Maybe we need annual driving compentency tests for all people, this would incentivise better driving for all, maybe get more people off the road and improve our cities, and stop people who can’t see properly from driving. Maybe use some of the registration fees for cars for bus or shuttle services for the elderly to get around and do things.

I am getting that yellow bastard vibes from that guy.

I hate how relevant this appears to be to daily life.

First of all, how do you not have diabetes drinking that much Kool-Aid? Second if a serial rapist rapes a serial killer who is the good guy between the two of them? Trump claims to have very different support numbers than reality shows and in a dictatorship being publicly against the regime is a great way to accidentally fall out of a window down and onto a bunch of bullets or somehow get polonium poisoning for some reason. A whataboutism is a great way to distract from the issues at hand but just because the US has a bunch of issues with democracy doesn’t mean china doesn’t have issues, and denying them with state propaganda (an appeal to authority) with arguable levels of factuality doesn’t negate the issue.

Don’t look at the Uyghur and Tibetan genocides behind the mirror. Look any country that ce realizes power in the hands of few will inevitably have that power used in terrible and stupid ways, you see that with the supreme court and the current president of the US, but you definitely saw it with the Stalin and Mao regimes back in the day and Xi isn’t that much better. Just because you aren’t aware of their expansionish and international bullying tendancies doesn’t mean they don’t exist. You can say that the current US government is bad and still be right about the CCP being bad as well. The best government is one that is responsive to its peoples needs and even if you ignore the genocides above just look at how Xi’s government handled lockdowns where they literally welded people into their apartments to stop the spread of covid, the crackdown on Hong Kong’s protests and free speech over their elected representatives being decided by the CCP and not the people of Hong Kong, the land grabs in northern India, the territorial claims in the south china sea, and all this while their country is suffering a severe economic crisis created by the government central planning and how properties are managed in china. Is there good in China? Yes they have a vibrant tech industry that is able to upgrade GPUs on the fly with more ram or build custom Iphones for example but that doesn’t stop the fact that private messages are scraped and purged if they don’t comport with the allowed speech from the CCP.

You might think that means I like the current way things are going stateside but that would be wrong, with tech giants asking for legal ID for using your own hardware, for backdoors in encrypted messaging, for you no longer being able to own what you bought and paid for, means that freedom and privacy seems to be commodities that the rich and powerful, no matter the type of government, don’t want you to have. I can guarantee that the fact that we can’t get universal healthcare in the US has a similar issue in china that they would love to have access to and wouldn’t be hard to implement but would mean that CCP control would be lessened, be it freedom of speech (see Tineman Square protests), freedom of assembly (the same), freedom of movement (see covid restrictions where people were welded into their apartments and certain regions of china (not just military instillations, where people can’t enter or leave such as Xinjiang).

In short China is what it has always been a land empire in east Asia who forces homogenity in their culture and doesn’t like dissent, but promotes education for at least the ruling class and usually becomes too top heavy and collapses in on itself into civil war that kills millions.

I’m not saying they do, but to assume that Iran transferred all data on how to produce a Shahed drone without some kind of ensurance that they will keep getting paid out in some form and not just forgotten the moment being friends with Iran is inconvenient for Russia is a graver error to commit. They may not be being paid in money but before this current bombing campaign I’m sure Russia was transferring the minimum they could get away with to Iran without hampering their own technologly transfer for the drones. All dictatorial governments (call them small coalition governments for more accuracy for this discussion as all brands of autocracy have their own rules but rely on a small group of people to run the government with loyalty to the ruler being paramount) have a corruption issue, be it Russia with their crony Oligarchy or Iran who has a specific group of people who handle the money for the country and can never be legally prosecuted for money disappearing from the government coffers. If we can know for sure that both of those governments have corruption issues we can also surmise that pocketing as much money as they can is going to be a part of their governments standard operating procedure and to avoid being robbed if they have a licensing agreement they will have physical impedements to avoid the licensing infringement, and they are not the only people to do this the F-35 for all exports except for 1 have a similar scheme in place.

While they may produce most of the components for the drones Iran probably kept some production parts homegrown to ensure Russia pays their licensing fees. That doesn’t mean Russia can’t make their entirely homegrown production line from beginning to end but that would take time when most of the production line was set up on Iran and they could purchase those components for their production run. Even if that isn’t a factor in a shooting war you probably want the maximum production of weapons needed to continue shooting.

Yeah it’s probably like corruption the optimal number isn’t 0 but as close as we can get without hamstringing society. Make it just hard enough so that those who would do it if it was easy can’t do it easily and then you have 90% less corruption. Think of it like piracy, it was big in the 2000’s when buying DVDs was a thing and storage was getting cheap but record labels and studios were not able to update their business model and the easiest way to get most media for the average user was something like Napster. When streaming came along and Netflix had a massive catalogue and was better in every way to cable and same with music streaming platforms at first piracy almost stopped completely and is only coming back due to enshitification. We need to implement a model like Netflix streaming which aligns incentives for politicians to make good policies and not sell out the country from under us for personal gain by making said decisions have actual negative and immediate consequences, be it trading in the stock market while in office or for a ster period of 2 terms after they serve their time in office, being a lobbyist for a set amount of time before or after presenting themselves as a candidate, and enforcing an open period after a law is drafted for public review and ability to lodge complaints and a 2-4 year reassessment of the law to see if it is actually doing what it was set out to do or not and repeal it if not (with exceptions for laws that govern long term policy such as schools where it can take 14 years for the policy to actually show concrete results.

I think it is usually multiples of 10 as well so for example I-5 runs from the border in San Diego (or close enough) to the border with Canada. I-10 runs from LA in California to Jacksonville Florida, smaller routs ending in 2, 4, 6, or 8 are small sections that terminate a few towns over usually or connectthe bigger highways to eachother.

I mean yes it raises gas prices which will help Russia on the one hand but for their war in Ukraine that may not be as big a help as having Iran still standing and putting political pressure on NATO assets as well as being a weapons manufacturing hub that Ukraine couldn’t easily infiltrate and bomb.

But that would make sense and be an effective way of making laws and governing and more importantly would stop those who haven’t meaningfully added to society from being able to easily profit from it in a way that others can’t.

I think Windows is trying their best to make windows as unappealing as possible and Google seems to want to do the same with Android. If there isn’t a slow trickle of people to Mac or Linux for computers and things like Iphone, graphene OS, or Linux mobile for cell phones and tablets I would be very surprised.

Yeah one of my favorite ones is how donkeys and horses can mate for mules but some of those mules will be able to make with either eachother or one of the two parent species but not both, but most mules are infertile.