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I hear opposing stories about China. On one hand I hear about China the superpower with wise leadership that doesn't need to think in 4 year increments and therefore is looking ahead by a century, but on the other hand I hear about China the third world country where shortsighted and obviously harmful policies go through unchallenged in particular because the concept of face doesn't allow them to course correct.

Nothing this decade shocked me more than when the Democratic candidate for president started bragging that a bunch of the Bush administration really liked him.

It's like Superman coming up and going "you know, Zod really likes me!" -- completely nuts.

There's more than one set of vultures picking our corpse clean. Oil is one, but the environmental industrial complex is the current grift. They're looting the poor because the poor can't fight back.

So you're probably on the right track in many ways, but it's time for democracies to meet the standard of conduct we expect from other fiduciaries. We should start arresting politicians for corruption when there's even an appearance of conflicts of interest.

Government doesn't have that sort of resolution. For example, where I live the money to buy these magical environmentalism boxes was torn from the pockets of the poor. The middle class and the rich were able to afford alternatives using fossil fuels directly, but the poor just had to sit and deal with it, so they pay hundreds of dollars every month just for the privilege of not dying of the elements, but they do get to feel very good that magic environmentalism boxes that literally don't do anything 9 months of the year when they need that power are installed on someone's roof somewhere.

On the upside, even though all the poor are getting absolutely raked over the coals, our politicians are getting very rich. So I guess they are accountable, just to the ultra rich.

Remember when that totally happened?

If the shit hits the fan, how much do you think you'll be worrying about sending currency of any kind to the other end of the earth in minutes?

You think you'll be able to depend on Electricity and Internet being there to trade?

Precious metals were used as international currency for milennia. How exactly could something that works very well be said to "not work well in practice"?

Martin Luther King Jr. once said “Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love.”

In general, I think this lesson has been forgotten totally by the woke. Their embrace of hatred will lead to more hate. Hatred by the majority will not end well for the minority, and with a fresh memory of people running SUVs into crowds of kids I don't think it'll be so easy to bring people back from the edge this time.

Unfortunately, public policy is a non-starter until policymakers get their heads out of their asses and start focusing on what is true rather than what they'd like to be true.

At the moment, the public policymakers are pursuing genocidal policies. They are pushing for magic environmentalism boxes that don't do fuck all instead of actual solutions, while actively working to reduce production of actual useful fuels. They're actively pursuing policies that are reducing the amount of food being grown on the edge of global food shortages. The global food shortages themselves are in part caused by worldwide central control of the economy due to covid.

We're going to use up every ounce of fossil fuels and we won't be ready, but we'll have lots of trinkets we dyed green and covered in "save the environment!" logos.

Kotaku doesn't exactly have captains of industry reading it...

Thing is, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't. You've got incredibly tight Capital conditions for exactly one thing because investors have stopped worrying about making money and now they seem to be under the impression that they're supposed to swoop in like Superman and save the world.

Imagine the hypocrisy of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund divesting from all fossil fuels. Doesn't that seem a little bit like "fuck you, got mine"?

I get a kick out of the fact that it's called actually foods and it's filled with stuff that isn't actually food.

Now there's an interesting method of denationalization: "We're privatizing this by handing equal shares to every adult. Do with the shares what you will."

My headlines are fake, but this one is not.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/chrystia-freelands-granddad-was-indeed-a-nazi-collaborator-so-much-for-russian-disinformation/

Gas prices may have dropped temporarily, but I've already been hearing stories locally and abroad of gasoline shortages, proving that you can't just drop the price of a limited thing and expect there to be no ramifications.

If you've got some medium to long term storage capacity, you might want to top it up now before prices really start to shoot up.

I worked with that model professionally. It wasn't bad. Not the best Dell ever made, but decent enough.

I feel like for a long time it was popular to hate on Dell, but they've made some really decent computers over the years. Not very standardized, but for what they were they were decent.

Ironically, I think the left is about due for a major change.

The thing is, people are learning the ideology and rejecting it. I think in the next little while, the institutionalised left is going to be in big trouble because that rejection is going to end up playing out in the form of mass electoral losses, mass losses in the marketplace, and mass loss of interest on the media front.

It'll be a positive thing for the left, because what comes out of it will need to be something that's palatable to the majority, not something that only specifically caters to a tiny minority of elites (those elites being those who happen to fall in the correct locations on the intersectional array).

Awesome, I didn't realize. Done and done. Thanks for your great ongoing work improving soapbox.

I might just be selfish for wanting to do things the way I presently do things, but any chance of a liberapay? I support projects using it already and I'd be happy to set up a recurring donation that way.