I think they've gone too far. Im boycotting

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43057031

The partnership is designed to protect undersea oil and gas pipelines, as well as cables for data traffic.

Both navies will operate as one – sharing maintenance facilities, technology and equipment to create truly interchangeable forces able to deploy rapidly wherever needed, the British Ministry of Defence said in a press release.

This is the most comprehensive defence agreement in modern times, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence added as the deal was sign by Defence Secretary John Healey and his Norwegian counterpart Tore O. Sandvik at 10 Downing Street on December 4.

"The British presence in the High North plays a crucial role in safeguarding Norwegian and European security," Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said after he met his British colleague Keir Starmer in London.

The two prime ministers then flew north to the Royal Airforce base Lossiemouth in Moray, Scotland. It is from here British P-8 maritime patrol aircraft are operating when flying missions over the North Sea or further north over the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

...

The partnership is designed to protect undersea oil and gas pipelines, as well as cables for data traffic.

Both navies will operate as one – sharing maintenance facilities, technology and equipment to create truly interchangeable forces able to deploy rapidly wherever needed, the British Ministry of Defence said in a press release.

This is the most comprehensive defence agreement in modern times, the Norwegian Ministry of Defence added as the deal was sign by Defence Secretary John Healey and his Norwegian counterpart Tore O. Sandvik at 10 Downing Street on December 4.

"The British presence in the High North plays a crucial role in safeguarding Norwegian and European security," Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said after he met his British colleague Keir Starmer in London.

The two prime ministers then flew north to the Royal Airforce base Lossiemouth in Moray, Scotland. It is from here British P-8 maritime patrol aircraft are operating when flying missions over the North Sea or further north over the Norwegian and Barents Seas.

...

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The EU should activate a never-before-used trade tool to counter Chinese restrictions on exports of critical raw materials if a new plan unveiled on Wednesday fails, the EU’s industry commissioner Stéphane Séjourné said.

“If this doesn’t work, and in one or two years we find ourselves with value chains that close down from a lack of Chinese sourcing – because we’ve not diversified quickly and we’re still too dependent – we will probably have to use the anti-coercion instrument,” Séjourné said in an exclusive interview with Euractiv.

The European Commission’s “RESourceEU” strategy is a Japanese-inspired plan to weaken China’s vice-like grip on trade flows of materials crucial for the tech and defence industries, like gallium, lithium and cobalt.

The aim is to cut Europe’s overwhelming dependence on China – without making the Brussels-Beijing relationship even more tense than it already is.

“The idea is not to break dialogue with the Chinese, but we need to accelerate our diversification projects around the world,” the EU industrial strategy chief said.

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The E.U. blacklisting will further isolate Russia’s financial system, making cooperation significantly riskier for foreign banks and investors. “In practical terms, landing on this list serves as a global warning: engaging with this country entails serious risk,” Shumanov explained. He pointed out that the designation will force even “friendly countries” like China and Turkey to curb Russia-linked operations to avoid “ending up among the pariahs or rogue states that assist those on these blacklists.” Credit-rating agencies may incorporate the blacklist status into sovereign credit assessments, reducing Russia’s access to investment, technology, and partnerships. “Entire industries face long-term contraction,” Shumanov explained.

Inclusion among countries like Myanmar, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Venezuela, and Syria has nothing to do with attracting investment or developing global commerce. Instead, Shumanov said, it signals Russia’s erasure from numerous investment programs and bars Russian businesses from prospective projects, largely because numerous governments closely track European economic policy.

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cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43056460

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Ukrainian children abducted by Russia are being forcibly sent to a summer camp in North Korea, a legal expert has said.

Kateryna Rashevska, a representative from Ukraine’s regional centre for human rights, told the US Senate that at least two young girls had been sent to Songdowon camp in North Korea.

At the children’s camp, the two girls – Misha, 12, and Liza, 16 – were “taught to ‘destroy Japanese militarists’ and met Korean veterans who … attacked the US Navy ship Pueblo”, she said.

Ms Rashevska made the comments at the start of the US Senate’s hearing on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

At least 19,546 Ukrainian children are believed to have been abducted from Russian-controlled territory and taken to Russia since the start of the invasion in Feb 2022.

They are often taken to re-education camps, where they are “militarised and Russified”, Ms Rashevska said, adding that the human rights centre had identified at least 165 such camps.

The Songdowon camp – located in Wonsan, North Korea – hosts around 400 children every year. It hosts a series of activities, including a water park, a football pitch and a large private beach.

...

Russia is one of a handful of countries that is allowed to send children to the camp. A former attendee, Yuri Frolov, previously told CNN that he attended the camp when he was 15, and socialised with children from Laos, Nigeria, Tanzania and China.

...

Earlier this week, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said only 1,859 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia had been brought back so far. Kyiv has made the return of stolen Ukrainian children a key demand during US-brokered peace negotiations with Russia, which are set to continue on Thursday.

Web archive link

Ukrainian children abducted by Russia are being forcibly sent to a summer camp in North Korea, a legal expert has said.

Kateryna Rashevska, a representative from Ukraine’s regional centre for human rights, told the US Senate that at least two young girls had been sent to Songdowon camp in North Korea.

At the children’s camp, the two girls – Misha, 12, and Liza, 16 – were “taught to ‘destroy Japanese militarists’ and met Korean veterans who … attacked the US Navy ship Pueblo”, she said.

Ms Rashevska made the comments at the start of the US Senate’s hearing on Russia’s mass abduction of Ukrainian children.

At least 19,546 Ukrainian children are believed to have been abducted from Russian-controlled territory and taken to Russia since the start of the invasion in Feb 2022.

They are often taken to re-education camps, where they are “militarised and Russified”, Ms Rashevska said, adding that the human rights centre had identified at least 165 such camps.

The Songdowon camp – located in Wonsan, North Korea – hosts around 400 children every year. It hosts a series of activities, including a water park, a football pitch and a large private beach.

...

Russia is one of a handful of countries that is allowed to send children to the camp. A former attendee, Yuri Frolov, previously told CNN that he attended the camp when he was 15, and socialised with children from Laos, Nigeria, Tanzania and China.

...

Earlier this week, Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, said only 1,859 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia had been brought back so far. Kyiv has made the return of stolen Ukrainian children a key demand during US-brokered peace negotiations with Russia, which are set to continue on Thursday.

Absurd, idiotic headline. Apart from being pure slander of the Soviets, the whole premise vulgarizes socialist economic theory and what economic planning even means. The more i read from Varoufakis the more i'm beginning to think he's really a moron.

He thinks he's so clever coming up with these comparisons, with nebulous concepts like "neofeudalism", as if he's just discovered something completely new that no one discovered before, when all it is, is just monopoly capitalism. All to avoid applying a good old fashioned Marxist analysis which is more than enough to explain these phenomena without resorting to estoteric theories about a new "feudalism".

The more you read him and others like him the more you start noticing the conspicuous, Marxism-shaped hole in their analysis. Because of course we can't be seen to be talking in Marxist terminology and applying dialectical analysis can we? That wouldn't be respectable, our liberal academic peers would call us names...

The result of this Marxism-phobia is that he has to vomit up onto the page sentences like:

So, just as the Soviet Union generated one kind of feudalism in the name of socialism and human emancipation, today, Silicon Valley is generating another kind of feudalism — technofeudalism, I have called it — in the name of capitalism and free markets.

No, you pretentious wannabe, the Soviet Union was not "feudalism" and neither is monopoly capitalism.

Idk why anyone ever thought this guy, who is clearly an anti-communist radlib, had anything intelligent to say.

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

Besides convenience, one of the main benefits of self-driving cars is supposed to be safety.

Yet in a bizarre move, Waymo — whose self-driving cabs had been enjoying extraordinary safety metrics — has just taken steps to make its robotaxis more human-like, eroding the safety narrative that’s been central to the autonomous vehicle narrative.

Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal observed a startling change in Waymos’ road etiquette, a new aggressive streak that would make a BMW driver blush. These include illegal U-turns, aggressive lane switching, rolling through cross walks, and running red lights.

Video by Jaimers.

(Invidious link)

YouTube Chapters:

00:00 - Intro
01:31 - Stage 1
05:13 - Stage 2
08:36 - Stage 3
12:02 - Stage 4
15:58 - Stage 5
19:43 - Stage 6
30:30 - Ending & Credits

Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all.

There is a moment in every public conversation about children’s imprisonment when language becomes a weapon. Governments call uprisings “disturbances”, media outlets describe frightened children as “rioters”, and the public is invited to see young people in crisis as threats rather than as children who have been deeply harmed.

That framing tells us far more about the adults in power than it does about the children locked inside these prisons.

Let's try help kids rather than locking them away and forgetting about them while doing nothing to correct the failures that created them.

Based on a leaked video, security researchers alleged that Intellexa staffers have remote live access to their customers' surveillance systems, allowing them to see hacking targets’ personal data.

"How to Build a New Global Order Before It’s Too Late", Alexander Stubb, December 2, 2025.

-About Geopolitical analysis, ethics, reforms of Institutions and relations for the Global West.

Arch

Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Slovenia withdrew from the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest on Thursday after organizers declined to hold a vote on Israel's participation, marking the largest boycott in the competition's 70-year history.

The European Broadcasting Union's General Assembly in Geneva voted 738 to 264, with 120 abstentions, to adopt new voting regulations without holding a separate ballot on whether Israel should be barred from next year's contest. The decision prompted immediate withdrawals from four countries that had threatened to boycott if Israel remained in the competition.

Source

TLDR:

OpenAI made a deal to secure 40% of the global supply of wafers from both SK Hynix and Samsung (2 of the 3 large providers of RAM) ostensibly for project Stargate server farms. But it gets so much worse, they made both deals on the same day without advising the other company, and have not provisioned any way to actually use (make chips from) the wafers. It looks more like they’re just trying to keep RAM out of the hands of their competitors.

From there the laws of supply and demand and panic buying by everyone else took over, RAM prices are going to the moon, and Micron (the third big provider) dropped out of the consumer market because they’re gonna make bank in the server market as the only unencumbered company. Consumer general purpose computer customers are royally boned. This will flow through into the SSD market as well.

In short, Fsck the AI industry in general and Fsck ‘OpenAI’ and Sam Altman in particular. If you pray, pray that this deal gets a legal injunction in South Korea, coz you know the US will just applaud this fsckery.