Multipolarity bros really need to stop fantasizing about BRICS being some sort of anti-imperialist military alliance It’s just delusion, BRICS isn’t a military bloc, it is about trade. It technically isn’t even a trading bloc either as it is literally just a forum to discuss trade relations. If you think any member of BRICS has defense obligations to one another then you are incredibly disconnected from reality.

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China obviously doesn’t give af about supplanting the US as a world power. If they did they would actually do stuff internationally. There is no Chinese equivalent to NATO. All they will do in regards to Venezuelan president being kidnapped is strongly condemn it. They won’t even offer PSUV any security guarantees. Literally all the Chinese government believes in is (1) trading with as many people as possible and (2) reuniting its breakaway territories. They have no ambitions beyond that. It is not true that China does business mostly with countries rejected by the Americans, but it does business with literally everyone. Chinese love to trade with everyone. While Americans media constantly criticizes China on every calling for regime change attacking their political system their leaders etc, the only time you ever hear criticism of the US on Chinese media is when the US does something that is viewed as harming trade, like the tariffs.

If you have a very noisy quantum communication channel, you can combine a second algorithm called quantum distillation with quantum teleportation to effectively bypass the quantum communication channel and send a qubit over a classical communication channel. That is the main utility I see for it. Basically, very useful for transmitting qubits over a noisy quantum network.

The people who named it “quantum teleportation” had in mind Star Trek teleporters which work by “scanning” the object, destroying it, and then beaming the scanned information to another location where it is then reconstructed.

Quantum teleportation is basically an algorithm that performs a destructive measurement (kind of like “scanning”) of the quantum state of one qubit and then sends the information over a classical communication channel (could even be a beam if you wanted) to another party which can then use that information to reconstruct the quantum state on another qubit.

The point is that there is still the “beaming” step, i.e. you still have to send the measurement information over a classical channel, which cannot exceed the speed of light.

Obvious answer is that the USA is the world’s largest economy while Russia is not, so if USA says “if you trade with Russia then you can’t trade with me” then most countries will happily accept ceasing trade with Russia to remain in the US market but if Russia says the same about the USA then people would just laugh and go trade with the USA.

The only country that might have some leverage in sanctioning the US is China but China has historically had a “no allies” policy. Chinese leadership hate the idea of that because then they would feel obligated to defend them and defending another country is viewed very poorly in Chinese politics. They thus only ever form trade relations and never alliances, meaning if your country is attacked they have no obligation to you. Chinese politicians may verbally condemn the attack but they won’t do anything like sanctions or even provide their own military support in return.

worth it

I tried to encourage fellow Linux users to just encourage one distro. It doesn’t have to be a good distro, but just one the person is least likely to run into issues with and if they do, the most likely to be able to find solutions easily for their issues. Things like Ubuntu and Mint clearly fit the bill. They can then decide later if they want to change to a different one based on what they learn from using that one.

No one listened to me, because everyone wants to recommend their personal favorite distro rather than what would lead to the least problems for the user and would be the easiest to use. A person who loves PopOS will insist the person must use PopOS. A person who loves Manjaro will insist that the person must use Manjaro. Linux users like so many different distros that this just means everyone recommends something different and just make it confusing.

I gave up even bothering after awhile. Linux will never be big on desktop unless some corporation pushes a Linux-based desktop OS.

I read the first sentence and stopped. Not worth reading the rest and does not deserve an actual reply.

They never claimed to have a communist system to begin with. That is a western label placed upon them. Communist parties do not implement communist systems any more than green parties implement “green systems.” They implement socialist systems.

Comparing this conflict to “manifest destiny” is just complete brainrot and doesn’t make it seem like you are that interested in understanding the actual historical circumstances. This is an unresolved civil war due to the USA’s invasion to protect one side of the civil war, which in China is viewed naturally as a major attack to their sovereignty so allowing a foreign power to just cut a piece of them off is viewed negatively due to the Century of Humiliation of them being carved up by foreign powers.

Both sides also agreed to the reunification of China and this “one-china policy” became internationally recognized by almost the entire world, and it was not until the year 2000 that Taiwan de facto stopped agreeing with this policy. You can make an argument that Taiwan’s fairly recent desire for sovereignty should be respected without resorting to bizarre comparisons like Manifest Destiny, as this is obviously not what is going on for anyone who is intellectually honest about the situation at all.

This is not even an economic dispute and so trying to use Marxian analysis and throwing around buzzwords like “imperialism” is irrelevant. One of the biggest reasons the PRC hasn’t invaded Taiwan is because they would be harmed from the destruction of TSMC, so if anything economic reasons are discouraging the PRC form acting than encouraging it. The desire for China to reunify with Taiwan is a cultural and historical disagreement, it is more of an ego thing. They view the splitting off of Hong Kong by the British, Macau by the Portuguese, and Taiwan by the USA as attacks on their national sovereignty and thus to their national pride, and have vowed to bring them all back into the fold for decades now, and Taiwan is the only one left.

It is really an ego thing more about national pride. Again, you can indeed argue that they their national pride shouldn’t override Taiwan’s right to self-determination, but it is not as deep as you make it out to be. If you read some of those Marxian books you would find that invasions for “imperialism” is supposed to have the goal of expanding to new markets, but China is already Taiwan’s biggest trading partner by miles, they already dominate their market.

You are trying to make this way deeper than it actually is. This is about one state’s ego and national pride vs another state’s desire for self-determination. It is not some deep analysis over capitalism or socialism or imperialism.

We still posting “news” like it’s 1921.

We can’t explain the spark of life yet

Because there is no spark of life. It’s just a poetic phrase that captures the vague feeling and emotional aura around the concept of life and living things, but it’s not a literal physical thing that exists that requires an explanation.

I use Debian as my daily driver for at least a decade, but I still recommend Mint because it has all the good things about Debian with extra.

Debian developers just push out kernel updates without warning you about any possible system incompatibilities, so for example if you have an Nvidia GPU you might get a notificaton to “update” and a normie will likely press it only for the PC to boot to a black screen because Debian pushed out a kernel update that breaks compatibility with Nvidia drivers and does nothing to warn the user about it, and then a normie probably won’t know how to get out of the black screen to the TTY and roll back the update.

I remember this happening before and I had to go to the reddit for /r/Debian and respond to all the people freaking out explaining to them how to fix their system and rollback the update.

Operating systems like Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, etc, will do more testing with their kernel before rolling it out to users. They also tend to have more up-to-date kernels. I had Debian on everything but my gaming PC that I had built recently because Debian 12 used such an old kernel that it wouldn’t support my motherboard hardware. This was a kernel-level issue and couldn’t be fixed just by installing a new driver. Normies are not going to want to compile their own kernel for their daily driver, and neither do I who has a lot of experience with Linux.

I ended up just using Mint until Debian 13 released on that PC because my only option would be to switch to the unstable or testing branch, or compile my own kernel, which neither I cared to do on a PC I just wanted to work and play Horizon or whatever on.

Conservatives lack object permanence, what else is new? It’s kinda like all the conservatives who say that transgender people only started to exist a few years ago because that’s when Fox News made them aware of them, and they can’t fathom the idea that they existed before that and they just didn’t know about it.

The system makes no sense if you try to optimize it to get the highest score possible, you will find the differences in a single point have no logic behind it. But banks also typically do not care if your score is one point lower or higher. The number is just a quick reference point to make sure you aren’t someone in financial ruin, and if the score is at least mid then they will factor in things like your current income to debt ratio more than the score. If you are a normal person taking out a single loan for a house and probably a car and you know you have stable income to afford it, then you probably don’t need to worry about your credit score.

I tend to agree with people like Wittgenstein, Bohm, Engels, and Benoist, that identities are ultimately socially constructed. Aristotle believed identifies are physically real, so that a tree or a ship physically has an identity of “tree” or a “ship.” But then naturally you run into the Ship of Theseus paradox, but many other kinds of paradoxes of the same sort like Water-H2O paradox or the teletransportation paradox, where it becomes ambiguous as to when this physical identity would actually come into existence and when it goes away.

The authors that I cited basically argue that identities are all socially constructed. “Things” don’t actually have physical existence. They are human creations.

One analogy I like to make is that they’re kind of like a trend line on a graph. Technically, the trend line doesn’t add any new information, it just provides a simplified visual representation of the overall data trend of the data, but all that information is already held within the original dataset.

Human brains have limited processing capacity. We cannot hold all of nature in our head at once, so we simplify it down to simplified representations of overall patterns that are relevant and important to us. We might call that rough collection of stuff over there a “tree” or a “ship.” The label “tree” or “ship” represents an overly simplified concept of some relevant properties of interest about that stuff over there, but if you go analyze that stuff very closely, you may find that the label actually is rather ambiguous and doesn’t capture the fully complexities of that stuff.

Indeed, if we could somehow hold all of nature in our heads simultaneously, we would not need to divide the world into “things” at all. We would just fully comprehend how it all interacts as a single woven unified whole, and the introduction of any “thing,” any identity, would just be redundant information.

Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.

— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”

You’re wrong. I’m a great ape and I can understand abstract language.

I think there is nothing more fitting than an anti-ML using Wikipedia on Marxism-Leninism as their source. Chef’s kiss.

I tried Brave. Didn’t like that it had a crypto ads on the new tab page. I also didn’t like that it has some weird built-in point system that you can turn off but randomly turns itself back on and glitches out. Back when I used to use Twitter (formerly X) dot com, it would show weird point counters next to every Tweet and the ability to disable it didn’t work.