It’s the same picture

Okay, but all of those are evil countries corrupted by the insidious hand of the Marxist Antifa

Hey now, if you hand everyone a “Hitler” card in Secret Hitler, it plays very strangely but in the end everyone wins.

Idk about “useless”. But the way the article doesn’t seem to want to mention the read/write speed is definitely indicative of some drawbacks to the medium. They repeatedly stress “cold storage” which could mean its a useful form of long term archive or backup for static data. Plenty of demand for that kind of information, especially in an era when real time overwriting by malicious actors and artificial engines has been fucking with historical data retention.

But its not going to replace your hard drive any time soon.

Anyone get the IO on this device? Cause I’m guessing its going to be less good than magnetic storage.

I assumed the Ghost of Christmas Imperative would just be shouting “CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS!” over and over again, while blowing an air horn that plays carols.

So to ignore class and imperialism in your advocacy for trans rights means to effectively throw the majority of trans people under the bus.

I mean… this is literally what the liberals have said they want to do, re: 2024

Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.

The number of policies liberals seem willing to support shrinks with every election cycle as reactionaries in national media flog them for speaking out. Police Brutality in 2014. Health care in 2016. Climate Change in 2018. Student Debt in 2020. Opposition to Genocide in 2022. It seems 2024 was the year we had to stop caring about LGBTQ.

I wonder what we’ll be asked to give up next in our quest to win that “Moderate” voter.

Very helpful if your goal is to impose increasingly draconian state security measures and tighten control over the economy from the executive level. Economic manipulation becomes a carrot-and-stick tool for compelling private adoption of public policies.

Trump’s done an excellent job of enriching the friends in his immediate social circle, so from their perspective (and the perspective of their associated industries) the economy is “doing great”. Then the outside groups get labeled as “Gone Woke, Go Broke” failures and Trump leverages public discontent to intercede in their industries, buy out private firms, force out C-levels and managers under the auspices of “fighting DEI”, and replacing them with cronies he can then lard up with federal money.

This isn’t a novel strategy, either. American liberals sought to open up business leadership to minorities and women with a similar set of carrot-and-stick regulations, contracts, and subsidies. Reagan-Era conservatives employed similar strategies to force Evangelical Christian groups into big law firms and onward to the courts, as well as stacking them on the board rooms of big businesses.

Trump’s adopted the playbook to force a more explicit form of fascism across the Military Industrial Complex and the associated network of (already heavily reactionary) public-private partners.

One would like to believe this alarming tilt towards Barbarism would wake Biden-Era liberals up to the dangers inherent in the heavily privatized economic model they’ve championed. But all I’m seeing is ambient smugness, followed by ineffectual liberal reforms insisting people are “getting what they voted for” when the rotten economy beings to crumble in earnest.

First 9 years of school is absolutely mandatory where I come from

Attendance is mandatory. Failure is always an option.

Then after 12 years of school you still need a degree for most job listings.

You can find jobs (even good paying jobs) that don’t require a degree, but they tend to be labor intensive, health hazardous, and with awful working hours. There’s a job I’m always seeing open in Houston for non-college recruits that involves hosing out shipping containers at the port. The job starts around 6pm and you’re in a giant rubber hasmat suit dealing with tanker ships full of toxic chemicals. The bosses want you to work 12 hour shifts, you’re in close with heavy machinery on a dock, and you’re surrounded by carcinogens that you have to meticulously shield and clean yourself of and hope your PPE is keeping you safe on the clock.

$80k+/year. The bigger companies looking for people with experience will pay north of $150k.

You can also work out on a rig for $150k+. You can drive trucks overseas (Americans working in Iraq could earn $200k+/year back during the occupation). If you do have military experience, there’s a ton of money working as a “consultant” in Private Defense. No college necessary. But… you know… there’s trade offs.

The glut of US tech workers is due to the excessive number of H1B visas being issued.

That’s been part of it. But even with the H1B and the outsourcing, there’s a ton of technology to be administered, maintained, and repaired. We’re a technology economy. The glut of US tech workers is due to induced demand.

Why hire an expensive American new graduate when you can hire someone from India with 3-5 years of experience at 60% market rate instead?

Because you need to be able to communicate your needs fluently and India is in the wrong time zone. You can outsource some of your work some of the time, but follow this logic to its conclusion and you begin to ask why you’re even in business in the states. Why not just invest money in India’s private sector if you’re so convinced their workers can do a better job at a lower price? Why have an American business at all?

Replace me with an AI and I will laugh my way straight over to the brokerage where I short your stock.

Chevron replaced their whole IT department with Indian outsourcing companies a year ago and they’re already falling apart from the inside out.

I mean, me too. Glad I never had a talent or penchant for art. I’d be broke.

Church is just another form of entertainment for Americans.

as the adherents aren’t acting in ways that are harmful to others

The Buddhist successors to the Mongolian/Qing Dynasty were plenty harmful to others. That’s what sparked the student revolts responsible for their leadership’s removal.

You can blame the icky yicky communists for polarizing and galvanizing upwardly mobile tibetan youth into an insurgency. But falling back on CIA agitprop to justify what was effectively a US military operation intended to destabilize a border region isn’t proof of your humanitarianism. Even the Dalai Lama himself regrets letting the CIA militarize Tibet.

The fact that the US reneged on their promises and only used Tibet to extract information about China is depressing, but not surprising.

It’s the story of the Cold War told over and over again. The goal of these operations is to spark civil war, not to liberate or liberalize any population.

Mamdani is a pretty good example of the left doing things right

He ran at the right time, the stars aligned and gave him some truly wretched losers for opposition, and national media tripped over a dozen billionaire’s dicks trying to insert itself into municipal politics.

But I don’t think Mamdani would have been successful against a Guliani, a Bloomberg, or a DeBlasio. And if a Republican had won over a fractured Liberal/Left field, I suspect we’d be getting an earful about how Radical Islamists cost the Democratic Party the election.

There’s thousands of Mamdani’s in modern American politics. You can find them in every DSA chapter in America. He’s not simply the product of The Left Doing Things Right. He’s a product of the liberals and conservatives finally running out of gas, then tangling themselves in a knot trying to block an alternative.

The fact that I don’t fall over myself to agree with whatever the leftist opinion-du-jour is?

Getting strong Know-Nothing vibes of this whole thread. No real ideological thesis or central position. Just a bunch of hollow “I’m a free thinker because I hate you” reactionary slop.

Reminds me of the old joke about the conservative being whatever the opposite of a liberal is, updated daily.

These are all largely arguments over organizing a working class majority in control of it’s own lands and capital. None in these groups objects to the central thesis of worker self-government.

By contrast, centrist/right groups favor narrow hierarchies of elite oligarchs, them bicker over exactly which one of their kingpins should get the big chair.

if you don’t explicitly agree with everything we say, you are other and therefore evil

“Vote Blue No Matter Who”

(Except Mamdani)

Opposing fascism is illegal, and centrists have a fetish for Law And Order. That shoves a lot of people leftward by default.