This is so true. 😄

Oligarchs have been unified by their pursuit for profit long before Russia became able to push any sort of effective propaganda to Americans. The Heritage Foundation that peddles these ideas did not emerge from Russian interference in 2016. Neither did Fox whose entire purpose is peddling domestic oligarch propaganda. Neither did the Chicago School of Economics anti-worker takeover of national economic policy. US oligarchs did not offshore middle class jobs or bust unions on Russian advice. This has been going on for a lot longer than the last decade. The pushback started as a result of FDR’s redistribution policies that cut US oligarch wealth in the aftermath of the Great Depression. First slowly, then more quickly.

And your “only way out of this” – why you don’t you tell me in small steps exactly how that happens. Lets hear it.

Campaign, donate and vote for “far-left” D candidates at every gov’t level - like AOC, Zohran, etc. Campaign, donate and vote for “far-left” independent candidatss where there’s no such candidates in that district. Join a union. Join a local socialist org. Eventually you’d tilt the balance of power in various gov’t institutions. Whenever you do that, you tax the rich to death. But that goes without saying cause every “far-left” candidate has that on their agenda.

E: FWIW, was where you are in my thinking a few years ago. I didn’t know as much about the historical development of econimic policy in the US, who drove it, who got richer, who got poorer, what tools were being used to do one or the other.

E2: And in case it isn’t clear how taxing the rich to death solves the problem, it deprives them from the money they need to buy the democratic system. It puts that money back into the majority’s pockets. Politicians have to fight for that money and therefore go back to serving the majority. They start passing the laws that you want passed. Like curbing online propaganda from both Zuckerberg and Putin. And many others that serve you instead of Bezos.

If on the other hand you eliminate all foreign propagnda with a magic wand today, all domestic propaganda will remain. Democratic control will remain in the hands of the oligarchs. They would keep making Americans poorer and poorer while scapegoating yet another group or actor. The most impoverished would completely lose faith in the democratic system because it no longer solves their problems. When the oligarchs propose a candidate who promises to solve the poverty (they themselves created) by dismantling democracy (since democracy is the only nonviolent tool that can strip them of their wealth), the desperate would vote for that. As FDR, and many others have explained a century ago.

The thinking that any of the current fallout in the US is foreign-led is not giving any good explanations for the reality we observe and therefore procides no good solutions. What you’re observing is primarily driven by the oligarch class in the US finding new ways to extract profit. That drives everything. It drives Fox, it drives the Heritage Foundation, it drives turning both parties in oligarch-serving machines. External factors are only helping accelerate it a bit. Feeding this machine with resources from the outside is a bad idea since most of those resources would be captured by the oligatchs. The only way out of this is to get an internal populist left movement to curb their power, reposses most of their resources and redestribute them to the masses.

You never buy an individual firm stock unless you have insider knowledge.

One recent report raised troubling questions about potentially systematic efforts to advance antisemitic and anti-Israel information in Wikipedia articles related to conflicts with the State of Israel.

Of course they’d use the anti-Israel crutch.

Many APIs Android apps can use are unavailable to PWAs. Also PWAs typically require server infrastructure to at least load once. The author of my favourite open source unit conversion calculator shouldn’t need to maintain a web server so I can use their app.

But yeah, for use cases that require a server anyways and don’t need elaborate mobile APIs, PWAs are probably the way to go.

It’s nice to hear from Mark Murphy on this. He’s a legend in the Android space.

Yup, makes sense. You do it in the beginning and then you forget about it. Until you change a phone. 😊

It’s not a dev option at the moment. It’s a permission setting and it doesn’t require enabling developer options.

OK, this sounds problematic. I don’t see any obvious language for opting out and it doesn’t seem there’s intent to opt out. There’s probably going to be a dev option to allow it but that would probably still make installing from sources like F-Droid impractical.

THX-1138

Gotta watch this film again.

I’m dowloading a backup and will be seeding it. 😄

What if I told you that in the Eastern Bloc many of the high schools used to be professional. In those schools you’d study most of the standard arts and science subjects, but also professional subjects like machining, automotive (mechanic, driver), construction, engineering, programming, agriculture, textile, food production, and many more. They used to produce ready workers in those fields. As a kid you’d choose which field you want to go to and apply after middle school, pass the necessary exams and get studying. If you wanted to go to university, you’d continue past high school.

Yes my point is that it’s a feature of using the market to decide these variables in the economy, that includes the supply-demand dynamics. If we used some form of planning at the macro level that takes data from the industry and educational institutions, project long term direcrion, and propagate targets or at least expectations down the industry and educational institutions, we could save a ton of real resources and parts of people’s lives, and reduce the negative social effects of this process. Effects that destabilize the whole system if they grow to any significant proportions.

Can you share the firm or the union representing? I’m curious if it’s a viable place for me. 😄

In software?

That’s not what I meant in that paragraph. I am not saying that universities are merely job training facilities. That was simply an example from my life where these types of professionals have come out of. I’m not making a judgement on universities as a whole. They just so happen to produce the vast majority of software engineers and finance professionals in Canada. That’s why I mentioned the university. If I was talking about electricians, I’d have said trades school, or college, etc. I am absolutely aware of the larger role of universities and you won’t catch me claiming they’re professional training factories.

The major saw an unemployment rate of 6.1 percent, just under those top majors like physics and anthropology, which had rates of 7.8 and 9.4 percent respectively.

The numbers aren’t too high although it shows the market is no longer starved for grads.

It’s important to understand that this is a standard feature of the capitalist economy where the market is used to determine how many people are needed in a certain field at a point in time. It is not unusual that there’s no overarching plan for how many software engineers would be needed over the long term. The market has to go through a shortage phase, creating the effects in wages, unemployment, educational institutions and so on, in order to increase the production of software engineers. Then the market has to go through the oversupply phase creating the opposite effects on wages, unemployment and educational institutions in order to decrease the production of software engineers. The people who are affected by these swings are a necessary part of the ability for the market to compute the next state of this part of the economy. This is how it works. It uses real people and resources to do it. The less planning we do, the more people and resources have to go through the meat grinder in order to decide where the economy goes next. We don’t have to do it this way but that’s how it’s been decided for a while now.

I was doing my CS degree immediately after the 2008 meltdown. At the time there was a massive oversupply of finance people who graduated and couldn’t find work. This continued for years. I was always shocked at the time why the university or the government does not project these things and adjust the available program sizes so that kids and their parents don’t end up spending boatloads of money and lives in degrees under false promises of prosperity. I didn’t have an answer then and people around me couldn’t explain it either but many were asking the same question. I wish someone understood it the way I do now.

In other words, Marx was right.

Google’s fucked.