Google’s delusional fantasy has always been you want to buy a guitar, you go on Google, their ad algorithm shows you a perfectly targeted ad for the guitar you want, and you love and trust Google so you click the ad and buy it. They think LLMs will make that actually work, they want to give you a Grima Wormtongue that can simper and manipulate until you do love and trust it, and once you’re a rotting husk it whispers the ad algorithm into your ear so you think it was your idea.

If half the people circlejerking in here were serious they could pay a liberal developer to contribute instead, but somehow I doubt that’s happening.

They put a plug in the bottom that melts if the salt gets too hot and it drains out into a tank that stops the reaction with no moving parts or anyone controlling it. After it cools down they can remelt it and put it back in.

https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2025/02/10/boston-man-found-not-guilty-of-being-a-chinese-agent/ that’s the first “Chinese spy” in that Hill article

During COVID China let people do government paperwork in an app instead of the embassy, and let local businesses sign up to help old or poor people with the app. The FBI decided to call that “police stations” and went after guys who owned a restaurant and set up an iPad for people to use and scared the shit out of them. They hadn’t done anything yet, but if the FBI scared them enough to lie or delete the app, now there’s a process crime and they’re fucked. There was nothing actually happening, like all the teenage autistic terrorists the FBI makes up and pretends to catch. Same with the other countries the panic spread to:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nv0p6047go

https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/chinese-police-stations-montreal-groups-demand-answers-apology-after-police-investigation/

People are saying puritans or religion, but the US was even more religious and puritain 150 years ago, when nudity in public bathhouses was common. What changed was the US got rich enough to buy millions of tiny single person bathtubs and make installing more of them than you need an investment asset that you sell to pay for retirement.

Japan has onsens and it also has people sleeping in a bush on the street. Both of those disgust Americans because you look poor. Even if you’re a sleepy business man in a suit it’s offensive that you’re not embarrassed that somebody might think you’re poor for a second. American onsens were for the poor, then for the very poor, then they were effectively illegal because we hate the idea that somebody too poor to buy a personal bathtub is allowed to live.

They say “artificial sun” because that’s what it is though, there’s no fusion reactions here they’re just microwaving hydrogen to millions of degrees to study the kind of thing that would happen IF somebody runs a fusion reactor for 22 minutes.

The story also goes on to say about how the deaths caused by the soviet-era disaster cause is disputed. How is that a pertinent thing to add?

It’s not disputed those are just different parts of the same IAEA report. 2 people died in the explosion, 28 of radiation poisoning, 1 from a heart attack, so 31 known, then 19 with high radiation exposure died years later for ambiguous reasons, so 50 potential direct accident deaths. And then they estimated about 4,000 as the total eventual cancer deaths.

Leaves out the one catastrophic demand that the US actually cares about

(D) taking appropriate steps to return to United States citizens (and entities which are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government from such citizens and entities on or after January 1, 1959, or to provide equitable compensation to such citizens and entities for such property;

“At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports. … The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company.” - JFK

The second one is more like what the original razed 17th century mosque looked like. Deng was the one who gave orders to open fire in Shadian, he’s not good guy liberal here. Mao’s strategy was to yell at people to be atheist. Deng’s strategy was a religious red light district. Keep it alienated from secular society, make the mosques look like they were air-dropped from Saudi Arabia instead of having been there for 500 years, and give people the choice to be religious or Chinese but not both.

Starting before Xi China realized that wasn’t working, especially in Xinjiang, so the new strategy was to integrate. That means less of Deng’s “laugh at this weird foreign religion” architecture and more of “respect China’s history of patriots who are Chinese first and Muslim second.”

The only reason the US wouldn’t be on the side of the European colonists bringing god and civilization to a deserted wasteland full of annoying houses and mysteriously angry natives is antisemitism. Once that calmed down criticizing Israel is criticizing US history and that would be woke.

Half of the comments here think the point of the meme is that communists are right-wing, and half thinks the point is that Nazis are left-wing.

Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt after the Yom Kippur War gives Israel control of a 100-meter wide buffer between Gaza and Egypt. So it doesn’t open its borders because it doesn’t have one, just a border with Israel. A later agreement gave Egypt some limited control over the buffer zone, so there are Egyptian guards in charge of the border crossing now, but they can’t do whatever they want.