Yes. For a non space-tier power. Their utility for space/LEO comms are valuable, but peripheral. Never going fully high tech, keeps the legacy systems in use and in current practice. Whereas a power like the US doesn’t do shit without a LINK net established and maintained, because we’ve forgotten/are unwilling to use the old methods.

It’s the Ukraine-Russo problem in the Black Sea, but applied to space. Denial is easier than presence, and even easier than dominance. If you can’t compete, why let them use it they way they want, or at all?

There’s a lot of strife inside the tech world from people who work for both big multinationals and startups, over their company’s continued dealing with Israel, and especially so with their armed forces. It’s not well covered, because tech journalism is - frankly very corporate friendly - because it relies on access to sources, and so is very subject to access journalism that self-censors and chills dissent or criticism.

Someone who joined on to work on population mapping for vaccine coverage planning, or a cloud service engineer, may strongly object to their work being contorted and sold off to enable and supercharge a genocide.

No. Nobody deserves a genocide.

I understood your first comment perfectly - you felt ‘online righteousness’ was the most worthy thing to bring up for discussion. Not:

• Wow, how could the Dems not have defused this wedge issue, dumb politicians
• How awful that the people of Gaza are facing their current existence
• What a blunder of a party platform to ignore the people’s dissent re: arming Israel
• Screw the right for bad-faith messaging, Trump has been worse
• etc

You saw a preventable death of a child suffering under apartheid and genocide, and felt that ‘online morons’ who didn’t vote/voted 3rd party deserved more attention.

And no, English is my first language.

No, I can recognize the politicians are shit and still realize the loss was primarily due to racist dumbasses.

If so, why open with this comment then?

People with “moral righteousness” here on Lemmy helped to elect someone who made it far, far worse.

The politicians. Is this a hard concept, or are you bad faith trolling?

They’re not stupid, they had access to better polling data than you and I, they knew there was a massive anti-incumbent sentiment, that while the S&P 500 was performing well, the people were struggling, and that Israel was increasing a vote loser across all political stripes - the politicians saw all that, and they still ran the campaign they ran.

They decided that, whilst choking out all grassroots challengers and criticism, and you’ve swallowed whole the “disloyal lefty” narrative that exonerates their failure completely. “We didn’t lose, it’s those disloyal fifth columnist double flagged operatives”

I’m disappointed in the broad electorate for not seeing through Trump, but I understand that economic desperation is rocket fuel for fascism and it doesn’t go away if faced with more of the status quo that brought us to this point. The Dems needed to pivot, and refused to change with the times.

If your reaction is basically…

But what about meeeee? I have to deal with orange man in the office now

… when confronted with a genocide, maybe just don’t comment?

And besides, it’s a massive cope to blame the loss on ‘online moral righteousness’ when we all saw the campaigns play out. “We beat Medicare” should have never been allowed to happen, and Kamala should have had some firm policy stances instead of “I wouldn’t have done anything different”.

for some absolutely absurd reason, it usually isn’t illegal for the government to lie. Like on the subpoena.

Wait, seriously? They can outright lie, not like “our investigation leads us to believe that you X and are charged with Y” like an arraignment?

This is so mind bogglingly insidious to actually roll out because Delta is a regional hub monopoly and major common carrier nationwide, they very well could be the market setters for this kind of AI-price scalping. Like, we’re just going to throw out the concept of serving ‘a market segment’ and trying to land on a certain price:offering ratio to capture market share via demand curve plotting, inherently leaving space both at the fringes and center for competition.

Now there is no competition. How does American or United price compare on routes or seat category, when there is no public price, but a personalized formula to maximize value extraction from each person? It’d be like trying to price compare at a close-envelope auction - you can’t.

There already is a lot of opacity in the buying process like phased seat releases creating artificial scarcity, but this is next level. I can absolutely see Delta holding back seats instead of selling them to ‘low value’ individuals who have very elastic demand, and releasing seats early/only for those who’ll pay the fees. Want peace of mind knowing you locked in your flight 6-9mo ahead? Pay up 🔫

This is my headcannon for why we’ll never have first contact. Because in a theoretical infinite universe, aliens 100% exist in some form, but they’re absolutely mortified by the signals we pump out into our nearspace from TV, radio, internet, etc

The most curious aliens might take a peek or come down for scans, but actually getting out of the UAP is like jumping the fence at the Cincinnati Zoo.

Of course, we need to make the asocial and undesirable ‘work-shy’ elements of society contribute their fair share to the fatherland’s struggle, the great leader has spoken! /s

The concentration camps didn’t begin as a policy of industrialized state murder, but grew out deliberate policy decisions that viewed people as problems that needed ‘correcting’ or eliminating, instead of viewing people as individuals. And we are seeing the same here today:

• Red triangles marked “political prisoners… [which] in Auschwitz were, above all, Poles.

• Green triangles marked “criminal”, imprisoned as a direct consequence of committing a forbidden act, or after release from prison in cases where the criminal police regarded the sentence imposed by the court as too lenient.

• Black triangles marked “asocial” prisoners, imprisoned in theory for vagrancy or prostitution, but in fact for a wide range of other deeds or behaviors, loosely and arbitrarily interpreted by the police. The Roma in the Birkenau “Gypsy camp” were classified as asocial.

• Purple triangles marked prisoners imprisoned for belonging to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, regarded as enemies of the state because of their pacifistic beliefs.

• Pink triangles marked homosexual prisoners, in practice exclusively German, who were imprisoned on the basis of §175 of the German criminal code.

And not just as a refresher/competency test! It should also be a chance to educate on updates like legislation that get passed, safety information and tips as research improves, and new traffic controls like double diamonds or roundabouts that weren’t in use when people learned to drive in their youth.

But at a minimum you should have to re-validate that you are a competent and safe driver every decade or so, agreed.

This is the line that even at my most cynical, I never thought Trump would go for/be allied to cross - fuck with the money directly. Ruin the bag for the capital class. Tariffs were bad long term but presented an opportunity for huge wealth transfer during that manufactured chaos’s period of ‘creative destruction’:

“He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske

But then again, this loon is who he put forward in his first term, sooo yeah.

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day