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  • This is important.

    It's the downstream consequence of decades of outsourcing, kicked off in earnest in the Reagan Administration. "Right to Repair" is just the tip of an enormous iceberg of military privatization.

    Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

    That's the nut of it. This money is being wasted in the general sense. But it isn't wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

    This goes back to the BBB and its rampage through some of the most high efficiency Medicaid programs on offer, in order to shuttle somewhere between $175B and $541B (depending on who is counting) to a national security system that's just legions of badged up bullies harassing locals for the entertainment of a few hooting chuds.

    why can’t the military fix their own equipment or farmers fix tractors?

    Because

    and SaaS is how corporate industry has decided it will continue to grow its profits indefinitely.

  • Was on the beach in Cozumel and had a raccoon that lived in a stack of surf boards solicit me for nachos.

    He did the little 🙏 gesture and then stuck out a tiny paw. Came back half a dozen times once he realized we were suckers for this act.

    Hands down, favorite part of the trip.

  • They aren’t producing that meat for the fun of it

    They're overproducing because they're heavily subsidized and operating under a functional price floor thanks to the wholesale market and industrial application of their products.

    Grocery store ground beef is practically a waste product. Agg Business produces far more of it than they can ever hope to sell retail.

    Its still true that less meat would be produced if less people purchased it

    Less people in a single dense region, sure. If half of New York went meatless, you'd see a sharp drop in beef sales to the Five Boroughs.

    But if you distribute those 4M people across the entire Continental US, there's no market mechanism to reduce distribution that granularly. All you're impacting is relative expected future profit margins per venue. No single business has an incentive to reduce wholesale purchases.

  • When populations are starving to death in 2044

    You don't have to wait. Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Haiti, Chad, Afghanistan, Syria... All undergoing starvation level famines right now.

  • when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

    But that's just it. The plane doesn't burn less fuel because you didn't buy a ticket. Hell, I've been on planes that were half full (in the wake of COVID).

    They're polluting whether you are on them or not. The only remedy is regulation / downsizing / nationalization. There's no future in which people individualistically shrink the industry. No more than you could have saved someone's life in Iraq by not paying your taxes.

  • Sure. Vote with your wallet.

    But 52.4 million tonnes of edible meat are wasted globally each year. Roughly 18 billion animals (including chickens, turkeys, pigs, sheep, goats, and cows) are slaughtered annually without even making it to a consumer market.

    This is a systematic problem that can only practically be addressed at the state level. Meatless Monday isn't actually reducing your carbon footprint because you're not actually the one emitting the carbon.

    This isn't like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by driving less" it's like saying "I'm going to burn less fuel by not taking the bus".

  • Silicon Valley turtleneck was just the Mao Suit of its era.

  • Jeff Bezos saved hundreds of billions of dollars by downsizing his wife.

  • Israel does not have a future after this.

    If Germany and Japan could have a future after WW2 - a war they lost categorically - Israel will do just fine in the coming decades, after successfully executing a full ethnic cleanse of some of the more valuable real estate in the Mediterranean.

    Israel isn't a rogue state, it's a cat's paw. They're doing the dirty work as a proxy for allies who have wanted to wipe Arabs off that corner of the map for decades. In the end, however, you're going to see western states welcome Israelis back into the fold with open arms, just so long as they can pin this all on Netanyahu and pretend it wasn't a national project with the full support of the Israeli public.

  • I would say the big distinction between Ukraine and Gaza is that in Ukraine there has been a meaningful (and enormously lucrative) project to arm locals in opposition to Russian invasion. It's been of dubious success, given how much territory they still lost. But its difficult to say that the Biden Era government (or even Trump Term 1) wasn't willing to shovel arms and mercenaries into Ukraine in an effort to cripple Russian advances.

    In Gaza, the Israel blockade has gone virtually unchecked - outside of a few salvos from Yemen and some allegations of support from Iran and Hezbollah. Americans are supporting the genociders not the victims. There is no Gaza military left to repeal an invasion nor is there any appetite for a Hamas resistance to repeal IDF advances. At this point, it's little more than a shooting gallery.

    There's a line of combat between Ukraine and Russia. There's nothing in Gaza. Just Israelis and their private security contractors kettling and massacring neighborhood after neighborhood, then flagging bulldozers to knock down the houses when they're done.

  • British Palestine (and other Mid-East / North Africa states) were notable in that they were far more accommodating to Jewish peoples than the European continent had been. They were colonial territories with large international trading hubs that were already pluralistic and accommodating to foreigners. And they weren't carrying the baggage of a few centuries of Inquisitions and Pogroms.

    Until the Shah was installed in '53, Iran had one of the largest Jewish populations in the world. Ethiopia and Sudan had hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living contentedly in its borders until the '70s, when civil war and famine ripped the country apart. And prior to the Holocaust, there was an enormous flight of Jewish residents to the Americas.

    Now, primarily white militant European settler colonialists might have trouble setting up an intentional community of Zionist radicals anywhere. But there's no reason to believe Argentina or Madagascar would have been materially worse for them than British Palestine.

  • Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.

    Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.

    But this idea that we've had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.

    But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels "policing" the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you've got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.

    Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.

  • We are heading towards a crash. We are very much already in one, and have absolutley no way out.

    I think this is what folks lose track of when they talk about "the crash". We're all waiting with baited breath for the financial system to topple over. But the financial system is increasingly just a dozen private equity firms bidding up one another's baseball cards. They can't "crash" in the traditional sense until a sufficient number of them refuse to contribute more to the pot, and so long as everyone has easy credit there's no real reason to do that.

    Incidentally, JPow and Trump (and every Fed Chair/President going back to Bernenke/Obama) have both been militant in keeping Fed Interest Rates at historic lows going on nearly two decades.

    Literally we are living through the gilded 1920’s again but with an American Hitler.

    I mean, the parallels between Trump and Coolidge Eras are in abundance. War on Immigration. A finance/tech sector that's eating the industrial economy. Massive spike in white nationalism paired with a full blown Red Scare. Deficit hawkery that never touches the national security state. Global ecological crises compounding into massive famines and agricultural failures.

    We are a country being lead into disaster by the least competent people imaginable.

    Part of the problem is that we've lost track of a consensus on what "competent" looks like. I see plenty of people (rightly) insist guys like Trump and Speaker Johnson and governors like DeSantis and Abbott are criminally incompetent. But then these same people get fully behind Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris, seemingly without recognizing that they're pushing the backside of the same privatization / national security state coin.

    What do you do when blue state bastions like California and New Mexico are turning out Crypto Shills as quickly as any captured conservative enclave like Wyoming or South Carolina? What does competency look like in the wake of Biden's squandered four years or Obama's or Clinton's corporately compromised time in office, for that matter?

    How do you talk about climate change or even scratch the surface of our US-backed genocides in Gaza and Yemen and Afghanistan or talk about housing policy or college debts or union organization when half the elected liberal contingent is just a commodity that's traded on the stock market?

    We're all waiting for the dream to end in a sudden shocking economic turn. I don't know if that's necessarily what will happen. What if we've just pivoted our economy towards a monetization of human suffering? What if this system is stable and enduring? There is no crash because there's nothing left to be broken into and fleeced.

  • the world is rotten

    The chef is rotten. The world is beautiful. You just can't see it from inside the steamer.

  • Trump: "I'm doing things my own way."

    CIA Section Chief: "Show him that Zapruder film again and make sure he doesn't forget about it this time."

  • The goal post keeps moving. It's a chronic problem with fascism.

    Elon naively trained his algorithm on generally available data, rather than constricting it entirely to Conservapedia and InfoWars. So now every time a news story drops that they haven't sandbagged with specific responses, they're forced to hear something they don't like.

  • You are well aware that those are retcon? None of this existed before “A New Hope”.

    Lucas had reems of material he used to turn out multiple screenplays before he ended on New Hope.

    That's a big part of where those changes in the re-releases came from.

  • An easy thing to say if you've never been shot at

  • What’s rent for a one bedroom apartment?

    Pretty wide range depending on neighborhood and quality. I'm in Condesa, so it's in the $600-1200 USD range. You can definitely find cheaper.

    I imagine border security into the country is easier than the other way around.

    It's not really an issue in Mexico City.

  • You only have to pay them if you move back to the US

    Specifically if you're a contractor simply working abroad. If you don't actually reside in the US and you earn foreign income /pay taxes for a year, you're not going to owe anything.

    That said, if you travel overseas for three months on contract, earn a ton of money, and come home to spend it, you have to report that in the US minus taxes payed abroad.

  • News @lemmy.world

    1 million voters have been purged from Florida's rolls as number of registered Democrats drops by nearly 10% while Republicans only lose 3% of registered voters

    politics @lemmy.world

    Blinken says he asked Qatari PM to rein in Al Jazeera war coverage, per sources