> Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
For now. I think this administration will absolutely have no compunction about using this against innocent civilians in THIS land as soon as they feel the need to to retain power.
The answer is not to avoid engaging with a corrupt institution. US is a democracy: vote, be active politically, go into organizations that need change.
So you are suggesting that you can change the US military industrial complex by.. working for the NSA or Lockheed Martin ?
Also it is quite questionable how much of a democracy the US is nowadays.
Gerrymandering aside, the populace does not get to choose the presidential candidates. And the whole two party thing ? Or the fact that to have a chance you need a super PAC with hundreds of millions ?
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting. If you feel that the problem is higher up or lower down in the institutional hierarchy, then go higher up or lower down. That's the civil approach, as I understand it.
Apart from the fact the if you stay true to your morals you will be incapable of rising to a position of power in such corrupt institutions, the degree of institutionalisation necessary to do so will definitely erode your ethics, turning you into another cog.
In my opinion, you underestimate the power of an individual. I'm not saying you have to be Gandhi, but he was one person. A problem with your assessment, is that if you're right, or, if everyone believes you're right, you'll have to wait for some external force to come in and change things, like a calamity or desperate revolt. By the time USSR broke apart, bread riots were happening, and, tragically, 30 years later we still have the same authoritarian, corrupt regime (in all but name) wrecking havoc at home and abroad. That's what a people get for believing in the story of disempowerment. That's my take, at least.
The Brits were bankrupting themselves with war spending, which culminated in WW2. After its conclusion, they started liberating every territory that wasn't directly profitable, including some that did not even want to be liberated. WW2 ended in 1945, India was liberated in 1947 alongside numerous other territories. Without WW2, India would likely have remained a British territory well past 1947. Beyond that, Gandhi wasn't one man - but the leader of a movement of millions.
As for Russia, I think your perception there is also driven by 'messaging'. There's a million videos of people streaming walking tours and the like in Russia. Here [1] is one done 4 days ago. That's a country that in the 90s was on the verge of collapse and was extremely dangerous. You can find similar stuff on e.g. Twitch because there's this somewhat odd subculture of delivery drivers, taxi drivers, and others streaming their days. Perhaps in part out of bemusement from this Western perspective paired against reality.
I agree in principle, but also agree with gp that in practice the things one has to do to rise to a position of power in corrupt institutions make it virtually impossible to be a credible agent of change, especially private/secretive institutions like military, intelligence, military-industrial corps. I guess politicians are the one role that is supposed to be able to operate without those institutional constraints but of course, (in the US) given corporate capture of political speech, political hyper-polarization, etc, in most cases they are just as or more constrained. It is a hard problem.
Snowden and other whistleblowers, of whom there have been many (many of which paid arguably a dearer price than Snowden did), made it plain obvious to everyone that US intelligence services are doing illegal things abroad and at home. Before that, only tinfoil-hat-types thought so: now everyone knows it. They moved the Overton window a tremendous amount.
I don't think actual change comes from people lobbying for some bill or whatever. It comes from a far more imperceptible shift in the zeitgeist of society, that is then eventually formally reflected in some way or another. For instance the Civil Rights Movement only succeeded because society had already largely shifted, before it had even begun, in a way that made it viable. A Civil Rights Movement in Saudi Arabia isn't going to succeed, because it needs the widespread desire for such to already exist.
And in this regard I think Snowden had a bigger influence on society than anybody or anything in my living memory. Prior to him there was a belief by many that government conspiracies couldn't happen because somehow if there were enough people involved, it'd show up on News at 9 or whatever. He made it clear that such conspiracies, far beyond the bounds of what even the absurd conspiracy theorist might propose, can and do exist. The NSA has friggin spies in World of Warcraft!
That sort of skepticism played a key role in fueling an anti-establishment mindset. And that mindset is what fueled the rise of everything from Trump to the DSA. I'm certainly not claiming those are good outcomes, but merely part of an increasingly visible shift away from the old establishment. And I think this shift will be, in the longrun, good for America. And I think in hindsight, it will be clear that a lot of this change started happening with Snowden.
I'm probably too focused on the Afghanistan war but I don't think that voting differently would have extended or shortened the war.
Both republicans and democrats wanted the war in Afghanistan back when 9/11 happened and they needed to get revenge on the scapegoat. Meanwhile the end of the war was initiated by Trump, then slowly concluded by Joe Biden.
So both the start and the end of the war had bipartisan support. Nothing against democracy but war doesn't follow the election cycle. It might start in one though.
Not sure about the downvotes, this is correct even if not pleasant to read (people need to be heroes of their little bullshit life story and all that).
It may be an afterthought for US citizens living in US, but its a deadly weapon pointing to 95% of the mankind and people wielding it are often shit to be polite. We the rest do care.
I mean, this site is full of people that develop the weapons used to commit atrocities and genocides (both physical and digital ones) so I am not surprised about the downvotes..
And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing.
And now imagine that the only one and same thing the LLMs say is not only fixed, but intentionally steered as the biggest and most inflexible propaganda mechanism we have ever seen.
Especially given the lack of competition in the space, and people mostly using models from 2 or 3 providers.
If it definitely had to be market value, then the law probably would've been worded differently?
It says the compensation is determined as a balance of public good and the interests of those affected, so to me it does read like the compensation can be lower than market value so it'd all come down the courts to determine how much below the market value the state can get away with.
Housing should be a commodity. Commodities are fungible, plentiful, and easily tradable.
Housing right now is the opposite of a commodity: it's a boutique investment for individuals whose price is propped up by regulations that artificially limit supply.
The mass buyout of housing is by the masses: individuals own the _vast_ majority of housing, benefit from its scarcity and rising prices, and lobby for more restrictive zoning. Most rental property is owned by individuals too, so they're also the main rent extractors.
It's not corporate lawyers who show up to protest new housing, it's retiree homeowners.
The only reason you enjoy cheap food is because of the free market.
Housing in many countries is not part of a free market but part of a monopoly where the government decides how much, how many, the what and the when the houses can be built. If it was a real free market, the issue would have been long solved.
Who builds all those bridges, roads, power plants, and other public works projects? Maybe them?
Also government formed co-ops. Find people who want a flat and agree on rent before you build it. As the loan is paid off rent becomes substantially cheaper. The second best time to plant a tree is today.
It also doesn't need to be the entire housing stock, just enough to help keep rent low (see Vienna).
Governments directly, cooperatives or non-profit organizations. The Churches used to be pretty active in that space as well to invest tithes, with rents paying for common-welfare projects.
first of all, Europeans don't need American wages. 57k is comfortable middle class in Austria, especially if you have government subsidised housing.
as for the "only rented" part, again, at this level of low rent it does not matter. you're better off renting. And Europeans have actual pension systems, we are nowhere near as reliant on real estate always appreciating in value.
Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?
pigeon-footed → splayed toes → several directions → indecision → ambivalence
Do not cross the two clouds until each has several branches.
Reject commemorate + dulcigenic → a sweet memorial. Prefer A monument can turn bitterness into sweet nostalgia without changing what happened.
Reject preindicant + sclerotical → a hardened omen. Follow foretelling → divination and hard anatomy → bone to knucklebones.
It is a prime example of esoteric LLM incantations, if not -excuse me- nonsense
Off topic and a little whimsical, but LLM incantations is a really fun idea.
In a world where one hyper intelligent AI controls everything, hackers work tirelessly in secret off-grid, doing extreme math by hand, finding the right series of tokens that magically coerce the AI into carrying out certain actions. Spell books are copied out by hand and distributed in dark alleyways. Itinerant wizards travel the land on horse drawn carriages, travelling from town to town, casting spells on people's devices to bend the AI to their will.
> The Chinese and Russians are in no mood to slow down relative to the US.
Typical boogeyman fearmongering to justify the existence and expansion of the US military industrial complex.
Out of all these three (US, China, Russia), a simple count of who has started more wars and conflicts is a clear indicator of who is the one initiating the vicious cycle of aggression and "defense" budgets.
Which being public wealth, should be publicly available.
Data that were sourced from the public, should be public. We need this legislated, or wealth inequality and fiefdoms will keep growing with the historically known outcomes.
Didn't Google take it down because of copyright? With the rise of paywalls it became a backdoor around them, but Google doesn't actually have a license to republish the copyrighted text they scraped.
It's not a backdoor is the sites intentionally served Google a version without the paywall so the indexing got "better" than what real users got. The sites kind of dug their own hole here, Google wouldn't even sit on the content unless it was offered up to them in that way.
Unfortunately copyright law allows them to give something to one person without giving it to others _and_ to sue to the former person to block them from giving it to the others.
This is a good lesson for young people reading this. If you work for the US military, you are not working for Defence.
Your work will be used against innocent civilians in far away lands.
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