functor
4d ago
Fine, lets say Maduro had the worst economic policy on the planet and did a large portion of the damage.
Sanctions will still cause more drugs and migrants.
functor
4d ago
Setting aside that Venezuela is already a failed state causing migration and drug cartels, and has been for well over a decade-
Yes the US regime change project has been ongoing for years with the explicit goal of creating a failed state.
Regardless of the extent to which it is Venezuela's fault, the US has actively sought to destabilize Venezuela. That means that the US has increased migrants and drugs flowing into the US so that Venezuela can be brought into the American zone of influence and get DEI, gay marriage and gender reassignment surgeries for kids.
functor
4d ago
That is an even stronger argument for not destroying Venezuela. Failed states cause migration and drug cartels. If Venezuela is struggling the last thing they need is sanctions and war.
As usual the military industrial complex is a leading cause of diversity and immigration.
functor
4d ago
China is built on middle eastern oil. They didn't destroy Iraq by bombing it, instead they gave billions in foreign aid and helped them build infrastructure. Has a decade of bombing Yemen made American ships safer?
The US wasted trillions in Afghanistan and China is building mines by making good deals.
functor
4d ago
America destablized Venezuela, put sanctions on Venezuela and the result was chaos in Venezuela. If the goal was to bring down Venezuela by making the people hate their government that goal will cause mass migration. The situation being bad in Venezuela is a reason to help Venezuela if anything. Chaotic failed state neighbours end up doing to America what Syria did to Europe.
functor
5d ago
Obama and Bush were at least wise enough to create migrant tsunamis and narco states on the opposite side of the planet, not close to home. Obama learned from Bush and didn't say he was going to rebuild Libya and turn it into a nation building project that is likely to fail.
functor
5d ago
This speech is beyond incompetent. How is he going to get support in Venezuela when his speech is about the US taking over Venezuela's oil? It soulds like a parody of what an American imperialist president would say.
Venezuelans are not going to vote for Exxon Mobile. They do not wanting American companies owning their natural resources.
At least Dick Cheney made an attempt to sell regime change in Iraq as an exciting new opportunity.
functor
5d ago
China does more overseas trade than the US. They are the biggest trading partner with almost every country in the middle east. They didn't have to waste trillions fighting forever wars there to dominate trade.
The US spent two trillion in Iraq for China to be Iraqs biggest oil buyer. Venezuela was not a threat to American martime trade.
functor
5d ago
If the US had committed to merely removing AQ leadership during the GWOT there would have been less chaos.
If the US hadn't been meddling in the middle east there wouldn't have been a GWOT to start with. If the US hadn't let people who live in a cave in Afghanistan into flight school it would never have happened.
Killing Bin Ladin would not have changed much in Afghanistan. Spending 20 years trying to spread DEI to Afghan villagers didn't help either. The US should focus on the US, not regime change.
functor
5d ago
Imperialist war projects end up causing chaos. Chaos opens up for refugees and migrants. The war to bring feminism to Afghanistan 10x the world's heroin production. US meddling in LATAM has caused millions of refugees to pour into the US and has helped drug smuggling.
functor
5d ago
Manuel Noriega
So we will soon have regular flights to the US to bring cocaine.
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/13/world/cocaine-is-again-surging-out-of-panama.html
Neocon wars always end up with drugs and refugees.
Just removing one person won't do much, the regime can easily continue even if one person disappears.
functor
5d ago
Regime change is bad therefore we do regime change.
American meddling, invasions and regime change is extremely unpopular in latin America.
functor
5d ago
There is no way the Venezuelans are going to vote to give their oil to American companies.
Also bombing their country isn't going to make them more pro American. All it will do is destabilize the country causing more migrants.
functor
5d ago
Taking out a leader means nothing. Leaders come and go.
functor
5d ago
There are a few big differences. Venezuela's geography is much denser than the open deserts of Iraq.
Yemen showed that a few desert tribes with some drones from Iran can tie down a third of the US Navy for over a year and win. The Gulf of Mexico is within striking range of weapons that can be built with parts ordered of wish.
The US wasted two trillion trying to occupy Iraq and largely failed. The US military was larger in 2003 than today, the recruitment standards were higher and they weren't trying to compete with China over who can have the biggest navy off the coast of China.
Also drones are going to make occupying a country complete hell.
functor
5d ago
Maduro is the successor to Hugo Chavez, who deliberately turned Venezuela into an ideologically anti-American state as a matter of principle.
I wonder why their ideology is anti American. It must be something in the water....
This reasoning is circular. The US warmongers causing countries to dislike them. Then they can justify even more war by saying the countries dislike the US. Being in constant conflikt will cause the other side to dislike you.
The economic incompetence and political repression have made Venezuela into something between a failed state and a narco-state spurred a massivive migration exodus.
Sanctions have had the explicit goal of wrecking Venezuela. Once again neo-con policies lead to mass migration and drug trafficking. The endless warmonger is the root cause of mass immigration. The country with the most Algerians in Europe is the one that colonized Algeria. The country with the most Pakistanis in Europe is the one that colonized Pakistan. The US invadaded central American states and now is turning into Guatamala and Venezuela.
There is no instance of these wars reducing migration and drug smuggling.
functor
5d ago
Grenada was a tiny war against an insignificant country. Just wait until Venezuela lacks a government when it turns into another Libya, Syria or Iraq. It will be an absolute haven for narco cartels just like Afghanistan was and it will cause a mass exodus of refugees.
functor
5d ago
The base and the elite are already splitting in the groyper war. The base wants America first, the elite want Indian H1B visas, more foreign war and more military industrial complex.
Just making fun of SJW while continuing George Bush policies is going to lead to Trump losing the election.
Who is supposed to support this war? The left wing voter base is not pro war. The America first crowd isn't excited about wasting billions on a foreign war that is going to end up swamping the US with migrants.
functor
7d ago
Punishing people for taking part in an armed conflict is a war crime. She can be punished for things she has done, she can't be collectively punished for crimes committed by her faction in a war.
Instead of solving the actual problem of mass immigration, we are solving fake problems such as privacy, lack of police state and freedom of speech.
This problem should never have existed and only exists because of bad immigration policy. It can only be fixed through changed immigration policy.
Creating special rules where for certain groups such as terrorists is a slippery slope. The west is slowly recreating Saddam Hussien's Iraq and justifying the policies that will turn us into Iraq with being tough on muslims.
functor
8d ago
will have to happen at some point, would work more towards solving this than anything.
Does it have to happen? What seems to be happening is that we are all turning into South Korea. Even developing countries are having collapsing birth rates. There seems to be nothing pointing toward women settling, their standards are sky high and climbing.
Especially middle income countries seem to be in free fall. Women in LATAM are seeing what the upper middle class in California have, and they aren't settling for Pedro in their village.
functor
10d ago
My take is that we are going to see watches with similar levels of polish and accuracy as an omega watch selling for 1500 dollars from Chinese brands.
functor
14d ago
Wokeism is the opposite of slave morality. It is a tool of the elite to beat its own population. It is a way for a corrupt oligarchy to claim that their subjects are evil, undeserving and morally reprehensible. Wokeisms purpose is to invert noblesse oblige.
functor
15d ago
We have had excellent success using lovable so that our sales staff/CSM can make mockups that are clickable and actually look good enough to show to clients. What used to take days for a UX/designer can now be done with a few prompts. Furthermore AI has been great at spawning feature ideas, and coming up with things to add. 90% of the ideas get tossed out but a few good ideas are worth their weight in gold.
Code that is boilerplate heavy has worked well with AI. We feed it the SQL-schema and we get the controllers, validators and repository functions. Getting this part consistent and getting it to use globally defined constants instead of hardcoding values took a decent amount of tinkering.
Claude does a good job of code review, however it doesn't understand the requirements and the bigger picture. It can tell if the code is good, not whether the code solves the business case.
AI is efficient at generating tests.
The main issue that I see with AI is that it is exceedingly difficult to maintain a well structured project over time with AI. I want it to use the same coding standard throughout the project. I don't want magic numbers in my code. I only want each thing to be defined once in the project. Each block of code it generates may be well written but the code base will spaghettify faster with AI. Unless the context window becomes the size of my codebase or a senior devs knowledge of it this is inevitable.
AI summaries instead of manually writing commit messages. We now get a proper summary instead of "fixed bug".
It is clear that we can't take the human out of the loop. The human will do less and to a greater extent feedback the AI. A 20% productivity gain is reasonable within the next couple of years. Add a few more percent due to better languages, cloud services, libraries, hardware etc and output can probably increase 25% from 2023 to 2028.
High productivity growth is excellent for the industry and the main reason why tech is so successful.
functor
17d ago
China has some of the best legal frameworks in the world for trade, Britain is a terrible jurisdiction for world trade.
China doesn't really care about how you conduct your affairs as long as you aren't openly provoking China. They have no issue doing business with the Taliban, questionable mining companies in Africa, Russians, or Americans. If you can pay you can do business. They don't give a toss about your ESG rating. Wearing a free Tibet shirt when going to court in China isn't advisable but neither is wearing a IRA t-shirt in England.
Will AI slop actually change anything? The sheer volume of porn and attractive women thirst posting on instagram is so vast that even if the volume is increased by orders of magnitude it won't change anything.
Does this actually work? The female status game seems fundamentally broken because women are competing for status with games that won't lead to relationship or career success. Does spending lots of time on social media actually increase the chance of getting a high value man? Instagram's user base leans heavily female to begin with. Writing mediocre slop on linkedin while friend-requesting large numbers of men seems far more efficient than posting breakfast pics on Instagram.
Do the thirst trap pics actually lead to quality dates on online dating? A reasonably attractive woman in a fancy dress is probably not going to have a more difficult time finding a decent man on hinge than a woman posting bikini pictures.
It seems like women are driving themselves to literal insanity playing status games in terms of shopping, competitive travelling and social media without actually getting much in return. Machu Pichu pics and bikini pics on Instagram, fast fashion and keeping up with micro trends and expensive handbags are largely irrelevant for women's success in life.
I don't think they are actually fighting for male attention. I think this is ingroup status signalling and woman trying to be more popular among women. The prize seems less tangible.
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