Whenever I hear news of China, they built a new electric railway, invented something new, or made massive tech progress.

A lot of things in China fall apart in a few years. You can build things fast when you don’t care about people’s rights and just force them off whatever land you need, and make people work insane hours. A lot of the amazing things China brags about is a Potemkin village, just made to show the authoritarian leaders they did got the project complete on time and they in turn use it in their propaganda. Authoritarians always love to brag about making the trains run on time, right? The reality is often different from what the media portrays it to be in an authoritarian country.

But still, China is slightly preferable to the US at the moment.

Ok now apply the same kind of criticism to the anti-liberal memes you’re consuming on the internet. Who do those benefit? Who benefits from dividing people?

Where does this stuff originate from? Some millionaire trust fund baby influencers on youtube or twitch? Why is this Hasan guy on the front page of a website owned by Jeff Bezos?

Keep on repeating the bullshit that Jeff Bezos wants you to about liberals being the real enemy. You’re soooo much smarter than everyone else LOL. You’re really “fighting the power” when you consume the content the billionaires want you to consume.

Yeah China is like the Soviet Union.

My grandparents had to hold their noses and be allies with the Soviet Union for a while.

But unlike the Soviet Union which was way behind the West in technology, China is ahead of us on EVs and we will have to catch up. But before worrying about that, we gotta take down the US.

US is the same as China now. Well that’s not true, US foreign policy is way more batshit insane than China’s. If you can even call it a foreign policy… it seems to me it’s just the whims of a deranged old child molester surrounded by fucking Nazis.

And China is further away and there’s pretty much zero probability China will invade my country. With the US, who knows? Kinda stupid to send money to a country I may have to be fighting against within a year.

Yeah I’m not into that kind of thing. Rogue One was weird enough trying to be Saving Private Ryan while having the toys I played with as a kid on the screen. And I find it kinda find it boring when shows spell out what they’re about instead of having a deep subtext so I tend just get annoyed by plot holes since there’s nothing else to think about.

Isn’t all of Star Wars about fascism?

Stop trying to make BRICS happen it’s not going to happen.

Also it sounds like you want BRICS to be a group of country where they don’t have freedom of speech? Why would this be a good thing?

It’s just all emotion and no rational thought now. People just go into outrage mode when certain topics are mentioned.

Really it opens a channel to criticize ICE without needing to logon to X to do so. But that’s bad because preventing communication is good?

Of course I doubt ICE will care about criticism directed towards their account on bluesky. But that means things said on the internet don’t have much of an effect on things, which means it doesn’t matter whether they’re on bluesky (or any other forum).

Mostly it’s about some weird belief by some about controlling what is being said on the internet gains power. You’d think the events that have happened would have proven this wrong, but still people continue to be upset about things being said on the internet and want some power over those things.

Really words on the internet don’t matter as much as people think, and the idea of blocking unwanted information is annoying at best and can lead to ignorance. What matters is the horrible acts ICE is doing. We should want more light being shown on them, and welcome any potential channel of discussion.

Wanting to prevent discussion indicates you feel you’re in the wrong. ICE is indicating they want discussion, while those that are outraged by ICE being on bluesky are indicating they don’t want discussion on ICE. Why would anyone want to make is seem ICE is in the right while they’re in the wrong? It’s people not thinking and only reacting emotionally and handing ICE a W because they are raging instead of thinking.

Sure… but I don’t think there’s any particular malice towards people that build PCs. Just greed and incompetence. Gotta buy up GPUs that there isn’t enough electricity to run to drive up the share prices!

But when the bubble bursts and hardware gets cheap, is that something we’d considered to be goodwill towards people building PCs? Or will it just be a side-benefit of incompetence?

Just ebbs and flows of incompetence to me.

That implies there’s some thought behind this. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

But what’s the point of it then?

I guess if you have multiple computers you can access the files from either computers. But for people that just have one computer the whole thing seems kinda useless. And then MS forces people to use this product they have no need for by holding their computer ransom. People don’t want their files on One Drive, they only have it because MS forced it upon them.

This is like forcing a passenger to fly a 747 and then saying “well the plane crashed because of pilot error” and ignoring the fact that someone was forced some to be behind the controls of something they understand against their will.

For a home user, a backup service or just a way to share files actually makes more sense than something that mindlessly syncs file actions, including deletes. One Drive could be useful if it were what people expect it to be. As it is, it’s useless for most people, and bad on them for thinking MS One Drive was a useful product I guess.

Who else just did a search on the Epstein files for “Tim Sweeney”?

I didn’t find anything on jmail, but there’s still a lot that haven’t been released, and a lot of stuff is still redacted.

The real news here is Juilan Assange still exists? People still think he’s relevant?

To me the whole thing is stupid.

They should just flat out tell Trump they’ll give him the stupid medal at the end of his term if he doesn’t bomb any more countries.

We’re not too far off given how many apps on my phone by default send notifications like “do you want to do this thing now?”

And so many interfaces that have been enshittified with pop ups wanting me to check out their new AI features.

A toaster constantly asking if I want toast is probably less annoying than a lot of technology now.

Yeah it’s kind of a thing where the switch benefited from the failure of the Wii U while the Switch 2 is being hurt by the success of the Switch.

BOTW was available on the Wii U, but since so few people had one of those, it made sense to get a Switch to play it.

With the Switch 2 I feel like “Meh, I already have a Switch it doesn’t seem like it’s offering much more than what I already have”. Also it’s larger and when I want to use the Swtich hand held (mostly just when I’m on a plane) seems like that might be a pain in the ass. Also with the Switch 1 they eventually came out with a better OLED model, so I’ll just keep playing the Switch 1 until they come out with something a little more compact and maybe with a better screen or whatever. Stick drift has been an issue for me so also want something with more reliable sticks.

Seems like I might be asking a lot, but for the price they’re asking if I’m not getting what I want, then I’ll stick with the Switch 1. It’s fine.

People can get arrogant enough to think that they won’t get caught.

Emmanuel Clase was a Major League pitcher making ~$5M per year. He got caught intentionally flubbing pitches for $5000. 5M a year gone now to get a few thousand dollars. Why would someone be that stupid?

Because they don’t think they’ll get caught.

It’s why things have to happen in a certain order. You can’t do the more aggressive economic actions against the US until after certain conditions are in place. First you need to cut dependency on the US for anything essential. Food and strategic resources like aluminum, steel, and energy. You also need a strong enough military to make any US military action costly for the US.

Once those conditions are met you can take further action. Hitting the US tech sector is more of a middle option. Manipulating the US bond market is the nuclear option.

Currently these options aren’t on the table since the US can kick out the legs of that table if you tried to play those cards. But many things are quietly changing around the world while Americans are obsessing over Epstein files, Trump playing battleship, and Hegseth and Rubio fucking around with tinpot South American dictators.

Something not often discussed is the possibility that the UK and France might not have been capable of stopping Hitler through military force at that time.

I mean even later even after building up a bit more, France got curb stomped and the UK barely got out of Dunkirk. And that happened while Germany was occupying Czechoslovakia and part of Poland which took significant military resources from fighting the UK and France. There’s a very real possibility that standing up to Hitler over Czechoslovakia would have gone even worse than standing up to Hitler over Poland. Sure the Soviets might have helped at that time, but their military wasn’t even capable of taking on Finland at that point.

At any rate at the present time, the world needs to build up it’s military power before standing up to Trump. We’re saying it’s because we’re fulfilling NATO obligations (like Trump told us to!) or getting ready to fight Russia maybe. But military build up is happening but it’s not going to happen overnight.

Just declare any simple script that does a wget on copyrighted information to be “AI”. AI is immune from copyright infringement it seems.