Buelldozer

Assuming that any nuclear weapons involved are only targeted at Ukraine I don’t believe that Nuclear Holocaust follows immediately. The United States has a direct line to the Kremlin for things like this and I’m sure that the other nuclear powers do as well.

In this “Russia nuking Ukraine” scenario I think Russia would have a bigger problem with the Europeans than the United States. The Europeans would be seriously pissed off and both the French and the Brits are well able to respond with a range of economic, political, conventional, and even nuclear options.

China would be hella displeased too, and not solely because of Taiwan, but because they would have to immediately choose between supporting Russia or doing business with literally anyone else in the world as the economic sanctions applied to Russia and any of their allies would be immediate and total.

Russia isn’t going to launch because the only possible outcomes is their total isolation from all other nations or their complete destruction in nuclear fire. Putin knows this.

Bring it on bitches.

Mastodon and open platforms will eventually win out in a divided social media ecosystem anyway, in my opinion.

No they won’t, Reddit killed Internet Forums, Threads has over 200 million active monthly users, and BlueSky already has double the number of users of Mastadon and is adding 10 new ones PER SECOND . Mastadon will be entirely irrelevant by the end of Q1 2025.

What we’re watching right now is the exact same fight that the chat platforms had back in the early 2000s. AOL chat vs IRC vs Yahoo Chat vs Microsoft Messenger. That was temporarily addressed by using multi-service clients like Trillian…and then Facebook rolled in and squashed them all. BTW there are several multi-platform clients out there right now that will allow you to interact with Xitter, Threads, BlueSky, and Mastadon simultaneously just like the Trillian of old.

I’ve been around the Internet since the BBS days and I can’t think of a single time where a de-centralized platform has out competed a centralized platform with “normal” users.

Make sure to actually understand how those “non-profit” websites and services are functioning.

Generally speaking if you aren’t the customer then you are the product. Individual Lemmy and Mastadon instances are getting around this for now because they are small enough that their operational costs can be covered by the ideologically motivated instance admins and users. If Lemmy or Mastadon ever gains wide popularity this will change.

The Biden Administration was “Round Two”, the return of Trump will bring Round Three.

Huh, this is pretty interesting. I wonder if there’s a way to set an Android device to auto-reboot if it hasn’t had a network connection or been unlocked after a preset length of time.

Yes I do.

Thank you for this. I know some people won’t appreciate it but not every community needs to be a full time political outlet.

People are correct in not wanting to die for politicians and imaginary lines on a map.

It’s a great philosophy but if all of your neighbors don’t follow it then you end up being forcibly hijacked.

There’s no such thing as a market so controlled that it’s immune to inflation. The Russian Ruble is as controlled as a currency can be and Russia is teetering on the edge of hyper-inflation. It’s core inflation rate is over 9% and their version of the “Prime Rate” for lending has now jumped from 19% to a historic 21%.

China has more breathing room than Russia but it’s still not going to be pretty, especially if this “bailout” fails.

Don’t they have many trillions in reserves?

Right now China has about 3.2 trillion in ForEx of all kinds and currencies which means that this bailout represents nearly half of the total.

ForEx is an extremely complicated subject, way too much for a single post, but it is essentially the lubricant for trade. If you don’t have enough of it in the right currency on an hourly (or less) basis to support your imports and exports then the machine will seize up.

So what China is doing here is risky as hell and if it doesn’t work they will soon have the same kind of financial problems that Iran does and that is stupendously bad for an export based economy.

2016 was an absolute shit show on Reddit. It was a dogfight between the Bernie Bros and the Trumpers until Bernie got knocked out of the primaries then knocked off Reddit by CTR. Then it was a dogfight between the ShillDawgs and the MAGAts with the t_d’ers eventually coming out on top because of their willingness to endlessly game the Reddit algorithm.

Where do you go for such discussions anyway?

The closest I’ve ever found was a heavily moderated sub on Reddit. I have no idea if its still any good or not because I haven’t been there in over a year.

Remember The Constitution says any rights not specifically granted to the Feds are the States.

The Supreme Court, to thunderous applause and cheering, killed that notion a LONG time ago. I wish California the best of luck in trying to resurrect the idea, I truly do, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Even now most Progressives wouldn’t like the idea in practice. They’ve spent over a century fighting to create a Federal Government that is Large and In Charge.

Are we starting to understand yet why it was a horrible idea to give the Federal Government so much power over literally everything? It’s precisely why the framers of the Constitution tried so hard to limit what the Federal Government could control and its why the “States Rights” argument has always rung true.

I hope California is successful in their efforts to “Conservative Proof” their State. What they are attempting to do flies in the face of nearly 140 years of precedent but its EXACTLY how this damn country was intended to work.

It’s how we’ve reacted to their aggression so far.

The United States really does not want to get into a direct conflict with Russia. There’s no question that we’d win any kind of conventional conflict but the American people have no desire for another land war in Europe. We’ve been there and done that, twice, and while I think we would support our European cousins for a 3rd go around getting support for it would require that the Europeans commit themselves first.

On a tangent but speaking frankly Europe as a whole needs to plan for dwindling support from the United States. Regardless of who wins the 2024 US elections the voting demographics of the United States are changing fast. There are literally tens of millions of current and near future immigrants from all over the world who will never care about European security as much as the current voters do. Why would they? Why should they?

The average immigrant from Asia or Latin America will not have ancestral ties to Europe and as their impact on US politics grows it’s inevitable that US support for European shenanigans will dwindle. As voters they will push the US Government to care far more about what’s happening in India, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and various countries on the African continent.

This is going to happen even if the United States elects nothing but Progressive Politicians for the next 10 election cycles and Europe needs to prepare for it.

This type of nonsense is happening everywhere online. Real people who are organically participating will almost always engage on a wide variety of topics and issues; any social media account on any network that spends the majority of it’s time focused on a single politicized issue or viewpoint can be assumed to be a sock puppet or a shill.

In short any account that hyper-focus on a single issue or viewpoint for more than a day or two is likely not organic and if it is organic then it’s likely toxic; either way you should avoid them.

American isn’t buying Iran’s bombs and there’s no amount of hysterical hand waving you can do to get over that fact.

Its happening with increasing regularity even in the lower 48. Here’s one from Wyoming.

More than a few high profile anti-gun people have owned firearms. Diane Feinstein comes to mind as another example.

ALL of the super wealthy anti-gun people, like Michael Bloomberg, have no issue being protected by people with firearms.

It’s not the guns that they’re against. They’re against them being owned by peasants regular people.