Sonori

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.

I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?

Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.

I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.

While I’ve only used one or two types of bluetooth headphones, i’ve never hand any trouble replacing the battery with them. The cups just snap out and then you unplug the lithium cell and plug a new one it, at least in my experience, so that may just have been a thing with the model you got.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1809311013839466846.html

I think this article sums it up well. In short, when the primary actual problem most left wing voters have with him is the issue the media largely ignores in favor of manufactured controversies like his age or his son missing a checkbox in n a government form, it is absurd to think that any other candidate would not quickly have similar controversies made up.

Functionally, probably? Given most states are sovereign instead of being divided up into zones by security checkpoints managed by a foreign power and which requires citizenship in said foreign power to cross. Between how much influence Isreal has in the government of the West Bank archipelago and the requirement that Palestinians possess a lower tier of Israeli citizenship in order to move from town to town, I don’t think a strong case can be made that the Isrealis have allowed the Palestinians have sovereignty over their own territory.

As such the Palestinian people of the West Bank have been and unfortunately practically remain part of the Israeli state, albeit a horribly discriminated and abused part of it with very good reason to splinter off into their own state. If Isreal had actually followed the UN mandate in the first place there might be a stronger argument that the West Bank and Gaza have always had a sovereign Palestinian government, but they functionally annexed them instead, and as such the West Bank and Gaza are now hopefully splintering off from the government they have been largely barred from participating in on racial grounds.

You mean free trade policies might result in foreign companies coming in and outcompeting local ones here instead of just allowing our companies to go into, take over, and outcompete their ones? How could this happen? Who could have possibly predicted this turn of events? How could anyone else’s companies come in and do unto us exactly what we’ve been doing to them for the last half century?

Why, next your going to tell me that in a free market a company with lower labor costs that is willing to slash profit margins might actually gain market share over a collection of companies that collectively decided not to compete with each other on margins./s

Cracking down on “illegal” immigration, exclusively targets legal immigrants showing for appointments at government offices, sounds about Right.

Surely randomly deporting legal immigrants can only going to lead to higher illegal imagination as people decide to not present themselves at the border in favor of banking on the shear impossibility of effectively survaling the entire country. But I imagine that is kind of the point, we need to manufacture a illegal imagination crisis but all we have is legal asylum seekers, so we better do something about that and bet that our electorate is too dumb to understand.

For a piece of legislation written to create a “free market solution”tm by a Republican think tank, they sure do love attacking it.

Almost certainly not, expanding 2.5 miles of additional catenary or especially third rail really isn’t going to have that much of a cost compared to specialized rolling stock. It’s also worth noting that the longer the route the less practical it is just down to the scale of battery needed and time it wastes charging.

Personally, i’d recommend Perun’s excellent video on the topic of your curious on the present state of nuclear deterrence, though it is several months old at this point.

It’s really strange how the stats own budget analysis blames a week stock market and tax income on said market for the drop as compared to their previous buget surplus but the narrative is that we need to bend over backwards for the poor billionaires.

I believe the top comment over there noted how at most wealthy Californian’s leaving could have contributed 1.4 billion of the 68 billion shortfall, so I’m as skeptical as every other time this argument comes up that tax is a major deciding factor on where you live and not things like jobs, geography, climate, weather, public services, safety, friends/family, house prices, cost of living, etc…

As a neat aside, an economic studiy found that at a national level the US could get up to a ninety percent tax rate on the super rich before enough of them would actually renounce their citizenship to get out of taxes to offset the increased income. Admittedly US citizenship is very desirable compared to most others, especially for the supper rich, but it gives some perspective on how high you actually have to go to make a difference.

It’s also worth noting that the current US tax rates are very low compared to both many other nations, and indeed things like corbate income is a third of its historical level during the 50s and 60s, and less than half of that of Canada. For instance 2017 corporate tax cuts alone are responsible for an estimated four hundred billion a year in additional national dept, have been found to have no statistical effect on market growth distinguishable from random noise, but arn’t likely to be fully removed anytime soon for some reason.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the rise of absurdly low taxes on high income earners nationally has been an increase in both public dept and taxes on low and medium income earners, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

They’ve generally been pretty open about using pirated books and data to train their product on.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/07/fruit-of-the-poisonous-llama/

There is also no law stating that copyright doesn’t apply to training AI in the same way it applies to every other use. Even this comment technically has a copyright, in the same way that people who write long original stories on forums like Spacebattles and Sufficent Velocity post by post still have a copyright on that story.

There is a carve out in copyright for academic research, but that protection disappears the second you start using it for a commercial purpose.

It’s a Chinese EV manufacturer who primarily competes on producing basic but solid EVs for prices on par with used gas vehicles by taking advantage of the lower cost floor of short range EVs. If you live in a nation without an indigenous car industry and especially if you live on an island or in a city, just need a basic car, and don’t mind having to stop for coffee every hour or two if you go on a road trip BYD has a lineup just for you.

The transformation doesn’t matter if it was illegally obtained in the first place. They published thier material for human consumption, not as AI feedstock. The problem for Microsoft is that the only thing special about chatgpt 4 is the amount of feedstock, and if they have to buy the rights to it suddenlyp putting half the internet into Siri and selling the result doesn’t seem so brilliant anymore.

You can also download many point clouds from opentopography if you have an .edu email around.

The party of “fiscal responsibility” tm everybody.