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As soon as Australians and Canadians who have their governments captured by big interests and don't want to admit it wake up, no doubt

It's 9pm in Australia right now mate, and I have no idea what we're supposed to be doing? Not liking this? Why?

No it's not, it's 6pm!

>The DOGE gutting has most likely set up some sort of similar problem that hasn't arrived or gone public yet.

It's a neat trick to pull to say something is a terrible disaster but also that you won't show why and that's by design. Impossible to refute.


They fired a lot of people at the FDA and also deliberately made it harder for the FDA to regulate. That is likely to cause problems for our food and medicine supply, the FDA has been the world standard for a long time.

>it was to keep the "3rd world" aligned with US foreign policy objectives

A check of pretty much any UN vote shows that this was a completely and utterly ineffective method then.

Example: https://cuba-solidarity.org.uk/news/article/4669/world-overw...


Amazon has become AliExpress at this point, so I just skip the middleman half the time

Amazon had better return policies. I suspect that is gone. I'll probably buy even less from Amazon, anymore.

I've gotten 2 different "You didn't return the right item" because I presume some underpaid, overworked contractor at the Amazon return site lost it or stole it.

Fortunately, the second one is very well documented, so Amazon is going to lose badly if they don't figure out what is going on.


It's a shame that all these stores have such a terrible UI/UX.

Amazon is pretty good at optimizing buying things but outside of that everything else sucks really bad especially on mobile


That's what I call it, "American AliExpress" lol

It's like if Canada wanted to end gun smuggling and school shootings, it would legalize the controlled manufacture, sale, and usage of the guns being banned. But they won't.

If I squint gun control doesn’t look much different than legalized drugs. They’re both just a question of how restrictive the regulation is.

There are still legal ways to have a gun in Australia and many other countries that “ban guns”. They don’t have total bans, they just have more restrictive regulations than the United States.

Consider how we regulate alcohol or marijuana as examples of how legalization of drugs works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control


You shouldn't touch HN either. It's based out of the US. You would own fascists so hard by deleting your account.

>Don't worry

I'm not worried. We'll use Zulip which has values and thus takes responsibility for everything its users post, right?


Soft power is just a buzzword to give value to things that have zero demonstrable value.

The CIA Factbook has played zero role in giving the US any measurable power.


The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy


True, TSA has been very valuable in airline safety. Think of it as "soft terrorism prevention".


In the early days of Wikipedia many articles were taken directly from the CIA Factbook since it was public domain. Numerous Wikipedians have fond memories of it and remembers it as something the US did that was actually good and not evil shit. That and America's Army. Cheap ways to gain goodwill. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't matter.


America’s Army didn’t strike me as cheap at the time - but definitely was in the context of the budget of the US military.


Millions of people around the world looked at the CIA world factbook. It was useful. It gives you a warm feeling about the USA and the CIA. Warm feelings are useful.

If you deny this argument do you claim:

1. No one used it or it wasn't useful, or

2. They used it robotically and formed no feelings, or

3. It is of absolutely no use to have people like your organization or country.


right. because there's zero demonstrative value in USAID giving aid to foreign countries which is why we just left.

...and then china moved in.

The real problem is that the problem isnt binary or immediately causal. "This happened, and then that happened".

These problems are slowly developing with more than 1 term in the equation.

China doesnt build silk road 2.0 because of one little decision. It's an accumulation, and by then it's too late.


What's the Chinese version of the factbook? European? Canadian? Why aren't they all moving in on all this sweet soft power?


There is none other than a heavier source like Wikipedia (heavy because the information is there but inconsistently buried in writing), but it is death by a thousand papercuts in terms of losing soft power.


I agree. People use "soft power" as the reason the US should do so many things for free, but the benefits aren't coming back to the US.


The argument against abandoning soft power is that it's going to cost a lot more in hard power to maintain the same status. We'll see how it plays out.


The hourly "AI is a bubble" threads doesn't scream optimistic to me.


Its a busy site, I can also find hourly "AI brought joy back to my life" threads.


>what the next FED chair appointee will do

What do you think he will do, given he's one of 12 votes?


The admin wants to cut rates drastically. But the FED policymakers just voted 10-2 to not cut rates. So I worry the admin will try something crazy to force a cut.


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