US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller later stated the US believes this step is “not productive at all” due to the UN’s role in the region.

Wow, we are really taking a firm stance here. Israel better be careful or we might become slightly miffed, or maybe even peeved.

If they’re such committed zionists, why are they here and not in Israel?

Nintendo doesn’t want you to play their games if you’re not willing to follow their rules. Ok, that’s their prerogative, but that means I will not be playing their games…at least not their new ones.

I prefer playing on my Steam Deck these days, and I really don’t want to buy another handheld just to play Nintendo first party titles. I’m going to play some of my favorite classic Nintendo titles on my Deck using emulators and just not play the new stuff. I’m sure they’re great games, but so what? There are lots of great games. I’ve got a huge backlog of great games already in my Steam library, and 20 more on my wishlist. If Nintendo some day decides to make their titles available for Steam Deck or PC, I’d consider buying them, but since that’s extremely unlikely to happen, I think I’m just done with Nintendo.

Nintendo has burned through all the good will they developed with me when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s. I doubt I’ll ever buy another Nintendo product again. Not that it matters to Nintendo, though. I’m many years removed from their target demographic. They make products for young people and that ain’t me. I’m sure those younger Nintendo fans will keep supporting the company, but, as for me, I’ve got the classic Nintendo games I want and I’ll keep playing them on whatever device I want. If Nintendo doesn’t like that, they can kiss my whole ass.

these platforms sell unsafe products

Which is something that can, and often does happen in unregulated free markets. The invisible hand is not necessarily very good at things like consumer protection, among other things.

I don’t think the decisions that led to our current monetary system were made arbitrarily, not at all.

The cost of living will just keep going up because inflation is necessary in our current, debt based monetary system. The Fed tries to keep this under control by not allowing the rate of inflation to go much beyond about 2% a year. The recent inflation issue we’ve been having wasn’t about inflation suddenly happening where it hadn’t been happening before, it was about the rate of inflation increasing beyond the Fed’s 2% target. When they talk about inflation getting back under control, they’re talking about the rate of inflation getting back to near 2%. But make no mistake: prices are still going up - they have to, that’s how the system works - and they will keep going up every year, seemingly indefinitely. For this reason, a cost of living raise equal to at least the rate of inflation is absolutely essential, otherwise workers are getting a pay cut.

But this is further complicated by the fact that the core inflation numbers are very broad. Housing costs are exploding. Core inflation would be much lower if not for rising housing costs. But the way housing costs increases are measured is by averaging housing costs across all markets, meaning the cost of housing in low demand areas is averaged with the cost of housing in high demand areas. This means that if you live in a high demand area, the core inflation rate doesn’t necessarily capture the true cost of living in your area, and that the cost of living in your area is going up much faster than the national average. Therefore, many workers need an annual cost of living increase that is much greater than the national inflation rate.

As far as I know, there is no national law requiring companies to give cost of living raises every year. Many companies do, but many don’t. A mandatory, annual cost of living raise is something that unions can negotiate, once again showing the value of unions.

This is why Europe must take control of its own defense. Europe doesn’t want to be a mere vassal of the US for precisely this reason.

The United States is currently experiencing a shortfall in the number of immigrant workers. This has exacerbated service disruptions and labor shortages in vital industries that rely on immigrant workers, like leisure and hospitality. However, the impact of this shortfall extends beyond just the industries in which foreign-born workers perform a significant share of the labor. For example, immigrants also help counteract the slowing growth rate of the U.S. population, which helps drive the expansion of the labor force and contributes to overall economic growth.

Foreign-born workers are more likely to participate in the labor force than their native-born peers. As a result, immigrants have helped power the U.S. economic recovery by returning quickly to work, despite being disproportionately affected by job losses during the pandemic.

The importance of foreign-born workers will only continue to grow over time, as these workers remain vital to sectors that drive economic innovation and competitiveness. For example, jobs in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), which rely on the contributions of immigrants, are projected to continue growing faster than other occupations. Similarly, foreign-born workers are vital to the care industry, shouldering a significant share of the work performed by home health care and child care workers. Immigrant workers, a significant share of them women, are also helping to meet the growing demand for caregivers as the overall population ages.

Article

Am I the only one who finds this kind of disturbing? We need immigrants because Americans aren’t willing to do certain jobs, for the amount of money that companies want to pay, and because Americans aren’t having enough babies? We need immigrants because we don’t do a good enough job developing talent and competency in STEM fields? We need immigrants because our people don’t want to do home health care or child care work, for the amount of money those companies are willing to pay? It sounds like immigration is necessary due to our own failures.

That’s not good, and I don’t think immigration really solves the problem. In fact, I think it makes it worse, because it allows us to continue to not invest in our own people the way we should. Plus, what happens to those other countries? If we have all their talented and hard working laborers, what are they going to do?

Over the past few years, about 4 in 10 young women between the ages of 18 and 29 have described their political views as liberal

I wonder how the other 6 in 10 young women would describe their political views. While 40% isn’t a majority, I would think liberals are a plurality. Still, it’s a little disheartening that there isn’t a clear majority in the US. It would be nice if a majority of Americans could reach a consensus.

I used to advocate for Linux, because I wanted more people to use it, so that more software devs would support it. I care a lot less about that since proton came to prominence. Linux still doesn’t get all the support from devs that I want, but there’s so much great software available now, both open source and proprietary, that I don’t really worry about non Linux users anymore.

So use whatever OS you want, folks. I don’t really care.

RIP Lt. Zogg

Classic schlock.

Every corporation should have a worker advocate, a consumer advocate, and a community advocate on their board of directors. It is ridiculous that only the investors get to make the decisions, currently. Investors only care about one thing: maximum return on their investment. They don’t care how the company is run, they don’t care how many employees get laid off, they don’t care if the company is benefiting the community, they just want the value of their shares in the company to go up, and/or to receive the highest possible dividends at the end of the year. They want passive income, they want the value of their asset to go up so they will be wealthier. That’s it. It’s unacceptable that only the investors are given a vote, and that others, who are also deeply affected by how the company operates, don’t.

When people are told that depression is an aberration, we are telling them that they are not part of the tribe. They are not right, they don’t belong. That’s when their shame deepens and they avoid social connection.

And that’s not the only reason people are made to feel they’re not part of the tribe, that they don’t belong. There are many things in this modern (post modern?) world that cause us to become alienated from other people, even and especially those in our own community. The nature of community itself has changed. Many relationships and social institutions feel more tenuous or impermanent.

It’s a vicious cycle: people feel alienated from others, it causes them stress, the stress causes anxiety, that leads to the immobilization response and depression, the effects of the anxiety and depression cause people to become further alienated from others, and the process accelerates and perpetuates.

Sorry, you’re all getting techno-feudalism.

I know a Gen Zer who’s hoping her Gen X parents will leave her their house and their 20+ acres of land, but it ain’t gonna happen. When they reach retirement age they’re going to sell it all and that’s going to be their retirement. Retirement is expensive, and the longer you live the more expensive it is, especially if you get sick, and you will get sick, eventually.

I’m ok with a decent amount of tech in a car. Like I’m fine being able to connect my phone to the car and have android auto take over the infotainment system.

This reminds me of my 2016 Honda Civic. It had just the right amount of tech.

I don’t think the housing crisis is being caused by people who live in rural areas and don’t want there to be endless urban and suburban sprawl. Most people want to live in urban areas, because those areas are where the jobs, shops, and infrastructure are. Sprawl is expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. It should be prevented as much as possible. But, the only way to prevent it is to make housing in urban areas, the area where people want to live because it’s where everything is, more affordable, and that means building more, dense housing in those areas. The real NIMBYs are people who own low density, single family homes in urban areas and don’t want higher density housing to be built in that area because it would bring down their property values.

Nevertheless, a nationwide housing drive risks stoking homeowners’ ire in a country where the middle class derives most of its wealth from real estate and two-thirds of dwellings are occupied by their owners.

That’s the thing that nobody wants to talk about. I’m constantly hearing people saying that “NIMBYs” are the cause of the housing crisis, which isn’t untrue, but it doesn’t really get to the heart of the issue. Why do NIMBYs exist? I think the prevailing assumption is that they’re just greedy, miserly boomers who love money and hate young people, but I think the problem is systemic, not simply caused by some individuals who happen to have character flaws.

It’s easy to call these property owners greedy, because it’s not your wealth. If it were your wealth, I bet many of you would be NIMBYs too. Because, again, it’s not just a matter of you having better moral character than them, it’s about the incentives, and how people with opposing financial interests have different incentives. People with wealth have an incentive to protect their wealth, and people without wealth have an incentive to try and acquire wealth.

This is why I’m a critic of capitalism, and why I want to move toward something that could be called socialism (although, not necessarily a Marxist or Marxist-Leninist conception of socialism). I think capitalism creates too many oppositional relationships. It causes people to have opposing interests. Owners and workers, companies and consumers, home buyers and home owners. I think it would be better to try and build a system around our shared interests, around the things we have in common, as opposed to one where we are constantly in opposition to one another.

We all need housing. It is a universal human need. So why have a system that incentivizes some to restrict other’s access to it? Why have a system that creates an adversarial relationship between those who have a home (and the wealth associated with it) and those who don’t?

All of these oppositional, adversarial relationships cause conflict and division.