Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…
Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.
Persians absolutely malding right now.
The same cynical bullshit they pulled in Gaza. Everything that gets bombed is “Terrorist” in retrospect. And you should applaud the IDF for their “precision” strikes, because hey look how everyone under that bomb deserved to die, amirite?
That’s not even on the table. The only thing Americans care about is the potential for Chinese surveillance. The potential for American surveillance and corporate surveillance (particularly for insurance companies) is considered a huge windfall that they’ll fight to continue.
Hell, I can see a future in which your car won’t even start without an internet connection.
Another consequence of inflation, I suppose.
Let’s say some extremist, highly organized group manages to successfully assassinate the 10,000 richest people in the world, and then disappears without a trace.
The problem is that these billionaires profit the most from a system of resource exploitation, but they do not benefit exclusively. We’d still have hundreds of billions of dollars in fossil fuel centric infrastructure that we’d need to replace and reconfigure. And that reconfiguration would require a national organized effort.
Ultimate, you can’t just wave a wand and make Rich People Go Away. You need a national project that is both popular and efficient. One that reduces emissions while improving quality of life. You need a Green New Deal.
That’s not something you can affect purely from subtraction.
…
The people in authority betrayed us.
There was a solid minute during the War on Terror when DC, Moscow, and Beijing were in full kumbahyah mode.
Turning the resource rich Middle East into a free fire zone had a broad popular appeal among industrial powers.
The Cold War ended in 1994, when the Russian government collapsed. We had a 15-20 year window in which Kennedy-esque American moderates thought they could dominate the industrial world through high finance while using a few “Rogue States” as punching bags.
And then 2008 happened, revealing that this was not working. And then we got Trump’s ahem national socialism ahem of interstate deals making minus immigration. And the only thing NATO states seem to agree on is everyone building even biggest militaries with which to duke it out across North Africa and Eastern Europe.
Now we’re flirting with Cold War 2, except it’s looking a lot hotter than the last one. Feels more like the prelude to WW1, tbh.
People help other people because it makes them feel good. And people expect themselves to be noticed or praised or rewarded, even if they tell themselves and everyone else that they don’t.
People want their labor to be recognized. But you don’t need to wield an Elon Musk level of deranged dictatorial financial clout in order to experience self-actualization for your efforts.
Pride in your work also comes with a degree of autonomy and creative freedom. A draconian profit driven privatized capitalist restaurant or clinic or school isn’t going to care whether the staff feed or heal or educate anymore. All they care about is driving up profits. By contrast, a (good) chef cares that people like the food. They care about evolving their craft. They care about the experience they are producing, even when that may mean the dish doesn’t make someone else money.
There’s a balance to be struck between enterprises with scarce resources and people with a desire to feel accomplished in their craft.
But you can strike that balance with good administrative leadership. The reward for a day’s work can be a beautiful place to live and a happy neighborhood, rather than a single incredibly rich guy hosting an award show for his pet favorites and using these token elites as an excuse to make the rest of his staff live in poverty.
people in charge of these movements are people who deliberately seek power
“Don’t trust anyone who tells you what to do”
“Okay, I’m not going to trust you.”
“No, you idiot! That’s not what I meant!”
So, anyway, let’s talk about why the Anarchists of the Spanish Civil War got absolutely rolled by the well organized and disciplined Fascists. Then maybe pop over to Russia, China, Cuba, Korea, and Vietnam, and consider why Marxism have had a better record on self defense.
Communism Killed 100 Zillion People
Now the massive population of China and Venezuela and Vietnam and Cuba and California are going to take over the world
No, they aren’t doing Real Communism. That’s just Authoritarian State Capitalism.
Yes, we have to fight them. That’s why we need the western governments to spend trillions of dollars on private military services.
We have to kill all 100 Zillion of them. Because they’ve been infected with the Mind Virus of Communism.
Yeah, it’s definitely not trivial, but not impossible
I’d go so far as to say “incredibly difficult, expensive, and time consuming to do well”.
Some people, just due to physical ailments etc, may need to leave vs fight and that’s ok too.
Oh, absolutely. Know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em.
I just see a lot of fascist tendency building up in English-speaking corners of the world. That 1.5-2.0B English speakers figure isn’t a great solution when it just means moving from Fascism HQ to Franchise Fascism. The spots with the most English speakers - India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the UK, and the Philippines are plagued by some deeply reactionary domestic situations.
It’s a tight spot to be, is all.
If it comes to your life, you really may need to learn another language.
Sure. But then moving from Berlin to Krakow isn’t necessarily going to save you from the imperial march.
Also, not a trivial thing to accomplish. It’s a bit like telling a 40 year old who has never learned to swim to brush up real quick before we push you off the side of the boat.
I don’t know your situation
I mean, for the most part I’m fine. This is all hypothetical, right up until it isn’t. But “you should just learn an extra language maybe?” isn’t what I’d call a practical response to the problem of a fascist local government.
You can go to literally any city in Earth and find many English speakers.
I’ve traveled to numerous cities in Europe and East Asia and visited many places where little to no English was spoken.
You can usually find a handful of people in a major business center who specifically cater to foreign visitors, if you’re willing to spend extra for the privilege. But get outside the center of Paris or Berlin or Malmo or Shanghai or Tokyo, and its very easy to find yourself amid a sea of people who have no idea how to understand you much less respond.
Yes, there are call centers in Manila or Taipei where tens of thousands of people have to speak English for their jobs. Yes, the entire staff of the The Palm in Dubai is fluent. No, that’s not really helpful if you’re out in the suburbs of Brussels or living as a student in Seoul. If you need to call a plumber because the sink of your flat in Palermo sprung a leak, there’s a very good chance you’re going to be explaining the problem in Italian or in very elaborate hand gestures.
So why do they want to codify stuff they don’t want to follow?
Selective enforcement. You use the law to pursue your political opposition. Planned Parenthood is a major organizing tool for liberal Democrats, so crushing the organization in your city/state means disrupting how Democrats fundraise and GOTV. Meanwhile, Republican-aligned physicians and unorganized back-alley clinics can provide your daughter or mistress the procedure on the DL.
I don’t understand why people have the tendency to interfere with others lives
Codifying cultural norms into law is a normal part of politics. The big question is what you want to normalize.
Oh shit, he’s good. He DDOS’d me right back.
People who are Nazis would say exactly this about the “Woke” Society.
It reminds me of the left/right split during the Iranian Revolution. Folks love to post pictures of “Before 1979” with the wealthy kids of the industrial elites dressed like EU/US fashionistas. Iranian progressives saw this as a privilege of the elites that shouldn’t be exclusive to the upper end of society. Iranian conservatives saw it as a symptom of elitism that shouldn’t be permitted at any tier of society.
After the revolution, conservative Iranians (very briefly) aligned with conservative Americans, as the Ayatollah and the Reagan/Thatcher governments aligned on this idea of regressive religious anti-Communism. But then Iran didn’t open itself back up as a western gas station, so the American white supremacists and the Iranian Islamic supremacists fell back into conflict again.
Then it was just two ultra-orthodox conservative groups screaming “Woke Decadent Radicals!” at one another, while everyone around them were ground to paste by the slew of wars to follow.
Well, you don’t want to waste space by adding the same file path twice