Combining French snobbery with Linux snobbery could set off some kind of chain reaction.

How soon until Quebec joins the Bloc de L’nux?

I only take issue with calling them anything other than something like crony capitalism

The fundamental difference between Chinese Socialism and American Capitalism can be summed up in their retirement rates.

In China, white collar men can retire at 63. Blue collar women are out at 55. That upwards of twelve years gap in retirement age is why China has billionaires and America has trillionaires.

If I died right now and was told I was going to be reincarnated but unfortunately I would be born poor and was given a choice of where to go, China would be near the bottom of my list of developed nations.

The real value of a civilization is its infrastructure. And you’re going to find it difficult to name a country more advanced and resilient - particularly to looming climate change.

But if you want to roll the dice on Starmer’s UK or Takaichi’s Japan or Milei’s Argentina? Good luck.

Slovenia - a Yugoslav state - was a major trading partner of the USSR. It’s economy was hollowed out, first after the decline of Russia, and then after a decade of looting, sanctions, and war.

That’s what my government tells me

It’s like when China every few years trots out some rich person or powerful politician and nails them for tax evasion or corruption in a show trial then goes back to pretending to be socialist

I think Chinese domestic economic planning goes a few steps beyond the semi-annual show trial.

Their green energy and ev markets illustrate as much

How does a Slovenian model meet an American billionaire?

Through modeling agent Paolo Zampolli. This is well-documented.

Very likely the story of Ghislaine Maxwell, given her father’s shady history.

Epstein was far from the only flesh peddler exploiting the wave of post-Soviet refugees following western Shock Therapy in Eastern Europe. Paolo Zampolli founded the modeling agency in NYC that imported Melania and eventually introduced her to Heir Donald. He did partner with Epstein in 2004 to purchase Elite Model Management. But it could have just as easily been a thousand other creep-o finance tycoons running around NY, Paris, Berlin, or Tokyo from the 90s/00s.

The whole fucking joke of Epstein and The Files is that he gets treated as a unicorn when we’ve had Jack Abramoffs and Lawrence E. King Jrs and Deborah Jeane Palfreys and Andrew Tates for just as long.

No no no. China is Fake News. They don’t even make cars. If they made cars, I would have seen Chinese cars driving around in America.

“China Battery!” typically trips everyone’s “Fake News! Evil Company! Communists Killed 100 Billion People!” alarm

The way to safer is to reduce the amount of cars.

Hersey! Blasphemy! Unamerican!

Ah, so they’ve already exploded, thus rendering them safe for use.

Like, doing this to a board member is worse???

Doing this to some random student is gross.

Doing this to another board member is also gross. But it signifies a kind of structural disrespect that undermines the office as well as the individual. It’s symptomatic of a general institutional disgust for student involvement in school affairs.

Like Bush Jr doing the creepy shoulder rub on Angela Merkel or - in a more extreme example - UN staffers who were “approached, accosted and raped” by fellow officials and dignitaries. It isn’t merely a personal transgression. It undermines the entire function of the representative body.

as if he does this all the time to children?

It wasn’t just “a child”, it was a fellow board member. Guy has zero respect for the office, the students, or women generally speaking.

If I had money on where this ended, I’d put it on them abolishing the Student Board Member seat on the grounds that it was too much of a temptation for the rest of the board.

Maybe slide in a rule about students needing to wear full figure coverings to prevent anyone on the board from becoming aroused.

The lawyers always win

Not always

Steven Robert Donziger (born September 14, 1961) is an American former attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, particularly Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc. and other cases in which he represented over 30,000 farmers and Indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador. The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion ($13 billion in 2024 dollars) in damages, which led Chevron to withdraw its assets from Ecuador and launch legal action against Donziger in the US. In 2011, Chevron filed a RICO (anti-corruption) suit against Donziger in New York City. The case was heard by US District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who determined that the ruling of the Ecuadorian court could not be enforced in the US because it was procured by fraud, bribery, and racketeering activities. As a result of this case, Donziger was disbarred from practicing law in New York in 2018.

Donziger was placed under house arrest in August 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan’s RICO decision, when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron’s forensics experts. In July 2021, US District Judge Loretta Preska found him guilty, and Donziger was sentenced to 6 months in jail in October 2021. While Donziger was under house arrest in 2020, twenty-nine Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as “judicial harassment.” Human rights campaigners called Chevron’s actions an example of a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). In April 2021, six members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Donziger’s case. In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that the pre-trial detention imposed on Donziger was illegal and called for his release. Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Donziger was released on April 25, 2022

There’s an easy solution to this:

Legislation

Legislation. A famously easy to advance and trivial to enforce solution to any social problem

Beginning to think copyright has become a tool of the plutocracy to harass and dispossess the working class.

The CHIPs act also favored union work and even funneled some money to worker owned shops.

It overwhelmingly favored Intel, for better or worse. And the early influx of cash did nothing to prevent Intel from axing 15,000 jobs.

I’m not here to praise Trump for any of his trade policies. But what Biden pitched through the CHIPs Act was largely a bailout for under-performing domestic producers more focused on dividends than scaled production or R&D. He’d have been better off nationalizing Intel than just handing them bricks of cash in the form of grants and low-interest loans. That is (kinda) what Trump ended up doing when he ordered the Treasury to take a 10% stake in the firm.

😡