Soot [any]

Sure is

Boom, installed, cool addon

A blocklist for malware would be safeguarding. But you can’t claim this is “safeguarding” against… completely safe software?

And it’s not exactly easily overridden, otherwise this post wouldn’t exist.

Sadly, there a few annoying things in Firefox which absolutely are not overridable at all. Firefox is heckin’ awesome, but this just ain’t true.

Those graphs are interesting. How does state ownership grow that quickly over that short a time? Are they just pouring money into nationalising industries? Massively growing state ones? Seizing bad 'uns? All of the above?

Given the government has been pretty stable under Xi’s premiership for that whole period, it must be something circumstantial leading to that heel turn. My best guess is just the realisation that state companies are outcompeting global private ones at every turn now. Very welcome whatever the actual cause.

Also, funny article.

The authorities’ stance since 2020, including regulatory tightening and zero-COVID lockdowns, appear to have inflicted long-lasting damage to China’s private economy, the dynamism of which was a defining feature of its economic miracle in the past four decades. Nearly 20 months into China’s COVID reopening, the private sector has yet to bounce back, despite many pro-private business utterances and gestures from China’s leadership. In sum, the findings here corroborate the view that China continues to suffer from “economic long COVID.”

“The fact that China’s economy is significantly growing with unparalleled state ownership despite COVID, while the private sector withers, just shows how the private sector is the cause of China’s ‘economic miracle’ and that continued, consistent massive state-led economic success just shows how bad the economy now is!!”

Again, it’s very hard to see the inner workings of China from our viewpoint, but one could definitely argue that they’re in the process of doing it. I think it was nary a year ago they passed a major law that mandates worker-elected board members for swathes of companies, and many more similar reforms that increase worker control over workplaces. They’ll probably spend years enforcing and setting all that up. If they do continue with changes like that, then they’re undeniably moving away from private sector control and toward a worker-controlled economy.

China is the only country of its kind, it has no peers to meaningfully compare itself to, so I daresay any fast, radical changes would be a foolish high-risk move that risks collapsing the socialist project globally. The west stands ready to maximally exploit the slightest crack at the drop of a hat, so it can’t risk showing any weakness.

But thankfully, it doesn’t live under bourgeois democracy, it actually can make progress through incremental, gradual change, and there’s definitely an argument to be made that it is doing exactly that.

I fully agree. I remember back when BE used to say he didn’t even want to voice his own videos because it would turn him into too much of a publicly involved figure. Today’s BE is unrecognisable by comparison where he wants every last dumb though to be a spectacle.

Living proof that Twitter is a cognitohazard

Boyboy have a very good video on Pine Gap where they talk about this exact issue at the start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHMa-Ba-2Mo

When Gough said they wouldn’t join in the fun overseas wars, the CIA bugged cabinet meetings and did all sorts. After Gough threatened to close Pine Gap, the Australian Governor General at the time (a supposedly entirely ceremonial position) worked for the CIA (which we only now know due to leaked documents). The Governor General just straight up sacked the prime minister despite having a parliament majority. Just that easy.

Even if you don’t believe the CIA involvement, at the absolute most innocent this was an incident where a very pro-Western unelected ceremonial guy, with completely private communications with US and UK governments, dismissed a democratically elected prime minister and installed a new one. It was a coup, by definition.

It’s probably worth mentioning that though his death was ruled a suicide, and it’s plausible, there are a lot of doubts around it.

Basically none of his family and friends believed suicide was likely. He had just written up a to-do list, so it wasn’t planned at least. It would’ve been quite easy for him to accidentally poison himself with cyanide. Nobody bothered to test for cyanide anywhere at the scene. And a biographer noted he was now a marginalised person with significant knowledge of state intel and would’ve been an extreme and obvious Cold War risk.

Millions of fellow human beings are constantly dying, being severely injured, or displaced. You fucking ghoul.