Libra00

Two things:

1. Lolwut? I already did in my previous comment.
2. Here, I’ll do it again:

Israel isn’t some puppet dangling from Washington’s strings, it’s a sovereign state that has always done exactly what it wants, especially when it comes to killing Palestinians. From the beginning Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians, and ever since it’s made policy decisions based on its own goals. This current assault is just a continuation of that same logic — expansion, control, elimination — with or without (and the latter is frequently the case; see: Biden’s numerous attempts to push for a ceasefire being flatly ignored until he was leaving office) America’s support.

Israel had a direct hand in the rise of Hamas, supporting it in the '80s to undermine the PLO. That wasn’t the US telling them what to do — that was Israel making a calculated move to divide and conquer the Palestinian political landscape. And now, decades later, they use Hamas as the perpetual excuse for mass killings in Gaza. Israel created the conditions for this war — the siege, the blockade, the decades of systemic violence — and now it’s using the fallout as justification to finish what it started.

Yes, the US plays a role: billions in aid, endless weapons shipments, UN vetoes, all of that makes the situation worse. But that’s not proof that Israel is pulling the strings. It’s just standard-issue imperial policy: the US backing a regional ally that helps secure its interests. Israel doesn’t need to control the US to get what it wants, it just needs to be useful enough that the US keeps looking the other way. Israel has shown again and again that it doesn’t give a damn what anyone thinks about this war or any other; it believes that it’s fighting for its very existence and has shown no reservation about doing whatever it believes is necessary to win, no matter what we or anyone else think about it. What’s happening in Gaza is the logical outcome of decades of colonization, apartheid, and unchecked power — power that Israel wields on its own terms.

So that’s not just one explanation of the Gaza genocide that doesn’t require kooky antisemitic conspiracy theroies, but TWO.

in the words of The Heavy: How you like me now?

Eat the rich, baby.

Turnaround to what, exactly? A retreat from fascism would be great, don’t get me wrong, but what we had before wasn’t exactly working otherwise we wouldn’t have found ourselves in this situation. As much as Democrats like to blame Donald Trump for literally everything (and he’s certainly done enough), he’s just the manifestation of peoples’ resentment and desperation at how much this country doesn’t work for most of its people.

Worse still, even if there is a return to the status quo from say 10-20 years ago, aside from not fixing the problem, that will just make everyone focus more on their relief at not being under a fascist regime anymore and thus they will become even more complacent about the things that didn’t work before. The politicians who opposed this backslide into fascism - and their ‘vote blue no matter who’ supporters - will be ever more convinced of the rightness of their position and thus have even less reason to change anything, so we’ll just wind up right back here again.

But also, let’s address your specific complaints.

They complain about big tech having your information, but turn around wanting you to sign a petition that asks for your information.

Yeah, let’s not actually try to, you know, do anything about any of this, let’s just sit around and let those tech-bros enshittify their platforms and cram ads down our throats. Let’s not inconvenience anyone with a protest or a petition or a call to your representative, for shame! Also if you can’t see the difference between a giant, all-devouring megacorporation having your data and putting your email/phone# on a petition then I’m afraid it’s going to take more effort than I care to muster to unfuck your worldview, so, uh, good luck figuring that one out on your own.

They complain about commercials all year long, but will tune in by the millions for a Super Bowl

Are you sure these are the same people? You’re painting with an extremely broad brush here. I only have anecdotal evidence to offer, but I complain about commercials and I haven’t watched a Super Bowl ad in probably 20 years.

They complain about unfair wages, bad workplace environments and shitty bosses but didn’t make so much of a fuss during the pandemic.

So your issue is both that they complain, and that they don’t complain hard enough? Talk about having your cake and eating it too, you’re straddling that fence so hard you’ve found a way to whine about both sides of the same issue.

So what gives, really? … fuck the majority of Americans

Apparently what gives is that you are confused and angry and lashing out at people you don’t know for perceived slights you don’t seem to understand, wishing for the impossible return to a magical happy place that never existed (go ahead, ask those of us who remember the 2008 crash how great the world of 20 years ago was, I dare you) because you don’t understand that there is a world of distance between ‘not a complete dumpster fire’ and ‘actually decent.’ You seem to be mad at people who don’t vote the way you think they should without even attempting to understand where they’re coming from or what their motivations might be, you don’t seem capable of learning from the mistakes of the past that led to where we are today, or even particularly interested in acknowledging that they exist. You seem convinced despite generations of evidence that just voting harder will fix anything, and you ridicule the fact that other people have not somehow received this ultimate self-evident truth from on high as you have. And worst of all you seem too exasperated or confused by all of the above to try to actually change anything, you fail to understand, much less support and encourage, the means by which others are trying to do that, and you’re way too up your own ass to realize that everyone around you is a person with their own internal life, hopes, dreams, etc just like you, much less to have a shred of fucking empathy for anyone who isn’t within arm’s reach (and I’m skeptical about even that.)

In short, what gives is: Fuck you, and while you’re at it read a book, you’re embarrassing yourself.

This. Whenever you have a question about why some organization does something it’s generally a safe bet to start with ‘because money.’ In this case, holding onto the verified fundraising power of incumbents and not offending rich donors.

The idea that Israel is dictating US foreign policy in the Middle East comes from a place of fundamental misunderstanding of the geopolitical and cultural realities of the situation. The US government will have significant geopolitical interests in the region as long as they have cheap oil (so, for the foreseeable future), it will always need friendly locals willing to share intelligence to keep an eye on things, especially someone who opposes and is willing to work against Iran, it will always need ports, airfields, and infrastructure to grease the wheels for military operations in the region, and it doesn’t need Israel’s encouragement to do any of this.

It also fails to understand the motivations of the right-wing segment of the government/population and how much power they have in US poltiics. There is a wide and deep streak of evangelical fundamentalism within American Christianity that has a disturbingly intense focus on biblical eschatology, including actively trying to fulfill the prophecies that are supposed to herald the return of Jesus. Israel features prominently in these prophecies so these true believers will never not back Israel 100% of the way regardless of their politics, atrocities, etc.

Yes, Israel has a powerful lobby in AIPAC. Yes, they spend a lot of money trying to bring our politicians in line with their goals. But we are already extremely well-aligned for cultural and geopolitical reasons, so what the claim that Israel is controlling US foreign policy amounts to is saying that a kid sticking his hand out the window of the car is materially affecting its course. Even if it wasn’t a borderline-antisemitic (and I use that term VERY hesitantly when talking about Israel, because they don’t) conspiracy theory it just doesn’t make sense: there are far greater forces at play.

Nope, miss it. My bad ;-)

Fair enough.

I think that this depends on how much this system can really “produce”.

True. And I did just recently learn that power prices per kWh in California are about double what I’m used to here in Texas, so maybe it’s more viable in that market. This just seems like a more complicated, more involved, more demanding version of pumping water into/out of a reservoir on a hill which we already have several examples of that are working great (there are more in the UK) without requiring complex and expensive maintenance and without subjecting pumps and turbines to highly corrosive salt water. I guess pressure in the ocean is easier to come by than hills big enough to create reservoirs on, but…

I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.

PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.

Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.

In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.

That’s not it at all. You don’t think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn’t learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don’t have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.

What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don’t have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don’t specialize in making computers go just don’t care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don’t waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.

And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it (never turn your hobby into a career if you want to keep that hobby.) I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)

Did you not catch the part a couple comments ago where I agreed with you? Yeah, of course it’s cheaper to not send divers down. All I’m saying is cheaper cheaper doesn’t mean cheap. And my larger point is that it’s probably not cheap enough, not least because they’re planning for a 20 year part replacement cycle on metal bits exposed to high-pressure seawater and that just doesn’t seem plausible to me.

I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.

Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.

I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.

You ever notice how it sometimes helps to read the whole sentence to understand what some part of it means in context?

A VPN is a VPN, having a different IP address is equally effective against those things no matter which IP it is.

There’s a comma after that second VPN so obviously it’s related to what follows, which is the part where I describe exactly how a VPN is a VPN: in terms of getting a different IP address. This is twice now you’ve gone way out on a limb here trying to back the play of some fucking troll who didn’t bother to explain themselves and I’m not sure if that’s where you want to be. Picking through my comment and taking bits out of context to feed back to me as ‘evidence’ to back up your pedantry and assumption that the rest of the text of that same comment shows you to be wrong about is not a good look. If you’re going to nitpick my shit to death then you should at least try to read the whole thing and understand how each of the parts relate to each other first, otherwise people might mistake you for some fucking troll too (albeit a clearly slightly more intelligent one since you can actually elucidate what your issue is with what I said, regardless of whether or not it’s remotely accurate.)

Then you are not a decent human being? :P

He isn’t wrong though.

Is this a ‘how can we do complex production without capitalism’ question or a ‘how can we motivate people to do work without capitalism’ question?

Former: Catalonia ran entire industries while at war. Something needs doing and it isn’t getting done? Volunteer, find people to help you, etc.

Latter: I dunno, ask your mom how she cleaned and fed you for decades without financial compensation.

Bonus: a significant portion of drug research at least in the US is (or was anyway) funded by the US government, so capitalists aren’t exactly doing all the work themselves.

Meh, fair enough.

If that’s the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:

The issue is whether or not anyone can associate that IP with yours, and what that comes down to is how willing they are to give up their records when the government asks nicely (or, even more importantly: not so nicely.)

I admit I didn’t include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?

GDF is also wrong about Israel.

Oh, my bad, I didn’t even notice the ‘no thanks’ button. Thanks.

Neat, I’ll check that out, thanks!

Edit: Ugh, it looks like all of the book clubs that are tagged as ‘sci-fi’ are actually ‘sci-fi/fantasy’ (or sometimes sci-fi/fantasy/historical/romance, which makes no sense) which is not what I’m looking for. Do you happen to know of any that are pure sci-fi? Preferably ones that focus on big-idea sci-fi like Greg Egan or Peter Watts?

My point is that whether you send down divers or haul 400+ tons of concrete and equipment up from the bottom of the ocean, it’s going to be expensive to maintain either way, especially if things don’t go according to plan and they have to perform maintenance more than once every 20 years or whatever.