This decapitation strike might mean no war for regime change necessary.

This doesn’t sound like a county who’s leaders are ready to roll over and accept American occupation

Just remember, if you suggest this was bad, you’re a Tankie and you hate freedom

I’d intended that to be a horse on codeine

Mustangcadine

It would be nice if Wikipedia automatically integrated with WayBackMachine or some other archive service. Or even directly backed up the information when it was linked.

The only President I recognize is

You’ll regularly find a link to a secondary source that contains a reference to a primary source. If you just want generically available historical, scientific, or broadly epistemological knowledge, its great. If you want an on-the-ground testimonial from an eye-witness, it may give you the start of a breadcrumb trail towards your destination.

That said, the bias endemic to Wikipedia is largely a product of its origins - primarily English, western media focused, heavily populated by editors from a handful of global north countries. If you want to learn about the history of a mayoralty in Saskatchewan going back to the 18th century, its a rich resource. If you want to find out the political valence of the major political parties of Nepal or Azerbaijan, you’ll find a much thinner resource.

Some of that is a consequence of the editors (or absence of them) around a particular topic. Some of that is a consequence of the moderators/admins graylisting or outright blacklisting sources. Newer sources - 404media, for instance - aren’t tracked while older sources that have changed management significantly and lost some of their trustworthiness - WSJ, CBS, National Geographic, as recent examples.

jihadists

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

Arabic word that means “exerting”, “striving”, or “struggling”, particularly with a praiseworthy aim

Curious choice of words.

To a degree. But you also run into the classic XKCD problem of Citogenesis. This isn’t a hypothetical, either.

Had you, for instance, mentioned something you read about your own historical house on Wikipedia in the city’s newspaper, it would now be a cited piece of information that Wikipedia links onto.

There’s also the problem of link rot. When your small town newspaper gets bought up by ClearChannel or Sinclair media and the back archives locked down or purged, the link to the original information can’t be referenced anymore.

That’s before you get into the back-end politics of Wikipedia - a heavy bias towards western media sources, European language publications, and state officials who are de facto “quotable” in a way outsider sources and investigators are not. Architectural Digest is a valid source in a way BanMe’s Architecture Review Blog is not. That has nothing to do with the veracity of the source and everything to do with the history and distribution of the publication.

Gotta keep the Boy Who Cried Wolf around in case there’s a wolf.

I have heard the smoke alarm many, many times.

I have never been in a burning building

Misread that as

I don’t have chicken

Only thing you can do is crack a door and take a peak.

none of them should have more than a few percent in them

Tesla makes up 2.3% of the S&P 500 and 4.5% of NASDAQ. Then you have business downstream of Tesla - Luminar Technologies sells the majority of it’s LIDAR systems to Tesla, Hertz’s EV fleet is plurality Tesla, Panasonic co-owns Gigafactory 1.

I was more speaking of the lenders who enable Musk’s bullshit like buying Twitter or fucking around with our elections.

They do it so they can be first in the door for future IPOs. JP Morgan has been a close ally of Musk’s for decades. And he’s repaid them with numerous opportunities to resell their debt. The Twitter loan was a small price to pay by comparison.

there’s a far bigger gap in intelligence

You’d never know it when you listen to YouTube Atheists talk. It’s all the same reactionary clickbait bigotry we’ve come to expect from the Internet.

You spend enough time with New Atheists, and you very quickly discover why the movement tripped over its own dick and died back in the '00s.

Christopher Hitchens secularizing the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, Sam Harris secularizing Islamophobia, Richard Dawkins secularizing misogyny. Joel Osteen juice and crackers seem far more attractive than some greasy, hollow-eyed Objectivist preaching nihilism and genocide in the name of corporate profits.

Big Tech keeps building smarter devices

Smarter or just louder?

It’d be nice to see the lending market smarten up and tell him to pound sand.

Because the stock valuation has inflated so far beyond the company’s actual revenues, its been pushed into a number of major index funds and become a “must buy” for 401ks and other retail investment accounts. This creates a kind-of self-fulfilling overvaluation as a result. I don’t think there’s any real market mechanism that will devalue Tesla in the near future. Kicking the Tesla tentpole means shaking up the entire S&P 500. Even the mega-hedge funds with the ability to do it don’t have a strong monetary incentive to try.

At the same time, the kind of stock growth Elon is expected to deliver in the next five years is astronomical relative to their core position. Either he’s going to Tulip Mania his company again or he’s going to fall far short of the mark.

I worry he’s going to fuck out space industry in the process of fleecing NASA though.

NASA’s been a contractor’s boondoggle since at least Reagan. The Challenger Disaster can be linked directly back to an outsourcing scandal that was covered up and buried under Reagan in order to keep Thiokol Chemical Corporation (now a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman) financially insulated.

I would argue that SpaceX exists precisely because NASA has become a budget of money to be siphoned from. The Space Industry was fucked in the 80s and never really recovered, leading to our reliance on Soyuz rockets for much of the Bush Era and creating an environment at Boeing so toxic that we’ve largely lost our ability to do space flight domestically.

For all the talk of Moon bases and Mars missions, it seems the real money in aerospace is just spewing up endless waves of cheap disposable satellites for commercial communications. That’s going to be the limit of US space technology for the foreseeable future.

Also, the machine costs $500B/year to operate and generates less than $2B in gross revenue. So John Shareholder is going to need a multi-trillion dollar bailout in a year or two.