Assuming this is entirelly honest, this is only the direct costs of the US military action, not the military costs of Israel which the US subsidizes or indirect costs to American businesses and consumers due to higher energy costs as well as due to, higher in various production chains a lack or higher prices of things produced in plants in counries in the area which are US allies and hence were destroyed by Iran or which are exported in routes that go via the Strait.

And then on top of the above described costs for the US, all the non-military costs also apply to the rest of the World almost certainly adding up to many-fold the costs for the US. Even in an American-centric perspective the ill-will towards the US from this has future costs for the US in terms of missing international business opportunities and reduced preference abroad for American products.

Then on top of that there is additional damage to the image of the US at governmental level all over the World which can even accelerated the end of the Reserve Currency status for the USD, and which depending on much that’s accelerated would mean Economic losses for the US next to which the $25 billion are a microscopic amount.

The whole thing is proper next level winning! /s

“It’s not me, it’s you”

Democracy

Athens

gather all members of their community

Actually the funny bit with “Democracy” in Ancient Athens it that it was only men and only citizens (so, not slaves), a group which wasn’t even “most members of their community”, much less all of them.

I bet whatever tribes that did it well before Athens were a lot more “Democratic”.

Ever since a nephew of Freud introduced concepts of Psychology into the Marketing world back in the mid XX century that advertising has shift mainly to work via psychological effects.

Perfect examples are perfume TV adverts (all about associating a perfume with sex and feeling sexy) and Car TV adverts (generally about associating a car with freedom, success and sometimes power).

So yeah, most of that shit is meant to just reside in your subconscious and subtly prod you towards a certain product or service at the right time, even if only because a certain brand name feels “familiar” or even “trustworthy” when you have to make a choice about a kind of product or service you don’t usually buy.

I actually have to do 3D modelling a lot nowadays and this just made me laugh my ass off.

I don’t think this is a Capitalist thing explicitly.

Being significantly outside the norm in visible ways is often a problem in any human societies, mainly depending on which traits one has which are most different from the masses and the time and society one is in. I mean, a highly intelligent woman with knowledge of herbal remedies in a 12th century European village would likely be deemed a witch, in a Native American tribe would be a healer and in present day society either nobody would notice or think her as old-fashioned “with all those teas”.

I expect that Neuro-divergence, being behavioural, is one of the hardest to accept as “normal” things in any human societies since humans are generally social beings. I mean, in present day in most of the West even Introversion (which is much more prevalent) is often perceived as a problem that people must overcome (“You need to go out more”) rather than just another perfectly normal way of being.

As I see it the neuro-divergent are just unlucky of living in an age of cities were it’s pretty hard for people to just live away from the rest most of the time and being out of the norm behaviouralliy ratther than say, in terms of body shape or having a preference for unusual foods.

PS: Now that I think about it, the whole insane “grift everything” culture of the current Late Stage Neoliberal Capitalism probably makes life way harder than it need be for people whose more variant traits negativelly affect social interaction, since in so many areas where merit in that domain was usually enough, now one must “pitch” and “network” a lot to get ahead.

IMHO, in a way, it’s the desperate, desperate, oh so desperate need of people who can’t deal with the uncertainty of Probability and Statistics and thus require everything to be a clearly defined something, no variance, no deviations.

It’s the same reason why some people simply can’t accept the Theory Of Evolution: the idea that “countless” (not literally, but figurativelly) random variances will yield incremental changes which over time add up to major change is just beyond them, so better have a single (or a handful) of fantastical all powerful beings of unexplained (and never questioned) provenance be the designers and agents of creation of all we see.

As I see it, shit like this is mainly stupid people compensating (in the Psychology sense of the word) for their own inability to comprehend the World as is and without mentally simplify it down to a handful of little labelled boxes.

The pretty much got the biggest idiot possible and gave it the keys of whole damned castle of cards.

I XOR all the bytes of my data and write down the resulting byte value on a post-it as our backup.

Saves tons of space, it’s fully offline and I never had any problem with it.

Thus completelly eliminating all bugs and data incorrections in Production!

That right there is the sweet smell of Victory!

Plot twist: They’re gonna double down on vibe coding it.

Same reason why somebody won’t tell somebody else “you should use that specific bathroom stall” but they will “don’t use that specific bathroom stall”.

A plane can still fall on your head.

Even further: the biggest problem with AI and thus the biggest decider on its suitability or not for something is that its distribution of failure in terms of consequence is uniform rather than it being more likely to err in ways with few or less grevious consequences than in ways with more or worse consequences.

In other words, unlike humans who activelly try and avoid making the nastiest and deadly mistakes, when AI fails, it can fail just as easilly in the most horrible and deadly ways as it can in the most minor of ways.

That’s why you have lots of instances of LLMs giving what for humans are obviously dangerous advice like telling people to put glue on pizza to make it look good or those with suicidal thoughts to kill themselves - unlike humans AI has no mechanism to detect “obviously dangerous” on an output it’s about to produce and generate a different output instead.

This is why using AI to generate fluff filling for e-mails is fine but it’s not fine in systems were errors can easilly cost lives.

So even flying over America without landing there is going to become dangerous.

Best choose flights with Polar routes, going the other way around or which fly over South America instead.

The part about the economist which “modelled” the impact of climate change and came up with hilariously optimist results that aren’t anywhere close to those from the Scientists from hard-sciences is just so typical.

Economists lying with models (i.e. basically using Mathematics as a layer of complexity hidding purposeful lies, so as to deceive those with little familiary with the Scientific Method or modelling) is THE main tool that has been used to push Neoliberal politics for 5 decades and created the shit we’re living in.

I worked in Finance and am intimatelly familiar with how you can make Mathematical Models to produce whatever the fuck effect you want: mainly by the formulas you chose for your model and by chosing what types of inputs it takes you can make a “machine” which will produce a specific fable from genuine real-life data.

Mind you, the Scientists and other people with Science Training won’t be deceived, but that doesn’t matter because those “models” and their “results” (generally produced in Think Tanks funded by the very people whose interests are, by an amazing coincidence, served by politicians acting as if the model is genuinelly representative) aren’t meant to convince domain experts, they’re meant as technocratic “arguments” for articles and opinion pieces in the Press to sway public opinion (or at the very least spread doubt on the consensus of the actual domain experts) and as a cover for the bought up politicians to chose the policies benefitting the interests of those who are or promise to be “good friends” to them.

By doubling down on ICE and ultra expensive penis replacement “trucks” the Auto Industry and it’s paid up politicians there are basically committing suicide, so sooner or later there will be plenty of room in that market for auto makers with friendly priced electric cars.

/me *Smugly looks on after having boycotted Sony for over 2 decades*

Good for you.

My point still stands though: from the point of view of somebody living in the EU, having the UK back isn’t all that much of a gain, especially anybody who looks at how the UK voted back when they were members and even more so if the UK and its people upon returning had more rights than other EU countries and citizens (i.e. if they go their exceptions back).

IMHO, it would be literally impossible to get governments in all 27 member countries to accept that Britons should get into the EU with more rights than the citizens of those countries and you need all 27 to approve a new member since it requires an unanimous vote.

(Frankly, you as an EU citizen not knowing this shit is surprising: for me as an EU citizen living in Britain during the Leave Referendum and subsequent shit show of the Leave negotiations was highly educational about the details of how the EU operates. Were you one of those people who “would be alright either way” because of having both citizenships and voted Leave?!).

But even more simple than that: bringing Britain into the EU without it changing enough Politically and as a Society that the chances of another Brexit were very low, would be the EU setting itself for yet another such event when, say, Reform UK got enough power that a section of the Tory Party felt that anti-Europeanism would get them into power.

The Political reality of present day Britain is the rise of the complete total nutter Far-Right in the form of Reform UK and Far-right ideas so normalized that even the Labour Party is spewing anti-immigrant and transphobic rhetoric.

Even with the EU sliding rightwards, very few countries in it have an Overtoon Window so far to the right.

Aside from the joke element of your post, Fascist is not the same as ethno-Fascist, so somebody who is a Fascist isn’t necessarily a Nazi-style one: they can simply be a traditional Fascist like the kind that for a while ruled Italy, Portugal, Spain and Greece.

You can easily tell the difference between the two because ethno-Fascists are all about how they represent an ethnicity which is somehow a superior ethnicity and use claims that they’re protecting themselves from another ethnicity who are describe as “violent” and even “vermin” to justify extreme violence against that other ethnicity. Traditional Fascist are all about The Nation and the superiority of it and it’s people, which probably explains why for example unlike the ethno-Fascists they seldom engage casually in the most horrendous of violent acts, such as murdering children just for being of the wrong ethnicity.

The only present day ethno-Fascists I know are Zionists (who claim to represent the Jewish People, who are “God’s chosen people” and have been stealing from, raping and murdering Palestinians and any other Muslims they can read whilst claiming they’re only “defending themselves”.

Mind you, conflating accusations of Fascism with accusations of Nazism and other similar purposeful absurdist misportrayals of the critique of others is in my experience (of living in Britain) a pretty common technique from the British Far-Right.