I was born and raised here in the United States, just like my father, and his father, and so on for several generations. You fuck off. You and your disgusting fucking federal government. May you all rot in hell.

I think most reasonable people would agree that there are many objectively good things about the modern world, but progress isn’t a strict good/bad binary. Often, progress results in both good and bad circumstances.

For instance, I think most reasonable people would agree that modern medicine is a very good thing. Vaccines and antibiotics have saved countless lives. Also, more advanced agricultural technology has allowed us to grow more food and feed more people. However, progress has also resulted in significant ecological damage, depletion of natural, nonrenewable resources and a significant loss of biodiversity. I think most reasonable people would agree that these are very bad things.

I don’t think the point is to ignore the very real, important positives about the modern world, but to point out that there are still things that need to improve, and unintended negative effects of progress that need to be dealt with.

I appreciate that for you the modern world is overall good, but that’s not necessarily everyone’s experience. Some people do feel purposeless, depressed and worn down, despite being relatively wealthy and comfortable, especially compared to humans of past eras.

It’s not just about winning, it’s about ideology. Embracing demsoc candidates wouldn’t just be a change in strategy, it would be a change in the party’s core ideology. Ideology is why political parties exist. Political parties are usually based in ideology, that’s why in other democracies there are liberal parties, conservative parties, socialist parties, Libertarian parties, etc. But here in the US we don’t have a system of political ideology plurality, so the two parties that we do have are often fighting internally to determine what the core ideology of the party will be.

You know why so many Democrats don’t like demsoc candidates? Because they’re not demsocs. They’re social liberals or neoliberals, and they want the Democratic party to remain an ideologically Liberal party.

If our democracy were more like most every other democracy on the planet, the neoliberals and the demsocs would each have their own party, and they wouldn’t need to be engaged in this constant, zero sum fight for control of one party.

Because the pro-Israel lobby in the US is just that powerful.

No major kernel decisions were made,” jokes Russinovich in a post on LinkedIn.

Man, wouldn’t that be wild, though?

Get out your spray paint, kids.

“Democrats must be bold and meet this moment,” he said. “This is the urgent work in front of us: to stand up to authoritarianism, to protect care and dignity, and to make life better for the people who count on us.”

Sure, Democrats, be bold. Meet the moment. Stand up to authoritarianism…then immediately fold, faster than Superman on laundry day. But, I don’t doubt you will succeed at making life better for the people who count on you, who are of course your donors, and other elites and oligarchs.

I stopped buying consoles and moved pretty much exclusively to Steam because it gives me many more options. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. Consoles are great for some people, but I need more flexibility. I sometimes wish I could (legally) play Nintendo first party games, but it’s really not that big of a deal.

Nintendo has spent decades building an extremely loyal, multigenerational consumer base. They also release very popular, high quality games. I have no interest in owning a Switch, but I get why so many people do.

I couldn’t care less.

Trump tells ABC he’s ‘not particularly’ interested in reconciling with Elon Musk, who appeared to say making peace would be in the best interest of the US

If you really cared about what’s best for the US, you and Trumpy would join hands and walk your asses into a volcano.

The acceptance of risk and seemingly crazy leaps of inspiration woven into American attitudes, he said, help produce a research environment that nowhere else can quite match.

American exceptionalism BS.

This really comes down to technocrats vs the people. The technocrats want to double down on neoliberalism because many economists and other experts are telling them it’s the only way. The field of economics, especially in the US is mostly just a cult of free market evangelists. Technocrats like Klein believe in listening to experts, which I would normally strongly agree with, but I just can’t listen to experts who advise that we double down on the same god damn policies that have left so many millions of Americans feeling left behind, desperate, and hopeless. It’s insanity.

What’s wild to me is that these games were all developed to run on Windows, not SteamOS or any other Linux distro. This is with the games requiring a compatibility layer to run. Imagine what they could do if the games were made to run on SteamOS.

I didn’t mean to imply that I think what I’m suggesting is possible in the current system. I should have made that more clear. That’s my fault. I understand that what I’m talking about would require significant systemic changes. To you, that might essentially make it impossible, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. People made the existing system, there’s no reason why people couldn’t make a different system.

False equivalency.

It’s a good thing not everyone is as arrogantly resistant to new possibilities as you, otherwise human progress might cease entirely.

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”

• Murray Bookchin

When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.

Money doesn’t have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn’t going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone’s checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people’s hands (or checking accounts) they’re going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn’t increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don’t transfer all of the newly created money into people’s checking accounts.

Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn’t just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.

I’m not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be paid back because they’re the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn’t lead to too high of inflation.

All of this is just so stupid, it’s so unnecessary. There’s no reason growth must be correlated with increased debt. The Federal government doesn’t need to borrow money for anything, they create their own money. They don’t need to go to people and say, “hey, lend me some of your dollars so I can pay for the army, or roads and bridges,” they can just make more dollars. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer, they make the money. You wouldn’t need to borrow money from your friend if you had a legal money printer at home that could print an infinite number of dollars.

But I know, inflation. Yes, if the Federal government made a bunch of money and went around dropping it out of hot air balloons, inflation would go up. When people get money in their hands they tend to want to spend it, this causes increased demand, supply can’t necessarily keep up with the sudden increase in demand and you get inflation. There’s a pretty easy solution to this problem: don’t print a bunch of money and just hand it out to people. Print it, and use it to fund infrastructure projects or public services. Put some of it in an account that can only be used to make payments to bond holders. I know the infrastructure projects would mean money being put into the hands of the people who work on those projects, but I doubt that would increase the overall inflation rate very much, and if it did you could always just pull back on the infrastructure spending when inflation was high and ramp it back up when the inflation rate goes lower.