Socialism is when things get bad and Communism is when they are at their worst.

Four Legs Good, Two Legs… uh… wait a minute, they’re changing it.

The Chinese government doesn’t want to have to deal with routing the world’s email spam through their domestic servers. Nevermind the nightmare of latency going round trip from a terminal in Sao Paulo to a data center in Beijing, just so some mid-level bureaucrat can know the porn habits of Brazil.

I would say the bigger threat of Chinese hardware is an end to the effective technology embargo the US sanctions regime has imposed on the Global South. Far scarier to Americans than a Chinese bureaucrat with access to the Amazon web store history is a Cuban Communist with a standard of living that outpaces their Miami peers.

NATO isn’t a partnership between democratic member states, its a partnership between regional militaries.

The end state of the conflict over Greenland will be - if anything - a series of US-backed coups in European countries that preserve NATO by realigning the civilian leadership with the foreign policy of the US.

We’re already seeing this with the AfD in Germany, the Reform UK in England, and National Rally in France. These countries are functionally aligning with Trump as white-nationalist governments working towards the same end goals. And they’ve all heavily infiltrated their domestic militaries.

The Algorithm used to match people isn’t designed to encourage healthy and normal conversations. It’s designed to encourage people to spend more time on the apps (and, eventually, more money).

Had a couple of lady friends who went on vacation to Europe - Spain and France, specifically - and had totally different experiences on the dating apps. Men were open and friendly, knew how to hold up a conversation (in non-native languages!), showed politeness, responded quickly, made first contact easy and low-anxiety, looked good, smelled nice, knew how to dance, charmed the panties right off them both, and then kept in contact afterwards. Like, even after they flew back home, these guys were still saying “Hey, what’s up, here’s something cool happening in my neighborhood can’t wait to see you again”.

Just a radically different experience than the American dating scene. One friend straight up swore off American men entirely. She’s booking a flight back to France for a three month go - working remote, learning the language, the whole thing - because of how blown away by the healthier and happier social conditions over there.

I mean, that’s absolutely where this is going at a business level. Cloud computing has been in the cards for decades, and the only real question is who will do the hosting.

With the price of RAM and CPUs going asymptotic, these big cloud compute companies are building an effective monopoly on high end processing capacity. They’re cornering the market on hardware. Eventually, you either use their computers or you stick with legacy hardware (that’s seeded with Planned Obsolescence time bombs) or you (shudders just to think of it) start buying computers from CHINA.

When you think about it, there’s really only one option.

To date, no US aircraft carrier has been lost in a military operation. You’re using “sunk” to describe military exercises that informed the US of all the strategies potentially deployed by these countries.

Those carriers are far from invincible.

If the Europeans want to put a US carrier at the bottom of the ocean, I’m not going to shed a tear. But you’re pointing to scrimmage runs and exhibition matches, while you’ve been letting Americans see your playbooks (hell, write your playbooks) for the last 60 years.

Put up or shut up.

200, in the year of the invasion. It swelled to 2,500 over the next five years, then trickled away into a final withdrawal a month before the Republicans lost the White House in 2008.

There were smaller deployments - Iceland sent 2 soldiers, for instance. But it all paled behind the the US at 150k and UK at 46k. Which goes back to the whole problem with a NATO internal conflict. The US is the backbone of European defense. Again, what do any of these countries plan to do against an aircraft carrier group? Nobody seems to have a serious answer.

Getting maybe 20% of the features of Notepad++ standard was nice out of the box. For a fleeting moment, I almost kept it as my default.

Gmail has started injecting a fat “Suggestions for responding to emails” feature into my composition space. Really fucking annoying when you’re trying to type something out on a phone. No idea how to begin disabling it, I couldn’t find configurations anywhere in the settings.

I’ve had this email address for over 20 years. Not looking forward to changing it. But enshitification won’t stop.

Of course, that would depend on there actually BEING an opposition party that was interested in doing something about this shit.

If Tim Walz was a Republican Governor, he’d have activated the state national guard and been doing photo ops surrounded by municipal and state troopers at firing ranges, talking about how they’re not going to harm another hair on a Minnesotan’s head. We’d be getting a full-on “Jade Helm” tier response, with every single member of the party leading rallies and giving speeches in their home districts, and Senators from the state grandstanding at the Capital and shutting down business until they got a full investigation.

As a Democrat, it’s not even clear if he thinks Jonathan Ross committed a crime. He’s waffled. He’s flaked. He’s made “both sides” noises. His DOJ has done virtually nothing. The Minneapolis DA’s office has done nothing. The crime scene wasn’t even fucking secured for a proper investigation. Klobacher’s more interested in backfilling Walz as Governor than doing her job as Senator. I haven’t heard a peep from Tina Smith. If Ilhan Omar wasn’t from Minnesota, I’m not sure anyone in the congressional delegation would have made a sound.

Nobody thinks the establishment Dems would lift a finger to support a grassroots liberal campaign to kick ICE out of the city. More likely, they’d facilitate further executions and kidnappings if they thought there was a whiff of insufficiently peaceful resistance.

I mean, we’ll see. But if the US really is serious about taking Greenland by force, you’ve got a US military base already on the island that’s been running these defense calculations for decades. It’s going to be an uphill climb just to reach parity with the Americans on securing the territory. I hope this isn’t perfunctory, and someone is asking the question “How do we deal with one or more US aircraft carriers?” seriously.

FSD, which starts at $99 per month, is key to the future of the company as Musk tries to establish Tesla as a leader in autonomous mobility. The one-time price was $8,000.

Real “Heads-I-Win” / “Tails-You-Lose” game Tesla drivers are playing. $8k is around 6.5 years of monthly payments. Not exactly a great deal, especially when Tesla heavily subsidies existing owners to trade up to a newer model every 2-4 years in order to boost their own sales figures. But the phrase “starts at” is the financial equivalent of a hand grenade. You know its going to blow up on you. Just a matter of when.

And with the dubious safety of these new fully-autonomous vehicles…

Higher Crash Rates in Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) vs. Traditional Cars

AVs in California experienced 26.3 crashes per million miles in 2022—dramatically higher than the 0.7 per million miles for human-driven vehicles.

One has to wonder what this will do to car insurance rates in the near future, as more of these vehicles hit the road.

A government spokesperson for Germany also confirmed to Reuters that soldiers would be sent to Greenland on Thursday. The country is expected to deploy over a dozen reconnaissance troops, according to the report.

:-/

This feels like the time Poland sent eight soldiers in with the US invasion of Iraq.

Two is bigger than one. You got’em.

The number of co-sponsors has risen to 70 since this was published

Only one third of the minority party in the House.

Like, I’m not even mad at them. I just wish the party had over 70 people with more than an ounce of ethics or a gram of self-preservation instinct.

I’ve not been following super closely for mental health reasons, but if it is just Denmark? We are looking at another Ukraine.

Ukraine’s armed forces alone are 15x the total population of Greenland. This is more of a Grenada than a Ukraine.

Whereas, if we start seeing other EU/NATO nations deploying troops to protect Greenland… there is a chance that SOMETHING remains and we don’t just have russia running over everyone else one by one.

I would be much more worried about the power projection of the world’s largest military by a factor of 20 than the country currently caught in a quagmire halfway into the Donbas.

That man looks like he’s staring into the abyss.

I don’t think it’s fair to give all the credit to the US on that one.

This isn’t about “the US” so much as “USAID” specifically. It’s billed as a kind of international state-funded charity and relief organization. But it functions in practice as a propaganda mill and a trojan horse for US intelligence services.

We can debate the reasons for Afghanistan’s current state to death. But we can’t deny USAID was involved in a deliberate campaign of radicalization under the auspices of providing humanitarian service.