16 karma · joined June 20, 2023
Perhaps. I'm sure most countries target all social media for 'influence'. But you hardly ever see pro-china 'influence'. 99% of the online 'influence' is anti china or anti-ccp. I'd love to see who is behind that as that's the real problem online.
99% of online propaganda is anti-china, anti-russia, etc. But the propagandists say pro-china or pro-russia online 'influence' is the problem. Hmmm.
Good. But just to be safe, you should check your credit report from time to time to make sure they didn't send your account to collections.
New York and pretty much all states east of the mississippi suffer from an overabundance of rainwater/water. Water will never be a long term problem here, at least not for a very very very long time.
As for kansas, no offense, but who cares? There have always been supposed water issues in that part. If the fear mongers were right, kansas would have been a barren deserted wasteland decades ago. Of course if the fear mongers were right, civilization would have ended already due to peak oil, global cooling, global warming, 2012, the pandemic, etc.
BTW, more than 70% of americans live east of the mississippi. So america isn't using up its groundwater like there is no tomorrow. Small parts of america might be. But on the whole, the US is rich in water. Water isn't a problem in the US and will never be. But for some reason, the fear mongering never ends. Maybe fear sells. I don't know.
Every fear years, the news runs the same fear mongering story. It's like groundhog's day.
Whatever happened to lake mead? Did the apocalypse already happen and I miss it? I swear a few years ago, california was over due to water. California still around? Mount Rainier was supposed to lose its snow cap by now. Is Mt Rainier bald as a monk now?
People bury time capsules in the hopes that it is unearthed 50 or 100 or 200 or 1000 years
You'll notice that most time capsules are buried with the expectation that it is unearthed on non-arbitrary dates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_time_capsules
> Also, why shouldn't the people who discovered it get to open it at this point?
The people who created the time capsules, if given the choice, would probably want it opened in 2028 rather than 2023.
Exodus 20:18 - "When the people heard the thunder and the loud blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance, trembling with fear."
The twelve olympians from greek myth became the twelve tribes of israel with became the twelve disciples of christ.
Noah's flood comes from the flood of gilgamesh.
It's all stolen and reimagined myth.
If you read up on US-Mexico history, you'd realize mexico needs protection from the US and nobody else. But your point is ultimately correct. We'd never allow any power to establish a presence in mexico. Not for mexico's benefit but our benefit. Even if mexico wanted to form a military alliance with china or russia or north korea, they wouldn't be allowed. We'd invade and 'liberate' mexico. This applies to canada and the rest of the western hemisphere. If a foreign power is occupying mexico, it will be the US and nobody else.
If you ever read a headline : 'Mexico establishes joint military base in chihuahua with china and russia'.
The next day's headline will be : 'US brings democracy and freedom to liberated Mexico.'.
Simple formula ( greed + opportunity ). Everyone from politicians to doctors to lowly grunts game the system if they can. Just because you are elected, are educated or wear a uniform doesn't change your innate human nature. You just hide it better. If you can get disability and work too, why wouldn't you. It's like eating your cake and having it too.
> I think a lot of people could convince themselves that if they don’t take advantage of something, someone else will.
Not themselves. Others. They will try to convince you with that rationalization.
For the rare and lucky few, it could be a stepping stone to product development. However, I've never seen someone jump from product development to a maintenance role. I think most developers would view it as a demotion and be insulted by it.
> including making a case for why their comp should track with some of the new-product-star people.
Never. The development team knows far more about the product and the business aspect of it than the maintenance team. If there is an issue that maintenance cannot handle, they reach out to the development team for a reason.
What? Of course it can be sold. To someone else who wants to run a mom-and-pop operation.
> might as well just go get a job for someone else.
Or be your own boss?
> That ultimately means that the business itself isn't worth anything
Are you serious?
> so when the owners decide they don't want to manage it anymore, it'll likely just have to fold.
Or they sell it to another person who wants to run the business?
You act like the only option is as passive investment.
Because the soviet union was russia. Russia is the successor state of the soviet union. Which country would you use? Moldova? Estonia?
> If you scoped broader to include the other post-Soviet counties you’d include all the countries where life expectancy has significantly increased since then.
Even russia's life expectancy improved after the initial disastrous decline. My point was that overall population hasn't recovered since the soviet collapse. This is true for ukraine, moldova, russia, estonia, most former ex-soviet nations. The only one to buck the trend are muslim ex-soviet nations.
> I would argue that WW2’s direct effects on thousands of millions of people deserve more weight than the fall of communism, which affected hundreds of millions.
WW2 didn't affect 'thousands of millions'. The world population in 1940 was around 2 billion. Also we are talking about the effects of the fall of the soviet union. Why I limited it to russia/soviet union.
> If we don’t take this type of scoping into effect I could claim that one person’s cancer diagnosis was a worse quality of life drop than WW2, and the discussion gets a little absurd.
Maybe it's a language issue. You don't seem to have a solid grasp of the english language. My point was that the fall of the soviet was worse FOR RUSSIA than ww2 was FOR RUSSIA. I'm not saying that the fall of the soviet union was worse overall than ww2. That's another discussion. So no. One person's cancer diagnosis isn't worse than ww2. One person's cancer diagnosis is worse than that person's diagnosis of ankle sprain. You see. You have one person and two bad events. You have one russia and two bad events. You compare the bad events on the one person or one russia.
You are being very disingenious here. I can't for the life of me understand why.
https://www.rferl.org/a/life-expectancy-cis-report/24946030....
To put it into perspective, after ww2, the russian population recovered in a few years. The russian population today is still below their 1990 levels. In terms of population, life expectancy, quality of life, etc, ww2 (as horrible as it was ) was an insignificant blip. The fall of the soviet union has been a generational catastrophe for russia. A funk they seem unable to get out of demographically, economically, politically, etc.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/RUS/russia/population
In the US, our population has grown 50% since 1990 ( almost 150 more people ). The russian population has dropped 5% since 1990. After ww2, russia had major population growth like the US. After germany and japan lost ww2, their population, economy, etc improved drastically. For some reason, losing a hot war ( japan, germany ) turned out to be much better than losing a cold war ( russia ).
Think about it, we are nearly 2 generations into the post-soviet world and russia still hasn't recovered their population. After ww2, russia almost doubled their population in 2 generations. Losing the cold war appears to have demoralized the russian elite and people far more than losing ww2 did to germany and japan. Why? Who knows.
What's unrelated? Many vegans claim that veganism is the natural human diet. That humans originally were vegan but became meat eaters. I've come across crazy vegans here who spout that nonsense.
> You then doubled down with an even pettier edit. It's not rocket science mate.
My guess is only silly vegans would take truth as a petty insult.
Also, I really don't care about the downvotes. I know why I was downvoted by silly vegans. My edit was a lure more than anything. So I can get a big laugh at their expense.
To propagandists hired to write propaganda.
If so, then every major US bank, oil, car, tech, transportation, banana, etc company is just an arm of the government. It's not just trillions in subsidies that we've provided for them over the past few centuries. We've fought wars to help these industries. The US government committed genocide against native, asians, middle easterners, etc to help these companies and industries.
Which is disappointing. India should have their own video sharing/livestream platform.
Yes. The elected leader is the boss of the executive branch of government. One doesn't negate the other.
Been saying the same thing myself. Every major company should own their own tech, media, etc stack. They should ban all competitors until they have their own homegrown champion. When india banned tiktok, I praised it thinking india will also ban facebook, google, twitter, etc in order to establish their own social media and tech ecosystem. Instead, the indian leadership just handed their social media space to facebook. China talked big about developing their own operating system, but seems to have limited it only to the public sector while microsoft, google and apple dominate the private sector. And lets not get started with the EU. Even though it's not a country, but the lack of participation by any european country in any major tech development of the past few decades is embarrassing.
> Small countries can only partially achieve this level of independence, but all countries should try.
Small to mid sized countries should form blocs of some kind to achieve some kind of independence.
> I think the world is even more beautiful with more diversity.
Exactly. What I despise are those who claim to support diversity while demanding everyone speak the same language, adhere to the same 'values', partake in the same culture, etc.
No there isn't. There is no question at all that any major company - tech, media, oil, banking, etc is independent. All major companies, anywhere in the world, are state corporations.
> They've shown a troubling bias in censoring anti-Chinese content
They've got to fight disinformation somehow. Right? It's funny how you, one of the biggest champions in the fight against disinformation, is upset when the chinese do it.
> Anyone claiming claims of CCP infiltration into ByteDance are "nonsense" is operating outside the window of evidence.
Morons who watch too much youtube nonsense spout ccp nonsense. That a major tech company is 'infiltrated' by the state is nonsense because as I said, all major tech companies are state companies. It would be like morons watching chinese version of youtube and spouting nonsense like google or facebook is 'infiltrated' by US state actors. Google and facebook are US state actors, they aren't infiltrated by us state actors.
It's funny how you just 'randomly' started spouting ccp nonsense as soon as the media and 'alt'-media started spouting the ccp nonsense. Hmmm.
Meh. Powershell, like most things windows, is just a dumbed down version of its unix equivalent to cater to its 'lower-skilled' user base. The best thing about powershell is its documentation and help section. It's far more 'detailed' and far more examples than its unix counterpart. How many times do you just wish a man page just had an example that you tinker with to get what you want? With powershell, you get that. Another thing going for powershell on windows ecosystem is that microsoft is tying powershell with their servers to make administration simpler and easier.
But powershell certainly isn't python or perl.
The fundamental difference between the past civilizations and modern civilization is that all past civilizations relied primarily on human/animal power and modern society relies on non-human power. This shift occurred in the early 1800s with the development of thermodynamics and the scientific understanding of the relationship between heat, work and energy. Once we could decouple work from human population, it allowed modern civilization to do more work with less humans. Something previous civilizations never were able to achieve. A train could carry more goods across the country far faster than a thousand horses. An excavator can dig out more dirt in an hour than a thousand men. Whether trains, excavators or super computers, the work that is done is due to thermodynamics.
You won't be remembered. The image of you is remembered. Not even that. It would be a photograph of a photograph of photograph of an image. We don't remember julius caesar or george washington. We remember the image of them. They themselves ( who they are or were ) doesn't matter. Just like we remember the image of Jesus Christ, even though the guy might not have even existed. Besides, eventually, there won't be anyone left to remember the image of you. So what's it all about?
Who cares? Your example has no relevance to my assertion. The difference is that the soviets and mullahs started out as marxists and muslims. The british empire didn't start off 'to civilize the world'? For hundreds of years, the brits were stealing land, transporting african slaves, invading countries before they started peddling the 'civilize the world' propaganda.
> The British mostly did believe that their great empire was destined to civilize the world
No they didn't. They made that up that nonsense in order to justify or rationalize their barbarity. Stealing is bad. Killing is bad. Even the brits understood that. It's only after a few hundred years of murder and theft that the brits invented the 'civilize the world' or 'white man's burden' nonsense.
> and the Americans believed they were creating a new Atlantis and that what they were doing to the natives wasn’t actually as bad as it was.
Nope. We never believed that nonsense. The city on a hill nonsense is justification to hide our own greed and imperialism. We knew what we were doing to the natives. Just like we knew what we were doing to the slaves was bad. We did it anyway because of our selfish interests.
> The problem isn’t that we are all sociopaths making up fake motives to justify crimes
No. It's not that we are sociopaths. It's that we are greedy. It's all too human and it's all too mundane.
> Hence the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
That's the point. There was never any good intentions. You act like the brits started their empire to do good in the world. No. The british empire, for the first 200 years, was looting, stealing land and transporting african slaves. It was all greed. It's hundreds of years into their empire(s) that the brits invented the 'white man's burden' nonsense.
What? You have sovereignty as soon as you decide it. Especially if you are fighting a war to maintain your sovereignty. If the treaty was never signed, the US would still be sovereign.
Try this extreme example. Imagine if the founders decided to simply wipe out the british and there was no brit left to sign any treaty. Would the silly british king still be sovereign over the US even though the silly british king and his silly kingdom no longer existed? Of course not.
US has been imperialistic from birth. Heck the revolutionary war was fought to secure our right to be imperialists and commit genocide against the natives. Our reason for existence is imperialism. Or maybe history is right and a bunch of racist slavers wanted to birth liberty and freedom into the world.
> That’s giving it too much credit as it implies a degree of even Machiavellian intelligence.
From a ragtag group of 13 colonies, we've taken over the world. Not only that, we've taken over the world while having the world believe we are the liberators. There are idiots all over the world who legitimate look to the US as saviors and liberators. Doesn't get any machiavellian than that.
> turning billions away from Western democracy and toward backward totalitarian ideologies that are in the end more hostile to us than the USSR was.
'Western democracy' was the excuse invented to invade and murder tens of millions across the world in the 20th century. Whereas the brits advocated 'white man's burden' in the 19th century to murder and steal. We came up with democracy. Nothing more imperialistic than the cause of spreading democracy.
> Like I said in another reply it was mostly driven by paranoid overreaction to communism.
No. Communism was just an excuse to continue our imperialism. If communism never existed, we'd make up another excuse. What's our problem with Iran now? The USSR has been gone for 30 years and our relations with Iran is as bad as ever?
Stop accepting what dumb historians on TV or news tell you. Try to think for yourself and see if an assertion makes any sense.