darkcalling

darkcalling, 7 days ago

They’ve already violated sovereignty by holding it for more than a few months. Freezing is a nonsense term. It’s stealing but saying I’m not going to put it to use YET and maybe you’ll get it back if you do what I want you to. They’ve already stolen it by virtue of taking it from Russia with no intent of returning it and denying them use of it, they’re just quibbling whether they feel morally okay using it now or later and for what purposes. So IMO I hope they just take it, because they’ve already crossed a line and should suffer for it.

darkcalling, 8 days ago

Decoupling happening.

Only question is whether the west will actually manage to incentivize the creation or movement of means of production to replace this tariffed production from China. Certainly there are forces in India that would like to take on this role though the level of corruption and other endemic issues like lack of reliable utilities in many areas there and incomplete transport networks, etc makes it an uphill climb. With enough free money and subsidies it’s possible I suppose given a few years even in the west. In the end succeed or fail this will hurt Chinese exports a bit, hurt US workers who purchase these things and have to pay massively more whether because of tariffs or higher costs from reshored production. At the end of the day this is shooting the foot efforts to mitigate climate change because this will lessen the appeal of moving to green energy, EV’s, etc and it’s pretty predictable at the end of all these high prices Republicans (bad cop) will come in, declare the whole thing a failure and gut the subsidies leading to shrinkage of the whole industry and its usage in the west to being a kind of luxury thing.

So not only is Biden abetting genocide in Gaza, he’s pushing full steam ahead for full-scale eco-cide and the worst climate outcomes. China should really just gut-punch the US already, slap up a total stoppage on things and crash the US economy into the ground. US politicians are already badly hurting the proletariat with these moves and inflation so it would be a matter of getting very bad fast rather than slowly.

darkcalling, 23 days ago

Guarantee you when this person heard Putin had an arrest warrant on those bullshit made up charges they didn’t have these thoughts, they probably thought good or it was justified or simply nothing.

darkcalling, 29 days ago

All this talk worries me. The west is truly run by deranged people drunk on the kool-aid their predecessors crafted.

darkcalling, 1 month ago

The EU will join them behind the firewall as will their Asian occupied vassals in Japan and occupied Korea as well as Australia/NZ.

It just sucks as someone who’s going to end up behind it.

darkcalling, 1 month ago

I’ll admit it’s not as great as it once was but I do think one reason the US especially wants to gut punch Kaspersky is because they’re developed advanced security systems for industrial systems which Kaspersky previously revealed western backed state actors were very interested in trying to learn more about. These types of systems would be on the front line against western intelligence agency hacking campaigns.

Kaspersky actually set the standard for HIPs and behavior control some years ago, they’re no longer an exclusive pack leader there but their software very quickly had a lot of granularity in control making it one of the better fully loaded packaged solutions.

Right now I don’t see any good software that really has everything packaged together. It’s all configurators and gui’s for Windows systems plus bolted on other aspects like firewall control.

darkcalling, 1 month ago

As usual it’s couched in the usual language of soft escalation they used in Vietnam and countless other places, the suggestion the troops will have non-combat roles, repair roles, free up Ukrainian troops but we all know the truth is if that was all they did it wouldn’t have a meaningful impact so they’re going to be in combat, in Ukrainian uniforms or plain fatigues with patches off or fatigues with patches on. Salami-slicing.

darkcalling, 2 months ago

In the same way that Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, AT&T, Twitter, Reddit are owned by the US government, that is subject to regulations of the government for the country in which they are legally headquartered, in which most of their engineering work is carried out, in which their primary development and internet distribution infrastructure is and in which their CEOs and top staff are.

Or how about how the top micro-chip lithography company ASML despite being headquartered in the Netherlands had its sales of its products to China vetoed by US pressure under the guise of US national security and suppressing China. So much for the free market from the country that claims to be capitalist. So much for allowing freedom of operation by private enterprise. And not just ASML, they’ve banned an American company, NVIDIA from selling it’s top AI chips to China as well, guess NVIDIA is an arm of the US government.

The US regularly applies pressure to companies.

That’s not even getting into a whole plethora of other areas where the US exercises hard and soft power.

darkcalling, 2 months ago

They were targeted for being Chinese. If they sold to a US company they could double the privacy invasive practices and you wouldn’t hear a peep. It’s not about privacy, none of your legislators give a fuck about that. In fact they use private companies to spy on you to get around that pesky constitution which says they need warrants or special legislative carve-outs but nothing about them buying your data from private companies who collect it anyways.

The US could easily have passed a nearly guaranteed to pass judicial review (unlike this) broad bill aimed at forcing better privacy practices for all social media that would either force better privacy for users or drive these companies out of business or out of the US market. But that would target Facebook which has been one of the primary lobbyists behind the anti-tik-tok scare campaign because it is murdering them in the young people market and ad dollars for retirees are not quite as good as for the younger crowd and any social media stuck with only the old is destined to whither to irrelevancy.

This is a hit job, make no mistake. By Facebook and by western investors who have been unable to invest in it and thus profit from it unlike western social media so it has to go.

If anything actions like this prevent more people from having an honest conversation and understanding of the privacy and other issues of modern social media. By putting all the blame on it being Chinese and not examining the psychology, the privacy invasiveness, etc of all of these social media apps they prevent an honest conversation, honest questioning and discussion.

darkcalling, 2 months ago

And how convenient, on lib lemmy I just saw a post in the news sub from Human Rights Watch (a division of the CIA-State Dept conglomerate) that was accusing them of human rights violations. Right on cue.

darkcalling, 3 months ago

I’m not sure why anyone thought the US’s sanctions were going to matter? Isn’t Russia’s economy massively backed by trades with countries like Mexico, Brazil, and China?

Historically they did. Historically just the threat of them sent most countries and companies scurrying to comply out of fear of being hit. The US expected them to work. The EU expected them to work. Even many in Russia have been shocked at how resilient their economy has been to it as have many in the global south. This was a damn-breaking moment, the moment everyone in the global south realized you could challenge and resist the US and win and it is why we have this sea-change moment happening.

So don’t talk like that, don’t act like the US sanctions are historically weak and do nothing instead of killing people, bringing down countries and companies, etc. This was not something anyone expected.