The phone running FuriOS seems neat.

I thought it was analogous to the DSA’s use of the rose as a general socialist symbol. The wilting is poignant in that context.

Most of the expense/time (proportionately) is the Navy patrolling the various trade corridors and oceans with near routine exercises/drills from nearby nations against it, preventing disruptions and theoretically enabling the dying/dead “Pax Americana,” ultimately for US capital’s benefit (in tangent with the stability of the US dollar as the former de facto reserve currency). It’s the real reason the US is content with spending all the money on the military, not just a projection of power but a real return on investment (even more so now that taxes are getting more and more regressive and corps pay less than ever). The murder is almost secondary when it comes to that, a petty demonstration of what they’re capable of. Pretty gross tbh.

It depends. You can generally choose a career field to specify in your contract, and you’re not directly shooting people for the vast majority of career fields. That’s not to say your actions won’t support killing people in some way, most career fields are there to support the ones that do, but there’s ones in cybersecurity for instance whose goal is generally more aligned to providing support to other nations or industries that might’ve been hacked. Outside of general areas though, it’s not like the mission is decided by anyone other than the U.S. President or Congress (or continuing obligations from prior agreements).

I mean, there have been at least a few instances of humanitarian missions that actually help, even if there has to be some sort of military justification for it like “building goodwill” or having it combined with some joint military readiness exercise with the host nation. There was that Haiti earthquake in 2021 (and 2010), the relief supplies to Mozambique following the cyclone, Haiti again with Hurricane Matthew in 2016, the Nepal earthquake, that typhoon in the Philippines in 2013, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the Indian Ocean tsunami back in 2004, plus Operations Support Hope, Restore Hope, or Provide Comfort for Rwanda, Somalia, or the Kurds in Iraq+Turkey. I’m not sure you could count Operation Pacific Angel, though it’s arguably more helpful in that it’s building capacity instead of just giving direct aid, and Operation Christmas Drop seems almost silly I guess (even though sometimes it’s medical supplies instead of toys). It’s hard to paint those efforts as ultimately about killing people (it’s possible though, I might just be ignorant).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of nasty shit too, whether it’s destabilizing OPEC member nations or their relations to drive down oil prices or just fucking up Afghanistan with no good plan and no real reason, it’s not like I’d consider it a positive force overall even in a macro geopolitical sense, let alone the stupid unsanctioned bullshit its smaller factions take part in (and the CIA, as always, can just fuck right off), I just wouldn’t characterize “every one” of the campaigns to be about murder.

Or the humanitarian missions delivering food or supplies sometimes. Most of the time it’s sit around and look threatening enough that trade is protected. That’s not really a defense, it’s ultimately a tool protecting American capital and propping up a failing system, just saying that most of the expense doesn’t go to murdering brown people.

Turns out ghosts also like corn.

Honestly it probably went better 5 years ago. Cyber in the military has been floundering for a decade, but they probably hit a sweet spot around that time where competence met a lack of interference.

And some of them are doing aid missions or patrolling areas to deter invasions, and some are doing defensive cyber to protect US elections or to counter other nation-state hackers or their subcontractors who ransomware hospitals. It’s not always murdering brown people.

I’m a fan of Анна Ястрежембовская’s art, it looks almost real.

Makes sense, as you get older you get more and more disgusted by the weakness of your flesh, and tend to crave the certainty of steel.

Isn’t the balkanization of the US explicitly part of Russia’s goal, and establishment of city-states (or CityCorps) the explicit goal of the dark enlightenment types that Peter Thiel is backing?

I’ve had entire dreams in the command line, which was fairly incredible to me at the time because I still couldn’t read the characters consistently, and was only taken aback at the strangeness of such after the fact. I had a sense of what the commands meant and I knew what I was doing (hacking the planet), but while I couldn’t read it I knew what the output felt like. Dreams are weird.

And 30 years after LASIK, you’d be incredibly lucky if your eyes hadn’t gotten worse to the point you’d need glasses anyway.

Grandma’s memory isn’t safe for Rust.

I’m not the OP, and I don’t much care about money so long as I have enough to be relatively comfortable, but I also don’t really feel as if I understand the concept of dignity. Why is it meaningful?

Plus he regularly abuses stimulants and appears to be in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s: even if he lives another 10 years I doubt he’ll be in office long before he gets sectional 5’d by Vance.

Same. The vast majority of us are idiots.

Maintaining continuity of consciousness is the only thing that would make me feel comfortable with converting myself to a machine intelligence.

Never dehumanize fascists or fascist-sympathizers (redundant but ok), it’s always important to remember that bad faith actors or their stooges are human and cannot be entirely eliminated from society, which is why people that fight for positive change have to set the rules such that bad faith actors’ actions are either quickly recognized and mitigated, or have society structured such that even those motivated solely by unempathetic selfishness can only achieve status by masking and contributing positively anyway.