Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”
Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”
Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”
It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.
Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you’ve got a position on cosmetic surgery… Everything’s a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.
Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.
You have a better, equally integrated solution?
I mean, we do. Linux OS, Libre Office, Apache servers, Linux Cloud Service of Choice, PostgreSQL.
But you need techs familiar with those systems and businesses eager to implement Linux at a foundational level early on in the company’s development. Because a lot of businesses outsource their IT early on, and because a lot of end-user hardware has Microsoft pre-installed, and because the major IT outsourcers all get big kickbacks from Microsoft to be the default solutions, and because Microsoft has embedded itself at the university level at a global scale, and because Microsoft has successfully lobbied itself as the premier US contractor of choice for federal and state IT setups, it can be harder to find professionals willing and able to configure a Linux environment. This is assuming the company founders even think to ask for alternatives.
That’s not to say it never happens. FFS, some of the biggest competitors to Microsoft - Amazon and Google most notably - have relied on Linux/PostgreSQL architecture to keep their overhead low and their integrations non-exclusive. But they’re exceptional precisely because they laid the groundwork early.
The problem isn’t that integrated solutions don’t exist. The problem is that most CTOs don’t embrace them early on in the company’s development and find themselves trapped in the Microsoft ecosystem well after the point a transition would be easy.
which tech-giant is the default choice
Meanwhile, on Lemmy, I suffer under the tyranny of Big Penguin
Yes, but that doesn’t make the comparison to all countries with over 500 000 people meaningful.
Fair enough. Any state with less than 500k people probably shouldn’t be on the list.
It’s framed as “look, if we put US states on a graph with other countries, they have such a high incarceration rate that there are almost no countries even on the graph!”
It’s certainly possible that you have one big state with a high incarceration rate - Texas or California for instance - that’s throwing off the national average. States are free to set their own penal process. It’s not a given that every state has a globe-shattering incarceration rate.
Saying “It’s not just one or two states with astronomical incarceration rates, its the whole country contributing to the total” indicates something notable about the politics and culture of the country as a whole.
Wyoming could have an incarceration rate of 0% without affecting America’s position as a carceral state. That it doesn’t is meaningful.
If we play that game we can’t trust American numbers either
😏
If it was absolute numbers, it would maybe make a point.
If you have a population with 10M people and 20,000 of them are prisoners, that’s significantly less concerning than a country with 100,000 people of which 10,000 are prisoners. You can’t make an apples-to-apples comparison between Texas and Wyoming with raw head-count.
it’s somehow shocking that the individual states of the county with the highest incarceration rate in the world also have a high incarceration rate
It’s shocking that the state of Louisiana has a full 2% of its population in jail. That’s twice the US national baseline.
Interesting how it’s southern states at the top eh?
Legit amazed California wasn’t higher on the list. They’ve been doing mass-incarceration at an industrial scale since the 70s. But I guess the population is big enough that the per-capita statistics work out.
States like Alabama, Louisiana, and Oklahoma have such small and anemic populations and dedicate so much of their domestic budget to incarceration that they’re basically giant publicly subsidized slave plantations.
Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.
Israel is trying to zero out that number as quickly as they can.
The trick is to always assume “China is lying about its internal statistics” and inflate whatever number they give by an arbitrary large percentage. 1.7M is obviously an under-count because the CCP is always lying about everything.
Also, you can do some broad brush “Everyone in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, North Korea, and Taiwan are prisoners of the Chinese state, so actually that’s over 60M people” napkin math to make the numbers look better.
Well, in that case, how about you pay me that $10 you owe me?
Like: Why don’t these corpos just use a PIN system, god damn it? (rhetorical question, they probably don’t care)
This is what a Zero Regulations For The Last Forty Years government does to the business sector. Very simple, obvious solutions that you’d think multi-trillion dollar tech companies would have no trouble implementing aren’t worth the effort.
Why bother doing anything for the consumer when you can just spend another $1M on advertising to make your shit service irrelevant?
Still an ugly pain in the ass for the person who wanted to exchange currency for goods and/or services.
I do find it amusing that Doordash itself seems so blaise about this misuse of their services. Like, what an amazing racket. Get paid by one of the biggest retailers in the country to not-pay drivers so they can not-deliver expensive hardware.
If they actually had nukes already, none of this would be happening.
Something would be happening.
Israel seems perfectly happy to unleash wave after wave of terrorist attack and assassination campaign on individuals within the Iranian government. To date, this tier of attack has failed to cause any country to break the nuclear taboo. We didn’t nuke Afghanistan after 9/11 (although a few fringe elements suggested we should). Russia hasn’t used nukes in Ukraine. Despite suffering their own wave of terror attacks, France and England haven’t unleashed nuclear hellfire in North Africa or the Middle East. Indian and Pakistan haven’t traded nukes over their border disputes.
Would a nuclear-armed Iran drop a nuke over Solemani or the pager bombs against Hezbollah? If nuclear-armed Israel can keep their bombs on the ground, I have to assume Iran wouldn’t be any more extreme.
Is reading comprehension really that bad? The argument is that Iran is on the verge of having nuclear weapons.
Since 1992, when Netanyahu addressed Israel’s Knesset as an MP, he has consistently claimed that Tehran is only years away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb,” he declared at the time. The prediction was later repeated in his 1995 book, Fighting Terrorism.
The sense of imminent threat has repeatedly shaped Netanyahu’s engagement with United States officials. In 2002, he appeared before a US congressional committee, advocating for the invasion of Iraq and suggesting that both Iraq and Iran were racing to obtain nuclear weapons. The US-led invasion of Iraq followed soon after, but no weapons of mass destruction were found.
In 2009, a US State Department cable released by WikiLeaks revealed him telling members of Congress that Iran was just one or two years away from nuclear capability.
Three years later, at the United Nations General Assembly, Netanyahu famously brandished a cartoon drawing of a bomb to illustrate his claims that Iran was closer than ever to the nuclear threshold. “By next spring, at most by next summer … they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage,” he said in 2012.
Now, more than 30 years after his first warning, Israel has conducted attacks against Iran while Netanyahu maintains that the threat remains urgent. “If not stopped, Iran could produce a nuclear weapon in a very short time,” he argued recently, suggesting the timeline could be months, even weeks.
Consider that Iran has already taken down - allegedly - as many as four F-35Is, I can think of a few reasons why the US has been reluctant to tangle with either country.
Trump’s rush to invade Iran only happened after Israel preemptively launched their military decapitation attack and missile bombardment “preemptive” strikes. The US has been dragging its heels on an Iran invasion since the 2002 Millennium Challenge suggested an all out war with Iran would be a disaster for US international fighting capacity. The definition of a pyrrhic victory.
Already, the US deployment away from the Pacific Rim has resulted in Chinese ships occupying territorial waters that the US had historically patrolled.
So this is already shaping up to be a historic internationally reorienting military blunder, even without nukes involved. Imagine the US trying to do an Iraq-style land war in Russia, plus an invasion of Iran, plus the low-key war with Yemen and Somalia, plus our military operations in North Africa, plus policing the Pacific, plus doing our military exercises on the US/Mexico border, plus whatever dumb horseshit military parades Trump wants to see.
The response to a movement being violent doesn’t make the movement violent
It makes the event violent, which poisons the movement and discourages more civilians from participating.
The '60s Civil Rights Movement wasn’t the first such movement in the US. We’d had multiple protest waves and minority ethnic civil revolts going straight back to emancipation (and before it). They largely failed because they could not win enough support from the broader proletariat.
The '60s movement was only seen as a success because it won legislative and private sector concessions in a way prior movements failed to achieve. That happened first and foremost in cities and states where the police didn’t come in guns blazing and the political apparatus was ready to negotiate concessions quickly, to avoid further economic disruption. Those that did failed to enjoy the 60s/70s era of rapid economic growth and lost national influence as a result.
But to say the Civil Rights Movement succeeded where it began? In Selma, Alabama and Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Mississippi Delta? Absolutely not. State violence crushed it. The movement ended in violence in these early enclaves. It was not peaceful because it was not received peacefully.
Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.
What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.