thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry

Buddy, I promise you, you’re already buying Chinese. There is almost no physical good on Earth that is not primarily produced in China. And you can’t really buy Chinese services because they usually don’t take customers outside of China.

The AI slop is here to stay unfortunately. The bubble will pop and like 99% of AI companies will die, but LLMs are actually very easy to run locally AND at least one of the big AI companies will “win” and capture most of the AI traffic, kind of like how Google “won” search. As models get more efficient all those data centers are gonna be unnecessary, but they’ll only become unnecessary because it’s easy to run frontier models on your own phone or whatever. AI slop will never disappear, that’s a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed.

Copilot will never go away. The only way you can get that thing off your computer is by removing Windows. The AI bubble is gonna burst but Microsoft is still gonna have LLMs baked into their OS.

It’s because the folks running the empire don’t understand how the empire works anymore. Israeli propaganda is very very very good, as is American propaganda about the importance of Israel. Combine this with lack of understanding of how power actually flows, white supremacy (Israelis are definitely more “white” than Arabs), and apocalyptic Christian shit and boom you get this insane focus on Israel at the expense of the far more important vassal states in the Gulf that actually matter economically.

I mean the long and short of it is we have no idea. We think the interceptors are running out. Movements of THAAD batteries from South Korea to West Asia seem to imply that. B52s strapped with cruise missiles are replacing a lot of Tomahawk strikes, which again implies they’re running out of those missiles. It seems Iran launches fewer drones and missiles, but more get through, again implying lack of interceptors. But we really don’t know what their stockpiles are, the fog of war is thick.

As for manufacturing, it’s functionally impossible to scale up manufacturing in the United States in a way that would make any difference for this current war. It is possible that they do so after, realising it is a fool’s errand to fight China without having any real weapons manufacturing base, especially when they depleted their stockpiles in this farcical “special military operation,” but that would require rejecting the God of Short Term Profit. Unlikely that the current rulers of the USAmerican Empire would make such a choice.

Thr long term effects of this is worldwide rearmament. Users like @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net have been predicting this for a long while, and I think after this war it’s even more likely. Countries within the empire are seeing the United States cannot protect them. They do not have the arms nor the will to do so. The obvious answer is you need to develop your own arms industry, your own defensive platforms, your own missiles, etc. The empire is always gonna prioritise Israel (look at Ukraine rn, or the Gulf, both of which, despite being more “important,” are getting no arms).

In his private life he is a highly disorderly, cynical human being and a bad manager. He lives the life of a gypsy, of an intellectual Bohemian; washing, combing and changing his linen are things he does rarely, he likes to get drunk. He is often idle for days on end, but when he has work to do, he will work day and night with tireless endurance. For him there is no such thing as a fixed time for sleeping and waking. He will often stay up the whole night and then lie down on the sofa, fully dressed, around midday and sleep till evening, untroubled by the fact that the whole world comes and goes through his room.

Marx lives in one of the worst, and therefore one of the cheapest, quarters of London. He occupies two rooms. One of then looks out on the street: that is the salon. The bedroom is at the back. There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture to be found in the whole apartment: everything is broken, tattered and torn; there is a thick coat of dust everywhere; everywhere, too, the greatest disorder.

In the middle of the salon stands a large old-fashioned table covered with oil cloth. On it lie his manuscripts, books and newspapers, then the children’s toys, his wife’s mending and patching, together with several cups with chipped rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps, an ink-pot, glasses, dutch clay pipes, tobacco ash; in one word everything is topsy turvy, and all on the same table. A rag-and-bone man would step back ashamed from such a remarkable collection.

When you enter Marx’s room, smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water so badly, that you think for a moment that you are groping about in a cave. Gradually your eyes become accustomed to the fog and you can make out a few objects. Everything is dirty and covered with dust. It is positively dangerous to sit down. One chair has only three legs. On another chair, which happens to be whole, the children are playing at cooking. This one is offered to the visitor but the children’s cooking has not been wiped away: if you sit down you risk a pair of trousers. None of this embarrasses Marx or his wife.

This is from a Prussian spy’s report on Marx. Sounds like a gremlin to me.

The psychic energy of Juche prevents all demon incursions via a passive buff.

Tea tourism in Yunnan province. Menghai（勐海）and Yiwu（易武）have phenomenal teas in particular. Although it’s a bit early for the spring harvest, but you should see some tea leaves on branches and stuff and be able to drink so great stuff.

If anybody here knew the answer to that they could make millions if not billions of dollars. It’s going to crash and burn, it’s just a matter of timing. Nobody knows. Could be next month, could be in four years.

Basically condeming themselves into irrelevance. Ford made the same move last week. In fifty years nobody is going to be being petrol cars anyway. They’re just ceding the ground to China in exchange for some short term profits. Not surprising given they’ve done this before in other industries, but the auto industry is like the last large manufacturing thing Europe has going for it.

It’s really not that high. Like if you have $5 million USD, you can have a yearly income of $200,000 forever. There is nowhere on Earth that this is not a comfortable living. Live in a nice home, buy anything you’d want, go on vacations, etc etc. Let’s even double that if you wanna be generous. After $10 million all your money should be going to others, there’s just no reason anybody needs more than that. If it’s not, and somehow you feel as if you need even more, then yeah the rich person brainworms are in full effect.

Astroturfing in general in China is significantly harder, because for basically every internet account you need a Chinese mobile phone number, and getting that number is difficult if you can’t prove that you’re a real person. Mobile number and identity are tightly coupled in China, far more so than the West. So while real people might still make and post AI slop, there’s significantly less AI slop made by AI accounts because it’s very very hard to make an AI account.

So “fan fiction” is a bit of a hard thing to label any myth pre-20th century and intellectual property/copyright nonsense, but if we take “fan fiction” to be very loosely “a story that uses characters from another story” then the answer 100% has to be The Odyssey, if we’re limiting it to things that we know exist and have written records of. Scholarly consensus is that The Iliad and The Odyssey, which in classical Greece were both considered to be by an author named “Homer,” were actually created by the different poets, and that The Iliad is the older of the two. So The Odyssey, which is the return home of one of the characters of The Iliad and indeed the basis of like every “adventure” story made in the Western world, has gotta be the most influential extant fan fiction. That said, really all Indo-European cattle raid/warrior type stories (think The Iliad from Greece, Mahabharata from India, Táin Bó Cúailnge from Ireland) are all fan fictions of an original proto-Indo-European story of that nature, but we have no written records of it existing, we can just sort of assume that it does based on similarities between all of these stories.

This actually isn’t that true. The Fed has largely rebuilt their position via interest rates, so there’s lot of room to cut. And as far as their assets, they’re down to a little above $6 trillion, down from a peak of $9 trillion, so again they have a lot of room there to absorb bad assets.

Protests are more of a ritual than a tactic these days. Protest is a tool, one of the tools in a toolbox to get what you want. They are not an end in themselves. If the protests aren’t disrupting anything, if they aren’t organized towards obtaining something or making somebody do something, they’re not any better than a block party or an online petition.

This is a good argument with a bad example. The Mediterranean in 220 BC was definitely not anarchist in most places, just because a society isn’t a “state” does not mean it was an anarchist society where people were free to determine the course of their own lives. If you roll this map back ~3000 years then yes, a lot of Neolithic societies were pretty close to anarchist ideals, where there were no “leaders” except for specific situations based on expertise, there was mass migration and tons of villages all with their own pottery styles and even languages mere miles from one another, a kind of veritable explosion of different ways of life all made possible by the recent spread of farming. States have only been around for roughly 5,000 years or so. Humans are millions of years old.