ultra-orthi battalions

That’s what they’ve been doing. They station them in the West Bank and they we’re doing so many atrocities that even Biden considered sanctioning the specific battalions , he didn’t actually do it because he’s a spineless coward, but he did consider.

For the sake of Palestinians I hope they split up these nut jobs.

Depends who owns it / who payed to have it constructed. If the tenets own it and payed to have it constructed, or payed someone who payed someone… Then it’s a condo or a co-op depending on whether you own a unit in the building or own x% of the building which entitles you to a unit.

If another organization, almost always some form of government, payed to have it constructed and owns it then it is public housing.

If it’s anything like cities skylines original, houses just pop up according to demand with seemingly no construction cost calculated, probably because it would add a ton more complexity with mortgages and speculative markets etc. for little gain to players who mostly just want to play with trains and metros.

My guess is the fat part of the bell curve is 25-40 here, probably similar to Twitter, younger than Facebook, older than tik tok and maybe Instagram.

What’s your issue with big tech?

I know a lot of libertarians oppose corporatism because they say the corporations market power and monopolies derive from government, but for big tech they mostly come from economies of scale and network effects, neither of which I think right wing libertarians oppose.

If you oppose it because corporate power, even if gained through fair free market principles, is a barrier to liberty than I think your on the left for a libertarian. The recognition that corporate power can be just as tyrannical and coercive as state power is not an idea held by most libertarians in the u.s. who tend to focus solely on state power. Recognizing both puts you to the left of most of them, and on the far left you have Chomsky who identifies as a socialist libertarian and thinks corporate/capitalist power is so much more of a threat than state power that we should give the state more power to be able to reign in corporations.

Trump said in a Truth Social post Tuesday. “Biden’s hatred of Bitcoin only helps China, Russia, and the Radical Communist Left. We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!! It will help us be ENERGY DOMINANT!!!”

Didn’t COMMUNIST China ban it mostly because it was putting strain on their grid? Not sure how wasting states worth of electricity to fuel a glorified ponzi scheme is going to help with energy dominance but who am I to question the self-proclaimed genius.

China subsidies vehicles, say €5000

EU tariffs vehicles, say €5000

Every vehicle purchase basically comes with €5000 from the Chinese government for the EU government

The CCP doesn’t want you to know this one simple trick

That’s a very solvable problem though, AI can easily be run off green energy and a lot of the new data centers being built are utilizing it, tons are popping up in Seattle with its abundance of hydro energy. Compare that to meat production or transportation via combustion which have a much harder transition and this seems way less of an existential problem then the author makes it out to be.

Also most of the energy needed is for the training which can be done at any time, so it can be run on off peak hours. It can also absorb surpluses from solar energy in the middle of the day which can put strain on the grid.

This is all assuming it’s done right, which it may not and could exasperate the ditch were already in, but the technology itself isn’t inherently bad.

By most accounts meth is less addictive then tobacco or alcohol . We don’t think of it that way because people usually know a lot of people who drink responsibly but we often only see problematic meth users mostly because it’s usually people with problems that use meth. If normal healthy people had access to meth they would probably fall into similar use patterns that they have with alcohol, some people using it only on occasions, some more frequently and some that become full on addicts. That’s horrible for the people that do become addicts but if they have the genetic and emotional disposition for addiction they’d probably become addicted to something any way, whether that be illegal meth, or some other legal or illegal substance. Prohibition does not stop addiction because addicts will find some way to get there high.

This isn’t to say that it should be sold by just anyone and go by the rules of capitalism, as capitalism and addictive substances do not mix well. It should only be sold in non-profit or government run stores to remove profit motive, and there should be non-discript packaging with no advertising allowed FOR ALL ADDICTIVE SUBSTANCES not just meth. The main problem with a lot of these drugs is capitalism looking for endless growth at the cost of human lives.

You can get the film replaced, for free the first time, then like $20 after. Mine basically came all the way off on the fold for my z flip, but then I went to a galaxy store and they replaced it and it’s fine now.

It’s not the capitalist auto companies who are going to get hurt though. The price advantage of the Chinese companies comes from low labor costs and government subsidies, so the auto companies will just move there production to whatever country offers the most subsidies and least labor costs because in our current globalized world capital can move freely.

The real losers will be the unionized auto workers who’ll be abandoned while capitalists maintain or even increase there profits in the third world. These sorts of race to the bottom always harm workers, whether it be with clothes and shein , or EVs.

Car prices haven’t gone up, the average purchase prices of cars has gone up but that’s because people are buying more expensive cars, Large trucks, SUVs, luxury sedans, higher trims etc.

If you look at lower end sedans there price hasn’t changed much and has even gone down. For example if you look at the Chevy Malibu the current base price is $25,100 , in 2014 the base price was $22,340 or $29,400 adjusted for inflation, in 2004 it was $18,700 or $31,067

Auto workers wages have gone down but they’ve steadied in recent years in 2004 hourly wage was $21.71 or $36.07 adjusted for inflation, in 2014 it was $21.38 or $28.17 adjusted for inflation now they are around $30.

So since 2004 the price for a car has gone down 24% and auto wages have also gone down 20%. The recent UAW contract wage increases with little to no increase in price shows there is some room for workers to get more out of that $25,000 cost pie, but there would be no room if that pie is shrunk to $10,000 to compete with Chinese manufacturers.

The average purchase price has gone up because people are buying more expensive cars, eg. Large trucks, SUVs, luxury sedans, high end trims etc. not because cars are getting more expensive.

If you look at lower end sedans there price hasn’t changed much. For example if you look at the Chevy Malibu the current base price is $25,100 , in 2014 the base price was $22,340 or $29,400 adjusted for inflation, in 2004 it was $18,700 or $31,067

None of those are close to the $10,000 cars coming out of China because you just can’t make a car for that cheap in a country with high labor costs like the u.s., or even Japan or Germany.

Lemmy:

Go UAW, fight for higher wages and better working conditions

Also Lemmy:

I demand the cheapest car possible, I don’t care if its built by slave labor in xinjiang. If western companies can’t compete with third world labor costs then they’re obviously inefficient and don’t deserve to exist.

Is it good or do they just have a massive network and data advantage. If tik tok left and everyone switched over to Instagram reels or YouTube shorts and they had the same amount of data tik tok has I think the experience would converge to whatever was on tik tok in a month or so.

There’s no secret sauce to tik tok, they’re throwing massive amounts of data at a recommendation AI and telling it to optimize for watch time, any sufficiently scaled company can do that nowadays. It’s more a matter of getting and maintaining an audience to create that data and content creators, both of which due to the network effect, and without federation, are drawn to the biggest service, not necessarily to the best.

If the choice is between the u.s. government and the Chinese government choosing what’s appropriate for me to watch then I’d choose the u.s government as it is still has some democratic levers which the American people can use to stop it from propagandizing too much. There is no such influence they can wield in the Chinese government. I’m not ok with it though and it’s more a matter of the lesser of two evils. Ideally there would be no centralized control over these services and the algorithms would be open source and the servers federated, to allow people to transparently evaluate the biases each service has and make their own decision free from the centralizing network effect present in current social media. If I am unable to inspect it then I want the person who is able to do so to have interests that are better aligned with mine, either an elected representative or at least a worker with similar national interests to me.

As for the book question it’s not a matter of a single book. Unless they’re advocating for atrocities I’m for any creator being allowed on the platform, the problem is how the platform is showing that content, it’s a matter of the book store instead of a single book. If the library has a copy of the three body problem, or even Maos little red book alongside a bunch of other books countering it then that’s fine. But if there’s no library and only one book store in town then the owner of that book store has a lot of political power and should be under a lot of scrutiny. If the owner of that store isn’t a part of the community and doesn’t have interests that align with it, or even run counter to it, then the people of that community are right to become skeptical and demand a more open system. This is why libraries are so important, they provide an information repository owned by the public instead of private interests.

It’s not about the data, it’s about the algorithm. Unlike other social media which has followers, subscribers etc. that dictate what you see tik tok is a pure black box recommendation algorithm. Tons of people’s world views are shaped by tik tok and a slight tweak to this algorithm can have huge political consequences. I’m far from a china hawk but even I can recognize the dangers of allowing that sort of machine to be in the hands of a foreign rival. Ideally we’d take it out of the hands of the corporate interests running the ones here in the u.s. as well and force them to be open sour e, but that doesn’t seem possible right now and at least those companies are more beholden to the American people then byte dance, there are American employees in those companies that can raise a red flag if management is telling them to push the algorithm in a direction.

The youth also probably won’t care in a years time. Even if tik tok actually shuts down in the u.s. instead of selling, which I still doubt they will as that would effectively be burning 10s of billions of dollars to prove a point, the youth can just move onto another app like Instagram reels or YouTube shorts which offer the same experience but aren’t as good because of the mass network effect tik tok has. If everyone is forced out of tik tok and onto one of the other apps they’ll gain that same network effect and have the same experience after a bit of transition/ AI training time. The kids aren’t attached to byte dance or tik tok, they’re attached to the content and content creators who make it, and those can move to another app very easily.

Can’t tell if this is sarcastic but the intention was that Tupac was helping Kendrick get over his “writers block” for his next diss track by “gifting” him an idea to make fun of drake for liking young girls, drakes trying to beat him to the punch, while trying to discredit it as just gossip with the budden podcast line.

I think I paid attention pretty well in my senior seminar on the Korean war but if you want I can link you my final paper on it if you want to make sure.

Assuming you have the American high school understanding of the war where the evil north invaded the free south and the benevolent u.s. came to the rescue, I’d recommend you read Bruce Cummings book on the subject to give some insight into what really happened. If you want a more condensed version refer to the comment I gave for the other guy.

The north did invade but this wasn’t some evil communist dictator attacking an innocent southern democracy. Both sides at the time the war broke out were repressive dictatorships who understood that unification was going to take violence, the north made the first big move but there had been skirmishes prompted by both sides leading up to it. If the south had their military ready Rhee would not have hesitated to invade first if he thought he could win.

After the initial success of the north the U.S. rescued the south and even after recapturing the south continued on to invade the north and carry out a brutal, near genocidal, bombing campaign of the north destroying up to 85% of buildings. Like Israel and Hamas the north did strike “first” but the south and the u.s. hit back disproportionately harder. It is with the memory of that atrocity that the north despises the u.s. and seeks any means of protection against it happening again. They aren’t dumb, they know they stand no chance of winning an offensive war while the u.s. is on the peninsula and have given up on doing so, now they’re just trying to survive.

None of this is to excuse the kim government for there many domestic atrocities, while the South has opened up since the war the north has remained one of, if not the most , repressive and abusive states out there. Just saying there foreign policy isn’t as crazy and aggressive as the west likes to make them out to be.

They talk a big game but they aren’t actually that unfriendly in practice. They haven’t funded terrorist organizations or tried to engineer coups in other countries, mostly because they don’t have the money or power to but still there are way worse actors on the world stage that the world happily deals with. Just look at Israel which has almost no international sanctions, and Russia with only about a quarter of the world doing some half assed sanctions for a blatant war of aggression.

They’re the hermit kingdom and the leadership is mostly concerned with the brutal subjugation of there own citizens and not international affairs.

They have been making nukes but that’s more of a defensive response to the loaded gun the u.s. has been pointing at them since there inception rather than some crazy plot to carry out a suicidal offensive nuclear assault on the u.s. or the south.