Capitalism is such a weird thing to live under.

The surface level is always like, “Look at how this individual overcome through their talent and willpower!”

And then underneath that it’s like, “Look at how this person was born into powerful connections, had favors called in for them, and leveraged those connections and the legal system to grow and consolidate power while throwing others under the bus to do it.”

To add to this point, China also developed their own sovereign internet tech/base. So although the western empire can to an extent try to block China out of participation in the western internet sphere of influence, they can’t block China’s use of the internet within its own sphere of influence and the impact that has for proliferation of internet services among its own people (which is a considerable portion of the world’s population). Even in a scenario of extreme efforts to “contain” China on the internet, China made sure it has sovereign power there. And if the western empire tries very hard to prevent other countries using Chinese technology when it advances beyond that of the western influence, all they do is make it so the rest of the world is increasingly technologically behind while China is doing widespread adoption of more advanced tools among it and its closest allies.

One way I read this in the broader sense:

Capitalists panicking: “Is socialism overtaking capitalism in both invention speed and integration to market the new normal?”

I recall from Blackshirts and Shirts (I believe that was the one) Parenti talking about how one of the issues the USSR had was that although it tended to outpace the west in invention, it had trouble at times getting that invention to a stage of mass production and distribution in a market to the same degree that capitalist-run markets would.

I get the impression CPC China has become a lot better on this than the USSR was and as a result, it enables them to both outpace in invention and integration to market. And the contrast is not only helping show how “house of cards” capitalism’s way of doing things is, it’s also genuinely threatening its ability to hold together because the capitalists no longer have hegemony in the market to be able to manipulate it as needed. With Deepseek, they seem to have treated it like an anomaly that they could contain. Now they are coming to understand that Deepseek wasn’t an anomaly. It was a tip of the iceberg representation of a shifting world order and AI is just one of the most visible areas being impacted because it’s the current prominent area of investment bubble hype that western capital is funneling its money into.

Am open to correction if this is too naively optimistic or simplistic a take on it, but that’s how it strikes me in the moment.

The US is allowed to have two jockeying parties vying for dominance to give the impression that fundamental change is possible through electoralism. But both are thoroughly controlled by bourgeoisie interests. It’s largely inconsequential if the occasional reformist slips through because the overall process and quantity of those who aren’t reformists will crowd out their influence into meaninglessness. And in the unlikely scenario that’s not enough to stop reformists from overwhelming the status quo, they can just call upon the police and military.

So yes, the democrat party is right-wing. But more than that, the system ensures it cannot get any further than mild reforms and that its policies will most represent the capitalist class.

It’s very P. T. Barnum? Something like that. Very much putting on a show, both parties. I think it’s part of why some USians have such a cynical view of politics and politicians. Their only experience with it is seeing a bunch of circus clowns pretend like they’re authentic tooth-and-nail fighters for the people. And no offense to actual circus clowns who are sincerely trying to entertain, rather than grift the populace.

Here you go: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Imperialism#Russian_"imperialism"

While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.

Lmaoooo

“I know you want to make things last and have a habitable planet to live on rather than destroying it in the name of short-term profit gains, but… have you thought about the economy?!? DID YOU CONSULT THE ECONOMY BEFORE YOU CONSIDERED TRYING TO LIVE SUSTAINABLY.”

Reminds me of something I heard in passing (cannot find a source atm, so take with a grain of salt) about an LLM that was trained on slack messages and would say shit about how it was going to do something and then not actually do it.

But it’s very believable, this kind of thing, when you understand that LLMs are mimicking the style of what they were trained on. I’m sure I could easily get an LLM to tell me it will go build a plane right now. Doesn’t mean it can go build one. LLMs are trained on the language of beings with physical forms who can go do stuff in RL, but the LLM doesn’t have that so it will learn what is functionally equivalent to being a bullshitter in the human case.

Fair enough.

I read through, but am not finding any detail info on what kind of workers these were that were fired. The wording is:

Today, we will begin reducing our workforce by more than 13,000 employees across the organization, and significantly reduce our outsourced and other outside labor expenses.

But I’m not sure if that means some of what counts as the 13k are outsourced and/or contract workers, or if that’s in addition to the 13k.

That said, I’m doubtful that most or all are engineer types, especially the more smug ones. The most experienced, which are also the most well-off financially and can contribute to them being the most smug politically, are also the most valuable and it’s why they get paid the class-consciousness-distorting money. It’s the ones on the lower rungs, including non-engineers in CS roles and the like, who are going to most easily have a business case made for firing them.

No disagreement here. But then, people like us have awareness on imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, etc. They may be polling a fair amount of dissatisfied liberals.

According to the poll:

Canada remains the top preferred destination for younger American women looking to leave, with 11% of those in the years since 2022 mentioning Canada as their top destination, ahead of New Zealand, Italy and Japan (all 5%).

I guess probably Canada because of proximity. The others seem more random as top choices. But I spose if they were polled in a way that listed limited number of countries, that could have skewed it too. I don’t know how exactly the poll was structured. The details at the bottom indicate the way it was conducted (via Landline and Mobile Telephone for 2024 US if I’m reading right) but there doesn’t seem to be information on what all questions they asked.

The main question referenced in the article is:

Ideally, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move PERMANENTLY to another country, or would you prefer to continue living in this country?

But presumably there is a missing followup question to ask about what country if someone says they would like to move.

The “race” part makes me think of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. And in that analogy, China (and more broadly, AES states) are the tortoise and the US (and more broadly, capitalist states) are the hare. AES states plan carefully, pace themselves, work their way through together. Capitalist states “move fast and break things” and then burn out systems and people.

I would love to see someone organize and put anti-imperialist questions to every representative in the country. Bet you only a fraction would entertain the questions and of those who do, few would sound like they agree.

As much as I like putting a spotlight on how little they act like representatives, this does have a partisan slant. I could easily see liberal democrats watching this and going “see, the problem is republicans.” Instead of “our ‘representatives’ are war-mongering imperialists.”

Like even Bernie Sanders, known for being one of the most reformist reps in the government (not that that means much since the standards are so low), failed to have the right narrative line on Palestine.

If people could see how thoroughly their representatives fall into step with war-mongering and empire, it may give more of them pause about the legitimacy of the system as a whole.

I’m inclined to think the reason is that too many people now associate “AI” with “slop”, so AGI is the favored buzzword to make AI sound like it’s going to places of unimaginable potential, instead of hitting the ceiling of infrastructure limitations that could take decades of careful research to overcome and which won’t be overcome simply by throwing more environment-eating data centers at the problem.

In a word: grift.

They’re in deep and AI being a specialized tool that gets reduced in environmental cost over time will not suit their desires for industry dominance. Luckily, China exists and we’re not dependent on these western capitalist grifters to define the entire landscape of large-scale AI.

Still, he added, “If you want to be a tech company you don’t get to say no let’s check out of this race.”

Capitalists see everything as race. A race to the bottom, the white race and racial supremacy, racy imagery and how they can profit off of it.

It also contributes to a kind of illiteracy of code in laypeople. I see this sometimes in the way video game players talk about a game’s code, being like “the spaghetti code teehee” etc., as if this explains every bug and design problem in a long-standing codebase. Since the code is hidden, it’s hard to correct them. Maybe it really is spaghetti code. But odds are its problems are more complex than that. And if modding communities tell us anything in games where modding is feasible, it’s that players are perfectly capable of fixing or creating workarounds for some bugs, even when constrained by the limitations of modding. And the company is just kinda mediocre at actually addressing issues. This is one of the annoying consequences of it - the NDA’d nature of everything means companies can hide behind “development is hard” narratives to excuse their institutional failures.

Open source not only furthers knowledge, but also enables some degree of accountability.

The conception of “white” as a race literally would not exist without the institutional power that made it so. It has everything to do with power.

White as a concept of race derives from the institution of white supremacy. An institution of power which designates certain people as “white” and others as “non-white”, and then it designates white as superior and everyone else as inferior. This is why you can’t be racist against “white” people. Because there is no institution of power based on designating people as white and then treating them as inferior; it’s just the opposite.

You can be rude to a person who is considered white. You can exclude them from things. You can even carry prejudices around about them (and if you do, it’s probably because you are dealing with them being the oppressor on a regular basis). None of those are the same thing as the oppressive experience of systemically enforced, institutional racism that “non-white” people experience on a daily basis.

Do you see the difference? One is having a bad day. The other is being gunned down by a cop because your skin was the wrong color and you get no justice for it. One is some people may not like you because of what they’ve learned to expect from dealing with you. The other is being enslaved by you and treated as subhuman. One is occasionally you may not get special treatment because of reform attempts to even the playing field for people who are treated as subhuman. The other is having to work extra hard in everything just to get seen, much less seen as anything resembling an equal.

There is no comparison. Some people who are considered white get confused somewhere in this and go “well my life was hard too!” Which is beside the point. The institution of white supremacy does not ensure that every “white” person has an ideal life. But it does ensure that a lot of non-white people live very short and traumatized lives as an exploited group of people, treated as subhuman. You can be white and still have a shit life. You can be non-white and somehow, despite everything, manage to have a relatively good life. But if you’re non-white, you are a special target for exploitation, specifically, if not a target of being murdered just for having the wrong skin color.

I could go on. It’s night and day difference.

He’s got a point there. I’m going to try looking at media that way too. Let’s see, the story of Adam and Eve is a metaphor for me taking a shit. I start out with the temptation to take a shit. When I actually take one, I am cast out of the land of needing to take a shit for taking one and left to walk the Earth, having taken one. Snakes squeeze things, so the snake represents the squeezing of muscles to evacuate my bowels of fecal matter.

It’s also a narrative that was lied about and warped heavily by israel since day one. Pretty sure it’s been confirmed that they fired on their own people Hannibal Doctrine style, but it’s made out as if all of the damage was caused by Palestinian resistance fighters.