Not a Republican. I assume Trump is making backroom personal deals to get the world’s politicians and businesses to bribe him in some way. Aligns with how he seems to operate with everything else.

The BigMac Index was actually a really good metric. It’s sold nearly everywhere in the world, was a low margin product, and depends on a complex global supply chain that’s a good stand-in for other supply chains. It was used as a way to cut-through governments reporting innacurate numbers.

IDK, ketamine is kinda similar to alcohol; more psychedelic. As someone who has always struggled with depression and has done ketamine, it does seem like it would be a good fast-acting, but short half-life anti-depressant (the afterglow lasts well after the buzz). Never knew anyone who abused it habitually, long term. Heard it messes up your bladder.

Ever since I switched to GrapheneOS, Vanadium has been working well. Never had a problem with Firefox + ublock, or Librewolf (except with a corporate intranet webapp that specifically required users to use Chrome).

Yeah, idk what the other guy was talking about. But, I’ve ridden with someone that apparently got dependent on that automatic braking feature. He “used” something like 5 times during a 1.5 hour trip.

Oligarchs replace most government functions with private entities that they have equity in and funnel tax dollars into their own companies. It looks like they’re trying to cause a depression too, so they can buy everything up for cheap (farms, homes, etc). I think they’re stupid, but not stupid enough to not realize an economic depression coupled with gutting social safety nets will lead to massive crime waves and riots; so I’m guessing they’re planning on a police state and work camps for people they arrest (think that’s what they’re going to do with many of the immigrants too).

I’ve heard it postulated they are realigning with Russia and other dictators because we’d lose our normal allies if we became such a society. And they probably have very lucrative deals with Russia as well.

I sucks we don’t have a good, inspiring opposition party or something to lead or rally around. Without that, anger will just manifest as unorganized, unproductive riots and violence. “Conservatives” are still pretty brainwashed too; believing whatever they’re told by media. They will support the government gunning down and enslaving “criminals,” at this point in time. I’d hope that changes when things get hard, but media will work hard to redirect the blame.

Yeah, I’ve been experimenting with YaCy, and discovered they have a PageRank-like algorithm, but it uses a lot of resources, so they don’t recommend using it and it’s turned off by default. Haven’t tried turning it on myself. Looks like the maintainer is focusing on YaCy Grid, meant for organizations, not general decentralized search.

The page uses canvas, and Librewolf blocks some canvas functionality by default for privacy reasons. You should see a little icon to the left of the url that you can click to allow the site to run correctly.

1. It’s always better to spend the money of others.
2. It doesn’t appear that bribing congresspeople is all that expensive. IIRC, it only took $60k to bribe that one congressperson who got caught.
3. Just the threat of financing primary challengers appears to be enough to control Republican congresspeople. He’s probably privately doing the same with some Dems too (offering not to finance challengers; he’s already said he will finance challengers to all Democrats).

For me. I think everything is physical, and there’s always a cause and effect. There is no magical non-physical consciousness. A combination of your genetics, experiences, and environment determine the “choices” you make/actions you take. Free will is an illusion, IMO.

Lol. This comment sent me down a rabbit hole. I still don’t know if it’s logically correct from a non-physicalist POV, but I did come to the conclusion that I lean toward eliminative materialism and illusionism. Now I don’t have to think about consciousness anymore because it’s just a trick our brains play on us (consciousness always seemed poorly defined to me anyways).

I guess when AI appears to be sufficiently human or animal-like in its cognitive abilities and emotions, I’ll start worrying about its suffering.

Global South basically just means underdeveloped/developing nations.

Capitalism results in the rich, mostly in developed countries, extracting resources for low prices and exploiting desperate workers for low wages in developing countries. The developing countries get little in return. Some of these countries have been able to muster some protectionism to mitigate so much transfer of wealth out if their country (such as China). Developed nations have purposely kept some developing nations destabilised to maximize exploitation.

I think the term fits fine. The surpluses go to the owners of the means of production (barring “state capitalism” I suppose). These surpluses are actually the true value of the workers’ labor that the owners take, which is why I think capitalism is immoral, but that’s not really related to my point. The system incentivizes the owners to maximize these surpluses, which means paying the workers as little as possible, and charging customers as much as possible. I.e. the system incentivizes greed.

Social democracies are absolutely better than unchecked capitalism, but it’s my opinion that they’ll never be able to stop from regressing (they have been, as I understand it). Because of the owners’ place in the hierarchy and outsized wealth and influence, they will always be able to push governments to their benefit, and then it just keeps snowballing as they gain more wealth and influence. Admittedly, very strong unions can counteract this, and were responsible for them becoming social democracies in the first place.

Great. Now we have barred-out LLMs.

I actually think it’s more targeted toward the Andrew Tate and Fresh and Fit follower types, and the propaganda does appear to be working on younger men, who are rapidly becoming more “conservative.” They’re extremely insecure in their masculinity, and think the subservience of women would be affirming.

Of course, it actually just hurts everyone, barring the people that benefit from keeping the working class divided.

If you’re running a lot of stuff on the same server, I agree with others that you’d want to use containers or VMs to avoid possible dependency hell. I prefer containers so I don’t have multiple OSs using RAM. I’ve never used Proxmox, but if I understand correctly, it’s an OS specifically built for running containers and VMs more easily, so I’m guessing that’d be a good choice. I personally just use Ubuntu LTS or Debian, Docker, and SSH to administer my servers, because that’s what I’m familiar with.

A cheap used Desktop PC off Craigslist or whatever should be fine. Desktops are more upgradable and configurable. You’d want to make sure the CPU and Mobo support however much RAM you’d want. Ext4 is fine if using a single disk; ZFS for multiple disks with redundancy. Preferably, a smallish SSD for the OS disk, but not required.

*arr stack for pirating: https://wiki.servarr.com/

Jellyfin for serving media. You may want something like the cheapest Intel Arc GPU for transcoding if you’re going to serve HDR video to low-spec devices.

Nextcloud for basic file sharing. NFS for high performance file sharing with Linux machines, if needed. Syncthing for syncing files if you need that.

Immich for something similar to Google Photos, if needed.

Also if they can’t afford that, surely they have state medical insurance

Ha! No, depending on the state, there are tons of barriers, means-testing, work requirements, mandated classes they might not be able to attend (due to childcare/lack of transportation), etc.

Even after the ACA, ER visits are still all the healthcare many people get.

I recently went back to pirating and transferring music to my phone like it was an iPod, lol. VLC is a good player (and works with Android Auto), and Strawberry is good on Linux for listening and library management. The SoulSeek network has a lot of hard to find stuff in flac (I use the Nicotine+ client).