I personally loathe the kind of shithead bullies highlighted in the article. It's not a crowd I like and it's not the kind of crowd I associate with and in fact they're the kind of dickheads that I have a rather consistent streak of dismissing and actively degrading. In that, I am the majority. These shitheels have little genuine clout or influence in broader communities. The wheat tends to separate itself from the chaff. Isolating a few social media examples of pig-headedness ought not be used as a broader indictment. If some fellas wanna start a discord called "real gamers no wannabes no sluts" then, well, I hope they find some sort of satisfaction there.
Not sure why this matters as most pension index funds also include Meta by the same lines... everyone buying into these indexes is complicit, no surprise
We've successfully campaigned to make many of those same investors divest from fossil fuel investments. I don't see why investments in crazy surveillance tech should get a pass (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
This. Giving markets free reign, usually doesn't result in alignment with long term best interests or political objectives.
It took years of activism and voting with our money to get banks, pension funds and similar institutions to stop funding cluster munitions, land mines, nukes, oil, tabacco. Now big tech and some AI companies are on the radar.
Land mines and cluster munitions have been essential for Ukraine to defend itself against the Russian invasion. Several other European countries including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland have recently withdrawn from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty. It's cheap and easy to for activists to pretend to be morally superior when they're sitting safely behind computers and don't have to deal with real world consequences.
So then the Ukrainians should just roll over and stop trying to resist? Losing your country is a far more serious consequence then dealing with some UXO later.
There is a big leap between not resisting and using weapons that are widely agreed to be abhorrent. You're framing a false binary choice here: either deploy weapons that the majority of countries have deemed unconscionable, or lose your country in its entirety.
There is also a difference between why we fight and how we fight. Fighting in self defence does not give a state the right to conduct a war in any way it chooses.
There are numerous ongoing conflicts in which we've seen states shed hard-won agreements on how wars should be fought. It's an incredibly dangerous trend which is leading us into a new era of horror.
Where would you put the limits on Ukraine's actions? What is beyond the pale?
What an ignorant comment, totally disconnected from reality. It literally was a binary choice: without using land mines and cluster munitions the Ukrainian defenders would have been overrun by superior Russian numbers.
Urm, that they're invaluable in an active warzone is unquestionable.
The issue with this tech is that they - at least historically - didn't have an expiration date. So if that war ends and you let your children play in the woods... Maybe occasionally one won't be coming back anymore.
That's the reason why they got a bad image. Because that's literally what happened post ww2 - for decades.
Maybe nowadays they could built them with a forced timer for exploding - if they did, great! If not, your descendants may consider you insane for that opinion in a few decades
There are expiring ("non-persistent") munitions, though generally they're safed (triggers are deactivated) rather than exploded. The former does leave explosive materials in the field, but makes the likelihood of detonating these much lower.
I've been regularly thinking about Apartheid-era South Africa. It was a massive Thing for me as a Catholic school kid in the '80s because it seemed (to me) so clearly wrong yet accepted. There were clearly "lefties" making it visible without a lot happening but then "How did you go bankrupt? Two ways: Gradually, then suddenly" happened. And a lot of it started with university students petitioning their schools to divest and that spreading. It will not be fast, but these things can happen and we should start to build a framework for it.
And yes, yes, Enemies Lists are fraught with problems and have a history of eating themselves, etc. But the one thing I know is worse is not trying.
If you're asking me to rate things on a scale where human freedom comes behind some economic measure, you are asking the wrong person.
On edit: it would be nice when these GOTCHAs are offered, if the offerer stopped and asked themselves, "Did centuries of colonialism denying education to the natives have any bearing on what I am asking?"
I know you meant this sarcastically, but unironically yes. GDP has more than doubled since the end of apartheid, and it has the strongest economy on the continent
LMAO, now normalize it against world change in GDP since the end of apartheid. Pre-apartheid they were beating the world average, all times after apartheid they have been behind world average.
Especially the last 20 years, it is falling off a cliff in relative performance. Yeah the post-apartheid peak was 10% above the apartheid peak from the 80s.... unfortunately if you can only get 10% better in 40 years it actually represents a massive failure relative to the rest of the world.
I'd agree that apartheid was bad, but it seems to be coupled with other factors that led them to fall behind on the world stage. I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
>I'm guessing the kind of ideology that accompanies literal filled stadiums shouting "kill the boer farmer" is not so far fetched from the kind of ideology that resulted in Zimbabwe going for broke.
Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man. South Africa, post-Apartheid, has an unhappy history of corruption as well. But it is confounding how one reaches for the "anti-white racism" explanation before considering how centuries of colonial "oppression" (which a fun euphemism for violence and denying education) might lead to a situation where government functions poorly when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
Let's not pretend like racism isn't a problem. Just like the bigots that hated the blacks, prejudice against the white populations is just as stupid and evil.
>when you abandon ship and leave your government setup in place for people with no experience and no mentor to figure out.
>>"Kill the boer"
"Kill" doesn't sound like mentorship. You can argue they just mean rip them out of power/office, which they have done, but the ANC's message has not been "lets use the colonizers as our mentors."
>Zimbabwe's failure is pretty clear: total corruption under one man.
I don't think it's that simple. They tried to basically replace the colonial-style farming model almost overnight, handing over agriculture to black citizens. They tried to throw out the bathwater of "colonialization" while thinking they could keep the baby with it. One could argue South Africa is trying some similar things at slow speed and seeing if the trainwreck works better if you play it in slow motion.
If they were really just trying to replicate the success of before except without apartheid, I don't know how you can even do that while simultaneously promising all the socialist reform and goodies of the ANC. It's like having the new guy show up and training him, and he's tell you that you're wrong and he has no idea how to do it but know's you're doing it wrong. If your goal is be mentored you'll have to get proficient at what your mentor is doing so you have some frame of reference to see if your "improvements" even work or are the reason why you're failing relative to your mentor.
> (and yes, Meta absolutely falls in the same bucket)
s/Meta/FAANG
Decoupling Meta and Palantir from your 401k would not derisk your retirement from surveillance technology. You'd have to kick out Microsoft and Apple and Google next, at which point you've already forfeit most of your portfolio's growth.
Tooling, because CUDA has support for C, C++, Fortran, Python JIT, and anything else targeting PTX, graphical GPU debugger, and the accelerated libraries ecosystem.
It just needs to be better than what Intel and AMD have been delivering since OpenCL 1.0.
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
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