I always find these articles being so popular in western social media weird and subtly braggy. It’s like the Lyndon Johnson quote about about making white feel better than black people so you can rob them of whatever. Such a distraction that makes people feel like we’re better than them/at least we’re not them. Yet pretty much every trend I’ve seen about Chinese ennui was at the time true of Americans and western Europeans just articles being written about the ennui would not be mainstream for a couple more years. Like minimalism during the financial crisis or recently quiet-quitting in the US were celebrated in US social media as great workers movements that are positive social movements and a sign of cultural strength while lying flat in China in US social media is a sign of societal decline. Whatever either is, it’s the same shit. It’s always weird exoticism to me. You don’t get popular articles about youth expectations about young people in Romania or Greece

Some years ago there was a documentary called Mayor about the mayor of the de facto capital of Palestine. I remember they had mediators from like Germany in the negotiation for the Palestinians to build a cemetery and the Israeli negotiator and German mediators telling the mayor that he needs to compromise and satisfy the Israeli demands. Some compromise.

The gist is that there wasn’t really a compromise to be made. The Palestinians wanted to build a cemetery in their city so people could have a place to bury loved ones and the Israeli military that say these people are free and independent are saying no to the people to build a cemetery for non-specific reasons.

There wasn’t anything the Mayor and the people of the city could do to be able to build a cemetery and not be attacked by the Israeli military that had in years past invaded and we’re occupying. It was more like they didn’t want anything built for the local population at all. They were effectively living in captivity with no real self-governance. Freedom could only be had in lands away from their home and that very well may have been the purpose. Before this direct genocide, the method in cool periods was to make life miserable for the native people’s to push them out for Israeli colonizers

Economic sanctions exist just to make the people suffer and hopefully cause enough destabilization so that the ruling class capitulates to whatever demands. I plain don’t like economic sanctions. I consider it a form of terrorism and one the pillars of modern imperialism

Professionally I do use VS Code but at home I have Lapce installed. It opens really fast. I don’t do anything extensive at home so I haven’t explored the plugin ecosystem yet but it’s fast. That’s most of what I care for at home

Reading this stuff reminds me of earlier in the 2010s when Iranian weapon systems press releases were always met with mockery, I live in region with heavy military tech development companies. I had a feeling back then that progress is progress and eventually they’ll be at a point of close enough to make the risk calculation too high for the US to operate so far from production/maintenance compared to whatever country is the current target for invasion/bombings and their weapon sources. I think we’re getting to that point

Operate and lose equipment that cost a billion+ to make equipped with ammunition that are hundreds of thousands to millilions of dollars to resupply that also need to be serviced for extended periods of time and major parts replaced after only a few uses. Parts of the US intentionally let costs run away. Whether they thought the technolical advantage actually made a justifiable enough difference for the poor production rate and maintainability cost is another question

100% numerous people in the US military know that they’re sitting on extremely expensive ships/aircraft/vehicles that are with modern enough weaponry, easy to destroy. A question of whether they have the power, for enough time required, to fix the bloat

Difficult and expensive to develop, manufacturer, maintain. Trapped in service contracts with completely single source suppliers, no alternatives. If it wasn’t so expensive to maintain, even just the ammunition, maybe it wouldn’t be such a panic situation but well after pretty much constantly being at war since the countries inception, the US is sitting on an albatross of a military. Not just all the equipment but how much employment is tied to supporting the albatross. Albatross multiplied hard with Iraq and Afghanistan paired with all the tax cuts since Reagan. Without Afghanistan and Iraq, probably wouldn’t be so wallet concerned for for a good amount longer

That’s on you. Why would this be any different in user behavior? It’s just a difference in underlying tech architecture

Socially it sounds like you want to be an asshole user but don’t want to put in the effort to be an asshole mod or an asshole server admin. Of course you running into assholes constantly is also very likely a personality flaw on you rather than others

I’ll keep an eye on this. Maybe even sub for minimalist usage. Currently use Proton Unlimited and probably at around ~200GB usage for storage and active use the VPN and email. But something fediverse is more interesting to me. I doubt it can suitably replace Proton for me now but it’s at least cheap. Nice to see cloud document/office stuff. Proton still doesn’t have a Linux sync application so that’s a weakness. Less sensitive stuff I’ll use Firefox sync for passwords but that Chrome web browser integration I think is a major feature for the Google ecosystem

I know a lot of people are opposed completely to crypto but for privacy services I would prefer paying with crypto. I prefer numerous options but I generally think Monero should be the minimum. Maybe trocador.app to support more. I will probably sub with a credit card to check it out and support though

Good. I saw an article the other day that kept referring to protesters against Palestinian genocide as “agitators.” They already lost conservatives to thinking mainstream news media was corrupt. Maybe they shouldn’t operate in a way where leftist also abandon them and possibly get hostile like conservatives

I’d have to read more to see if I had any faith in its potential, article paywalled for me.

In my experience with friends, family, and coworkers when people show me crazy loony shit, it’s a YouTube video or a podcast. YouTube was always the #1 crackpot incubator but I think podcasts have passed up Facebook at #2. I don’t know what goes on in the lands of twitch.tv and if that gets categorized as social media and does it even matter since you don’t need an account to view

For a while I thought of Reddit as regularly trading position with 4chan as an anglosphere mass shooter’s favorite social media

Not long ago I finally saw clips of early 2000s Alex Jones 9/11 conspiracy vids. They were like the crazy stuff you’d see a coworker going off their rocker would start showing people on YouTube. I think I’d expect crackpot peddlers to adapt faster than government regulators for how they reach mass audiences

Vietnam is like a cultural a bridge between East Asia and continental southeast Asia. Long term they’ll gain a lot from this US blunder. Even before Trump term 1, China, South Korea, and Japan had established a business presence in Vietnam