Sadly, this is probably true.
How about we get someone who can win in a swing state so we can avoid Trump? Because right now from the polling it looks like Biden can’t.
Saying that Biden needs to be replaced is not the same as saying don’t vote for whoever is the Democratic candidate. I’ve been screaming into the void telling people to vote on Lemmy and even I think he needs to be switched out. The post debate polling is that damning.
If the dems shove it down our throats I’m still voting for him, but there’s still a narrow window to get a better candidate and we should take it.
The point of an armorer on set is that they ensure that the guns aren’t dangerous. The typical rules about “don’t aim at something you don’t want to destroy” doesn’t apply in a movie because otherwise all the action sequences would look dumb with people firing wildly at the ground. How stupid would it look if John Wick shoots at the floor and blood spurts out of the guys face.
That said, anyone who hires a scab armorer gets what they pay for and deserve to be prosecuted.
Now when I’m lazy and don’t support some standards in my open source projects, I’m just going to say its for security.
404 Media is worker owned; you should pay them.
Vertical integation and scale are not inherently monopolistic. Some monopolies formed because they exploited these advantages, but there are competative industries today where several vertically integrated companies compete.
Monopolies in econ 101 are not called inefficient because they extract profit. They’re inefficient because they don’t respond to market forces. Since they control all supply, they can disregard demand.
I mean if central planning can be redefined to mean decentralized capitalist markets, I’ve got a book gor you to read too.
My dude, did you even read the Peter Theil article you linked? His entire speil is in no way congruent with your point. He’s basically just saying the rent seeking from a gaining a monopoly can make high risk investments worth it. His argument is still grounded in market logic. He leaves out the people who started high risk companies they thought would be monopolies but turned out to be undesireable.
And I don’t even agree with his point, neither Google nor Amazon needed massive capital to hit the market, they needed massive amounts of capital to operate at a loss to squash their early competition to create a monopoly; something that can only be done by the horrible market distortions of a governmnet or rampant late-stage capitalist billionaires with equivalent piles of money.
Edit: I would also point out Theil is a believer in autocracy, known widely for literally owning a company whose product is disinformation, and is shilling to prevent the breakup of his monopolies. I wouldn’t trust him under any circumstances.
China has some more central planning than the US, but they lean on the same market mechanisms that the US does when it comes to most solutions, ie tax penalties/incentives and subsidies. An excellent example is their smog reduction plans.
Its also great you linked an article about Chinese steel because they do the same stuff there
There isn’t a party planner in every steel mill determining output, they let individual companies react to market forces they shape with tax structures and subsidy.
People’s republic of Walmart
Good thing Walmart wasn’t supplanted by Amazon who delegates most of whats sold to 3rd party sellers. They certainly havn’t copied that for their online sales, right?
Out of curiosity, do you think the USSR collapsed because all its own citizens thought the government was doing too good a job?
China introduced private corperations and capital because they increased efficiency and production.
Are you saying every government whose ever tried tons of central planning just messed up or randomly decided to scale it back just for funsies?
Are we just gonna ignore the fact that the whole critique of centralization is that its inefficient, ineffective, and unresponsive to peoples needs?
Like as capitalism is becoming more monopolistic, its becoming increasingly bad at delivering goods that people actually want and just becomes better at supressing and controling them. You know the same critisism thats pointed at autoritarian communism.
I don’t think this is the W you think it is.
Given that this is what their lawyers have agreed to, it would be weird for an appeal.
If everyone you know uses secure messaging apps, youre in a bubble; their adoption rate is very small.
Of the people I know, even those who use Signal/Matrix still use Chrome and GMail/Docs/Drive. They have a long way to go before they don prosthetic noses.
What’s far more likely than 3d printed prosthetics becoming fashonable is people just rolling over and accepting the distopian surveilance state.
I can’t even get most of my family to use Signal to prevent Facebook from reading their private messages, what could happen to convince them to go full cyberpunk?
Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.
If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.
As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else’s ISP making that info worthless.
If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you’re technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.
I think a lot of these points have been made better elsewhere.
The extended discussion of hypothetical US interference just because of a tenuous chain of connection to the CIA is just typical US-badism. The US frequently funds tools which they think further geopolitical goals and this doesn’t inherently mean its untrustworthy, just that their methodology of control is more resilient to uncensored speech; the best example of this is TOR, decentralized, anonymous, and created by Naval Research and DARPA. The author can’t concede this point as it’d bring up they’re unsubtly simping for a different colonial power, one who does require such censorship.
Signal’s centralized nature has always been a major criticism (and it’s reasonable), however as a trade off it’s easy to on-board the tech illiterate. It’s nontrivial to set up a Matrix server and I’ve seen the difficulty of migrating activist groups there. It’s good as a long term goal, but one also has to recognize that a person struggling with housing has different concerns and will prefer to use whatever their friends and family do.
The Federal Government actually owns most of the west. Its the reason why there’s more land for public recreation and national parks in that region of the country.
You can typically hike, camp, or explore BLM land, which is the majority of it, as much as you want so long as you don’t start any fires or litter.