It’s antisemitic to talk about how Israel developed its nuclear capacity.

the CHIPS act is the grift that keeps on grifting

These problems are often presented by Americans a cultural but in reality they are the problems of global capital.

Taiwanese and Chinese Bosses think that the US system of bribery is too inefficient and that US workers are too expensive compared to their lack of skill and dedication. (See American Factory, it’s really good at laying this out)

These economic realities are different in China and Taiwan because they are not the imperial core. This experiment was doomed to fail because reindustrialization is fighting against the direction of the market and regardless of who controls the coin purse, nobody is going to take on that risk. The CHIPS act and things like it, give away free money which incentivizes failure because in order to derisk the proposition the US government has to make it profitable regardless of the success of the venture. It’s almost like reindustrialization of these key industries needs to be based on a nationalized industrial capacity, especially if we’re going to view it from the basis of national security.

But alas Americans are too capitalist brained to even understand 20th century nationalist logic anymore.

Audiobooks aren’t really a good solution to be honest. Reading / writing literacy are the basis of scholarship. We have centuries of research and examples that we’ve turned our back on that efficient learning happens only when you can unlock good literacy skills. Specifically the aspect of reading/physical writing/sublingualization is a cornerstone of comprehension of complex ideas. With something like Marxism that’s based on understanding both technical and archaic language and social constructs it becomes really hard. There are tons of self professed Marxists that couldn’t tell you what commodity fetishism actually means in simple terms.

Great example is the Communist Manifesto itself, meant to be a pamphlet for factory workers in the 19th century, but is typically a mildly difficult text to approach for the average person today.

Audiobooks can replace something like pleasure reading where you’re just reading pulp garbage, but they’re not really a good replacement for learning.

The parentposting is the worst with math.

My favorite flavor is the “THIS 5th GRADE HOMEWORK IS TOO HARD” when the adult clearly has never learned basic concepts like order of operations (PEMDAS) and cardinality of logic (e.g. how you solve sudoku where you order working through the solution always taking the smallest number of unknowns, first solve places where only one numbers missing until there are no first rank order problems, then move on to second rank order problems where two numbers are missing).

But there are definitely parents answering ‘she was looking for Romeo when she said “wherefore art thou Romeo?”’.

You can 100% see this degradation with adults in real time if you look at popular reality TV shows that have puzzle/knowledge/trivia components like Survivor and The Challenge and just binge watch the whole back catalog. You’ll see things getting harder until the game hits its stride and identity but then at one point just simpler and simpler and simpler.

Survivor is actually pretty bad now because the entire show started cheaping out and reusing things over and over again. So people just started 3d printing the puzzles and memorizing them. Literally No Reality TV Contestant Left Behind style pipeline. The other thing is that they completely devalued the actual survival aspects of the show, and it’s a game of attrition where it’s who can think straight on the lowest amount of calories. The only reason to know any actual survival skills on that show anymore is just in case of tie breakers where they have to make fire from flint.

Yeah because it’s primary research and this is a huge unaddressed and uncared about problem that’s only growing. The last National Assessment for Adult Literacy took place in 2003.

PIAAC (PROGRAM FOR THE INTERNATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF ADULT COMPETENCIES) which this is likely partially based on is typically who provides the survey data to these institutions.

Barbara Bush Foundation is another source that deals specifically with this.

A lot of this data is cobbled together because the government has practically defunded any studies of this issue. Literacy has effectively been taken for granted and hasn’t actually been upheld. Everyone in this space says more data is needed but isn’t optimistic that more data is going to paint a better picture of literacy (both in children and adults) in the US.

It’s not about serving assets it’s about hiding telemetry from adblockers, dns filters, ip lists, etc.

Almost every B2C company I’ve worked at, I’ve written or had my devs write proxies for whatever trackers we use. The reality is that every company to whom this data matters to figure out their business model will proxy their trackers. If they don’t they need to fire their lead engineers.

It’s actually pretty easy to disguise this traffic even to the point where you can use the originating server/cdn to interleave the tracking with the content source.

Most companies are incapable of actually building something this techical.

Damn I wonder why there’s a real feeling out there that laws are applied unevenly depending on your wealth / social position. Can anyone help me figure out who’s causing this???

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CHIPS was always going to be a giveaway for nothing. It reminds me of that FoxConn CEO’s quote about the fact that the US could pay them to fab in America but nothing would actually come of it. Then they just dropped that $10B Wisconsin project as soon as possible.

That was under Trump. Biden literally saw this and doubled down thinking that TSMC would roll over.

I think one thing you guys should keep in the back pocket, is that Mozilla jobs are the outlier. The average Open Source Developer salary is very close to the US Federal poverty line. They’re paid mostly in comped passes to conventions. Most of the “averages” you see are compiled from data from companies like Mozilla. OSS devs are typically make around $30k in pure cash, even for ones working on large projects. The only OSS devs that make between the $95k and $150k (25th and 75th percentiles) you’ll see online are ones that work for Mozilla, or Intel, or whoever.

What makes this possible is MIT licensing models that corpos shilled in the 2000’s and 2010’s that directly benefit corperate engineering costs, but don’t contribute back nearly the value they extract. If the majority was GPL + copyright assignment, there would be income streams for leveraging OSS projects in closed source applications via licensing deals.

But the genie is out of the bottle on most of these things. See how Amazon is effectively forking an destroying existing OSS models via AWS provisioning of things like redis and elasticache.

existing domestic oligarchs and the political class in Russia. They had no interest in handing the country over to the west.

I think this only holds true if you copy-paste Putin and the oligarchs from 2024 onto Putin and oligarchs in 2000. Putin is the reason oligarchs in Russia found ideological consistency and power ranking. During the years of Yeltsin and the early years of Putin, oligarchs were hypercapitalist outgrowths of organized crime, corrupt Soviet politican holdovers, and a new class of educated liberals leveraging knowledge and forging western ties. All of these people simply were stealing from the same pot, and trying to kneecap each other. They were all essentially vors, the oligarchs didn’t care about “handing the country over to the West”, they cared about personal enrichment. In fact the educated liberal oligarchs would have loved more Western ties.

In this critical period if the US blitzed strong economic ties and huge foreign direct investment, they would have easily bound Russia. If every oligarch regardless of position was offered significantly good deals from the US overnight, Putin would have either been forced into making a real mistake to capitulate to it or he would have had to fight it during a time where he was relatively weak.

The end of this period really started with the jailing of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, that’s the point where Putin’s direction and dominance finally crystalized. Compared to the jailing of Khodorkovsky the killing of Boris Nemtsov or any other actions against dissidents were swatting away flies. If in 2000 the red carpet was rolled out Russia would have been captured, and would only need the typical maintenance that the US offers to Gulf States.

Right, and that’s why there are growing tensions with the west now. The only reason Turkey gets concessions is because NATO wants to have access to Black Sea, and that makes Turkey strategically important. However, the attempts at regime change clearly demonstrate that the west is not content with the status quo.

Sure Turkey is embattled, but it’s restrained. That’s the point. By allowing Russia to slip out of NATO’s grasp Russia doesn’t have the same restraints.

France may have resisted more than the rest of Europe, but it is politically captured by the US to a huge extent today. As we saw during recent elections, the Atlanticist centre was not displaced even despite being deeply unpopular with the public. France continues to pursue self destructive policy that benefits US in regards to Russia and China.

Marcon’s unpopular policy decisions such as raising the retirement rate, and neoliberal economic reforms wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow in Russia with the public. Just look at how quickly Ukranians who are much more annoying as a population capitulated to IMF capture of their farmlands despite the existence of constitutional barriers. Conscription is deeply unpopular in Russia since WW2, and that barely creates resistance 3 years into a meat-grinder war.

It’s also worth noting that what you’re describing is precisely the strategy that US took towards China. The US leadership thought that if they brought China into the fold, created economic ties, and so on, then eventually it would become a vassal. It didn’t work in China and it wouldn’t have worked in Russia.

The problem with the US-China relation is the ultimate problem of the US as a Capitalist Empire. Capitalists and the runaway displacement of manufacturing were responsible for the US screwing up keeping the lid on China. In 1995-2003 Russia would not have represented a real shift away from US manufacturing given your previous observation and my agreement with that Russia is in fact a gigantic strip mine for natural resources.

However, my original point is precisely that equal relations were never on the table.

I agree, however I think that they weren’t on the table more from the US side, than they were from the Russian side.

Realpolitik is often used as imperial cheer leading and appologia. Mearshiemer is a real one for the fact that his version of realpolitik binds the empire as well. A major difference with him is that Mearshiemer recognizes that as powers grow their understanding of what security under the realpolitik framework becomes more paranoid. He essentially recognizes that under realpolitk the power of a country is inverse to it’s actual ability to hold to its advertised values.

I will always read Mearshiemer because his analyses are actually serious. Also fun fact Mearshiemer is actually Sanders left in his personal politics which is something you will never understand from reading his work. That’s why he’s worth reading.

The goal of the west has always been to try t Balkanize Russia and then plunder the resources. This is what they tried to do during Yeltsin years and what Putin ultimately put a stop to. While Russia is capitalist, it does have its own interests and it does not see itself as an inferior to the west. That’s the real point of contention.

I agree with this. My point is that I think this would also been possible through tiered neocolonialism by giving Russia a seat at the table.

The west was literally trying to get regime change in Turkey in the last election, and Turkey is now shifting towards BRICS as a direct result of that.

Turkey has always been playing both sides. It’s bought Russian weapons throughout the 2000’s to the detriment of NATO weapons dealers. Turkey has never been a rank and file loyal soldier. The US will always have to do this intranacine management within NATO, esp. with Turkey. In the case of France it has been resisting this kind of management and instead letting France manage it’s own colonial legacy through NATO. France has resisted many hegemonic actions spearheaded by the US and the US has simply done internal propaganda against it and has left it mostly alone. My point is that this would have been a viable strategy for managing Russia within NATO and would have worked a lot better against it because unlike France who has a restive population, Russia has a captive population and is well-managed through its hypercapitalist oligarchy.

Not only that but tighter economic ties that would come through NATO would actually have allowed America to over time disassemble Putin’s stranglehold within the country had they played the long game. Building up a cadre of oligarchs that overshadow Putin’s power would have been a lot easier with NATO alliances, because everyone would get rich and many would not have wanted to rock the boat. The West’s best tools of hegemony are economic and cultural. By attempting to isolate Russia they are fighting with one hand behind their back.

Putin’s positioning in the 2000’s was that he wanted a France-style relationship with NATO, not a Turkey one. He wanted NATO to roll out the red carpet as a show of that. That’s ultimately why Russia and NATO fell out. Putin sought his own way.

The other benefit to this is that by giving Russia a France-style seat, it diminishes the power of France. France has special rules because in reality France is the leading military power of continental Europe. The UK is just a tag-a-long. By having 2 large military powers in continental Europe in NATO, the US can easily play one off of the other.

After 15 years in the industry, I don’t actually hate cargo cult programming anymore. Cargo cult programing is a useful tool to deal with the industry. Junior devs are going to join a cult, you want them in your cult, and you want your cult to have clear rules. If they want to know why the gods rain cargo, they’ll ask. At one point you don’t have any real control over hiring even as a Lead, EM, etc, because in larger companies saying “no” often doesn’t matter when hiring has been dragging on too long. They need to fill seats for deadlines they decided without you anyway.

As a tech leader with standards, you either need to be in a wonderful company or you need to have a wonderful cult.

I don’t think that’s true. Turkey has never been a subordinate to the US not to the same degree as any EU country. They’ve always been a wildcard in NATO. Likewise Russia especially Putin’s Russia would be easy to subordinate. Putin needs flattery, he wants recognition that he’s part of the club. Had America flattered Putin through official means 95-2010, Russia would be in the tank. There’s very little actual ideological difference between the two countries ruling parties. If Putin was treated like a France level ally, where they’re allowed their own sphere of influence and can influence/direct NATO operations, Putin would have fallen in line.

Just think about it, Russia-Chechnya is a copy-paste of a NATO counter terrorism operation. If Russia was in NATO and could say, hey lets do counterterrorism in Chechnya, whenever the US said “jump” they’d say “how high?”

Brzezinski was decisively wrong, and his misjudgment helped to lead to the disaster of the war in Ukraine. Russia did not simply succumb to the U.S. plan to expand NATO to Ukraine, as Brzezinski assumed it would. Russia said a firm no, and was prepared to wage war to stop the U.S. plans. As a result of the neocon miscalculations vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia is now prevailing on the battlefield, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead

I agree with Sachs that Brzezinski was wrong. Sachs does not present the actual reasons why. Brzezinski claimed Russia was incapable of creating an anti-hegemonic collaboration in 1997. That was true, and it was true in much of the 2000’s. At one point that obviously stops being true, Brzezinski’s statement isn’t evergreen that’s simply now how history works.

However Brzezinski’s statement could have been evergreen had the United States asked Russia to join NATO in 2000’s. The NATO-Russia Council was the first step towards making Brzezinkski’s statement evergreen. In 2000 there was a real potential for Russia to join NATO, Putin asked about an invite, NATO said a noncommittal “just apply” response. Had NATO rolled out the red carpet for Russia like they do for Ukraine now, Brzezinksi would have been right forever.

The United States would have extinguished Russia as a competitor had they allowed them a seat at the table comparable to other “Great Powers” of Europe. They did not. When the US picks partners like this, they want bootlickers and grovelers. They want the opposing party to know that they are subservient and to act accordingly, that the US is their savior. That’s been the interaction between the US and most NATO expansion countries in the 2000’s.

The US simply shot themselves in the foot with this one. The reality is that the US is incapable of running an amazing hegemony because of its obvious political neuroses. Those are problem #1, they can’t even handle the #2 problem of the obvious contradictions in the world order and capitalism because they’re stuck viewing it through a neurotic lens of their ideology. Those first order problems of neuroses have weakened the hegemony long before the second order contradictions start nipping at the seams. Those second order contradictions have been nipping, especially with Turkey.

People sleeping in front of buildings and socialized housing lower property value, I bet if we filled the walls with homeless people it would raise it

Where have I heard this before…

It’s sensational to talk solely about burqa’s and niqab’s, but this applies to motorcycle helmets and balaclava’s too, of course.

But this is simply just hide the intent of the law. As others have pointed out in below advertising and performance art is allowed. So Gucci Burkas are a-okay legally speaking as they advertise the brand.

Likewise if you look into the issue, Switzerland has also by referendum banned the building of minarets 10 years ago. Both referendums were spear headed by Walter Wobman, a right wing MP whose literal political positions are both anti-migrant and anti-“Islamization”.

These things are so transparently racist that you can disprove these talking points about “equality under the law” for face coverings by a few clicks and some light reading.