Now the UK owns nothing and has £3tn in debt
The UK has accumulated plenty of valuable capital in this period and spends a sizeable chunk of that accrued debt protecting it.
They can take it back whenever they choose. The Brits simply have a national, state, and local leadership more invested in the well-being of the leisure class than the working class.
NYTimes hitting the acid again
Idk, the TV told me this is antisemitic to think about
I haven’t listened to him lately, but I never got the impression that he was much of a right winger from anything he has ever said on there while I was listening.
You can only invite Elon Musk, Dave Smith, and JBP onto your show so many times before you tip your hand.
Hell, Tulsi Gabbard gets an invite every time she launches a new campaign.
Can’t trust mainstream American news because they’re right wing
Can’t trust foreign news services because they are all psyops campaigns intended to trick Americans
Who the hell are you allowed to trust? TikTok influencers and indie podcasters?
We honestly need to end the myth that Wikipedia is some impenetrable white tower.
It’s a perpetual two-edged conversation. On the one end, you’ve got reactionaries doggedly insisting the existence of Wikipedia is an attack on their personal reputations and a warehouse for far-left ultra-communist radical propaganda. On the other, you’ve got a very naked western bias to articles (thanks to a preponderance of western editors) and this creeping pay-to-play model of participation that enthusiasts and supporters simply refuse to acknowledge.
The utility of the site is such that nobody is really excited about ignoring it and replacing it is a herculean effort even would-be trillionaires haven’t managed. So the fight continues to be over degrees of control in editing existing articles and publishing new ones.
It isn’t a White Tower, but Wikipedia has become - like it or not - a system of record with an implicit amount of reflexive trust that hundreds of millions of people have learned to adopt. You can’t cynically reject its contents any more than you can naively accept them.
You think people break into the Louvre but can’t touch Wikipedia?
I think there are enough copies of the Mona Lisa such that we wouldn’t need to question what it looks like if the original was stolen.
In the same way, there are so many backups and mirrors and third-party logs of Wikipedia that we can very clearly see what is being changed and by whom. It is valuable in large part because it is so easily auditable. That’s not to say its infallible, but you can at least point to what you disagree with and challenge it piecemeal. This isn’t like a Grok AI or Conservapedia, where the preponderance is a black box of bullshit.
That’s what the “Talk” section functionally does. People can (and do) check it when an article has lots of frequent heavy editing. And a lot of these edits do get rolled back as they’re exposed, as Wikipedia admins are reasonably good at keeping the propaganda generically pro-western rather than nakedly for-profit or regionally partisan.
At the same time, Wales is a self-proclaimed libertarian who is constantly putting his hand out to keep the website funded and operational. I have to assume there’s a certain degree of self-dealing happening in the background just to keep the site from getting the kind of abuse suffered by Internet Archive or Anna’s Archive.
Like so many other wars, the assumption was always that the conflict would be over in a few weeks and Germany would come out ahead. Russia didn’t have the horsepower to compete with the highly advanced German war machine, the French were a bunch of goofy, peacenik frog-eaters who would roll over at a light shove, and England barely has a dog in the fight.
Where are any of these countries going to get an advanced industrial economy to fuel a long running European land war? Like, name one nascent industrial society that could possibly generate enormous profits by arming the entire Allied faction of Europe? Go ahead, I’ll wait for you to find it.
It’ll be bing-bang in and out. No muss. No fuss. And if the SDP won’t back this thing then someone else will! Then there goes the socialists’ chance at peacefully taking power in a heavily militarized capitalist oligarchy.
Where is the ambient horizon lighting coming from in the right-side of the picture?
The nature of reality is such that you can believe a very silly thing and have it impact your life in no meaningful way. People have been wrong about the nature of the universe for millennia and continued to get by. The oddball who believes in native moonlight and stargates isn’t going to benefit tangibly for being correct or suffer tangibly for his misbelief. In many cases - thanks to the proliferation of internet subcommunity echo-chambers - they may actually suffer (socially) for reconciling their beliefs with reality if they can’t bring their friends along for the ride.
But, again, when they have extremely limited influence over their surroundings (this guy is not, presumably, running an astronomy lab or charged with funding improvements to municipal mass transit) their zany beliefs don’t really matter. Correctness doesn’t benefit them and incorrectness is more fun.
My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the “real” Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED.
I would be curious to know where he thinks the LED is plugged in. Also, why this particular LED is so fucking hot.
some of the most conservative
re: Poorest
Meanwhile, the ultra-wealthy Nevada and Arizona ranching communities are frothing with rage at the possibility of once again shrinking the size of their herds. They’ve got the money to bribe Trump in a way the broke ass dirt farmers of Eastern Colorado simply do not. There’s a reason Lauren fucking Boebert represents the district and not Jared Polis. It’s a placeholder seat for a back bencher, not the kind of place from which you can wield real influence.
People keep saying this. The European states keep bending over for American military and diplomatic services.
Until the EU can decouple from the western tech and finance sectors (don’t hold your breath), they’re chained to the US economy and exposed to US tariff threats. And until they kick out the myriad of military bases, they’re beholden to the Pentagon. Europeans talked about decoupling during Trump 1. They talked about it during Bush 43. They talked about it during Reagen, ffs.
The only country that’s ever demonstrated an ounce of seriousness has been France. Every other country seems more than willing to take the American coin and bend the knee. And for all the bluster, I’m still waiting to see the rest of Europe take the threat of American hegemony seriously. Last I checked, Greenland is queuing up to get more American military bases, which doesn’t look like decoupling to me.
Identify the real cost of low interest savings relative to capital improvements, for starters. If you’re spending money on Uber because you can’t drive your car, for instance, or you’re eating out all the time because you don’t have a functional dishwasher, you can just do the math and show where a quality purchase saves money.
After that, it can help if you budget forward in your savings (I’d like to take a vacation, I estimate $2000 cost, we can set aside $50/wk for 40 weeks and go somewhere nice next Christmas). Then you’ve got a plan for your savings, you’re not just hording cash.
Finally, if you’re savings is growing, you don’t need to feel like you’re trying to save your way out of inflation. Putting money into a blue chip like Berkshire Hathaway or an S&P ETF gives you future returns that will eventually outrun your current income. That helps defuse savings stress.
Don’t be a tankie.
The Socialist Fraternal Kiss
Previous civilizations didn’t have the level of technology required to “end the world” in the literal sense.
Modern civilizations don’t have that level of technology. We can make earth inhospitable to a lot of humans and a lot of mammals. But we’re living through the 6th global extinction event, not the 1st. In a million years, modern humanity will be a distant memory one way or another and life will continue to thrive.
The worst case scenario of climate change is the inverse temperature variation of the last great Ice Age. This was an event that killed billions. But it was not an event that extinguished all life. Not even an event that extinguished all human life. And that’s at the end of the century - 2100 - a year none of us were going to see under the most ideal conditions.
It would be presumptuous to believe our grandchildren would live to see “the end of the world”. To insist its happening in the next 40-60 years? Come on.
I make it to “the end of the day” seven times a week.
That’d definitely a better way to understand history. We’ll all live to see the end of our own cycle of existence. Then we’ll pass the torch.
They could still do it with their highly lucrative network of wind farms under construction.