I mean, I agree about the fearmongering, but the comparison is off.
1947 was significantly safer than 2024 precisely because the USSR had tested successfully. If the US was the only country with nuclear weapons, it would have nuked the USSR, China, and a dozen other countries by now. This is how the US operates with technological advantages (when it still had them); From the air, from afar, safe on its big little island on the other side of the globe.
But today, it no longer has that advantage, and it's a dying empire, which in 1947 clearly it wasn't. Dying empires get desperate, especially after the loss of technological supremacy; all of its geopolitical rivals have hypersonics now, the US can't get one off the ground. It's been doing every desperate thing it can to extend the neocolonial party another few years. This is way more dangerous.
like trillion dollar bank bailouts, subsidies awarded through ruinous competition among jurisdictions, trillions and trillions of dollars of defense spending for which the government will invent endless wars.. like that?
what? no. Government money is a direct pipe to transnational corporations and the billionaires that run it. Welfare payments are peanuts compared to it.
Also, while they save all the expenses on staff, meaning, gradually destroying hotel staff jobs, too.
Airbnb: all the price of a regular hotel without the staff or attention.
also strangely missing from this discussion about the supposed outrages of pricing when you round, and losing 0.1 or 0.2% in cash payments, is that credit card companies will charge that gas station is a bit over 2%. So no matter what coin you abolish, the gas station comes out on top on the cash payment, even if it's the quarter. It'd still come out on top if it was the dollar bill/coin for bills under $200, so, pretty much always.
but then, why do they not take no for an answer and keep nagging about it, and interpret "never" as "not in the next two weeks, but ask again, please!" if they don't have an interest in having these messages there?
(and no, "it's to help YOU, the hapless user! is of course never the right answer. Corporations never do things for users without an interest of their own.)
I thought the opposite, at least as a first thought: Roughly two or three years ago, facebook announced their intent to integrate their messengers - so that you could send a message from your fb inbox to whatsapp, from whatsapp to instagram. And since whatsapp has E2E as a major part of their marketing, I'd think adding it to FB and IG rather than removing it from WA would be the way to go.
(though of course it's not REALLY: it harasses you to backup your messages all the freaking time, and when I say "never", as I ALWAYS do, it asks again in 2 weeks. I assume once they're backed up on Meta's servers, there goes the encryption. But that's a parlor trick and they STILL have that data, as I assume at least 80% back up anyway and the rest is mostly worn down by the constant prompting.)
then the US would declare it part of the "rules-based order" that nobody may use guns and bullets, and then the US will use guns, bullets, missiles, and chemical weapons while expressing grave concerns about any non-allied state using as much as a musket.
and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives.
I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in.
But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.
also, you can propagandize quite well with something that contains no lies. The current discourse conflates "propaganda" with "lie", but of course that's .. well, part of propaganda. The best ways to rile up a mass is to tell them verifiable things, but in selective ways, leaving out context, leaving out history, leaving out ambiguities; it would be hard to claim the information is "wrong" on its face, but it's still wrong simply because of what it leaves out.
I have no idea, I can never remember, it makes no logical sense - no, 12 noon is NOT post-meridian, it IS meridian. I usually go 11:59 or 12:01, and then I'm still not sure if it doesn't put the entire hour in some interdimensional hole where this doesn't make sense.
I've encountered software that just assumes everyone MUST have a middle name. I'm German, I have no middle name. Some software (well, online forms) make this a "hard" assumption, so you have to put an "X" or something in the middle name field; it'll scream otherwise
I have a feeling there's a but of point-missing going on. The authors are not really getting paid for their work; modern copyright is a get-rich-cheme for rights-holding corporations. (I write 13 books and netted a few hundred for it. All the rest was bagged by the publishers.)
Resisting paywalls is not resisting the idea that the authors should get something for their work. It's resisting an double exploitation structure, where networks monopolize, enshittify, and bleed dry everyone they can get their hands on - authors, readers, advertisers, subjects, everyone.
That this is so is easily shown_ take structures where the actual authors get paidm and people pay voluntarily. Patreon is still a fairly good example for this: people do their work, put it online for free, and people still pay for it (and some bonus content), for the joy of listening to it/watching it/whatever.
The lemonade stand put all the other stands out of business ...
who all got lemonade delivered for free by a million lemonade aficionados who wanted to share their lemonade with the world, for which YouTube showed the lemonade drinkers ads while pickpocketing all the documents in their wallet and copying them, also throwing buckets of lemonade in the trash because it wasn't the officially approved taste of lemonade, some other lemonade claimed there was a hint of taste that "copied" theirs, or for no stated reason at all, just dumped it, sorry, "terms and conditions", which.. we'll never tell you.
1947 was significantly safer than 2024 precisely because the USSR had tested successfully. If the US was the only country with nuclear weapons, it would have nuked the USSR, China, and a dozen other countries by now. This is how the US operates with technological advantages (when it still had them); From the air, from afar, safe on its big little island on the other side of the globe.
But today, it no longer has that advantage, and it's a dying empire, which in 1947 clearly it wasn't. Dying empires get desperate, especially after the loss of technological supremacy; all of its geopolitical rivals have hypersonics now, the US can't get one off the ground. It's been doing every desperate thing it can to extend the neocolonial party another few years. This is way more dangerous.