Qatar has much better relations with Iran than most Arab states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–Qatar_relations

The way I’ve heard these minimum tax agreements described usually is where all the signatories agree to collect the same minimum corporate tax rate. The article says 15%. The US already has a 21% corp tax rate, setting aside tax incentives.

So what does it mean in this case to say that US corps are exempt? Does this mean that a US corp homed in the Caymans will pay a different rate than a French company in the Caymans? Or that the US is refusing to collect a minimum 15% after tax incentives?

I’m sure it’s spelled out in the text of the treaty, but maybe someone here has already done the digging.

Ukraine has been nuked? Or perhaps that’s read as “used” as a threat. In any case, the point was that the previous agreements did not provide any defense guarantees.

And what is article 4 in relation to the UN security council? There have been several security council meetings on Ukraine.

They promised to not attack them, not to defend them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Clearly Russia broke that agreement, but the US, UK, France, and China haven’t.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I don’t know much about Machado, but I do know that polls conducted under dictatorships are often not worth much.

Just in time for Grijalva to be sworn in

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/12/nx-s1-5606350/adelita-grijalva-swearing-in

Does anything other than the style of the skull and crossbones of his ex-tattoo suggest that he is in any way a Nazi or fascist?

Finally got my last PC switched off Windows. It feels good.

I think there may be more opportunity for success here than your argument seems to suggest.

I agree with the focus on inequality. The sense that society is fundamentally unfair has a corrosive and a radicalising effect on politics. People can react to it in very different ways, from redistribution to out-group scapegoating, but the underlying motivation is that people see that there is vast wealth available in our society and they’re still struggling.

Where I may disagree is that most people are non-ideological. Not everyone, but a healthy majority. They aren’t focused on the philosophical roots of a candidate’s policies. They care that the candidate

1. Sees, likes, and cares about themselves and their group
2. Has a vision that gives them hope for something better

Many people can find that in candidates with a variety of ideological positions. The overlap between people who supported Bernie after the great recession, and went on to support Trump is bigger than one would expect.

So the equation is much less zero sum. You don’t lose one reactionary for every radical you bring into your camp. There really aren’t that many committed radicals and reactionaries.

The most toxic message today is the economic moderate. “Hey, it’s not so bad. Things could be a lot worse.” This is the zero sum relationship. You can’t keep both the people who are doing well and like how things work, and the people who are struggling and want the life they deserve. The material difference isn’t left vs right, it’s status quo versus change. There’s a lot more room for flexibility in the change camp.

Fucking cool, and also remember to leave your phone at home, or at least on airplane mode.

I’m just commenting on the book. I find YouTube videos pretty insufferable. I guess it’s a tangent.

I’ve listened to a couple interviews with the author about this book, and I have not found them persuasive. I can accept that there’s a possibility that artificial super intelligence (ASI) could occur soonish, and is likely to occur eventually. I can accept that such an ASI could choose to do something that kills everyone, and that it would be extremely difficult to stop it.

The two other arguments necessary for the title claim, I see no reason to accept. First that any ASI must necessarily choose to kill everyone. The paper clip scenario is the basic shape of the arguments presented. I think it’s probably impossible to predict what an ASI would want, and very unlikely that it would be so simple minded as to convert the solar system into paper clips. It’s a weird proposal that an ASI must be both incomprehensibly capable and simultaneously brainless.

Second that the alignment problem can not be solved before the super intelligence problem with current trajectories. Again, this may be true, but I do not think it’s a given that the current AI techniques are sufficient for human-level, let alone super-human intelligence.

Overall, the problem is that the author argues that the risk is a certainty. I don’t know what the real risk is, but I do not believe it is 100%. Perhaps it’s a rhetorical concession, an overstatement to scare people into accepting his proposals. Whatever the reason, I’m sympathetic to the actual proposals; that we need better monitoring and safety controls on AI research and hardware, including a moratorium if necessary. The risk isn’t 100% but it’s not 0% either.

Pretty sure they’re typically publicly owned. Maybe some places lease them. Couldn’t find a national survey, but here’s at least one example of a county that bought some machines and a service contract.

https://fm.kuac.org/elections/2025-03-10/assembly-fails-voting-machine-contract-may-force-change-to-hand-counting-ballots

Maybe a car fleet is a good example. Ford designs and builds the cars. Counties buy them, and often buy service and maintenance contracts to keep them running. The counties still own the cars.

I suppose counties could receive the source code, have it audited, and then compile and load it themselves.

I thought about this for a second, and I don’t actually think being open source would do any good. It’s not like we can compile and run our own voting booths. There’s no way to know what’s actually running in the machine at your polling place.

And voting machines are publicly owned, but perhaps you meant designed and manufactured by the government?

Exactly. They’re trying to scare us off. A little courage now may spare us the need for really scary things later.

It would be interesting to learn something about the demographics on Lemmy.

I usually liken the bad vibes on Lemmy to being stuck with a bunch of cynical teenagers. Nothing is ever good enough, nothing good can happen. They know this with absolute certainty.

I am also probably older than average here.

They do, but I’m a little surprised by how well they’ve positioned themselves on this one. It seems to me that the most likely scenario is that the Republicans will give nothing on principal, the shutdown will go until November when the premiums increase, and the country will see that the Republicans would rather close the government for two months than spare them a doubling or tripling of their healthcare costs.

And all the while Trump trashes the government in an attempt to retaliate, without really understanding that the government provides services that people, his voters included, depend on. I’m not sure, “the Democrats made me do it,” will save him with anyone other than his cult members.

I am cautiously optimistic.

I try to stay skeptical about conspiracy theories, but I have yet to see an explanation for why this guy had so much money and connections. To talk about “science” and “money markets”? At Bill Clinton’s request? None of that makes sense to me.

How did it never occur to me to ask where bee’s wax comes from?