Germany no, not directly. Indirectly they are collaborating with their ally and shielding their foreign policy. Like saying only those US rivals are dangerous. Indicating we need to invest in more weapons to defend ourselves against the bad guys. Europe probably should create their own military alliance to decouple from US military aggression, and stop supporting US sanctions / economic aggression.

I’m curious how that will play out. They removed the carrot but kept the stick.

All we can really agree on is that the country is ontologically evil and must be stopped at all costs.

But at what cost?

Oh no, I was the russian bot all along?

ONLY if you ignore “soft” power, “regime change” economic imperialism and meddling in foreign democracies.

You are responsible for your own actions, and the actions of your own country. Don’t allow yourself to be blinded by the propaganda pointing to the “shithole” countries. Look at the numbers and the effects of the wars in recent decades. Follow the money.

Can you point to the comment you suspect of being a russian bot?

Many have done that for decades, but the tend remains that the internet is getting less and less free.

It’s become strawman arguments to create different tribes. The issue isn’t about China or what they do well or do badly. The “facts” and accusations against “tankies” are just taken as given.

Prejudice has become mainstream and a serious problem because people are just fed up with actually arguing. I think it started with the global warming denial. we learned that it’s not just fringe groups that are simply immune to arguing, but that you can have half of the people be immune to political discourse. And of course Russia propaganda played a major role in that, but much less than the climate denial or religious or libertarian propaganda that comes from think tanks and the Koch brothers and Murdock and other plutocrats.

As a radical and dissenter myself, I’m not pro Russia or pro China but I see them as a country of human beings and see how the propaganda against them is used to deflect both blame and attention away from the dominant world order, “US centric imperialism”. The “leftists” and “progressives” point their finger to Iran or China or Russia about the LGBTQ or whatever issues over there using mainstream media or memes, instead of primarily focusing on the responsibility of their own actions, the actions of their own countries. The effects of soft power, the effects of “economic imperialism” on other countries, and their ignorance of what regime change actually means for the actual quality of life of those people living in “shithole” countries. Liberals don’t realize how redpilled they are, how “unwoke”. Hate sells really well in the attention economy.

Almost nobody on “those instances” believes Russia or China is socialist. It’s simply that a unipolar instead of a multipolar world will mean much less hope for any socialist projects to succeed. Constantly painting them as “evil” and threatening them with military expansion is also just wrong.

Italy made VPNs practically illegal. The UK might soon follow. And surfing the web with a VPN is a painful torrent of capchas. And email addresses you can get without revealing your phone number to identify yourself are becoming sparse too.

If you’d want to actually address the issue (insofar unsupervised teenagers watching porn is an issue) you’d need something like a U2F security key that can be used as anonymous age verification and be bought anonymously in a physical shop for cash, just by showing your ID to a clerk (without your details being stored). Keys being stolen or misused could then also be flagged in a public database.

Don’t worry about the AI companies, they can afford it and then make a profit (eventually).

Worry about the open source AI models that you can run locally using solar panels. They will become defacto illegal piracy. Affordable hardware to run large models without too much power is finally appearing (Ryzen AI max), but the software will become proprietary intellectual property of those who own the world. Which is the worst case scenario.

You made a very strong claim that she committed a sex crime. You imply her accusations are wrong and malicious. You jumped to that conclusion and took that as fact. And you didn’t even bother to read what she did. You judged her without even caring about that.

Not saying you are a bigot, but what you did was bigoted. You should reflect on your behavior, apologize and resolve not to do it again. Only then you could ask for the downvotes to stop lol.

Yeah public broadcasting is under attack because of advertising. Advertising fuels private broadcasting and it’s in their owner’s interest to push anti public broadcasting propaganda.

Any system humans design to serve us as a society will over time become “min maxed” by people or institutions seeking to maximize their profit or gain more power or maintain power in the face of changes. Advertising is a primary vector how those with the most economic power can influence society without people even realizing it. And everything is political.

For example take the ratings and something like yellow pages and announcements for new businesses like a plumber - needing to invest additional capital in advertising has an effect too. It makes it so new businesses are more indentures, more like wage slavery, than if no advertising existed at all. Obviously no advertising at all would favor seniority. But we have advanced in technology since we designed our government systems - there should be an independent “forth estate” or fifth or something for economics and regulation. They could be independently voted on to the executive or legislative. And their job would be to deal with regulation in the public’s interest, and sponsor things like an independent ratings portal that is moderated, and force shops like amazon to use the independent ratings for the products and the vendors. It will stay a struggle to stay ahead of people trying to abuse the system for gain, but right now we pretend the tools we have right now are somehow god given. We Europeans are far more conservative than we like to think.

If we want to have any resiliency against what is coming (because we destroyed our planet and let wealth inequality spiral and social media is nearly completely controlled by plutocrats) we need to push for better tools to govern democratically. And advertising is a major obstacle because it allows unmitigated influence of those who own the world.

TLDR: We don’t *have to * screw over new plumbers, but we should do it if we had to because stopping the brainwashing is more important.

Ok, it’s obviously a complicated task, and banning advertising will make things more complex. But that is what progress often is.

But before the internet we used to even have TV shows reviewing things, under the mandate they don’t get paid to do so. People do have an interest in learning about new cool things or improvements to old, and comparative reviews. There is no reason this wouldn’t serve the legitimate need for information better. Now we have ratings and that could be improved as well, through better technology to gather independent reviews.

And yeah, there are not free lunches from corporations, but there are from people or from the government. We pay collectively for things and distribute them for free all the time. Public broadcasting could be extended to youtube or even news papers, to make them more independent from profit driven behavior or owners. You can’t have democracy without free press, and currently we don’t have that. We have corporate press and every single youtube channel has to serve corporate news. And as you point out, in capitalism there is no free lunch. But we can make it free so we can stop the insanity of neoliberal and fascist propaganda currently destroying our civilization globally.

Another thing I forgot to mention, advertising is the main vector to increase consumerism. Which is killing our planet.

There are also market effects on what type of content is produced / profitable to advertise on.

And mostly unknown psychological effects of advertising on the human mind. Maybe advertising has altered your mind so much that you “don’t even mind” it any more. It is a brainwashing technique after all haha. Maybe all those youtube ads made about 5% of the people’s brain soft enough to vote for MAGA. Maybe the effect of advertising is as bad as lead in gasoline.

1 Self checkout rarely allow you to pay with cash. 2) Self checkout can be made easier faster by scanning with a phone app

That leads to different complications and outcomes. See OP complaining about slow self checkout. The more self checkout, the less cash transactions and the less privacy.

A fully cashless society would make people more vulnerable. Not just privacy, but maybe some bureaucratic snafu that doesn’t allow you a residence, maybe your ID card expired, and no banking account. If you’re not in the system, you can’t even buy food. Or if your account is in the red and blocked.

Ideally we should have have fully anonymous cash cards. But regulation is being pushed in some countries to limit them, or make you give ID. Or they take 5% “tax” on the revenue. And a phone app is easier to use.

In what reality do you live in lol? This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is literally the business model of “data collection companies”. European privacy laws and the cookie disclaimer BS just showed us what is already happening.

If you don’t think all this data isn’t being collated and used then you don’t understand the nature of neoliberal capitalism and politics. Mock me all you want, but it seems they’ve already won when basic privacy is now a fringe idea.

Yeah you’d want to legally verify that and organize en masse for this to have any impact.

I suspect it might even be easier (forward vs inverse kinematics).

If you could combine both (pressure sensors and pistons) you could do force feedback input devices that can be 3D printed. Which could be useful for serious applications, like controlling a vehicle and “feeling” the road, or feeling the air pressure on the wings of a plane. Or controlling an excavator and “feeling” the earth by measuring feedback in the pneumatic pressure. Currently things like that is really expensive.

HOW THE FUCK IS BEING CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR EVERY MOVEMENT BEING TRACKED CONTROVERSIAL NOW??!?

What the fuck? Do people not understand the concept of privacy? Have you ever read one of those cookie agreements? This is exactly the same!

If you pay via card or app or account they have your name and identity. We KNOW they use or sell that information from countless examples. That information is bought and aggregated by other companies, and the NSA owns or backdoors those companies, or the cops or ICE can buy that information without a warrant.