Apple is nagging with its v26.1 update. V26.2 is coming out any day and will probably be the only update for all iPhones can run it (so no v18.7.3 for my 12 mini since Apple likes to push iOS users to the newer major iOS version).

Billionaires and autocrats have sabotaged both systems. We are going to have to figure out a third way or we are going to descend into techno feudalism and that is going to suck for everybody but about 5000 people on the entire planet .

if you are reading this you are not one of those 5,000

Is socialism? Almost the entire world is against them except Russia that uses them occasionally as a thorn in the side of the United States.

America's gearing up for war with them. Prior to that we had cut them out of the rest of the world and all of the global markets.

So I don't think Venezuela which is under active attack by every capitalist nation in the world is a fair representative of alternatives to capitalism.

I do think we live in the real world though and we can't pretend that socialism works even if the only reason it doesn't work is that billionaires, who are themselves vehemently opposed to capitalism, will sabotage it making it impossible to properly implement.

The important thing to remember is billionaires do not support capitalism either. So capitalism is going to get sabotaged by billionaires too and therefore capitalism is not an alternative to billionaires.

We are going to have to figure out a third way. Because both capitalism and socialism have failed us.

From the Hamas Charter:

There is no fix besides austerity and suffering.

That's because rich people don't want to have to spend the money to solve problems that are mostly your problem and not theirs.

You need to get out of the habit, a habit let's remember you were conditioned into by the wealthy, of assuming that nothing can ever get better and that good things aren't possible anymore.

That habit is an extreme and toxic form of conservativism.

Technically they can't ban them but they can't throw you in prison for using one. And they can throw people in prison for running them of course.

This is the ultra wealthy and the ruling elite moving the take over the last form of media where regular people can access information without their consent.

But hey, the girl who hands you your coffee says Merry Christmas now so that's a fair trade right?

And if you don't understand what that means that's the problem.

I'm not sure about that. It seems the government in this case are the only ones in the world who have the interests of the kids in their heart. God know parents are fucking useless raising TikTok zombies.

Children don't have absolute rights anywhere, not even in the US of fucking Eyh!

It's borderline worthless trying to get any people to agree anything over a Teams meeting let alone hold an international debate. That's not to say COP30 achieved anything, it didn't.

Exactly. I was born in 82 and I have never understood the allure of Pokemon. I am much more interested in the binder full of Garbage Pale Kids cards my wife has.

The two are nothing alike. British politeness is sometimes unbearable but in India the "yes" culture isn't even stopped by agreeing to two incompatible things. The answer there is to lie to your face by agreeing and then apologising afterwards.

It is an insane culture where you can't be sure that what you agreed on will actually happen in the slightest.

Not comparable in the slightest. The Japanese may not say no, but they don't do it while lying, as evident by your example. The Indians will outright say yes to your face and then apologise afterwards when they don't do the thing they said yes to.

This isn't just project management, this is as straight forward as "Pick me up from the hotel at 1pm." "Yes Sir" and after catching an Uber to my destination I got a "Sorry Sir" the day after when the guy who said yes flat out admitted that he knew he wasn't rostered on that day. Or the other time a few days later when a colleague of mine agreed to go to two meetings at the same time knowing full well the second was a clash and despite the second being trivially movable an hour later.

That is not how antitrust laws work in any place on the planet. And the rest of the places definitely do enforce their laws.

Indeed. Given the number of employees I would have figured it would be an order of magnitude higher than that at least. The Pentagon got an awesome deal.

We were actively hiding the cost of college by giving colleges direct Cash subsidies from state and federal governments. They were passing those cash subsidies onto the students in the form of lower tuition. I do not know how much simpler I can explain this to you.

If you look at the actual operating expenses of colleges they have not increased substantially in the last 40 years. You will find some increases because there is more technology. Yes 70 years ago colleges did not need computers or advanced medical equipment to train doctors on. They also didn't need staff to keep all those computers and all that equipment running. So there is some increase due to do technology.

But that increase is relatively small. And can easily be accounted for by the new technology.

Meanwhile all of those subsidies are gone.

Suppose what we should have done is when you went to college we should have handed you a check and had you walk it to the finance office so that you would understand what the cost of college actually was instead of hiding that from you.

The reason we didn't do that is we were fighting a war with people who pretended to be socialists. So you needed to get socialism because that made America stronger country that could actually stand up to those enemies but we didn't want you to get comfortable with socialism so we hid socialism from you.

We did the same thing with the housing market where trillions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to subsidize baby boomer houses so that they could actually afford to buy houses. We also heavily subsidized the loans they got for those houses.

But if you really want to piss off somebody over 50 try explaining to them that they received a massive amount of benefit from socialism.