🇨🇦GreenBeard🇨🇦

You want the official answer or the somewhat more “woke” answer?

Technically, it doesn’t. Neurodivergent is a broad umbrella that means a number of different disorders. Including, but not limited to, autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, developmental prosopagnosia, developmental speech disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, dysnomia, intellectual disability, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Disorder (FASD), obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), sensory processing disorder, synesthesia, Tourette syndrome, and more.

Why do most people THINK it only means Autism and ADHD? They tend to get more media attention.

The “woke” bit is Autism and ADHD have been historically “male coded” disorders, while things like Bipolar, OCD, etc. were either female coded or gender neutral in popular culture. For a long time they didn’t even think women could have Autism or ADHD.

I for one don’t want to pretend I didn’t benefit from more pearl clutching over people’s “perfect baby boys” being a little atypical neurologically. I did, and it’s silly to pretend I didn’t. Also as one of the “Flagship” neurodivergences, I’m also more likely to end up in a MAHA gas chamber to “Purify the Gene Pool”, so there’s both upsides and downsides to penis-privilage, but at least people care which is more than some other spectra get.

The only way you believe that is how it works, is if you’re already buying into the framing of the “Anti-Woke”, “Anti-Empathy”, Anti-human. You’re imagining a world where it all begins and ends in Republican or Democrat.

I want you to think real hard. Most Democrats, can’t stand each other. There’s like half a dozen different factions, and the only thing that they all agree on, is we should probably not intentionally destroy our lives, homes, and futures, condemn our children to die and ultimately wipe humanity off the face of the Earth. We’re stuck, working with a bunch of idiots who keep undermining every positive thing we try to do, and I will stand with you always to oppose them someday. But right now, we have a bigger problem. Because this isn’t a fight between right and wrong. This is a fight between “Right, Wrong, Good, Bad, and Ugly” vs “The End of Everything”.

You’re right, Democrats aren’t a solution. They’re a stop-gap. They’re a play for time and we have to come up with a better answer in the meantime, because they will fail. Their true policy is they have no real policy because they are such a big tent they have no coherent message. They’re just opposed to ending everything.

So yeah, if you take the Republican framing of this being a clash of two principled, moral, coherent world views, it seems reasonable to say neither of them seem to fix anything. It’s not though. It’s the chaotic mess of everything that might be on one side, vs endless silence on the other.

Confused

Targeting systems

Drones

bigger heavier equipment capabilities

Bigger Drones

nimbleness over odd terrain

Drones

Under no circumstances is walking better than flying, tactically. Once you introduce airborne combat, a mech loses all tactical benefit. Tanks/mobile artillery? Sure, that you can justify, mostly because it’s low profile and easier to hide if necessary. In almost every other circumstance, if you can have an airborne gunship you want an airborne gunship, and you don’t even have to alter the laws of physics to make them work.

The only way you could make the case for mechs is if whatever magic Clarke-Tech you were imagining for moving them was astronomically more efficient than flying for approximately the same tonnage, and you were desperate to conserve as much energy as possible, to the point where flight just isn’t an option, and even then, the most efficient machine would look something like a gigantic beetle.

About the only advantage it has is intimidation factor. Kaiju are spectacularly intimidating, and a gigantic robot kaiju would definitely make some people evacuate their bowls on the spot. However there’s no edits you can make to the laws of physics that make it better at anything, from a tactical perspective, than a different form factor.

I can’t speak for the whole of Canada, let alone the world, but as far as I’m concerned as long as one monstrous Republican shill still draws breath and sits in Congress, it will never be safe to trust America. If it’s so easy for America to fall to fascism once, it can and will fall again until there is massive systemic reform. It will be a generation before people like me are willing to put the past behind us. You are still engaged in illegal wars, holding foreign heads of state hostage, keeping refugees in internment camps and every masked ice agent still walks freely on your streets.

Talk to me when the Dems actually do something about the incalculable harm America has done to the world. Boycott, divest, and sanction, for all genocidal rogue states, America included.

Honestly, I don’t expect much but a slowdown in the rate of terrible things coming out every day. We will need to continue organizing, continue building support networks, continue finding ways to protest, support our neighbours and get people prepared to fight for all our sakes. This is a positive, in that it drops a boat anchor that will keep us from falling deeper into authoritarianism… for now. It will not, by itself get us out of this mess. It will not undo the damage that’s been done, and most importantly, it won’t last forever. It’s an opportunity to take a breath, regroup, and prepare ourselves for the hard work ahead.

Democrats in Congress isn’t going to save anyone. It’s just going to stabilize things, temporarily. It’s a place to start, not a finish line.

Edit: What’s far more promising is the number of state level elections that went blue. This is a massive opportunity to undo past state governments’ illegal election fixing and corruption, pass electoral reform, and get serious about laying the ground work to keep someone like Trump from ever taking power again.

Now now, Iranian proxies, or Mossad trying to frame Iran would also be unsurprising.

We’re less far gone in Canada, but it’s still bad. We’re hanging on by our finger tips to worker’s rights, the US is largely in free-fall. That said, they’re doing their damnedest to run the same playbook in Europe and Britain, as I’m sure you’re all too aware. Hang on to your community. Don’t take it for granted. Work at it. Grow it. Build a wall (metaphorically) around it because they are going to try to break you the way they broke us. Don’t let them divide you over petty things. Race, ethnicity, sexuality. They weaponize the wedges to divide and conquer. Repetition creates reality. Ritual is a defence against propaganda, don’t be afraid to use it. They will mock you for using emotion, while weaponizing rage and hate. Stand together.

Of course that’s easier said then done if you work somewhere with little to no workers protection and fear losing your job.

That part. No one said it was right. It’s simply what many of us have to put up with to survive. Building solidarity and unions in the current environment is difficult. Labour power has been set back almost to square one in a lot of places, and if you’ll remember, building it up in the first place, cost a lot of lives and a lot of blood. It’s really hard to be a martyr for the cause, when you know no one is going to step in to support the people who count on you, which is why organizing NGO support networks is so essential. They know that community is what gives us leverage, and that’s why they do everything in their power to make community building seem futile.

We have no churches, because they’ve all been compromised. We have precious few non-corpo social clubs and sports orgs. Unions have been beaten into a bloody mess. We have a handful of charities and volunteer orgs, most of which are dependent on corporate grants donations for survival. I’m not saying it’s hopeless, but we need to be clear where we are to figure out a path forward. We need to build communities of truth and trust beyond their reach if we’re going to push back. Just saying “no” sounds great in principle… but we have to all say “no” together otherwise you’re just lighting yourself on fire, and the machine will not even notice you’re gone.

A question asked in bad faith isn’t stupid, it’s a question in bad faith. Bad faith questions are quite common unfortunately. Rhetorical questions, begging the question, questions that are based on a sneaky false premise, etc. The subject might not even realize that the question is bad faith, because they acquired that question elsewhere. The fact it was honestly posed by a proxy, doesn’t change the fact that the question is bad faith.

Why would management even consider that they’re contradicting themselves every 5 minutes? They’re the ones that sign the paychecks, they can be absurd if they want to be. It’s not like there’s every going to be personal consequences anyway, and if the company burns to the ground, they’ve already got their golden parachute worked out.

The amount of money being printed has almost nothing to do with inflation (ie. the dollar losing value). As long as it’s balanced and kept in tension by a relatively responsive interest rate, it doesn’t really do much. Big, sudden floods of cash one way or the other make a lot of disruption (like QE after the recession, or COVID checks), but that’s actually pretty rare.

You made a silly comment that sounds more like someone who listens to corpo media than someone who understands economics. How am I supposed to know what you do or don’t understand at that point?

Porn. The internet is made of Porn. Always has been.

Lots of us understood. No one in power considers it a bad thing.

You really don’t understand how money works do you. If you want to get technical, private banks print more money than the fed.

I mean, technically yes, but also, that’s kind of a bait and switch scenario. You’re honoring the debt, but what you received is worth less than implied, which means most people are going to think twice about buying bonds again.

No, but playing debt-ceiling chicken every few months isn’t a good sign.

Well, yes but also, it might be. Not like, a Terminator scenario, but more in the, as long as all the wealth being spent on it being a lost opportunity cost to do something about all the other important things that aren’t being funded. I’m not worried about the slop factories out competing us qualitatively, but rather choking out every other part of society because a bunch of idiots currently control all the purse strings.

Quick and dirty version. Governments create bonds, which is kind of like the opposite of a loan. It’s a request for money, and in exchange they agree to pay what you give them back with interest. Then they shop around for people to throw money into the bond. That money is then used to pay for government services, equipment, facilities, etc. and taxes are collected to pay out the bond. It’s a bit more complicated but like I said, quick and dirty version.

The general idea is you get a lot further asking people to float you a loan than you do hoarding gold or something to try to scrape together enough money to do big projects, and people aren’t going to revolt or rob the treasury for a stack of unpaid loans.

Who does the state owe the debt to? Lots of people. Mostly rich Americans but also foreign investors, other governments, retirement funds, etc.

Does the US have a problem paying its bills? It didn’t always, but in recent decades, yes.