The west doesn’t scream. The west condemned Alawites for not liking to be massacred.

And this is stupid. Inverted signal is the same signal, just inverted. It’s not independence of thought.

Yes, I missed that part, meant more the “working all your life on the same plant” thing.

What he says is less important that what he does.

I wonder how the red necks that have “Russia and Muslims are bad” engraved into their spinal cords are taking this?

If he takes money from Russia, I’ll confidently proclaim this world is done.

If his successor is Vance then the invasion of Canada and Mexico might actually happen.

Is Mexico a major furniture manufacturing country?

al-Sharaa is the best thing to happen to Syria in decades

Could we please stop? He’s a jihadist saying pleasant things to Europeans and Americans with nobody caring whether they are true.

Ahmed al-Sharaa is the guy whose dogs are massacring Alawites right now, mostly done with that.

Can I have my A for this answer?

Talleyrand, I think, took bribes for shapes of the borders in treaties he affected.

The USSR didn’t have any limits to choosing an employment

You were distributed to a place by the state after finishing your education. If you left that place too soon, you’d be frowned upon and that’d be mirrored in your labor book (USSR had such a document, basically a dossier documenting your whole history of employment with characteristics, you could get such a “flattering” characteristic by a superior not liking you that you’d never be accepted to a good place after, and you couldn’t refuse or lose a record in your labor book).

and people weren’t forced to work anywhere.

Being unemployed for too long was literally, seriously, illegal in the USSR. Google for “тунеядство”.

People with something really bad in their labor books (say, dissidents) or some other necessary documents (being German after the war, being Jewish in a wrong period of time) had problems finding a place that would accept them, and would sometimes be prosecuted for being unemployed (that was usually informal employment, because you still had to eat something).

But in general yes, some kind of employment was always possible. Dying from hunger or being homeless was almost ruled out. Most of the population lived in some sort of “acceptable poverty” - conditions very bad by US measure, but with the previous correction. That’s sort of one good thing that most people from ex-USSR agree on.

Seems that they want to repeat the USSR of 70s, just capitalist and without the revolution and industrialization and mass repressions preceding stages, and rather right-wing.

Maybe they want that to avoid the same fate due to avoiding state capitalism and overregulation combined with politics inside the bureaucratic machine. If they are moderately smart.

Or maybe they just want to repeat the same track with modern technologies. Then it’ll suck.

A couple more world wars with a depression, something like that. Just 20 years more

One can have a laptop-form dock station. Or something like.

Then it’ll even out after some time.

That’d be the humanity.

Any system without wide popular involvement turns into shit.

Wide popular involvement requires simplicity and small number of levels, and ability to ruin and rebuild any part of the state apparatus quickly. So it’s limiting, but those limits are liberating, one can say.

At the same time there are no good systems for that wide popular involvement, one would have to pick between Switzerland and the idealized Soviet system, neither is perfectly functional.

I mean, I doubt he’d refuse her offering to SLAM him, I think there was no such offer.

Franco sort of was nicer.

All of STEM is suffering because of corporate greed and rising anti-intellectualism.

How do I say that even … it’s normal. When you are talking about infinite growth being unsustainable, that means that at some point the industry should implode.

They have sort of an oligopoly and stagnation now, which is why all these layoffs happen - the “AI” solves some problems cheaper than people, even accounting for the worse results.

But if we imagine the industry suddenly destroying that oligopoly and becoming interesting again, it still would require less people.

And when they start going down financially, they might invade Madagascar or Guyana or something like that as a last resort and turn into a pirate republic, having enough troops. Yes.

I sometimes feel like bare-metalling FreeDOS. Except that and modern laptops, ha-ha, shouldn’t work too well, but at the same time Lenovo even sold some with it pre-installed.

Would just play X-Wing and TIE Fighter and WarCraft II, edit simple text documents, smile at how right it’d feel.

Surprise - people saying things you like are not your friends any more than people saying things you hate.

Surprise - people saying things you hate are not your enemies any more than people saying things you like.

Surprise - the words “socialist” and “capitalist” have no useful meaning at all. Specific solutions devised and offered as part of something “socialist” or “capitalist” are all over the place of the choice of instruments, with nothing uniting them along those lines other than how cover art aesthetics unite books.

And surprise - people saying ugly and dumb things might have a better idea of what they are doing than people who seem very fine. No connection at all.

I think Alex Karp and his colleagues are quite close to having a bunch of Starlinks and AI-powered combat drone networks covering all the globe. Maybe with some commercial stuff working similarly. The future might be theirs. Yep, that’s a very raw and stupid application of computing power and it’s dystopian, but what gets deployed IRL matters more than elegance.

Also this is in the context of USA giving Israel a kick in the butt, so maybe it’s not such bad news that they are getting involved with Arab monarchies and not, say, with Turkey or Russia.