[–] 5 points 1 day ago*

Yes, but the trend of technological diffusion means that most countries today are on a much more even playing field than back when only the white Europeans had guns, and used them to oppress everyone else still fighting with bows and spears. Unless, of course, US AGI dreams become true and then it becomes this shit again, but with US terminator robots versus Global South guns.

The alternative to the multipolar shift, the immediate socialist camp strategy, was tried by the USSR and failed because staying in the US-world-order was both easier (because the US was default successor to all European colonial empires) and more attractive (for bourgeois politicians, because the US had more money and offered more profits).

Once we move to a fully multipolar world, then constructing a socialist camp will be much easier because the U.S. will no longer be the hegemonic default counter-choice.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 day ago* (1 child)

    If you're American, you apply to ELAM through the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (the official USA-Cuba liaison organization for this program, led by Claudia De la Cruz from PSL) here: https://ifconews.org/elam

    I've made an earlier post with more info on ELAM: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/5868962

    Best of luck to your application! If you get in, you gotta post to show us everything inside Cuba.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 days ago*

    Good, this should never have been made dormant.

    Also, China definitely needs their own version of this, since China has an even more restrictive no-first-strike policy that could legitimately mean the decapitation of all leadership before the decision to fire back is made. Has anyone heard any news on them building that out?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 days ago* (2 children)

    Unfortunately I pretty much agree. If the U.S. capitalists have their way, we will all be ruled by capitalist-funded superintelligence, which will ensure U.S. dominance forever and the suppression/execution of the now-unnecessary former working class. All I can say is that we should improve ourselves, study up, try to organize in the US, and if that doesn't work, fuck off to China or some other AES country so we can at least help save everyone else in the world. My condolences to any of the Americans who insist on staying when that time comes.

    I've posted this earlier:

    There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:

    1. communism, where the abundant fruits of automation are distributed evenly among all, ala fully automated luxury communism
    2. exterminism (from Peter Frase’s book Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers (with robot soldiers and whatnot).

    It’s quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.

    We have a maximum of maybe 50 years before the capitalists work out all the kinks in their super-intelligence dream. Maybe the collapse of the U.S. empire will stop this, or maybe not. It is all hard to say.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 days ago

    I actually agree with him in the sense that if a revolution happened tomorrow in the U.S., the U.S. still has enough money and a loyal-enough professional military to suppress it using extreme violence (picture the BLM protests plus ultra-ICE).

    In order for a revolution in the U.S. to be successful, most of the U.S. neocolonies need to have revolutions/move toward sovereignty, and thereby stop paying the United States. When that occurs and the U.S. by definition loses its empire, it will no longer be able to afford for its own advanced military. At that point, a revolution will be winnable because it doesn't matter how many F-35s you have if you don't have the money to fly them.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 child)

    Don't these lines just tell you to shut up and be a good tool for your master (who conveniently has that position because he is ordained by God)? This is the exact shit that they taught the serfs and slaves, and it's only after they were abolished that this was reinterpreted to support modern government.

    The good thing about the Bible is that it is so convoluted that you can always find a verse that you can interpret to mean the exact opposite:

    Acts 5:

    29 Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings!

    Luke 4:

    18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,

    19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

    Psalm 2:

    10 Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.

    11 Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.

    12 Kiss his son, or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

    For instance, if you connect these three sets of verses, it can be interpreted that Jesus was sent to help the poor and disabled. Thus it is our mission to obey God in doing this, to follow Jesus in his mission, rather than to obey other human beings. If these other humans try to stop our mission and end up experiencing destruction, it is because they are getting in the way of God's mission.

    If you spend all day around religious people, it is a good idea to get familiar with every single verse so you can counter-argue all their reactionary positions using the "authority" of the Bible. DarkMatter2525 is a decent resource for this purpose.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago*

    The fires don't even have to be a conspiracy theory. They're doing the same to the burned-down part of Los Angeles.

    Wealthy capitalists just have a lot of liquid capital, and so they can exploit every single crisis to claim more assets at rock-bottom prices because normal people have lost all their money and have to sell to not starve. Everything that is bad for us is just another investment opportunity for them.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 week ago

    DeepSeek's newest model costs something on the order of 1/100th of OpenAI's, while being slightly dumber. Even still, DeepSeek is actually able to make a profit on their margins because they focus so many resources on making their models as efficient as possible.

    OpenAI and Anthropic are betting on simply pumping more compute into the AI to get to superintelligence first. They don't want to waste time on optimization because they think once they get the superintelligent AI, it can just optimize itself after the fact. Any time you think that OpenAI and Anthropic won't make money or have some problem, they will just say that the superintelligence will fix everything like a deus ex machina.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    No no, you're doing it wrong. If you make headings by just changing font sizes, Word will have no idea what you actually want.

    In Word, you need to edit the default font sizes of the heading options shown in the ribbon, then apply them to the lines you want the headings to be by highlighting the text, then clicking the desired heading option in the ribbon.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Much of this probably has to do with the online version being really limited, but in the desktop version, you can right-click (or is it hover-click?) on the numbering or heading icon in the ribbon, open the expanded dialog, and set up really nice custom numbering/heading systems.

    I've used Word/LibreOffice all my life, and I'm trying to get into LaTeX and Typst. It feels just as bad moving the other way (except math, LaTeX math is awesome!), I've just resolved to have AI generate my damn LaTeX templates. We all like what we're used to.

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    This $3000 book (Dictionary of Contemporary Chinese Economics) by Nanjing University has official explanations for every term used in Chinese socialist and Marxist economics, including:

    • productive forces
    • economic base and superstructure
    • value vs money vs price
    • circulation of commodities versus circulation of money
    • labor theory of value
    • primitive accumulation of capital
    • socialist market economy
    • primary stage of socialism
    • China's rural revitalization strategy, and poverty alleviation program
    • development, environmental, industrial, financial economics
    • dialectical and historical materialism

    The book is written by Chinese economists who shepherded China through Reform and Opening Up, so you can be sure that their explanations are accurate, and not the misleading liberal claptrap you usually see around economics

    It's so hard to find good official documents that explain Marxist economics, so this book is amazing. This is the best reference I have ever found on it.

    Y'all should all download it for reference.

     

    The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) is responsible for auditing the US government to avoid wasting money. However, the Pentagon just refused GAO inspectors and blocked public release of their latest F-35 report, probably because they look so bad. Here's what the numbers that have been released earlier already show:

    F-35 readiness rates are disastrous:

    • Mission capable F-35s (can fly any mission, even a beginner familiarization hop): 67% in 2021 → 44% in 2025
    • FULL mission capable (can do all combat missions): 38% → 25%^1
    • Even the old F-16C built in the 1980s sits at 64%, much higher than the F-35

    F-35 fleet is split into castes:

    ~1,057 F-35s have been built, spread across the US and its allies. Of these, the US operates ~800 of them.

    "TR" (Technical Refresh) is the jet's built-in electronics hardware, "Block" is the software it runs. Old hardware can't run new software, so TR-3/Block 4 is the only fully modern configuration:

    • 238 global jets / ~180 US jets (~23%) built before TR-2/Block 3F will never be fully operational, and are not upgradeable. These can only be used for testing, training, or scrapped.
    • 524 global jets / ~400 US jets (~50%) stuck at old TR-2/Block 3F standard, no plans to upgrade them.^1 Combat capable, but frozen at 2015-era capability.
    • 295 global jets / ~220 US jets (~28%) are the only ones on the modern TR-3/Block 4 path. Except these are good for training only:^2 they're delivered without their delayed radar, and the engine core upgrade needed to fully power and cool the Block 4 electronics will only be installed in 2031

    Zero F-35s are both combat-ready and on the modernization path. The mid-generation jets are the only ones actually doing any fighting, even though the aircraft was bought for the capabilities Block 4 promises.

    The US only has ~800 × 25% full-mission-capable = ~200 combat-ready F-35s,^2 all frozen at 2015-era capability.

    Meanwhile, China has produced ~500 J-20s at ~120/year, projected ~1,000 by 2030.^3 This means China probably already has more modern, combat-ready 5th-gen jets than the USA (at even a bad ~50% readiness rate (~500 J-20s × 50% = ~250 combat-ready J-20s versus ~200 combat-ready US F-35s).

    Lockheed profits from every failure:

    Lockheed's own 2025 study found their suppliers can't make 48 critical components for the F-35 on time. The Pentagon now wants to give Lockheed another $13.7B just to get to 65% full-mission-capable by 2030.^1 Of course, the Pentagon will also need to replace the ~580 unupgradeable or frozen US jets, all of which become future orders for Lockheed.

    Other References

     

    This Wednesday, Hunter Biden launched the $LAPTOP crypto coin, only for it to crash 98% by Thursday while 'mystery traders' of the coin have made windfall profits. ^[https://wset.com/news/nation-world/hunter-bidens-meme-coin-down-98-since-being-launched-report-crypto-laptop-social-media] ^[https://futurism.com/future-society/hunter-biden-laptop-memecoin-crypto-rugpull-national-disgrace]

    This exactly mirrors Trump's and Melania's earlier crypto rugpulls. This universal scammy behavior is the most visual example of the equivalence between liberals and conservatives. Both will scam the working class to enrich capitalists.

     

    After her side job as Biden's Commerce Secretary in charge of suppressing Chinese technological innovation, Gina Raimondo has now gone back to her main job of licking capitalist boot by suppressing any mention of wealth redistribution like UBI.

    UBI is the only relatively mainstream solution to AI layoffs that isn't just straight socialism.

    Joe Biden's Former commerce secretary Gina Raimondo has decided that UBI in response to AI is the thing to fear most. She said: "I personally think it's like the end of America."

    She is now heading up a newly-launched extremely well-funded organization to make sure the country reaches for anything but a basic income in response to AI. It's called RAISE US, and the money behind it comes largely from the companies building the disruption it exists to manage.

    RAISE US launched June 25, with Raimondo as CEO and former Indiana governor Eric Holcomb as co-chair. It has already secured more than $500 million toward a $1 billion target. Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and the OpenAI Foundation are anchor partners. Behind them sits a wall of corporate and philanthropic money: Blackstone, General Motors, IBM, Eli Lilly, Mastercard, Deloitte, UPS, Cisco, Workday, Arnold Ventures, and a dozen more.

    The article goes on to show that RAISE US's advertised alternative to UBI, job retraining programs, is proven to be as ineffective as one single community college course is at improving job prospects. RAISE US's entire job is to mount excuse after excuse to allow capitalists to capture all profit from replacing everyone's jobs, while making it appear like it's the workers' fault for not keeping up.

     

    Who could have possibly foreseen this? /s

    It's almost like when these AI CEOs constantly tell their investors how they're going to make everyone homeless and jobless, then all the workers start taking them seriously and seeing them as the threat that they are.

    As I have posted before:

    There are only 2 ways the worker-capitalist contradiction can ever be solved:

    • communism, where the abundant fruits of automation are distributed evenly among all, ala fully automated luxury communism
    • exterminism (from Peter Frase’s book Four Futures), where the capitalists finally fulfill their dream of automating everything and can genocide all the unneeded workers.

    It’s quite important we bring about revolution before option 2 becomes viable.

     

    This video by Adam Ragusea (a pretty mainstream food channel) looks at how U.S. hereditary farms often preserve quasi-feudal relationships where large farm landowners exert control over migrant and trafficked laborers, recreating power imbalances similar to feudal lord-serf dynamics.

    Along the way, he makes a nice overview focusing on the advent of capitalism as a progressive force against feudalism, and how US farmers, whose practices are descended from southern feudal slave plantation owners, still preserve some unproductive, harmful aspects of feudalism.

     

    In the West, we have heard endless news stories about the advent of clean hydrogen. Unfortunately, it is mostly a ploy by Western fossil fuel companies, lying about repurposing their natural gas infrastructure for hydrogen in order to be allowed to keep burning natural gas for longer. As a result, actual progress on clean hydrogen is very slow and has basically not grown beyond the existing chemicals industry.

    In China, hydrogen production is a serious and intensive field of research and scaling, with the potential to help make China fossil fuel independent.

    submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by to c/china@lemmygrad.ml
     

    This on-the-ground documentary is amazing for dispelling persistent myths about Chinese food safety. In the early 2000s, China had a series of scandals and subsequent police crackdowns around waste cooking oil, which was being scooped out of sewage grease traps and being reprocessed into disguised brand new cooking oil.

    While this was a legitimate problem, Westerners somehow still believe that to this day, all Chinese food is still cooked in waste gutter oil. In actuality, China has cracked down completely on uses of gutter oil for human consumption and has instead created productive industries to turn waste gutter oil into valuable products like hydraulic oil, machine lubricant, and sustainable aviation fuel.

    This kind of waste-to-products recycling is exactly what we need more of.

    submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by to c/china@lemmygrad.ml
     

    The Chinese government has spent half a century, and continuing today, working to restore degraded environments.

    China began by greening the Loess Plateau, a formerly productive forest and grassland ecosystem turned into a sandy wasteland by centuries of exploitative farming. The government work with villagers on the ground to change farming practices, build dams and terraces, plant trees, and more. Altogether, the project restored 4 million acres and lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty.

    See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2G79sIJ97w


    China then applied these same practices to greening the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts, stopping sandstorms, halting the growth of the deserts, and restoring former desert into productive grassland:

    Caption says forest coverage increased from 8% to 73%.

    See more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91vrHrcVJ_w

    submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by to c/breadtube@lemmygrad.ml
     

    In the process, he debunks mainstream economists' lies that AI will definitely increase wages, and explains how the Industrial Revolution in Europe (the classic example for how technology improves living standards), actually:

    • didn't increase living standards in Europe for 200 years until after WW2 (and even then only due to militant labor organizing)
    • required colonialism and imperialism abroad in the Global South, reducing their living standards until even today

    I've found Gary's Economics to be an amazing stepping-stone channel to introduce liberals to leftist economics. He basically uses Marxist economics but never explicitly says so, making his points very palatable to libs.

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