Israel has launched a preemptive strike on Iran, declared a state of emergency in preparation for retaliation

[Marduk]

Did we ever  stop beating every other country with a decent resource pool in technology?

Yeah, now there's close competition, especially in East Asia.

Not on the level of permitted labor pools, as is the point in question.

Permitted or not, most of the labor pools were stuck rebuilding from world wars or very uncompetitive in themselves.

The "more efficient" is a matter of chasing the poorest job markets with the least environmental regulations. These do not make for long-term viability or good re-investment rates.

Well, yeah, sufficient regulation is an effective way to price yourself out of the market.

Are you willing to stand by this argument for the environmental and workplace safety regulations at the heart of so much of the cost disadvantage?

Part of it, yes. But places like Japan and South Korea show it's still possible to have competitive prices and lots of heavy industry with at least reasonable standards.

The term has nothing to do with this back-end information economy, and most of the companies that turn a profit still would without any of this panopticon bullshit. And as a bonus it'd  dramatically lower resources burned on making money off productionless abstractions.

>most
Well that sucks for the rest... But who is it to judge which companies are "productionless abstractions" and which are not? The data is on the market, who buys it, uses it and for what is a separate question.

This is the part that people don't grasp. Stakeholder capitalism is fake. The whole purpose of the term is whitewashing private sector excesses by making them appear inclusive when they aren't. It's still the same boards of directors running the show, but now, through the magic of DEI/ESG, they get to pretend that they're "environmentally and socially responsible and sustainable" when, in reality, they're accountable to no one, unsustainable, and anti-social, as always.

And if it was real it would have been a good thing? I oppose it regardless. You are implying that then it would have been a good thing. I oppose both the fake and the theoretical real version, while you are making it sound like the bad thing about it is that it's not *real* stakeholder capitalism and it should be followed much more strictly and idealistically, basically that the only problem with it is that the directors are scamming the left who wanted it, as opposed to... what, doing it honestly?

That border is permeable by design. Modern states are blends of private and public power, on purpose. They do it that way to put reforms out of the reach of the electorate, because they want a "permanent state" of experts and technocrats and algorithms that votes cannot change. They are anti-political. They use politics as a means to achieve the end of politics.

Yet some rich modern states have perfectly functional borders...

People are entitled to privacy and not being data cattle for Alex Karp and Mark Zuckerberg.

Don't use their fucking services then. There's more alternative services on the internet now than you can shake a stick at.

This isn't as cut and dry as you make it out to be. Back in the 1960s, Cornelius Gallagher headed up an entire subcommittee on invasion of privacy and the increasing computerization of American life.

The Computer and Invasion Of Privacy : U.S. Government Printing Office : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

HEARINGS BEFORE A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVESEIGHTY-NINTH CONGRESSSECOND SESSIONI JULY 26, 27, AND 28,...

archive.org

60 Years Ago, Congress Warned Us About the Surveillance State. What Happened?

"We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

When he went after the FBI and Hoover, Roy Cohn blackmailed him and tried to get him to pin everything on Kennedy. A decade later, the Church Committee picked up where they left off. Now, the privacy of modern citizens is in shambles. People give away metric fuckloads of data about themselves to snooping algorithms constantly, and that information gets siphoned back into the State by initiatives where three-letter agencies and private companies share intelligence and metrics on the citizenry.

>increasing computerization
Yeah, sure, tell people and businesses to use computers for less things, that's gonna totally fly, because paper bureaucracy, everyone loves it. That will work out great...

What do you think private-public partnerships are? And besides, I didn't say accountable to the public sector. I said accountable to the public.

How is anything accountable to "the public"? How does "the public" hold anything accountable? Through elections and its effects on the public sector, the government, usually. That's how it always work. If you want to make *anything* accountable to the public try starting with the public sector, which is fucking supposed to be, and see how it goes. Most of "the public" is unwilling and/or unable to even achieve that, and you want it to fuck with trying to police the private sector on top of that? Fix what's necessary instead of fucking around with lefty revolutionary ideas that will break even more.

Crucial distinction, there. I wouldn't trust the public sector as far as I could throw them. The public sector constantly does things that are against the interests of the public. For example, the CIA is part of the public sector and I despise them utterly.

For utterly wrong things, but that's besides the point.

Many government agencies in the US are inimical to the well-being and privacy of the citizenry and are basically like hostile foreign actors on our own soil.

Yet someone has to keep the foreign ones off it too, that's the harsh reality you are undertaking a titanic effort to ignore.

Obesity is not a result of being wealthy. Obesity is a result of being poor.

Geographic Association Between Income Inequality and Obesity Among Adults in New York State

Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD) is a peer-reviewed electronic journal established by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. PCD provides an open exchange of information and knowledge among researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and others who strive to...

www.cdc.gov

Then why aren't the poor people in Somalia, North Korea and Vietnam fat?
No, you can't get fat if you are actually poor. The"first world poor" who are not rich, but by world standards are pretty well off get fat. Give people with poor impulse control and culture access to any bloody food they want and money to buy it and they will absolutely get fat, that's what shows up as correlated to this, as the same bad habits also are not good for one's economic prospects. You think if you gave a random North Korean peasant an option that he could eat the same stuff a "poor" obese American eats, he would say no?

Our corpos feed us potassium bromate-filled flour and bleached sewing machine oil. What is the precious "free market" going to do? Supply us with companies that outcompete them by selling real food? They're not going to correct their behavior out of the goodness of their hearts. They have to be compelled to stop. RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement were supposed to do something about that, but you can already see their agenda being watered down as it runs headfirst into decades of cronyist bullshit.

Then stop buying from them. They will cry, they will whine, they will shout THE SCIENCE AGREES WITH US, but eventually they will have to either go bankrupt or sell the food you want. "The public" you trust so much has the power to vote with their wallets. In gaming and movies you can see some big results from that. But in cases where you don't... have you considered the possibility that "the public" you want to speak for so much may disagree with you or simply not care?

The ruling class don't care about borders, they don't care about flags,

But do you?

they don't care about the Right or the Left or what the public thinks. All they care about is how to extract as much money as possible. They are cosmopolitans with no particular national loyalties. If the US were to collapse, they would be kissing up to BRICS and insinuating themselves into their financial and political structure the very next week.

Yeah, no cosmopolitans should be the ruling class of any self respecting nation-state. Be it shitlib cosmopolitans, red cosmopolitans, green cosmopolitans or pink cosmopolitans or "global islamic revolution".

 

[Iconoclast]

Wanna know something? Anyone can invest.
Anyone can save money.
Do you know what prevents people from doing that? Want. Get only what you need and save for what you want.
That is the key to living a good life.
Something you don't seem to understans

Society has a certain minimum, socially necessary amount of labor that must be done in order for it to function. The same is not true of financial arbitrage and speculation. That's just decoration. I'm sick of people pretending that this is not the case.

This is a hypothetical, and I am not advocating violence, only offering an example:

If you were to hang all the power plant workers, road workers, textile workers, foundry workers, machinists, welders, plumbers, electricians, and so forth, society would collapse immediately.

If you were to hang all the investment bankers, private equity vultures, corporate lawyers, PR mouthpieces, telemarketers, CIA spooks, and college administrators, society would not only not collapse, it would actually, in all likelihood, improve instantly.

Society literally cannot function without people willing to do hard, dirty, demoralizing work, with long hours and very little pay, proportionate to the effort we put in. Society can function without these bloodsucking Wall Street leeches and the support structure that keeps them rich and keeps us down.

But do you?

I do if those flags mean something other than "bend the knee to parasites".

 

[Marduk]

I do if those flags mean something other than "bend the knee to parasites".

>flags
>not flag
Sounds pretty cosmopolitan to me...

Do any? And so now do you realize that from some perspectives that's no improvement from the people you complain about?

 

[Bassoe]

So I want to know what the fuck the last page or so has to do with anything relating to the conflict between Israel and the IRGC/Ayatollah?

View attachment 2281

Israel has became an example to both sides of the argument.

On one hand, they're an aspirational model for ultranationalist kooks everywhere, doing everything right for themselves as a nation, with things like collective punishment for groups who dares attack them, massacring foreigners to steal their land and distribute it to their settlers, being an explicit ethnostate, having a functional healthcare system, quasi-UBI in the form of their stipend for haredi, etc. If they can do it, so can we as the logic goes.

On the other hand, they're perceived as having accomplished said goals at our expense. It's our soldiers serving as cannon fodder in their wars. It's us getting deluged with radicalized migrants. Our taxes which pay their bills. We're the ones at constant risk of getting dragged into wider warfare. And so forth and so on.

 

[Marduk]

Israel has became an example to both sides of the argument.

On one hand, they're an aspirational model for ultranationalist kooks everywhere, doing everything right for themselves as a nation, with things like collective punishment for groups who dares attack them, massacring foreigners to steal their land and distribute it to their settlers, being an explicit ethnostate, having a functional healthcare system, quasi-UBI in the form of their stipend for haredi, etc. If they can do it, so can we as the logic goes.

Israeli far right would wish to know how to enter the alternate reality where they got all their agenda through.

On the other hand, they're perceived as having accomplished said goals at our expense.

>perceived
Yeah, whenever you think you hate journos enough, you find out that no, you don't.

It's our soldiers serving as cannon fodder in their wars.

No, not really. Israel is not responsible for everyone being an asshole in the Middle East, and their soldiers do plenty of nasty fighting themselves if you didn't know.

It's us whi tweet deluged with radicalized migrants.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with that. Some lefty ruled european countries who whine about "ultranationalist kooks" in Israel volunteer to get the worst migrant problems, some who don't care about don't, while certain countries in ME who support Israel's enemies the most take not a single "migrant" even though they supposedly care about them the most and share their religion. Nonsense. Want no migrants? Tell the "humanitarian" and "muh asylum rights" and "muh immigration" mafias to get fucked. Most of them don't even like Israel, because it's famous for telling them off too quite often. Which is why the "ultranationalist kooks" admire so much.
And it's not like Israel is mysteriously spared "migration pressure", being on the African mainland it has even more of it than the worst of lefty Europe. It's just more "ultranationalist" in handling it, so it balances out at less than average for Europe.

https://www.jns.org/israel-news/human-rights/23/9/7/316844/

Our taxes which pay their bills.

Nope, they have pretty damn high taxes, ask any Israeli.

We're the ones at constant risk of getting dragged into wider warfare. And so forth and so on.

Everyone is, and they don't have to worry about "risk of getting dragged into wider warfare", they just are in wider warfare, guess that cures a lot of worrywarting in their society.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Wanna know something? Anyone can invest.

Except small-scale individual investment is extremely vulnerable to market fluctuations and crashes. You need a much larger, diversified investment portfolio to be relatively safe, and you need to be a big-time institutional investor to gain the "too big to fail" status that allows you to rake in profit while knowing the government will bail you out of any real risk.

 

[Vyor]

If you were to hang all the investment bankers, private equity vultures, corporate lawyers, PR mouthpieces, telemarketers, CIA spooks, and college administrators, society would not only not collapse, it would actually, in all likelihood, improve instantly.

That would make the economy collapse instantly and remove any and all new businesses off the map.

massacring foreigners to steal their land and distribute it to their settlers,

They don't do that though?

 

[Zachowon]

Except small-scale individual investment is extremely vulnerable to market fluctuations and crashes. You need a much larger, diversified investment portfolio to be relatively safe, and you need to be a big-time institutional investor to gain the "too big to fail" status that allows you to rake in profit while knowing the government will bail you out of any real risk.

Yeah and you can make soft money even buying part of a stock at least for a larger part.
50 bucks you can buy a single stock in a company or smaller ones.

A soldier from my old unit who knows absolutely nothing about stocks or trading saw medical companies as a way to make money during covid while deployed and invested and made bank.

 

[Iconoclast]

That would make the economy collapse instantly and remove any and all new businesses off the map.

Good. Let the fake economy collapse. Let the real economy take its place. At the end of the day, some people labor for money, and other people play word games for money, and I know which of those two has more intrinsic value.

The international derivatives market is over a quadrillion dollars. It’s ten times the size of the real global economy and made up of recursive bets on bets on bets and contracts for contracts for contracts. This is equivalent to saying that no matter how hard you work, there is a ghost, an enormous phantom, representing ten imaginary, made-up IOU claims for every one unit of work you do.

That is obscene. But you what’s even more obscene? That people fight and die to feed this spectral parasite.

 

[Bassoe]

Except small-scale individual investment is extremely vulnerable to market fluctuations and crashes. You need a much larger, diversified investment portfolio to be relatively safe, and you need to be a big-time institutional investor to gain the "too big to fail" status that allows you to rake in profit while knowing the government will bail you out of any real risk.

Counterargument; the Gamestop short-selling where normal people found a workaround to get rich in the stock market for a change and it literally got shut down and the rules changed cause that’s not supposed to happen. Give me a moment to rummage through my hard drive, I think I saved some articles on the matter somewhere.

 

[Vyor]

Good. Let the fake economy collapse. Let the real economy take its place.

The "real" economy would die because THERE'S NO MONEY FOR STARTUPS

 

[Iconoclast]

The "real" economy would die because THERE'S NO MONEY FOR STARTUPS

Sure there is. Instead of taking out an interest-bearing loan and paying someone to temporarily use their money, I would use the gigantic pile of actual sound money that I already have, from working and being paid fairly for my labor, or, failing that, I would crowdfund the proposal and cut the crowdfunders in as shareholders.

You see, we’re arguing past each other.

“There is a group of parasites running off with all the money.”

“Nobody will have any money unless we beg the parasites for it!”

“We could, just, you know, smack them like a big piñata until the money falls out.”

“NoBoDy WiLl HaVe MoNeY!!”

 

[LordsFire]

Sure there is. Instead of taking out an interest-bearing loan and paying someone to temporarily use their money, I would use the gigantic pile of actual sound money that I already have, from working and being paid fairly for my labor, or, failing that, I would crowdfund the proposal and cut the crowdfunders in as shareholders.

Congratulations, you've reinvented how startup investment banking is already done. (Or at least one of the ways it is.)

You just don't like what most of the people running such banking are like right now. Which is understandable.

But if you do somehow, magically, get rid of them, how are you going to keep the same sort of people from taking over the new iteration of the system?

 

[Bacle]

I am going to ask again, what the fuck does any of this shit have to do with the conflict between Israel and Iran?

@Iconoclast take your off-topic rants about how you hate the modern monetary system to another thread, and stop spamming/shitting up threads with off-topic rants anytime you think you can shoehorn in another manifesto length diatribe against anyone who doesn't share you Jehovah's Witness based bullshit.

Whatever cred you had left from the Wu Flu stuff is gone, and you are just another lolcow now.

 

[Iconoclast]

I am going to ask again, what the fuck does any of this shit have to do with the conflict between Israel and Iran?

@Iconoclast take your off-topic rants about how you hate the modern monetary system to another thread, and stop spamming/shitting up threads with off-topic rants anytime you think you can shoehorn in another manifesto length diatribe against anyone who doesn't share you Jehovah's Witness based bullshit.

Whatever cred you had left from the Wu Flu stuff is gone, and you are just another lolcow now.

This war is contemptible and the people who accede to it are slave-meat who don’t know any better. The same exact political class who tormented us during the COVID plandemic are now expecting us to fight and die on their behalf. They are laughing at us, amused at how slavishly loyal we are to tyrants. And trust me, they appreciate your unflinching sycophancy.

 

[Vyor]

This war is contemptible and the people who accede to it are slave-meat who don’t know any better. The same exact political class who tormented us during the COVID plandemic are now expecting us to fight and die on their behalf. They are laughing at us, amused at how slavishly loyal we are to tyrants. And trust me, they appreciate your unflinching sycophancy.

What american soldier has died, exactly?

 

[Bacle]

This war is contemptible and the people who accede to it are slave-meat who don’t know any better. The same exact political class who tormented us during the COVID plandemic are now expecting us to fight and die on their behalf. They are laughing at us, amused at how slavishly loyal we are to tyrants. And trust me, they appreciate your unflinching sycophancy.

...you are an idiot, if you think that is what is going on in the conflict between Israel and Iran.

This war has been going on since the Ayatollah took power and declared 'Death to Israel, Death to America', and no one is expecting US troops to fight or die against Iran, since we aren't doing any sort of land ops, and it seems like now Israel is just going to maintain air superiority over Iran and whack anything that looks threatening that belongs to the IRGC or Iranian military.

And if you think Iran being allowed to have nukes was the 'more moral option' in this situation, then you are an even bigger moron than I thought.

What american soldier has died, exactly?

None, and none will, but that doesn't matter for his rhetorically diatribes, he just wants to rant and preen about how moral he is and how immoral most of the rest of the world is for not following his morality.

 

[Iconoclast]

...you are an idiot, if you think that is what is going on in the conflict between Israel and Iran.

This war has been going on since the Ayatollah took power and declared 'Death to Israel, Death to America', and no one is expecting US troops to fight or die against Iran, since we aren't doing any sort of land ops, and it seems like now Israel is just going to maintain air superiority over Iran and whack anything that looks threatening that belongs to the IRGC or Iranian military.

And if you think Iran being allowed to have nukes was the 'more moral option' in this situation, then you are an even bigger moron than I thought.

Iran doesn’t have nukes. They weren’t trying to obtain nukes, either. Netanyahu lied, just like Bush lied about Saddam having WMDs as an excuse to finish what his father started.

If you believe in the absolute bullshit “Iran was trying to get nukes” narrative, you are a rube. Easily duped.

 

[Bacle]

Iran doesn’t have nukes. They weren’t trying to obtain nukes, either.

Yes they fucking were, even the IAEA called this out.

Netanyahu lied,

No he didn't, the IAEA confirmed what he was saying.

just like Bush lied about Saddam having WMDs as an excuse to finish what his father started.

Bush's fuck up's are known, but Bibi didn't lie about Iran's progress towards a nuke, and the IAEA confirmed that Iran was nearly at the breakout point for enrichment to the pointed needed for full weaponization.

If you believe in the absolute bullshit “Iran was trying to get nukes” narrative, you are a rube. Easily duped.

No, I believe Iran was after nukes because the leadership of Iran bragged about it for years, the IAEA reported on violations of the agreements around enrichment even before Trump's first term, and because none of Iran's rhetoric around destroying Israel or the US had changed at all.

The only dupe here is you, and you've fallen so deep down a very stupid rabbit hole that I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince you, rather than just mock you.

 

[Iconoclast]

Yes they fucking were, even the IAEA called this out.

No he didn't, the IAEA confirmed what he was saying.

Bush's fuck up's are known, but Bibi didn't lie about Iran's progress towards a nuke, and the IAEA confirmed that Iran was nearly at the breakout point for enrichment to the pointed needed for full weaponization.

No, I believe Iran was after nukes because the leadership of Iran bragged about it for years, the IAEA reported on violations of the agreements around enrichment even before Trump's first term, and because none of Iran's rhetoric around destroying Israel or the US had changed at all.

The only dupe here is you, and you've fallen so deep down a very stupid rabbit hole that I'm not going to waste my breath trying to convince you, rather than just mock you.

The IAEA are liars. Just like how the OPCW lied in Syria about Assad using chlorine gas on his own citizens and quashed a contradictory report. Most of these so-called neutral observers are, in fact, not neutral and are politically motivated.

And besides, Israel is a psychotic little apartheid rogue state that just flattened Gaza and killed 50,000+ civilians, turning small children into fish food. If I were an Iranian civilian, I would see this and I would be horrified for my safety, knowing full well that Israel would be able to kill me and my neighbors with impunity and still enjoy broad international support. If we’re going by your logic, then why should Israel have nukes?