to pedophiles so that they can feed their sons instead

Lego's Q3 2025 earnings announcement, October 2025

So Lego just posted another monster quarter and everyone's doing the usual "timeless appeal of analog play in the digital age" garbage and like, no, the actual story is that Lego is a privately-held Danish family company that spent the 2000s nearly going bankrupt and came out of it having figured something out that almost nobody in consumer products has figured out, which is that your core IP is the manufacturing tolerance.

Here's what I mean. A Lego brick made in 1958 still clicks perfectly onto a Lego brick made last week. That is not a marketing claim, it's a manufacturing fact, and it's enforced by tolerances measured in like two thousandths of a millimeter — the stud diameter variance on a standard 2x4 brick is famously smaller than most medical device manufacturers hit on parts going inside human bodies. Which sounds like trivia until you realize it's the entire business model: every brick ever made is compatible with every brick that will ever be made, which means the installed base isn't a depreciating asset, it's an appreciating one, because every new set expands what you can do with the bricks already in your kid's bin (and your bin, and your dad's bin in the attic).

Now compare this to basically every other toy category. Hot Wheels from 1972 don't interface with Hot Wheels from 2024 in any meaningful way — they're both little cars, sure, but the track systems have changed, the scales have drifted, the accessories are incompatible. Barbie has gone through probably a dozen body molds. American Girl dolls from the 90s have different proportions than the current ones. The entire video game industry is structured around planned incompatibility — your Switch games don't work on Switch 2, your Xbox 360 discs mostly don't work on Series X. Incompatibility is the business model, it's how you get people to rebuy.

Lego said no. Lego said the brick from 1958 will fit the brick from 2058. And this is insane, if you think about it, because it means they have voluntarily foreclosed on the single most powerful lever in consumer products, which is forcing obsolescence. Every company that sells a durable good spends enormous amounts of R&D figuring out how to make this year's product not work with last year's product without pissing the customer off too much. Apple is a master at this, Microsoft is slightly worse at it, car companies have built entire industries on it (proprietary charging connectors, OBD-II access, right-to-repair fights). Lego just... doesn't do it.

What they get in return — and this is the thing the "timeless analog charm" people miss — is that the brick becomes infrastructure. A Lego brick is not really a toy. It's a piece of durable manufacturing infrastructure that gets distributed into hundreds of millions of homes worldwide, and every new set is basically an expansion pack for an operating system that already has universal install. Which means the network effects are doing most of the work. When a grandparent buys a Lego set for a kid, they're not buying "a toy" in the sense that a Mattel product is a toy — they're depositing compatible substrate into an accumulating household stockpile, and every deposit raises the marginal utility of the next deposit.

This is also why the IP licensing deals (Star Wars, Harry Potter, the recent Nintendo stuff) work for them in a way they work for basically nobody else. When Hasbro does a Star Wars license, they're making Star Wars figures that sit on a shelf. When Lego does a Star Wars license, they're making bricks in Star Wars configurations, which means even if the kid loses interest in Star Wars in six months, the bricks get absorbed into the general pool and keep producing value. The license is temporary, the substrate is permanent, and the substrate was already the valuable part.

The near-death experience in the early 2000s is the instructive piece here, because Lego almost lost this. They went on a diversification binge — theme parks, video games, clothing, Galidor (look it up, it's hilarious) — and they started loosening the tolerances on the actual bricks because the bricks were seen as a commodity and the "brand" was seen as the valuable part. Which is exactly backwards. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp comes in in 2004, basically says the bricks are the company, tightens tolerances back up, narrows the product line, and the company starts printing money again. The takeaway the business press drew was "focus on your core competency" which is such a domesticated reading of what actually happened — the actual lesson is "the boring manufacturing discipline IS the moat, and when you think the brand is the moat, you are about to destroy the company."

Which is interesting because right now there's a huge knockoff market — Mega Bloks, Chinese brands like Lepin (which got sued into oblivion), various others — and they make bricks that are almost compatible with Lego. Almost. And it turns out almost-compatible is actually worse than incompatible, because when a kid tries to fit a knockoff into a real Lego build and the stud is 0.03mm off, the whole structure gets wobbly, and the kid learns not to mix them. The tolerance is a credential. You can counterfeit the shape but you can't counterfeit sub-thousandth precision at scale without becoming, essentially, Lego.

They come from a mix of sources, Anon, and the quality varies wildly.

Some originate from Hamas-controlled media in Gaza, which has obvious incentives to portray Israeli actions in the worst possible light. Others come from activist organizations like Defense for Children International-Palestine, which has documented ties to terrorist groups.

The most problematic source is social media, where unverified videos get shared with inflammatory captions. A video of injured children in Syria gets recycled as "proof" of Israeli war crimes.

Here's what makes this tricky - children do die in Gaza, and some are killed by Israeli strikes. But there's a massive difference between children being killed in military operations (tragic but not illegal) and children being deliberately targeted (which would be a war crime).

The "intentionally targeting" claim almost never has anything remotely like evidence. It's usually inference: children died, therefore they must have been targeted.

There's also something darker at work here. The idea that Jews deliberately murder children taps into blood libel accusations that have persisted for centuries. Today's version just swaps IDF uniforms for medieval robes, but the underlying antisemitic fantasy remains the same.

Credible investigations find no systematic policy of targeting children and there's been no direct evidence of the IDF targeting children.

But facts now matter less than narrative and emotional resonance.

And

We should? What more should be done?

I do not believe the line that more cannot be done

Okay - what more can be done? That's twice you've suggested that the IDF is lying when it says it is doing its best to minimize the civilian casualties that Hamas celebrates.

The IDF has been working on this problem for a very long time and I'm 100% certain they'd be thrilled to have new ideas about how to eliminate Hamas while harming the smallest possible number of non-combatants So please: share your ideas.

From here, it seems like you're accusing them of negligence or apathy, despite acknowledging that Hamas deliberately, consciously uses children as human shields and welcomes their deaths as a PR victory .

The IDF has implemented measures to mitigate civilian harm in Gaza that experts like John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, characterize as a historic "gold standard".

These specific tactics include making over 70,000 direct phone calls, sending millions of text messages, and dropping millions of leaflets to warn civilians of imminent strikes. These actions intentionally forfeit tactical surprise.

The IDF also pioneered "roof knocking" (dropping non-explosive devices as a final warning) and released hyper-detailed evacuation maps dividing Gaza into hundreds of tiny numbered zones to facilitate precise civilian movement.

While civilian suffering is tragic, data suggests the IDF has maintained a lower civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio than other modern urban sieges, representing an unprecedented effort by a military to protect an enemy population while fighting a combatant that uses its own people as human shields.

So if you don't have actionable ideas the IDF can use to spare more civilian lives, you owe them an apology for your allegation of apathy or negligence.

No military in human history has ever done more to protect the civilians of an enemy population.

If you have workable ideas, share them.

MAVIS NICHOLSON: "Do you think it is possible, then, for someone to forgive themselves even when they've done something absolutely terrible?"

TONI MORRISON: "Yes. It's called grace. At some point you do. If you don't, you're in a cul-de-sac. But you have to go through the fire first. You have to experience the full fall, and the complete self-loathing, in order to come around to something like the forgiving of oneself. It's when you skip responsibility, when you use a subsititute emotion like guilt--which is of no use to anyone--but if you feel the real thing which is shame, hatred, humiliation, and self-loathing: that is the door. And if you get through that, then you can forgive yourself."

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.