It’s hilarious in a way that Thiel, one of the billionaires who triggered a liquidity crisis that sunk SVB, is off proposing to fill the gap that he created. It’s also entirely fitting with the conspiracy theory of the tech bro fascists wanting complete autonomy to setup electronic fiefdoms.

I don’t really get how this would work though, in more practical terms – as a lot of the crypto stuff is just antithetical to the banking industry. Like even the whole schpiel the crypto bros often go on about how you can send money quick from wallet to wallet, with the old “OMG we did it! How can banks be so stupid and slow!”. It’s largely due to regulation. Like anti-money laundering regulation, where countries don’t want citizens funding things like foreign terrorist groups with untrackable/unblockable wallet to wallet money transfers, so they tell banks they gotta scrutinize every transaction quite a bit, under threat of hefty fines – and where the govt can overtly tell banks to block payments to unfriendly countries (eg. Iran).

Meh, it’s clear they won’t care about the fundamentals at all, nor do they care to understand how the industry works. They’ll likely use the bank to undercut existing players, while propping it up by manipulating the stock / piling in their billions. The regulation comment is a misdirect, alot like claims of wanting to be regulated were a misdirect back with FTX – these guys are far more likely to aggressively lobby for / pay the republicans to dismantle regulations in their favour, changing the landscape to their personal benefit. After the competition starts crumbling / they start moving towards a monopoly, they’ll either turn it into a regular bank in terms of service (but under their control of course), or they’ll intentionally tank it to gobble up whatever reserve/insurance funds exist, shifting that wealth into the billionaire’s pockets too, and leaving people with few options other than “under the mattress” for their savings. That’d make people almost entirely dependant on maintaining a regular working income, completing the tech bro fascist wet dream of having indentured slaves that can’t push back against any of their bullshit.

There’s no particular reason they couldn’t. Even a simple dirty bomb detonated in a high population area could wreak havoc – and any country with centrifuges can basically make one of those in no time.

Basically every sovereign state now has a very clear risk calculation supporting the development of nuclear arms and for ignoring all the UN’s attempts for international cooperation / non-proliferation. Iran was compliant, from all accounts, with the vast majority of requirements that had been set out for it – something that Israel’s nuclear program is seemingly not required to adhere to (it’s still “unofficial” that they have between 90 and 400 functional warheads).

Opening yourselves to international inspectors just gives the USA a very clear target list + floor plans. Further, not having a nuclear option means the USA will potentially attack you. Even if rules of engagement say they shouldn’t attack civilian power plant infrastructure, the USA, Israel and Russia do it without hesitation. North Korea, China, and Russia have shown that having a nuclear deterrent will keep the USA away. It’ll even make the USA suck up to you / praise you, and let you attack/invade your neighbours without the USA taking action.

What Trump and the States have done, in my view, essentially translates to destroying any semblance of international cooperation between nations (cause why bother trying to appease the EU, if the USA is gonna ignore international norms and bomb whoever they want anyway), and has made it so that every nation should now pursue weapons of mass destruction as a “deterrent”, which will no doubt lead to catastrophe in time. But there aren’t really many ways I can see it playing out otherwise.

Like that 5% NATO military spending… should prolly be every NATO country building a nuclear / WMD program of their own, unbeholden to US constraints, “just in case”.

Personally, I don’t mind seeing when comments are heavily down voted. If an opinion is unpopular, that’s ok, especially in some areas where you generally know there’s a likely bias in the audience.

What annoys me is seeing comments removed / silenced by mods when the comments dont align. If the comments calling for explicit violence or using overt slurs, by all means censor. But many online spaces will eliminate even respectful / neutral comments simply because they aren’t in line with that narrative.

I think it became inevitable that traditional ‘sites’ were going to be in trouble once AI bots gained ground. The user interface is much more organic / user friendly, given that it can be conversational.

It’s why big corps were so quick to start building walls/moats around the technology. If end users had control over what sites their AI bots used to pull information from, that’d be a win for the consumer/end-user, and potentially legitimate news sites depending on how the payment structure is sorted out. Eg. Get a personalized bot that references news articles from a curated list of trusted / decent journalist sites across a broad political spectrum, and you’d likely have a really great “AI assistant” to keep you up to date on various current events. This sort of thing would also represent an existential threat to things like Googles core marketing business, as end users could replace many of their ‘searches’ with a curated personalized AI assistant trained on just reputable sources.

Big tech wants to control that, so that they can advertise via those bots / prioritize their own agenda / paid content. So they want to control the AI sources, and restrict end users’ ability to filter garbage. If users end up primarily interacting with an AI avatar, and you can control the products / information that avatar presents, you have a huge amount of control over the individuals and their spending habits. Not much of a surprise.

It’d be cool to see a user friendly local LLM that allowed users to point it at reference sites of their choosing. Pair that with a news-site data standard that streamlines the ability to pull pertinent data, and let news agencies charge a small fee for access to those APIs to fund it a bit. Shifting towards LLM based data delivery, they could even potentially save a bit in terms of print / online publications – don’t need a fancy expensive user-facing web app, if they’re all just talking to their LLM-based model-hot AI assistant anyway.

Israel’s actions in the past couple years have all seemed like sorta a desperate attempt to leverage the US Hegemony that’s protected them, before the US buckles.

Sorta like imagine a kid in Grade 1 who’s a total racist bully to his classmates. But the kid has an older brother in grade 6 who has no issue beating the shit outta any Grade 1 kid who fights back. When the older brother nears the transition to middle school – at which point the younger will lose his protection – the younger brother starts instigating like crazy, to try and establish dominance while still protected.

Is this a questionable move under the current administration? Definitely. I can imagine it essentially being them wanting to broadcast racist/discriminatory things, without worrying about foreign country hate speech laws generating lawsuits for US social media companies that put that sorta thing out there. They want media companies like X to be free to broadcast as much right wing hate as possible to democratic nations, to more easily influence things like political elections. The Trump admin/repubs would almost definitely abuse the hell out of it.

But awkwardly, is there a case, generally, to be made out of this sort of thing? Yeah, I’d say there is. But the approach to resolving it is kinda extreme, and authoritarian in nature. Like step 1 of trying to have control over your nations online media, would be to bring in a China/Russia style national Firewall. If the government wants to allow people to make online comments without fear of repercussions from foreign actors, or to have social media options that are uninfluenced by foreign actors, governments need some level of control over the geo-location and flow of internet traffic. If America wants to let Musk goose-step around Nazi saluting, while ensuring that Americans are uninfluenced by how the rest of the world views that sort of thing, they need to be able to block connections to/from foreign countries. If they want to block Chinese bot farms from manipulating the public image of the CCP on social media, they need more direct control over how data from China flows into the USA. And they likely need more ‘direct’ influence/control over social media companies via stricter regulation on things like knowing your customers.

I’m not sure how you’d have to structure that sort of thing’s governance, in a democratic nation, to ensure that it doesn’t get abused, and I imagine the only politicians that would be interested in this sort of thing would be the ones hoping to abuse it.

But that wouldn’t even be full mitigation. Someone like Khashoggi, who is sort of a poster child for this concern, was killed by Saudi Arabia due to expressing his opinions in Journals / online about the SA regime (to my understanding at least). It’s questionable, had his opinions been “successfully” kept within nations that view free speech as paramount, whether he would not have still been targeted/killed. Even if that story was successfully “kept” from the population of a dictatorship, there’s no particular reason to think that the dictator would not seek vengeance for the slight. Like Kim Jong’s got a pretty tight stranglehold on the media in North Korea from what I understand, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t above trying to assassinate foreigners who campaign aggressively against him or who end up going viral for insulting him.

SVB was intentionally crashed by tech bros like Peter Thiel, likely as a strategic move to lobby for change in the banking sector / to gain more access for tech companies. The bank operated in a risky space, with too high a concentration of tech bro customers. This left them exposed to Thiel and crowd going “Hey, look at the balance sheet, if we all withdrew our money at once we can pop this bank and trigger a discussion about banking regulations / reform!”.

So, no one forgot, it’s all part of the same larger plan really.

When the Nazi’s came to power in Germany, they had less support amongst the public than the republicans do today.

If you think it fair to hold all of Nazi germany accountable for the atrocities that went on, there’s no reason to pretend America is some “special” exception. Germans take responsibility for their past, with things like banning AFD – even if a German can legit say “It wasn’t me gassing those jews”, they still recognise they were responsible for what occurred as a result of their inaction and apathy. In the US, like 30% of them didn’t even bother to show up and vote. Apathy is no excuse, and not worthy of absolution. They literally elected a felon and a rapist.

Regardless, I still stick by the reduction in visits and the on going boycotts aren’t about making them “realise our value” or whatever. It’s a visceral recoil experienced on an aggregate scale, to the vitriolic bile being spewed by the people they elected, targeted quite literally at all of us here in Canada. If someone vomits on you constantly, you move the fuck away – and it isn’t about “wanting to make them miss you”. It’s about the vomit.

I agree with a chunk of this, but your note about ‘reminding them at large of our value’ is off. Most people I talk to here in Canada look at the issues in the states as basically untenable in terms of stability / trade / geopolitical unity. Supporting Russia, attacking their allies/threatening to militarily annex peaceful democratic areas like greenland, putting up BS reasons for trade tariffs (fent). The USA is a schizo trade partner at best, where for 4 years with the dems it may be ‘normal’, but when it flips repub its suddenly xenophobic dictator land, with less stability in its agreements than a third world military dictatorship – at least those deals tend to last until the next coup, whereas Trumps agreements change based on his dementia; his administration has become comfortable with making up totally fake numbers even, which can change based on how they want to present the fake narrative about why they’re doing whatever stupid crap they’re doing. And there’s no assurance it’ll go back to a ‘stable’ dem setup for four years next time around – the way it’s trending, the dems will be locked up, with all their funding methods declared unamerican by EO, similar to the shakedown of the law firms that’s happened recently as reported by 60 minutes.

If you live next to a family in a mansion, and they suddenly start flying a Nazi flag, beating/deporting their own maintenance staff (sometimes their own family too, by mistake), and screaming about how they’re gonna take your house, you don’t pull back on visiting as a way to ‘remind them’ of your value. You pull back because WTF, no. And if you can’t move, and they were your main contact locally, you start lookin for other friends / buying guns and protection. Again, not to remind them of your value, but because fuck no.

heh, your edits are kinda hilarious when you note that the position you’ve ‘agreed’ with has just ~15 upvotes, while the two noting its a ‘dangerous by default’ thing each have like 50 or 100 upvotes. Men gave you their perspective, and you choose to ignore it. Most guys agree on what that sort of behaviour typically is – and even if it is the left over covid habit, that’s still a “this person is wearing a mask and likely wants to stay distant from others, I should walk in the mud because they’ll think I’m a threat if I get too close”… is still in the ball park of walkin in the mud cause he wants to show he’s not a threat.

A large number of men have internalised all the negativity expressed in the media about our gender over the last few decades. Lots of the ones who’ve resisted / refused to do so, have gone the extreme right / alpha male BS route, trying to aggressively push back against it in a rather sad way. I reckon its partially because progressive / left leaning approaches don’t typically allow for any dissenting voices on things like gender, and are heavily influenced by feminist ideology: masculine sexuality and traits are the enemy. Caucasian males in specific, is one demographic that’s always pretty safe to dunk on in pretty well any scenario.

I’d phrase it a bit differently though, I think, in that its more risk avoidance than threat internalization – even if one follows the other. Like I know guys who get anxiety if they’re asked to work a shift with just one other coworker (female) on site - I’ve had the same concerns personally. It’s not because we think we’ll slip up and accidentally assault the woman or something. It’s that we’re worried we’ll say something / do something that the woman will take offense to, there’ll be no witnesses to support our side, and the standard of today is “believe the victim (if its not a male victim)”. Avoiding being in that situation/getting anxiety over it, isn’t an internalization of being a threat, so much as it’s wanting to avoid the potential risk of something that’s shown in many media circles constantly.

Nodding hello and saying good morning / afternoon is something I reserve typically for older men, usually white or asian. Any other demographic tends to net a negative response more often than naught. Like imagine if every other person you said “hello” to quickened their pace to get away from you or shot you nasty looks – you’d prolly stop doin it too. I’ve even had X’s who said they thought that behaviour was an attempt to ‘pick them up’, which I definitely don’t want to mis-convey. I still say it back if someone says it to me, but I can’t initiate without it re-enforcing a negative male stereotype. That pleasantry was killed off like a decade or more ago, in part because the onus to maintain it shifted away from men… and women didn’t really want to take the step to keep it goin. I mean, you didn’t exactly say “g’mornin” to the mud walker guy to let him know it’s all good, did you? ;p

Progressive feet and hand numbness… sounds like untreated diabetes to me, based on symptoms I remember when my dad first got it. Definitely get checked / a docs input. Untreated, you can literally lose toes/limbs. I’d even consider starting to eat a diabetic diet while I waited for an appt, to see if it improved the situation.

As for the sex stuff, as an older guy, I reckon the bigger part is to find a partner you want to live with outside of the sexy-time stuff as a priority in general. Everyone ages and their bodies change, physical stuff is important but its not enough to maintain a longer term meaningful relationship, in my experience at least – and ultimately, the time spent boning is a tiny fraction of the time you’d be spending with the other person in the long run. To add to that, I’ve had relationships in the past where we didn’t do much of the direct penetration stuff, but I still found it really… rewarding? titilating? gratifying? … just making her eyes roll back / bite me as she climaxed and then collapsed exhausted. The endorphin release from intimacy isn’t just about getting your rocks off, in some ways the feeling of knowing you can drive your partner nuts is better – to me, that’s what makes me feel ‘virile’, more so than simply fucking/orgasming myself. Biggest issues there was just making sure she understood I didnt feel a need to orgasm myself everytime we were together, so long as I rung her bell thoroughly.

Sure, though that’s part of the problem that the States is whining about. US taxes paid for the service, which lots of other nations/foreign companies used.

Things like Libraries require taxes to operate. You’d likely be annoyed if you were struggling, and then found out your gov was using your taxes to pay for a bunch of foreign countries to have libraries. And then you find out that those foreigners are able to use those libraries to make good money, which they don’t use to support their libraries, cause the States is already covering it. So you’re paying taxes, and struggling to do so, so that EU companies can reap profits and live comfy.

And yes, charge a fee. That’s basically what I’ve said, no? That there’s a value add, and that there are ‘professionals’/companies using it who aren’t paying for that value add. So something like a fee for frequent pulls against the vuln feeds, to replace whatever funding the US gov was giving, would make sense to me. though I suppose this has now been kicked down the road till next year.

Yeah, but that’s sort of the point I was making… it was a data repository used by “thousands and thousands” of security professionals and organizations. So people who were generating revenue off of the service. I mean, they’re professionals, not hobbyists / home users.

I’m not an American, but in terms of everything running like a company/for profit, I’d say that its best if things are sustainable / able to self-maintain. If the US cutting funding means this program can’t survive, that’s an issue. If it has value to a larger community, the larger community should be able to fund its operation. There’s clearly a cost to maintaining the program, and there are clearly people who haven’t contributed to paying that cost.

In terms of going back to whatever, the foundation involved is likely to sort out alternative funding, though potentially with decreased functionality (it sounds like they had agreements to pay for secondary vulnerability report reviews, which will likely need to get scaled back). Maybe they’ll need to add in a fee for frequent feed pulls, or something similar. I wouldn’t say it’s completely toast or anythin just yet.

I’m honestly not totally sure what to think about this one, though I recognise that it’s a big shift/likely a negative overall result.

Reason I’m humming and hawing, is that there are lots of expensive cybersecurity type ‘things’ that rely on the CVE system, without explicitly paying in to that system / supporting it directly, from what I recall / have seen. Take someone like Tenable security, who sell vulnerability scanners that extensively use/integrate with the CVE/NVD databases… companies pay Tenable huge amounts of money for those products. Has Tenable been paying anything into the ‘shared’ public resource pool? How about all those ‘audit’ companies, who charge like 10-30k per audit for doing ‘vulnerability / penetration tests’.

IT Security has been an expensive/profitable area for a long time, while also relying on generally public/shared resources to facilitate a lot of the work. Maybe an ‘industry’ funded consortium is the more appropriate way to go.

I’m curious – I’ve looked at this a little in the past, but paused once the payment requirement showed up. Doesn’t feel like it really matters at all about using a VPN or otherwise to try and hide my identity, if there’s a charge on a credit card that proves I use a torrenting service… ? How are people sorting that out, or are we all just pretending you can’t get tracked through a payment?

Lots of people seem to think it’s either or, and it really shouldn’t be, in my view. (I’ll note I’m canadian, since it seems to matter to some these days).

The argument that foreigners shouldn’t be allowed to protest is to me somewhat valid, but with a bunch of reservations. Peaceful protests, publishing op eds, (obviously) University papers, online posts, and other ‘regular’ forms of expression I’m totally in agreement that they should be allowed to express themselves/participate.

But we’ve also seen cases in Canada where our immigration levels got so high, that we literally had CCP organized protests in favour of a detained Chinese CCP Billionaire, as well as the tearing down of “peaceful protests”/awareness things in regards to HongKong and the crack down the CCP did there. We’ve seen large, organized groups of Indian students – their messages of “go get free food” being amplified by foreign controlled social media – draining our food banks dry, the loss of that social support helping to fuel class conflicts and increased animosity towards Indian people as a demographic. We’ve seen ‘protests’ leveraged by foreign powers to sow discontent and animosity intentionally, and/or to control the narrative around news stories.

And that’s really no surprise: one of the stated methodologies of authoritarian regimes, for attacking democracies, is to basically sow civil unrest through the amplification of contested issues/topics. They’ll amplify/fund controversial right-wing and left-wing viewpoints in order to cause internal conflict. They’ll hype up race conflicts. Like how the majority of people are totally fine saying both “Hamas is bad” and “Israel’s genocidal actions in gaza are bad”, but somehow it’s always framed as just a 2 sided thing where you’re on one side or the other, is great for authoritarians: why fight a democracy, when you can make it fight itself. If we’re accepting Students/people from authoritarian regimes, we have to be realistic in acknowledging many of these people will share the regimes beliefs, and will be actively working against our governments / peoples. They aren’t the stereotypical refugee seeking a better/freer life, but rather people with malicious intentions and a desire to disrupt.

So I’m fine with such people having visas and non-permanent citizenship revoked if the person’s involved in criminal activity (violent protests), and/or if they’re a primary organizer/instigator/funder of such things, or (as was the case with some ‘student’ groups in Canada) they’re actively coordinating their protests with foreign embassies/agents. I’d also be in favour of increased scrutiny of people from such regions when it comes to long term stays / partial immigration (where they don’t renounce their former non-democratic country). Lots of countries also expect singular citizenship, I see no particular issue with western democracies at least requiring that their citizens not support/be registered citizens of authoritarian dictatorships. If you want to live in an egalitarian/democratic country, you shouldn’t be supportive of authoritarian autocracies/dictatorships.

And again, similar to the note about ‘one side or the other’, in terms of free speech, most folks generally recognise that there are some reasonable restrictions / repercussions involved with it. Hate speech, explicitly calling for the killing of some group of people or what have you, clearly not a ‘right’ for most sane people – at least, not one that wouldn’t come with consequences. In the same way that the left is fine boycotting Musk for his Nazi salutes (he’s free to express himself as a Nazi, and other people are free to take issue with that / not support him because of it), foreigners explicitly challenging the existing norms of society should be prepared for potential consequences if they do so in a manner deemed inappropriate.

Yeah, the drop in travel and drop in spending on American stuff is sharp – not sure the specific %, but it’s definitely up there. What’s interesting is that it’s a “spontaneous” reaction from many Canadians, not so much a result of leadership. Like, yes, Trudeau made a speech or two that were fairly clear on the sentiments, but people’d already been booing at hockey games / cancelling trips etc before that. Sorta like our armed forces reserve applications going bonkers / crashing the website frequently due to volume, without any specific reason.

But these things are still driven by what seems like mass paranoia / potentially media trends, to some extent - especially as there’s been few ‘real’ controls/measures implemented. Canadian media is heavily skewed/oriented towards the USA, so we’ve seen a fairly constant blast of negative Trump/American perspectives. Social media makes it really easy to fan those xenophobic flames – like you’d just need a small batch of bots/agents upvoting/downvoting posts to shift the herds perspective on sites like reddit, as, if they catch posts ‘early’, that’d essentially allow control of which comments are visible, allowing for control of the discussion. The anti-american stuff feels a lot like a social media trend in this respect – like people ‘spontaneously’ recording themselves dumping buckets of ice water on their heads, or taking photos of ‘planking’, or some random dance move, or stealing stuff from public washrooms, etc. Those sorts of things were basically coordinated through algorithms on social media, moreso than people rationally/objectively deciding to do them. It’s not like people across the country woke up one day and all thought “I know how to support ALS research, I’ll film myself dumping a bucket of water on my head!”. It was a nonsensical behaviour pattern spurred on by oligarch controlled algorithms, demonstrating the power of those algorithms to manipulate the masses.

Very difficult, as most traded goods pass through US boundaries via train/truck.

More “regular” trade agreements between individual states is generally more likely going forward I imagine, but the sort of integrated supply chains that we’ve all benefited from in North America for like… decades and decades… is pretty well toast.

Eg. the US wants to build their own cars, in country. This means Canada and Mexico will likely also need to build their own cars, in country. Mexico has a bit more of an opportunity to build up integrated supply chains with countries in south america, though they tend to be a bit less stable – the proximity is a win. It’d be really cool to see if they did though – not sure what sorts of free trade agreements are around in the south, honestly.

Canada is busy trying to shore up agreements/trade with areas like asia and europe, as those are ‘sorta’ the same distance/calculus as shipping things via sea to mexico / south america.

It’d also be interesting if the waning of the US hegemony results in more western countries trading with traditionally ‘blockaded’ countries. Cuba has long been a Canadian vacation spot, but trade with Cuba has been limited due to US pressure. Given the current state of things, I don’t see why Canada wouldn’t increase trade there. And given the state of Cuba currently, it could be really beneficial for both country’s people.

I’m mostly familiar with the Canadian situation due to my locale.

What I’d say on this front, is that the government of Canada has generally taken preformative steps so far in regards to the issues in the USA. There’s a lot of chest thumping and pageantry. Our largest province, Ontario, recently re-elected a fairly hard right Conservative politician – one who is well known for doing things against the public interest (like selling off what little green/parkland exists around toronto, to his developer buddies)… he was re-elected because he draped himself in pro-Canada trappings. He’s the guy who made the “Canada is not for sale” hats more popular. Branding yourself as captain Canada works for elections currently – which is why, for example, its very likely we’ll see a Liberal party returned to power federally, even though until very recently they were looking at a significant routing (that, plus them changing to Carney, who is probably the most right-wing/conservative leader of the Liberal/“centrist” party in history).

When I say preformative, I mean things like… there have been no explicit calls from our government to businesses/industry to follow suit on untangling supply chains or shifting trade relationships explicitly – they’ve taken some steps to try and lay ground work for further diversification of international trade, but haven’t pushed any levers, outside of allowing market forces to do their thing. Our banking regulators, for example, happily remain within Microsoft’s cloud ecosystems – and they have seemingly no interest in the financial industry outsourcing all of their websites to foreign countries / the USA. Many of our levels of government have made overtures of “buy local” procurement policies, but when you ask for details they’re all just “planning/reviewing/considering”, without direct action on the table. It’s not what you’d expect, given the ‘rhetoric’ of it being an existential threat / crisis. Our politicians are full of sound and fury, but they aren’t bothered enough to take direct action at this point.

If you rely on concrete / verifiable data points from our government, trade and relations are deteriorating, but there’s no overt cautions/warnings/mandates to take action. Media posts that hype up the fear by changing words feed into the public paranoia, and ignore the relative calm seen in our government agencies.

I ain’t American. I’m from one of the countries most irked by America at present (Canada) – if you look at my @, I’m on a Canadian lemmy server.

But its still true that Russian propaganda is mostly about disrupting allied nations and fostering civil unrest / animosity between countries. They have literally stated that they seek to amplify things like race-oriented conflicts and stories, because it helps to destabilize western countries (so things like Tiktok, where any anti-black event is automatically on the front page, is part of that routine – compared to other nations, where it shows more benign things, such as “child prodigy plays piano”). Things like “BuyCanadian” campaigns are likely supported/partially funded by Russian interests – because it’s not just “avoid american products”, but “avoid all traditional allies” in tone. Sorta like how Russia didn’t need specific ‘agents’ in the US, but could instead fund “influencers” that were saying things that promoted Russian geopolitical goals.

Is there a reason to be concerned about what’s going on in the states? Yes. Doesn’t mean that we should hype up negativity beyond reason / create anti-american echo chambers.