History says that it is. There have opuoentoy wealthy people into Antiquity. But supporting the number of opuoentoy wealthy that modern Russia has requires an organized economy. You can't have 1,000 Billionaires in an 500B sized economy.

Not a lot of North Korean billionaires living it up in the West though. To extract that level of wealth you need a better class of worker.

Industry requires labor. And an extract based wealth generation scheme requires a large amount of unskilled and semi-skilled labor along with a relatively small amount of highly skilled specialists to operate.

It's in your interest for the unskilled and semi-skilled labor to be as vast as possible to keep costs down.

Because they'll make a fortune from the next guy too. But they won't see their entire labor pool decimated.

The goal should be to use whatever is most effective and efficient for yourself,

And if taught as they should be, that will be the keyboard.

Counting out 5*5 on your fingers works and might be the fastest way you've been taught to multiply, but that doesn't mean we should excuse schools not teaching times tables and how to use a caluclator.

It works well for casual conversation. But if you're trying to have a technical conversation it will fail on uncommon or custom words or phrases.

They also stopped teaching typing in schools. My younger family members never had an computer class or a typing class.

Is it really surprising that a government that started a war while spending zero dollars on air superiority, zero dollars on artillery, zero dollars on defensive fortifications, zero dollars on civilian bomb shelters, zero dollars on radar and enemy detection and zero dollars on a military college for its officers is losing the war it started with a 45:1 casualty ratio?

If Israel were truly trying to maximize harm in Gaza it could easily be 4500:1.

This is special Olympics vs. Olympics here.

I was alive and politically active in 2004/2005. There was a legitimate belief that the pullout would be a blueprint for peace.

The path to zero settlements and zero settlement violence is peace in Gaza. As long as Hamas keeps breaking cease fires, the political factions who are advocating for the end of West Bank Settlements will never gain power and will never be able to implement a pullout.

Did you comprehend this section? There's a faction in Israel that is pro 2 state solution. Unless that faction takes power, Israel will never roll back it's West Bank Settlements. Since that faction is responsible for the pullout in Gaza, the Israeli body-politic is not going to vote them into power until the Gaza Strip is peaceful.

The settlements represent land-grabbing, and land-grabbing and peace-making don’t go together, it is one or the other.

The faction that was against that in Israel implemented the Gaza pullout. You're right it is one of the other. Advocating for Gazan violence is defacto advocating for settlements.

You're just straight up defending Settler Colonialism.

I'm doing the opposite. The path to zero settlements and zero settlement violence is peace in Gaza. As long as Hamas keeps breaking cease fires, the political factions who are advocating for the end of West Bank Settlements will never gain power and will never be able to implement a pullout.

As long as we in the West continue to invest massive dollars into Gaza and just accept that they use it to find their war machine, were perpetuating the settlement situation in the West Bank.

We can deny patterns in human behavior as long as we want to. But Israel's body politic will never accept a two state solution while their two state solution experiment has a hundred hostages and openly says they want to bomb, attack and rape them again. Stop being a child.

They withdrew the Gaza settlers into the West Bank and used the Oslo Accords to justify the ever expanding settlement of the West Bank

Two different leadership coalitions. The coalition responsible for pulling settlers out of Gaza lost power because of the massive failure that was. And the alternative coalition (still in power today btw) who advocated for increased settlements in Gaza and in the West Bank won power.

Look at the numbers between 2000-2005 on this chart. The growth (192k, 226k, 249k) over that 5-year span is congruent with the growth you'd expect from a slightly younger-than-average population and a small ingress of settlers. Over half of that growth occurred in the three biggest West Bank settlements established before the Gaza pullout. So certainly some settlers in Gaza likely relocated to established settlements in the West Bank but not a significant chunk. Additionally, look at the settlements they pull out of in Northern Samaria (in the West Bank). They did that to prove that pullout was a viable option. Yes those settlements were small, but there's like 50 settlements smaller than the largest that they pulled out of.

And if you look at the biggest 10 settlements on that list, it makes up over half of the total population of Israeli settlers. And they're all like 15 miles or less from the '67 border. It's legitimately plausible for Israel to pull 50% of it's settlers out of the West Bank and fully pull out of 85% of the land area of the West Bank in just a couple of months. And more importantly, there is an active political coalition attempting to do that in Israel. But every rocket, every suicide bomber, every organized rape, every hostage prevents them from being able to be a big force again politically in Israel; because they're still seen as being responsible for the boondoggle that is Gaza.

You're mistake (and the HRW's mistake) is believing that the group of Israeli's responsible for pulling out of Gaza is the same group responsible for expanding into the West Bank. They're opposing groups. And as long as Gaza is non-peaceful; the group advocating for expanding into the West Bank is going to continue to win.

Small correction, Israel hasn't occupied the Gaza strip since 2005. Over the course of 2004 & 2005 the withdrew behind the 1967 borders, and evicted several sizeable Jewish settlements and settlers at gunpoint. And ceased their military occupation of Gaza.

And at the same time they withdrew from a handful of small settlements in the West Bank to show that they were serious about following a similar path across that significantly large chunk of territory.

But the point is that this recent war and violence is not caused by an occupation of Gaza.

Undoubtedly Harris is an improvement compared to Biden.

I used M365's' Copilot. And I asked it to bullet point summarize the article's text.

Ya it's almost like consistently committing to and conducting operations to murder your neighbors for 20 years will lead them to engage in ways to mitigate those deaths.

Has the ever been a war where one side was expected to fund the other side's government and military?

RCP has Harris at a 1.8% favorite in its polling average. At the beginning of this month Trump was winning in these polls (granted partially because of Biden's degraded mental state). So opinions could legitimately change.

Additionally, Kennedy is still at 4.5%, and generally 3rd parties support degrades the closer to the election it gets. It's difficult to say where that support will degrade to. If Trump's support falls to 1% and Trump takes 3% of that support, he'll be ahead in the polls.

Finally, all the national polls have a margin of error between 2-3%. It's just as possible that Harris is up by 4.8% as it is that she's down by 3.8%.

So the chance of Harris losing the popular vote is significant.

Literally convenience. Before ads it was just easier to stream the shows.

Bibi has gone in and out of power as leader of a major coalition. Putin has been a dictator since I was in middle school.

Not really equivalent beasts.

Hamas is doing more damage to Israel than has been done in generations, just of a diplomatic sort.

People believe that?

They only bring those policies out when they're not in power

If your support is never on the table, your support doesn't matter.

I actually consider pirating movies I have the rights to stream just to cut down on advertisements.

But instead, what about a truck with truck bed?

Nice sarcasm.

So your saying Sanders has an anti-government ideology? To say another way, Sanders want to maximize the amount of dismissed problems in the government?

No. What about what I said makes you think that? Sander's intent is pro-government and pro-grovernment control of healthcare along with a wide range of other economic and social industries. Just because the effect of his actions makes us less likely to want government control of healthcare doesn't mean that was the intent of his action.

I haven’t heard or seen anything from Bernie that indicates he is authoritarian.

Except for the one time that he was given power over a system and expressed authoritarian tendencies?

lols

Slight tangent. But I've recently been pulling old home videos off of MiniDV tapes. And I've found that the ffmpeg dv1 decoder can correct several tape issues when re-encoding from dv1 to essentially any modern codec. So I've got like 3GB video files that look incredibly poor, but then I re-encode them into h264 files that look better than the original. It's baffling how well that works.

The problem is that the quality on Mac has been degrading so It might just be time to consider a switch. Honestly, for that type of user, I recommend Chromebooks.

Huh I didn't know about that. Maybe Walz is a better pick then.

Truthfully, the utilitarian nature of the dish.

I think this was a poor pick. Penn's governor was a good candidate, but also didn't have the George Flyod riots in his political past. You're already seeing Republicans key in on that.

Sorry for the delay been a crazy week.

I agree that Sanders is a democratic socialist. I am confused as to why you brought this incident up then. I thought you were trying to prove that Sanders was an authoritarian, but it seems like we both agree that this was a mistake he made and not some outcome that he wanted to happen or that was aligned with his ideology.

Emphasis added by me. I'm saying that to a Centrist (and honestly to myself too). Sander's actions to dismiss problems in a desired government program is aligned with his ideology. And a viewing of the record of Socialism and Socialist thought has seen that same patter arise over and over again.

It’s not clear to me that Socialism explicitly calls for that, maybe I have missed that. But Bernie is a Democratic Socialist. I understand this to mean that democracy would be used to create the laws, not an authoritarian.

Some OG Source but the context here is, after Das Kapital. The Socialist ideology takes off. Movements in Marx's lifetime to "vote in" Socialism arose, in this instance in Germany. Marx criticizes this attempt instead of advocating for revolution and dictatorial control exercised by a smaller group of Socialist leaders eg. the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" (wikipedia summary that's easier reading).

Capitalism is a system that's designed to orchestrate the economy of a state. It offers some suggestions for the content of its society and the organization of its government but it is largely agnostic. And has been successfully used alongside Dictatorships, Republics, and Monarchs alike. Socialism dictates not just the economy of a state, but the makeup and mores of its society along with the organization of its Government. There are many modern Socialists who are led to believe that Socialism is compatible with a modern, Western society and Republic; but it pretty explicitly rejects it. Bernie, I believe, is one of those people. But when given power he exercised that power in the same fashion that non-Democratic Socialists of the past have done. That should be concerning to all people, including Centrists.

Oh yes, the Bible says Big Dicks are the Best!

Unfortunately true too often.

If fighting socialists disqualifies you as a socialist, then there would be no socialists.

That might be a little bit too much"on the nose". But maybe the slaughtering of a live animal as a sacrifice would be more fun.

A statistics class where your grade is determined by "drawing lots" as it shows God's desired grade....

I grew up pretty Christian. That particular section (or book) has some pretty spicy stuff in it. There's also other questionable sexual stuff in other areas. Like you're supposed to impregnate your brother's widow if they die without an heir, polygamy etc ... It's a book that's incredible forward thinking for it's time, but it's time was like 6,000 years ago.