yogthos

I see little evidence of Iran being on the ropes actually. The color revolution attempt failed, they managed to clean house, and they demonstrated during the 12 day war that they can hit Israel and US assets easily.

The US also has a massive logistics problem with Iran being half way across the globe from the burger reich. A quick knock out blow is not possible, and Iran has the advantage in a protracted conflict because it's a large country with logistical depth.

It's going to be far harder for the US to fight Iran than it is for Russia in Ukraine. And that's been going for 4 years now.

I'm beginning to think that the whole reason lemmy.world exists is to remind us why we left reddit

As an orange man once said, if you don't count, you don't have a problem.

Right, it's the lack of any double checking that's shocking. I use LLMs to make mermaid diagrams of code all the time, it's super useful, but you have to actually read through what it generates.

Oh I'm well aware, but seems like a lot of Europeans are not.

I think all that has to do with how the model is trained. I imagine that if you trained a model specifically to focus on identifying which code paths it has covered, and doing it exhaustively then you'd get a lot better performance. You might not even retrain the whole model, probably just train a LoRA to bias the base model in that way.

Indeed, and the fact that around 60% of the population is living on subsistence wages underscores the point. They literally pay people just enough for them to keep working, literally all the value produced through labor is appropriated by the parasites.

China is a prime example. It went from a century of humiliation and utter destruction in WW2 to becoming a super power that can challenge the US today. There is no precedent in human history for such a rate of development, and increase in a standard of living. We can look at some numbers to see just how stunning China's progress is.

90% of families in the country own their home giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes

The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf

From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China%E2%80%99s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4

People in China enjoy high levels of social mobility in general https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html

Student debt in China is virtually non-existent because education is not run for profit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2016/08/29/why-china-doesnt-have-a-student-debt-problem/

Chinese household savings hit another record high in 2024 https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-jones-bank-earnings-01-12-2024/card/chinese-household-savings-hit-another-record-high-xqyky00IsIe357rtJb4j

The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult https://www.businessinsider.com/typical-chinese-adult-now-richer-than-europeans-wealth-report-finds-2022-9

Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI

From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&amp%3Blocations=CN&amp%3Bstart=2008

By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html

Over the past 40 years, the number of people in China with incomes below $1.90 per day – the International Poverty Line as defined by the World Bank to track global extreme poverty– has fallen by close to 800 million. With this, China has contributed close to three-quarters of the global reduction in the number of people living in extreme poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience

China massively invests in public infrastructure. They used more concrete in 3 years than US in all of 20th century https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2014/12/05/china-used-more-concrete-in-3-years-than-the-u-s-used-in-the-entire-20th-century-infographic/

China also built 27,000km of high speed rail in a decade https://www.railjournal.com/passenger/high-speed/ten-years-27000km-china-celebrates-a-decade-of-high-speed/

Vietnam provides another great example, poised to become the fastest growing economy in Asia https://en.vneconomy.vn/vietnam-has-a-potential-to-become-the-fastest-growing-economy-in-asia.htm

And then there's DPRK which survived brutal sanctions after the fall of USSR, and looking like a modern nation today https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=vcGj0SMVLrI

To add to that, the whole idea of state capitalism is a bit of a misnomer. It basically says that while you have state owned enterprise, the internal capitalist relations within it remain largely the same. While that's true, there is a fundamental difference here. Capitalism is a system where people who own capital hire workers to exploit there labor with the purpose of increasing their capital. The goal of capitalist enterprise is to create wealth for the owners with any social benefits being strictly incidental. On the other hand, the purpose of state enterprise is to provide social value. Workers in state owned companies are producing things that the society needs. They are working for their own benefit and those of others around them. Therefore, the nature of work itself is fundamentally different from actual capitalism.

You do understand that we live in a class society where the rich control the media, fund political campaigns, do lobbying, and so on. There's a reason this whole notion of wealth caps isn't happening. The working class population has no leverage in the political system by design. The only way you can create a society where you don't have massive wealth inequality and exploitation is by putting the working class in charge. And people who benefit from the status quo will literally fight to the death to prevent that from happening.

I imagine it's like when a dog looks you in the eye for emotional support while taking a shit.

There's another aspect to this. Since they know it's illegal and will get shot down, they're positioned to make money off of it in the process.

Pretty cool story, but it was USSR that did pretty much all the slapping in WW2. The US was a minor player at best.

Seems like Iran has been cleaning house since the 12 day war, and recent attempt at a coup, with the riots, shows that the leadership there is solid right now.