I dont think you can blame everything Orban does on Americans

Sure. He’s got a huge network of domestic supporters who are along for the ride.

Every fellow American I know hates and mistrusts their government? To be fair, all of the people I spend energy associating with are strongly progressive.

Will you distrust the government when it flips back to Dem control?

Obama currently has a 90% approval among liberals. It doesn’t seem like they’ve learned anything.

Orban is a fucking FSB puppet

He came up through US anti-communist front groups and has turned his country out to Silicon Valley goons and evangelical reactionaries.

So had Putin, at least during the War on Terror era.

They’ve been peas in a pod under every Republican administration since Bush 41. At best, you could describe them as Rogue Assets, assuming you ignored how often they work to benefit American industry.

Trump, Silicon Valley, and Europe’s Far-right

Heritage Foundation, a prime mover in American domestic politics: Why the U.S. Must Befriend Hungary’s Populist Leader

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban at a Joint Press Availability

We’ve seen the American hand behind Orban since his days in the Alliance of Young Democrats (ironically enough, founded by Orban’s favorite whipping boy George Soros).

He’s an American proxy and always had been. If he’s been a wedge into the EU for decades, that’s by design.

Orban is a fucking russian asset

He’s more bound up in American geopolitics. But then Americans keep smelling shit, then blaming foreigners for the load in their pants.

This seizure appears in response to a gas pipeline that Ukraine destroyed during the war.

The price shock from the Iran War is driving people to do desperate things in order to stay in power. You can get mad at Orban for being a POS. But he’s not the prime mover here. This is all downwind of Israel/US closing the Straight of Hormuz.

So yes, you can visit your favorite blog, but its still not the same as it was in the 90s or early 00s.

It absolutely is. I might argue podcasts have kinda usurped the old blogging space (or, at least, supplanted it). But I’ve got an RSS feed full of blogs I follow that are barely different that what I was looking at 30 years ago. The 90s is alive on Feedly.

Fucken computers bullshit, its fucken sick

Lolz.

One method was to lower the quality of inputs. Plywood instead of hardwood. Then fiberboard/chipboard instead of plywood.

In fairness, hardwood is in limited supply. It takes a long time to produce, is expensive to harvest correctly, and typically means demolishing old growth forests to obtain. The “lower quality” products definitely have their trade-offs, but a lot of the quality issues are resolved through engineering improvements and materials sciences.

I would argue the real downside of lower quality inputs is the advent of “disposable” furniture (the IKEA brand crap most notably). Stuff that could have been designed to last, but isn’t, and ends up in landfills after moving day as a result. Rather than a savings yield, what you get is a waste surplus.

And later, CNC machines stepped in to produce delicate and complicated designs in a fraction of the time - and frequently even more precisely and more cleanly - than anyone with a carving chisel could do.

And that is the part which is NOT being effectively duplicated in IT.

Lolwhut? We’ve come so far even in the last ten years, in terms of IDEs, deployment pipelines, and automated unit testing.

dont browse the web Facebook or any modern Google/iPhone Store apps.

The internet used to be a space for weird geeky hobbyists that more traditional plebs couldn’t access or couldn’t be bothered to fuck with. Now it’s still that, but it has a bunch of shit for the rubes, too.

At some point, I feel like I’m talking to someone who says “I fucking hate Florida. Every time I go, I spend a week at Disney World and it’s expensive and awful and loud and stupid.” And here I am, out in the Keys, working on my tan and fishing and hiking and hooking up with cuties, having no problems whatsoever.

We are not at the end of the road. We are not at the beginning of the end of the road. We are not at the end of the beginning.

I definitely get the impulse to doom. And I’m as prone to it as anyone. But when I look at crypto and AI, all I can see is the same analog fuck-ups made in prior generations. Beanie Babies and Labubus didn’t ruin the stuffed animal industry. The Delorean and the Hummer didn’t ruin the automotive industry. The Great Depression of 1932 didn’t ruin the financial sector.

Plenty of things to be excited about in software and tech that lives entirely outside the cloistered hype-beast market. Raspberry Pis, 3D printers, 3nm chipsets built with ultraviolet lithography, solid state drives, lithium and sodium ion batteries with incredibly recharge rates, gorilla glass and carbon fiber, 5G+ radios, full voice recognition, self-piloting vehicles.

How is none of this thrilling? Hell, even just the advent of coding pipelines that can take a project from a funky coding idea to a deliverable feature in a few keystrokes is such a huge step forward in development. I can’t hate the sales goons pushing junk when I’m so immersed in all the novel innovative applications of technology I’ve been watching bud itself up from the ground for the last 40 years.

Even LLMs on their face are such a novel application of graph theory. You can do so much cool stuff off a second hand laptop today. It’s an exciting new frontier.

But I’m not talking about that.

You and the rest of the US national media.

Despite all the bombs you drop, you fail to achieve anything in the end.

Tell it to Raytheon stockholders. Hell, tell it to Facebook stockholders.

More importantly, tell it to every single Palestinian rendered homeless by the Nakba and the subsequent seventy years of genocidal policy. Israel exists in its current state because they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and took their homes, their farms, and cut off their access to Arab neighbors.

Meanwhile, your equating human lives to grass

Mowing the grass (Hebrew: כיסוח דשא) is a metaphor used to describe periodic Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip to manage the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The term was coined by Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir, two columnists for The Jerusalem Post and strategic studies researchers.

Naftali Bennett referred to the idea in a speech in 2018 when he said “מי שלא מכסח את הדשא, הדשא מכסח אותו” (‘He who does not mow the grass, the grass mows him’)

I’ve seen plenty of data points to suggest the IDF is running America and this is one of them

Out of curiosity, how do you mean?

The correct way to fire her would be out of a cannon.

Unfortunately, there’s a correct way to remove Kristi Noem from office and this ain’t it.

We killed a whole lot of school girls in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq as well. Didn’t get the same kind of coverage, because the executive branch (and the public) were more disciplined in messaging.

But I think a lot of warfare is, at the end of the day, a libidinal need to “mow the grass” as the genocidal IDF leadership put it. Kill your enemies. Kill their families. Kill their kids. Depopulate territory of opposition.

Do I think dropping big explosives from the air works toward that end? Absolutely.

You think dropping big explosives from the air is the only form of warfare? How did that work out for you in Vietnam?

Killed a whole lot of people

Iran loves to issue empty threats.

They’ve been crippled. Their ability to project artillery outside their borders is receding with every passing day. As soon as the US/Israel offer them a seat at the bargaining table, they’ll come rushing back just like they have every other time the US/Israel has pushed their shit in.

If you love getting rug-pulled, go ahead and root for Iran.

If you want to cheer for the team with the kind of blood-lust necessary to obliterate a civilization, you’d be better off cheering for the US and Israel.

Exactly what Israel did in Gaza.

Bomb the schools. Bomb the hospitals. Bomb the sewage treatment plants. Bakeries are next.

we should not be wasting money

Every time I hear someone complain about how much money this is costing, I picture that bloody backpack from the girl’s school we bombed.

The American value of human life must be net-negative at this point.

I mean, King Charles is - at a bare minimum - king of England.

Think this would be closer to calling Marta María Batista Fernández President of Cuba.

The end game