Hey as long as the CCP doesn’t send troops and equipment into Taiwan, they have nothing to worry about.
When a foreign country invades, it’s absolutely fair by all rules of warfare to strike back inside their borders and even capture or destroy their territory.
When it’s time for hostilities to conclude, that captured/destroyed land can make a good “demilitarized zone” perhaps overseen by an international peacekeeping force.
Oh I call the cables I use to wire up my controllers “suicide cords” because it’s just the hot, neutral, and ground hanging out one end, waiting to touch me…
I read a pretty convincing article title and subheading implying that the best use for so called “AI” would be to replace all corporate CEOs with it.
I didn’t read the article but given how I’ve seen most CEOs behave it would probably be trivial to automate their behavior. Pursue short term profit boosts with no eye to the long term, cut workers and/or pay and/or benefits at every opportunity, attempt to deny unionization to the employees, tell the board and shareholders that everything is great, tell the employees that everything sucks, …
Every time I install Windows the first thing I download is total commander. I can’t function without it.
It looks like midnight commander with some upgrades
I’ll let others address the “enshittification” angle but I thought I’d point out that “shareholder value uber allies” is a relatively recent … “innovation” … in economic theory, brought about by failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Milton Friedman in the last half of last century:
https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/what-made-chicago-school-so-influential-antitrust-policy
The rethinking of what the boards of companies are supposed to do (from maximize stakeholder value to maximize shareholder value) and how they can operate (from requiring justification to approve mergers to requiring justification to block mergers) really took off with them, and exploded when former union boss Ronald Reagan found “religion” (because Nancy’s pussy was just that good) and ruined the economy for workers.
Lots of other people contributed, including Clinton after he “won” the 1992 election with 40% of the vote due to Perot splitting the Republican vote. His campaign of fiscal conservatism but without less bigotry became the model for the Democratic Party for the next two decades.
Anyway, Biden’s FTC is finally working to help workers again, which might even release the death grip of the Chicago School from our economy. We’ll see after November I guess.
I dunno I think there’s probably been one or two “honest” inflations where a vendor has seen her costs increase and has only raised her prices just enough to cover those increases.
But yeah, I bet the majority of inflation has been rooted in avarice by shareholders and owners.
It’s fascinating that this isn’t something that is always thrown back in the so called “pro life” person’s face. They’re only pro birth. They don’t care if the baby that comes out is fed, clothed, housed, eventually educated, etc. Or at least, they don’t believe there’s any collective responsibility to take care of that baby.
Santa & his coterie are quantum so it doesn’t matter what you think his velocity is
https://fortune.com/2023/12/19/biden-canceled-one-hundred-billion-dollars-student-debt/
They’ve forgiven $132 billion so far. It’s not what we wanted, but unfortunately the Republican stacked Supreme Court said Biden couldn’t do blanket forgiveness.
It’s almost like it matters not just who the president is today, but who the president was for the past several decades. And who is and was in Congress.
We can build on what Biden and the Democrats did accomplish, but only if we give them the tools to do so. If we want more stuff like the child tax credit expansion that we got in 2021, we have to reelect Biden and get strong Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we want more stuff like the inflation reduction act that is creating jobs and repairing infrastructure, we have to vote for Democrats.
They’ve made it clear they want to do more (i.e. build back better, blanket student loan forgiveness, protect abortion rights). Those long drawn out fights with Manchin and Sinema weren’t just for show. They were a clear indication of what the Democratic Party wants to pass if it has the votes in Congress.
Probably has braces
What’s frustrating to me as a person who’s generally against violence is that Israel has a pretty elite secret police force and pretty elite special forces that they (apparently) haven’t used at all to deal with the actual perpetrators of the October 7th massacre & kidnapping.
They just started bombing thousands of civilians to kill dozens, maybe hundreds of Hamas militants.
Like, surely they could have cut the head off the Hamas Snake with surgical strike teams infiltrating Gaza, probably the West Bank, and international locations in Qatar or wherever the leadership is.
Reasonable people could conclude that Israel had to respond to Oct 7th, and that the best target would be Hamas. I can’t fathom how any reasonable people could conclude that bombing groups of people with 90% or more innocent civilians and the rest possible militants is a good response.
I can imagine that UNreasonable people might conclude that all Palestinians are guilty by association (because Hamas is their Netanyahu-supported elected government) and they’re all militants (even the babies). Or those unreasonable people might believe that Palestinians aren’t people worthy of protection.
So goddamned frustrating.
The First Peoples of North America definitely didn’t have such sharp, well defined border lines. It’s not as of they had a bunch of written treaties establishing hard borders.
You're exspecially not supposed to fart in front of girls!
You’re kind of arguing against the foundation of human society. If we’re all required to “do our own research” about things, where does that requirement end? How can I buy food if I have to do my own research on what’s healthy or what’s dangerous? What about my tap water? How can I put gas in my car? Use electricity? A computer? A phone?
Somewhere along the way you have to trust the systems that have been built by the people before us to function, and for people who work in those fields who are experts to use their expertise.
Obviously oversight & verification is also important. It’s important that people earn trust and work to maintain that trust and get booted if they violate that trust.
But it’s foolish to just stop trusting experts out of nowhere. It’s extra foolish to stop trusting experts specifically because they say things you don’t like to hear. As far as I can tell, that’s been the accelerating project of the Republican Party since at least the talk radio explosion following the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. Maybe longer if you go back to Moon landing deniers and their ilk.
“deep held beliefs” yeah one side “our borders define our country” the other side “nuh uh”
I like the Action Lab guy going through the explanation for this https://youtu.be/ezUmSO_OAxY
It would be wild if stuff like this is some proof of life after death.