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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I lived in the UK back during Brexit and the only people who said that “the BBC is Leftwing” were the English Far-Right - in fact that kind of stuff started (or at least became “mainstream” enough to be noticeable) at around that time and then was picked up by the Far-Right populist side of the Tory Party during the Leave Referendum.

    They’re a posh kind of Rightwing, so far more subtle than loudmouths like Farage, Boris Johnson and Trump, but it didn’t take me long after coming to live in the UK (a decade before Brexit) to notice how much to the Right they were (not even Center-Right) from their fawning coverage of the Monarchy, almost invariably positive spin on the “upper” classes and the ultra-wealthy and heavy nationalist take on all foreign affairs (they almost invariably spinned it as “other countries are listening to Britain” when the same news in foreign media barely if at all mentioned Britain).

    Certainly the core message from the BBC was always that “the System is good as it is, be proud of it” and “don’t make waves”, in a country which is highly unequal and has pretty low Social Mobility when compared to the rest of Europe.

    Also remember how, well before they had any meaningful impact, the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson got way more airtime in the BBC than, say, the leader of the Greenparty.

    Brexit didn’t happen by chance: the fields were Far-Right Nationalism flourished had been long plowed by amongst others the BBC.



  • It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.








  • If the information never leaves the device then it doesn’t need a policy - privacy is not about what an app does in the device which never leaves the device hence never gets shared, it’s about what it shares with a 3rd party.

    A clock doesn’t need to send system time settings information to a server since that serves no purpose for it - managing that is all done at the OS level and the app just uses what’s there - and that’s even more so for location data since things like determining the timezone are done by the user at the OS level, which will handle stuff like prompting the user to update the timezone if, for example, it detects the device is now in a different timezone (for example, after a long trip).



  • It makes no sense because most of Twitter’s business is outside the US - even if Trump wins, which would be indicative of of a majority of American voters chosing him (maybe not even that given how the US voting system works), that would still only strengthen Nazi-bar Twitter amongst about 100 million people and do very little about the rest, plus those 100 million not being in average the very educated or afluent probably means that it wouldn’t attract most of the biggest and higher spending advertisers.

    In other words, strengthening it’s Nazi-bar nature isn’t exactly a strategically sound thing for a business that tries to cater for a large proportion of the people online all over the World and then make money by selling access to them to advertisers.

    Also, as we seen with Truth Social, targetting the MAGA crowd can’t really sustain a big online business even with the endorsment of the MAGA-in-chief.



  • Couldn’t agree more.

    The Economy (namelly GDP) is a deeply flawed metric when what one wants is The Greatest Good For The Greatest Number (the basic Leftwing principle), since it’s a Trade-centric metric hence measures just one part of the human experience and even that done in a pretty unrepresentative way - either countrywide numbers that ignore the proportion of it per people are used or when we do get per-capita numbers they’re based on mean values (that suffer from the “if 1 guy has 10 chickens and 9 have 0 chickens, then in average each has 1 chicken” problem) never the mode which is the one that best covers most people’s experience.

    The point about housing is especially puignant because it’s how a lot of GDP “growth” was fabricated during the last couple of decades: house prices go up which is counted as more raw GDP but the house price Inflation (which is the entirety of that price raise, as there was no actual improvement of the houses themselves) is not counted in the Inflation index used to Deflate the raw GDP to create the supposedly inflation-free Real GDP (the official one) so house price increases make that figure which has been made politically important look good whilst the thing is not at all good - the value of a house has no utility value for those who live in it (who would have to sell the house to realize it but also buy another one at equally inflated prices so ultimatelly gain nothing from high prices) whilst it presents a massive problem for those who don’t own their own house (also because rent prices follow house prices) with, for example, the situation in Portugal that the average age a person leaves their parents’ home is 34 and half the people who graduate with a Degree leave the country because salaries are low and cost of living (which for a recent graduate is more than half housing) are very high in proportion to it, something that’s also causing lower birth rates in one of the most aged countries in the World since people have children later and don’thave as much available money to pay for the costs of them, hence have fewer (in average below the number that’s necessary to keep the population number steady).

    GDP goes up but homeowners saw no improvement since their house is not in fact any better and in some cases are even worse of because if they want to get a better house - say, to get a room for their children - the difference they have to pay in price between the old one and new one is larger, whilst those who do not own their house have to pay larger rents, so have less free money for other things since salaries have not gone up anywhere as fast. Only “investors” are better of from this, and they’re a tiny fraction of Society (and here in Portugal a large part, if not most, don’t even live here, so they’re not even in this Society).

    And this is just one thing were The Economy and how it’s measured is unrepresentative. Don’t get me started on Ecology and how Nature is treated in this has having little or no value for people.


  • Alfred Nobel never created a Nobel Prize for Economics.

    Instead what there is is the Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is not a Nobel Prize but they convinced the Nobel Committee (using a lot of $$$) to treat it as one.

    Now, I don’t know if this guy is right or if he is wrong, but trying the whole Appeal To Authority thing using a “Nobel Prize” which is no such thing to throw some generic criticism on other Political models has a strong whiff of Propaganda.

    PS: Also his arguments are very much cherry picking. For example I’m Portuguese and calling European Integration a “remarkable success story” for Portugal is hilarious - the actual reality was that Portugal grew massively when it kicked out Fascism (and the country was very Leftwing back then, so for example invested massively in Education and created a National Healthcare System) accelerated a bit when it joined the EU (because the money the EU sent to help with integration of what was then one of the poorest countries in the EU added up to a significant fraction of the GDP), then braked hard when the EURO came to be, culminating in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash with the country’s Economy significantly shrinking and the Troika coming over and forcing Austerity (which later even Cristine Lagarde admited was “the wrong thing to do”) and forced Privatization of actual profit-making state companies creating veritable anchors around the neck of the Economy in the country (for example, Telecoms are compared to average incomes very expensive in Portugal, a “rent” borne by the rest of the Economy which pulls down for example small businesses and kills business opportunities that rely on widespread digital access). Looking back all the best things that were done for Portugal were very much Leftwing such as investment in quality Public Education, a National Health Service and large programs of public housing (which were stopped decades ago, so now we have a giant house price bubble).

    It wasn’t Capitalism that pulled Portugal out of the shitter, it was kicking out the Fascists and basically Social Democracy (and I don’t mean in the Portuguese Social Democrat Party, who are hard right with have nothing at all to do with the actual ideology in the name of the party), topped up with charity from the EU (in a way good while it lasted but then again went into all the wrong things, so the country has disgracefully bad rail-service everywhere but the North-South between the two main cities but lots and lots of underused highways built with that money).



  • You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.

    Even if (and it’s a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to “get back to its roots” to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own “going back to its roots” in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.

    Sure, they’ll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly “go back to their roots”, but it will take several electoral cycles.

    Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.

    One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).

    The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.

    The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they’re stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.


  • Whilst the first paragraph does make some sense, it presumes that in such a situation the Republicans would not conclude it’s the style of the candidate rather than his ideas that caused the rout. That might be a little optimist considering that the traditional Republicans’ were just as far right economically before and almost as right in Moral issues, but they had a different style of candidate (remember Reagan?).

    It might also be a little optimist to expect an absolute walloping of anybody, Republican or Democrat.

    That said, it’s a valid scenario, though it relies on very low probability events.

    The second paragraph is inconsistent with every single thing the Democrats have done in their pre-electoral propaganda, from the whole “vote us or get Trump” (something which wouldn’t scare the Right) to the raft of pre-election promises on Left-wing subjects like student debt forgiveness or tightening regulations on giants such as Telecoms a little bit. If they really thought they could win with only votes stolen from the Right, they would be making promises which appeal to the Right, not the Left.

    Besides, the whole idea that Rightwing voters would go for the less-Rightwing party rather than the more-Rightwing party is hilarious: why go for the copy if you can get the real deal?

    From what I’ve seen in other countries were Center-Left Parties totally dropped their appeal to the Left and overtly went to appeal to the Right, they got pummeled because the Maths don’t add up and, as I said above, Rightwing votes will choose the “genuine article” over the “wannabes”.

    It’s not by chance that in Europe even whilst becoming full-on Neoliberal parties, Center-Left parties maintained a leftwing discourse and would throw a bone to the Left once in a while (say, minimum wage raises) when in government.


  • Three points:

    • Biden and Harris are right now with their actions physically supporting the Genocide. Trump talks about supporting the Genocide even more. Well, guess what: Trump lies shamelessly (as the Democrat propaganda here doesn’t stop reminding us of in everything but, “strangely”, not this subject) and isn’t even competent when it comes to actual execution. So on one side we have an absolute certainty that the candidate supports the Genocide and on the other one we have a probability that its so based on the statements of a known liar. I would say the claims that Trump is worse on this are doing a lot of relying on Trump’s word (on this subject alone) in order to elevate his evilness of this above that of people who are actually, right now, shamelessly and unwaveringly supporting the Genocide with actual actions.
    • If the Leadership of Democrat Party manages to whilst refusing to walk back on their active support of a Genocide, win the election with a “otherwise it’s Trump” strategy, they will move even further to the Right because that confirms to them that they can do whatever they want and still keep in power. Now, keep in mind that the Democract Party leadership already supports Fascism (ethno-Fascism, even, which is the same kind as the Nazis practiced), so far only abroad (whilst Trump does support Fascism at home) so there isn’t much more to the Right of that before Fascism at home. You see, for a Leftie voting Democrat now will probably be the least bad option in the short term, but it’s very likely to be the worst option in the long term because it consolidates and even accelerates the move of the Democrat Party to the Right.
    • Some people simply put their moral principles above “yeah but” excuses and won’t vote for people supporting the mass murder of children.

    In summary:

    • Trump’s Genocide support is a probability based on his word, willingness and ability to fulfill it (i.e. his competence at doing it), whilst Harris’ is an actual proven fact with actions happening right now.
    • A vote for the Democrats whilst their policies are so far to the Right that they’re supporting modern Nazis with the very weapons they use to mass murder civilians of the “wrong” ethnicity, if it leads to a Harris victory will consolidate this de facto Far-Right status of the party and maintain momentum in going Rightwards. Voting like that is, IMHO, a Strategically stupid choice even if the case can be made (and that’s the entirety of what the Democrat propaganda here does) that Tactically it’s the least bad choice.
    • Some people can’t just swallow their moral principles, especially for making a choice which isn’t even a “choose a good thing” but actually a “choose a lesser evil”, and “Thou shall not mass murder thousands of babies” is pretty strong as moral principles go.