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Zerverus

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[dead] 4 years ago

Are we still pretending that Elon bought this for some kind of mission instead of a thiel, sachs, musk venture of delivering a highly tuned propaganda platform to the GOP for 2024 in the misguided estimation that this will put them into the inner circle of power ?

Why would not wanting to spend your ads on Twitter be political. The place is a brand risk, only Elon wants you to think this is about owning the libs

This is how facists work- they frame anyone’s dissenting speech and actions as politically opposed.

That scenario does not exist.

It’s like with bank cards where everyone in the judicial system for years agreed that they were safe and only when it couldn’t denied anymore suddenly it took another 3 years for the system to reflect that.

A) cryptography is hard. Chances of Sony getting it right are not good. Chances of critical flaws being found later are basically infinite.

B) 99.9% doesn’t exist with technology. Once it’s broken the exploit can be scaled.

They love showing off prototypes, but given that 85% of their military is engaged in Ukraine and doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to replace their losses for about a decade, this is just stupid

Their most modern MBT isn’t usable at the frontline and couldn’t even make it through the latest parade in front of the Kremlin. Their most sophisticated jets are lobbing dumb fire missiles in indirect fire mode. Their tanks universally compete in turret throwing competitions upon contact with 1970s handheld AT technology.

It’s fair to say that it was western and Russian overestimation of Russian capabilities and Russian underestimation of Ukrainian ability and Western willingness to respond that caused this war.

If Putin had adequately understood that Russias Military would be humiliated and shown as outdated and ineffective by his move, he’d not done it.

So maybe we should stop the breathless coverage of supposed Russian wunderwaffen

Japan is much more complicated than that and apply capitalist measures of success isnt doing it justice

- Demographic crunch, as mentioned. The country not descending into uncontrolled decline may already been a decent achievement

- Focus on quality. This is unique to Japan and runs counter capitalist growth stories. Japanese consumers value quality. a lot. But it’s bad for business in the growth sense, you don’t need to buy a new fridge for 10-15 years because it works and isn’t made obsolete artificially, Japanese consumers are happy, growth : consumption metrics are not.

Quality is just not captured as a variable in the western / American way of looking at economic health. Not having train delays, having great customer service, no forced obsolete products, high reliability in services and products are not reflected / incentivized in that model - they don’t exist but that’s not how Japan works.

Japan has issues, quite a few, but it’s not nearly the hellhole American economic publications love to make it out for decades now. It may be a nightmare scenarios for the get rich quick dudes with US MBAs, but quality of life is pretty decent for a country this far down the demographic curve.

We can only really judge how they fared when America enters that demographic slope.

God forbid someone would learn from these events and make necessary changes.

There’s a middle ground, the US approach of putting your head into the ground unless a donor can benefit financially isn’t necessarily true for the entire world.

Things have changed dramatically and continues to in the wake of China-US tensions (many Chinese companies setting up shop in SG to avoid a risk of getting frozen out from western market access), HK imploding, Shanghai lockdown troubles and political instability in Malaysia

On fin tech, there’s Silicon Valley style critical mass now.