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I mean, I agree about the fearmongering, but the comparison is off.

1947 was significantly safer than 2024 precisely because the USSR had tested successfully. If the US was the only country with nuclear weapons, it would have nuked the USSR, China, and a dozen other countries by now. This is how the US operates with technological advantages (when it still had them); From the air, from afar, safe on its big little island on the other side of the globe.

But today, it no longer has that advantage, and it's a dying empire, which in 1947 clearly it wasn't. Dying empires get desperate, especially after the loss of technological supremacy; all of its geopolitical rivals have hypersonics now, the US can't get one off the ground. It's been doing every desperate thing it can to extend the neocolonial party another few years. This is way more dangerous.

like trillion dollar bank bailouts, subsidies awarded through ruinous competition among jurisdictions, trillions and trillions of dollars of defense spending for which the government will invent endless wars.. like that?

what? no. Government money is a direct pipe to transnational corporations and the billionaires that run it. Welfare payments are peanuts compared to it.

who flagged this? why? unflag it

Also, while they save all the expenses on staff, meaning, gradually destroying hotel staff jobs, too. Airbnb: all the price of a regular hotel without the staff or attention.

I thought the same. The step to "renting to attend a protest" is miniscule. And they'll sell it, of course, as a "safety enhancing measure".

also strangely missing from this discussion about the supposed outrages of pricing when you round, and losing 0.1 or 0.2% in cash payments, is that credit card companies will charge that gas station is a bit over 2%. So no matter what coin you abolish, the gas station comes out on top on the cash payment, even if it's the quarter. It'd still come out on top if it was the dollar bill/coin for bills under $200, so, pretty much always.

but then, why do they not take no for an answer and keep nagging about it, and interpret "never" as "not in the next two weeks, but ask again, please!" if they don't have an interest in having these messages there?

(and no, "it's to help YOU, the hapless user! is of course never the right answer. Corporations never do things for users without an interest of their own.)

I thought the opposite, at least as a first thought: Roughly two or three years ago, facebook announced their intent to integrate their messengers - so that you could send a message from your fb inbox to whatsapp, from whatsapp to instagram. And since whatsapp has E2E as a major part of their marketing, I'd think adding it to FB and IG rather than removing it from WA would be the way to go.

(though of course it's not REALLY: it harasses you to backup your messages all the freaking time, and when I say "never", as I ALWAYS do, it asks again in 2 weeks. I assume once they're backed up on Meta's servers, there goes the encryption. But that's a parlor trick and they STILL have that data, as I assume at least 80% back up anyway and the rest is mostly worn down by the constant prompting.)

This (she) is why we can't have nice (non-corporate) things

then the US would declare it part of the "rules-based order" that nobody may use guns and bullets, and then the US will use guns, bullets, missiles, and chemical weapons while expressing grave concerns about any non-allied state using as much as a musket.

and then you're still the product, They're just charging everyone they can get their grubby hands on.

and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives.

I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in.

But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.

"negative waifu" is genius.

also, you can propagandize quite well with something that contains no lies. The current discourse conflates "propaganda" with "lie", but of course that's .. well, part of propaganda. The best ways to rile up a mass is to tell them verifiable things, but in selective ways, leaving out context, leaving out history, leaving out ambiguities; it would be hard to claim the information is "wrong" on its face, but it's still wrong simply because of what it leaves out.

That explains SO much.

I have no idea, I can never remember, it makes no logical sense - no, 12 noon is NOT post-meridian, it IS meridian. I usually go 11:59 or 12:01, and then I'm still not sure if it doesn't put the entire hour in some interdimensional hole where this doesn't make sense.

I've encountered software that just assumes everyone MUST have a middle name. I'm German, I have no middle name. Some software (well, online forms) make this a "hard" assumption, so you have to put an "X" or something in the middle name field; it'll scream otherwise

I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.) Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone. That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.

The lemonade stand put all the other stands out of business ...

who all got lemonade delivered for free by a million lemonade aficionados who wanted to share their lemonade with the world, for which YouTube showed the lemonade drinkers ads while pickpocketing all the documents in their wallet and copying them, also throwing buckets of lemonade in the trash because it wasn't the officially approved taste of lemonade, some other lemonade claimed there was a hint of taste that "copied" theirs, or for no stated reason at all, just dumped it, sorry, "terms and conditions", which.. we'll never tell you.

it also has little incentive to do so, as it's positioning itself as a possible mediator, one that also does a lot of business with Israel. And remember, the thing that led to the short animosity between China and the Soviet Union (well, one of the things) was that the SU was a country with a mission to spread its system, while China wasn't, and isn't. China seeks to do business with everyone without telling them how to run their affairs, quite unlike the US.

The more likely explanation is that the companies are catering to their custmer base. As in most of the world, there is huge public support to stop the killing of Gazans. Western companies, and companies in Wester-capured neocolonies, can't show support for Gaza. Maybe this is ALibaba testing out if it can. It'll be interesting to see if it lasts, or if it gets changed again in a few days. This should tell you more.

that's a tired old talking point that the US always throws in. The fact is that, as part of their agreements to operate in the Chinese market, Western companies cooperated with Chinese local companies, which included sharing of knowledge.

These terms, the Western companies agreed to to gain a piece of the juicy Chinese market. And the Chinese did it because they had the rare power to stop Western companies from just coming and draining resources, in the colonial manner the West usually operates.

Building on this, China has now surpassed the West on much development. Electric cars, solar technology, cell phone towers are now much more advanced in China.

I'm German, but in Bogota. Famously, Germany has a strong affinity to cash, credit cards have seen a slow adoption, and the cultural aversion to debt makes them still a bit "off", though they are accepted in the majority of places. More common are bank debit cards, but every business will accept cash. It's been historically common to pay for used cars in cash, out of a mix of spending limits on cards and a paranoia that this should be a transaction of equal immediacy.

In Bogota, well, much of the country is unbanked or underbanked. You can pay ANYTHING in cash through the ubiquitous "cash payment" officies (like Pagatodo). You give them a reference number the service gave you, and cash, and they mark your bill paid. This works for a five-dollar power bill, internet bill, evenfor as a thousand-dollar flight you booked online.

There's a paypal-like phone app, Nequi, that almost every colombian has as well, far more common than credir cards. While big stores and restaurants will accept cards, a small (and not licensed) street vendor will often have a QR code to pay by Nequi. This needs no special equipment and no special permits, apparently.

There are many signs "cash only", and many signs "cash and nequi, no cards", especially in small stores.

Nequi, however, is not available to foreigners, even to those who live in Colombia with permits. Cash is everywhere.

You actually understood "safe" to mean "safe for you" as in, making it actually safer for the user and systemically protecting structures that safeguard the data, privacy, and well-being of users as they understand their safety and well-being.

Nooo... if they talk about something being safe, they mean safe for THEM and their political interests. Not for you. They mean censorship.

unrealted to this thread, I know, but yes, thank you. I despise when the top results and the casual links to support something turn out to be videos. I don't want to stop everything I'm doing to dedicate 100% of my attention to something on a fixed take-up time schedule. Give me a text I can scan while my other audio keeps playing, thank you!

I get the impression that it's strategy to exclude competition that otherwise can't be beat.

You can't beat Huawei cell towers. You increasingly can't beat Huawei phones, which have become much better and cheaper than iPhones.

You can make up some story about it being spyware (while we have a mountain of proof that the US has spyware in Western devices...) and exclude them, also hoping that it will limit their advance. Of course, the opposite has happened, CHinese tech comapines have now rapidly gained the ability to sourse in-house (or in-country) what they used to import, leading to a tech jump through sanctions.

which doesn't matter, because the op is done.

15 years ago, the line was "you shouldnt trust wikipedia, because ANYONE could edit it! Those are not official sources!"

now, we've learned that you shouldn't trust wikipedia exactly because those same "official sources" edit it to align with their geopolitical interests.

Then again, we knew that 15 years ago - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia-idUSN1...

The UK has it as well, and it has at least 6 viable political parties that regularly win votes in districts. But yes, it makes it harder to "grow" as 5, 10% doesn't get you a foot in the door of power the way proportional representation does.

the "sane vs lunatic" was always a media construction. In US politics, for half a century, it was always "warhungry imperialist vs warhungry imperialist", only with a different color (and sometimes one of the warmongers had a nobel peace price). I mean, the Simpsons famously spoofed that in, what, 1996?