What, founder of cryptoscam Worldcoin is going to cash out of a project sold primarily on hype. Say it ain’t so. /s

Perhaps, but to people who have spent the last few decades in the halls of power surrounded by members of a western style military who take it as given that they are a western nation just as formidable as their close allies in Europe and Asia, the idea that the nation itself could falter in such a way is certianly far from many of their minds. Doubly so for a party that is used to bulldozing its way through critical media outlets, courts, and public protests.

They’ve had general success in previous wars with most if not all of their neighbors, and something tells me the focus in their telling is not on the massive amounts of foreign aid they received in the lead up or duration.

They may often talk about how any given threat may be an apocalyptic end of the nation, but I don’t think they actually believe it, at least when it comes to the court of public opinion in some far off foreign lands.

Could a senior politician be so disconnected from the basic reality of their situation by yes men, loyalists, and wishful thinking? Well by all accounts Putin did honestly believe the FSB’s reports that Ukrainians would welcome any Russian forces in droves as liberators, and that any conflict would be over before well before the west could respond, so I’d say yes.

The path they are seeing is the path for Benjamin Netanyahu and his far right party to hold on to power for a few more years, all else be dammed.

His far right campaign and political messaging pre October 7th focused hard on how he was the only one strong enough to control Hamas, and on how he could ensure the fires of conflict would burn just hot enough that they would never find common ground and unite with the West Bank (the pretense that Isreal and the US demands they do before the West Bank authority can be recognized as a nation by the UN) but never got enough to possibly harm Isreal itself.

Between constant legal battles and scandals with Isreal’s supreme court, he was just bearly able to hold onto power when Hamas demonstrated that they clearly weren’t actually under his perfect control, and so now he needs a win a war to play the strongman and distract everyone from what he had been saying up until that point. He needs a reason to shut down media outlets criticizing him, and war powers to run over the opposition.

He also needs the votes of the farthest right of his far right party, and thusly needs to appear amenable to their position of complete Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza.

All of this means that the IDF must be seen fighting a great war for the very survival of the nation, not a series of hostage rescue or series of commando raids to capture high value targets and more importantly intel. It’s also why he cannot let this end in a ceasefire or give into Hamas original terms of a hostage exchange for the Palestinians being held without charges for years in Israel, but must fight on until whatever passes to the far right as a total victory.

Little things like burning though most of Isreal’s foreign support and international reputation are at best problems for the future, and maybe even opportunities for campaigning, because when the world turned its back on Isreal only he and his party of strong men are going to be able to keep things going for the average citizen.

Why should I be afraid of a foreign company learning my information, and instead trust a local one that proudly sells it on the open market to anyone that wants it?

This proposal puts no fetters on what information amarican companies gather or sell to the Chinese.

And yes, the largest nation in the world definitely stole all their technology, all thouse technology transfer agreements, companies outsourcing their manufacturing lines to it, and of course the hundreds of billions it’s government poured into the R&D of new energy technologies at a time when most western countries were slashing or eliminating their own subsidies and investments had nothing to do with it. Nope, none at all./s

Don’t get me wrong, fuck the CCP. They are authoritarian imperialists who constantly cultivate racism and xenophobia while openly punishing anyone who speaks out against them, and are far, far more interested in protecting the power of the party’s leadership than even appearing to try and appear actually left wing, but this does nothing to protect american consumers.

The only practical effect is to shield amarican manufacturers from competition with companies that have not colluded to focus exclusively on the largest, highest profit gas guzzlers they could fit on the roads during the last two decades the instant it looked like their customers might actually have had an option but to bend over and take it.

Chrysler and GM could have focused their efforts on building cheaper EVs instead of half assing compliance cars and then selling them for enough to ensure that sales would never get big enough to divert manufacturering lines from their high profit margin Trucks and SUVs, but instead actually chose not to.

Now the government is actively protecting them from competition on a thin pretense, and say it with me now, we know it’s a thin pretense because the government has no problem with Amarican, european, Japanese, and Korean companies doing the literal same exact thing and then selling the same recordings to the Chinese government.

If the government was actually even the slightest bit concerned about amarican car buyers privacy, it would not allow a company like Tesla where employees regularly pass around clip compilations of the funniest things they’ve seen on the car’s internal cameras to have cellular modems, internal cameras, or over the air updates.

Instead it says if you want a car with bluetooth speakers or over the air security updates, you must buy the land yacht from the good amarican company that just donated to our campaign and is making a killing on the margin shortly after it looked like even a hundred percent tariff might not be enough to protect amarican car manufacturers from the consequence of their own direct choices.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that there is only risk from low cost Chinese vehicles, could you imagine if security researchers had been demonstrating that these theoretical attacks have actually been trivially done on American and european vehicles for decades now? Thankfully all other car companies are bastions of cybersecurity best practices, near impossible to hack or slip malicious code into via an over the air update.

Also could you imagine if a Chinese company could spy on you directly and learn personal infomation though your vehicle, instead of buying that same information on the open market from a good american car company instead? The horror.

It’s just a convenient coincidence that this comes at the same time as the american car industry risked actual competition with competitors that didn’t spend the last two decades building half assed compliance EVs while focusing on selling the public on the largest, highest markup truck and SUV that can still theoretically fit on the road.

Ohh well, guess Amaricans are just going to have to pay three times as much for new vehicles than the rest of the world for vehicles with similar manufacturing costs, wouldn’t want to risk GM or Fords profit margins after all.

I sure am glad that the government may not be willing to provide social housing without a five year wait list while you to live in a tent under the freeway and get all your worldly possessions, photos, and documents thrown out by police, but is always proactive about ensuring that billion dollar companies never have to worry about facing even the slightest consequence of their own active decisions to undermine the fight against climate change.

Biggest /s possible.

I’m not the one who said making China’s suppply chains as transparent as the US’s would end the system of using minorities as prison labor in Xinjiang, just the one who pointed out that the implementation of said transparency here on the same problem has not lead to the end of said practice.

I mean the transparency available in the US still hasn’t resulted in an end the same system of minority prison labor here at home.

Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.

I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.

US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.

Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?

This predisposes that much more expensive one sold locally is not also the same model and manufactured in the same factory. When so much of what is sold at Amazon or Walmart originates from Alibaba or bulk orders from said factory, the only difference in the exploitation is if Bezos gets a cut on top.

Functionally, I think you’ll have a lot more luck pushing for and requiring supply chain transparency from the Amazons and Walmarts of the world, or directly using national economic and political pressure, than focusing on increasing the cost on the small market of people going direct to the source.

Admittedly though this is less true as it has become more widely known that Temu and the like have the same product selection as Amazon, and indeed that seems to be the actual reason this legislation has been proposed.

Nevertheless I can’t see the US government taking slightly more of a cut having much of an effect when most of the products which heavily involve Uyghur labor are meant for internal use or export to the third world. You would need to propose serious practical consequences for the leadership of the CCP and follow though on those consequences to force external end to a political project that’s popular domestically like this, or at least a very closely and precisely targeted BDS campaign, and not just continuing business as usual but with higher taxes.

Really? Doesn’t seem that wild to me that a place where cartels have openly claimed responsibility for assassinating politicians that threaten the status quo might see a large pushback against a change to the status quo.

I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.

Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.

Standard procedure to reduce copycat killings and be respectful to the families of the victims killed on stream. Imagine why people in the US might want a hypothetical livestream by the Sandy Hook shooter of them shooting a bunch of kids taken down.

Yep, we’re all gonna die.

Not because the robots planned it mind you, but just because some lobbyist sold a few Congressional members on the military needing AI enhanced weapons, and we couldn’t be behind China when it came to the LLM powered ICBM race now could we.

That every currency is not accepted everywhere in the world, though every one you listed is pretty commonly accepted by business and as such you absolutely could by things with them in the Eurozone, is not an argument that they are the same as an casino token.

Yes lightning, the network of centralized trusted third party banks that are needed to make bitcoin useable so long as you deposit all the bitcoin you want to use into one of these centralized banks first, at which point they can make bank to bank transfers without having any involvement with the actual bitcoin network at all.

Or you could do basically the same process with an actual Debit card, which does the same thing but can be used in actual stores.

You also need to note that for something posturing itself as a currency, the fact that you either have to wait hours or days for the price per transaction to come down or spend an even more absurd transaction fee on you’re cup of coffee before you can check out is actually a rather fundamental problem.

I’ve rarely heard it suggested as an investment, but it can actually be realisticly used to goods and services outside of itself and as such does have an actual purpose, which is more than can be said for any crypto currency.

I don’t think it’s obvious that a tool for loaning money to businesses would be primarily used for loaning money to businesses trying to solve problems with the tool itself.

I don’t think the internet has really changed all that much when it comes to due diligence. Maybe it’s a little easier to do background checks or find a person’s previous projects, but you still need an trusted third party to audit a company, you still need to be sure who is legally liable for if things go wrong, etc…

Neglecting that a lot of companies don’t actually want every person’s pay, every dime they spend for a luncheon, and every thing R&D buys to be publicly available to their competitors, it’s still not actually much help for verifying and auditing their financials because nearly all fraud already relies on people entering false information to the computer about what the transaction was for or why it was made, not anything that could be verified by the chain.

Um, no. Traditional markets have financial related companies, but you’ll have to show me where you’re getting the idea the finance sector makes up the majority of the traditional market and as such it is no different than the crypto space where finance makes up nearly the entire market.

I also don’t think that the existence of the internet really changed much when it comes to the need for rules for soliciting investment from the public such as providing investors accounting figures and legal accountability. Nor has it changed the fact that cryptocurrencies haven’t changed the process for gaining the investment necessary to start a new bakery or other small business and never will provide a pathway to do so, and as such hasn’t really changed much at all when it comes to providing customers with more access to investment loans outside of more crypto businesses.

A lot of the scandals you listed weren’t done under the current market regulation, but rather directly led to the current market regulation at the behest of the little guys who got screwed over and pressured politicians into passing it, and as such I just don’t see how removing the protections for the little guy is ment to benefit them over the rich.

I mean surely then the rich would be opposed to the crypto and loosening regulations rather than being the ones most heavily pushing and lobbying the government for them?

They banned it after it kept driving up energy prices.