Christ, if you could see the abysmal efficiency of business tier SQL code being churned out in the Lowest Bidder mines overseas…

Using a few terrabytes of memory and a stack of processors as high as my knee so they can recreate Excel in a badly rendered .aspx page built in 2003.

Persians absolutely malding right now.

It’s ok to charge money to run a business.

They’re not charging money. They’re just throwing up a big sign demanding my email address.

They’ll just get a check for Infinity Money to keep going, because otherwise something something China Will Win.

Can’t do crimes if you’re rich. It’s in the Constitution

The original author (Jeremy Hsu) is misleading here with the term “screenshot every 500ms”.

“meta tags every 500ms” might be more accurate, but the end result is the same. The device is monitoring what you consume in order to aggregate data on your household.

The same cynical bullshit they pulled in Gaza. Everything that gets bombed is “Terrorist” in retrospect. And you should applaud the IDF for their “precision” strikes, because hey look how everyone under that bomb deserved to die, amirite?

They are doing very well

Its crazy to see people double down on this line two years into the conflict.

Nobody is doing well. This is a war of attrition that’s ruining Ukraine’s interior, devastating its population, and obliterating its economy. The absolute best thing you can say about the conflict is that Russians are also losing lots of blood. But that puts the terms of “victory” entirely within the scope of “How many dead Russians have we produced?” rather than “How much of Ukraine is there left to save?”

What they need is more weapons.

Who is going to be using them?

good.

Cluster bombs dropped across the country will be killing people decades after the war is over.

Absolutely hate this shit.

I wish. Crypto has been depressingly buoyant.

Was hard to tell. Just kinda grabbed whatever came through the hole in the wall.

The supreme court is an altogether different branch of government

The British Parliamentary Ministerial system combines the Legislative and Executive branches. So even talking about “branches of government” goes out the window.

commonwealth countries also have supreme courts

They don’t have co-equal branches and their courts aren’t organized in the US Circuit model.

But even that’s beside the point. What’s at issue is a lifetime appointee (who gained the position through bribery) continuing to bribe an elected official to be favorable towards his political position. It’s pure patronage.

There isn’t a comparable position in the USA.

I might argue that the SCOTUS is at least approaching comparable. But then imagine Clarence Thomas letting Baron Trump borrow the RV he got from his billionaire sugar daddy Anthony Welters, executive VP at UnitedHealthCare.

And then imagine Trump appointing Welters to an advisory committee at HHS. That’s in the ballpark of what we’re dealing with.

So Lord Alli is a businessman who received favours from the Labour Party, giving him unelected political influence, and he’s giving favours to a Labour PM in return.

Which UK Law considers perfectly normal, legal, and good.

So, there’s no problem, see?

it often wasn’t about working the mines as much as them racking up a debt trying to get rich

That’s debt peonage. And debt peonage is enforced through the violence of loan sharks, who serve the same function as overseers in a plantation system. African slaves were also roped into debt peonage as the first step in African export. You get told you owe X and have to work Y years to pay it off, then you get placed on a ship and sent halfway around the world to spend your most productive years working for someone else.

When you’re exhausted, you’re disposed of. There’s never any real promise of “repaid debts”. Its just a social convention used to gull people into working for free.

God do you even actually have a point

Yes. But the point offends you, so you’re closing your ears to it.

All this makes it sound like police are giving you a bunch of time to respond and addressing you politely.

I mean, I agree on the principle. Don’t just hand your phone over to… anyone, really. But the game becomes very different when a guy with a gun is hassling you over it.

More the plunge in O&G prices during the 1980s. Coal, oil, and natural gas got incredibly cheap under Reagan after the US cut sweetheart deals with the Saudis. Nuclear has huge upfront development costs, while oil, gas, and coal are very cheap to start up and run incredibly high margins.

Lobbying and activism had very little impact, as evidenced by the campaigns against coal waste and gas flaring and strip mining that all fell flat.

Their economy is growing

It absolutely is not.