Yeah, that seems to be the point. He’s again appealing to his macho fascist supporters by further enabling abusive behaviour. Domestic violence has been decriminalized for years already in Russia, violence against outgroups is allowed/encouraged, they have a national snitch on your neighbour system, … It’s become a true fascist society.
Convergent evolution. Some eagles are evolving into chickens. A new species of murder chickens.
I was wondering what “feminist propaganda” was and apparently it’s talking about misogyny.
Another forbidden topic seemed to be targeted at criticism of misogyny at Game Science. The company has come under fire for lewd and sexist comments attributed in media reports to its founders as well as recruiting materials from 2015 replete with sexual innuendos. Those original job postings and comments were deleted, and the company has not commented. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/asia/chinese-videogame-wukong-censorship.html
But this anti feminism attitude is not limited to this 1 gaming company, but government policy under Xi Jinping’s authoritarian rule: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-08/feminism-in-china-internet-crackdown-erase-womens-voices/100165360
In 2022 there were some stories of how people on work visas were unable to jump ship while others were fleeing en masse. And now after all the tech layoffs in the USA, I imagine that finding another company to sponsor their visa, has become a lot harder still. So that’s one group still working there: people who will be deported if they lose their job.
Inspired by is not the same as based on. I don’t think that it can ever be canonical because the time period was never explored in depth by Frank Herbert himself, but I do think that the what ifs of this time period could make for a very interesting premise.
Either way, the showrunner is apparently Alison Schapker, who was also the primary showrunner for Altered Carbon, which I really liked. So I’m definitely going to give the first episode a chance :)
From imdb: “Ten thousand years before Paul Atreides joined the Fremen to lead an uprising on Arrakis to take down House Harkonen, two sisters (Valya and Tula Harkkonen) create the mysterious all-female order called the Bene Gesserit. In Dune Prophecy, the siblings combat forces that threaten the future of humankind.”.
Iirc, 10000 thousand years before Dune was the time of the Butler Jihad, when humankind fought against the thinking machines. So I think it’s a series based on apocryphal stories on how the feudal society in Dune came to be. Lots of creative freedom for the creators, kinda like Knights of the Old Republic was for Star Wars.
I’m absolutely certain that it wasn’t ads that put a firm like TomTom on a downward slope. This was actually the first time that I’ve heard someone proclaim that ads are the reason.
If your business is to sell maps + navigation devices for money and then the times change and now nearly everyone already owns a smartphone with built in gps + some car manufacturers provide sat nav as a default + another company is giving access to a map away for free, well then your business is in trouble.
I’ve never even heard of ads in TomTom or Garmin, since I stopped using a dedicated sat nav once I had a smartphone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was one of the things they tried to stay afloat after smartphones became ubiquitous.
I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.
And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.
About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.
Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.
Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.
Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.
I really like their pagewide xl printers, but those are purely aimed at businesses. Just to name one thing I like :D
And those xl printers are the only thing that I can think off. I won’t even consider buying a current HP computer/laptop/small printer/…
This is also something that many people outside of the USA don’t understand: 49% of the americans are not voting for the Trump/republican shit show that they see in their foreign media, but rather for a heavily editorialized image of the person and party.
The quotes are there because it’s a common misconception that as soon you have any kind of 4g signal, you have access to a fast connection, which is not the case. So in many countries at some point they proclaim that “xx%” of the population now has access to “4g”, which will be technically true, but the actual % that has access to fast 4g will be substantially lower.
Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.
Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).
That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.
Tbh, that 4g coverage up north looks pretty damn good for how few people live there. To me it just makes no economic sense to provide that good a service there. So I’m curious and as a Finn you might know: does it make economic sense or was this investment done for other reasons?
And why are you unwilling to accept that there is a lot of nothing land in Finland? Most of Finland is a lot of nothing land, plagued by mosquitoes in the summer and darkness in the winter.
Your country is neither unique, nor exceptional in this regard.
The Finn already addressed this in their first post: 97% of the country has 4g. That is country, not people in the country. So yes, a reindeer in Lapland has a better potential internet connection than many rural north americans.
Edit: I found some recent numbers: this carrier claims to provide 4g to 99% of the population, 5g to 96%. https://www.dna.fi/wholesale/about-us/networks That 2nd statistic must be pretty damn rare, the country of Nokia indeed.
Hitler also had a 100 000 polish intelligentsia murdered as preparation for German colonization of German controlled Poland.
Authoritarians seem to believe that most people are sheep and that if you want to control those sheep, you not only have to kill the current shepherd, you also have to kill all potential future shepherds.
This reads like a case of game design by spreadsheet to me. Instead of the lead designers being creative persons making creative decisions, these are accountants that are designing a game by ticking boxes. They didn’t try to make a game that they would like to play, they tried to make a game that they think others would like to play.
I’m using qwant as my default now. It does well for most searches, but for map related things I still use google.
Is this from Spain?
It sounds like what they are doing is clearly illegal and you probably could do a lot of people a favor by complaining to the authorities.
Generally for the eu: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-8-2017-003934-ASW_EN.html “If users receive unsolicited communications after having withdrawn consent, they can file a complaint with the national regulatory authority. In addition, they have the right to a judicial remedy before national courts.”
The responsible agency for Spain: https://www.aepd.es/