MrSkelter
As a native Brit with advanced degrees who’d been imported to California by an American employer I did the same things.
I have no criminal record in any country, no ill health, no other barriers at all, and was very well qualified.
Yet I had to fly to London for a chest X-ray and get letters from the local police in every country I lived in attesting to my character among other things.
Worst of all, unlike other countries, a US citizenship acquired post birth is second class. I cannot run for the highest political office. Denaturalization is a real possibility. I am expected to be fully American but am not equal to other Americans, including my children and their American mother.
Immigration is very broken in many countries.
The wig fallacy is in full effect here.
Look to the Netherlands, UK, Scandinavia and others for governments who aren’t getting caught doing this.
I suspect the latter due to your use of communist as a pejorative, a reliable indicator someone knows nothing about it as an idea but is keen to talk about Stalin.
What’s happening in Gaza is described by the majority of Israeli Holocaust scholars as genocide. Opposing it isn’t radical. Supporting it is perverse.
Your bias is showing.
Massive increases in efficiency across the board. It’s hard to find non condensing dryers nowadays, almost every boiler heats water in demand, and our very old housing stock is increasingly being triple glazed and insulated.
Very high energy costs due to energy privatization accelerated things. People cannot afford to waste energy in the UK.
The US is learning that lesson now for similar reasons. Trump is doing more to drive efficiency than any number of “green” candidates.
In my English school sports teachers watched us change and shower, I saw one re-locate a dislocated hip on the rugby field. We would stop midway through a cross country run to to press-ups on snowy ground and classroom misbehavior could result in a letter home or “the slipper” (a leather paddle) at the child’s discretion.
For all this my school wasn’t a hotbed of abuse and paedophilia. However many were. The current restrictions were designed to deal with that, the bigger issue, the abuse of kids by adults.
Decrying all the work that’s been done to make schools safer for children from predators is incredibly short sighted.
I am not a fan of the subscription model, but remember when the suite came in a box big enough to put shoes in and cost $2K. If you upgraded every couple of years the subscription are cheaper.
The truth is that replicating apps like photoshop isn’t enough. The work required means they can’t be free for any significant period and you gain nothing by switching. To be useful the new apps have to be significantly better and more performant. Then they need to be cheaper and to demonstrate they will stay the course.
We’ve had high quality competitors to photoshop a long time and they are still niche choices for people who don’t need to interact professionally on a broad basis.
Forget their poor performance. For a vibe coded alternative, or any, to pull users away it needs to be significantly better than what’s there now. That is extremely difficult and impossible to achieve via cloning.
Political organizing is the democratic process of building agreement amongst voters and then pushing for change from the ground up. It revolves around action, protest, nomination and election.
Lobbying is a system whereby people and groups with money, spend those funds to influence politicians and policy without the need to build a coalition of supportive voters. Its aim is to turn money into influence.
Put it this way, the Antarctic is vastly friendlier. Paradise by comparison. Breathable air and unlimited water. Yet we can’t even self sustain there.
It’s great because real human UX has a lot to kick against.
The UK had (damnit) ARM. Arguably the heart of modern computing.
Europe produced the web.
The idea Europe is a technical backwater is cope. The truth is because the capital is elsewhere European innovations get hijacked by (primarily) American companies.
They now claim that any area with a sufficient large number of people they deem are “terrorists” is a legitimate target.
They use that to “legitimately” target villages, hospitals and schools.
These are crimes. The point of defining war crimes is to compel state not to take “opportunities” at the cost of innocent lives. It’s never okay.
The irony of course being that Israel deeply embedded me military facilities in cities and civilian areas itself.
On top of this good design requires control of every line and curve (G2, G3, radius?)
The things these tools do for you and don’t allow you to easily control ruin their work.
If you do manually edit the output for precision they aren’t actually providing any value.
They are the drafting equivalent of clip art.
The point is that a single company is making a deliberate effort to create a false impression about a technology which is now a key part of the US economy.
This is equivalent to overt stock market manipulation.
The technological aspects are much less important than knowing it’s the result of a single company.
That the company is Israeli and likely has ties to that government is just another layer of alarms - given that countries existential reliance on US aid which requires ongoing leverage to apply to US governments.
You can draw a circle on the road and have “roundabout rules” without the need for any car to even turn their wheels.
You are constantly reminded of what you only know because of earlier episodes, and how much goes unsaid.
It’s something only empathy can make sense of and it challenges the viewer to empathize across time and culture.
The class resonances mean it’s a different experience when watched as a British person too.
A better result at lower cost would come by making the entire piece from wood. You would need a few handtools and nothing else. Plenty strong and totally gap free.
Plus the huge bonus of acquiring some woodworking skills if you don’t have them.
You write as if you are a lawyer for an AI corp trying to avoid a judgement. It’s akin to saying Teslas FSD/Autopilot can’t kill anyone, it’s just a computer. Cars can kill people. Totally different things. FSD/Autopilot is safe by definition and no one should try to legislate it.
They are infinitely tolerant of the vagaries and missteps of capital, and hold the state to a standard of perfection no business can attain.
They will never support greater rights for workers or renters. They see those people as the enemy.
One group of people are upset their views, which were consequence free until recently, are now resulting in negative consequences.
The other group is arguing to defend the rights of people who until recently didn’t have them and who are being threatened with a loss of liberty, freedom or equality.
There’s no equivalence.
At the turn of the century the CIA predicted climate change and water being the primary drivers of conflict in the 20s.
We are already seeing the US deposing Venezuela’s government and taking their energy as US’s intentional fossil fuel dependency bites.
Things will only get worse unless radical changes are made. We have to move faster than the skeptics and entrenched interests desire.
To save the planet some people are going to lose their wealth power and position. Despite their protestations it’s entirely logical, just and necessary.
Everyone knows think tanks are opinionated.
This one doesn’t have real staff or a real address. It’s an attempt to benefit from “intellectual” engagement with an issue, and having a corpus of work in support of a view, without doing the work or spending the time.
Plenty of people support Israel’s worldview. They are just choosing not to hire and pay them in this instance. That’s what makes it fake.
All other issues aside, Trump and the Republicans love to boast that they aren’t bound by anything including their own promises. This is the end result of that.
You’d be mad to cut a deal with the US right now. The Trump Admin will just try to take another bite. They are dishonest and unreliable. Making America’s word mean nothing is the greatest long term damage done to the country and the surest indicator of the end of the American Century (80 years but we can round up)
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
Your comment about the size of the earth is confounding. How is that relevant? Raising temps 4 degrees locally is a serious issue. Yes it will be worse if it scales but it doesn’t have to in order for us to care.
The tech companies could be building green data centers. Using renewable energy they are paying to add to the grid ( ie building the solar plant along with the data centers) and then flowing half the power they make back to the grid to lower prices. They could similarly work with water, purifying non drinking sources and adding to supply overall.
Costs would balloon but the negative impacts would go and getting a data center would mean jobs, lower prices for energy, less carbon and clean water.
Doing it the way we are - based on subsidies and pollution - is a choice.
Israelis, and their supporters, love to boast of Israel’s technical prowess and world leading capability in many areas.
Most people do this and Israelis are no different. However in Israel’s case there is evidence of its ability to build, hack and exploit technology at a very high level. The attacks on centrifuges and pagers being prime examples.
Yet when reports of these capabilities being used for influence appear suddenly Israel is being unfairly picked on? It doesn’t make sense.
Israel is very open about its use of propaganda. From AIPAC to “hasbra” to funding film and tv projects pushing particular viewpoints.
Russia and China do not have anything like the power to work like this Israel does. There is no Russian or Chinese AIPAC equivalent.