I agree with this take.

AI will definitely make some white collar jobs way more productive, and thus change the nature of that work and reduce the number of people employed in those jobs.

A good example is translation, where translators are now mostly reviewing translated texts instead of translating from scratch.

This means the ability to read fast and take on the role of editor is what remains important in the remaining jobs for translators.

The only country that can be blamed for destroying Iraqi industry is the USA. Two decades of war, one decade of sanctions and another decade of war (by Saddam against Iran) sponsored by the USA in the 1980s.

Obviously, Iranian industry will outcompete Iraqi industry at this point in history.

Iraq needs to rebuild and they need outside help.

I’m not gonna defend Iranian war mongering. And neither will I defend Turkish war mongering, or IS, USA or Israeli war mongering.

But the only path forward for Iraq is by making peace with the two power brokers in the region: Turkey and Iran.

And that’s what the current government is trying to achieve. The Turkey-Iraq corridor and the new port they are building are going to lay the foundation for their future prosperity.

As for Iran, Iran is desperate for allies. It won’t be that difficult to find some mutually beneficial relationship with them.

It’s more-or-less geographic destiny that Iran and Turkey will become the dominant powers in Western Asia.

They both basically ruled the area for most of history.

The best we (the West) could do is nudge them towards human rights and peace and friendship. For Turkey, that’s mostly a done deal.

For Iran, that was exactly what Obama tried to do. And it’s also what Iran has been trying to get for the past 25 years.

Iran is inherently on a path towards secularisation and more dovish policies. It’s the threat of war by the US and Israel that keeps the defense hawks in power.

Iran, especially, will never fully trust the USA - and for good reason. But they do want better relations with the USA. They just don’t want to get burned or bombed.

Thank you. I thought I had checked Wikipedia.

It seems smack in the middle between Eritrea and Yemen.

Does anyone know exactly where in the red sea this is?

I want to know if it’s in Yemens territorial waters or not.

The most common and stable society since the dawn of agriculture has been the feudal/slave society.

Countries like China and Bangladesh are basically this type of society.

And even the USA had sharecroppers until very recently.

We have to be very diligent, every waking hour, if we want to preserve our modern western way of life.

And we are horribly failing, by getting sucked into divide&conquer tactics that polarize the working class and thereby neutralize our political power.

He said those things towards the end of his life after he had been smeared for years.

Prior to that interview in 1983, he had criticized Israel for the atrocities they committed in Lebanon and people called him an anti-semite for comparing Israel to Nazi-Germany.

Eventually, he said fuck it, and went full anti-semite.

I don’t blame the guy. He’s only human and people can only take so much shit before they turn into bitter old men.

I used to think Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-semite. I also used to think Roald Dahl was an anti-semite.

But after researching what they actually said, it’s clear that they were just smeared, because they weren’t racist enough against Palestinians and (shockingly) thought Palestinians deserve human rights.

Honestly, I am now highly skeptical whenever someone calls another person an anti-semite.

The fediverse would be an improvement for now. But if it gets popular, bots will take over.

And corporate owned media hasn’t really brought us much good, either.

It got us into wars in Vietnam and Iraq and it also got us the destruction of the middle class.

I don’t think there really is a silver bullet. Best I can think of is, media owned by the people and for the people.

The eggs we buy in supermarkets come from hens who have never seen a cock.

It’s basically bird menstruation in a shell.

The US never did anything about Rachel Corrie or the USS Liberty or Hersh Goldberg-Polin. And we can probably add hundreds of Palestinian Americans to the list, but even their names aren’t known in the mainstream media.

It seems the USA capacity to care depends on how much AIPAC will allow it to care.

They aren’t combatants or PoW, taking them hostage was a human rights violation from the beginning.

But Israel can’t really expect Hamas to follow Geneva conventions when they themselves violate it a hundreds times as often.

Because they manage to attract investment.

As long as investors are willing to give cash in exchange for equity, a company can operate on that cash and run at a loss.

Hamas is trying to keep as many alive as they can.

But (a) 2000 pound bunker busters don’t discriminate between Palestinians and Israelis and (b) if the IDF comes too close to the hostages, their guards have to decide whether to let them go alive or to kill them.

In the case of the Druze guy, I can definitely see Hamas choosing not to kill him. But in cases of Israelis who also served in the IDF, the rational choice is to kill them instead of giving the IDF a propaganda win.

And finally, sometimes the IDF probably accidentally kills them and tries to blame Hamas if they can get away with it.

They could have had all the hostages back in October. Hamas just wanted back the hostages that Israel holds.

And again, they could have had all the hostages back in May.

Netanyahu seems committed to genocide and the hostages are collateral damage.

It’s deranged and I am ashamed our western leaders are cheerleading this.

Yeah, the biases of TikTok are pretty clear.

But it’s also clear that western owned sites are filled with western propaganda. It’s insane how Zionist reddit appears, even when the demographic on reddit is actually much more progressive/left.

But people just get banned who post something critical and there are obvious bot farms heavily manipulating the voting there.

The same is true of the mainstream media.

I have therefore switched from being anti-TikTok to being pro-TikTok.

Lemmy is better, but only because it’s new and the powers-that-be haven’t really refined their approach. You can already see though that lemmy.world has changed, with people getting banned and such.

I had comments removed on lemmy.world that were very mild.

Which is why I moved to dbzer0.

Back to TikTok, if it takes an adversarial superpower to get back free speech in the West, then so be it.

It always surprised me that the country that pioneered Lean production techniques has always had such an enormous waste of labour resources in their office culture.

They have one of the lowest GDP per hour worked of all Industrial nations.

Italy, Spain and Germany have way higher labour productivity, while even Turkey edges out Japan.

One thing I don’t understand is, how can polio resurface after 24 years?

I am tempted to think that it was intentionally released, but perhaps someone has a less evil explanation?

I do find it interesting how much press it gets. Especially since Iran is quite capable of hiding their tracks better.

I think the goal of Iran was to get caught, so that if the election is close, one side will accuse the other of the election being stolen through help of Iran.

It might even be Russia or China framing Iran to be honest.

And I think the US is widely sharing this information to beat the war drums and have cause to attack Iran for election interference.

It’s also by design.

The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.