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Comment Read this (Score 1) 22

A military document published before WW2 ended. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farchive.org%2Fdetails%2FAr...

Fascists in America may differ slightly from fascists in other countries, but there are a number of attitudes and practices that they have in common. Following are three. Every person who has one of them is not necessarily a fascist. But he is in a mental state that lends itself to the acceptance of fascist aims.

1. Pitting of religious, racial, and economic groups against one another in order to break down national unity is a device of the "divide and conquer" technique used by Hitler to gain power in Germany and in other countries. With slight variations, to suit local conditions, fascists everywhere have used this Hitler method. In many countries, anti-Semitism (hatred of Jews) is a dominant device of fascism. In the United States, native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor, antiforeign-born. In South America, the native fascists use the same scapegoats except that they substitute anti-Protestantism for anti-Catholicism.

Interwoven with the "master race" theory of fascism is a well-planned "hate campaign" against minority races, religions, and other groups. To suit their particular needs and aims, fascists will use any one or a combination of such groups as a convenient scapegoat.

2. Fascism cannot tolerate such religious and ethical concepts as the "brotherhood of man." Fascists deny the need for international cooperation. These ideas contradict the fascist theory of the "master race." The brotherhood of man implies that all people — regardless of color, race, creed, or nationality
-- have rights. International cooperation, as expressed in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals, runs counter to the fascist program of war and world domination.

In place of international cooperation, the fascists seek to substitute a perverted sort of ultra-nationalism which tells their people that they are the only people in the world who count. With this goes hatred and suspicion toward the people of all other nations. Right now our native fascists are spreading anti-British, anti-Soviet, anti-French, and anti-United Nations propaganda. They know that allied unity now foretells the certain defeat of fascism abroad. They know that post-war allied unity means world peace and security. They realize that fascism cannot thrive or grow under these conditions.

3. It is accurate to call a member of a communist party a "communist." For short, he is often called a "Red." Indiscriminate pinning of the label "Red" on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device. It is a favorite trick of native as well as foreign fascists.

Many fascists make the spurious claim that the world has but two choices — either fascism or communism, and they label as "communist" everyone who refuses to support them. By attacking our free enterprise, capitalist democracy and by denying the effectiveness of our way of life they hope to trap many people.

Hitler insisted that only fascism could save Europe and the world from the "communist menace." There were many people inside and outside Germany and Italy who welcomed and supported Hitler and Mussolini because they believed fascism was the only safeguard against communism. The "Red bogey" was a convincing enough argument to help Hitler take and maintain power. The Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, whose aggressions plunged the world into global war, was called the "Anti-Comintern Axis." It was proclaimed by Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito as a "bulwark against communism."

Learning to identify native fascists and to detect their techniques is not easy. They plan it that way. But it is vitally important to learn to spot them, even though they adopt names and slogans with popular appeal, drape themselves with the American flag, and attempt to carry out their program in the name of the democracy they are trying to destroy.

Comment Re: It will be quashed. (Score 1) 16

Or it is a play to place corporations under central government control, basically corporate statism. Such a system typically buys billionaires a seat at the table. Considering that table is of the most powerful and economically significant government in human history, that is likely a very interesting arrangement for the billionaire class.

Comment I remember USENET well, a nerd echochamber (Score 1) 86

You have a medium memoruy. I remember how USENET was, prior to the web forums you complain about. Reddit has blocked the possibility of a real discussion forum that works for complicated topics, locking in a short term popularity contest with ever-shifting "hot topics".

Reddit is not all things for all people. There's a popular /. consensus that they hate the politics discussion. I don't give a rat's ass. I don't want to "dunk on liberals" or berate conservatives. I want to see new tools for my hobbies, rumors about upcoming product developments, discussion of technique or troubleshooting, etc. My joy in life is doing hobbies, not having "real discussions of complicated topics." That sounds like homework.

Usenet was an echochamber for like minded, technically-skilled individuals. It was great for Linux and programming and maybe some extremely male-oriented bands and movie genres, like heavy metal or star trek. There were barely any women and few who weren't computer enthusiasts. I don't want to talk to LARP-ers and tech workers. They're at my day job.

I want to hear from chefs, cooks, DIY-ers, artists, artisans, plant enthusiasts, dog lovers, perverts, people from far away, and people who are nerdy about thing other than computers, especially those I'd encounter naturally. I was able to get very specific advice on my specific niche interest in a very specific species of succulent houseplants and how to fertilize them...or how to fix my ailing blueberry bush. I get more joy from that than ranting about wokeness, the DSA, or Gen-Z or whatever assholes enjoy bitching about these days. There are subreddits that have art challenges that allow me share my drawings and painting of very specialized niche interest with a worldwide audience...something that would have been my dream as a teenager.

Reddit is not perfect, but if you can't see why it is so superior, then your interests extremely narrow and I feel sorry for you. I wish you had more that brought you joy in life than argument and controversy, for your sake as a human being, alone.

Reddit's beauty and joy is fully it's network and community. Their practices as a business are hit or miss, but I do applaud them for the bot/spam management. It's far better than I've seen on usenet, forums, or any other form of social media, especially X and facebook.

Comment Usenet was a nerd echo chamber. (Score 0) 86

p>There used to be this thing called 'Usenet'. It was everything reddit and more!

Nope, definitely not. I remember usenet well and used it often. It was nothing but a nerd echo chamber. It was great for autistic dedication to a specific male-oriented band or discussing Linux and garbage for anything more civilian. Also, the spam was legendary. Reddit's strength is their bot management and diverse network. My hobbies involve non-nerds, like chefs, artisans, artists, mechanics, DIY folks, as well as nerds. If my only interest was programming, sure, usenet is great. If I wanted to do anything involving arts and crafts?...it was desolate.

Comment Free formula and diapers won't make a dent. (Score 1) 154

Subsidize baby formula and diapers. And make onsite daycare services required at larger companies in order to normalize the practice.

Some places do that. It doesn't help. Many countries have tried cash payouts that far exceed the diaper budget. Also, rich people tend to have similar numbers of kids to middle class folks. The main barriers to having more kids is housing and support. Most high paying jobs are in areas with expensive real estate, so having room is a massive issue, but even if we had enough housing, most parents can't fathom having a 3rd kid because having 2 is such a struggle today. You have to do sliding scale daycare and have LOTS of it, which you implied. In my area, most daycares have a 3-6 month waiting period. But daycare only helps the first 2 kids. You have to do more: free pre-K and afterschool programs to replace daycare once your kids get older. Even if you're wealthy enough to have a stay-at-home parent, the burden of the family gets overwhelming and most quit after 3.

Countries with great support networks have managed to raise their birthrate. The only proven way to raise the birthrate is to support the motivated to have 4 or more, including putting as much of the burden on the state to raise the kid, if the family chooses to. It's EXPENSIVE, but so is finding yourself in a nursing home in your twilight years with a massive personnel shortage of people to take care of you....as well as a lack of taxpayers to fund everything you depend on ranging from gov to basic industry.

Comment It's also unusable with 8GB of RAM (Score 4, Interesting) 51

Reviews of these 8 gigabyte laptops running Windows 11 have them unable to complete basic tasks like web browsing and conference calls.

Unless the ram is upgradable this is going to be a disaster. People just return them because they feel broken. Microsoft is trying to solve the problem but internal culture means they can't. Every division of Microsoft is fighting to be profitable and so they want to gobble up your RAM and use it to serve up advertisements and synergize with other companies for profit. This is why the windows 11 weather app uses 3 GB of RAM.

Comment That's far from enough according to the data (Score 1) 154

That's only 1 variable. It's been tried to disappointing results. You can double everyone's salary and it will barely make a dent. If you've had kids and a working wife, you know how bad it gets. The good jobs? They're in expensive real estate areas....nearly everywhere in the world. So houses are hard to find, daycare is hard to find, and support is terrible once you have a kid.

Once people get a job in the city, they don't want kids. You can't make someone want them. All you can do is make existing parents have more. So you're never going to get every couple to churn out 3 kids, but you can make families of 1 or 2 have 3 or 5. However, support is the main factor. Work is a massive burden and even if your wife isn't working, many kids is a massive burden.

Data has shown that incentives don't make a lick of difference, but support programs have. Sliding scale daycare is 1 great way to get people to have their 1st or 2nd kid. However, if you want anyone to have more than 2, you need support for older children: sliding scale daycare for young ones and free afterschool programs for older kids.

Additionally, you need to alter the culture for parenting flexibility. That's tricky because the gov can only set rules for gov jobs. My job is great about it. I can step out during the morning or afternoon for a school event and make the hours in the evening. Jobs that are rigid and stuck in the past are a huge burden for families. Even if you have a stay-at-home mom, the dad needs the flexibility to be involved with his kids' lives if you want families to go past 2 kids.

More money is not the main problem. It's a huge one, but the bigger issue is lack of resources. Daycares in my area require a 6 month application process. Spots go often. It's harder to get into daycare in some areas than many ivy league universities.

It's not cheap, but sliding scale childcare and LOTS of it, will help the birth rate, help families, and be a MASSIVE stimulus since nearly every dollar is paying for human labor for a segment of unskilled (no formal training) women, most of which are very young or very old. But even the programs for older go out to a diverse pool of individuals and are great investments in future citizens to build skills and a sense of community.

However, many gov have tried throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best. It's easy, but it just doesn't work well. It requires a lot of follow through since the resistance to reproducing is very complex and the causes are many and you can have infinite money. So long as you have a job or other responsibilities, it's a huge load. Reducing the load reduces the friction to the 3rd kid and beyond.

Put simply, you have to make it EASY to have kids. Nothing else really works.

Comment Re:Geometry is dead (Score 1) 59

May I introduce the Apple Mac Studio? ;-)

That's a bold strategy Cotton - let's see how it works out... 8^) All joking aside, I have an M4 Mini, and it seriously hauls ass.

Apple Silicon M5 Ultra

M5 Ultra fuses two M5 Max chips into a single SoC — resulting in the most CPU cores of any Mac, the most powerful Apple silicon GPU ever, and our most capable chip for AI. Color-grade uncompressed 8K footage, perform computational fluid dynamics, and run frontier-class models on device — no cloud tokens needed.

Stop it! I'm drooling! Seriously though, I'd love to take a test ride in that. I don't do all that much heavy duty computing these days but it would be fun testing that beast out

Within the 7.7-inch-square enclosure lies a thermal system that allows Mac Studio to fly through intensive tasks at lightning-fast speeds. And even with all that power, it stays remarkably quiet, so you can process batch video renders or coding agent tasks without interrupting your focus."

That made for a flashback. My old G5 Mac - the one In that incredible aircraft aluminum case, sounded like a jet taking off while rendering 3-D animations.

Comment Re:Windows needs XBox (Score 1) 59

No it isn't. It's API stability.

Too bad the operating System at present is not stable.

I know, I am still pissed off that My M4 Mac is better than my Intel Macs in every way. We need to go back to 286's this business of changing things has to stop. 8^/

You figure that inertia is going to hold 50 years from now? Also, there was a reason why my previous place kept a museum of windows and DOS machines. Because despite claims of stability, they aren't all that.

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