• 3 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • Fair point, I can only speak directly about my local experience.

    That’s true but we, that includes me, can look around and see what’s happening beyond our State and National borders to see if a theory fits.

    Realistically, the standard of living has been falling for a while.

    IMO that’s the crux of the problem right there. The Standard of Living has been falling everywhere and it’s been falling faster as “Globalization” took hold. The real issue though isn’t trade between countries that have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles, it’s the one sided importation of goods between countries that do not have roughly similar economic systems and lifestyles.

    The problem with Globalization is that it tears the floor out from underneath the vulnerable. The under-educated and the poor struggle to make a living because their jobs have been shipped away to another country where someone can live for less and thus work for less. It’s a race to the bottom.

    Those vulnerable people, and even the once privileged who’ve watched their livelihoods ripped away, are increasingly desperate to find a way out of their situation and so they’re increasingly turning to the only people who seem to care. To paraphrase a bit “It’s the (real) economy, stupid!”

    This isn’t my idea either as this outcome was widely predicted by Union Bosses and Business Leaders during the Clinton Administrations runup to NAFTA and MFN Trading Status for China.

    If they were correct, and it appears they were, then the only way to stop the madness is to re-onshore the jobs as much as possible with a special focus on geographic areas that have the highest imbalance. The U.S. started doing it under the Trump Administration and the Biden Administration has accelerated the trend. If everyone will just hang tight for another 12-18 months the effects will start to get really noticeable and the Right Wing rise will ebb away.






  • Unfortunately and sadly doesn’t surprise me anymore.

    It shouldn’t surprise you at all. Any notion of “Free Speech” on Internet Platforms was shot in the head during the Trump Presidency and then the corpse was burned at the stake during the Pandemic. There were vast quantities of myopic morons making the arguments “These are private companies, they can do what they want!” along with “You have no right to speech on someone else’s platform!” simply because they approved of what was being done.

    Now the arguments being used by 2017-2022 MAGAtards are being shouted by 2023-2024 Liberals / Progressives.

    It’s pretty obvious that social media as a whole is just a corrupt mess.

    It’s pretty obvious that people are perfectly happy with restrictions on the other person but never themselves.

    People forget that the restrictions they hammer the other person with today are going to be used against them tomorrow. Plan accordingly.




  • I’m somewhat surprised that there’s no purchasable solution to this problem as all of the technology to make a short range drone interdiction system already exist. To detect one all that’s necessary is an appropriate camera setup and a system hooked to it capable of recognizing them, both of which are already prevalent in the market. Add an inexpensive laser range finder so the system can know if the drone is truly over your property and at an altitude acceptable for interception.

    Once that’s done it becomes a matter of how to interdict the drone. One relatively safe option would be for the system to deploy a high speed short range interdiction drone to overfly the other drone and drop something on top of it meant to snarl its rotors, for instance fishing line with weights.

    None of that is necessarily easy but its certainly doable.



  • The advertisement I saw for this film struck me as some white supremacist nonsense

    Racism in a semi-historical film that covers post Civil War America? Shocking

    Seriously tho’, WTF are you expecting for a film set in that time period? If it pulled the racism it wouldn’t be accurate. It’s going to be chock-a-block with sexism too and for the same exact reason.

    If you don’t want to see it that’s fine but intimating that the film has unnecessary racism in it is ludicrous.


  • Banks lend money based on your assets. And when you have very large asset holdings, those loans can have very favorable terms.

    Yes and there’s two problems with this scheme; one is large and the other could be an apocalypse.

    The first problem, the large one, is that the wealthy aren’t paying taxes on the money they receive from those loans. This starves the Government of the funding that it needs which causes endlessly escalating deficit spending as the rest of the population cannot provide enough tax revenue to cover everything the Government needs to do.

    The apocalyptic problem is that their scheme only works when those assets appreciate in value. If they decline in value, or even just hold steady, it collapses. Right now the wealthy take out another loan, either on a different asset or on the same assets appreciated value, in order to repay the original loan. However if assets decline in value, or even hold steady, they’re unable to keep “flipping” loans like this and they’ll need to come up with the cash to actually repay them. Which means that they’ll have to actually sell some of their assets, as this spreads to more and more of the wealthy the marketplace will enter a value reduction spiral (too many sellers and not enough buyers) and as that happens the Lenders, the banks, will be left holding assets that have increasingly less value. This will quickly lead to an unstoppable chain of Bank failures.

    We’re arguably already in the spiral with Commercial Real Estate values continuing to decline and CRE Mortgage default rates are climbing. We’ll likely reach the tipping between late 2024 and mid 2025, then the bank failures will really start to ramp up.

    Somewhere in there the stock market will start to deflate as the wealthy seek liquidity to stave off foreclosures. Once it deflates enough it too will collapse.

    If you’re not familiar with the pending CRE crisis this Business Insider article explains it pretty well.

    It’s quite possible that we’re standing on the edge of another “Great Depression” event.







  • It’s not that the titanium metal is fake, it’s probably real. By “fake” what they mean is that the part made with the titanium isn’t what the documentation for it claims. It may have been made by a different company than what the documentation says or it may not have been tested in the way that the documentation says.

    Every last piece, down to the tiniest screw, in a commercial airplane has a paper trail and for these parts someone is saying that the paper trail has been falsified. That’s the “fake” part.


  • it was the 80s/90s, windows didn’t exist

    Wow, that’s a pretty narrow gap. The 80386 started mass production in 1986 and Windows 3.0 (the first actually usable one) came out in 1990.

    I refused to use Windows until Win95 and even then I was experimenting with OS/2. In 1997 I installed Slack 3.4 and have been around every since. I’m currently running Linux Mint but I sorta miss SuSe and may go back to it.