I worry for Cubans. Don’t get me wrong, the way the Chinese are providing solar is downright heroic and undoubtedly saving lives, but this comes at a time when the US is expressing interest in taking over. These solar moves from China could be seen as a way of saying “Cuba is under our wing; dont go starting a boondoggle”, after which you know western leaders would immediately start a boondoggle.

Cubans are under intense pressure, and im sure their people and leadership are struggling to navigate in a way that keeps Cubans safe while also minimizing risk of conflict.

This lays bare the actual reasoning and motives for US “aid” around the world: to wield power and obtain leverage.

Samantha Power, the former director of USAID, also laid bare how the US weaponizes humanitarian aid by masking its strategic interests with the rhetoric of altruism. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Power acknowledged that the agency has “generated vast stores of political capital” in the countries where it works and uses its leverage to bolster American financial interests, like helping a US company “enter a new market.” New Jersey Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat who once worked for USAID, was even more blunt. “USAID isn’t charity,” he wrote in a post on X. “It’s a foreign policy tool with bipartisan origins that is critical in this dangerous global environment. Gutting it means gutting our ability to compete and keep America safe.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/usaid-trump-musk-history-controversies/

This doesn’t help your specific problem, but for what it’s worth: airvpn allows you to set a port # which is retained when the VPN hops to a new server, or is reset. In other words, I set the port # in airvpn a year ago, and i have kept the same port since. I haven’t kept super up to date on VPN trustworthiness, so maybe airvpn is no longer recommended.

Well obviously they decided to only survey Russian shills. That, or the entire Institue is a Russian bot.

/s

China is still the world’s leading polluter

This is a rhetorical sleight of hand that conveniently glosses over the actual history of polluting nations.

Tenuous, unsourced statement alone - that has no bearing on automotive batteries which use different battery chemistry, design choices, and validation processes. Apples to oranges.

So are SIM cards.

Assuming you dont have a platinum PSU, you could upgrade to a more efficient PSU. That probably won’t give you as much gains as tweaking bios settings though.

Lol dog, you have no “movement”. You have a disparate collection of people bleating epstein to deaf ears on social media. Please show me how this epstein “movement” has had any measurable effect on the administration’s ability to orchestrate fascism.

Again, the original question was: at what point would you concede that this strategy is failing?

When the first doors are broken down? When the first public execution happens? When socialists are being loaded onto trains? When the first mass grave is discovered? Once the first million Muslim or Arab Americans have been executed?

Is there any point at which youd give up on this strategy?

Dont get me wrong, we need justice for the people that were abused, but appealing to the morality of our oppressors is silly. True justice for these victims will come when our systems functionally disallow the formation of any sort of Epstein class. Keep in mind, someone else has undoubtedly already picked up where Epstein left off.

Where did I say we should give up on justice for child sex abuse victims?

We should be giving up on this naive notion that one of these Epstein file drops is going to magically turn 60 million people against Trump.

So, we’re already there?

Your gumption in trying to reveal evil is admirable, but this simply isn’t a winning strategy. It’s not working.

And the 40% of Americans who don’t give a shit will continue to ignore you.

At what point can we say the Epstien strategy will not “take down” Trump?

Hey, you basically defined my system.

Truenas scale machine running 4x 16TB drives. I use a cheap rosewill 4u server rack case. It has hot swap drive bays in front. Big plus.

The brain is an amd 5950x running on an asrock x570 steel legend w/ 128GB of the cheapest crucial DDR4 ECC I could find. Also running an rtx 2080 for jellyfin transcoding.

My consumer mobo is the bottleneck. Given how my end goal is to have a 10gb nic and an LSI card for more sata ports, I’m going to have to get creative with m.2 ports. I might plug a 10gb nic into an m.2 port.

PSU was a 1kW fractal platinum rated. Way overkill, but the high efficiency is key.

You’ll notice my build uses a lot of gaming parts - i simply harvested my old parts when I upgraded my gaming PC. Despite this, it still idles under 200 watts. My point is not that you should seek out gaming parts, but if you happen to have any on hand, they could be effectively leveraged given price increases on new parts.

The biggest thing is: Use ECC. This is non negotiable for your setup. ECC saved me a couple weeks ago when my 5950x shot craps, randomly. So far no issues after increasing to a set voltage. ZFS and ECC go together like peas in a pod.

Trunp voters aren’t stupid, nor are they passive victims of a con. They are rational actors whose material interest and cultural identity are actually being addressed by Trumpism.

This is the best strategy.

However, if you ever knew youd NEED to use public charging, check out USB condom adapters. They open circuit the data pins.

The US slaughtered 20% of the country’s people. “Invasion” is putting it lightly.

Uh, yeah. It was. You realize that imperial Japan expanded beyond the island, right?

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

Operation August Storm,[1] began on 9 August 1945 with the Soviet Union’s invasion of the Empire of Japan’s puppet states of Manchukuo and Mengjiang, in Japanese-occupied Manchuria and Inner Mongolia respectively. It was the largest campaign of the 1945 Soviet–Japanese War, which resumed hostilities between the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Empire of Japan after almost six years of peace.

Original claim:

The US used the nuke to minimize potential Soviet influence over a post war Japan

Your rebuttal:

A normal human could not swim the Sea of Japan. 😏

What are you even talking about?

But I’m laughing harder at your other notion that the soviet ubermenschen were right about to swim across the Sea ofJapan and the US had to cheat to beat them there

Again, not sure what youre talking about, or how this follows. The only person bringing this idea is you.

Perhaps you need to check your le epic notes again.

Not sure what youre talking about, or how any of that follows.

The simple fact is that the notion that the US did not need to nuke Japan is a well-respected position among historians.

Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, put it this way: “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. In being the first to use it, we adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians of the Dark Ages. Wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

https://www.wagingpeace.org/were-the-atomic-bombings-necessary/

https://www.historyonthenet.com/reasons-against-dropping-the-atomic-bomb

https://jacobin.com/2023/08/atomic-nuclear-bomb-world-war-ii-soviet-japan-military-industrial-complex-lies

Alperovitz further highlights that the Japanese had initiated peace envoy missions as early as September 1944, reaching out to figures like Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek by December 1944 and engaging with the USSR in April 1945. That the Japanese were interested in negotiating a peace was well known. Moreover, the Americans knew that there was a potential for a surrender without necessitating an invasion as early as April 1945, provided there was clarity in the surrender terms.

The argument that the bombings prevented the necessity of an invasion is undermined by the very cities that were chosen to be bombed. It is now known that as many as nine atomic bombs were proposed to be used tactically against Japanese military targets as part of a planned — though never authorized — invasion. That two of those bombs were ultimately used against cities of no particular military value is evidence that plans for an invasion had already been abandoned by August of 1945.

The potential for a massive confrontation between the Red Army and the Kwantung Army in Manchuria introduced the prospect of the Soviets seeking equal participation in subsequent conflict-ending talks. This would have positioned them to assert a stronger claim over the region, resulting in gains that could far exceed their initial claims to territories lost in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Consequently, the atomic bomb, instead of being used tactically, evolved into a strategic weapon of terror intended to jolt Japan into immediate surrender.

Genuine question: before today, had you ever heard of the take that the US didnt need to nuke Japan - given Soviet advancements and Japan’s military crumbling?