Allies did too, actually. On lower scale maybe. USSR … did have its own stuff, but it was kinda even more unhealthy (leading to blindness sometimes) than what the rest had, so it was used in extreme conditions only, usually very low temperatures, very rarely.

I personally used high doses of German military marches and pr0n to “self-medicate” being 15-17. LOL.

And Star Wars soundtracks after that. And Warcraft II soundtracks.

No, it’s the “neutral” types. Who are all good when the guys with skulls are defeated, and all compliant when the guys with skulls are in charge.

Guys with skulls themselves are usually more peculiar types, not really discomforted by open public discourse. Just not limiting themselves to any moral boundary. You’d probably find them interesting.

The latter portion, which wants portrayed evil to be grotesque and not like reality, because they are not going to avoid evil anyway, is even bigger.

I mean, I don’t like fools. Like half of my family are terrible fools. But the “smart” people with no idea of kindness, fair conduct or at least sport are worse, and in my experience more common than fools, not less.

Except maybe for children and the dumber types, most people already know what evil looks like. They are willing to pretend, so what more lifelike portrayals will do is irritate them.

I’m thinking of going stoic and dropping anything Android, but this would require setting up an emulator working good enough for WhatsApp, Google Authenticator, MS Authenticator and probably something else.

3 shites dropped.

It’s funny, after the breakup of USSR there existed for a few years such an entity as “CIS armed forces”. It does not anymore because national governments want to control their own militaries.

Any country can become such, but as you’ve said yourself - everyone having nukes is more realistic than nobody having nukes, and the “mass destruction” part can even have upsides.

It should, but that’s only one level.

First Germany should build a competent armed force which will participate in all the ongoing wars on the globe to gain experience.

(I’m not a German citizen nor I intend to become one.)

It’s a common misconception that using peaceful means is always more moral than fighting a colonial war.

One can imagine a simple experiment. Country A conquers country B and brutalizes country C. Would it be more moral for Germany to peacefully trade (including military goods\technologies) with country A or to use said armed force to get a piece of country B? Country B suffers in both cases, but in the latter case Germany doesn’t finance the aggressor, and also presents some competition and can make life in parts of B controlled by it better. It can also offer military help to C for some preferential treatment.

Ah, also country A already has such a fighting force, all bullies already do. A military has to fight wars to remain competent. So there’s no vegetarian way to defend from influence of bullies. And there’s no neutral way as well - either you are a bully or you actively fight bullies. Maybe both. If you are neither, then you become weaker with time, and thus simply part of supply chain for bullies. Also neutrality always helps bullies and never the victim, that’s Eli Wiesel quote, if someone didn’t know.

Of course it is. Visiting a doctor is cheaper elsewhere. It’s the particular mix of regulation, subsidies and market that makes it so bad.

Eh, cocaine seems kinda too much. I understand lots of adderall.

BTW, where I am normal ADHD medication is illegal, unless you get it and the recipe in another country. As you might imagine, that is kinda expensive to do every few months.

I’ve stopped taking lots of strong tea with sugar, because despite kinda helping with work, it makes me really depressed.

Every piece of software is insecure, because people make errors and mistakes.

When a law of nature prevents us from doing what we’d want, the right decision is to adapt our approaches.

That would return us back to modularity, Unix philosophy and all such stuff.

Yes, I think Xorg wouldn’t survive the filter, but it wouldn’t be the only thing.

Of what I’ve read of Minitel, it was cool, but the kind of thing that simply requires government to mandate it. And also subsidies.

This is the big lie. Inflation hurts the rich when bond rates are at an insufficient premium to inflation rate. Those who don’t have savings, can complain that their work wages are not rising fast enough, but that is a complaint towards their employer who is raising prices enough to pay higher wages if they weren’t oppressing their workers.

I don’t understand this paragraph. Maybe it’s correct, but the way you use words confuses me. Inflation means that the same real world items cost more of conditional units, that is, money. The bigger proportion of your interactions is done with money and the smaller frequency is, the more you lose from inflation.

Corporatist/Republican media helped swing election to most genocidal supportive candidate over this lie. But a war on Russia made the inflation self inflicted.

What war on Russia? Russia invaded a sovereign nation, leveled cities, killed civilians in droves.

Goal shouldn’t be that profits can’t exist. It should be poverty elimination, easier life for everyone, and inherent resistance to having profits used to rule over you more harshly.

With superprofits from cocaine, prostitution and other forbidden things going to mafia groups associated with politicians - yeah, one would think such profits shouldn’t exist. Whichever path you like most, you won’t be allowed to tread it while people with the opposing interest have so much power.

It is not power hungry DNC or RNC who will ever provide UBI. It is candidates who want to disempower Israel first wars and rulership. A campaign for UBI is first and foremost an extermination of the corrupt rulership, replacing it with the empowerment of individuals.

So how are you going to do that?

It’s like elaborating in detail what you are going to do when we settle Mars and build safe dome cities, without any plan at all how you are going to make that economically plausible.

AI, including current LLMs, as a humanist oracle, has the power to make you/us less stupid if its mission/programming is truth.

No it doesn’t, it won’t ever be smarter than the dumbest human and also however many oracles you consult, you still bear full responsibility for your own decisions.

Regulating AI for “national security domination” is inherently coopting that oracle function. Google/reddit/lemmy has been such a function of filtering up answers for you to digest for many years already.

Once again, treating these technologies as ever possibly acceptable to tell people what to think is nuts. These are glorified predictors. Their role is to fill the holes where you don’t have anything better. These are by definition worse than anything dedicated. And of course they can’t think.

You can escape inflation by substituting goods, and you only lose from inflation if 1. you have too much cash, or 2. your income rises slower than inflation.

If you have enough cash for it to grow faster than inflation, you win and those who have less lose compared to you. So your relative power grows.

Inflation makes the poor poorer faster than it makes the rich poorer, actually it doesn’t do that.

And by “inflation” specifically people usually mean devaluation of money due to growth of monetary mass, which itself is a result of closing budget holes with emission.

So UBI is a massive economic/prosperity boost above and beyond inflation. Eliminates poverty and crime, reduces the need for savings,

Eliminates small crime. Superprofits from selling cocaine working together with corrupt officials will not really change with UBI.

Politicians can no longer lie their way past even an idiocracy that understands “I like money”.

There’s never enough money.

More program cuts means higher UBI.

Only if politicians act as you want them to.

It would be treason if your AI suggests the empire is not pure good, and Israel has done something wrong, and contradicts the CIA/media disinformation plan.

The problem here is not with what you are describing, but that you are seriously considering treating a computer program as an oracle, that can ask questions about good and evil.

Investing in dead ender climate terrorist energy is a mistake.

I hope that’s not your opinion of nuclear energy. People criticizing it miss the fact that a grid has to support some baseline.

All things are good and needed, which are not about burning fossil fuels (and sometimes even those, if getting “greener” energy somewhere pollutes more than just taking a canister of gasoline or diesel fuel). And the more diverse energy supply is, the smaller is each particular environmental impact, be it from greenhouse gases, lithium, ruining watersheds when building hydroelectric stations, similar impacts of wind farms, oil spills, escaping gases, toxic liquids, plastics, … .

People miss that nuance. You make humanity sustainable again by diversifying as much as possible, so that any particular kind of harm would be minimized, and so that no particular industry would possess strategic power. Not by dividing energy into holy and unholy and burning witches. It’s just math.

Promising reindustrialization is a lie, and tariffs won’t do it. It will bleed Americans dry while letting oligarchs pillage what’s left.

Promising won’t because promising ain’t doing.

But input is leverage, and leverage is power. Look how “free” input from corporations into Linux gave them control over it. So if reindustrialization really-really happens, it will improve politics of your country. It’s the way it works. When you live off cheap Chinese labor, your economy depends less on your own.

Weaponizing AI to control population, and kill people is the new priority. Putting your hopes in DNC so that they can undo project 2025 is controlling you in a way that doesn’t avert the path to collapse in any way.

Agreed.

The only escape is UBI and peace. Not something a Israel supremacist neocon DNC wants, because UBI is power redistribution instead of wealth redistribution. The binary of AI and automation is either cooperation where abundance and the profits from abundance can be shared, or extermination of useless riff raff that dares to whine about oligarchy and empire.

I personally have doubts about UBI. It requires fiscal discipline that no recent US government had. Otherwise it speeds up inflation. Not significantly if we compare it to corporate bailouts, but still.

Peace is always good. But war is a symptom of problems that still would exist if there were no war.

I’ve recently watched an interview by Bill Joy (the Sun founder) where he mentions how clear water access has done much more to reduce mortality in the world than antibiotics. I think it’s the same with accessible good automation vs “AI” and other hype phenomena. I think non-oligopolized tech industry and non-oligopolized Web would do hell of a lot more for all kinds of abundance than any new magic wand like “AI”.

I don’t know, it’s just experience. Especially onions.

Sugar in them, I think.

Only should be really careful about lentils, peas, anything that sticks to the bottom.

Cabbage is good. Beef is good. Potatoes are good. Carrots - make it go bad a bit faster when not on fire. Same with peas. And of course with onions it’ll go bad very fast.