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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • What an incredibly deep ignorance about the modern world.

    If you’re curious about how countries militaries actually stack up these days I’d suggest looking into the results of some of the recent NATO joint exercises. The French military is actually quite formidable with a lot of recent heavy intervention in old colonies and anti terrorism strike force actions lately… now, nothing can really compare to the insane US military budget but France is pretty fucking serious.

    The UK is a joke, though.

    The real sleeping bears are the Baltics though. Those fucks are scared shitless of Russia and have heavily invested in widespread training in an effort to present Russia with an occupational nightmare due to partisan resistance if they ever invade.

    As a contrast while China has a shit load of stuff there was a massive amount of military supply corruption leading to a really high practical failure rate. They’ve got infantry for days of course, and their navy is quite serious… but there’s a strong suspicion that China’s airforce is much weaker than numbers would suggest.




  • Alternatively, you can view vandalization as, essentially, a sin tax. If the person is willing to pay the cost to keep their current setup whatever… but vandalization will provide an economic motive for the victim and others around them to revise their behavior.

    Hey, let’s just… let the market decide.

    I do agree that you’re unlikely to make the vandal change their beliefs, but given enough vandalization you’ll end up stealing Musk’s money.


  • I don’t believe so. I think they’re separate considerations.

    I think that Colbert’s decision to not say Trump’s name for a long time was a good one - I think that Trump in particular is narcissistic enough to be wounded by silence. However, even when he wasn’t president there were some things he was doing (like proclaiming the innocence of Jan 6 insurrectionists) that we needed to call out and have attention on - but his opinions on random shit didn’t need to be heard.

    Now that he’s president we need to listen and hold him accountable when he speaks. Unfortunately some dickwads reelected him so he’s in the middle of the spotlight regardless, so we should closely examine his bullshit (i.e. when he said “I will own Gaza” - the media should be hounding him over that shit).




  • If bad shit is unobserved and unpunished it has no cost and will be normalized faster.

    Our problem right now is that people shake their fingers at Trump but he never actually pays any consequences - if bad actors are forced to pay for their damage we can discourage repeats from them and, if we publicize it, others.

    Also, all but the dumbest marketers know that some news is directly damaging - it’s just that some things you might think are damaging aren’t. As an example, a wardrobe malfunction in the middle of a live commercial Ala Janet Jackson isn’t going to cause brand damage because it’s not actually a negative association…

    Similarly, while Toyota needed to complain about the use of Hiluxes in the Chad-Libiyan border war because embracing it would implicate them in human rights abuses… The Great Toyota War was excellent PR for Toyota by both getting their name out there indirectly and by proving how fucking indestructible those fuckers are.

    So I’d probably say that the premise of that statement is just false but is instead highlighting that a lot of things called “bad press” actually aren’t.