Consumer demand doesn't mean shit, consumer profitability is not why these datacenters are here to take all our power and water. The elites are desperate for the golden goose of finally replacing labor, destroying the capacity of workers to organize once and for all, and turning most of the population into precariet thralls. I'm sick of reading articles where this is posited as being due to demand in a free market sense. The free market is secondary, in fact this arc of greed shows that it was always secondary.

A Department of War must be headed by a Secretary of Offense. The current guy has outstanding qualifications.

This entire thread calls for corporal punishment.

Pigs will eventually have wings.

On Sept. 11th this year the Microsoft-signed Secure Boot key used by many distros to sign their bootloaders expired. It seems like there has been a massive uptick in problems with installing linux on a dual boot setup. It becomes more and more clear that vendor lockout is the primary purpose around the push to have UEFI on everything

If, starting from tomorrow, every single oil-producing country completely stopped selling any oil, civilization would collapse within, maybe, a few years. As it stands, trucks, shipping vessels, airplanes, concrete producing factories and many other essential things all run on hydrocarbons. For many developing nations almost all their power stations need oil or gas or coal. In order to combat climate change we need to come up with ways all these things can still function without needing oil anymore. Like, for example, moving most of your cars to EVs.

Climate change doesn't threaten 'the environment' or 'mother Earth' or whatever. CO2 level have been far higher in Earth's history. Biomes change drastically, a whole bunch of species goes extinct, other species evolve to take their place but life always adapts in the end. What we really want to avoid is homo sapiens being one of the species that goes extinct, and keeping our advanced civilization would also be nice. To that end we need to adapt our technology to need drastically less hydrocarbons and legislate some measures, perhaps even social restrictions, if it comes to that, to help achieve that goal. Not just 'hydrocarbons = evil, stop using them right nao!'. We need to be smart about this. So I would possibly question Norwegian government's decision to drop subsidies for EVs, it might be a bit premature, but nothing else.

If you're looking for someone to be angry about, you could start with any governments that impose significant tariffs on cheap Chinese EVs. Allowing more of those to be imported could go a very long way towards reducing petroleum usage. But those governments worry, certainly rightly, that this will lead to their domestic auto industries becoming completely uncompetitive, so I understand this position to some extent. Real world is complex.

Norway isn't one of the top oil producing countries in the world and they're way behind the top producers in volume. They're known as an oil nation because of a small population relative to the amount of hydrocarbons they produce. More to the point, they never put a gun to anyone's head to force them to buy their oil (or perhaps, never sent a team of Viking berserkers to intimidate people into buying their oil). If people weren't buying their oil, they'd be buying from Saudis instead.

Oil is used for a lot more than just gasoline, it's also used in producing various plastics for example. The goal in reducing the impact of climate change isn't to eliminate the use of oil, that isn't possible for the foreseeable future, it is to stop burning so much of it that it's raising temperatures at an unprecedented rate. In a fully carbon-neutral world (which is looking very hypothetical now) oil will still be used, just a lot less of it than now.

China isn't automating everything - we don't have the technology for that. AI was sold as such but we know how that is turning out. They're automating manufacturing which has already been highly automated in technologically advanced countries which China certainly is now. Unemployment in China is apparently just over 5%, which is slightly on the high side but nothing drastic. Youth unemployment is quite high but that's happening in a lot of places now.

Besides, China is very big on impressing foreigners and showing Chinese stuff in best possible light. These CEOs have probably been taken to the most cutting edge, state of the art factories - most of their auto industry is probably not quite as automated. It does look however that Chinese auto industry is pulling ahead, certainly in EVs.

So you didn't read the part about needing a bitlocker recovery key to log into windows from grub.

Just another act of an ongoing shitshow. This is a government that is obsessed with 'optics', i.e. their popularity. They're now massively unpopular in UK, mostly, I believe, because people expected them to implement substantial policies, especially after a massive victory in the elections. They've been too afraid to do anything, however, for fear of upsetting anyone, and ironically this pissed off more or less everybody. This is just another desperate attempt to score some cheap political points - maybe with parents, or whoever is the usual target audience of the 'won't somebody think of the children' legislation. Or maybe with older voters - see, Britain is still great, we can issue fines to foreign companies! Never mind the fact that I'm pretty certain not a single one has paid anything - they've either just quit providing service in UK or just shrugged their metaphoric shoulders and carried on as before.

The sad thing (one of them anyhow) is that people are now looking to anyone who promises solutions. Like Reform, which promises to solve all the problems by kicking out some immigrants. As it stands they're projected to win the next election - those would be 'interesting' times, like in the Chinese curse.

For the Internet to have a Philly accent, there would need to be Unicode representations for the Philadelphia alphabet (which of course would render here as gibberish): Fukin' A, Fukin' B, Fukin' C, ...

As a kid, my best source of consumer economics education was Mad Magazine. [big print] "SALE! 20% off!" [mouse type] "the prices we raised 25% last week".

This deflection was so important for you to put out that you said the exact same thing as AC. Good boyyyy

I' m marvelling at the mental gymnastics it takes to frame selling spyware that gets innocent people and journalists killed by their governments is "not rolling over". Other people get to die for existing and you get to pretend you were protecting yourself in selling the software that got them killed, even implying that the murder assistance software is a victim of antisemitism. Typical zionist sociopathy

Fuck everything, we're doing five blades