primary thing $$$

it’s what will ultimately make or break the strike. people start getting desperate when they are behind on their rent

i feel like only people with too much free time get bored

most people are caught up in their own day to day lives. it’s just the nature of things.

you have to go to work to pay your bills. your girlfriend wants to go out to dinner every once in a while. you have to go have dinner at your parents. you have to walk your dog. you have to brush your teeth, do your laundry. you have to figure out what you’re gonna eat for dinner. should probably schedule that dentist appointment soon. need to do my taxes.

etc

really doesn’t leave you that much time or energy to worry about the big problems of the world.

look at the chaos that Y2K was. one doesn’t simply adopt a new calendar.

it’s too ingrained. it’s like ripping out the foundations of a house to build a new one. it would have to be one hell of a calendar

Israel & the US are more or less one and the same. if i remember correctly, 98% of representatives in congress last election cycle was endorsed by the AIPAC

there’s a reason we can only vote for pro-Israeli politicians. Israel projects US power in the mideast

not saying they don’t do all of that. read the reuters article i linked before. or this one: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/03/why-russia-has-been-so-resilient-to-western-export-controls?lang=en

all i’m saying is

a) it doesn’t need Israel’s help for this.

b) israel doesn’t have the industrial capacity (small country, gdp only $500B) the geopolitical position for it (they are a tool of US interests and would not meaningfully harm US interests) and the domestic will for it (again, russia is friends with Iran, Israel’s mortal enemy)

there absolutely are parts of the government that will support Russia. Almost half of Israelis speak Russian and have connections to that area. So yeah, of course. But from a top-down directive it’s doubtful

notice i’m not denying Israel does not supply extremists. i’m specifically referring to this russia-israel dynamic

yes, israel supports extremists. they have a very advanced intelligence system and do all sorts of crazy shit. they’re wild. i agree

if you look at my history it isn’t particularly pro-israeli

it’s just that in this specific context, I don’t think it’s as significant as it may seem on first reading. Israel has had a long relationship of cooperation with Russia. Although lately things have gotten more tense between the two, with Iran and Russia becoming closer. Iran is Israel’s mortal enemy and Russia supplying money and tech transfer over in exchange for Shaheeds is a big no-no for them

so while yes, there probably are pro-Russian elements in the Israeli state that have probably helped Russia circumvent sanctions and export controls… the brunt of their materials probably comes from China, from European sources, and maybe even American companies themselves.

russia doesn’t need Israeli help to get access to American parts

All the way back in the Cold War the Soviets had a governmental department specifically to source parts from the West that was blocked off to sanctions. They have decades of experience creating shell companies, intermediaries, etc.

if someone wants to do more research the parent organization was “First Main Directorate of the Committee for State Security under the USSR council of ministers” and the department was called “Directorate T: Scientific and Technical Intelligence”

so basically the Russians have had many decades of experience circumventing sanctions and export controls. The Russians, while a shell of the former USSR, still have a lot of the human capital and experience in this regard.

I remember reading an article on Reuters or Washington Post or something where apparently even after sanctions, the Russians are getting roughly 90% of the high-tech components they were getting before the war. So the sanctions have hurt, but by a marginal amount. I think it’s this article: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/western-industrial-components-rebuilding-russias-military-2024-08-16/ but Reuters is now paywalled for me

You’re still supporting evil, even if it’s the lesser evil.

this is rather why i like the quote from ZIzek i heard in an interview recently

“if i were an American, I would obviously vote for Kamala. No question. But before I go into the booth, I would make the Christian Catholic cross with my hands and beg God for forgiveness”

i voted for Kamala but I did it with an awful taste in my mouth. Of course, just like all humans are guilty of Eden’s original sin… I think all of us Americans are guilty of benefiting from imperialism, capitalist exploitation, and the spoils of genocide.

games like EU4 simulate it pretty well

when you first take a territory, it requires infamy. other countries look at you with sideways. you can’t extract the full value out of the land yet. but after a long period of time (upwards of 50 years) it slowly starts to become legitimized. especially as you import settlers and built population centers. after a long enough time, it’s both de facto and de jure yours and if you hold it long enough people will recognize it as yours.

so look what happened with West Bank. when Israel took control of WB in 1967, it was majority Palestinian.

what did they do? first, you import settlers. you give incentives for people to come and populate the area with Jews. you also tacitly endorse the ideology of the settlers, so they do it even without you actively supporting it (so you have some semblance plausible deniability when people call you out)

then, you take the native peoples and you herd them into smaller and smaller pieces of land. you restrict movement (like through their “jewish only roads” and the many checkpoints through the WB) (edit: sound similar to what Americans did to another native peoples by chance? almost like it was a blueprint)

fast forward to today, and now 63% of the land area of West Bank is majority Jewish. The Palestinian population is still higher, but they are forced into smaller and smaller pieces of low-value land. In about 50 years or so they’ve managed to turn a majority Arab area into a majority Jewish.

this gives them legitimacy. there’s no way some future government, even if they wanted to be more generous, would ever give up majority Jewish land.

I’d say the entire process is gonna take ~75 years or so. we’re almost to its conclusion. they’re gonna replicate their WB strategy in Gaza, but since Gaza is much smaller and they’re being much more brutal about it, it’ll go much faster

I think the best way to become more resistant to propaganda is to read and understand history. If you only pay attention to this conflict since Oct 7th and you are getting your entire media diet from certain dubious sources, you don’t stand a chance.

but if you deep dive and actually look at the history. look at the beginning of the state of Israel, look at the early leaders, what they were saying, what they believed. look at the process of occupation, what the policies have been (ethnic cleansings population transfers, restriction of movement, blockade of gaza, destruction of airports, killing of journalists, etc)

then you will have a more cynical eye when certain people try to twist and bend the truth. and you will be more accurate in predicting where the ball will land.

they’ve been self-defensing their way towards the total elimination and annexation of Palestine from the 1940s to now.

this whole thing really should not surprise anyone that knows even a simplified history of god’s special country. they have been slowly and steadily inching towards their goal. they’re not really shy about it.

hear it from Israel’s first prime minister

“You are no doubt aware of the JNF’s activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin.” He added: “Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.”

“With compulsory transfer we have a vast area… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”

Here’s another guy, a director of the JNF, Joseph Weitz

“There is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, and to transfer all of them, save perhaps for [the Arabs of] Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [Bedouin] tribe. And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.”

yeah exactly. when the system is about to blow up, they turn a valve and release a little steam

that’s one of two paths we are headed towards today. the pressure is building up. we either need to turn the valve soon OR we’re gonna blow up

i have a feeling though we’re headed for the explosion route

i think most legislation is explicitly for the capitalist class. that much we probably agree with

but i do think every once in a while, when there is a ton of pressure and the elites are scared, they throw a bone to the working class.

it happened with the antitrust act, it happened with the New Deal, and it happened in the 1960s with the Civil Rights era and the end to Vietnam

yes, capitalism will eat itself. it’s what we’re essentially seeing right now in slow motion. but there is something there in democracy beyond just capitalism. even if it’s buried deep down and impotent

it’s an eternal battle. every once in a while we pass legislation to try and reign in corporate power. like for example the anti trust act in the early 1900s

the issue is that public attention is temporary. eventually we move on to the next crisis and people forget. grow complacent.

corporate interest, however, is eternal. it’s persistent and never gives up. it keeps pushing, infallibly, in order to weaken the structures meant to reign in their power. whether by legislation/policy (AT&T and friends unilaterally killing Net Neutrality some years back, Disney signing into law expansion of copyright, etc) or through more subtle methods (buying politicians and getting people into positions of power that have no intention of enforcing the laws)

this is inevitably what happens with every democracy. eventually the vigilance fails and the structures of power are hijacked by opportunists.

although having said all that, I don’t think greed had much to do with the inflation we saw. Sure, some companies took advantage and raised prices more than they needed to just to inflate that extra juicy profit margin.

but realistically we’re headed to war and war means massive government spending which means inflation

And it wasn’t. The supply chain breakdown would have happened no matter who was in office

if i remember correctly, COVID brought our inflation up to roughly 6%. then the Ukrainian war took it the rest of way where it peaked near 9% (over 10% in my home state)

these things would have happened anyway, although choosing to prolong the Ukrainian war as long as possible most definitely increased inflation. people think we only gave 2 or 3 hundred billion, but realistically the American public has paid more than a trillion in the invisible tax that is inflation. hundreds of thousands of layoffs because of higher interest rates are also connected to this

It’s because, in the liberal and activist communities, it’s become customary and accepted to treat men like shit.

this is just as dumb as the opposite “they didn’t vote for Kamala because she’s a woman”

people don’t like Kamala because she’s an extension of Joe Biden and Biden has been a failure. that’s why she lost. she offered status quo when people want change. the DNC is incapable of changing quick enough to avoid fascism

i think you give too much credit to Trump. the economy has been rigged against the working class for a long time. it’s just getting progressively more brutal which makes people feel increasingly insecure.

an insecure working class elects strongmen who promise simple solutions

there was a vulernability on the iphone a while back where someone would send you a specific hindu character and it would crash the OS. it can get you no matter what you do really, use or business. the difference is a business has a lot more to lose.

as for the OS talk…

I use MacOS on my macbook & Linux on my desktop at home. I don’t think Mac is intolerably locked down. I have virtually the same experience on both. Mac is a very smooth experience once you set it up how you like. I have the same command line applications, the same config files, the same firefox profile that gets synced in between them, same unix utilities that share folders/files as if they were native, can ssh from one to the other, etc

including windows in that would be a PITA

windows is clunky and the company pushing it is becoming progressively more hostile to its users. apple is greedy but at least with their OS it’s not pushy. it’s the hardware where they stick the knife and twist in terms of price

it’s pretty dangerous not to be getting security updates. probably for regular users won’t be a big deal. i have a feeling really bad vulnerabilities will be patched even if you don’t pay for it just out of a potential PR issue. but i would almost definitely pay this if I were a business who didn’t plan on switching to Win 11 soon

on a personal level i don’t understand why anyone continues to use windows these days

indie OS

it’s the OS that virtually every server uses. even Microsoft servers slowly switched away from Windows roughly a decade ago. Today majority of their servers run Linux

it’s not indie- it’s big and corporate. the difference is there’s a weird serendipitous intersection of OSS and corporate interest that has arisen in a way that allows regular joe schmoe to run software you can actually control. so that your computer actually belongs to you

imagine with your car. would you be OK with ads in your rear view mirror? with your car constantly sending data about how you drive to some nameless corporation? your car randomly turning on and updating itself while you sleep? taking away features you may want or adding features you don’t?

that’s the path we’re going down with cars right now. and it’s partly because people are content to sit on their laurels and cede all of their collective power to companies like Microsoft