I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper.

I know, I get the meme. I just took it as inspiration for another wordy, serious comment, which I now realise continued the trend. I suppose the apt follow-up would have been some even shorter quip like “OK Boomer”. Instead, you had to make a serious reply of your own and break the chain. Thanks, Obama.

I genuinely value your post.

And I value your genuine response and explanation. We hope together.

Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics

That I can get behind. When confronted with the absurdity of our great ambitions and worries in face of our own insignificance, what else can we do but make memes?

What better way to bear dark times than to make light of them?

When life is serious enough, you don’t need to be.

Live. Laugh. Shitpost.

I get the meme, but it’s kinda dumb. This is a website where you’re free to just not read my comment, if you don’t wanna engage with the topic, not a captive audience like a retail employee.

Because limited liability corporations were created to avert liability from individuals. His firm is liable, but no single individual within it.

Not even the ones making the executive decisions, despite their near-monarchic power. I guess since they’re appointed by a board of directors, it’s something like an electoral monarchy, except the board isn’t democratically elected so it’s a plutocracy by proxy. The ultimate culprit would be - and this is a chorus you’ve probably heard a thousand times on here - the shareholders, and going after them is hard. Particularly when the shareholders are themselves corporations…

But the CEO is the pin focusing shareholder intent down into decisions and ultimately action. If they were effectively held responsible for their decisions, it would at least provide some counterbalance to the shareholders’ demands. It could also solve the “shareholders are corporations” issue, since you could make the CEOs of those companies liable for demanding illegal measures from companies they control.

Of course, such a drastic change would be hard to actually push through, as things stand, since it would inhibit (illegal) profit and growth and “the economy” is a sacred cow. It’s still worth pushing for, in my opinion, but building awareness and support takes patience and tact to avoid pushing people into political apathy.

The alternative I could see (and would prefer, but suspect to be even less attainable) is to dismantle the stock and capital system entirely. What you’d replace it with is a whole separate debate I won’t cover in this comment. Drastic systemic change is difficult to plan and enact, and building and maintaining the new system is difficult in the face of insecurities, old habits, unforeseen challenges that it may not yet have developed effective ways to deal with and generally all the growing pains that come with new things.

They’re not mutually exclusive, and the first may be a step on the road to the second. Either way, public support is key, and that is rarely won quickly.

I can’t even write a two-sentence comment in 30s without overthinking. I do like to use formatting, but that doesn’t make it quicker…

One more thing, the Israelis should be forced to use their ground forces if an invasion of Iran occurs.

Absolutely. The prospect of US soldiers dying for Zionist supremacy is despicable.

I can’t wait to read that headline and puke.

Edit: Aaaaaand here it is 🤮

I suspect an offense against the USA would be easy to pull off.

I suspect nothing in war is ever easy, and something the size of the US comes with certain operational challenges. Establishing air superiority would be difficult, for instance, and without it, transporting troops, supplies or equipment over longer distances is difficult. Consider the difficulties Putin has in Ukraine, and then scale that up to US proportions.

The low standards of ICE and the nature of their operation would allow just about any organized actor to have a free hand in the US, if they chose to do so.

Covert operations? Probably. Asymmetrical warfare? Possibly.

Full-scale assault, with the objective to take and hold key administrative centers to force concessions? Hardly.

Nobody said they had to be morally integer…

I think the issue is that offense is harder than defense. A defender generally has the home advantage in terms of logistics, familiarity with the area and political will. The difference this makes is hard to estimate, and even harder so if you’re not even aware of it. Combined with delusions of grandeur, this is a recipe for underestimating the enemy.

And call me a cynic, but I suspect neither Cadet Bone Spurs nor Major “Warrior Ethos” “Signal Chat” “American Crusade” Boozeth are entirely qualified to make high-level military judgements.

(Neither is my armchair general ass whose only education in the matter is some MilHist blogs and articles, but at least I’m not an actual general charged to actually make them.)

For Putin, I’m not sure. I’m disinclined to believe he’s just ignorant about the tenacity a people under attack can develop, given Russian history, but I can only make unqualified guesses.

Either way, as you say, I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end, because a blunt and rusty axe still hurts, and they don’t seem concerned about where they swing it and who’s in the way.

but if you want to discuss how democratic China is in comparison to Europe

Pretty sure I explicitly said I don’t, but thank you for offering your argument anyway. Have a nice evening.

I could make up a slur to refer to liberals such as “dronies” referring to drone strikes by the Obama administration they support, or “bombies” for supporting Europe when it bombed Iraq and Libya and Yugoslavia.

Actually, I think that’s a good idea. Call out people that blindly endorse violence or support a given government uncritically. I’d still rather have a bombie government that bombs the middle east than a nazi one that does so too, but worse, and also actively tries to remove any potential for resistance from their own people, but saying “A bombie isn’t as bad as a nazi” at least carries the subtext “(but still bad)”.

(Obviously, not bombing would be best. Imperialism is a despicable policy.)

It also kinda sidesteps the ambiguous definitions and interpretations of liberal philosophy. For instance, I’d consider imperialism to be decidedly illiberal, given its disregard for the consent of the governed, but that obviously isn’t a universal understanding. I’d rather not get into that here, so let’s just agree to call bombing-apologists bombies.

Bringing up China in the context of public transit should be regarded well.

The post brings it up in the context of a particular candidate’s opinions on China’s mode of government and civil liberties. If it specifically pointed out “China’s public transport is…”, I’d agree with you. But just because this aspect is nice, that doesn’t mean China as a whole should necessarily be regarded well.

(Again, I just want to point out the logic arising from the premise that the candidate does defend China; whether that premise is true is beyond me, and whether the claim is true is not something I’ll argue about here. Trying to have a chill, civil Sunday and all.)

being pro-China should be the default position.

You can absolutely be pro-public transit without also endorsing or excusing all the other shit one particular country does, just because you happen to agree on one point. China is more than its railway.

Also, I’m pretty sure “normie” is just as much of a derogatory epithet as “tankie”, and neither is particularly bad. Certainly not bad enough to rise to the level of a slur.

(Whether she actually is a tankie isn’t mine to judge. Endorsing their politics is an indicator, but I don’t know enough about this specific case.)

Aside from the fact that following the law should be an understandable concession to wanting your instance to continue existing:

I don’t think I’ve seen any Anti-Palestine sentiment there. I’m also pretty sure most of us are on the same page about Zionism. This dispute is about the way that we express it, which is being framed as defending it and compared to actively perpetrating genocide.

There is a significant difference between following laws about hatespeech and following orders to actually murder people. Erasing all nuance doesn’t help the actual discourse about what we all agree is systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.

Normalise it while they’re young, so they fight it less when they grow up

Open source wasn’t ever perfect, but whatever cracks in there were are being blown a mile wide by these goddamn slop factories.

This is the perpetual issue, not just with AI: Any system will have flaws and weaknesses, but often, they can generally be papered over with some good will and patience…

Until selfish, immoral assholes come and ruin it for everyone.

From teenagers using the playground to smoke and bury their cigs in the sand, so now parents with small children can’t use it any more, over companies exploiting legal loopholes to AI slop drowning volunteers in obnoxious bullshit: Most individual people might be decent, but a single turd is all it takes to ruin the punch bowl.

The post accurately copies the article’s headline without editorialising.

The article itself is shit though.

I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.

I think it’s also a symptom of assholes fucking it up for everyone. You wouldn’t need the DoS-protections or security tools if there were no attackers.

Don’t know a solution for that, unfortunately. I think you have a point about inadequate development work, but I’m not sure it’s the whole puzzle.

Suddenly yanking it out might cause a lot of stuff to collapse, but at least some parts would still be able to operate without it in the long term. Maybe one of the blocks in the upper two stacks?

I feel like we ought to expand that traditional quote about the last fish being caught, the last tree being cut and all: When the last emotion is commodified, you will realise that you can’t buy happiness.

a super giga 1000€ license for more than 16 Core CPUs

Year of the Linux Desktop! Any day now… any day… huffs copium

I heard one guy talk about the importance of cable shielding and connector material and shit once, but the ones I actually know just talk about the other hardware (speakers, mixing pults, lots of terms I couldn’t recite).