If voting isn’t enough (I didn’t think it is) then do more. Go knock on doors for the candidate that you like. There are a million ways to participate in democracy.

Love to door knock for Heinrich Himmler.

These “both choices bad. Better to not vote” people really don’t make any kind of sense to me.

Hey, listen. I vote every year. This year, 90% of my ballot is going to be blank, because so many of the candidates are absolutely abhorrent. But when I am presented with the Himmler / Hitler choice, I will be firmly bubbling in © None of the Above. I might even knock a few doors and tell my neighbors about how great © None of the Above would be. If I could figure out where to send my money, I could even see myself donating.

Image being unhealthy and saying “it’s going to take more than a 20 minute walk once a week to get in shape. Better not even do that then cuz what would be the point?”

Its funny, because I’m picturing you trying to recover from a broken leg with that mentality.

Diploma mills gonna mill diplomas

Republicans. Would. Be. Worse.

We will be more like China

We won’t be like China. We’ll be more insulated and divorced from Chinese media, culture, and conversation.

That’s the stated end goal. Bringing up sharp walls between nationalities in order to control the flow of information between people.

If we keep TikTok open, we risk exposing American young people to Chinese norms, ideals, and social standards. We might even be exposed directly to Chinese mass media (ie, propaganda).

This is a real security risk, as it raises a possibility that younger Americans won’t accept American mass media at face value.

Nintendo gets to do this (the Yuzu shit) because so many other developers have stopped making anything except slot machines.

Behold, the unlimited power of a fully nationalized war time economy.

No Poor Muslims Allowed

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently.

The first new nuclear plants since Three Mile Island just came online in Georgia last year. Vogtle 3 and 4 will produce a combined 1.2 GWe at peak capacity.

These reactors took 16 years and multiple bailouts and bankruptcies to complete, costing an estimated $34B to finish.

Hopefully, future power construction will move a little smoother.

As a comparison, the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant took ten years to complete at the cost of around $7.5B and it has a peak generation of 3.3 GWe

The only response to this decision is to vote harder and get even madder at anti-war activists going uncommitted.

And every time she’d try and report the posts the report button is greyed out.

What about the uninstall button?

What does it say that these once popular forms of mass surveillance are filling up with dog shit?

More than 122 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the outbreak of the war.

America deserves a President Kamala Harris

TrashFuture has hit on a few new attempts at Killer App firms, but it’s all Mindfulness this and AI that.

I think the last app I downloaded was an AI art app, which I used maybe twice.

I mean, the joke is going to be in the enforcement, as a battalion of Australia’s largest and roundest uniformed fascist shitheads march through the streets breaking windows and swinging at the heads of anyone sporting a Palestinian flag.

You’re going to have folks with swastika face tattoos explaining why these anti-Zionist activists just need to obey the law.

China has a much better education system that’s available to everyone.

One that they’re still rolling out and expanding, as Americans claw theirs back.

US has traditionally compensated for lack of a good and accessible education system by simply poaching talent from across the world. However, as economic conditions in US continue to worsen, this strategy becomes increasingly less effective.

The US has been able to parlay its wealth and comfort (or, at least, the illusion of it) into net positive migration.

I think we’ll continue to see the US enjoy net migration, simply because it stands a good chance of coming out of the Climate Apocalypse better than it’s equatorial peers.

But stronger even than the US is Russia. I have to wonder what a mass movement into Siberia is going to look like over the next century.

I mean, the US is facing two fundamental problems.

The first is simply that China has more people. Which means they’ve got more professionals and more researchers and more engineers capable of experimenting on and solving problems of R&D. There’s no real solution that the US has to close that gap except to hope their Unis / Firms can brain-drain off the most productive members of the Chinese workforce. And given the paranoia Americans have over espionage, we’re no longer able to do that.

The second is that Americans are not, themselves, willing to invest in R&D at the rate of their Chinese peers. We stopped doing that shit in the 60s and 70s, and have been functionally coasting on our exigent R&D ever since. So now that China’s reached post-80s technology, they’re going to surpass us purely on momentum even without a strict numerical advantage of workers.

Nothing the US did, in terms of foreign policy, was going to change either of those factors. The Chinese population isn’t going to stop producing exceptionally advanced scientists and engineers and the US economy does not have the capacity to vacuum them all up even if we’d wanted to. The US foreign policy can’t do anything to advance our domestic agenda, because that would require a degree of central control over the domestic economy that we are ideologically unwilling to assert.

So these fumbles might accelerate our fall from grace, but everyone in the State Department and the Pentagon can see where this shit was heading going back to the Clinton Administration. The problem was that we fixated so hard on petroleum as the premier energy source of the 21st century, we lost track of what the Chinese could just as easily accomplish with Australian coal and domestic hydro and - now it seems increasingly - domestic solar, wind, and nuclear. So we pissed away all our resources playing tug-of-war with the Levant and its neighbors while the Chinese economy accelerated straight past us into the 21st century.

US bullying is accelerating the rise of China’s semiconductor industry. By forcing China to in-source production of advanced chips, they’re achieving the decoupling they claimed they were seeking, but on the worst possible terms.