it’s a phrase from the Black Panthers

Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.

https://inf.news/en/culture/99cd839e359599d0079b82992ff8fe3a.html

They had a Ming-style mosque that was destroyed in a massacre of Muslims during the Cultural Revolution in 1975, they rebuilt a warehouse-looking mosque in 1981, then the Arabic-style mosque was built in 2010.

The Guardian does write the article to make you think it’s a historical landmark, and not a Chinese copy of the Eiffel Tower kind of landmark that’s being rebuilt to look more like the one the government originally destroyed.

Accurate. No extra bucket, alleged “non-voters” guy isn’t actually refusing to grab one, he just looks smug and isn’t praising the Democrats. Dems aren’t doing enough, boat’s still going to sink. Democrats decided to bring two buckets instead of getting rid of the drill or the Republican. If “non-voters” guy stopped balancing the weight and came over to pat the Dems on the back like they want him to, they would just slide to the right and push their end of the boat under without having to wait for the hole to do it.

Same Marx letter: “While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

Unfortunately it wasn’t actually swept off, instead of “at least we aren’t slaves” it’s “at least we aren’t the periphery” that became the boasted prerogative making core country labor feel like it has more investment in the system and more to lose than it actually does, and keeping them demanding anti-immigration and anti-trade and bombs to maintain hegemony.

Sometimes people are assigned progressive by social expectations and start playing that role without really thinking about it. She tried to write an apolitical generic kids book, and everybody’s white, fat people are evil, and bankers are big nosed goblins. Then other people read it and started pointing things out, but she couldn’t detect any of this herself so when she tried to be inclusive she just added Ching Chong the asian and a minstrel slave race. Need to make someone black, I said Hermione has ugly frizzy hair so I guess it’s her. Need a gay, make it the asexual grandpa so it’s not gross. Eventually something comes along that cracks their assumption that they must be progressive and they come out as right wing on Twitter.

The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

“Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.

Crypto losers started suing each other about the mine last year

The ones suing Mineone played the China card, but they didn’t try calling them spies, they went with Chinese taking our jobs. Calling the feds seems like it was a long shot after lobbying Wyoming failed.

Even if they built them in a US factory their cars would still be better and cheaper. They just know that once they start the US will ban them like Tiktok, and they’d rather keep the battery and bus factories they already have in the US and avoid competing with anybody politically connected.

DRM plugin and all the built-in cloud stuff is proprietary on the server side

They aren’t exporting them below cost, that’s why they want to export. Inside China every company tried to start an EV division because they heard Apple was doing it and assumed it must be a good idea. Now the market is topped out and the biggest companies are trying to price the smaller ones out of business (which still isn’t below manufacturing cost because China regulates that and is nervous about having tons of cars from bankrupt companies on the road). They export with a huge profit margin to make up for the domestic price war.

The opposite of woke is random shit boomers happened to grow up with. If your politics are based on some principle you can justify, then if you lose you try again later. If your politics are based on a random collection of historical accidents you can’t justify, and you don’t even like most of them except for a couple, but you think the only way to keep the couple you do like is to defend all of them, then losing is the end. You have to fight to the death, and once you do lose you can’t cope by doing better next time, all you have is revenge.

Sometimes liberals also want to defend historical accidents that they think fit their idea of liberalism, and then they adopt the same kind of aggressive deterrence strategy, like pro-Israel liberals with college protests or the English with trans people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/nyregion/columbia-protests-arrest-agitators-israel.html

A lot of the arrests “at Columbia” were on the street outside when people showed up to protest the NYPD, so they’re including those to juice the stats

They’ve been saying that for decades but nobody else is interested.

Internet is full of text and video about humanoid bipedal things performing tasks. There’s a lot of investment money gambling that LLMs + human-shaped robots can make an electric slave that an unskilled overseer can vaguely yell at and the robot can figure out what they meant and how to do it like a human can.

Fatah doesn’t control the West Bank because it’s more popular there, the IDF just couldn’t help them seize power in Gaza when they lost the election in 2006. If anything Hamas is a little bit more popular in the West Bank.

People say that because outside of modern times in the first world, landlords = the mafia. Without expensive police, landlords have to enforce their own rent. So if you’re socialist or any other political movement bad for landlords, they probably make up the biggest paramilitary force in your country and if you don’t decapitate that chain of command fast you get dumped in a cave with 20,000 other skeletons.

And even in a first world country, the police manhours dedicated to evictions and the private security industry funded almost entirely by landlords is something anybody who wants to deal with housing prices is going to have to worry about.

They weren’t just being cheap, they wanted to take human-written ads, auto-generate a million variations to send to individual people, then feed the ones that got clicks back in to train an AI clickbait generator. It also means the variations would be functionally watermarked so if anybody posted part of their text on Reddit or something the BBC could track who they sent that variation to.

You don’t usually call the audio engineer a musician though. The fact that you “want a string section” is the important part. Art is communication, if you fuck with the AI until it communicates what you want, that can be art, as long as you’re not trying to pass off that the fake brushstrokes contain any meaning. If you learn all the right prompt words to make it “good” and then Photoshop it to fix all the telltale AI glitches but the only idea being communicated comes from 6 random people on Deviantart smashed together, that’s not art.

Mill very well expresses the essence of the matter in the form of a concept by characterising money as the medium of exchange. The essence of money is not, in the first place, that property is alienated in it, but that the mediating activity or movement, the human, social act by which man’s products mutually complement one another, is estranged from man and becomes the attribute of money, a material thing outside man. Since man alienates this mediating activity itself, he is active here only as a man who has lost himself and is dehumanised; the relation itself between things, man’s operation with them, becomes the operation of an entity outside man and above man. Owing to this alien mediator – instead of man himself being the mediator for man – man regards his will, his activity and his relation to other men as a power independent of him and them. His slavery, therefore, reaches its peak. It is clear that this mediator now becomes a real God, for the mediator is the real power over what it mediates to me. Its cult becomes an end in itself. Objects separated from this mediator have lost their value. Hence the objects only have value insofar as they represent the mediator, whereas originally it seemed that the mediator had value only insofar as it represented them. This reversal of the original relationship is inevitable. This mediator is therefore the lost, estranged essence of private property, private property which has become alienated, external to itself, just as it is the alienated species-activity of man, the externalised mediation between man’s production and man’s production. All the qualities which arise in the course of this activity are, therefore, transferred to this mediator. Hence man becomes the poorer as man, i.e., separated from this mediator, the richer this mediator becomes.