Finger wagging intensifies

So the “I’m alright Jack” posture.

It’s a selfish and immoral posture already when one takes it at the voting booth to chose a candidate that will personally benefit them whilst screwing most people, but it’s especially low when one for personal upside maximization is knowingly part of the machinery that swindles people into supporting a Genocide well on it’s way to Holocaust.

It’s not what makes them money so they don’t really have the business incentive for maximizing hardware sales that leads to a relentless pushing out of new versions of their hardware that are barely better than the last one and all manner of tricks for early obsolescence of older devices (things like purposeful OS and App under-performance and even incompatibility with older versions of the hardware).

Also in the big picture of gaming the Steam Deck is tiny and in its early stages, so business-wise is not the time to go down a strategy of relentless new hardware versions and enshittification, quite the opposite.

Absolutely, they’re doing the right thing and as the right thing aligns with their business objectives it’s a bit wishful thinking to claim its because they care so much about their customers as people.

Since Psychopathy and Sociopathy are ranges rather than absolutes, it’s estimated that about 4% of humans are Psychopaths or Sociopaths and we’re talking about the what’s basically the handful of people in a universe of over 300 million who seeks and achieves positions at the top of the Power Duopoly in the US in a domain well know for it’s cut-throating and backstabbing, I would say that the odds heavily favour the explanation of them being very high on the Sociopath (or Psychopath) - so called “well adjusted Sociopaths” - spectrum than them being normal people who are “relaxed about personally enabling the murder of tens of thousands of children”.

The image of a Sociopaths or Psychopath who actively seeks to inflict horrible pain on others for their own pleasure is incredibly atypical and Hollywoodesque - being high on those scales just means having no empathy for others, including their suffering or joy, and the result is that a Sociopath or Psychopath simply does that which they think is better for themselves and they can get away with (they care about the consequences for themselves, not for others), with absolutely no consideration for how that makes others feel, hence harm or even death of others is fine since that has the same emotional resonance for them as breaking an inanimate object.

Fossil Fuels are decreasing as a percentage of the overall energy supply that powers so much of the Economy and Industrial and Agricultural production in Western Economies are a small fraction of the total (less than 20% together).

Nowadays it’s not about the West making things with pillaged resources from the Global South, it’s all Financialization and the Ultra-Wealthy extracting the last leftover wealth from everybody, everything and everywhere like the endgame in a Monopoly Game.

Oil by itself is not enough justification, IMHO.

Besides, Israel is being the very opposite of a force for stability in the region, which isn’t going to help the Petro-Dollar.

(If you go check the Gold markets, it’s never been this high, something which possibly signals increasing distrust in the US Dollar and other main currencies)

The Economy is not booming, it’s only the prices of Assets such as houses that are in a bubble.

Last time around the “wealth” (even if illusory) was spreading a lot more and causing all sorts of things to grow by feeding consumption, as well as a general feeling of prosperity (until it turned out it was illusory and the whole castle of cards fell) whilst this time around it’s pretty much only large asset owners who are actually gaining from this whilst the rest just increasingly feel poorer and more treading water ever harder merelly not to drown.

It’s a different Economic climate and even a different feeling for most people, even if both periods share the house price bubble.

PS: And, by the way, this is not just in the US.

The only way to equate Israel with the Jewish Religion is to be a Racist - it requires one to believe that “Jews are all the same” hence they are all represented by Israel. This is expecially Racist given that there are many Jews who are openly critical of Israel, its actions and even its existence - it doesn’t get much more obviously Racist than when non-Jews claim to know better about Jewishness and who represents All Jews than actual people who are Jews.

This is how you spot the Racists: not just the obvious ones but also the kind that playacts as anti-Racist whilst in practice, as I pointed out, holding extremelly prejudiced views and in practice viewing, judging and treating other human beings as “etnic group members” rather than people - they’ll tell you all about what people of other etnicities are like and how you should support or not people based entirelly on the ethnicity they were born into.

In my personal experience Britain is riddled with Racist thinking, but a lot of it was disguised as “support of ‘good’ races” (only they carefully avoided the word “race”), except when it came to Muslims since discrimination against them has long been treated as acceptable.

You can chose to dip you hands in the blood of thousands of dead children by activelly rewarding a candidate who is enabling their murder, or you can chose not to.

Given the lack of Democracy in the American system, that means that you either participate hence end up with blood on your hands no matter which of the two electable candidates you vote for or do not participate.The choices of others who do participate are irrelevant for that decision.

Justifying your choice of supporting a enabler of child murder candidate because others might chose the candidate you dislike the most and hence makes you fear for yourself, is not the high moral standpoint you seem to think it is.

Absolutely, it’s a though choice. However this preaching you and those like you are doing about “Not voting is a vote for Trump” is not done from the top of a Moral High Horse, it’s from the top of the pile of the bloody bones of tens of thousands of murdered children which is still growing, and driven by at best selfish self-preservation not any kind of selfless moral principle.

So spare us the bullshit.

The slaughter of innocent children makes no difference to sociopaths.

If there is one thing this Genocide on its way to Holocaust has shown us. is that the Democrat Party leadership are without a doubt sociopaths of the worst kind: a normal person with the power they have would not be actively helping it by sending the Neue Nazis the very weapons which they know are being used to massacre children.

There really is no other possible conclusion: no normal person would go “yeah but our campaign contributions from the AIPAC are more important than tens of thousands of dead children” or “yeah but the profits of the MIC shareholders are more important than tens of thousands of dead children”.

So a re-run of 2006-2007, but this time around there wasn’t even an actual boom preceeding this.

I read it as being particularly good at it, since everybody does indeed do pattern matching and can spot details.

That format of presentation - especially when the choice was clearly made to go for more points rather than more depth per point - is unsuitable for precise, detailed explanations, so expecting otherwise isn’t exactly logic.

As somebody who, judging by everything else in there matches that particular part of the spectrum (though never formally diagnosed) I’ve always had an eye for details and am big at figuring things out via pattern matching (I.e. notice that certain combinations of things tend to go along with certain other combinations of things or outcomes) which is also what powers the “skip” thinking (you can jump directly to a list of possibly explanations by recognizing that it shares a pattern with something else whose explanation I already have and then work backwards from there to confirm if indeed one of those possible explanations is the correct one).

I’ve studied and worked in highly intellectual areas (Science and Technology) and have seldom come across others with a similar style of thinking so to me it makes sense that in that graph those things are there in the sense of more/better than most.

It’s called Stockholm Syndrome: people without options often end up genuinelly believing that the guy who tortures them only twice a week rather than daily is “deep down a good guy” and even “is our friend”.

I suspect sometime ago it switched from belief in him to most market players believing that “enough people will believe this guy’s shit that the line will go up so best jump in early”, essentially a self-made prophecy as long as enough people believe that others believe.

In that sense this result of his presentation pushing the line down A LOT means that even the idea that no matter how much he’s lying he will move the market up is finished and his bullshit being a Midas Touch has now reached the natural endlife of becoming a Shit Touch.

That being so, has much more massive implications for Elon’s business success and wealth as well as that of companies links to him, than merely the market losses in this one instance, since he is very much a One Trick Pony whose “bullshitter of tech fanboys” trick has stopped working and nobody is going to be betting on Elon pushing the line up anymore, the core of his success in getting wildass ideas funded and his companies in non-Tech industries getting Tech-style market valuations.

The next couple of years for Elon are going to be really “interesting”.

Also there’s this whole track record of Elon Musk’s demonstrations were there’s no clear independent validation that they actually work as we are being said they to or they’re merelly announcements or concepts: those things are invariably complete total bollock at best bordering on Fraud.

I reckon that finally he has entirely exhausted both the benefit of the doubt that his demonstrations are in any way honest and representative of real products present or future, and the idea that “he might be bullshitting but he’ll pull in enough suckers that early investors will win from going all in even if it’s 100% bollocks”.

The Midas Touch of Elon’s bullshit has finally ran its course and turned into a Shit Touch.

Having lived in several countries in Europe, in and around major cities, I have actually chosen the train over even the tube (aka subway) because it’s significantly faster for longer distances (fewer stops, better acceleration) and in general more pleasant (a bit more space, actual open spaces outside the windows rather than just dark walls).

In my experience, trains, subway and buses have different optimal use cases: trains for longer distance (in a city context that’s 20+ km) mass transportation of people to and from hub points in the city (they basically feed people to and from cities), the subway distributes people around the city center and buses are what feeds the trains and tube stations in the areas further away from the city center (were the subway coverage is far more spread out) and in cities without a subway they do the work of the subway (but they’re less efficient than one).

Note that I’m not talking about the use case of trains to transporting people between different cities at long distances (50km+), but a different use case which is of trains for commuting which feed people from the suburbs and satellite cities to a main city and back.

Trams basically fit the same niche as the subway when there’s no subway - they’re much cheaper do deploy but can get stuck in traffic unless the tram lines are in physically segregated lanes from automobile traffic.

The way I’ve seen buses used in general is them set-up to going around to “every nook and crany” in residential areas plus with main tube/train stations as part of their route (often at the start and end of the bus line), so they have pretty windy routes and are a pretty slow way to do longer (5km+) distances since they’re really there to feed people to and from the train and tube lines so are trying to cover as much of the residentia areas as possible hence travel back and forth in out of the way places and stop a lot.

Buses are also used in the city centers when there is good subway coverage but there they tend to just be secondary to the subway, generally just making up for gaps or other flaws in the subway network design (for example, parallel subway lines which only join far away so to do the trip with the subway you would have to go all the away around so the bus has a direct route) and as you get further out from the city center and the subway lines open up a spread out to cover those areas which end up too far from a subway station.

When the timetables of those things are properly synched it’s really amazing: you can be living in a suburban area or smaller village outside the city proper, use a bus (or a bicycle, or walk) to get to the train station, catch a train to a main station in the city center and in there switch to the subway which takes you to a station near your destination were you just exit and then just walk to your final destination (with a proper subway service, in the central area of the city you seldom have to walk more than 500m to get anywhere from the nearest subway station) and you’ve spent maybe 30 - 45m to get from a house or appartment in the suburbs to an office in the center of a major city, zero chance of getting stuck in traffic, no worries about having to find a parking space, way less exposure to polution that if driving.

The Guardian are pretty much the voice of New Labour, who are totally in bed with Israel (they’re still sending them weapons and even sent surveillance planes to help them in Gaza).

If The Guardian is actually critical of Israel and the IDF that’s a pretty good indication that the Zionist Genocide has already burned most of their good will even in Britain which is one of the most right wing states in Europe and has a history of invariably either being one or supporting White Colonist States in their Genocides of the locals (remember how they supported Appartheid until the last minute and even called Mandela “a terrorist”?!).

The last White Colonialist Nation in the World, no less.

No wonder countries like the US, Germany and Britain love them and send them weapons “to defend themselves from the savages”.

Yeah, but unlike Biden who is a Fascist-just-not-at-home-(yet), she’s an actual Leftie, which comes with the whole “Nobody deserves to be murdered because of their race (even if they’re non-White Muslims and the killers are White Jews)” mindset.

BDY sells their vehicles in Europe.

I do believe the safety regulations in the EU are actually stricter than in the US.

There are no penalties for filling a bogus DMCA takedown and the legal cost for restoring the content falls on the victim of such a takedown: the DMCA legislation was designed exactly for it to be used as Mazda and many other use it against individuals and small companies who can’t spend thousands of dollars fighting bogus takedowns.