That would be nice, but they won’t suddenly surrender.

Russia already lost 500000-700000 men. This war only ends when Moscow is in ruins or when the nation is bankrupted.

Ok, get this. You elect politicians to “help slash federal spending”.

What the hell is Musk even doing and why is he outsourcing this job to unpaid idiots, when politicians already get paid to do this?

Okay, I’ll do a few suggestions for free:

• Stop subsidizing companies. All of them.
• Tax the rich to boost the federal income.
• Legalize all immigrants so they can be tax paying citizens.
• Crack down on employers using illegal underpaid illegal immigrants.
• Provide universal health care. Sick people don’t work.
• Cut down on police force spending.
• Cut down on car infrastructure spending.
• Cut down “defense” spending in artificial oil wars.
• Help Ukraine to defeat Russia, so Russia will have to surrender and disarm their nukes, so that USA can also cut down on cost for maintenance of nukes.
• Expand renewable energy. It’s free energy yo, and it creates jobs for tax paying citizens.
• Stop mining fossil fuels. It will cost more to clean that shit up than is earned.

It’s the meme timeframe for employees under Trump. It’s about 10 days, but really -3 days.

Trump hired Anthony Scarramucci (The Mooch) as White House Communications Director to start on August 2017.

As a good boi, he started the job right away on July 21, leaving his pregnant wife at the hospital.

Trump then hired John Kelly and John Kelly fired the Mooch on July 28.

That’s the question. Let’s say Trump makes himself dictator. Who’s going to inherit the title when Trump eventually dies from old age or from falling out of a Russian window?

It gives me flashbacks to his first term, many mooches ago.

He’s going to play the Apprentice role again, in which he tries to increase tv ratings by randomly hiring and firing as many people as possible in every episode.

Will the MAGAs back Vance without Trump?

I mean… it’s been more than 24 hours by now, hasn’t it?

This will mainly hurt the American industries. The rest of the world is moving on, whether or not USA is on board.

not sure what a ceremonial rich dude could have done.

This is the kind of situation in which a king (or president) can make a difference.

Royalty don’t have any direct power to order people to do things, but they do have a voice with quite a broad reach. Whenever the king speaks, people will hear it. Even if they don’t care about the king.

In a time where people are getting their information from sources curated to fit their own political bubble or economical interests, it’s quite powerful to be able to reach a whole country across political and economic interests.

Royalties can’t dictate, but they can encourage and motivate people to work together on a common goal despite of their differences.

When something is seriously threatening the country, it would be nice if the king would bother making a motivational speech, so that people, companies and politicians could see the purpose of uniting against the common threat.

It might not sway the opinions of people or companies who have strong interests in not doing anything differently, but it will boost the morale of people trying to do their best, enabling them to rest assured that they’re doing the right thing despite of what others might do. We could say it’s a really vague forn of long term meta-politics, but sometimes that’s also all that is needed to set a direction.

It’s not political as such, but more like “yo let’s save this sinking ship” instead of passivily watching it happen. It won’t fix anything by itself, but it’s a good start. Without a good start and set direction, you can be sure that nothing will ever change.

The posted article and me.

I’m a union representative and it bothers me that people always jump to the $$$-question. That’s only rarely what strikes are about. Look at the ongoing Tesla strike in Sweden. They were paid over market wages and they still strike, because it’s not about pay.

My own contract doesn’t even mention pay, except that we have the right to annual negotiation. This right has lead to higher wages than any minimum wage agreement will ever do. We’re not here to fight for back pocket scrap metal, we just want a balanced relationship between employees and employers.

This is just difficult to see for anyone who is still working on the employers terms only, or someone who is used to consider jobs “take it or leave it”, instead of taking pride in what they do because they want to do the job.

Ok, let me explain.

Money is probably the least important thing in a union contract. It’s always about rights.

Unionizing is the only way to escape the prostitution-like relationship of paid work. Accepting to being paid more is just accepting being a more expensive prostitute. “Here’s $100, now you do what the man says… Ok … $200?”

No, it’s never okay. No amount of money can ever make it okay. You should have the rights to choose how and when you do the thing that you’re offering as a paid service. That’s why you need a clear contract that outlines all of your rights.

In this case it’s about termination without cause. As an employee, you’ll want a binding contract, so you can plan ahead. Termination without cause is the employers trick to keep you on a one sided contract in which you’ll have to dance like a bear in a Russian circus, while the employer has no obligation to keep you fed once the show is over.

The reason they strike is that the employer has already abused this power.

I think it’s fairly optimistic to believe that they’ll stop bugging you with the Windows 11 upgrade even if you do pay $30.

Well it isn’t 6.

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that

Is this their Vietnam?

forced into an echo chamber.

Yes, it does that.

Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.

It should be highlighted that the tough competition from Chinese manufacturers is on the Chinese market. The increased tariffs won’t help on that. VW simply got outcompeted in China.

VW is still the most sold brand in Europe. Every time BYD sells one car in Europe, VW sells 74 cars Europe. That’s not the problem. It’s that the Chinese market used to be the largest market for VW, but now the party is over after 40 years.

Exports are risky like that. It’s difficult to blame the China for this when they have cheaper and more technology advanced vehicles available domestically. I hope VW can see the writing on the wall and up their game, but I fear that this market won’t ever come back. In my opinion they should focus on going back to the core idea of making smaller and cheaper cars available to the people, instead of making luxury car exports.

This is clearly a “why not both” situation.

Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There’s a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.

IMF is part of UN.

Egypt is trying to achieve a rapid transition to electric vehicles. They have started domestic vehicle production with a little help from China. Not just cars, but also smaller mopeds and such I think.

So, by making people drive domestic vehicles fueled by domestic electricity, they hope to be less dependent on IMF loans and imported vehicles and fuel. They want to be the key hub for electrifying African vehicles, so they are also aiming for exports.

It makes sense like that, but it’ll obviously piss off a lot of people, both inside and outside of Egypt. I’m not at all sure they can actually see it through. It’s a bold move when they have a poor economy to begin with. They are in the middle of a financial crisis, so something drastic needs to be done.

My Newt = Minute

Minute is a synonym for small.