Working class employee of the Sashatown Central News Agency, the official news service of the DPRS Ministry of State Security. Your #1 trusted source for patriotic facts.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/393380/Squad/
This is my favourite shooter, based on the Battlefield 2 mod Project Reality. Everything feels, looks, and sounds realistic. Matches take several hours and have a lot of coordination between specialised squads. The maps are huge and detailed. I’ve played rounds where I only fire a couple bullets and like PUBG it’s so much more thrilling than an arcade shooter with nonstop action.
I was a 9/11 truther because there were so many weird coincidences that day, but ultimately had to accept the accident theory. Shit happens.
Stellantis going bankrupt: I 
Stellantis executives being fed molten gold until their greed is satiated: I 
I like Twain’s work a lot. He became really radical in his later years: https://socialistworker.org/2010/04/21/the-twain-they-didnt-teach
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
mom never lets me play Introduction to Random Signals and Noise. I’ve beaten Environmental Plant Physiology so many times and even got 100% on soil pH challenge mode.
That’s a pretty generic closure. They sent similar messages during the moderator protests as they went public. Protesting subreddits were temporarily closed and the mods were swapped out for controlled ones.
Cargo ships are your cheapest paid option. I’ve yet to do it, but contact the shipping companies and see what their passenger policies are. There are also shipping agents who coordinate with those companies as intermediates.
There’s also the potential of crewing a small boat if you have any skills or show them you want to learn fast. I did a lot of sailing around Panama just by sitting in a marina at either side of the canal and chatting with people who are about to sail somewhere. The work was either poorly paid ($50-100 per day) or free in exchange for a bed and food. For transatlantic/transpacific sailing though, I don’t know if you’re going to find as many yachters as I did who were just sailing in the Caribbean. That’s also a fun option if you want to build those skills since they need a certain number of crew to even transit the canal and they’re all going somewhere after.
edit: And for the latter you’ll also have luck on boater forums. I can’t remember which I used, but there was a designated subforum where people would post if they have or want crew work specifically for linehandling.
“But you didn’t” is such a powerful idea in art. The only reason European artists aren’t stuck in strict biblical representation with church-approved colours is that people pushed boundaries. The modernists rejected boundaries altogether and embraced pure creativity to such a degree that their own audience couldn’t recognise it as art. I’ve seen that same Malevich painting in the MoMA and that’s revolution. That’s a communist rebelling against centuries of only realistic paintings of idyllic landscapes and aristocratic portraits being taken seriously. He’s saying a red square is art for the sake of creative expression, an idea that would mature into “common people are alienated from art which is restrained to a professional class. Everyone should be entitled to its production and consumption” with proletarian art. He destroyed the idea of subject as a model of patronage as much as he did as a creative restraint.
Art should do that. It shouldn’t just have a message, but a call to some greater action that enables better art. We wouldn’t have modern music without Wagner violating the tonic as the most sacred principle of European music. Modern music, and especially classical music, is fucking beautiful in completely new ways because someone had the courage to reject centuries of what Serious Adults said was beautiful.
I use two definitions for the two broad intellectual trends in art over the past century:
Robert Hughes on modernism- “the shock of the new”
David Harvey on postmodernism- “The reduction of experience to a series of pure and unrelated presents”
AI fundamentally can’t create modernist art because it recombines what already exists into a crude 3rd stage simulacrum. You’ll never see genuine brilliance from how we understand AI. It’s incapable of creating a new perspective, new consonance out of dissonance, or a societal transformation through art. If the world is a shared historical trajectory where we’re discovering the same common thing, AI doesn’t participate in that. It has no investment in the nature worship of art nouveau or the class politics of constructivism or the physics of cubism. It can’t overcome the 1936 standard of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he was only describing crude printing presses.
AI can create postmodern art but only because postmodernism is ideologically, historically, and financially flattened into artists as bourgeois bloggers. If the world is nothing but commodified individual commentary in a marketplace of ideas with the most valuable commentary coming from wealthy failchildren, AI is a wealthy failchild that can also regurgitate what it learned from scraping art school data while still staying tailored to market preferences.
I don’t personally value the latter or see it as anything more than a counterrevolution against the future we lost in the mid-20th century. There’s no reason I’d ever pay for an AI image if I can generate a more personally-tailored version instantly for free using the same IP it recombined to shit out. It’s inherently Thomas Kinkade kitsch but somehow less valuable because they don’t even pretend to involve creative labour in it.
The only good work environment I’ve had was a municipal parks department. Not even unionised, paid $17/hour for the same work I could get $25-35/hour for at a private landscaper, no benefits for seasonal workers and few super-competitive permanent roles. But in decoupling from the profit motive, production became based on need rather than financial goals. I worked so much harder than I would at a private company because building a public pollinator garden is ecologically critical work that educates people on important things. Clearing snow at 4am in -10c weather was something I did until the point of exhaustion because I use those same bike trails and sidewalks the moment I get off work and each bike is one less car that might kill my neighbours. I got to do eco-Marxism without having to use any of the vocabulary alongside a mixed bag of liberals and radicals who intuitively understood those ideas through observation.
With strong unions and outright syndicalism, that kind of nuance returns to the incentive structure. It’s productivity based on socio-ecological need instead of production for profit. We cared about getting people their 40 hours per week and if you came up 5 hours short you’d get paid to study and design sustainable landscapes used by your neighbours. If you needed time off you got it, if you needed a break you took it. You got to spend all day making beautiful de-alienating things for your coworkers, wildlife, and community. When my neighbours hold the power instead of owners and shareholders, it’s so much easier to convince them that doing A instead of B will improve our shared conditions.
The largest arboriculture company here is employee-owned but not unionised at a national level. Their stock isn’t publicly traded and each year the permanent employees get to buy shares with a certain percentage of their income. That access to stock options increases with your rank. While they’re the only arborists I’d want to work for and set the industry standards for safety, I don’t like two things about that:
Seasonal employees don’t get stock options, nor do new employees without like a year under their belt. This concentrates the internal wealth of the company in upper management and senior employees, making the incentive structure represent them instead of Joe Schmuckatelli risking their life 30m up with a chainsaw.
The incentive structure is the same as a public company as a result of that. Make number go up so you get dividends at the end of the year. The only way to make number go up is to do more with less. Productivity is in direct contrast to the welfare of workers because they don’t have a union to represent their safety or rights. If I get a small bonus every year from dividends but I spent that year risking my life unnecessarily to boost the stock price, it’s just gambling on Russian roulette.
Nature designed this creature to receive scritches.
Tesla having an oligarchical stranglehold over US EVs is why I can’t affordably own a better brand like BYD. If you want to be idealistic about Tesla’s supposed climate change role, explain it to me in the context of The Purpose of a System is What it Does. Tesla uses public funds to make luxury cars while suppressing the EV industry through its proprietary infrastructure, obsession with private transit, and government influence. The Boring Company is a direct response to California trying to implement high speed rail so that the wealthy don’t have to share space with workers.
Of course I negatively judge someone for owning one. If it’s a cybertruck, they’re feral and I write them off as a member of society. Electrification is dead on arrival as long as they exist.
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cpdxzjw9p47o
Elon Musk’s appearance at a Trump rally this afternoon is garnering significant attention online over a one-armed gesture.
He made the gesture while thanking supporters for contributing to Trump’s victory. Musk thanked the crowd for “making it happen”, before placing his right hand over his heart and then thrusting the same arm out into air straight ahead of him.
“My heart goes out to you. It is thanks to you that the future of civilisation is assured,” he said.
Several users on X, the social medial platform he owns, have likened the gesture to a Nazi salute.
Musk has since responded, posting on his social media site X: “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks. The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.”
I wish western journalists would have opted to become compost instead. Compost is useful.
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/02/snakes-act-ecosystem-engineers-seed-dispersal
(rattle)snakes as pollinators are greatly underappreciated. Their stomach acid doesn’t destroy the seeds contained in the stomachs of their herbivorous prey.
I think horticulture programmes are drastically underrepresented. It’s one of the most interdisciplinary sciences that you can use to teach pretty much anything. In studying the dialectics between organism and environment I could teach every component of those interactions from soil to sky. Plants are deeply political and a great platform for left-urbanism, socioeconomics, and historical materialism discussions. Operating a greenhouse is an education in several trades, while being able to grow a plant builds important life skills. It’s an excuse to take city kids into nature and show them why it’s worth defending.
Does the new ARMA have a more intuitive UI and control scheme than ARMA 2/3? That’s what keeps me from recommending it instead. Squad is much more streamlined in that regard without losing the depth, like comparing Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld.