You can discuss any war you like in any forum that will discuss this subject.

The national media wherever you are will discuss certain conflicts and maybe strive others but the attention will really be elsewhere. As humans we have a limited attention span. Until last decade we had outsourced the sorting of importance to editors in newsrooms. With social media it’s been a hybrid of editors and algorithms. A lot of algorithms are fed by traditional, trusted news organisations so the biases persist. This is very generalized but I would describe the formula like this: far away, no oil, no business interests? No news.

Also, people like having opinions. But there is also an ignorance level the majority of people will stay under. You’ll always have a-holes that just parrot stuff unreflected. They live these days mostly but not exclusively on Xwitter. I’m not talking about those guys. The more level headed will not want to discuss certain things for lack of knowledge.

On Lemmy, you’ll find more level headed people that are influenced by biases that persist in the Anglosphere - we speak English after all. Also, people are not willing to walk into wood chippers. There is no comment on the internet that doesn’t have the potential to trigger a shit storm.

Journalism is also about narrative. Aung San Suu Kyi’s journey from imprisoned freedom fighter to de facto head of government, to looking away from genocide - the hero journey was aborted and with it attention waned. Most white people don’t want to look too closely at Africa for fear of finding contemporary conflicts with their roots in the era of colonisation. Since our attention is limited, those are the conflicts we gladly let go of first. Also, we need to stay focused on whether or not an octogenarian shat himself in Washington.

This is not a picture of you, right? Maybe you didn’t doxx her but there is really no need to continue this being spread online for a post in this forum.

If by r-word you mean resplendent than have at it! Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

The other ones I mentioned.

That’s ucked fup.

China’s biggest denomination is CNY 100 or about USD 15. India pulled its largest denomination bill from circulation maybe 5 years ago. The US stopped doing anything above USD 100 a while ago. Bigger denominations are a counterfeit and bribery risk.

Nobody cares about the Swiss Franc in cash outside of Switzerland. There are 10 million or thereabouts Swiss people. All the other currencies are used in much larger populations, three-figure millions at the lower end.

Because the earth doesn’t stop turning and somebody will always be asleep.

WhatsApp used to cost money until then Facebook bought it.

Delightful. Tardy is an excellent musician that just won’t die, will he.

but would an EU-style freedom of movement remove that by allowing citizens of both Canada and US cross freely…?

Captain Obvious says yes.

It should be noted that not all that glitters is gold. At various times, Schengen member countries have reinstated border checks. Not at every border crossing but randomly checking people. Often unfortunately in accordance with the Family Guy police stop meme Pantone skin color chart. Germany is doing it at great cost as an internal political maneuver. Italy is doing it to people coming from Spain post the run on Ceuta. At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis every EU country along the way did it. Free movement is the first victim of anti-immigration politics everywhere. There is an argument to be made that this lofty ideal inked on paper in the 90s was too lofty for its own good in a realpolitik kind of way.

Given the current US administration and the crap they’re pulling on their friendly neighbours to the north there is no way this will happen. This century, if I had to put a time frame on it. This is what happens when the toddlers run diplomacy. Earning respect takes ages, losing it takes no time at all.

If you listen very closely, you can hear the world’s smallest fiddle being played in the distance.

Is this our various currency questions sock puppet? Asking insane questions or incredibly boring ones they answer themselves?

Which is it?

I may be white, sensitive, and full of bullshit. But I’m not American!

I don’t dispute the stats. I think you are trying to convince me of the usefulness of a rail network. That’s unnecessary. I already think that.

Keeping in mind how car focused the US is, I don’t think they would tunnel through the Appalachians or run track over the Rockies today if somebody hadn’t thought to build out a rail network more than a century ago. Because that’s a counterfactual statement, it’s only an opinion.

Sensitive? WTF do you mean sensitive? I’m not sensitive. Thank you for rage baiting with us today.

Let me say up front that I’m very much in favor of democratic socialism. When I now try to disabuse you of two points in your comment, it’s not for ideological reasons. It’s more of a gut feeling about how politics, and especially politics in the US works.

Mandani works in NYC. A politician like that wouldn’t work in Wisconsin or Louisiana. Probably not even in California. That is not to say people wouldn’t benefit from more left leaning politics in those places. But they wouldn’t get elected into high enough offices in sufficient numbers to drive change. There is the US hangover from the cold war that reflexively makes anything with socialism a turnoff for the poorly educated masses (the irony!). And the power of religious belief, especially monotheistic religions, favors right wing authoritarians. The Midwest is too religious for its own good. NYC is the outlier.

MAGAs don’t vote on track record. It’s vibe based and that vibe is obnoxiously trying to own their opponents. The fact that 47 is ruining the US"s standing in the world, the economy, and all unwritten political norms that had underpinned the republic are not as important as fucking with the libs. 47 may be at the end of his political career, somebody is going to take over and continue on this path. You can’t fight feelings with facts. And you can’t drive change without getting enough socialists into office everywhere.

yet many a European would take issue with your US centric viewpoint on rail :)

That’s because virtually nobody got rich off of trains in Europe. They would have all been reasonably regulated and their incomes reasonably taxed. And rail was used to connect places in Europe that already existed and often already had roads connecting them. There was no “wilderness to conquer.” That’s what sets the US railroad apart from their old world counterparts. And as far as cargo is concerned, a lot of it may run on rails. But that’s because it’s already there. They wouldn’t build a new network today. And the infrastructure that survived this far isn’t exactly in good shape.

I agree with you. I still think somebody is going to do something with the compute capacity that hasn’t burned up in cycles to train models to create Yoda with a six-fingered hand. And somebody will find something worth doing with these models. It probably won’t be search, or writing, or making graphics for your PowerPoint. But I think video creation, be it for Hollywood or video games, will be here to stay and be potentially profitable. There will be a use in coding although probably no profit. I’m still hoping for good uses in medicine and pharmacology as well. And as aids to people with disabilities there are probably very good use cases as well. And they are the richest people on this planet so there is a Ferengi level of profit there. /s, of course.

The digitization of books will be useful as well.

In the end, the ROI for so-called AI will be inked in red. And the US will enter a recession, which will give us MAGA 3.0. So invasion of Greenland ca. 2034?

A thing that gets overlooked often is that being the first in a field is often quite bad for business. Apple learned that lesson. They didn’t make the first smartphone, tablet, or mp3 player. They waited for other people to be first and then iterated well on that.

The people who financed laying the train tracks that became the economic arteries of North America (along with robbing more land and pushing out the people who already lived there) didn’t become rich. The second generation that ran logistics and passengers was way more likely to become rich. They didn’t have to pay for the infrastructure but they benefited from it being there.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, the son of the South African emerald miners, Google, etc. They’re just laying tracks right now. The conglomerates that don’t rely only on so-called AI have a chance to survive. All the other ones are going to run out of money and/or get bought and taken over. The real winner of the industry probably hasn’t even made it to the starting line.

Training models takes a big investment and then becomes difficult to protect against people who will just try to copy and steal it. In a way, I think world history will look at the US as the first generation track layers. You built the data centers at ridiculous cost, both in hardware and negative consequences for people and the environment, and then get out-iterated by all the people who didn’t want to jump on to the hype train three years ago or couldn’t foot the bill at the time. The cost decreases the longer you wait. US companies think they are investing into future long-tern licensing agreements to use their yet unknown products. I think that’s dumb and isn’t going to happen.

I think Apple will benefit from their lean back and wait approach. They will look at where this stuff consolidates into something useful and then just buy it.

Edit: Forgot this point: most of the train tracks have become redundant in the age of airplanes. The infrastructure is decaying. Data centers may become overgrown train tracks faster than we expect.