When they talked of bombing Lebanon “back to the Stone Age” my mind immediately jumped to nukes and I’m not surprised they’ve clarified I was correct.

Then we can charge them with crimes for their existing and put them in special-work-house prisons to use as free labor.

:porky-happy: And who said reshoring wasn’t possible because of costs? :porky-laughing:

They were very foolish not to purge the military after the last time. At the very least they should have set up armed people’s militias or something to counter and check them if even a little if it wasn’t possible to purge the military.

Fact is the US is going to continue trying to coup Bolivia forever, well as long as lithium has value to their plans which is going to be some time. That and the fact they buck the US to do things like try to join BRICS+ and yeah this is incredibly obvious and they really should have done more to secure ideological loyalty of the mid-level officers and troops.

And sooner or later and this may be the time already, it may already be too late, they’re not going to care about keeping the mask on, they’ll just straight up tell their puppets to massacre anyone giving them serious resistance and then go around jailing, torturing, killing those from the old government as is the usual modus operandi.

It’s really unclear. They shot down 4/5, the 5th which had cluster munitions (themselves unacceptable to use on anything but large columns of armor and troops and even then the risk of unexploded ordinance from them makes their use if not a war crime at least borderline because they will be killing civilians after a conflict) veered off course according to Russia and blew up over a crowded beach.

The problem here is why it veered off course. Of course Ukraine defenders would probably claim it was damaged and veered off because of that, on the other hand we know for a fact that if they can’t find anything else to hit the Ukrainians have admitted to steering munitions into civilians and maybe this was a case of them veering off the last one so it wouldn’t get shot down and deciding to hit civilians instead. We just don’t know. What we do know is if the US was intimately involved then they’re responsible. Further that the US/NATO supplied the weapons. Further that they’ve never stopped supplying weapons despite knowing for years they’re used in terrorist attacks on civilians.

Not even the 90s, try the 50s with operation aerodynamic.

One of the reasons I provide archive links still (I hope those work for you).

Yes it’s true China has a lot of surveillance. That’s like saying China has cops or criminals. Well the west also has cops and surveillance. If your interlocutor is trying to use the existence of such a thing in China as evidence it’s bad and they don’t also at least think the west is equally bad then they’re a hypocrite. It ceases to be a point of any real relevance because it’s not a distinction, there’s no daylight between China and the west on this, if one wants to take the anarchist path and claim all states are this way and thus we must abolish the state that’s honest at least and somewhat consistent, what isn’t honest is using a trait common among western states not frequently associated with propaganda and a propagandized image of human rights violations, surveillance and using it to bash China as uniquely evil.

It’s dishonest in the extreme. Everything China does has been done by the west (usually Britain or the US) first. CCTV cameras everywhere? London had very high coverage long before China had them anywhere but critical areas. Cell tracking tech? Guarantee the US has it deployed first and more widespread.

But that doesn’t fit the narrative of China being exceptionally bad. China is usually a step behind the west.

Could be part of some existing agreement. Maybe they’re duplicates of things on display and this way they can lend them to another country for viewing and hedge against the country falling apart and looting.

Egypt would never attack the occupation of Palestine, the US wouldn’t let them and Sissi seems compliant. So the only other things I can think of would be either an expectation of a regional conflict with Hezbollah and Iran that gets very intense (with Egypt on the side of the US probably so on the receiving end) and/or their military and/or people rising up and a civil war or collapse situation emerging because they’re very upset about the genocide happening next door while their US puppet leader does nothing.

Exciting things happening. Russia has no reason anymore to uphold UN sanctions that it earlier voted for against the DPRK now that it itself is isolated and subjected to blockade by the west.

Another win for the policy of unity among Marxists, not among liberals, opportunists, and distorters of Marxism (yes that includes especially ultras).

Russia is too hesitant and weak on the west. I get they are afraid of escalation but I wish these Russian liberals would get it through their skulls that the west is over for them, they aren’t going to come to terms with them that work for Russia, they’re not going to get sanctions relief and in fact taking too long to recognize the threat landed them in this long boondoggle of a war in the first place.

I just don’t get people who tolerate them. As someone who’s spent years blocking and avoiding them (arrrr) they just seem unnatural and infuriating but to so many people used to them they’re just an accepted part of life.

Please empire die already. Let me see free computing within my lifetime.

Another day, another curious question from a person known for them.

We’ve been discussing Russia’s situation and the war for years now here. Given the west’s response to Ukraine, given the amount of troops Russia has committed to Ukraine already, given how long this war has gone on and will likely continue to go on with western support before Russia achieves victory.

Do you think they should have just nuked the Fins and Swedes to take them out of the picture? Used some imaginary lever they have called “crash nordic economies”. What pressure and what ability do they have to stop them other than military force in a full on invasion that they don’t have the troops for? And which would put them in a direct conflict with NATO and fully realize and cement the idea in Europe that Russia is expansionist and aggressive and must be put down no matter what.

Now the better question is why did they allow the baltics to join NATO? Why didn’t they draw the line sooner and stop the expansion eastward? And the answer is Putin is a naive liberal, Russia was very weak after the collapse of the USSR and frankly they couldn’t afford and still couldn’t afford to get into a full war with NATO. He believed in Minsk, he was a sucker who resisted the reality because he wanted to avoid conflict. Yes in a magical scenario where Russia’s economy didn’t matter, where they’d fully implemented war communism and could conscript tens of millions of willing, eager to fight and die Russians they could probably beat the Europeans bloody senseless and mess up the face of the US pretty bad but that’s not the reality. That hasn’t been a reality since the 1980s when the USSR existed.

I mean you’re getting into liberal fantasy land of Asiatic hordes and Russia just being able to conjure up huge armies to wage war on the entire west and defeat them. To say nothing of the liberal nature of Russia’s leaders meaning they don’t want this and have always wanted integration and cooperation for profit and only begrudgingly at the last hour finally realized the threat and took action against Ukraine. And even now it shows Putin is a compromising guy. He hates doing this, he doesn’t like fighting the west and he has delusions of them compromising sooner or later that I think are hurting the overall strategic vision for Ukraine by the Russian military. He still thinks after this is over that after a bit of time he can go back to selling Europe gas and oil and slowly re-integrating. Some Russian thinkers declare the door to the west is closed and Russia has started to pivot to the east but they really don’t want to, the leadership like Putin wants to believe they can get back in with Europe.

Probably fine but not the most ideal.

Right now the market for SSDs sucks. Before the latest price-gouging via chopping supply in half (Crucial happily going along with Samsung’s openly announced plans to do just that to get prices up) I got a 1TB TLC drive for $60, now they’re all $110+ without exception.

For a main OS drive where you’re getting lots of random reads on start-up and during normal operation, DRAM helps a decent amount to prevent waiting (with things like big games loading lots of files this is obvious as is on an OS disk where lots of random reads occur as part of normal operations). It’s definitely something I think most people would notice between an NVMe drive with DRAM vs one without. Maybe not as much vs a SATA SSD under most work-loads.

Also OP you should realize most SATA SSD’s (even cheap ones that were name-brand), except ones in the last few years typically had a DRAM cache, it used to be standard, it’s only with NVMe that they’ve started dropping it to save money because the write/read speeds on NVMe drives sorta mask the lack of it under many but not all workloads (particularly for extra drives people were buying for non-OS installs like drives just to put games or large files on that are in addition to their main drive it matters less).

With that TBW I’d suspect it’s a QLC drive (and confirmed by searching). I always used to avoid them myself but these days with these prices if you’re looking for a deal it may be hard not to though the combination of QLC and no DRAM makes me think it’s less than ideal for an OS drive. Just make sure you have a decent back-up plan for important documents and files to another drive or the cloud as when SSD’s fail (and even good MLC/TLC drives can) they do so catastrophically and you won’t be able to recover a thing.

For reference QLC/TLC/MLC stands for quad-level, triple-level, multi-level(2). There’s also SLC or single-level. SLC is the oldest and most reliable, charges stay stable longer, the whole platter is more stable. Each increase decreases the cost per GB but hits reliability. The less bits per cell the more stable it tends to be, less prone to charge flips, better write speed potentials, it degrades more slowly and has more re-write cycles. But it costs more of course.

MLC is very pricey, easily twice the price per terabyte, but TLC is usually only a bit of a premium, maybe another $20-$30 (the T500 from Crucial for instance has DRAM and it’s TLC for $35 more which isn’t cheap admittedly but I guess it depends on where you are financially and if you plan to use this for a while. There’s also the SK hynix Gold P31 which is TLC, DRAM, and $5 cheaper than the T500 at least where I looked).

Verdict: If you’re looking for something in this price range (<$80) then definitely go with what you’ve chosen. However if you game or want something a bit more reliable with higher TBW, a bit faster, and with DRAM so you don’t have to worry about that bottleneck on an OS drive AND you can afford the extra money I’d consider strongly something TLC, with DRAM, or both, like the drives I mentioned.

Neither Washington nor Moscow was and is a well-honed propaganda strategy employed by the CIA, US State Dept, western media, etc. It doesn’t matter to them if you’re willing to criticize them, they don’t care as long as in the same breath you criticize their enemies, implicitly acknowledge their propaganda, validate their contention that yes, things have been done badly here BUUUT the numbers of death and human rights violations (according to western propaganda) are much higher over there, thus naturally it’s better over here than there. After which comes the next step of dismissal which is “stop whining, things could be worse, be grateful, you have no idea how privileged you are, how dare you attack this great country why do you know in blah blah blah you can’t even blah blah blah?”.

People who say this are not engaging in critical thinking. You criticize the west but do you believe the Chinese media? Do you read their perspectives? If their media is invalid because they abuse human rights, so should the media you read from the west be invalid. Yet this is never the case. It is never the case that such propaganda is examined, subjected to ruthless criticism and introspection with outside the empire perspectives and discarded. Even when there is a history of people calling out problems time and again and being ignored in the moment, do you listen to them in future or breathlessly await the latest piece of China bad news to make you feel slightly better about your problems?

Self-effacing and dishonest acknowledgement with a framing that it’s still the best you’re going to get is not helpful. Acknowledging too little too late and offering worthless words of salve to the victims.

Education and awareness are worthless. The past is the past. It only matters if you learn to prevent it in the present and future. Do you think the dead care about you saying what was done to them is wrong? Do those suffering today from the western military/intelligence actions who you will say you feel sorry about in 10 years care that in 10 years you will be sad and acknowledge the wrong or do they care about you understanding the wrong, spotting it now and speaking up to stop it NOW. Not to deflect, not to “but China worse” their suffering.

Look no further than many of those mindlessly defending “isreal” and their genocide. There are many among them who understand the holocaust, who know the history all too well. Yet they didn’t take away the right lessons, they took away that it was bad it happened to Jews but it’s good when it happens to Palestinians who are deserving. They take away something that’s frozen, disconnected, it gives them no analytical power to prevent the next atrocity unless it’s exactly like the last.

This kind of thinking is never accompanied by an honest assessment that one can’t really impact the process in China, the problems in China. All one can do is assist aggression by powers that have historically, time and again done bad things (often to the very same countries these accusations are against).

Is it not proper to clean one’s own yard first before screaming at your neighbor and going to knock down their fence to try and force them to fix their yard? Yet the priority is always on their yard, on the soothing balm, the salve that at least you live in a less bad place than those savages in China, Russia, wherever. A complacency, a smugness, a racially tinged feeling that for all the problems in your land, it has many upsides while their land has few. A feeling that their problems would justify violence, revolution, uprising, but your problems should be solved by working within a system that has never done anything but appropriate the memories of its victims while continuing the victimization and has been happy to brutally crush any real dissent and threats to it time and again.

Minimization of real western atrocities in favor of playing up, laser-focusing on accusations against others.

Just incredible levels of hypocrisy. I mean even for the west this is just shockingly naked “how dare you interfere with our interference in your country” level stuff. Considering not only is FARA on the books in the US and tougher than the Georgian law BUT the US is actively having a freakout about Russian/Chinese influence and investigating, interrogating, harassing, spying on, and using their media to hound anyone even sympathetic to them as deserving of prison or expulsion makes it extra rich.

There is no such creature as the journalist at national outlets and most local ones of renown. It is a myth. There is only the propagandist, the agent of the bourgeoisie, the agent of empire. The Goebbels in every respect with twice the blood on their hands and ten times as much guilt.

The problem with threats like this is the west hasn’t and never will face the plethora of well armed and trained, organized, and intel supplied insurgencies that Russia and others in the axis of resistance face because the west are the ones who have spent years, decades cultivating them.

I’ve often thought of this but let’s say you want to hit the US. There are no groups you could give it to. The cartels in Mexico would never provoke the US like that and they’re the closest to a non-west affiliated armed organization (with greater than a few dozen members who could easily be killed) operating within 3000 miles of the US. Same in Europe. Most Russia could do without starting a war by handing them to a group not currently fighting and telling them to start would be to target the Zionist occupation of Palestine by handing such weapons over to groups in that region.

So it’s an empty threat without years of groundwork and millions of dollars. The only real options Russia has are to put more weapons into the Middle East that will stay and be used there or to directly strike without hope of denial or obfuscation at the west or their client states directly which looks like escalation.