I get the narcissistic part, how does that reflect autism tho?

Closest to that is a base trim Bolt. Considering inflation since COVID, 29k is pretty decent for the US market.

You ever look up how RAM is manufactured?

Pakistan has already taken the opportunity to step in as the key mediator

Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Is it exploitation of a massive power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Is it illegal? Probably about as illegal as a game pre-loading 4gb of DLC I’m not going to buy as part of an automatic update. The terms of your agreement with Google for Chrome allow them to update their software as they see fit. Their gamble is that you won’t switch.

Tomorrow’s headline “The Trump administration removes the requirement to report US deaths due to war.”

Yes, the supreme leader of Iran stated he was opposed to developing nuclear weapons in 2003. The supreme leader then did not proceed to authorize two decades of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, a nuclear weapons program the West has not been negotiating about with Iran under his supreme leadership, a nuclear weapons program which was not bombed out last year, because of course it didn’t exist. /Sarcasm

Jesus, someone replace Jensen with an AI already. The bots could generate much more nuanced and empathetic responses. /SARCASM

The how does matter. You can appreciate the removal of a despot and still oppose unilateral regime change by force–especially one so explicitly motivated by resource exploitation. This is very different from the UN-sanctioned and NATO-led intervention that deposed Gaddafi.

Would you describe China attacking North Korea or Cambodia or another SE Asian dictatorship to depose their leadership as “accidentally doing something right”?

It’s a common mistake to assume that gun buybacks are being proposed as a solution. The solutions being proposed are a set of laws/policies to tighten gun controls, like who’s allowed to buy guns, what guns are allowed to be owned and how many, improving checks and mitigating newer loopholes.

Tighter gun controls are shown to reduce mass shootings. In Australia, the laws have loosened a lot since the big wave of gun laws in 1996. The buyback program is a consequence of bringing people in line with the new laws.

The realistic goal is not to make it absolutely impossible for a motivated extremist with lots of resources to plan and commit a mass shooting, it’s to make it much harder to prepare to do and to create more opportunities to notice their preparation.

I think it echoes that video of those two Apache crews blowing up civilians in Baghdad and then targetting people who came to help the injured. One of the most chilling parts of that video was probably how casually routine it all seemed. Can only imagine what footage existed that never got leaked.

I agree, I’m separating the justification of the engagement from how they label people. So the parallel I’m drawing only has to do with how they loosely label people as part of a group based on broad characteristics once they decide a group can be a valid military target, i.e. “insurgents” or “narco-terrorists”.

Declaring drug smugglers as valid military targets is certainly new, but ordering strikes on military targets on the thin rationale of “hey, they look like the group we said we can hit” is not new for the US military.

If it’s not obvious, I disagree with both of these issues.

I agree, but it’s also consistent with how the US operates. Through Afghanistan’s and Iraq, anyone appearing as a military-aged male in the vicinity of an operation (e.g. a village where insurgents were shooting from) was labeled an enemy combatant and treated as valid targets.

Fuck AI, it’s a bubble, etc. But I do wonder how much of the spending is actual revenue-generating operating costs and how much is further investment/R&D. I doubt Sam Altman sees spending Microsoft’s billions on whatever tf he wants as a loss.

Depends on what class you are, which I think a lot of comments in this thread understandably seem to assume from a middle class perspective, even assuming “wage” as the main source of wealth.

Real estate is one major source of capital gains, but for a lot of the 1% and investors, capital gains is primarily from financial instruments, i.e. stocks, bonds, etc.

I’m sorry, either I’m dense or your explanation is confusing. How is what you described different from the capital gains tax?

Yeah, both possibilities mentioned are plausible. Some actual investigation and evidence tying him to the account are warranted.

Thanks for sharing that idea! I appreciate what you’re getting at: that basic care (food, clothing) embodies the tenet of equality in socialism. However, the example of a parent feeding a child doesn’t quite capture the power-relations, freedoms, and systems aspects of socialism. I don’t think we really want to say a master feeding/clothing their slave or a king feeding/clothing a favorite court jester is really “demonstrating socialism”. Socialism is about how society as a whole arranges ownership, production, and resource distribution (i.e. collective ownership of the means of production). It’s a counter to capitalism.

Parental relationships are, ironically, a special case where limiting freedoms and greater power disparity are justified in most egalitarian systems. We usually don’t give children ownership over the means of production.

Good formal description: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socialism

So if socialism is bad because it’s in the name of Nazis, then democratic republics for the people must be pretty horrible too, going by the DPRK.

While we’re cherry-picking, the Kingdom of Norway is consistently one of the best countries to live in across several metrics. So clearly we should go back to kingdoms, because it’s in the name. Sometimes the old ways are best XD