I used to believe that the Cuba embargo is due to Cuban refugee vote in Florida.

But that doesn't make sense anymore given that Florida is no longer a swing state. In fact it never really made sense since the demo that is very pro-embargo has always been solidly Republican and therefore unwinnable.

So what really explains the embargo? Quite frankly I think it's banana republic foreign policy and wealthy people in the US not wanting there to be a successful socialist state. For instance, the recent energy crisis in Cuba is driven by the Biden administration sanctioning oil tankers who visit the island. Why on earth would the supposedly pro-Cuba democrats do that? Who asked them to do that? Who had the clout to make them do that? Some losers in Florida who were going to vote for Trump in a red state anyway?

Scamming is bad but I gotta admit.. kinda hard to feel sorry for people taking advice from Elon Musk.

I always heard "Canada is three mining companies standing on eachother's shoulders in a trechcoat."

Although that one applies equally to Australia.

Post less – and think before you post

Does the fediverse have a problem with too much posting? 🤔

I mean yeah I don't think Chinese companies are going to have crowdstrike installed given that it's essentially a rootkit controlled by an American company. It'd be like American companies installing Kaspersky or Xuexi Qiangguo.

There was a time when America could reliably produce assassins who could kill both presidential candidates and even sitting presidents. What the he'll happened? Deindustralization? Too much porn and video games?

As a friend once said "benzene is what anti-nuclear people think nuclear waste is."

I assume the real main selling point for Windows 11 is the inescapable constant nagging you get when you try to stick with WIndows 10.

Animal testing is awful in the best case, agreed.

What this article and other articles about Neuralink allege is that the company blew right past any kind of ethical guidelines that the industry has in a desire to be fast. The industry standard is to avoid any "undue suffering". They admit animals will suffer but all effort must be taken to minimize it.

What whistleblowers have exposed is that Neuralink started putting devices in primate's brains when they knew the devices won't work and were deadly in predictable ways. For instance a lot of monkeys got their brains cooked alive because the device put out too much waste heat. This was done because Elon was getting impatient and wanting to see progress in primate trials, so they just YOLOed a bunch of obviously deadly devices into a bunch of primate brains and in doing so, tortured and killed all the animals needlessly.

There have been solid, foam filled or gell filled bike tires for a long time.

The fundamental problem is that the ring of pressurized air in a pneumatic tire is a shock absorber. When you hit a bump the entire tire (even the part that isn't touching the ground) contributes to the dampening because it turns into a shock wave in the donut of air. When you switch to any sort of tire that doesn't have pressurized air in it, the dampening can only occur by deforming the tire in contact with the ground, and it's not going to be anywhere near as good. Typically you end up with a tradeoff between uncomfortable ride on the one side, and bottoming out on the rim and lots of rolling friction on the other.

In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.

Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.

Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.