The US (Nixon) made an agreement with the Saudis that the world buy their oil in dollars in exchange for the US providing protection - thus extending the dollar’s period as global reserve currency beyond the time the US unpegged the dollar from gold. Known as the petrodollar agreement, this extended the period the US gained an unearned portion of global wealth beyond the 70’s.

America was, Americans were paid handsomely for its agreement with the Saudis. Bretton Woods then this is why boomers were able to buy a house and live well on one wage.

I understand not everybody benefited from this. In fact I think American capitalist ideology largely squandered this period wealth enriching the likes Tump, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg etc. I guess ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ and ‘trickle down economics’ turned out to be big lies after all, whouldathoughtit.

And how would most people on here characterise your political position?

Well they’ve promised so that’s that. No story here.

asdf

If it isn’t conservative and religious people, it’s political murderers they all hate on around here. Fucking brainwashed liberals.

The ‘smart’ phones in everybody’s pockets already are. Kind of, more or less.

Well perhaps the intention wasn’t to wiretap everybody, but it has ended up that way.

The chain going for £1 is obviously the story here.

I tried something or other on aws. I only needed the ‘definitely free, no cost whatsoever we will suspend the account before you hit whatever limits we set - that I didn’t even hit a fraction of’ tier free trial month to do whatever it was I was doing.

At the end of the ‘totally free’ month they charged me something like £1.80. Obviously £1.80 is inconsequential, it is the fact there was any charge at all given everything I had been told - I can’t remember what I did, probably learned to set up a vpn or something simple - I didn’t even use it beyond setting it up and testing it.

I made sure I burned the account in a big firey pit and I will never go back to them for anything I am paying for (news that I doubt is keeping Jeff Bezos up at night, but it isn’t inconceivable I might have bigger projects in the future). I doubt they could figure out what the charge was for. Presumably chatgpt hallucinates their billing now which might be an improvement.

Most news sites ask me to consent to google tracking or pay, neither of which am I prepared to do in almost all cases. I am sure I am not alone in this. Their decision to align with google in this way is more than a turn off, it is an indication of their untrustworthiness.

I shouldn’t need to explain why I do everything I can to avoid being tracked by the likes of google. The idea that I will pay to be subject to propaganda died with the 20th century. If news outlets want my eyes on their pages they need to come up with a way to make it worth my time.

We need new search. Really we need a new web.

Blockchain’s immutability might serve a public record of ‘news’, even moreso if combined with certificate verified identity on information disseminating ‘social’ media. The blockchain could actually be useful in this case. You don’t have to link your irl identity to your internet identity everywhere, but it might not be a bad idea in the areas of information disseminating social media. These are just idle thoughts.

Edit - I saw a post today purporting to be a twitter screen grab of a James Woods post with a reply. The James Woods post was a screengrab of a video, supposedly of the current LA riots, with a comment along the lines of: Democrats can’t talk about peaceful protest and support this. Following this was a reply saying ‘this video is from 2020’.

I have no idea if either or both of these tweets happened, if the video was from 2020, or if either person were who they said they were! With the blockchain’s immutability you could verify all of this automatically, and algorithmically reduce the reach of repeat offenders’ posts.

There is a lot of value in this in terms of public discourse.

Similar processes could happen with both scientific/academic papers and government policy v. outcomes.

It might change the nature of the public debate.

Peter Thiel already has it.

You are wrong. ‘We have to take care when it comes to genocide’. No you don’t. You have a right to be angry and a right to shout about it. You are engaging in genocidal apologism.

To tolerate intolerance creates an intolerant society. To tolerate genocide is fucking disgusting.

This certainly appears to be true.

My government, and Israel, have made it clear that my opposition to the genocide in Gaza makes me an antisemite. I have maybe only once read of a Jewish person or group opposing this view.

So be it, I know which side of history I want to tell my young nieces and nephews I was on, so I have no problem whatsoever with any of legal issues this might cause me.

Of course, the price for Israel (and silent Jewish people) making the judgement that I and most socially liberal people are antisemites, is Jewish people are on their own, other than the far right/nazi aligned groups who support their actions in Gaza, in terms of international support from people not governments.

Edit - and as an aside, I think this new alignment indicates that a lot of the 20th century Western notions of political ‘left’ and ‘right’ are dead, ‘liberalism’ is a political double-speak (do you mean economic or social liberalism? Because they are at odds), and it isn’t Russia v. the USA, because American oligarchs and wannabe strongmen are in perfect alignment with their Russian counterparts.

Well linux is the kernel of many operating systems, including many ‘smart’ devices.

If this was your joke then apologies, but it probably is in a load of ‘smart’ toasters. If they exst of course, I assume they do.

Had

And not asking for it will kill whatever remains of the creative industries.

What do you want, a few years of ai slop followed by the more or less rapid decline of the internet (as it is overwhelmed with model collapse creative works and untrustable content) that will afford the likes of Clegg (in his role of ‘meta’ executive) a huge payout, or creative people having any hope of a sustained ability to make a living?

I know what I would prefer and I also know what is most likely going to happen. This is the result of decades of neo-liberal fossil-fuel-powered capitalism.

In the era of ‘smart’ phones most people have what they need, other than the equivalent of a Windows installation cd (as others have said probably on a bootable usb these days).

But I think all of the user beginner friendly distributions have a gui settings and package manager that isn’t inherently more difficult than windows straight out of the box (and is probably more straightforward). Macs are presumably marginally more stable due to the consistent hardware, but I have only ever had an issue with quite esoteric wifi and graphics cards, and not for a long time.

The relevant context is first Bretton Woods, then Nixon abandoning the gold standard, and the petrodollar arrangement.

Clearly the US dollar needed, and needs, international acceptance if it is to be global reserve currency. This is changing of course, and perhaps the US could abandon the late 20th century economic order entirely in one move as you suggest (more than they already are), but good luck buying stuff from other countries with dollars in that circumstance. What is North Korea’s currency worth these days?

Apparently not in the US!

I have a degree, and was a lecturer. Assuming I didn’t want to be a public figure who might get found out in the future, or I didn’t need a specific education for obvious professions - medicine/engineering or whatever, I would just lie and say I had a degree. Here in the UK no one checks. I only need to learn prompt engineering anyway. What’s the point? I don’t think it is worth the lesser UK cost is it?