Not discounting it that her gender had something to do with the result, but come on. As if she wasn’t also a genocide supporter, a political insider, held a high position in a government that oversaw a period with economic hardship for many people. Also she had an charisma of a house plant, likability of a piece of two by four and ran on a campaign that’s main message was “I’m not the the other guy”. But yes her being a black woman and people being misogynistic and racist was the main issue.

Not that I care, but nothing gets fixed if people hold these ridiculous analyses of why she lost. It will be the same mistakes done after every four years.

The picture is an collaboration by Damia Bouic and three professional scientists Thomas Widemann, Emmanuel Marcq, and Colin Wilson. Original images taken by Japanese satellite Akatsuki.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/0116-a-new-look-at-venus-with-akatsuki

That’s one way to kill off the remaining American foundry business, since if US can’t compete now and Korean and Chinese workers are as good, then there is no reason to shift production off in the long term.

What the hell is an ActivityPub platform?

As if any institution, org or group that has an agenda to push doesn’t have battalions of bots guiding the discussion of forums to whichever way they want and not just fake followers and likes. As if people would need permission or would ask for it even if they had to. You just cant have any real sense of the public opinion on the internet, if there ever was such a time.

It’s all because of the US chip monopoly, if it were so they would not be so bold to hardware backdoor half of the PCs on the planet. I think as consumers we should have the right to choose if we want to have an American, EU, Chinese or Russian Backdoor in our computers, thank you very much.

“The Aristocrats!”

nice, that’ll tech them.

Now playable: Flatout 3

Aww yiss, I have been waiting for this. It’s finally playable first time since relase.

I really do wonder why they ended up in this. It can’ be that hard to make even a hacky DIY system to do it automatically. The navigation system just had to have some digital or even analog output, then it would be just the problem of interpreting the signal with some script and writing it into a file.

When Wilby recommended the company use standard software to process ping data and plot the sub’s telemetry automatically, the response was that the company wanted to develop an in-house system, but didn’t have enough time.

Investors want it, because they want to ride the wave towards profit. It doesn’t matter if it’s good, sustainable or not. That is what matters.

How secure something is an spectrum. Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example. It’s about what is the threat levels of what one is doing. Total tinfoiling like writing your own quantum proof multi encryption ciphers and sending that over an tamper proof usb stick with self destruct mechanism by a carrier pridgeon is not necessary or practical for average people who just want privacy, but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

be that as it may, my point still stands. Nobody is realistically getting into that market.

What makes you think that consolidation of markets isn’t how the free market operates as it matures? As if the X86 market was any way competitive and healthy before when there are literally two companies sharing critical patents with each other and gatekeeping the competition out.

I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters. It’s just common sense, even for a layman. Everything is compromised, Telegram is, Whatsapp is, Signal is, all of them are.

A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential.

It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.

Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete.

how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.

Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services

Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.

Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.

Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.

With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.

Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.

Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.