the arms on @Lumalo@hexbear.net’s l’s broke off when he joined and they were rattling around in the servers for a few days until they got stuck in the deliberalator and the whole site crashed, the admins had to crawl in and get them out

what i’m saying is that by holding us to certain evidentiary standards there was no way we could possibly prove any of this

you seem lost, so i’ll explain:

the governments they overthrew were compradors selling out their own people for some scraps from their french neocolonial overlords. the lands of niger, mali, and burkina faso are rich in gold, uranium, oil, and diamonds, and yet the people have lived like slaves. force was clearly justified if the previous governments were unwilling to cede power peacefully. they were suspended from ecowas at the obvious behest of france and the u.s., countries notable for their willingness (and outright glee) in using or abetting violence to effect regime change whenever it suits their own interests. let’s not pretend that the suspension was because of the coups, it was because the coup leaders are not obedient dogs of the empire.

the win here is that they’re formalizing and solidifying an alliance against western imperialist theft of their natural resources and labor.

traore has explicitly claimed to be guided by sankara thought, if i recall

Yeonmi Water-Park

dammit i should’ve seen that one, i will assign myself 3 extra turns pushing the bumper cars

france and the u.s. have been withdrawing from their bases there. after they couldn’t goad ghana and nigeria into a preemptive guardianship of free and fair elections it became clear they’d at least need to beat a tactical withdrawal from their democracy efforts.

finally excavated the senate, eh?

bam! got 'em

these aren’t complete and you may already be familiar, but for anyone interested:

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/in-search-of-true-color/

https://tmora.org/online-exhibitions/photographer-to-the-tsar-revealing-the-silk-road/sergei-m-prokudin-gorskii/

https://www.gettyimages.com/photos/sergei-prokudin-gorskii

in bad country, citizens are required to queue for upwards of several minutes before going down the state-owned water slide

really scraping the bottom of the propaganda barrel with this one, huh?

yep, in many ways that’s the easiest way to do it. co-registering the 3 photos can be tricky, especially for close ups. but it’s bulky and laborious. it’s not really until the filters got incorporated into multilayered film that it became cheap enough for widespread use.

your customers on a boston to west palm beach flight were perplexed to see your flight attendant adorning a flag of palestine pin, and then utterly rapt by his dreamy eyes when he asked if i’d like any snacks or something to drink

:eric-andre-let-me-in:

early color photography experiments date back to the 1840s, a color photo from 1896 is plausible, it was just prohibitively expensive for most uses for a long time.

similarly, italian inventor stefano lavori began working on early versions of what would become the iphone (shortened from italian telephone) in his workshop in ragu, italy in 1864 while attempting to devise a tomato sauce recipe that doesn’t require glue.

We are talking about geopolitical changes on the scale of decades

but by tankie logic, decades happen in weeks, so the fact that it’s been several weeks and u.s. hegemony hasn’t collapsed proves you’re wrong!

it’s a common misunderstanding and it’s actually something of an in joke with the fandom. there’s a really good edit someone made that basically changes the canonical order to be:

The Mechanic (2010)

The Mechanic II (2013)

MECHANIC III: New Dawn (2022)

The Mechanic 3 (2015)

MECHANIC 2 (2020)

MECHANIC (2019)

The Mechanic: Revelations (2014)

which works remarkably well. they actually brought back the original director from the first two the mechanic movies for new dawn, so stylistically it fits better even though it was made a decade later. the end result is a sort of rashomon version of the mechanic narrative. it’s really a must watch for mechanic fans.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.

–Michael Scotus

All simulations are ultimately constrained by their creators’ assumptions: They are self-contained universes ticking along to preprogrammed logic. They don’t necessarily reflect anything fundamental about the world as it is, much less how we may want it to be.

exactly. the map is not the territory. no simulation could possibly capture the complexity of an entire neoliberal capitalist economy and predict the long-term equilibrium outcome of such a system.

An artist named Vincent Ocasla, for instance, created a city with a stable population of 6 million. The only catch? It was a libertarian nightmare world. It had no public services—no schools, hospitals, parks, or fire stations. His dystopia had nothing but citizens and a concentrated police force populating an endless plain of one bleak city block, copied over and over.

Without a monopoly or oligopoly, high fixed cost + low marginal cost businesses almost always see prices competed down to marginal cost (e.g., airlines).

true but the airline industry still consolidated into an oligopoly through control of their own currencies (redeemable miles)

might see something similar with gpu computing where the nominal prices are driven down to marginal cost but the real profit comes from control of the supply of tokens that can be redeemed for gpu time

but that still assumes there’s a real profitable use for this shit besides ever more individually targeted advertising and various flavors of outright fraud