Stage 2:

Documents folder? You want to rule my whole computer, dictate some nonsensical folder structure and then you act like, out of the goodness of your heart, I can have this little set of folders, deep in your weird structure, to store my stuff? And you’re even telling me how to sort it? On my own hard drive connected to my own computer?

I think this aspect of far right recruitment is the same everywhere: Wealth disparity and a strong, negative news cycle drive people to anything that claims to be against the established order.

And despite all of this being a direct result of 40 years of ring wing policies (Reagan, Thatcher, privatization, deregulation, etc.), they successfully pinned it on liberals the the left at large and declared those to be the establishment.

It is all too easy for someone wanting to rebel against the existing system to fall into the hands of this far right “counter-culture.”

That what I read out of it, too.

Disillusion with our future is setting in (and to what part it’s due to the negative news cycle, the growing gap between rich and poor, social media propaganda or other things can be argued).

But there was, and is, no large, left movement with an attractive message to pick up those people, and right wingers both own all the big media and have long been conditioned to blame liberals and the left at large for all of their problems.

During the Occupy Wallstreet days, I had hope, but what once was a movement of angry people with a good cause feels like it has since been replaced by a movement of even angrier people fighting those that want to fix things.

I believe the idea is:

1. Mention nukes and grab everyone’s attention
2. Run social media campaign (“oh noes, <insert undesirable politician or ideology> is leading us into war with nuclear power, they bad”)
3. Have bought politicians and lobbyists push to reduce sanctions or block additional sanctions
4. Profit.

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But increasingly, I see step 2 fail and people simply hate the guy more for his destructive megalomania, as they should.

Typical past ceasefires or truces with Russia:

• +0 Hours: Shelling stops on both sides, occasional gunfire erupts in places.
• +1 Hours: Russians rush supplies to their troops.
• +3 Hours: Russians violate truce and try to gain as much ground as possible in a surprise attack.

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Fool me once…

I think that is really the core of it.

I remember that it took months of discussions, compromises and buttering up specific opposition members to get it passed, and that it was a trimmed-down version of the original Medicare plans.

I wish I could remember where, but when answering a question very similar to the OP’s - perhaps in an interview? - Obama explained that he would have very much liked to tackle two big things: health care and climate, but that his party’s resources were stretched too thin to do both at the same time and that he knew they would loose control of the house in the midtems (2011), so he picked one thing.

It’s a battery factory that was built there despite environmental concerns.

I think the main things that attracted the ire of environmentalists are:

• When the building permits were still being negotiated, Tesla just started clearing land illegally
• A battery factory requires lots of water, this one was built in a region already low on groundwater
• There have been several instances of spilled chemicals
• The sewage coming out of the factory has been contaminated (phosphorus and nitrogen) beyond allowed thresholds for two years
• The local water supply company is reportedly near its limit, but Tesla wants to expand the battery factory and clear additional land

.

But the situation is a bit muddy. Early protests around 2021…2022 often had a share of far right wingnuts trying to recruit people. That’s lessened, though. This specific protest was definitely swelled in numbers by the factory expansion and land clearing plans, but is also part of a planned day of protests by the “Disrupt Tesla” group. They have a web presence here: https://disrupt-now.org/en/.

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

So true. By this point, Russia is already using everything it can, short of an actual, hot war with the west. And their military is stretched to the limit already without that.

I think this sabre rattling is still useful to them as a one-two-tactic:

1. Public threat from Russia, mentioning but not directly threatening nukes (the “push” side)
2. Russia-aligned media in the west publish articles saying “Putin’s threat should be taken seriously,” Russia-aligned western politicians smearing their opponents as “irresponsible war mongers”, followed by pushing for existing sanctions to be lifted, etc. (the “pull” side via stooges/crooked politicians)

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

That would give me some hope, but I’ve also seen indications towards the opposite.

I watched some recent talks between Chinese officials and what I think it was a German delegation seeking to convince China to exert more pressure on Russia. The Chinese politicians sounded exactly like Russia-indoctrinated tankies, talking point for talking point. When asked about a specific German politician In an interview with a journalist, one Chinese official spewed forth a shower of insults (all the favorites, from “unhinged” to “deranged”, “delusional” and “hysterical”, just one after another, at least that’s what the translation said).

I really hope what I’ve seen there is just an outlier.

Just some thoughts:

• Current LLMs (chat AIs) are “frozen brains.” (Over-)Simplified, the synapses on the AI’s input neurons are given the 2048 prior words (the “context”) and the AI’s output synapses mean a different word each, so the synapse that lights up most strongly is the next word the AI will say. Then the picked word is added to the “context” and the neural network is executed once more for the next next word.

• Coming up with the weights of the synapses takes insane effort (run millions of books through the “context” and look if the AI t predicts the next word correctly, if not, change a random synapse). Afaik, GPT-4 was trained on more than 2000 NVidia A100 GPUs for somewhere around 4 to 7 months, I think they mentioned paying for 7.5 Megawatt hours.

• If you had a super computer that could keep running the AI with live training, the AI’s ability to string up words would likely, and quickly, degrade into incoherence because it would just ingest and repeat whatever went into it. Existing biological brains have these complex mechanisms of distilling experiences and evaluating them in terms of usefulness/success of their own actions.

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I think that foundation, that part that makes biological brains put the action/consequence in the foreground of the learning experience, rather than just ingesting, is what eludes us. Perhaps at some future point in time, we could take the initial brain structure that grows in a human as the seed for an AI (but I guess then we’d likely have to simulate all the highly complex traits of real neurons, including mixed chemical and electrical signaling and possibly even quantum-level effects that have been theorized).

elitist, college liberalism ideas

liberals are becoming way more rude, aggressive. Elitist,

young privileged, college liberals who look down on everyone

That smells an awful lot like ring wing indoctrination 101:

1. Restating several times to drive home the claim that liberals are elitist, aloof, rude, “looking down on everyone”
2. Claiming “they” are being aggressive and nasty against super polite people only a little bit to the right
3. Therefore joining the far right is a well-deserved act at getting back at these nasty liberals

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You wrote two and a half paragraphs that are essentially just liberal bashing. My experience is that liberals are the people who don’t judge you for personal choices, who reach out a hand even if you’re worlds apart.

My observation:

They position themselves similar to classic revolutionaries - they claim to be the counterpoint to the “establishment” or to the “out-of-touch elites.”

That’s pretty tempting for people who don’t like the direction the world is heading in. Most don’t see or don’t want to see that the AfD is chock full of the exact people who rule them from the top down, police their opinions and take away their personal liberties.

What’s tragic is that, historically, a left wing group would normally find itself in the position the AfD is holding now. Yet here we are, after 50 years of slowly shifting rightwards until the social contract began breaking, with a party that offers a harsh jump further right as the revolutionary cure.

They had a serious investigation going, but that was during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister (BoJo = the Trump-impersonator with the silly hair), so it was pretty handicapped and when the investigation stopped, well:

Johnson’s government refused to release the report to the public before the general election in December 2019.

By June 2020, the report had still not been released, and the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been convened, the longest gap since the committee’s creation in 1994.

(from Wikipedia)

• The Guardian: Russia report reveals UK government failed to investigate Kremlin interference
• Wikipedia: Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report
• The report itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20210114193823/https://docs.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=aW5kZXBlbmRlbnQuZ292LnVrfGlzY3xneDo1Y2RhMGEyN2Y3NjM0OWFl

Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)

The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into “window-looking jobs,” employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.

Yep. Push and pull.

Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).