Not talking about the USSR there skipper.

You keep saying that people are called “tankie” for being “left of the DNC” but the only people I see being called “tankie” are folks who think a lot more people aught to be dying from polonium poisoning.

Somehow supporting colonial aggression by a totalitarian state is a left cause.

Probably because there are a lot of tankies here. 🙃

Privatized public transit:

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

Lotta people here have some body dismorphia

It does seem like short shorts are coming back.

Most of the tech billionare’s ideas comes from watching a dystopian 80s scifi and saying “let’s do this but where I’m the bad guy.”

Show me one thing Elon ever came up with that isn’t in Total Recall.

They would have had to build that infrastructure. I’m not saying fundraising is easy. But it’s possible as proven by wikipedia. They could have cut Google loose 10 years ago and said "we’re going to use our runway to try to put together a wikimedia foundation style fundraising operation. I don’t think they can do it now because the trust, goodwill and quite frankly, userbase is gone.

What on earth would that do? The poisonous leadership would not use it to improve the browser nor would they start working for donors instead of Google.

My point is that there is a funding model that they could have pursued when they still had goodwill and trust. And my hope is if the government finally puts the boot in with Google, then this current version of mozilla will collapse, the rats will leave the ship and hopefully a good browser will emerge the way firefox emerged from netscape.

It’s the board and the wider leadership who are controlled by Google and intent on destroying Firefox. The current CEO is pretty new, and replaced a heavily criticized CEO that spent years overseeing the decline of Firefox. The new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.

Daily reminder that Mozilla’s new CEO is a former McKinsey consultant.

Mozilla could have focused on being user-supported through fundraising like Wikipedia. Instead they chose the comfortable path of being funded by their biggest competitor, who is an evil monopoly spyware ad business, which has been compelling Mozilla to kill Firefox and become the badies on the way down.

Gonna save this one for later.

Yep this. It’s a combination of becoming more financially well-off, combined with loss aversion, combined with a sense that the culture starts to alienate you. It’s like grandpa simpson said: “I used to be with it. But what was ‘it’ changed. And now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’, and what is ‘it’ is scary and strange.”

Man, I’m so glad this shit is illegal on multiple levels in Europe.

In other news: https://midwest.social/post/17142014

They conquered the whole planet in search of someone they could beat at cricket.

He’s a “free-breathing absolutist.” He thinks everyone should have a supply of oxygen except the people he personally doesn’t like.

I quite frankly flat out do not understand why people on the left are so against space exploration suddenly

Ever heard the song “whitey on the moon?”

Setting that aside, exploring space is not the same thing as building a company town for the world’s least mentally stable pregnancy fetishist oligarch in an unworldly cold desert where everyone is sure to die.

Problem is they’re not protesting for an end to west bank settlements, or a meaningful negotiation with Palestine that creates a viable Palestinian state with right to return, or an end to the Gaza embargo, or even a curbing of settler violence, house demolition or the like.

All these things are not part of the discussion in Israel.

Mostly they’re protesting against the utter and complete disregard Netenyahu has for the lives and well-being of the hostages.

supporting Israel being an easy and surface-level way to alleviate that guilt.

No doubt reinforced by enormous amounts of hasbara.

Almost as if they’re overcompensating for something. 🤔