devoply

Western governments are covert about surveillance. China is overt about it, you continuously feel insecure and watched... and much like US's security theatre in airports that's the aim. So anyone who might wish harm to the communist party's agenda to feel threatened. How much are people willing to tolerate this sort of behavior? Hitler showed us all the way. In fact from a social development point of view China is going through what the world went through when it experimented with Fascism. So how does this end? Well, probably with some sort of war, likely a cold war of sorts.

It's also obvious that just like in WW2, American business will align itself with business interests even if those interests seem to be outright wrong. No matter, money is money. You would think we'd learned but we have learned nothing.

I don't mean currently no one talks about China, I mean there was a period after 2009 where there were a number of hacking incidents that no one talked about until much later.

As for a Smith refusing, yes, that could be the case. But there was no consolidation of power and industry as there is in Capitalism. So you could easily find many other Smiths to help you with whatever you needed. Going forward there are many specialized industries many of which are extremely consolidated. So you can't just go to someone else they own a whole spectrum. And that also makes it much easier for China to shut down things, as they could blacklist a whole set of businesses not just one.

What if on the other hand this is the fundamental aspect of Capitalism... Where the people with capital are always telling other people who might want access to whatever they are holding, money, markets, production, whatever, that if they don't kowtow they won't do business with them. And no one talks about it, just like no one talked about all the Chinese hacking so as not to ruin their reputation and anger China.

Looks like though this is the future. It's Capitalism where you love a product, say freedom of speech or democracy, but the company that supplies it gets bought out. And now you can't get that product anymore because it's not a part of the new company's corporate strategy. It's the same thing really. All these companies get bought out by the Chinese. Same thing goes for natural resources and the environment. They are just being bought out. Get things you need while supplies last.

It would be interesting to see Trump pass a law prohibiting any US company from doing this... from stiffing freedom of speech to support China.

Seems like a rip-off. Not only do you get to live in sub-standard housing you're making rent-seekers some serious profit margins for nothing. These places should be $250/mo. and everyone should be able to afford them if they need a place but don't have the cash.

To quote dumb and dumber, so you mean there's a chance?

One interesting rule might be to keep people with a certain amount of money from meddling in politics. Like you track all the money, and rich people are not allowed to influence politics at all. That would destroy the strangle hold that various groups with a lot of money have on American or hell global politics. Trump should not be allowed to be President. There should be an inverse relationship between money and power. The more money you have, the less power you have to do anything political with that money.

Maybe like we make a new category of money that can only do certain things and is heavily regulated and watched. And that's the sort of money that you can have way up there in the clouds, you can't have regular people money which is the money we have right now.

That then would move the discussion from how much they have, to what they can do with it.

Well when America vacuums up power if you are a European nation without any ammo you better watch out.

liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control

Saddam was willing to leave.

Both were successful by the metrics set out for it.

Because they were beat downs.

Afghanistan and the second Iraq war, and the various "police actions" undertaken since then, have objectives that are unclear or are metric-based and do not easily translate to a simple objective that can be reasoned to be a stable endpoint.

i.e. not beat downs. America is good at beat downs, any idiot with a gun is good at a beat down because as the Beastie Boys said it takes a second to wreck. It takes time to build.

Remote wars then are bad because they facilitate beat downs. Because America has big guns, lots of money, and little actual intelligence of how to fix or change anything.

It's funny all these people saying oh well the CIA doesn't do anything it's those stupid people who are fighting with each other because of their ideology. And then look at how Russia with a bit of money screwed up American politics and how badly they reacted to this little bit of interference.

You really want to make a must to punish children? If you get in there early there shouldn't be an in addition to.

Prison is a final measure when all other measures have failed. Even with prison, first time offenders of non-serious crimes usually do not do time or are diverted to other programs to help them avoid this fate. I just love how all the nerds here are going crazy over letting bullies off the hook initially to try to reform them -- it's as if they all want to bully the bullies.

Not only that, they will have wives, girlfriends, and children; they may eventually have employees. You can not stop them period. They are a part of the human population. They can not be weeded out.

Maybe if you counselled them and taught them how to manage their own needs and emotions many of them would not become criminals saving society many ills.

You can not eliminate the personality that needs bullying to validate themselves from the population. You can however hep them channel those needs into other things like entrepreneurship and leadership. To productively shape their needs for power over people rather than harassing and harming them.

How does banning cars and making cities more walk-able effect obesity?

Bullies themselves need counselling on managing their own needs and emotions rather than punishment. We focus so much on the victims, we also need to focus on the perpetrators and see them as victims as well if not of anything else than their own psychology.

You can't wake up as that's all also a story. It's turtles all the way down. All you can do is tell a different story, to change the script so to say. So far we have gone through a few scripts... Polytheism (many gods) -> Monotheism (one god) -> Economism (money is god and the way to reach god (get more money) is through science perhaps). We need to figure out the next story. I think Economism is terminal.

There is no science and epistemology without their drivers. They are in fact the political economy. You can not divorce how they are used from politics.

Humans live in stories not in reality. In modern times we have figured out how to sublimate reality with stories, but this process is as old as civilization and propaganda.

So no matter how much stupid shit we do that makes no sense from any rational perspective we can tell a story about how it's good and make it all better. Then when someone like that 16 year old Thunberg girl tells a story that's against all the stories we have been telling we get angry about it going against progress, development, and technology... which are all stories of their own that obfuscate the fact that all of these things are not capable of co-existing with any sort of stable natural system here on earth... as they are meant to continuously destroy and recreate reality. They are in effect to turn reality into fantasy (we call it science fiction) by any means necessary.

Okay imagine living with all the above + war + religious leadership that does not agree with your beliefs. That's a religious and tribal governance in our time.

You see anyone killing anyone because they don't like the Apple watch? You seen a person who drives a Chevy Impala being hated on by someone who drives a Toyota? No. You see someone who works at Facebook being subjected to hate because someone else works for Google? Exceptions may be someone rich getting treated better by the law than someone who is poor, but in theory (and in religion you only have theory of the true religion anyway) they are both equal. If a rich person kills a poor person they will have a very difficult time getting away with it regardless of their wealth if there is enough evidence against them to convict... You see most people that work getting enough food to eat and housing. etc. etc. Yeah so not the same at all.

The economy unites everyone that's what the West discovered. So if you focus on the economy and tempt people with their desires you can get them to work long hours, cooperate with each other, and create things that everyone in the world wants. How do you make war in the economic power structure? You make things that other people want that they are willing to pay a lot of money for... So they essentially enslave themselves working maybe a month to pay for your things.

Or you can hate people because they are not your tribe or religion... and then the West moves in an exploits that tribalism... And everyone is miserable and murdering in killing each other. The Ottomans were making wars on everyone around them for the longest time. There was no tolerance for anyone other than Orthodox versions of faiths like Islam.

Point being economic power structure is a lot more productive and stable than one based on tribalism or religion... As long as you play by its rules... Otherwise your own tribalism is exploited and you are soon turned into a fool.

Mobile use cloudflares 1.1.1.1 with vpn... free

Yeah it's a national security concern because if someone is leading so heavily they will destroy your lead and then you will never catch up. Just look at what happened to so many European tech companies.

VPN problemo solved.

US was already shown to be behind in 5g, China is already caught up. Heck they even helped AMD catch up to Intel, and see what sort of major success that was ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD%E2%80%93Chinese_joint_vent... ) . These moves are there to slow it down. But China can make other moves like moving tech knowledge from one company to others and play all sorts of games. Fact is knowledge despite what Americans want the world to believe, replicates and distributes powers in ways which are very difficult to stop. If China is not building it, they will move the knowledge to some ally which can build it. It's almost guaranteed at this point that we are already living in a bifurcated world where US will need to manufacture everything in other countries than China. And yet China's manufacturing edge is not going anywhere. They can clone any US product anyone else is producing and sell it to their trading bloc.

Why can't you bring back Congress?

Zuck's views need some scientific validation. Has Bill Gates investment paid off better than similar amounts of money spent by the government... or philanthropy in general?

Or AI drones that the US will soon be using to kill various people around the world.

What was great about India compared to Pakistan was the fact that it was a tolerant multi-ethnic democracy that may emulate Europe and North American democracy and become a stable functional multi-faced growing democracy. That dreams seems to be giving away to India another country very much like Pakistan which has little tolerance for anybody. If this non-sense keeps up who knows maybe the military takes over the country taking cues from Modhi's strongman tactics. That has been in fact one major downfall of Pakistan.

Joel Spolsky says anything more than 1k is too much and require approval. Has this amount now changed?

Not really Canada needed another source for selling its oil and possibly lumber because America loves strong arming it in trade deals because it's 1/10 the size. So geopolitically this move hurt Canada quite a bit. It could've gotten itself out of it by releasing Meng on some technicality but would've then felt Trump's ire.

or don't. decisions decisions. if netflix can get a few good shows every month or a few movies... that's enough value for what they are charging and about the amount of free time i have to invest in watching tv.