I'm paying for my search engine now. I'd pay for Firefox if Mozilla wasn't a fucking clown car of an organization at the business level. I have a deep respect for the engineering team there, but the bean counters running the place should long ago have been ousted. It's the same cabal paying themselves exorbitant salaries and driving completely inane initiatives that nobody wants (see pocket, now AI). I'm not giving them a dime until they get their corporate shit together and I'll be disabling whatever crap they're shoving into Firefox.
Oh I agree 100%. I also play for my search engine so it's definitely not a lack of interest in doing so. I agree with your point as well. Get rid of the money vultures in the C-suite who are paying themselves exorbitant salaries and hand that money over to the Firefox devs. Give them the runway necessary to bring on more developers that would give Firefox the attention it needs to keep up with Chrome/Chromium and maybe start playing with the idea that if you want the latest updates when they release you pay for the browser. If you don't need immediate updates you'll get the deferred releases under a 1-2 month delay or whatever they deem fit with security fixes obviously being backported to keep those who refuse to pay happy enough to not abandon the browser entirely.
Targeted tariffs in combination with robust industrial, economic, and monetary policy can be effective in incentivizing certain types of production to remain in, grow in, or return to a country.
Blanket tariffs on entire countries or indeed the entire world amounts to a massive tax increase on your entire populace unless you can somehow start producing everything yourself immediately.
There is an argument that it's primarily being used as a cudgel to give the US an advantageous starting position in trade negotiations, but that seems to be a post-hoc explanation/justification.
Even moreso than guns, the automobile industry has been waging an incredibly successful propaganda campaign for over a century now equating the ownership and use of a personal automobile with freedom.
It's because it's being peddled by the same "oh, I know how we'll use government to fix this problem that isn't top 10 on anyone's list" types who's in previous generations gave us unwalkable cities, unaffordable housing, and the modern urban-suburban hellscape.
While individual points are supported or resisted individually and by individuals, when you sum it up on a population level it's like a gut reaction against listening to someone who's lead you astray before.
Basically the people pushing changes lack the political and cultural capital to see them through because the capital was wasted for naught in decades past.
I live in Chicagoland. Nothing is stifling it except state government itself. I don't want to get on my high horse, but I actually have a choice and it is bad enough now that I opt to drive on a highway. And that is the 'good' mass transit example.
FWIW, I originally came from an old EU country. Mass transit was the way to move around and let me assure you that the government is not better there. The issue is more cultural than anything else.
I would argue that it's cultural specifically due to the decades of lobbying and back-room deals. Yeah, the government isn't helping things because it's beyond their ability now. It would take a similar decades-long approach to shift course, and cost gobs of money.
Eh, I guess I am talking to militant anti-SUV people.
Allow me to rephrase:
- Your environment imposes restrictions upon you
- Even if you can control your actions, optimal choice is to move within those restrictions
- Doing things that attempt to move outside those restrictions are not optimal
- Some people choose the optimal path
- Some people are upset that the optimal path is chosen
Good grief, why am I bothering with nonsense so early?
> Doing things that attempt to move outside those restrictions are not optimal. Some people choose the optimal path.
Optimal for what?
> Some people are upset that the optimal path is chosen.
Person A chooses the "optimal path" (according to whatever definition of "optimal" A has) for their benefit. Their "optimal path" puts person B at risk and forces them to deal with unwanted costs and changes their environment. Do you think that person B is wrong to be upset about the choice of person A or not?
<< Do you think that person B is wrong to be upset about the choice of person A or not?
Oh boy. I am not responsible for you. By this tirade, you only demonstrate to me you are willing to make suboptimal choices so that you can feel better about yourself. That is cool, but don't drag me down with you.
By your logic, each time you breathe out CO2, it forces me to deal with unwanted costs and a change to my environment. Can you hear how ridiculous that argument is at its core?
Can you hear yourself and realize how ridiculous your reduction ad absurdum is?
Let me help you: taking your analogy to the other extreme, and it seems like you shouldn't be mad at anyone if they decide to light up a cigarette in an elevator.
I am not mad. At best, I am disappointed as I let the someone go by themselves as I don't get on the elevator. For every choice, a consequence. It is absurd that you think your response was a reduction at all.. Honestly, if you are on my side, please stop. You are explicitly not helping.
> disappointed as I let the someone go by themselves as I don't get on the elevator.
Ok, so you think that people are expected to just step down and be quiet about it. Others would certainly complain and rightly so.
Also, while you might feel okay about taking another elevator, we can not tell people "if don't like your pedestrian-hostile and accident-prone environment just go move away, or stop being a pedestrian".
I say "people are justified about being upset, because they end up facing the consequences and bearing the risks of the choices made by others" and you somehow imply am I saying this is an argument about "forcing" anything?
That is a seriously bizarre conversation. Peace out.
That's pretty crazy. I've been on reddit since its inception and have never been banned from pics despite having posted on all kinds of unsavory subreddits over the decades.
If I cared about it. I might want to find a set of subs which when you simultaneously post in will result in largest number of bans. Would be interesting experiment. Exactly how many posts you need to get banned from largest number of sub-reddits...
If you're at the point where you have been vetted and allowed to post on r/Conservative, you've gone way past mere "association." This isn't like some board game forum where you can just create an account and start posting. r/Conservative (probably with good reason) has a long and very active vetting process before you're allowed to post there, and only posts that conform to their ideology stay up. So getting banned for participating is a little more than just "guilt by association."
You need to send a photo of your FSB / KGB id to be able to get recognized as a true conservative from USA + you need to post the propaganda of the day
Really depends on who the mods are. I got two bans on reddit:
First one:
In a programming sub, as there was over 10 years a rather known bug. Typical discussion goes off and using the bug as a example of issues that never get fixed in the language.
Short term sub banned for breaking the rules. The stated "broken rule" was one of those very broad one's where you can hit any discussion with. Appeal the ban, stating that my comments are based on facts. Pointed to the github, the 10 year long discussion. No answer beyond "you are perma banned for breaking the rules".
Got private contacted by one of the main developers of the language, as he noticed my banned status and was unable to get a answer from me.
We gone over the bug in PMs. Bug got assigned to somebody and fixed. Thanks for fixing that 10 year old bug.
That was my first experience with mod overreach. But that did not undo the ban for "being right".
Second one:
In a specific country sub, i noticed there was factual proven misinformation. Corrected the user in a lengthy post, with multiple links to news articles. Short term ban by a mod, for "misinformation".
Appealed the ban, got into a whole discussion with the sub mod. Told him that he is using his own opinion, not the facts. Stated multiple times my news sources from my post (not entertainment news but professional news), inc reuters.
Stated that he is not following the rules by using his person opinion as basis for the temp ban and asked for escalation of the ban review. Asked to show what rule i broke (never got a answer beyond his personal opinions).
Other mod came in, stated that i "attacked the mod" by asking for a escalating of the review, and by accusing the mod of not being neutral (i mean, using personal opinion vs official news websites = your not neutral).
Perma ban ... Kafka lol. As you can guess, never got a answer to what "misinformation" that i broke.
/Insert slap head emoji ...
What did the mods gain? Maybe that short dopamine hit for "winning" by banning somebody. Sounds more like losing if you need to ban based upon your opinion, and not the facts, but hey...
O, made new account, and back on sub. Never got banned again. Did i change my posting behavior. Nowp ... If i see misinformation, i come with receipts (links to actual reputable news articles).
Its like, what do you gain? Its just power tripping people that love to mod. There are good mods out there but a TON of them are just nasty dopamine junkies, that want to "win arguments" with bans.
Are there not concerns with burning up multiple agglomerations of metal, plastics, and ceramics the size of a small car in the upper atmosphere every day?
Modern end-of-life satellite designs are made to cause "rapid disassembly" very high up in the atmosphere to trigger high friction on as many individual components as possible - down to fasteners. This promotes completely re-entry burn up of everything so what reaches the surface is dust that settles back down to the surface (or ocean floor) and eventually gets compressed into rock (over millions of years). Basically back to where it came from.
Remember orbit is not like a flying airplane. Those things are going so fast friction forms a plasma that eats away at the object as it decelerates. If you can expose more surface area that effect will eat away at much more of the object. So you design it to have through-bolts or other fastener designs where the outermost portion of the fastener burns off quickly, allowing the whole assembly to rapidly disassemble and vastly increase surface area.
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
The deorbits are controlled to occur over nonpopulated areas (i.e. the middle of the ocean). I don't think it amounts to much of a concern, compared to, say, the sum total emissions of all factories, power plants, ships, airplanes, and vehicles.
People used to think the oceans could just slurp up all of our garbage and plastic forever without a problem. Yet, here we are.
Idk anything specifically but something that comes to mind is we floated CFCs into the upper atmosphere for decades before we figured out that was doing terrible things up there.
Guess MSFT needs somewhere else AI adjacent to funnel money into to produce the illusion of growth and future cash flow in this bubblified environment.
> produce the illusion of growth and future cash flow in this bubblified environment.
I was ranting about this to my friends; Wallstreet is now banking on Tech firms to produce the illusion of growth and returns, rather than repackaging and selling subprime mortgages.
The tech sector seems to have a never ending supply of things to spur investment and growth: cloud computing, saas, mobile, social media, IoT, crypto, Metaverse, and now AI.
Some useful, some not so much.
Tech firms have a lot of pressure to produce growth, it's filled with very smart people, and wields influence on public policy. The flip side is the mortage crisis, at least before it collapsed, got more Americans into home ownership (even if they weren't ready for it). I'm not sure the tech sectors meteoric rise has been as helpful (sentiment of locals in US tech hubs suggests a overall feeling of dissatisfaction with tech)
We've lost a lot of ability, societally speaking, to maintain order and discipline bad behavior. People are volatile and the youth have very little respect for their elders. Just read testimonials from teachers about the environment in public schools. They're structurally prohibited from addressing problem behavior, from kids not turning in work and being given a million chances to "make it up" or just being given a 50% for not doing ANYTHING and then being "socially promoted", to not being able to remove problem kids from their classrooms, to the gutting of the para role, etc.
And this is just a microcosm of the wider society. Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun. We're also living in larger and larger polities and individuals are far more anonymous. That means the grapevine and social shame are night impossible to enact.
But this is the atomized, individualist, omni-competition that we keep being told is great for society and the economy.
> Easier to just remove yourself from a situation when anyone could be carrying a gun.
There are more guns than people in the US. Whole states have open and concealed carry laws. You'd have to live like a hermit.
The solution is blindingly obvious: make gun possession and ownership illegal. Yet we can't stop indoctrinating kids from a young age that guns are a human right, no matter the cost.
And to your point, a lot of the time people will say it's just a gun county it's hard to disentangle from that. And in a sense, I agree: gun culture is the problem, and identifying it as such and dismantling it needs to be part of the program, not just laws.
Though it's often intended as a defense, I think it's most appropriately interpreted as a policy recommendation.
All this does is keep people alive. Certainly important and might solve the final "acute" symptom but doesn't address a single other thing in the parent comment. All which is very much true if you are paying attention to the way society has gone just in the past 50 years.
Civil engagement is down across the board. Standards are slipping at best for nearly everything, and societal enforcement of the rules has become more and more nonexistent if not outright punished. And I don't mean policing.
It's like a workplace. If you are dealing with problems in your workplace by telling everyone to go to HR you've already lost. You cannot have mommy and daddy solve everything and remain functional. If society as a whole cannot react daily to maintain order for mundane social interactions and everything needs to escalate to a legal or policing situation you've already lost and the "guns" part is almost irrelevant.
Performative radicalism that freaks out wider society instead of slow steady progress has led to the near complete irrelevance of the left in the west, especially the anglosphere. I mean, UK Labor is a centrist pro-capital party now. It's over.
Naive idealism mixed with immaturity leads to these things. Wishing for things to be so doesn’t make them so.
Someone somewhere has to work for things to happen.
To me it feels like when a parasite finds a weak host. Neither will survive long. The relationship can be symbiotic but that requires effort as well as conscientiousness on both sides. The place was not running at break even but they wanted more despite that. They wouldn’t even accept cuts in staffing… They bled it to death with idealism.
Business is hard. It's hard enough to "start a bookshop". And while I admire folk who have a bigger vision, the whole thing rests on the business being successful.
Given the right priorities, it can work. A business can be profitable, and also embody progressive principles. It can be both an income, and socially responsible.
But most businesses fail. 90% or so don't survive 5 years. That's before adding externalities.
So starting a business with goals orthogonal to successful business is twice as hard.
I was struck by the demand by employees to be a collective. Thats an unusual request. It suggests that, even hired, that was floated as a path. It suggests the owner wanted employees to be "part of the family". So suddenly getting decisions from on high was jarring for them.
Unionising is a strange response. (Even the union was surprised.) Frankly the writing was on the wall at that point. A more experienced business person would just have closed then and there.
Obviously the employees thought that they could have succeeded had they just got the stock for free. I suspect not. They wanted more pay, would have had no incoming monthly investment, and would be short at least 1 worker (enough was likely doing a lot of work.) Doesn't sound like a solid business plan to me.
So yes, idealism is fine, but it doesn't make the business work. And I agree, in this case it killed it. But frankly, starting a bookshop these days is a pretty doomed approach. A (good) coffee shop (with some books) may have had a chance.
No true Scotsman? Yes, there are conservative loonies today (just as there always have been). There are also hangers ons/co-opters/johnny come latelys who adopt the "conservative" label as a means to legitimize their platforms. None of these are relevant to what is being discussed in this thread.
The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on conservatism is exactly what I mean:
> Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.
By promoting the incumbent ideas, there's no chance that they "freak(s) out wider society" as the OP said. The ideology is simply to resist change, which will almost always be less controversial than advocating for change.
The so-called conservatives are radical centrists at best. While today’s „far-right“ would have been considered moderate conservatives not so long ago.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The current "far right" is rounding up the brown people (except the ones they agree with) and sending them to concentration camps. That would have been unthinkable a few decades ago, even on the right. And it's definitely not centrist.
As a european, US migration situation is insane. And it’s hard to cal US „right“ that tolerated such policies promoting illegal migration for decades a „right“ wing.
And european mainstream right is no longer right for the last few decades on those topics. Today’s „far“ right sound like what mainstream right would say 10-20-30 years ago depending on exact country.
You are saying that for you, last decade's right is centrist or left. And you are saying that last decade's right would call the current right centrist or left. So what are you?
Good question. My views didn't change. But somehow from voting moderate centre-right or even classical liberal I had to start voting for far-right instead. So... who am I?
You said it yourself - even the right used to tolerate illegal immigration. But you were okay voting the center right at that time. And now you're voting the far right who are putting them in concentration camps. So you're far right, but you didn't used to be.
My views didn't change. I voted moderate right before it was tolerating migration.
Here „far“ right offer is to deport illegals and curb new migration.
Also, we have detention centers since forever. What do you propose to do with illegal migrants waiting deportations instead? Put them in prisons? That's a wee to harsh, isn't it?
Of course, then people can start talking BS about muh concentration camps with allusions to soviet and nazi camps. But those camps had some specific features that ain't present in detention centers.
Why do you think so? Would it not be better to recognize fascism/nazism as early as possible? Hitler was in power for several years, doing various increasingly bad stuff, before he started the holocaust.
Nowadays this label is overused so much that it pretty much lost it's meaning. It's not fascism-nazism to be against mass migration. Nor it's fascism-nazism to not fully support whatever letter comes next to join LGBTQAZ+ or whatever it is now.
Just like it's not communism to advocate for better welfare, labor rights, affordable housing and so on.
It did. The War on Terror was so bad for the political actors who took part in it in the US (and by ripple effect in Europe), that they were trounced by Obama, who is still the highest approved US President in the 21st century.
Trump won, partly by saying the War on Terror was a disaster and the Republicans were disasters. He distanced himself from a right wing which had done the same thing, made itself irrelevant to the mainstream with performative patriotism while we actually lost lives and trillions of dollars in a quagmire people didn't want about 1-2 years into it.
Whoever brings the left back will have to distance themselves from the party in a similar way
Having a set of beliefs tethered to reality probably. Also as a general principle the right/centre don't believe the job of the government is to interfere in every aspect of peoples lives. This at least limits their ability to reproduce the empty gestures and moral lecturing of the left.
That reminds me, yesterday a friend told me she believed the Trump assassination attempt was staged to make him look good: that the shooter had missed on purpose and the ear wound was fake.
I mean… it’s not impossible. I just don’t think Trump is that smart, though.
I’ve heard people making this up to. Yet their instagram and twitter is full of people praising assassinations, but then when they are attempted they claim “hoax”.
Or maybe something unrelated happened (business becoming more capital-intensive perhaps?), and everyone except the most radical moved on to other things?
The extremely effective general strike that happened in Italy of a few days ago didn't start from academia, but dock workers in Genoa. Grumpy, robust, very left-wing dock workers.
The biggest issue of most "performative", as you call it, left wing movements is the lack of direct experience with everyday politics. Real-world politics are extremely messy, often in direct conflict with our ideals. Stuff like, How far you can push your message, how far can you pull the strings of the people and the institutions around you.
Those workers have a very good understanding of working both with strong forces and delicate equilibriums (...equilibria?). Both in their everyday work and their contractual situation. Otherwise people die, for real. They knew exactly what they were doing to get their end goals.
I see the same approach in people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Interestingly enough, she has too a working class background in a field where power balance is paramount. On the other hand I can't think of a single well-known British Labour politician who shares the same.
But she worked as bartender[1] - which is one of those jobs that teaches you how "Fuck Around, Find Out" works in real life, very quickly. Again, it's not matter of social or economic status, but coming to understand extremely diverse social dynamics outside of the academic field.
Both her and the dock workers were pretty effective in their causes because they have experienced first-hand how going for an half-assed or whimsical approach even in everyday politics bites you hard.
[1]Also wikipedia says that her mother was a house cleaner and school bus driver?
Someone who spends most of their career working in bars and restaurants could be called working class. Not someone who does it as a temporary job for a few years after their university degree while waiting to find something better.
Not really. Don't know about what really happened here, but if a place is performative, and mostly unneeded and irrelevant, it tends to blow itself up, and then the problem clears itself away. Movements that stick around and achieve things have their vicissitudes as well, but they get through them.
Sure fascism is getting some power, but not because of left radicalism.
It got powerful because millionaire CEO sponsored them, due to them loving the idea of techno feudalism. And by being enabled by those who said "ignore them they are just trolls". And by support from Russia.
Labour has been "Blairite" ("centrist pro-capital," or just say neoliberal) since the SDP sabotage and the endless, worthless reign of Kinnock. This happened at the same time the New Democrats were stomping the Rainbow Coalition into the ground to finalize the transformation of the US Democrats into the exact same thing.
UK Labour has been a "centrist, pro-capital party" for probably your entire life (or at least most of it.) The only reason Corbyn even ended up in front is that a bunch of centrists nominated him as a joke candidate, and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed Miliband had changed the voting rules and accidentally made Labour a democratic party. Of course the membership voted for Corbyn, everybody else was garbage.
Same reason why Trump won the Republican primary in the US - the Tea Party had forced the voting process to be democratic. Unlike the Democratic party, which doesn't even have a vaguely democratic process, culminating in them having absolutely no process in the last election. I still insist that if Sanders had run as a Republican in 2016, he would have been president.
That telephone monopoly was privatised - and later dragged their heels on rolling out broadband because ISDN was so profitable, causing untold damage to the UK tech economy as the country fell behind on connectivity.
It’s a great parable of badly-managed state-run monopoly vs badly-managed privatised monopoly.
If the Tory government hadn’t reserved the market for cable TV exclusively for two US companies, NTL and Telewest, BT would have rolled out fibre to the home in 1990.
I don’t think I blame BT for not wanting to invest in a market it was barred from making a profit in. This is the result of heavy handed local regulation strangling a national incumbent for the sake of foreign interests.
At any point other competitors could have made the same investment but didn’t want to either until relatively recently.
Well one of these things happened and the other one was a hypothetical? It seems very wishful thinking to assume it just would've happen if the politics of the 70s had some how limped into the 80s
>and they hadn't been paying attention when Ed
Miliband had changed the voting rules
and accidentally made Labour a
democratic party.
Great line.
I think it's fair to say that both conservatives and labour have simply been riding on Margaret Thatchers coattails for the last 3 decades. If any of them have come up with any great original ideas of their own i haven't noticed.
On the subject of democracy it has been very inconvenient recently for both parties. This is where kier starmer comes shining through. In every other area he's bumbling, indecisive and unambitious to name just a few of his traits. But when it comes to maintaining control of his party he's masterful (well, uncharacteristically competent anyway) . He took full advantage of his opposition years to purge the Corbynites from his party. He had the time, it's not like he was doing much opposition. He recently took advantage of a scandal to rid himself of his more leftist and popular deputy Angela Rayner and did a cabinet reshuffle, buying himself more time.
It's noteworthy that the only single occasion that he took any firm and decisive action was in suppressing the right wing riots and prosecuting all the instigators in a truly impressive display of efficiency from the law enforcement and judiciary.
I agree with your analysis of the Democrats. It's hard to manufacture consensus while ignoring your electorate. Especially when you have such an outspoken rival like trump. Starmers opposition is so pathetically bad that he looks ok by comparison.
Fortunately, the status quo was bravely rescued by the Guardian's non-fact-based yet effective discovery of Corbyn's antisemitism. Gotta love such center-left newspapers.
That was the point I stopped buying the Guardian, I'd like to say it was ideological but the fact is it became boring, they only had about four versions of the line against him which writers would rotate - there's only so many times you can read the same thing.
Well Corbyns been hard at work proving them right. At least people should be pondering how making palestine a cornerstone of his political ideology would meaningfully help Britain. Unrelated but it's something George Galloway should think about. I accidently listened to about 30 seconds of him talking and he seems to be a captivating speaker.
Anyway what sunk corbyn wasn't his anti semitism, that was the excuse, but his socialism, which isn't at all what New Labour is about. Starmer is a centrist, which stems from his policy of having no position on anything. He is rightfully mistrustful of the left wing of his party. They would have lost in the elections.
Of course it was his actual old-school social democrat values that did him in - can't have that in a party called Labour. But the look wouldn't have been right, so an absurd excuse was found.
"Performative radicalism" is a problem left and right
Look at UKIP, blaming the cluster fuck of the Brittish economy on immigrants, who are weak, other and easy to blame for damage caused by making taxpayers pay for banker's misfortune and Brexit
I am in New Zealand and we have the same problems, on the left and the right.
It got the Bolsheviks to take over, and one of their main goals on international stage was to estabilish Communism in Germany. They didn't get to it only because they were defeated by Poland in 1920, and you can't get to Germany without conquering Poland first. So, Germans funded a party that nearly started a war with their own country. That's a hell of a gamble.
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