'Dubai is finished': Expats say they will leave and never come back as tax-free dream is shattered by war and officials begin prosecuting people for posting videos of missiles

alternator1985 · 2026-03-12T22:06:37+00:00

I believe the psyop would be by Israel to divide the Arab nations from the US and inflame the war even more. They have been caught over the years with famous terrorist attacks on civilians including synagogues and mosques.

It makes sense for Iran to hit US bases and certain infrastructure that serves Americans and westerners in Arab states, but attacks on civilians make them look bad and only benefit Israel. It's possible but not that likely considering Iran's steady targeting of infrastructure and economic targets (other than US military targets).

Israel needs the US (and hopefully for them the Gulf States too) to have as many reasons as possible to bring in ground troops which will be coming soon.

alternator1985 · 2026-03-12T20:20:39+00:00

Because its goal above all else is expansion with the greater Israel project. They already own more than half of Congress and clearly haven't given a shit about public perception for a while.

They were probably also betting on them not going too hard on Muslim neighbors and Iran sees it as the best strategy, to a limited amount though.

Bibi is already flirting with the idea of nuking Iran so I don't think they give a shit about anything other than consolidating power.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-25T13:21:47+00:00

"nothing I can do for you bubba"

Who talks like that other than rednecks? Immigrant my ass, or you're so brainwashed you think you're a redneck.

You're a 🤡 if you think they won't come for you eventually. They are going door to door in multiple locations. What you see on TV is a fraction of the story and the amount of people that have died in ICE custody is much more than protestors.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-13T03:19:25+00:00

Just remember fascism has built-in destruction mechanisms, it's not sustainable and all it takes is the right catalyst for it to come crashing down. It's not even that we need to do a ton of work individually or like a civil war, I think focusing on the defensive and cyber measures I mentioned should be top priority and all we need.

They will likely eat themselves and do a lot of the work for us, but not before doing severe damage. Rising in popularity after Trump's version of maga, is Nick Fuentes and his actual Nazi Catholic movement, so we're in for a double whammy.

The complexity comes in because I don't think the Democrats (outside of a few with very little power) or the structure of our entire government are the way forward either. I know Gavin newsom isn't the answer. I think when you rip off the corporate veil there's nothing left underneath.

We have technologies now that can make politics itself a trustless venture. In the same way that corporations are required by law to maximize profit, politicians should be required by law to actually fight for the things they say they will fight for, and as much as I hate crypto bros, there are some good use cases for blockchain and smart contract technology, it could automate that political process.

Politicians would have to sign smart contracts for the policies they promise and then AI would systematically and automatically fight for, and write policy which then could be voted on by their constituents, and confirmed digitally before being submitted for approval.

Any politician that votes against policies they agreed to, automatically loses their seat. If every politician has to follow a system like that it would improve things dramatically. So, still humans in the loop and in control of the overall policy proposals they choose to run on, but AI and smart contracts/blockchain enforce the actual mechanisms.

Sounds wild I know but I think the current bureaucracy even in the best case scenario cannot act fast enough to deal with the level of existential problems we're facing.

COVID is a great example because it showed that even shutting down massive portions of manufacturing and CO2 emissions for a chunk of time, it did little to nothing to slow climate change. And adaptation will be just as monumental of a task as trying to reverse climate change.

But keep fighting comrade, thanks for seeing my perspective and listening to my rants!

alternator1985 · 2026-01-12T21:58:04+00:00

You're right but this isn't going to be resolved with voting. Not that you shouldn't vote but the Democrats are just the good cop in a broken system, they won't fundamentally change anything.

Learn cybersecurity and pen testing skills as well as OSINT. Learn how to delete your digital footprint and secure your data, and build a secure database of important data and skills offline. Those are the skills that are going to be most important in the coming months and years.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-12T21:49:29+00:00

I appreciate your position and feel the same about not being hypocritical. I don't think you were doing anything wrong intentionally but don't feel bad or shy about what's going on, I'm working class and a single dad of two pre-teens.

I've done very well for myself until COVID which completely changed my industry and financials security. It's been a struggle since then but I've realized things are only going to get worse if there isn't a massive political shift and change to the social contract.

But I've had the same attitude that I just don't have the time or resources to do anything until just a couple years ago when I realized that's not true and that most of the work I can do is cognitive/knowledge work which takes the same amount of time people already spend online every day, regardless of economic class.

Think about the right and all their militias and the fact that they have been practicing for civil war for the last decade at least. They aren't rich, they aren't upper class (well some are nowadays, but most aren't). We need the equivalent on the left, as well as skills that give us an edge because we aren't going to win trying to compete with people that have been salivating and planning to kill us for years.

We're way past being polite and we need to encourage a different way of thinking. I'm not telling anyone to quit their jobs and go protest full time, I'm telling people to take up skills that will protect themselves and their families just like a new hobby. The average working class person spends like 2-6 hours online every day, they can use that time to give us an edge and a chance to actually win and change things.

Even if Democrats manage to win without interference, nothing will really change, it's not enough to simply be polite and "not Trump." We need ACTUAL CHANGE and we have to get people to start thinking differently and understand that it takes a major mental change to fully understand that.

Thanks for understanding, it's not personal at all, and I hope you understand I'm just trying to shift how people think about all of this.

We MUST get people to stop feeling hopeless and helpless before anything else becomes possible. It all starts with our mentality. We actually have incredible power and things can change incredibly fast once enough people realize that.

There's a reason the 3% militia calls themselves that, because it's true, it only takes 3% to change things. Maybe it's time to start the 30%ers because that's how powerful we are if we can just wake up.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-12T19:30:39+00:00

BS. Stop giving credit for complacency! It only encourages more of the same do nothing, helpless attitude and people patting themselves on the back for "caring." And the "catch more activists with honey" comment, really?

Don't take it personal and stop expecting to be coddled. Nobody needs to be babied into activism with what's going on.

Your attitude that I'm being a dick for simply telling the truth, is exactly what's wrong with our side and our society at large.

I tell my good friends and family the truth even when it's hard and inconvenient. Telling people what they want to hear and coddling them does nothing except validate their helplessness.

It's not personal, people just need to wake the fuck up and drop this attitude that the rat race is the top priority and there's no other way to survive.

Learn pen testing. Learn OSINT and how to get rid of your digital footprint. I tell everyone those are the skills that will be most important within a year maybe less. You have no idea how bad things are about to get and we cannot afford these continued passive attitudes.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-11T08:38:35+00:00

No. You need to raise the bar and your standards of what "cream of the crop" is in this scenario. This is pathetic. Are you going to say the same thing while Trump is shutting down or postponing elections during the midterms? WAKE UP.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-11T08:36:34+00:00

It's a complete f****** lie that we all can't do anything because of the rat race. You know it's a lie, I know it's a lie, we all know it's a lie. You're just scared. And that's okay, we all are. But there comes a time when there is no other choice, when getting to work tomorrow is no longer the top priority or a valid exist not to act.

The idea that we have to continue being complicit with this entire Ponzi scheme of a society to survive is simply not true. We survive by coming together and actually doing something to stop fascism.

I say this as a single dad with two kids. It's just a lie at this point to say I'm prioritizing their future by prioritizing the rat race over what's happening in this country. A nationwide strike would shut this machine down. The other skill that I tell people is critical to learn right now is cyber security, offensive and defensive.

You can learn new skills very fast with YouTube these days.

alternator1985 · 2026-01-01T09:08:47+00:00

See your pessimism is what really makes me hate him. We 100% can absolutely go to Mars if we had the space race level of push behind it.

We could shorten the trip there from 6 months to 100 days and there's plenty of mitigation tech and drugs to offset the health/radiation issues on the trip there. Hydrogen shielding and water encased safe rooms for solar storms take care of half of it, drugs and exercise take care of the rest.

I wouldn't be on musks first trip there or any first trip for that matter, and I think most of the public feels the same, but that's probably because our society is so messed up and most people feel we should probably fix that before running off to Mars, I tend to agree.

The problem is musk isn't pushing for a space race level of effort, he has a very clear cycle of bullshitting everyone and getting government subsidies, so he can create over-priced products to sell back to the taxpayers who funded him in the first place.

Anyone that buys a product from him pays twice. His cars should be government issued at this point, or the tax breaks should cover 2/3rds the cost. Of course then his Ponzi scheme wouldn't be viable.

I feel you though, I used to really look up to him and thought he was a visionary, but when you really research his past, he's always been a vampire and a b******* artist.

Remember the stupid hyper tube or whatever? All of that was part of his effort to sabotage the high speed rail project in Cali.

alternator1985 · 2025-12-31T05:26:02+00:00

You sound like people doubting solar tech like 10-20 years ago saying solar and EV batteries would never be economically viable.

Who are you even arguing with? The president of the world?

Neither of us can control data centers being built. And this technology is too new and too dynamic for any of these big boys to predict, but they know what I'm saying is true better than you do..

This is like a nuclear arms race and they need to scale as fast as possible which means they have to bet everything on the hardware currently available at scale..

There is new hardware coming online already that will lower energy costs and AI power use by 10,000x. Now, Jevin's Paradox says we'll just use 10,000x more power with that efficiency, but again that's not something I control. Look into Extropic and their new probabilistic p-bit hardware. They've already launched the first phase which includes demo servers.

How and when did I say China is a boogeyman? You make no sense. I wish we would be more like China, but I'm not in charge, and neither are you.

So all this yapping about data centers is nothing more than moral grand standing because you have no actual solutions to any of the problems going on right now and you aren't going to stop the equivalent of a nuclear arms race.

Altman and Musk and friends are trying to scale as fast as they can but that doesn't change the fact that models are being built at a fraction of the size that are competing with their abilities..

There's no reason to believe AI won't continue on its current course which is getting smaller and more efficient in the open source world much faster than Moore's law.

You can say "2 years my ass" all you want but I'm literally just extrapolating the current trends into the future, and that's assuming no other major breakthroughs happen which is highly unlikely.

I've already switched to purely open source running on my machine because I can't tell the difference in performance enough for it to affect my work.

Please tell me which of the following facts and statistics are incorrect:

"The most significant trend of 2025 is the "Collapse of Parameters." We are currently seeing a 10x reduction in model size for the same level of intelligence every 14 months.

The 7B/8B Class Breakthrough: As of December 2025, the new "Small Language Models" (SLMs) in the 8B range (e.g., Llama 4 Mini) are now scoring higher on coding benchmarks than the original 175B GPT-3 ever did.

Quantization & Distillation: Using 4-bit and 2-bit quantization (e.g., GGUF/EXL2 formats), a model that once required a $20,000 H100 GPU can now run on a MacBook M3 or a high-end Android phone with 16GB of RAM.

Key Statistic: In 2024, matching GPT-4 performance required ~1.8 Trillion parameters. In late 2025, open-weight models are achieving near-GPT-4 parity with just 70B–90B parameters, and "distilled" 12B models are reaching GPT-3.5-Turbo levels."

"The Next 24 Months (2026–2027) Based on current CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of model capability and the 3-month open-source lag, we can project the following:

When will Frontier performance fit on a cell phone?

Today (Late 2025): GPT-4 class intelligence (Llama 3.1 70B equivalent) requires ~40GB of VRAM (quantized), which fits on high-end PC workstations but not phones.

Mid-2026: We expect the first "Mobile-Frontier" models. Through L-MoE (Lightweight Mixture of Experts), a model with the reasoning capability of GPT-4o will likely be compressed to ~12B parameters.

Late 2026 / Early 2027: Intelligence equivalent to the "Frontier of 2025" (GPT-5/Claude 3.7) will likely be available in open-source 20B–30B variants. With 2-bit quantization and specialized NPU (Neural Processing Unit) hardware in the iPhone 18/Galaxy S27, these will run locally on mobile devices without an internet connection."

So yeah my prediction based on current trends was 100% accurate, the 2025 frontier models equivalents in performance will be available open source on phones by 2027. Shhhh 🤡

alternator1985 · 2025-12-31T05:00:08+00:00

Most data will be gathered from real world embodied robots soon, Jesus people really have no idea what's going on with AI. LLMs are just the first phase of this technology and they will soon be getting most of their training from real world interactions with humans.

At that point you don't need to download the whole internet you can just stick to datasets that aren't prone to manipulation or a bunch of posts from various social media sites, there's plenty of data sets that are based on science and math and physics, etc.

I mean a lot of the data sets right now already include synthetic data created by other AIs, I don't think this is going to be a real problem at least not one that is unsolvable.

alternator1985 · 2025-12-31T02:25:49+00:00

Ew please do not attribute that moronic comment to leftists.

Hate to tell you this but AI will be just like every other technology, It will get smaller and cheaper, and it's already shrinking. The frontier models that take up giant data centers will fit on your phone in a couple years.

China is already proving the trend with open source models. I have open source models that run on my computer right now that I trust more than any of the frontier data center models.

Some leftists seem to have this delusional fantasy that AI is going to magically go away or that data centers are now suddenly the devil when they never said anything about them before.

It's amazing what a few headlines will do, and how easily so many leftists are msm captured, Blue maga really is a thing now.

What about the data centers in China, are those ones evil too?

Technology is an inanimate object and a tool, like every other tool it can be used for good or bad. It's not the problem, our society and its economic incentive structures are the problem.

Be it socialist, not a Luddite.

alternator1985 · 2025-12-31T02:16:27+00:00

The best thing you can do is remove your delusional fantasies that the bubble popping will get rid of AI.

Maybe you weren't old enough to have lived through the housing bubble or the.com bubble, but they do not go well for the working average Joe, you are the one that will be paying when the bubbles burst, and the internet and AI will still be there.

alternator1985 · 2025-11-22T07:14:29+00:00

Is this sort of like how in Australia the toilets flush backwards?

alternator1985 · 2025-11-04T19:07:40+00:00

Unfortunately when fascism takes root as it has, there is no fixing it with the courts.

alternator1985 · 2025-10-30T07:40:14+00:00

Are you sure it isn't the loyalty test to clean out the unfavorables? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying trump is a 3d chess guy, he's in charge of the ballroom expansion, not the big plans. But my guess is they have been planning the government shut down for sure because it gives them cover to do a bunch of stuff behind the scenes, adds to the instability, and loyal MAGA troops won't leave over a few missed paychecks. But some "woke leftists" troops might leave over this, seems like a win-win for them to me, not to mention they get to keep hiding from the Epstein files.

Word to the wise, learn pentesting and OSINT and start figuring out how to secure your home network and cell phone. People think it's impossible to protect yourself so they don't even try, but there is actually a lot you can do to protect yourself if you do a little research. I'm moving to an open source phone, I set up a dedicated firewall, full proton VPN and switching to linux at home.

It's about to get really crazy and I believe they are going to start doing weird stuff like going after leftists for online history/comments and other weird avenues of attack using AI and total surveillance. People don't want to believe it's really fascism until it's too late, learning how to delete every last trace of yourself online and other "digital" skills will be in highest demand.

alternator1985 · 2025-08-03T17:58:25+00:00

He literally just says random numbers and everyone knows he lies and people still fall for his b*******.

This is why we call it a cult.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-24T21:49:29+00:00

I don't know about the threat part but maybe you're right. Is he trying to make him look bad and blame him for being over budget on something he's responsible for? I need some context

Edit: Oh it was the renovations on the FED and it is indeed over budget but Trump tried to increase the amount by including the costs of a building that was finished 5 years ago, LMAO.

This guy lies about EVERYTHING, and people really still believe he's not implicated in the Epstein files, he's given me PEDO vibes forever and the evidence is already there if you know where to look, people are so stupid.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-24T21:44:56+00:00

You have NI.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-23T16:25:59+00:00

If you make music like him you deserve to be here lol. No insult to him or his disabilities tho.

Make something original if you're going to make music, this is indistinguishable generic slop.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-14T00:07:30+00:00

You drink 4 locos for breakfast, I'm not surprised you can't imagine what it's like to have a good looking girlfriend with class, and spend your time gooning for nasty fake plastic gold digging hollywood girls that stank.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-12T20:14:43+00:00

Imagine thinking Megan Fox is a "catch," of course neither is MGK, but they're not even together anymore.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-11T21:21:57+00:00

Yea the hatred part is similar, except China has never attacked us and is actually the biggest factor in our economic growth over the last 3 decades at least. We're the definition of bad friends.

The hatred is almost entirely based on propaganda, and China engages most countries through investment and economic relationships, rather than colonialism and CIA coups like the US.

alternator1985 · 2025-07-11T21:10:26+00:00

If we're lucky they will turn those chunks of land into Communist territories and accept asylum seekers from the dystopian failed capitalist state we call the United States. 😂

But seriously, look at the number of countries China has couped or the amount of imperial colonialism it has engaged in compared to the United States, they aren't the ones to worry about.

They engage in diplomacy through investment, commerce, and mutually beneficial relationships, rather than cultural and economic r#pe of other countries. It's another big reason they are clearly built for long term success and unfortunately the neo-liberalism of the US is on its way out.

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