AFAIK, basically they’re having to buy way more expensive liquefied gas all the way from their friendly ally, the US, rather than the cheap energy they could get from evil evil Russia. People have been pointing at the Cost of Living crisis in the UK since before the pandemic, but shit really hit the fan once they sanctioned Russia and blew up their own pipeline.

Not sure how exactly that works in the USA, but one of the PT’s government greatest achievement in Brazil was both providing legislation for selling off-patent drugs (called “generics”) and also making those tax free to encourage competition.

Lots of really important drugs (for example gut worms) became much more affordable in the span of some 5 years.

And sometimes it takes way longer than that.

There’s even a controversy about whether Google’s PageRank algorithm was intentionally developed as a worse version of (future) Baidu’s RankDex so they could patent it. The fact that there’s any scientific advancement at all under capitalism and the patent system is frankly a miracle.

How Netflix brought Latin America back to its roots of film and TV piracy

I fixed the title. Why pay for less when you can not pay for more?

You should probably watch the video because it’s not about that. It’s about how any UBI “solution” will inherently be a concession from the ruling class that can and will be taken away or gutted, just like the NHS, unemployment benefits or whatevers other wellfare state measures have been tried in the past.

And he goes on to point out that as long as the current ruling class holds the political power, any such measures that depend on begging for them to change things and keep them good are bound to failure, cut corners or downright sabotage. His point is that it’s a futile effort without the working class also seizing political power.

TL;DR: Read Lenin and while at it read Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution too

If anybody is getting paid for this please DM me. Gotta pay rent, so might as well do it while doing something good for society.

Now, hear me out, this might sound crazy, but what if Europe gave historic reparations to Latin American countries for their colonialism and imperialism, therefore reducing the need for further deforestation? Though in all honesty a large portion of the current day deforestation is for soy plantations, which is used to make livestock rations that then go on to feed European and Yankee livestock for the profit of the local latifundiarios and nobody else. Despite what it may seem, most Brazilians (and the other countries) don’t really want more deforestation nor are they benefited by it.

And that’s not even counting all the indigenous people who are actively fighting the destruction and takeover of their lands, including a recent vote over legislation that could’ve legally barred them from claiming a lot of it.

I’m also for that.

It’s still up right now, they plan to kill it by 2024 and YTMP will supposedly be online by then. I suppose this has to do with reallocating their developers and avoiding redundant apps. Not that they’re consistent with the latter.

It’s not like podcast players are particularly complex to build and maintain, so they don’t require that much cashflow. Podbean sustains itself quite well with the odd image ad and AntennaPod is FOSS. I think the problem is more the opposite, since competition is so easy and monetising it would suck interest out of it, Google has no interest in actually competing. Which is why they’re trying to build their own walled garden with uploading your podcasts only directly to YouTube, RSS feeds be damned.

People keep trying to say that this time capitalism is so extra bad that it’s actually something different. Crony capitalism, maniacal capitalism, feudalism. This couldn’t be the exactly the same system that produced all the monopolies of the last century in which every source of food was (and is) owned by a small cartel of supermarket monopsonies. These people could really use a read or two of Lenin’s Imperialism. Capitalism is when market, feudalism is when rent.

I’m still gonna read it when it comes out because data is cool, but what a lib title, and a worse interview.

The reason is right there in the article:

which requires the U.S. president, absent a waiver, to identify and sanction Chinese officials responsible for abuses.

Problem is, they can’t identify these officials (or the abuses) because of lack of evidence (or even proper investigation). As evidence of this lack of evidence, can anybody name any official known to take part in any of the vague accusations?

Even the abuses listed in the article are just “forced labor and labor transfers” and that’d be really funny of the US to use as a charge against any other country given their 13th amendment private prisons.

deleted by creator

My uninformed opinion on this is that he is so immensely rich that Twitter doesn’t really need to be profitable in the long term anyway. Kinda like how YouTube usually operates at loss, but on Hitler’s drug cocktail. It may bite him in the ass eventually because his whole house of cards of “real life Tony Stark” seems to be waning, but I think he’s about as likely to become bankrupt as Yankee student loans are to be forgiven.

I don’t know the internals of Bing, but they have some triggers which themselves seem to be made with NLP. They use it a lot to fetch web info. That means that if the model somehow produces some creative version of a crime that doesn’t get caught, it’ll just send.

I think this is why Bing sometimes refuses to continue the conversation, or ChatGPT will flag its own text as against their terms sometimes. But yeah, they definitely can encourage how to crime sometimes, I’ve made ChatGPT explicitly tell me how to replicate some crimes like the Armin Meiwes cannibalism one while bored.

They aren’t “programmed” to do something, they just produce likely text. If it somehow “learned” from portions of the data to threaten to dox people in circumstances like this, it just replicates that. The programmers themselves likely never saw that portion of the corpus with 4chan bickering, since the dataset is usually impossibly large.

Work visas/permits are just proletarian bans. If you derive your survival from labour and are not allowed to work somewhere legally, your only survival options are to move elsewhere or work illegally. In Northwestern countries like the USA this is by design, because then immigrants/refugees without visas are coerced to work without their deserved rights which then becomes a justification to jail them and force them into prison slavery.

It’s time for liberals to start voting with their wallets. Not that it matters because their wallets are at least 6 orders of magnitude smaller than the ones who will actually invest in Ukraine.

Investments in the 21st century be like: 📉📈

Yes, from my understanding every single member of the WGA is striking even if they weren’t working AMPTP (which includes giants like Disney, WBD, Universal, Paramount, ViacomCBS, FOX, Netflix, Amazon and a bunch of others). They are still allowed to work in areas that don’t fall into the WGA’s representation such as personal youtube channels, podcasts or other forms of non-writing work, but they are advised to consult with the guild if the line is blurry. For example, Adam Conover is a member of the board and negotiating committee, and he is still doing his podcast since it’s mostly a self-employed interview podcast, but has directed it towards talking about the strike itself. I think they may even be allowed to direct given the DGA quick agreement, but I’m not sure how one would direct without a writer.

Edit: punishment can range between fines to outright expulsion, but it’s rare for something like that to go through because you also get known as “that shitty scab” to all your coworkers and nobody wants to be both poor and hated.

There are also lots of cultures who had long rest breaks right after lunch, which have been getting eroded by global capitalism for a while now. But days off are much more valuable with the alienation from labour because now we spend most of our time selling labour force, and then have our free time dedicated to equally hard but unpaid household labour.