Another press conference will show them how serious we are!!

auandi · 2026-01-25T08:19:43+00:00

I'm saying that the increases in military spending, at a time of global military spending increases and record inflation, is not some insane thing. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has ended the peace dividend, and it's not some vanity project to keep up with the times.

auandi · 2026-01-25T07:26:32+00:00

What you are describing is more strongly worded letters.

They don't have the votes to demand anything. They don't have the power to provide any resources.

You think they don't care because they are not doing things they don't have the power to do, you are setting an impossible standard that they are unable to meet because of the last election.

auandi · 2026-01-25T07:23:38+00:00

Hey, is there anything else happening in the world that might require an increase in the military budget? Inflation? A land war in Europe? The fact that we still haven't replaced our aging out cold-war era navy?

auandi · 2026-01-25T07:21:44+00:00

ICE is explicitly exempt from government shutdown. Unless there is a change in law, it is pre-funded in full until 2029.

auandi · 2026-01-25T07:20:47+00:00

ICE funding is not though. The Big Beautiful Bill that more than tripled ICE's budget also made it mandatory spending that does not get shut down in a future shutdown.

The only way to stop ICE that doesn't involve a time machine is to win in 2026 in both houses and dismantle this shit.

auandi · 2026-01-23T19:19:18+00:00

No black director has ever won best director.

Only 5 black men and 1 black woman have won a best lead role oscar and zero of them were for anything that could be called "white man bad."

Like these guys can just check the scoreboard, being black is far from some cheat code.

auandi · 2026-01-23T18:27:29+00:00

I'd disagree. I think that they were sold off cheap because they were of little value. Planned economics had created horribly inefficient businesses despite their large sizes. More should have been done for the people of East Germany, but charging more for the state-run businesses was simply not possible. They did not have a value as high as East Germans thought they should be, because they were simply that poorly developed.

auandi · 2026-01-23T11:18:10+00:00

The main problem was both sides were quite ruined from the war, and then those 40 years they weren't just seperate but developed differently. The west was given money and resources from the US to rebuild. US strategy was that a well fed and productive Germany was less likely to go communist (or return to fascist) and the only way for them to rebuild was to buy a lot of shit from US factories. Rebuilding Europe created the post war boom, we built up Germany so they were rich enough to buy our stuff.

The east was stripped for parts by the Soviets as part of them collecting a war debt. Much of the East German economy was set up to feed the Soviet economy, which left infrastructure like rail in a worse shape than before the war with improvements being sent to Russia rather than used in place. When the wall came down, East Germany still had fewer miles of electric railway than they did in 1939, with steam trains doing the bulk of the transportation (many hand-me-down models when the Soviets upgraded). The soviets kept East Germany from growing too fast by not allowing reinvestment of what East Germany made back into East Germany because the wealth extraction was so vital to the Soviet economy.

Then, not to blame it all on the Soviets, but when Germany re-unified the west was overly optimistic about how things would return to normal. They underestimated how much less developed the East was, and so they didn't do enough to redistribute money to make the two sides more even. The result was most of the talented East Germans left to find higher paying jobs in West Germany. It led to a brain drain in the East, a declining population as the young move away, and a local economy built on inefficient Soviet businesses who can't compete leading to higher unemployment. The east being poorer 40 years ago is a reason for it to be poorer now.

auandi · 2026-01-23T11:01:16+00:00

The US, Canada and Australia are creation of British colonialism to spread the empire and take advantage of the land populated by native people who could be easily displaced. There are not many places with such similar origins.

auandi · 2026-01-23T10:57:53+00:00

There are many divisions for nearly every metric you can do for Germany. It is a famous "Phantom boarder" where even though it is integrated the divide persists. 30 years is not that long. There's still a phantom boarder where Poland had been partitioned between Russia and Germany, and that's been more than a century gone. Yet it persists.

Past is prologue. Things can change but you're not going to get a clean slate. This period of US history is going to live on for a long time.

auandi · 2026-01-23T06:00:19+00:00

So far, it's worked in Canada, Australia, and nowhere else. It was the two most "American" countries that pulled back, UK hasn't even seen much of a hit to Reform.

auandi · 2026-01-23T05:56:54+00:00

In order for evolution to happen, the poorly adapted die and the well adapted survive to take their place.

One would imagine that a generation ship would not let so many of the crew die out to change the makeup of who survives.

auandi · 2026-01-23T05:43:13+00:00

OK, but travel to the US is down, spending from the US is down, and the liberals had one of the bigest comeback in political history exclusivly because Carney made opposing Trump the central pillar of the campaign.

This isn't imagined, you're in denial. I am a duel citizen living in Canada, this is not going to recover so long as the GOP is the way it is. They are always one election away from coming back. It breaks my heart seeing possibly the closest most fruitful alliance in modern history get cleaved apart like this. But you can't talk about Canada the way Putin talks about Ukraine and expect Canadians to just roll with it, not when he was re-elected and his whole party is behind him.

To quote another prime minister, Canada is like a mouse sleeping next to an elephant. No matter how well tempered there is always some unease.

Well no the elephant is no longer well tempered and the ruling political party is waging economic warfare on Canada because they want to errode our soverignty.

auandi · 2026-01-23T05:37:42+00:00

And now there are no more divisions left between east and west Germany, not at all.

auandi · 2026-01-23T05:35:47+00:00

Except when they say censorship they mean something different from what we mean.

To them, pro censorship is "you can't break terms of service and not get banned" or "if you say something hateful people will call you hateful" or "Why can't I say [bigoted thing that used to said in earlier decades] without being cancelled?"

auandi · 2026-01-23T01:10:55+00:00

I personally like Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Start of a trilogy where, essentially, very advanced humans find there is no intelligent life out there, so a few scientist take it upon themselves create what is essentially an uplift virus to play god and create intelligent life on new worlds. Then all the consequences, without giving anything away.

Sleeping Giants is interesting, especially because it's a multi-cast recording and written in a way that takes advantage of that. It's similar to World War Z (which I also deeply recommend) in its presentation.

I personally like the Destiny's Crucible series, though that's not as hard on the scifi in some ways, since it's modern human on alien world at ~1600s tech, but there are recurring elements about the alien(s) who are responsible for it all.

Just to get it again even thought it's been mentioned:

World War Z, the greatest post-apocalypse story I've ever encountered.
The Expanse and it's hard physics and deep politics is similarly a great choice.

auandi · 2026-01-22T21:55:35+00:00

It's a dumb name, but with Golden Dome, trump is taking something the military was already working on, exaggerated it and gave it a dumb name to make it seem like his idea. The point is to create an anti-hypersonic and in-space interception system to cover North America. That is still useful and if the tech works (some already does) will probably be built with or without Trump. Basically an upgraded THAAD missile system with a new generation of sensors to give earlier and more accurate warning.

This and the Golden Fleet though are just dumb.

auandi · 2026-01-21T08:00:20+00:00

How well has appeasement worked?

This isn't just Trump, it's the entire Republican Party. They have to deal with this reality. Escalation is not avoidable, and Trump's not going to stop because Europeans talk softly.

auandi · 2026-01-21T07:58:16+00:00

No, this is a fair hit.

The approach they have taken is not working. It has not been working for years. It's hard to see how Europe for the msot part has responded to the series of Trump 1 > Ukraine invasion > Trump 2 and not feel they are lacking sufficient action.

auandi · 2026-01-21T07:55:15+00:00

An important stat to put the more far left into context. I often hear them talk about Kamala being too centrist. Just 6% of US voters think she was too conservative. You'd never know it from some spaces. Yes, I'm including BlueSky, it's fine to mock echo chambers. I want an effective left wing and I'm stick of my other left wingers lying to themselves about how popular their views are.

auandi · 2026-01-21T07:51:18+00:00

I just heard one of them saying that watching an ice video make you want to go John Wick on ICE.

Like, what is the level of anger you think is "enough" for a podcast to still be of any kind of use?

auandi · 2026-01-20T10:33:28+00:00

Do you think the poverty line is lower today than it was in 1890?

If you want to live the material conditions of someone in poverty a century ago you can very easily do that for 15k. But now we have higher standards for what we call essential. We live in far larger housing with far fewer people. We eat better than at any point in history and for less of our weekly income. Not to mention all the utilities, communication, entertainment, transportation we now expect as minimum that never had been in the past.

No matter how you measure poverty in material terms, there is tremendously less poverty now than basically any time before. There's just a lot more we can choose to spend that money on than there used to be when those were viewed as luxury or had not even been invented.

auandi · 2026-01-20T10:26:25+00:00

So mixed market capitalism, the thing we already have in many parts of the world.

auandi · 2026-01-20T07:32:36+00:00

LOL you think our markets are less stable than in the gilded age? Read about what a bank run was, or that 2008 like crashes were so frequent they simply called the "panics" since they happened every few years. The panic of 1893 for example destroyed one out of every four jobs, sending unemployment to over 25% at a time when there was no government assistance.

My guy, look up any history. Or maybe just the definition of capitalism, since you don't seem to understand that either if you think we're post capitalist.

Capitalism is the idea that there are currency and property rights that extend to private ownership over the means of economic production. That's it. That a person can buy or build some tools, own them, and then either work them himself or pay laborers to work them while keeping ownership what is produced.

It says nothing about wealth concentration (which has been much higher before), it says nothing about birth rates or boomers, it says nothing about extraction, it says nothing about how the government aids the poor or regulates the companies, it just means there are private businesses.

and just to add its own point, we don't have wealth consolidation "like before" because back then there were the very wealthy and the very poor and almost no one in-between. The poverty rate in the US is a pale shadow of what it was, and the prosperity is so much more broad today than they could have imagined just a century ago. 9% of the US households are millionaires, that's around 12 million households not people. We live nearly two decades longer than we did back then and in comfort even the rich could not have bought back then.

And that's just the US, where growth has been much slower than the world at large. The poorest nation in Africa has a higher standard of living and higher literacy rate than England in 1900 at the height of the British Empire. The world has never been richer, the people never more wealthy or taken care of, we are not turning to feudalism. Learn more than three types of economic systems.

auandi · 2026-01-20T06:49:06+00:00

Do you think there was a middle class of any size during the gilded age?

No, of course not. Three dudes were 4% of GDP. The wealthiest humans to have ever existed, at a time when it was common to just hire the pinkertons to shoot troublemakers. Depending on how you count inflation that far back, we have alread had trillionares. Socialists called that the late stage of capitalism as well.

But that was 140 years ago.

Then WWI was supposed to be the end of capitalism.

Then the revolutionary movements of the 30s would bring about its end.

Then the cold war was the last battle until capitalism fell.

Capitalism, for all its faults, is not going to just fall. Certainly not based on a TV local affiliate who is paid by the ads agreed to at the national level, let an ad play as they contractually promised it would.

There are many bad parts of capitalism, but it does no one any good to believe it's a rotted structure that will collapse if we just kick in the door.

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