Zionism was a White Jewish Supremacist ideology from the very start and Israel was a White Jewish Supremacist and Colonialist project from the very start.

It didn’t become so, it was always so and always meant to be so, the only thing that changed was the feeling of impunity to push-back from Western nations as, over time, Israel invested a lot abroad into capturing Politics and the Press, into Kompromat gattering Honeypots such as the one headed by Epstein, and into in Propaganda, especially in Anglo-Saxon nations, thus capturing the political classes there and shifting Western public opinion in favor of Israel. As that feeling of impunity increased, so did they more freely, openly and violently practiced their ethno-Fascist (same variant of Fascism as the Nazis) ultra-racist ideology against those they very openly called “vermin” - Muslims in general, especially Palestinians.

They have and always have had, as they themselves say, “Western Values”, specifically late 19th century white colonialist values and early 20th century white supremacist ones.

PS: And if anybody has any doubt on the White part of their supremacist ideology, just look up the treatment of Black Jews from Ethiopia by the state of Israel, which included amongst other things forced sterilization.

He’s a psychologically sick guy with a profound Narcisist complex whose constantly harping about how he’s great at everything.

People who believe themselves better than everybody else and hence would never fall for a scam are some of the best marks around for scammers.

So it seems like a reasonable explanation that he got swindled into doing something which superficially looked like a win - especially in light of the recent similar “win” in Venezuela - but had secondary effects which turned it into a defeat.

Mind you, I’m not “assuming” jack shit, I’m just putting forward what I think is a likely explanation.

My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.

People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn’t run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.

Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I’m in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.

Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don’t).

None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.

There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren’t really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).

And this is far from the only situation were you’re stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can’t pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I’ve seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can’t pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn’t activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn’t.

In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural “buffering” with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn’t exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.

The EUR absolutelly is - the EU is a big stable open economy with large Financial Markets a freely trading currency and deep Treasuries markets.

It’s not by chance that over the last 2 decades mainly the EUR has taken a bigger and bigger slice of foreign exchange reserves away from the USD, with by 2025 the EUR being roughly 1/3 the amount of USD reserves (see here).

(That said, looking at that data, the EUR and USD foreign currency reserves have barelly moved since 2017)

Agree on the RNB not being ready - China’s currency isn’t freely traded and neither are their treasuries, and access to mainland Financial Markets is highly restricted. That’s reflected on the above mentioned foreign exchange reserves where the RNB is but 1/10 of the EUR reserves.

The end of the USD Reserve status is going to cause an absolute shitload of harm in the US (at the very least, huge inflation) but how much damage is it really going to cause elsewhere?

The US isn’t a keystone nation in most manufacturing processes anymore, nor does it produce anything that nobody else does: Modern day America mainly exports Social Media and enshittification. Even things like cloud services are provided by datacenters all over the World with the ones based in North America serving North America.

The greatest value of the US for the rest of the World is as a big consumer market for their exports, not as an essential provider of anything which is physically bound to it.

Absolutelly, there would be damage, especially for any nation left holding US Treasuries to the end (especially in the worst scenario of a US default), but “absolute shitload of harm” outside the US, that doesn’t seem likely: if the US magically dissapeared today a bunch of multinational companies would see their Revenues fall maybe 15% but otherwise things would just keep on working because very little the US makes is key.

Granted, countries for which the US is a disproportionatelly high export market like Canada and Mexico would suffer a lot economically, plus Israel would collapse without America’s propping up, but beyond that …

That really depends on whether or not there is a tipping point were an exit from the USD becomes a positive feedback cycle were states ditching it cause more states to do so (which is probable, IMHO), and if so how far we are from it.

I don’t think we know enough to be able to say that there’s no such tipping point or we’re far from it and, similarly, we can’t really say there is for certain such a tipping point and this action by the UAE would be enough to reach it.

All we do know is that over the last 2 decades the USD has decreasing as a fraction of foreign 1currency reserves in most of the World.

Should’ve figured out long ago from what repeatedly happened to the Kurds that America doesn’t give a shit about any they call “allies” other than Israel, especially Trump’s America.

It’s even better: it’s supposedly the same mythical being, but one side thinks Jesus was Their last messenger and is even Their son, whilst the other disagrees.

They’re fighting about who was and what was the nature of the last spokesperson from their mythical being.

They’re furious that the White Jewish Supremacists are also racist against White non-Jews rather than only against non-Whites.

In all fairness, “This is false, Trump is lying” is by far the most likely thing when he says anything that makes him look better (or at least less bad).

IMHO the most likely scenarion is that Trump was played by Netanyahu, later figured it out or was told that he had been played and now is lying about not having been played in the first place.

You’re assuming I’m using my domain to send spam or am operating the e-mail server myself. That’s a pretty wild assumption.

Further, I don’t live in the US nor do I have assets in the US, so that act means shit for me.

You can pay a company that hosts e-mail to do it for you, and pretty cheap too.

Which I do.

Like the registar, one can change that provider too, and if do that I get to take the e-mail address with me as well as all my e-mails (all data is fully exportable), unlike with Google were the e-mail address is theirs, not yours.

Try again.

Literally the worst that can happen to me if I’m really really unlucky is end up tied down to a single provider, same as you.

There were already 100s of registars back then (and as of 2024 there were over 2000) along with a standardized process for moving a domain to another registar, all regulated by an international regulator, ICANN.

Given that ease of migration is guaranteed by ICANN, making the market highly competitive, the only real risk that this entire system end up “consolidated” is if ICANN is totally subverted, a pretty tall order considering it’s in the interest of every single country in the World and millions of businesses (who also have domain names) that it is not, so that’s highly unlikely.

Meanwhile Google is just one and has always been just one. From the very start there was NEVER any perspective of there being more than one provider of gmail addresses so there was NEVER any perspective of being able to move away from Google and still keep your e-mail address if Google screwed you in some way. As for all your e-mails, those were always freely accessible to Google and they could always do whatever they want with that data.

In simple terms, you chose to be Google’s bitch and hope that they don’t screw you over too badly, whilst I, maybe, if I’m really really unlucky and an entire international system for domain name regulation is subverted against the interests of all countries in the World and most businesses, might one day at worst end up in the same situation as you.

I’m afraid your face-saving risk “analysis” on this is hilariously bad.

Not the previous poster.

A simple ESP8266 module from AliExpress is less than $4 (an ESP12F module - which is the FCC certified one with most I/O ports available - is $2), can be programmed with Arduino, has WiFi and that is more than enough for wireless home automation peripherals that are not supposed to do lots of processing (it will still easilly fit a REST interface for automated control and even a web interface for user control alongside it).

That said, in order to power it unless you can somehow draw 3.3v from the device it’s attached to, you actually need more parts and that’ll add up to more than $4 unless you’re doing it with batteries (and design and assemble your own voltage regulator circuit which is not that hard and is cheap, or maybe get a slightly more expensive ESP module that comes with voltage regulation) - this works fine if your device sleeps most of the time and just wakes up once in a while to check some data from a server holding instructions for it. For an always one device, best IMHO to use a 3.3V wall power adaptor, which will cost at least $6 from AliExpress.

The power considerations apply exactly the same for ESP32s.

Exactly.

My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.

Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could’ve carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.

Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of “Definitelly Do Evil” Google.

Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed “popular” stuff that’s designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.

That, right there, is how much America has been made great again.

Keir Starmer will go down in History as a supporter of XXI century Nazis and their Holocaust.

Next to Starmer doing anything and everything in the service of ultra-racist Fascists actively committing a Genocide that’s becoming a modern version of the Holocaust, Chamberlain just looks like somebody who made a minor mistake.

Try doing that with a passport and the typical access to Education from, say Burkina Faso.

I did not know that.

Took them two decades but better late than never!

I totally agreed with that: their Server OS is superior to their Desktop OS.

I just think it’s mainly because their Desktop OS has fast enshittified after Windows 7 rather than because Windows server is actually all that great as a server OS.

In fact, thinking about it, one might even say that Windows Server is better than the Desktop version because it’s to a very great extent a Desktop OS (in terms of having things like having an a complex UI layer and set of support applications integrated) the very thing which is actually a large part of the reason why its an inferior server OS for typical server-side scenarios because there what you most value is maximum computing resources made available to the server applications (which tend to be heavy users of computing, memory, networking or a combination of those) and an integrated UI layer actually uses more of those just for the OS (both directly for its own work and indirectly from the added complexity of a bulkier OS resulting in less streamlined execution paths) making fewer resources available for the same hardware.

If you look at the Linux distros and distro variants for server deployment they are actually vastly inferior to the Windows OS Desktop - for starters because they’re command-line only, though nowadays there’s often web-based management interfaces which are still a much lighter option than a directly integrated UI layer - exactly because absent an intergrated UI layer, not adding the UI support on top via something like XWindows or Wyland on a server Linux distro actually makes them better for server tasks.

Ah, yes, Windows NT.

I remember how this little operating system with a kernel invented by a Finnish dude and with no real corporate back almost completelly ate their market share in the server space back in the day (not that they’ve had a significant server market for long in between the end of the era of corporate Unixes like SunOS and the beginning of the era of Linux).

I actual did server-side development and just about every company I worked for in 2 decades and 3 countries had masses of Linux servers and if that much a handful of Windows servers, and that included all sized of company, from small ones to massive corporate behemoths - Linux was simple the best way to get the most use and performance out of your server hardware.

Whilst I haven’t been doing server side stuff for a few years, I’m actually surprised they still have any server market at all, since the only upside their server solutions have over Linux is perfect integration with their Desktop OS whilst all the rest are downsides.

I guess that they have some market share because basically their servers serve as glue between instances of to their Desktop OS in a network because of using closed protocols (i.e. a forced dependency on the desktop market rather than superior quality) whilst for any kind of generic computing they’re an inferior solution to even a free OS.