The US is winning over Russia and North Korea. Who needs Canada and Europe?
China’s self interest in maintaining access to raw materials and markets could make them an interesting regional security partner in Asia if Taiwan was peacefully resolved. Being a single party state with a president for life is definately a negative but we are only 4 years out from finding if the US is going to be the same deal.
Even with growing disparity between the ultra wealthy and regular people most people in developed countries still score very highly for human development with a lot of freedoms, access to health, education and live reasonably prosperous lives by historical standards.
Its been a long time since most of us saw widespread famine or war or plagues decimating our populations. There is good reason to demand more social and economic progress which you would think would increase the appeal of that and not the politics of self destruction. There is no sane reason to burn it all down for most people.
Yet fascism still seems to be in a massive resurgence. Something really odd is happening. There is a huge information war that has seriously undermined society. It has taken over many religious groups, outsider groups like conspiracy believers and alt health, and conservative leaning parties. It is in online gaming and image boards and normie social media. It preys on socially immature young men, appealing to their insecurities. It preys on people looking for spiritual connections and community. Seeing peace and love hippies standing side by side with Christians and full on Nazis is fucking weird but I saw it during COVID.
The fascists were always there but they were not a political force and there is no reason they should ever be again. Not sure why it is happening or why we are letting it happen. It is certainly not in our interests. It always ends badly.
I was a huge SpaceX fan from the early days so watched a lot of Musks presentations and interviews and noticed a lot of repetition and always felt he was strongly working from talking points combined with a reasonably good high level understanding of the topic.
He didn’t work as well off script and seemed to have stunted emotional development, not unlike a lot of internet age manboys raised on memes, video games and porn. It is difficult to reconcile his behaviour with an adult, father and manager of people and money. I suspect he has some seriously competent peiple around him like Shotwell who cover for his fuck ups.
IMO he probably is the kind of guy who can soak up stuff around him, turn it into a set of talking points and repeat it with the appearance of expertise. I think he may have had some cognitive decline due to age and lifestyle but I think he was a pretty competent bullshit artist in the past.
I am not an expert at anything but like many IT people discovered long ago that I can pick up most things in my general field with a bit of research. It is a dangerous mindset sometimes. There really is the feeling that with some basic undergrad math and comp sci and a weekend of googling you can understand quantum field theory and it’s totally delusional of course.
Unfortunately the fake it to you make it culture seems to have won. It doesn’t matter how crap you are, if you put yourself out there with confidence you will outcompete the quiet competent types. And when you get caught out there never seem to be consequences.
I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
I think all “western” countries were considerably more community focused in the past.
I am in rural Australia and as a kid our supermarket and hardware store were owned by farmer’s co-ops and the hotel is still community owned and puts profits back into local sporting clubs. I have old pictures of some of the community fund raisers in the past and they looked extravagant for the time for a small population. Everyone pitched in to help building sporting clubs or other community facilities or to fight natural disasters. One old timer said they thought the US influence of entrepreneur clubs (Rotary, Lion’s, Apex) was one of the first things to divide the community as the shop owners started to do their own thing separate from everyone else. We still have local community run child care, aged care and hospital. Increasingly people send their kids to the religious private school for social signalling despite the government school being well supported by parents and having excellent facilities and standards. The US funded churches are everywhere competing for customers and preaching hate and division. The disconnect between how people here naturally chose to build a community and what they are told to believe is interesting. I saw a silly old bugger wearing a MAGA hat last year. His parents probably came back from fighting fascists and helped build this community through unimaginable hard work and sacrifice.