What are we rating this blunt rotation?

Make one post feel like it’s got a thousand lurkers

Australia had proposed to provide Vanuatu with 500 million Australian dollars ($344 million) over a decade under the terms of the agreement as originally drafted.

One way to make friends and influence people.

TIL, the only actual international naval base China maintains is in Cambodia. It’s bizarre to think Australia even needs to do this.

here we are probably the last unpolluted corners of the human experience

:-/ I seriously doubt that.

At some point, we’ll have to find a better way of sifting the wheat from the shit. But I’d be crazy to assume bots around bouncing around the Lemmiverse pushing misinformation just like they are everywhere else.

Everyone goes to Reddit, despite it being an AI Bot filled shit show

Search engines direct you to Reddit as a first page - even first result - choice. It’s superceded Wikipedia in a lot of cases.

Critical support to the real MVPs

They’ll whip you for chewing gum.

Imagine what they’ll do if you actually try to affect politics

It’s crazy to think anyone is going to get prosecuted for this genocide. Americans are going to talk about Gaza like Turks talk about Armenia in 30 years.

“Once we have enough information on our elected officials, they will most certainly align with our interests” is a beautiful idea. But simply not born out in practice.

Far too often, you can have someone on camera dead-to-rights doing the most corrupt shit imaginable and… they’ll win in a landslide in the next election cycle, because they’re doling out the red meat to the right constituents.

it’s on Lemmy too.

Kinda hard to gauge the degree though.

Are you a bot? Am I a bot? Is anyone reading this or is it all just bots jerking each other off?

But everyone seems to rather sit on their phones or being plugged into music than to talk to strangers and live your life in the real world.

I grew up in the 80s.

People stared at their newspapers/comic books or their Gameboys or had eyes closed listening to head phones or just tried not to make eye contact.

There was not some golden era when talking to strangers was normal and people were living in the “real” world. Today isn’t nearly as divorced from the past is people like to pretend.

Banks aren’t allowed to be this blatantingly shady

😆

Private Credit/Equity is is playing the role of facilitator of collapse

Which are just a backchannel for the original Banksters, in the same way that Bear Sterns and SVB were back doors for the bigger and more heavily regulated formal banking sector prior to their own implosions.

Hey, remember that time Aaron Swartz used public APIs and perfectly legal aggregation of information to compile scientific journals in a data set outside the paywall. And he was arrested, prosecuted, and threatened with life in prison until he (allegedly) killed himself?

Then his original and highly lucrative pet project, Reddit, was mutated into a propaganda factory by the Epstein Class, cannibalized by the Investor Class, and gutted for AI slop by the Tech Sector?

What determines whether a bubble pops or not is not logic but rather belief

Well… there’s harder economic realities that people eventually bump into. And that shapes belief in the credit markets and the investment banks.

For instance, Greenspan hiking interest rates from 2006 to 2008 was what put Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns under pressure to cover an escalating interest payment. When they began to default, all their creditors panicked (justifiably) and began withholding shorter term lending. And that accelerated the collapse. But because of the network of interbank lending, Lehman tugged on the strings of Goldman, WellsFargo, BoA, JP Morgan…

It wasn’t just vibes. There was a material credit crisis resulting in Bear Sterns - specifically - not having enough money in the till to pay its credit notes. And because everyone was so highly leveraged, there was a real accountable cascade of defaults.

In theory, bigger institutions could have backstopped the slide by offering even more generous credit terms (which is what the Federal Reserve / US Treasury ultimately did). The “vibes” part was the risk/reward analysis. Everyone could see the looming risk. Relatively few executives could conceive of the long-term consequences of a collective bank run.

some economists have warned

We’ve been getting this warning for years. Over the same time, the value of these stocks have not diminished.

Did you not read the article?

It’s the exact same article that gets printed twice a month going on 40 years.

I would bet even money that it is itself AI generated, at this point.

Headline: “AI STOCK SELLOFF!!!”

glances at stock chart YTD

:-/

According to that definition Snowden doesn’t defecate, he goes for a heroic dump.

If he’s shitting on the right people, I think this qualifies

America: “How much deficit are you on?”

Russia: “$70, maybe $80B, my dude.”

America: “You are like a little baby.”

You could have a heroic doctor but nobody’s full time job is ‘hero’.

Anyone who is regularly engaged in heroics would be a full-time hero, in the same way that anyone engaged in full time medical practice would be a doctor. In Snowden’s case, he effectively quite his job at Booze-Allen and became an advocate for dismantling of the surveillance state effectively full-time. He stopped drawing a salary as an intelligence analyst and focused all his time on assembling, distributing, and propagandizing the nature of the PRISM program and the need to end it.

A hero is a term that’s useful in a novel but some people wanna cosplay

It’s a term that is used to describe an individual engaged in a heroic effort on a sustained basis. To your point, you could easily describe a Doctors Without Borders volunteer or a volunteer firefighter as a hero-as-full-time-job. Depending on your ideology and the individual’s circumstances, you could also describe a civil rights advocate or a military operative or a journalist as a hero.

It’s a weak descriptor, because just calling someone a “hero” doesn’t explain their heroic status. Whereas, calling someone a doctor pretty clearly illustrates how they’re (presumably) spending their time. But “Hero Journalist” definitely conjures an image that is different than “Paparazzi Journalist”.

A hero is a concept

It’s a descriptor of a person or personality.

“Help! Help! I need a doctor.”

“I’m sorry ma’am, but a doctor is more of a conceptual term. Nobody here can fulfill your request.”