But their god is money.

The whole point of note taking is the physical act of making the note, because it forces you to focus on the words and record them in a second way in your brain. If something just makes a note for you, you will never remember it.

And that’s the point. They want to commodity memory itself. You won’t need to remember anything, Mark does it for you!

It’s fascinating how the imperial situation changes “Cuba can defend itself” from a reason to not attack into justification for attacking. The same thing happened with Iran, being capable of self defense does not deter the empire because it’s unforgivable.

Claiming that the Al-Aqsa Flood didn’t occur is antisemitic, and also erases heroic Palestinian resistance.

But Israel 100% deserved it and Zionism is a genocidal ideology. Zionists rape Palestinians in their torture dungeons.

Does sanctioning Chinese companies even do anything at this point? They don’t have to rely on US components in their supply chain, they don’t have to trade in USD, they don’t have to rely on patented US technology, they don’t have to hire Yankees, and they don’t have to interact with Western banks at all. Those sanctions seem to be essentially ceremonial at this point.

I would like to point out that Democrats consistently vote to increase the military budget, even when Trump is president. The most recent defense authorization act received 115 yes votes from Democrats to 94 no votes. On domestic issues you can make the argument that Democrats are a lesser evil, but when it comes to the empire the evil is bipartisan.

The main difference between Republicans and Democrats on foreign policy is that Democrats are better at it.

That’s not good. Iran was in really bad shape before the war started, another few years of the maximum pressure sanctions campaign and they’d eventually be dealing with enough civil unrest that justifying a “humanitarian intervention” would be possible. Instead of the US and Israel attacking on their own, NATO would have helped topple the government like they did in Libya.

Instead we got Republicans, who fumbled this so hard that Iran is winning and on the cusp of being a regional hegemon. The US empire is spiraling towards collapse at this rate and I am 100% here for it.

Oh yeah, they could actually use a fuel subsidy to justify more austerity! “We need to help consumers at the pump, so we’re defunding [vitally important government program] to fund fuel rebate checks.” I wasn’t thinking neoliberal enough.

I wonder what will be sacrificed on the alter of fuel subsidies?

I’ve had the same thought. It took months for Israel to kill that many people in Gaza, and they were obviously trying to exterminate the population. They had to make Gaza look like the fucking Moon to kill that many people in that short amount of time.

Everyone has a camera in their pocket these days, in both Gaza and Iran, and hiding this level of mass death is impossible. Israel tried, but information always got out regardless because it isn’t possible to actually hide violence on this scale.

Since the article doesn’t mention it, the obvious reason is the energy crisis changing the conditions for negotiation. Supply disruptions will strangle Europe in the coming weeks, putting immense pressure on their coalition to make territorial concessions.

Plastic is a hard problem to solve since meaningfully recycling most of it requires a expensive energy and chemical inputs.

Also, I’m running into some weird math. Doing some light searching, China’s plastic consumption demand will reach a peak at 119 million tons in 2030. That means their recycling target will be able to meet 16% of total plastic demand in China, but for comparison, China recycles 17% of it’s plastic today. I doubt China is aiming for plastic recycling to remain about the same if it’s supposed to be a new national target - I guess they might not be looking to increase the percentage of recycled plastic and are only interested in keeping up with demand? Or, probably likely, something is wrong with my sources because I can’t get behind paywalls. 🤷‍♀️

18 cents isn’t nothing, but that doesn’t even bring the average gas price below $4.

They’d have to either start subsidizing fuel or banning exports to meaningfully lower prices, and both seem unlikely. Banning exports would obviously displease the oil industry so that’s basically a non-starter, but if prices get high enough they’ll start to cause demand destruction so maybe we could see a gas subsidy being implemented even if it goes against the dominant austerity ideology.

That’s kind of like saying that your untreated cancer was fine a year ago because you were healthy for the most part.

Loneliness epidemic. They’re not really being recruited, they’re just going to the last non-commodified social space left.

It’s not like you need to believe in gods to pray, sing, or attend service. It’s just a place to be welcomed by other people.

Unlike the internet, which is a place to feel lonely. Just enough social interaction to remember what you’re missing, never enough to satisfy.

Wouldn’t this essentially eliminate burner phones?

Now I want to see someone recreate this scene with one of the hallucination machines.

September-October is when economic crashes happen, historically.

I prefer analog for the vibes, but digital is just more practical in every situation.

Yeah, it’s actually more complicated than just being mask-on vs mask-off. It turns out that only the competents wear their mask, because they’re competent enough to know why they’re wearing a mask. The incompetents think that masks are woke.

No. Profit is revenue in excess of costs, yes, but the cost of building a table isn’t merely the cost of the materials. Costs also include the time and effort spent building the table, the time and effort spent learning to build tables, the cost of acquiring tools with which to build, the cost of having a space in which to build, and the cost of finding customers to buy the table.

When you factor these other costs in to the table, the builder breaks even. Yes, even if they end up with more money than with which they started. They simply exchanged their time and effort for money, but they can never get that time back can they?