d-RLY?

Seeing how history repeating itself is doing so from multiple centuries at one time. If you are a leftist, then you NEED to be arming yourself and making efforts to join orgs/groups of comrades. The far-right and the constantly enabling centrists are doing the same song and dance done before the Civil War and all of the Red Scares. They don’t wish to fight the rich elites/capitalists that profit from the constant repeating of history and gaslighting the masses. They are going to welcome fascism as their methods of keeping power. It is the centrists/moderates that allowed Nazi Germany to happen. It is the centrists/moderates that allowed slavery and segregation to stay around. They are what allowed child labour and complete disregard for workers’ safety and health to continue. They want you to just ignore it all and tune-out (unless it serves them to call attention for their political theatre). We keep us safe!

It is also crucial that leftists be where the masses are in order to make whatever pushes that can be made. There can’t be class awakening if leftist aren’t there to speak-up, otherwise it is all just reactionaries and bootlickers spreading their lies.

Facts! It isn’t just anarchists and black movements either. Communists, socialists, and socdems (so basically most flavors of anti-capitalism) are arming-up or at least learning how to shoot or breakdown a weapon to make inert (Socialist Rifle Association/John Brown Gun Clubs/Redneck Revolt). Also seeing more pro-2A orgs/groups for various minorities (two examples being Latino Rifle Association and Pink Pistols) getting more members. Now is the best time to support and/or join whichever ones that are active in the areas that folks are.

It is also a smart idea to get at least one or more guns and learn to use them. Also in the event that the libs somehow start banning things again, as the fascists and conservative bootlickers most certainly have plenty on their side already. Not about to let them have an easy time if any of them start pulling anything thinking the left is defenseless (as they still think real leftists are the same as the centrist libs). Even then, there are more liberals also starting to get guns too.

I think the only reactions from the west will sadly be just endless propaganda about how they are “actually just using it as cover for making enough nuclear weapons for there to be one for every person in the US”. Or some other BS that just serves the military industrial complex and contractors that stand to make even more mad profits from this new cold war we are groomed into more and more daily. Just look at how freaked out the federal government that won’t shut the fuck up about how fucking perfect our “free market capitalism” is, has made damn sure to tell companies they can’t sell lots of shit to any Chinese company.

Doesn’t matter if those companies can pay. Just matters that they are artificially kept from having the most current tech at all costs. Also how our government also legally blocks certain Chinese products over here for additional BS reasons and even shown to not be issues by our own allies (before those allies also had to ban them because we said so).

Fortunately for China, they have said “fuck you, we will just do it then” and are closing the gap pretty fast. So all the sanctions/bans will just mean that China has the most to gain from being able to offer cheaper but similarly working (or close enough) tech to more places. But it will all just be used to bring back the “good old days” of history that really doesn’t need to be re-lived.

They aren’t using any concrete, it is basically just hemp stalk cores and lime mixed with water. It is just similar in how concrete can be mixed and used along with a marketing term. Seems to be better in function given that it can be used as blocks similar to concrete or bricks, while also being able to use in place of other insulation materials inside walls or in the attic spaces.

Which he is also pretty consistent about. Yet somehow these children’s cartoon evil/greedy businessmen are just handed power and trusted by such a shocking amount of people. It is kind of impressive in a “we’re fucked” kind of way.

Not being hyperbolic, but almost every single time I have to speak with or am spoken to by a manager/GM at work. HR at all large companies I have ever worked for as well.

FSB not KGB

The landing part is the hard part, but it isn’t like Russia is any less inept than any other nation with a space program. Until SpaceX and now NASA got their new launch systems up and running, it was Russia that was getting our people to and from the ISS. The US had a pretty long span of time having to rely on basically the same launch systems that were directly competing against them during the race to the Moon. Shit is just really hard no matter how long any nation/company has been doing it. We still get plenty of pretty epic explosions from SpaceX and will see many more (especially with the BFR project). And before them we lost Challenger without it making it to space, and Colombia while coming back to earth. They did at least get to the Moon and did leave a mark of sorts. I wish there were cameras with high resolution recording all the landings and crashes from all nations that could upload after the fact for us to see. I would love to see how big the dust plumes get from all of them (especially the crashes), and see how long it takes for shit to settle again.

While I understand your headspace. Space isn’t easy even with modern tech for any nation (or company in the case of the private launch sector). They didn’t have the benefit of the Space Race injecting mad money and manpower like the US and the USSR did (shit is hard to justify spending money on while still being on the newer side of certain industrial development as a nation). They also had to make their own systems to get there. Even SpaceX still has failures to land their first stage boosters after getting it pretty well figured out. Just a crazy amount of variables means it will fail majorly if any random one is wrong. Even if they had failed to land, it would still be worth some respect for even getting on target. I think that once AI is much more mature (and not just a large language model that tends to just make shit up that sounds correct but isn’t), then I think your stance would be more correct. As the ship itself would be able to deal with all of it with or without input from earth. Would also be better at making the tough calls to abort or proceed without any emotions/stress causing bad decisions.

Being fair, they did land some things on the Moon before while part of the USSR. Though it is nice to see a new nation get a first for something relating to the Moon.

A lot of homeless people do end up in prison both for all of the anti-homeless laws in various cities. For some folks it may end up being a better option than just outright dying in the streets from lack of food, medicine (love how the richest nation can’t put our tax money into anything that actually helps all of us), and/or from the elements. So while your point of bringing up prison population is a valid one. It is still (in part) related to homeless population numbers, just not totally useful by itself.

That being said, I do think that China is actually putting much more effort into dealing with the problem. As bringing people out of poverty/homelessness is crucial to keeping support of the masses. When enough people are just tossed out and can’t get help. It will lead to dramatic and very widespread revolts and even civil wars. That is true for any nation, no matter what system is in place. Socialist nations were birthed by such widespread poverty for the many while the few hoarded the wealth and resources. It is kind of one of the main points Marx and other anti-capitalist theorists base their shit on.

They make a large amount from Google paying them to be the default search engine. Also they have been making additional projects that can be subscribed to as add-ons for Firefox (like a VPN and an email forwarding service that allows you to make fake email addresses or phone numbers to use on sites that will forward the messages to your real inbox/phone). You can use a limited version of the email thing without paying though so it is easy to try out. And they are always ready to take donations of any size and can be reoccurring. I personally pay .99/month for the email service even though I don’t use it often. As it is nice to have if I need it, and it is basically a donation at that point. lol.

Here are links to those products if you care to read more about them or at least see pricing.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/

https://relay.firefox.com/

But even just making a point to donate some one-offs here and there does help in small ways to keep a real option in browsers that isn’t just another Chromium-based project.
https://donate.mozilla.org/en-US/

Everyone hated when IE was the only browser that sites were coded for, and we are seeing more and more Chromium only sites. Which means a bad vulnerability in Chromium will impact all the browsers based on it. Also privacy add-ons for Firefox tend to work better and block ads well.

This kind of vibe is becoming actually scary from a “no one knows how X actually works, but they are building things that might become problematic later” headspace. I am not saying that everyone needs to know everything. But one really really bad issue I see while fixing people’s PCs is that a shocking amount of high school and college aged folks are really about media creation and/or in comp sci majors. However they come to me with issues that make me question how they are able to function in knowing so many things that all involve computers, but not the computers themselves.

These next paragraphs are mostly a rant about how the OSes are helping make the issue grow with all users and not just the above. Also more ranting about frustration and concern about no one caring about fundamentals of how the things they make their stuff on function. Feel free to skip and I am marking as a “spoiler” to make things slightly less “wall of text”.