@p My hatred of co-pilot is such that I am experimenting with some XP-pro 64 installs some folks have been hacking on. They're still a mess for drivers. But it's not like I'm running modern games or apps anyways.
In the specific case of Microsoft spending nuclear-plant levels of electricity and doing massive pushes to send people out to train other companies to use Copilot more, pushing "FREE COPILOT!" on VSCode users and Github users, and having quotas for a percentage of lines of code generated rather than written, right? They're spending way more on this than seems reasonable in order to corner a market that will not ever be profitable.
There's something they believe about this market that is not obvious to me; I am curious what it is.
@p@lanodan@hj > send people out to train other companies to use Copilot more, pushing "FREE COPILOT!" on VSCode users and Github users, and having quotas for a percentage of lines of code generated rather than written, right? Aside from training their proprietary AI, like I said before, it secures market share. People are stuck with their habits/muscle memory and changing to something else is hard. Thus little migration or demand for a better tool outside the proprietary ecosystem is asked. Even tho nobody asked MS to make this in the first place. The create a problem and they give a solution. It's pretty common in these sphere. They create offer and demand just via hype. And it makes the stock prices go brrrrr.
Yeah, have worked at several VC-funded startups, I know. The question is why are they still spending this much on user acquisition in this specific case on this specific market, out of proportion with the expectations for the general case.
@p@hj >The question is why are they still spending this much on user acquisition. Mike Judge just said it in this scene. The goal is to inflate stock prices to absurd levels and make a ton of money all at once. Securing Market Share is part of that strategy. The more market share they have the more they can impose new rules/standards that nobody asked for but cripples competition to follow the rhythm. Thus they also look like they're innovating while they actually do shit. So not only they're inflating the true value of their "product" but they're also making it near impossible for a free market to exist.
If they'd stop they would look as if they're hesitating or in a bad position, and that's bad, as the stock value will go down. Same thing happens when they keep pivoting. So to avoid to be seen as pivoting they invest in everything (these entities have the fund anyway). Same thing happens when they keep changing directors or vcs dumping them. They can't be seen as if the project is in a bad spot.
What they believe is that "AI iS tHe FuTuRe!!" and that chatbots will replace all the plebs and somehow they will get richer off this, rather than get hanged by a starving, unemployed mob. There is no rationality in it; it's vapid suits believing ridiculous things while having cartoonish green dollar signs in their eyes. They can fund this nonsense because they have hundreds of billions of VC dollars to throw at a wall with absolutely no accountability. The reason they have that money, in a very small nutshell, is that interest rates are way too low and it's illegal for poor people to invest anywhere except the stock market.
I believe there is a promising future for AI, but Silicon Valley is currently falling for the same meme where they try to build business models around technology that's at least a decade too immature for it to work, just like what happened in the late 90's. Much like last time, I expect it to mint a new generation of Mark Cuban-esque billionaires who will think their shit don't stink because they got out at the top after offloading a cash-incinerating startup on some clueless corporation chasing hype late into the cycle which will go on to write off the acquisition completely a few years later.
I have not only worked at these companies, I have also seen Silicon Valley and I have read "Zero to One" and I used to spend a lot of time on HN.
You drive the other guys out of business in order to corner a market, and then the price is whatever you want it to be. But some markets people are trying to corner and some they are not. What is different about *this* market? Why do they think *this* will ever be worth money?
@gentoobro@p@hj@mangeurdenuage At least part of me feels like they're trying to make more and more of the population dependent on them, because it's like they finally managed to make a search engine which only returns the data they want people to see.
And reminds me of how unusable smartphones are as tools, but how useful to non-users they are as consumption-addiction machines.
LLM's have a promising future to replace low-level call center workers, professional translators (a huge industry, I know), and minimum wage corporate photoshop monkeys. These are legitimate uses that will benefit the world, but it's not a gold rush even though all the suits are acting like it. With any luck, the Mark Cubans of this cycle will hodl all the way into bankruptcy.
I think we're seeing some degenerate, collapsing-empire shit here. The sclerotic, hyper-regulated, hyper-inflating, socialist-all-but-in-name economy has been dead for a while and the only big gains to be made are on asset bubbles and scams, so everybody is looking for "the next big scam thing," be that AI, electric cars, cryptocoins, regulation-dodging taxi services, or orbital burrito delivery systems. Nobody is looking to run an honest, modest, and consistently profitable business.
> What they believe is that "AI iS tHe FuTuRe!!" and that chatbots will replace all the plebs and somehow they will get richer off this, rather than get hanged by a starving, unemployed mob.
That's the hype, that's the sales pitch; I'm not sure that's what Microsoft's C-levels think.
Researchers a year or two ago said the training data was going full-Ouroboros and that there wasn't enough novel information to feed these things. Presumably if they can say it in public, they can tell management.
One thing about Microsoft is that they are driven by massive government contracts, enterprise contracts. It's entirely possible that they understand the limitations but want to corner the market because there's demand from the government or the Fortune 500. Who and why would be *really* interesting in that case.
I have so much fun playing with ChatGPT to create stories based on strange premises and build up detailed lore bibles for fictional universes that I'm convinced its most valuable use case will eventually be found in the replacement of slop. There will still be genuine human efforts of creativity that produce art and kino, but anybody in the mood for slop will be able to ask the machine to cook up exactly what they're in the mood for.
It will create a new generation of slop, and it will put a lot of the previous slop sellers out of business. Eventually people will tire of the "LLM feel" that it all has, and as such will not replace real skilled authors and artists.
Well yeah, that's basically what I was saying. The slop industry will go the way of the dodo, and genuinely talented creatives will be better off for it. The whole world will be better off for it, honestly.
I like making my own custom-tailored slop, it's fun. I mean, it's not art, but sometimes I'm just in the mood for cooking up a small narrative universe based on a few scattered ideas bouncing around in my head.
I guess in the sense that it does have some high-level creative human input, that's true. Honestly there's probably more human creativity going into the LLM slopiverses I've made than the focus-group corporate bureaucracy driven processes that produce currentyear MCU slop.
> At least part of me feels like they're trying to make more and more of the population dependent on them,
They're spending a lot on trying to make that happen. And there's a lot of rhetoric (which may or may not actually represent what they're thinking) from the government about China getting better AI than us and being the "leader in AI".
> because it's like they finally managed to make a search engine which only returns the data they want people to see.
I think you've nailed it, I think this is it.
I wonder if this is a propaganda manufacturing scheme. The big deal in the 20th century was Bernays and mass communications. That fragmented: nation-states are trying to push back, but it is harder and hard to control the flow of information. When there are only four TV channels, it's easy, but decentralization has frustrated governments a lot, you don't know who is getting their information from where. But if you could flood the world with bots that tailor their information to the recipient and manage to stay on-message the whole time, whatever the message is, then it doesn't matter if communications are fully decentralized.
Then on the other end of this, the government has used things like long-ass lists of keywords to watch for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29 . AI as a propaganda tool *and* a monitoring tool, I can see why that would be worth a hundred billion dollars.
@p@lanodan@hj >What is different about *this* market? Why do they think *this* will ever be worth money? Should I point out the asch experiment ? Because they say so, they know what they're doing, and many people say the same, their product is N°1, obviously since they make billions. What kind of fool would think otherwise ?
What kind of fool spends more money on a market than the value of that market? You figure out what it's worth, and owning 90% of a given market is worth about five or ten times that market's annual value. Spending on AI seems to have exceeded what I'd expect, unless I mash together my note that Microsoft makes its money from government contracts with @lanodan 's thought, at which point it makes sense.
@gentoobro@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss >Nobody is looking to run an honest, modest, and consistently profitable business. Which is one of the major reasons of the fall of civilization. Fortunately we have the GPLv3 to mitigate that bs.
You're seeing the peak performance, approximately. They will become a little more efficient, as seen by DeepSeek, but that's only because the first generation was written by "data science" tards rather than actual software engineers.
But that demand isn't worth trillions of dollars. They're wasting lots of money, but that's ok because it's your money, not theirs, and they get their bonuses for hitting stock goals by pushing hype.
@gentoobro@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@mangeurdenuage i'm feeling the urge to try and put gentoo on my laptop again so i can learn to maintain a gentoo install on something that don't matter before i debate doing it on my primary.
People constantly reference the fall of Rome like it was something that rapidly occured within the span of a decade instead of several centuries of slow decline occasionally punctuated by brief periods of rapid localized collapse (and even sometimes short term recovery/rebound, but not enough to overcome the general trend of decline).
> Also correct, and due to the tehc illeteracy of the people in power you can tell almost anything for why it doesn't work yet, "throw more money at it, it will work at some point".
The explanation for any massive movement of money is *never* "People with a lot of money don't know what they're doing."
@p@lanodan@hj@gentoobro >One thing about Microsoft is that they are driven by massive government contracts, enterprise contracts That is true, one of the main goal of the gov is to solve the current problems. And they've been fed quite some lies by the tech sector.
>It's entirely possible that they understand the limitations but want to corner the market because there's demand from the government or the Fortune 500. Who and why would be *really* interesting in that case. Also correct, and due to the tehc illeteracy of the people in power you can tell almost anything for why it doesn't work yet, "throw more money at it, it will work at some point".
@p@hj >This *specific* market is different for some reason. >What is the reason? The promise of autonomous robots that can replace or eliminate the workforce isn't it ?
Funnily this reminds me of how many bars and restaurants tend to just have the television easily being in most people's field of vision if not also being kind of loud.
The problem they don't realize is that dog whistles and evasions evolve mush faster than LLM's can be trained and tested, even with trillions of dollars. Worst case, if they manage to lock down the whole internet and make it lame and gay, people will just return to meeting in beer halls.
@p@lanodan@hj@gentoobro >But if you could flood the world with bots that tailor their information to the recipient and manage to stay on-message the whole time, whatever the message is, then it doesn't matter if communications are fully decentralized. We've been there for a while.
@mangeurdenuage@gentoobro@hj@lanodan Yeah, but bots were obvious before, and again, CARNIVORE, right? It was keywords. When the NSA made that list of people accessing scary materials, it was based entirely on domains: people visiting the sites for the LKML and 2600 ended up on the watchlist. Manual review of lists of keywords: you get a lot of false positives and false negatives and it's a lot of work to build the lists.
For whatever reason people seem to think there's no way China could have made many of the same mistakes we did and put themselves in a position where they're dangerously overextended. If anything, they're even more susceptible to it. China has yet to face a financial crisis on the level of the subprime crisis, but they will.
@Hoss@dcc@p@hj@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage And basically never use "bronze age civilisation collapse" because it seems like it collapsed so hard there's way too little information about what happened.
@Hoss@gentoobro@lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage Well, that's an isolated thing rather than a guardian AI that sits and watches you specifically and tailors psyops to you.
> People don't understand the entire point is it won't
Someone's gotta pay the power bill, but I think things get worse before they get better and actual collapse means things get worse and stay worse past the lifetimes of the grandchildren of anyone in this thread. terminator.mp4
This was not a indictment of China, which I have admitted in the past seems to in some ways have managed their rise better than we've maintained our crumbling hegemony. I'm just pointing out that nobody averts a crisis forever, and China does have some building internal pressures. That being said, I won't claim to know when things may actually start to buckle, as that is dependent on a great many variables.
@Hoss@p@lanodan@hj@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage china cant defend its own shipping lanes either. the entire world still relies on the us navy to keep the pirates at bay, and with the new hypersonic missiles even thats becoming a difficult task. what happens when there's no american carrier fleets in the pacific?
I wonder how economically viable shipping containers of products across the ocean will be when every container ship needs to contract with a PMC escort fleet to ensure it reaches port unplundered.
They have the largest surplus male population in the world. If you don't think that's a crisis in the making, you don't know history. Millions of men with no stake in civilization and nothing to lose is one of the most dangerous problems for any nation to face.
They haven't averted crisis. They've managed and mitigated crisis. See, the rest of the world doesn't treat crisis as a financial oppportunity to ruin the stability of its own people. These 'crises' America faced, were deliberate ploys to financial enrich a few. From stock market crashes, to great depressions. All planned. The superior Chinese respect its people far too much to pull such obvious stunts.
Direct hot war with China is a meme. Only way that happens without ICBMs in the air is if one party is fighting through a proxy like we currently are with Ukraine, but an Asian conflict would make the plausible deniability a lot harder due to the "volunteers" more readily standing out among combatants.
@Hoss@gentoobro@hj@lanodan@mangeurdenuage@p They have to be demoralised. So, when China goes to war with America, the weak ones will be willing to fight for food rather than prison.
I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm saying you'll never see direct engagement. Between nuclear powers, at least one of them always needs plausible deniability. Doesn't matter that it's obvious to everybody as long as there's enough geopolitical abstraction to keep the nukes in the silos.
Why do you think the modern proxy war paradigm exists? In a way, it's for the sake of both parties. The whole scheme exists so that nuclear doctrine can't be justified because neither party wants to actually be put in a position where the doctrine prescribes use of nuclear force.
Nobody wants ICBMs in the air because that means the end of the regime, one way or the other. People won't sit idly by after cities get nuked; they'll secede, revolt, or evacuate immediately, and the elites get hanged for letting it happen. Nuclear powers will certainly continue to have conventional hot wars with each other.
Proxy wars existed before the emergence of nuclear powers, but Cold War MAD doctrine brought proxy wars to the forefront of geopolitical conflict, and they've continued to remain prominent even after the Cold War ended.
Proxy wars exist not because of nukes, but for political expediency. They're nothing new either; in many ways the American Revolution was a proxy war between France and Great Britain.
@gentoobro@Hoss@hj@lanodan@mangeurdenuage@p Right, but the difference between a Chinese man going of the rails might mean they start making unregulated Ramen, and listening to loud tai chi music. Where as when an American is slightly inconvencied, they shoot up an entire school. It's no where near as significatnt issue. Other countries people are much more reasonable, and therefore easier to manage. Even when problems need addressing.
@mangeurdenuage@hj Nobody whose opinion directs the flow of capital; I thought that could be taken as read. Journos think that bots are going to replace all of the uppity plebs.
@p@lanodan@hj@gentoobro >is *never* "People with a lot of money don't know what they're doing." It's mainly a trust issue. But the goal isn't mainly making something that works. The goal is to see stocks price go brrrrr.
@mangeurdenuage@Hoss@gentoobro@hj@lanodan I was pointing out that saying that this has to do with western civilization is incorrect if it's happening in the east, too.
The establishment never really seems rattled by school shootings, there's always a real fake and performative taste to the media/government outrage when a big one hits the national news. It's almost like they expect these tragedies will happen to advance their own political ends. But if somebody plugs a few rounds in some insurance C-suiter corpo scumbag, they seem shocked for real, as if something that wasn't supposed to happen just occurred. Really makes you think.
@Hoss@gentoobro@lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage I was pointing out that saying that this has to do with western civilization is incorrect if it's happening in the east, too. I didn't say it's not degeneracy, I said it is incorrect to add the qualifier.
@p@lanodan@hj@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage I think more people should start inserting an "X-Spook:" header in their everyday email with a handful of random phrases meant to set off intelligence sniffers. You can get away with it when dealing with normies 'cause nobody looks at mail headers anyway.
You're not convinced a nation with millennia of history peppered with million-casualty battles and which slaughtered 50+ million people so recently it's still within living memory truly cares for human life?
> If the US fleet didn't exist, others would fund their own because of the importance of trade.
Part of the reason that we replaced the Articles of Confederacy with the current Constitution was that they weren't doing this. Barbary Coast pirates, funded by the Ottoman Empire, were raiding ships and not just robbing but kidnapping everyone aboard, castrating the men to sell as eunuch slaves and then selling the women and children as sex slaves for these degenerate harems. Jefferson couldn't get Europe to help out and couldn't get enough funding from the states. The entire reason we have a navy is because nobody else spends their time or money on stopping people from getting murdered/robbed/kidnapped while they float down shipping lanes.
They’ve also blown up a housing bubble that is pretty wild. I kind of lost track after it passed 30,000 yuan per square meter for a concrete death box.
Add in the uncertainty of the 70-year lease expiring on all the properties retirees are living in, and that everyone one working adult is supporting seven pensioners.
The casualty rates are similar to other places. The difference in absolute numbers boils down to the fact that rice was vastly more productive per acre and man-hour than the other grains until very recently. If Europe had rice and a rice climate, and China had rye and rye climate, the casualty numbers would be opposite.
Nobody has ever respected human life, but only some places are honest enough to admit it.
China is up to its eyeballs in problems, but I suspect they'll manage to sort them out before the US sorts out its problems, if for no other reason than the ruling class of China doesn't actively hate their own people and isn't actively trying to destroy their nation like what's going on in the US.
It's hard to be a pirate in the era of satellite tracking and communication. Take over the wrong ship and some commandos will helicopter in and fuck you up. You have to be state-backed, basically.
The Chinese ruling class is far from compassionate, but they do want to maintain demographics that are majority Han Chinese. That's something. It's pretty sad that the bar has been lowered to "doesn't want demographic replacement of the underclasses", but that's where we are.
> School shootings are the work of mentally ill children
The reason it always happens in relatively affluent places is that they're the work of people that were put on antipsychotics around the onset of puberty. It's literal brain damage, not in a hyperbolic sense. A lot of *adults* have trouble dealing with shit like Remeron and shrinks hand that stuff out like candy.
Not ending civilization (and indeed their own reign) is enough to keep the nukes in the silos. There has already been several near-misses and various tests where the soldiers in the silo refused to push the button, both soviet and western.
Damn, two edits while I'm reading it? And a third when posting?
Traditionally, decent rulers cared about their people at least enough to make their country strong. After all, a king without anyone to rule is just a pretentious bum.
Sorry, usually when I edit it's not because I'm changing the content of my post. I just reread it and start getting autistic about how it reads in my head so I start rewording it.
The qualifier is correct because it's the West and maybe China too. The rest of the world seems to still know how to run a normal business instead of everything being some kind of giant scam.
For a man that professes to like the language of C programming. You sure do make a lot of broad sweeping claims. If you really appreciated C, it would be the flexibility and robust power to solve problems. Given how you just tried to sledge hammer some ides together and yell in American. I highly doubt you actually have the capacity to appreciate the highly nuanced language of C.
I'd ask if you've ever read a history book, but that would be unfair seeing as how it takes you entire childhood education just to learn to read a newspaper in Chinese chickenscratch glyphs.
I definitely believe that SSRIs are another contributor to this phenomenon. I was on that shit for a couple years, and once the meds start taking effect you just stop giving a fuck about anything. I guess the idea is that you stop caring about whatever was making you wanna blow your brains out, but the pharmacologically-induced apathy is indiscriminate and wholly encompassing. I definitely could see some kid fucked up that shit before his brain has even finished wiring itself going out and shooting up a school.
@gentoobro@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@mangeurdenuage If Xi is smart and needs to shed some bodies, he should invade Russia while this Ukraine shit is going on and retake Greater Manchuria.
Never going to have a better opportunity when the east is poorly defended. And it isolates North Korea completely. Little Rocket Man has been a headache for Beijing.
There is no reason to take Taiwan and press the conflict with the USA. You don’t have to cut down the tree in your yard to prove it’s your tree.
Most of the world had tariffs themselves. It was only the US getting bent over the barrel. They're just mad that they can't have their cake and eat it too.
I suspect that Xi will either die or "retire" and a moderate like Den Xiaoping will come back in and stave off the problems for a while. Maybe there will be some short lived administrations in between.
> There is no reason to take Taiwan and press the conflict with the USA.
No reason besides mianzi and that's reason enough.
There also won't be a conflict with the US: unlike Japan or South Korea, if someone invades Taiwan, there are no US soldiers stationed there, so there won't be any flag-draped coffins. China's been drilling on that nearby island. The game plan is to go in on Friday night US time and have their flag over Taipei before the news cycle starts on Monday morning, so nobody hears about it until it's over. No dead Americans and an island on the other side of the Pacific changes management: zero popular support for a war.
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage 80s was when it became more of a problem. That was when the birth control policy came into force. The next 30 years families were mostly limited to one child (minorities exempt) so there were a lot more boys than girls.
The problem has been mostly been handled so far with mail-order brides from Vietnam.
Trading with Russia is very profitable for China. They are friends of convenience at the moment, sharing common foes. That may change after the US loses the military ability to invade foreign countries, but for the time being a conflict between China and Russia would be disastrous for both of them.
It is not an important market compared to the value of control of mineral resources in that mountainous region.
They can make that up elsewhere. They would have a way smaller border to defend, and Mongolia still acts as a buffer state. It would also settle the border dispute with Russia with a vengeance.
And yet they're 4th in the world in GDP PPP. Who else is China going to trade with? India, also an exporter? The US, which is hostile to them? It's moronic to attack your allies of convenience when there are bigger enemies afoot. Hell, the Chinese even wrote a book about this.
Better to learn to constrain the autism to composing the message, and leave edits for the inevitable tpyos. It leads to more complete thoughts and better arguments.
What appears as a reasonable statement, ignores the excessiveness of these tarrifs and the intent behind it. But, that's the great thing about American logic. It doesn't have to be based in fact in order to be stated.
The real "excessive" measure was boomers strip mining our domestic manufacturing and selling it all off to China in the 80's. I don't blame China for taking advantage of our fathers' short-sighted greed, they built their whole nation off that act of cunning because their strength has always been the long game. That being said, I support any efforts to rectify that horrible betrayal against American Millennials and Zoomers.
The Vietnamese beef with China is so ancient and acrimonious that even though we fought a bloody war with them which still exists within living memory, it's already largely water under the bridge, a mere blip compared to their icy relations with China which are older than our country multiple times over. Ho Chi Minh didn't even really want the US to be his enemy, but when we came in to prop up France's colonial mess he didn't really have any other option than to turn to the Communists for help.
> I definitely believe that SSRIs are another contributor to this phenomenon.
Oh, Remeron isn't a regular SSRI. It's what they give to people that regular SSRIs don't work on, it's a last-resort antipsychotic that doctors have started just handing out in the past few decades. One of the Columbine kids was on it from age 10 or 11, it's the on the list of drugs for more than half of the mass shooters.
Don't get me wrong: you're right about SSRIs, but this is like the difference between codeine and morphine.
No, the fruit store that I buy my vegetables from a few blocks away operates in pesos, cash. No dollars involved. In fact, there are very few dollars inside most countries. The fact that trade is denominated in dollars is irrelevant to the fact that some big bank just converts the local currencies directly and then settles accounts later. And increasingly less trade is even denominated in dollars.
But even then, using dollars doesn't prevent you from running a normal, non-scam business. The Panamanians do it all the time.
Yeah, bourbon can be sold to Americans. And Canadians. And countries civilized enough to have a coast guard, if they feel like it. And if Kentucky desperately needs to sell bourbon to muslims in the middle east, they can pay extra to a shipping company that hires PMCs rather than leeching off everyone else for said protection services.
I know you were talking about a whole different animal of psychoactive pharmaceutical, just pointing out that SSRIs are a class of drug which are much more commonly prescribed which likely play a major part in this stuff.
Also, reasonably managed, non-antagonistic countries have already negotiated low tariffs. Mexico and the US are back basically to the USMCA, with both leaders declaring victory internally.
It depends on how this little run-in goes. He might lose face or whatever and get pushed out. I dunno; China's internal politics is hard to see and understand.
Best not to attack your customers. It's bad for business. If Xi was smart he'd stop the currency manipulation and let the Chinese buy half of America with the capital flight.
This is a sage realisation. America thrive of in the moment decisions. Which means you never get skilled at seeing the long game. It's important, if America wants to exist long term that they start learning better ways to manage long term goals.
@gentoobro@istvan@lanodan@hj@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@mangeurdenuage Man, China doesn't have blood feuds with anyone except the Anglosphere, which it treats as monolithic (so stickin' it to the US is adequate revenge for the Opium Wars, for example): everyone vaguely asiatic is either Han or a degenerate case of Supreme Han People.
Worry not, Chinese propaganda bot (Joined March 2025), the US will continue to shoot itself in the foot, to the benefit of any country that doesn't loicense itself to death. China can't do that, since it would take too long to write down the concept of a loicense using scribbleglyphs.
* Edit: I misspelled "too" as "to", which in English is an insignificant error but in Chinese turns the entire sentence into a stale yo-mama joke.
In retrospect, through skillful diplomacy we might've been able to bring Ho Chi Minh over to our side without firing a single shot, which could've peacefully reunited Vietnam under an American-aligned regime. We never would've done that though, because it'd mean snubbing France and all of the MIC interests who were clamoring for more blood money.
Correct, philosophically, the east operates under the assumption that peace is superior to war. But, if it comes to war, to be complete, and utterly ruthless.
China lacks an expeditionary navy capable of sufficient air defense to invade the US mainland, or even Hawaii for that matter. The US has a retarded amount of planes.
what about RNA mutation medicine that secretly holds Shroom DNA that takes over your minds and gets your to say.... start an LGBT compaign, where they dye their hair blue... scream incoherently about illogical claims untill their goverments no longer understand basic biology. I'd say our war is going well.
Ok, to be fair, this is an actual OC photo that I personally took in Vietnam in 2019 when I vacationed there. I did not try it; it looked like it was a stray and who the hell knows what they eat.
Protecting them from bombing is the hardest part. It's why Ukraine is so fucked now, and why they've lost 3x the number of men as Russia. Before Ukraine ran out of AA missiles they were roughly 1:1.
This is main reason the globe is pushing for A.I. For as long as academia has served to understand complexity, it's done it by being entirely reductive of complexity.
China leads the charge on understanding and using humanities inability to deal with complexity against them. We will overwhelm you into submission. We are a nation. One nation unto psyops.
:wtsherman: War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
:wtsherman: We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.
:wtsherman: I would make this war as severe as possible, and show no symptoms of tiring till the South begs for mercy. [...] Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage Maybe she wouldn't need to take sleep medication if she weren't gulping it down with coffee. Woman desperately try to find the cure for being one, meanwhile the only meds I've taken in the last few years was cetrizine when pollen got too bad.
Vietnam is probably America's most embarrassing war. As stated above, there were possible avenues to achieve diplomatic victory before ever needing to put boots on the ground. Then, after we put boots on the ground, we fought a long, bloody, expensive war for years all the way up the point that leadership in the north was actually getting ready to sue for peace after the Tet Offensive failed. But before they could do that, they saw we were withdrawing and could practically walk on in and seize the south. America never took more Ls in one war than 'nam.
@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@hj@istvan@lanodan@mangeurdenuage And the music, that was the big loss. "Oh, a bunch of people died and whatnot boohoo boohoo" the music is still with us and it still sucks and the boomers are completely insufferable because Vietnam and Woodstock are the defining moments of their generation and the defining moment of Gen-X/Millennials is going to be "We knew they had to be stopped and we still didn't do Day of the Pillow."
We'll agree to disagree there, the music was pretty kino. Only silver lining of that whole era. I agree with you that the culture which birthed that music was shitty and unapologetically degenerate though.
He quit the military before the war started because he thought it was retarded; a man with insatiable bloodlust doesn't do that. shermandidnothingwrong.jpe
Lol, no. Afghanistan takes the cake. No reason at all to invade in the first place, then get picked off and scammed by goat herders for two decades, then get actively kicked out by said goat herders, all while being a century ahead of them in technology and having unlimited money to fight with. The Viet Cong were at least smart and civilized people, fighting with Chinese and Soviet weapons of a similar level as the Americans.
At least Afghanistan was based on some shadow of a justification in the wake of 9/11, it was the prolonged and pointless occupation that really did us in there. Iraq was worse, a war based entirely on lies that destabilized a whole region of the Middle East. There was nothing to destabilize in Afghanistan, it was lawless before we got there, lawless while we occupied it, and lawless when we finally pulled out.
It was fought using many of the same principles that "won" Korea, and by many of the same generals too, namely DePuy. But, those tactics, which worked ok in Europe and against Imperial Japan, don't work for shit against an insurgency. There was corpo-style rot in the officer corps too, but the main failing was the approach in general. At one point one of the generals was asked by a congressman "how do you fight an insurgency" and his hare-brained response was "with force". See also: Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan.
I could see how they went into it thinking it'd be another Korea, only to realize the Korea playbook doesn't work when there's a significant population among the side you're fighting for that doesn't want you there.
9/11, an inside job by the CIA carried out by Saudis, having nothing at all to do with goat herders in rural Afghanistan. Iraq was nearly as disastrous but much less embarrassing because the US didn't get completely kicked out (yet, at least) and the Iraqis managed to have a civilization both before and after the war. Afghanistan is the most embarrassing war because it's like a whole platoon of marines getting beat up by one scrawny drug-addicted bum.
They thought Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, he wasn't. Turns out he was in Pakistan the whole time, and the Pakistani glowies likely knew. With how obvious it is now that 9/11 was an inside job, who knows what level of involvement he actually even had. Dude was probably just a fall guy playing face for whoever was running the op, for all we know the guy ain't even dead. Sure was suspicious that the body of the most wanted man on the planet for an entire decade was unceremoniously dumped at sea before any third parties could verify identity.
How lucky for them there was so much hard drugs to grow and sell to fund other government activties. Otherwise, it'd have been a complete waste of effort.
>Be 90 IQ retard with no prospects. >Join the army. >Get shipped off to Afghanistan. >Get ordered to guard poppy fields. >Never ask why you're doing this. Remember to thank the heckin' vetterinos for their service, guys.
Ironically, Mexico seems to have been the one of the most cooperative countries throughout this whole trade shakeup. Who would've thought under Trump we'd see international relations sour with Canada while they improve with Mexico. Maybe Kushner and Sheinbaum have mutual friends through Synagogue or something.
The chinks are more clever and formidable than American hegemony fans want to admit, and they need to be respected as such if you are to deal with them effectively. India is a scourge that has displaced skilled labor around the world with a plague of smelly browns who aren't particularly competent at anything but scamming the system. It's hard for me to imagine a scenario where I'll have an opinion of China that is more negative than that of India.
> then get actively kicked out by said goat herders,
We unilaterally decided to leave and announced our departure. The military equipment was "accidentally" left there because we were laundering it. Same shit we are doing with Ukraine: send $40B worth of guns and missiles and anti-tank rockets per month and all of it shows up for sale in markets in Libya for SOME REASON.
> civilized people,
Poop spikes. They made poop spikes.
The rant delivered by the French plantation owner in the extra-long version of Apocalypse Now is the correct view of it.
The guys on top kept making demands of the guys in the field, who kept saying "This is actually impossible, we can't advance and if we advance, we can't hold". MacArthur kept saying "I don't care, just push north, this is gonna be glorious like WW2", and Mao's oldest son was killed in the Korean War, which he didn't want to enter, but Stalin made it a condition of aid; China had just come off their own civil war, with Stalin backing Mao and the US backing Chiang Kai Shek, and were still reliant on Russia.
@gentoobro@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@hj@istvan@lanodan@mangeurdenuage The entire deal with Afghanistan is that it's Kabul and then Appalachia: you break the infrastructure and dudes in the mountains do not notice. Most war is fought like that nowadays: it's considered a faux pas to bomb civilians, but you can bomb the water treatment plant and the power plant and whatnot. That works in Iraq, it doesn't work in Afghanistan.
You don't think we go in and kill a guy right in the middle of a presidential election if we haven't been sitting on the information for years, do you? Obama literally ran focus groups to decide whether to kill bin Laden where he was or drag him to the Hague or have a trial in New York.
> for all we know the guy ain't even dead.
He was next to dead on 9/11. Dialysis in a cave, man. Think that's cheap? Maybe he made the call and said "All right, yeah, I don't think I'm gonna make it to next year."
@WhitestTemplar@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage See, that is the shit that keeps the banks from getting in line. You say that, some commie says "Oh, everyone hates capitalism", and the Rockefellers and Carnegies and Rothschilds and so on never end up hanging.
If I were some shadowy organization trying to make sure no one was able to discuss me and I had the funds to do it, then I, too, would ensure that every time someone tried to post about my shadowy organization *anywhere*, then it gets derailed by something contentious. It is entirely possible for commies to go about discussing how terrible capitalism is without getting derailed. It is entirely possible for you people to go around railing about Jews every chance you get. But any time I say the first goddamn word about the banks or the IMF or the UN or whoever, *someone* shows up to derail it by REEEEEEEing about Jews. This is the best possible outcome for the people involved: any conversation about them is derailed, the well gets thoroughly poisoned. Who *am* I "not allowed to criticize"? Evidently people can say whatever they want about "late-stage capitalism" and "techbros" and "the Jews": I see those circlejerks all the goddamn time. But one word comes out of my mouth about Dulles or Bernays and fifty people show up to derail it and make it about "the Jews". glowieinthebushes2.png
@p@lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage Copilot sucks. Just like Excel did, compared to Quattro, but I’m sure it will become King of the Hill eventually, just like Excel did.
> Although not clinically relevant, mirtazapine has been found to act as a partial agonist of the κ-opioid receptor at high concentrations (EC50 = 7.2 μM).
> The depressive-like behaviors following prolonged morphine abstinence appear to be mediated by upregulation of the KOR/dynorphin system in the nucleus accumbens, as the local application of a KOR antagonist prevented the behaviors.
mirtapazine is inducing depression while reducing inhibition. great idea!
@Hoss@p@lanodan@hj@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage Yeah, that was way more embarrassing than when the US invaded Afghanistan and assigned its troops to defend guys who were raping little boys for tradition™ and made them stand outside while listening to it.
> Technically you can, but you are kind of missing the bigger picture.
This must be why people feel it is necessary to derail any discussion of it.
These cocksuckers' heads would be on pikes already if it were possible to ever have a coherent discussion of them, but it gets derailed every goddamn time. Zero exceptions.
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage Talking about banks, especially in regards to the "western" experience, and not talking about jews is like talking about about the Bible without mentioning God. Technically you can, but you are kind of missing the bigger picture.
Those cheese pizzas and hot dogs aren’t going to cook themselves.
Also pizzagate and wayfair are all ridiculous conspiracies. Just because the federal government was trafficking children for sex in Central Asia doesn’t mean the federal government was also trafficking children for sex in North America.
@WhitestTemplar@Hoss@gentoobro@hj@lanodan@mangeurdenuage I mean, you know what they did and what their plans were and the effect it has had on the world? You don't even have to go outside the official sources to find enough to hang anyone involved, you don't have to speculate. The CIA puts enough of that shit on their goddamn website.
But nobody hears it because it's always, 100% of the time, every single time, derailed, like you are doing right now.
"there were possible avenues to achieve diplomatic victory [in Vietnam] before ever needing to put boots on the ground"
With Communists? Supported by the Evil Empire? We don't live in the same universe.
JFK also took a different tack, assassinating the two fellow Diem bothers, the Catholic strongmen who ran the south. Only fitting he was in turn assassinated a month later, and of course that seriously destabilized the South, and it was years before they were ready to trust us again. More fools them, or as Kissinger put it right after Nixon was elected in 1968 but before he was in office:
"Nixon should be told that it is probably an objective of [Clark] Clifford to depose Thieu before Nixon is inaugurated. Word should be gotten to Nixon that if Thieu meets the same fate as Diem, the word will go out to the nations of the world that it may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."
"leadership in the north was actually getting ready to sue for peace after the Tet Offensive failed. But before they could do that, they saw we were withdrawing and could practically walk on in and seize the south."
Again, your faith in negotiating with Communists is touching. But Vietnamization worked well enough, and was put to the acid test by the 1972 Easter Offensive. The Soviet's second supply of a full mechanized army for the NVA PVAN, with 150K men (300K per Wikipedia) was utterly smashed, with 40K considered themselves to be lucky to make it back north.
The first really major use of smart weapons, bombs in this case dropped by the US (I remember hearing/reading about this in real time), preceding the Yom Kippur War a year later (primitive ATGMs plus SA-6 SAMs hurt the IDF badly, and Nixon's resupply of aircraft prompted the Arab oil embargo...).
Your blessed diplomacy? There was a treaty signed in January 27, 1973. Hmmm, Wikipedia says "fighting between the three remaining powers temporarily stopped for less than a day...."
Although the North did keep some of the territory they'd seized, but the real end was all too simple in principle: Soviets supply a third army's worth of equipment, which we now realize helped to bankrupt them, the Congressional Watergate Committee was established eleven days later and that eventually gave the politicians on the side of World Communism a veto power to arrange an all around surrender, like ending our ABM defenses in early 1976.
Before then, the South was deliberately starved of munitions, and I'd assume spare parts for their fighter jets (the infamous naked burned girl came from a South Vietnamese air strike), the individual infantryman had one grenade and less than a normal basic load of rifle rounds (or so was said at the time and long after). And of course no US air support as was needed to stop the 1973 invasion.
But in a different world ... maybe the North would have tried another gambit. Maybe they would have tried again and been even more comprehensively stomped with a couple more years of weapons development. But like Afghanistan a political failure, just not one doomed from the start.
Better culture, enabled by much higher IQs; like their fellow Arabs surrounding Israel, Afghans are about as dumb as African-Americans, it could have worked. But the New Left was firmly on the other side and they succeeded in taking over the Democratic party between Nixon's two successful elections, 1968 and 1972. Something Reagan had to fight, and we can circle back to Afghanistan for part of that, Carter was characteristically completely shocked by the Soviet invasion of it, and responded ineffectually, plus pissed off everyone with a grain embargo.
@p Too many people in the dissident sphere purity spiral. (As with that guy). I look round at most of these folks, and think,
"Wow, these guys align with me on like 90% of everything. Fuckin sweet!"
And the 10% of stuff we don't agree on, (in an ideal world) we could let it go. Don't tag/bother each other with that. But some people will get hung up on the 10% and turn it into a crusade.
It turns into blood feuds when it comes the minutia for a few people. I think it's despair coupled with being badly burned by the world in general.
"Hey P, thanks for making a place where we can say "nigger," is the proper response. And then, not tag him on things he finds tiresome.
Some folks though, can't handle less than 100% agreement in all their stances - and we get people like that guy or PoisonDartPepe.
I'm pleased we have a space where I can fisk troons, drag pedos and toss around gamer words as the internet intended. That should be enough. But not for some people.
> You literally didn't say why, you just made an assertion with nothing to back it up.
I said it twice.
> The issue isn't mentioning jews,
This happens a lot, too: "Hey, I'm just asking questions. What, no one's allowed to say that?" You wanna shit in the punch bowl and then say "Oh, just because it had some ingredients *you* don't like to drink, I've somehow ruined it?"
There's a big difference between "Someone mentions something" and "Every single time, motherfuckers pop out of the woodwork to redirect the conversation towards their own personal Bikeshed of Contention", which is a well-known tactic: it's in the goddamn CIA subversion manual from WW2, it's in the goddamn prime-time family-friendly sitcoms, a goddamn teenager knows how to mimic Cadmus.
> we'd have a lot more Luigis running around just doing it solo.
What, you want someone to help you kidnap a governor too, glowie?
CEO of a health insurance company, and he was a real bastard, sure. He was the CEO of a health insurance company, though: not a Rothschild, not Kissinger, not Soros, not a Rockefeller, not a Carnegie, not a Getty.
Luigi Mangione shot a guy that still had to drive his own ass to work. When he got got, the dude was walking down the street before 7 a.m. in December, on his way to show a PowerPoint to the shareholders. $40m net worth isn't nothing, I sure don't have $40m, but he's not getting invited to Davos, he doesn't have an island with a temple and a bunch of trafficked teenage girls, he didn't go to Kissinger's funeral. Fuck's sake, man.
There sure as hell *are* people that get invited to Davos, people that go to the Bilderberg meetings, people that own islands full of trafficked teenage girls, people that attended Kissinger's funeral, people that call up the administrators at the IMF and World Bank and tell them to bring them a Powerpoint, and they're all real people with names and agendas and they don't even hide this shit half the time because they don't have to but if I get anywhere near them, someone shows up to turn the conversation to some mythical shadowy cabal of Jews with no names, no agendas, no history except as the bogeyman lurking behind every corner, the cause of bad weather.
Why jump in every single time to divert that kind of discussion, except to make sure nobody comes near the topic? Tell me, come on, give me a goddamn reason, because I've eliminated every other possibility but the one.
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage You literally didn't say why, you just made an assertion with nothing to back it up. The issue isn't mentioning jews, it's that action takes a will which the vast majority of people lack. If that wasn't the case we'd have a lot more Luigis running around just doing it solo.
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage I'm not defending private healthcare polypharmacy, quite the opposite. In the case you describe it was probably the usual "not addressing the real problem while medicating the wrong symptoms" type deal. The videos of girls proudly listing all of their medications are a whole other thing; normal people wouldn't brag with something like that.
David Foster Wallace did a really interesting article about John Ziegler, who was a talk radio guy in LA. Part of his description of the guy's show was "apocalyptic glee". (And basically the only reason I mention it is so that I can link to the piece, which is a great read: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/host/303812/ . Very entertaining.) We laugh lest we weep, right?
Microsoft main client isn't end users. It's OEMs Their goal is to convince OEMs to make hardware that will particularly support their proprietary AI to the exclusion of alternatives. If they corner the OEMs, they win, but to get there, they have to have a large enough market at Gen 1 to convince the OEMs that it's lucrative to make Microsoft specific hardware for Gen 2 and 3, etc.
> Be the change you want to see in the world then.
:glowinthedark:
> Is the ADL not jewish, does it not have an agenda?
"halp i am bein oppressioned by a lobbying group"
I've addressed this so many times that my first instinct is to tell you to eat fifty dicks because it bores the shit out of me. If the ADL was just cutting discount bras in half to sell as yarmulkes, would this be a problem? Was Carnegie Jewish? Was Rockefeller? Queen Beatrice? The rest of the thousand worst people on earth? "Sure, he may be a monster, he may be eating babies, he may have reintroduced polio, he may have been a frequent flyer to Epstein Island, but look...he's not Jewish. Let it slide so we can go read the 'Early Life' section of the journo that just disagreed with me on Twitter." My god, you're fucking retarded. If the thing they are doing is the problem, race is at best a lossy heuristic and it seems like a complete dipshit maneuver to try to convince people that are focused on the problem to use an inferior heuristic.
Answer the question instead of trying to turn this into an argument about your personal bikeshed:
> Why jump in every single time to divert that kind of discussion, except to make sure nobody comes near the topic? Tell me, come on, give me a goddamn reason, because I've eliminated every other possibility but the one.
Be the change you want to see in the world then. Obviously don't tell me about it, or anyone for that matter, but if you actually wanted them dead, you could do it, by yourself. Or the supposedly countless masses of people who see the same shit you're talking about could also do it. The fact that you or no one does proves that they simply do not have the will to and that isn't linked to whether or not someone mentions the jewish over representation in things that the vast majority of people do not like.
>some mythical shadowy cabal of Jews with no names, no agendas, no history
They do have names and there is extensive histories about them and how they are an evil people. Is the ADL not jewish, does it not have an agenda? What about AIPAC? What about the hundreds of jewish aid foundations, most of which have jew in the name, that work to bring shitskins into White and only White countries?
@p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage Did I ever fucking say it's only a jewish problem? I didn't, there is a lot of traitorous Whites, but the root of the problem speaks yiddish you fucking nigger. Millennia of jews playing the same trick, give the powerful some money on loan and then they own them and then extend that to blackmailing rings a la Jeffery Epstein in the modern day. That isn't happening again? Get the fuck out of here you turbo retard. You are like doctors these days that just love treating the symptoms rather than finding the cure.
He’s a lolbert, and loberts refuse to see patterns (Which is a pattern, while someone like my friend Otto might be an exception for the VAST majority of them it rings true, and the exception proves the rule after all)
"Sure is funny how every time I try to talk about this, people divert it to screeching about Jews. That doesn't happen when they're screeching about Jews, though. I guess I know 'who I'm not allowed to criticize'." "YEAH BUT JEWS JEWS JEWS AND YOU ARE ACTUALLY A LIBERTARIAN"
He did just say, "There's always going to be a boot on someone's neck, best to make sure you're the one wearing the boot." I'll go ahead and take his advice and put on my boots.
@p@Witch_Hunter_Siegfried@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage There is no pattern, only your assertion that there is one. Hint: Statistically speaking especially when you consider certain circles, people have talked about banks or the Rockefellers or what have you without mentioning jews once and yet those groups still exist.
> There is no pattern, only your assertion that there is one.
Oh, so what you are saying is that it's incorrect? You don't think it's the case that every single time I talk about this, someone shows up to screech about Jews and derail the thread? You're insisting that I'm lying. "Proof" of this would be enumerating all the threads where I tried to talk about this and then showing the post where people showed up to cry about Jews, after which the thread ended up derailed.
You are doing it. Prove me wrong by not doing it. Find a thread where I talk about this stuff and nobody shows up to divert it into a discussion of their opinions on Jews. You can't: it doesn't exist.
But it doesn't actually matter, you fucking dipshit: I base what I do on this being the case, because it's the case. I don't care if you believe it or not because I don't need anything from you.
At any rate, I'm delegating the remainder of our interactions. Good luck.
@mangeurdenuage@p@hj No, that seems to be the entire base of current economy. Loss leaders payed by fractional loans using our savings as a collateral.
I would call it a recipe for disaster, but they won't be the ones losing the collateral, so who cares, right?
@p@lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage Because more users looks like a growth, and you can borrow money against it. It looks like more paying users in the future... The good old "if only 1 % fallacy"
> can't handle less than 100% agreement in all their stances
Back when I was in college & university, I noticed that in discussions with other Americans, we could agree on a sizable majority of any issue, but even minor differences in opinion would lead to "I hate you and I hope you die". So I spent more time with foreign students from Germany, Taiwan, and various African countries. We'd often have little that we agreed upon, but we remained friendly and often pooled our funds to buy pizza after a discussion.
It was a big disappointment when that formerly US-only characteristic spread across the world.
It's day two of those guys and the numbers started escalating today (I suppose they aren't paying attention in chruch), so I ended up putting the bot to them, so I have untagged them because it'd be a dick move to keep sending them messages they can't reply to.
I'm actually doing the move right now, more wireguard shit but going the other direction. Fun stuff, wish I had time to do more of it.
@eriner@graf@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage The "Why is Microsoft spending this much money?" bit was interesting; the part about banks never got to the "Glass-Steagall" phase, let alone the "IMF" phase, which is somewhat frustrating.
All these people you mentioned are buttgoys, they are an intricate part of the system and the system is carefully managed and directed by Jews. These vile ghoulish scum will use the Jewish system to retaliate if you start killing them. The minute you target an elite gentile traitor who collaborates with Jews, the system will escalate and direct all its resources to find you and hunt you down.
This happens because Jews will dedicate significant resources to protect their assets and front men. Thus the "bankers", "UN", etc can't be dealt without running into Jews. So we're back to square one.
Don't ask him any more questions; I am hoping that, since I am lousy with names, when I eventually get around to watching whatever it is that he's talking about, I will not remember the name of the character, so I will not be spoiler alert.
The prosecutor always pushes for the maximum penalty. The defense always moves to have the charges dismissed, and the defendant always pleads not guilty at the arraignment. When it happens, though, newscasters always pretend to be shocked and they take an indignant tone. This is because they think you're a fucking retard and you will buy it: congratulations, you fucking retard, you don't know how the legal system works. It has nothing to do with secret Jews influencing the prosecutor and everything to do with career prosecutors' incentives.
> Thus the "bankers", "UN", etc can't be dealt without running into Jews. So we're back to square one.
They also can't be dealt with without running into Euro-honkeys, you shaved ape.
The profile of the case and the potential for copycats is enough to drive any prosecutor to push for maximum penalty. I don’t know that the jury will play ball with that judge unless it’s a severe mistrial. Which is a regular trial in New York
@p@WhitestTemplar@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage >This must be why people feel it is necessary to derail any discussion of it. I wonder if this is an affect is siloed conversations and censorship at large? I remember occupy wall street and the justified rage the general public had against banks and the financialization of the economy. JP Morgan started their LGBT DEI push in 2011. In hindsight, it's a pretty obvious D&C op to split progressives from economic populists and caused the cultural division that kept people away from targeting banks and finance for a while.
> I wonder if this is an affect is siloed conversations and censorship at large?
Well, if I'm being perfectly honest, at the individual level, it's that Coca-Cola doesn't spend advertising dollars trying to dislodge coffee, it spends the money on trying to get rid of Pepsi. Heretics and apostates are the target of more ire than infidels. There's also a tendency of partisans to dig trenches and demand that you get in the trench and grab a rifle and fall in line: "Pick a side!" Same rhetoric as the lefties, even: "$outgroup is literally trying to genocide $ingroup and if you don't buy our worldview *now* then you are basically as bad as $outgroup! You're probably a secret member of $outgroup!"
And the people doing this, they have this GLR-style worldview. (They also get angry if you point out that they're doing GLR, not Hitler.) And they think they're going to get converts from the Republicans or Libertarians. GLR didn't ever get any traction, so they shouldn't be trying to ape his recruiting strategies; it's a recipe for only getting dipshits to join up and in the off-chance that they even get enough dipshits to be noticed, the psychopaths will show up to fleece them.
So, I think they're doomed and they've picked a stupid hill to die on, and that's the one thing they *really* can't tolerate: not being taken seriously.
> it's a pretty obvious D&C op to split progressives from economic populists and caused the cultural division that kept people away from targeting banks and finance for a while.
That's my reasoning, yeah. I think the only real axis on the "political compass" is the y-axis and that the people all the way at the top of the y-axis are in charge and hosing everyone south of them.
@p@lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage I think the highest possible value should be, where the interest is the total value of the market, since as long as you pay the interest, it is more beneficial to the bank, then you actually paying the debt off.
I think a lot of those people ended up switching to other AB InBev products. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AB_InBev ) It would be cool if the recent proliferation of local beers continues; it seems like basically anywhere now has a handful of small breweries (somewhere in the mid- to late-aughts, they repealed some post-Prohibition rule that made it hard to have a small brewery, and about ten years later, there were like a million beers to choose from just in LA and everywhere else I've gone, it's great).
> They killed that brand.
It's important that beers take a stand and tell you that they are a gay beer. Selling beer wasn't about money, it never has been: it's about being a gay beer, and Bud Light will suck yo dick.
It's a disease to politicize everything; people keep talking about the fall of Rome but you know, you have Lenin doing that essay about whether owning a cat is compatible with revolutionary ideals or if the concept of pets is reactionary bonapartism, right? It's a fucking cat.
Anyway, now suckin' a dick is a politic, and beers will now suck yo dick so they are political, too. There's nothing to do but laugh, but it's the same joke over and over nowadays.
@BowsacNoodle@p@WhitestTemplar@lanodan@hj@Hoss@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage There's also the pharmacy full of poison pills that Wall Street used to kill OWS from within, namely academics going "how do you do fellow kids" while installing the progressive stack on them and pushing out leadership, all while media turned on them once they realized the advertisers were getting mad
@gentoobro I just want to buy a house. I'm pricing my service accordingly.
No investors. No Uber model where I lose money on every chat because some VC is picking up the tab. None of that shit. I won't do it. I hope that can itself be a selling point. "There is no end game. I want to be making some sort of profit the entire time."
No need for exponential growth on the exponential growth to please investors.
The problem here is, the people most likely to want that sort of firm at the same people likely to turn up their nose at *anything* I sell, especially if it's an AI product. @p@lanodan@hj@Hoss@mangeurdenuage
It's a situation fostered by the people who own us. They deliberately encourage and promote it to keep the US citizens factionalized.
On a surface level, all pop culture, education, media influencers and most of Amerimutt Christianity installs it in normie wetware.
Below that, the glow-niggers subvert movements which might address the root cause of this issue thought infiltration, subversion, lies, causing infighting and using the dumb/despairing as repeater-stations to spread meme-malware.
It's all about the people in charge maintaining their power. Amerikwans are very dangerous to their government when about 3% of them decide it needs to go.
@not_br549@istvan@lanodan@hj@Hoss@ProfessionalPetFoodTaster@gentoobro@mangeurdenuage He changed his mind after Fort Sumter. When the war broke out, he was running LSU, which was, at the time, a military academy. He thought the war was a bad idea and that it was going to take years, that all of the politicians involved were over-confident (the Union and the Confederacy both expected the war would be won in a few months), and that it'd be a mistake to trust the war to Lincoln.
> if you fill up an order book for a product, in this case, aircraft, then you also cuck your competition out of the ability to also expand or buy that product.
This is one of Apple's favorite techniques. Gorilla Glass starts rolling off the production lines and Apple buys all of it: every other phone manufacturer is stuck with plastic for years. They did the same thing with high-DPI LCDs and then started advertising "retina" displays. Sometimes instead of just agreeing to buy the entire output of a company for a year or two, they just buy the company. Their entire business model is "fancier than all of the other ones" and if you buy up all of the fancy thing for long enough that other manufacturers can't get a product into the store for at least a year or two, then you maintain (albeit somewhat artificially) your image of being a year or two ahead of everyone else.
> you can always offload assets in the future to recoup expenditure in acquisition which prevented your competition from being able to source means of production,
Well, yeah, it's just another means of cornering a market that is of dubious value, though. And while that may work for hashing hardware, it doesn't work for money you spend on user acquisition: you can't sell ads that you've bought. So user acquisition cost has to somehow relate to the value of the user acquired.
> have no idea how this works in the IT world or with AI,
It does work with consumer electronics, and, except that there's no physical scarcity so the thing you try to lock in is users, it's the dominant strategy for VC tech firms and large tech companies ("IT" has a somewhat more specific meaning), which is why everyone's talking about user acquisition cost.
@p I was talking with another coworker the other day about aircraft orders and deliveries across the major US airlines and also our direct competition (NetJets [who just ordered like 200 jets]) and he mentioned to me a concept that I never even considered before: if you fill up an order book for a product, in this case, aircraft, then you also cuck your competition out of the ability to also expand or buy that product. So, even if it might cost you a loss to do something like that, it might be a strategic benefit for you---and, you can always offload assets in the future to recoup expenditure in acquisition which prevented your competition from being able to source means of production, basically. I have no idea how this works in the IT world or with AI, but, when you talk about it making no sense for a company to do something---like what Microsoft is doing with AI---there very well could be some ulterior motive or 4D chess kinda strategy being played. @lanodan@hj@mangeurdenuage