• @[email protected]
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    377 days ago

    They are promising to gut the CHIPS Act which would be needed to even think about doing this.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      Apple tried this in the past. Who knew making special little screws was way more expensive to make in the US. Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …

      • Jerkface (any/all)
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        36 days ago

        Kind of sucks when you outsource all of your manufacturing …

        It’s kind of awesome for everyone if you don’t piss off your trading partners. It happens in the first place because it’s better for everyone involved! It’s a consensual arrangement that parties only engage in because it is in their interests.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 days ago

        The only silver lining I see to the tariffs is that it could end up sticking it to all these large corporations who fought hard to move operations out of the US, to places they knew couldn’t meet US worker standards, in order to save money. Obviously, US consumers will feel the pain, but we’ve been buying products subsidized by Chinese suicides in Foxcon factories, and so perhaps it’s a comeuppance.

        Disclaimer: I don’t know what’s going on.

      • @[email protected]
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        56 days ago

        I ran into this at work today. Proposed a very simple approach for something to an architect and an engineering lead. Engineering lead said this was a practical solution that solves a problem that’s been plaguing them for two years. The architect nearly immediately said, “well, the real source is a mainframe that was stood up in the very early 80s. Let’s ignore the fact that changing it takes an act of Congress or that we have multiple modern downstream systems between it and us that are a much better home for this new function.”

        It really seemed to amount to, “I didn’t come up with this, therefore I don’t support it.”

        Ah, corporate politics.

  • @[email protected]
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    357 days ago

    Maybe if wages actually rose with productivity, Americans could actually afford goods made within the United States.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 days ago

        The sheer amount of money being removed by the 1 percent is regoddamndiculous. It’s something like 45 trillion dollars since wages diverged from productivity in 1975.

        • @[email protected]
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          67 days ago

          Hahaha

          This whole presidency is raised for maximizing CEO income and no taxes for everyone at the top.

          It will be interesting if Trump actually manages to pull it off, because he’ll make the US swap places with China:
          No one trusts the country anymore, but if it has low enough wages and proper production capability it will produce everything cheaply just to export it all overseas where the luxury goods will be sold. Of course all profits will be made overseas, not in the US because hardly anyone can afford the luxury items no more.

          Meanwhile the production states will get deep smog clouds and intense small coal particle pollution in return. And the need for face masks will be back…

        • @[email protected]
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          26 days ago

          That the real issue right there. But that’s why all the manufacturing went out of the country in the first place. Often because businesses were sold, or passed on to their children. Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.

          • Jerkface (any/all)
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            16 days ago

            Then the new owners were only doing it for the money.

            As opposed to what reason for owning a factory??

      • MrScottyTay
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        37 days ago

        That’s one of the issues with how we’ve (most western capitalist countries) been doing this.

        People are struggling for money so minimum wage goes up. Labour to create things is now more expensive and prices go up.

        There is only one solution and that’s to theoretically (or technically) eating the rich that are hoarding all of the wealth.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 days ago

          What really needs to stop is the obscene bonus culture. It is quite disgusting to keep reading a company needs to lay off 500 people only to then give some CEO a bonus of 15million. Or banks running a deep 9 digit number loss in a year but still the higher ups get a bonus for some reason or a vague years old contractual promise. The top should feel loss first before it “trickles down”, and honest pay for honest work should include the top as well.

          And while I am at it, senseless management jobs should be allowed to be contested, no more “manager toiletpaper” who only shows up once a week to make an order, yet makes 5x the wages of people under him.

          • MrScottyTay
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            16 days ago

            That would be one step in the theoretical eating of the rich, yes.

          • @[email protected]
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            16 days ago

            Yeah, like a couple years ago, the CEO of Sanford Health hospitals quit / retired, and when he left gave himself a 17 million dollar bonus. No wonder medical bills are so high. Gotta have that needless bonus.

    • @[email protected]
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      16 days ago

      It’s not even about wages. The precision tooling and engineering equipment would probably take a decade of development to get the US equivalent with China. We just don’t have it here.

      And it’s not about rising wages with productivity. Americans by and large don’t want to work in factories or manufacturing. The pay would have to be astronomical to fill the needed positions.

    • @[email protected]
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      137 days ago

      The Trump base will blame Obama/Biden/Clinton, I guarantee it.

      It must be so freeing to live a life more divorced from logic or reality than an indoor dog.

      Maybe eliminating natural selection was a mistake.

  • @[email protected]
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    277 days ago

    This guy just spews his bullshit, Would it be nice if they could be made in United States? Yeah sure but the thing is an iPhone would cost like $3500. And I know damn straight I’m not paying that much for a phone. And I’m pretty sure you guys wouldn’t either and that’s coming from someone that sometimes makes some stupid financial decisions and that is not one I would make

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      If Apple didn’t try to make 400% markup on their underpowered trash, it would probably just cost what it costs now. Except the child slave labor part would go away.

      • @[email protected]
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        167 days ago

        Except the child slave labor part would go away.

        That’s the neat part, the republicans are trying to repeal child labor laws.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 days ago

        underpowered trash

        I hate to say it, but it’s actually quite powerful trash that they produce.

        • Darren
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          117 days ago

          Yeah, I’m in the process of shifting all of my workflows over to Linux/Android from all-Apple, but my Macs are a huge sticking point. My main computer is an M2 Macbook Air, which is ridiculously quick. I’m basically just waiting for Asahi to gain display port over USB, at which point I’ll ditch macOS. But until then…

      • @[email protected]
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        37 days ago

        My almost five year old piece of under powered apple trash cost me less than 45 US cents a day, still has regular OS updates and works between eight to ten hours most days running my entire life. I might even splurge out and buy a new one if they ever release an overpowered non trash handset…

    • @[email protected]
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      -37 days ago

      I mean I would pay a premium for a made in America phone. Probably about 2 times as much. Iphones just suck ass so I’d never pay for one at all

  • @[email protected]
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    97 days ago

    US can’t manufacture iPhones, but it can manufacture other things. That you can’t build Versaille overnight doesn’t mean you can’t plant a few flowers and lay one square stone.

    I think SPARC CPUs were manufactured in the USA even in 00s.

    The whole re-industrialization idea is good, people making something know it’s not magical and wonderful. That an ARM CPU in an iPhone is a relative of an MC in a toy, and that said MC’s internal structure can be grasped in an evening.

    Worker jobs in manufacture affect societies very well. Just believing that this is going to happen means believing yet another US administration promising something until its term ends.

    • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ
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      7 days ago

      Which is what subsidies are for. Encourage companies to do the things you want, don’t destroy the economy by making everything else impractical lmao. I see what the end goal is, supposedly, it’s just an extremely stupid, naive, or outright malicious way of accomplishing it.

  • @[email protected]
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    36 days ago

    In the meantime, the Liberty phone seems to be the closest option for a US-made smartphone. While not entirely comprised of US-sourced components, the PCBs are manufactured in California, as well as device packaging and assembly.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 days ago

      Decade old specs for decade in the future price.

      I have not looked beyond the front page of the link you shared here, and I don’t mean my criticism to be more than tongue in cheek, but oh boy, $2k for that is… Something.

  • @[email protected]
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    -17 days ago

    Toyota is able to build Camrys, Highlanders, Tundras, etc. in the US. So I don’t see why we can’t have a factory in the US to build the iPhone?

    Does building an iPhone require more manual labor than building a car? Maybe it requires more precision than cars, but I don’t see why we can’t train and equip people to do it here.

    There are microchips being made in the US today. See Intel. Maybe not the latest process node but it is not an outdated node either.

          • @[email protected]
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            17 days ago

            I 100% agree, and hope that remains to be an option. But also… things can change, and they can change fast. We are all only a few days of missed meals or missed mortgage payments from having very different standards.

            • @[email protected]
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              26 days ago

              Step 1 - Create a depression unlike we have ever seen and make people desperate for any job they can get.

    • @[email protected]
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      47 days ago

      You absolutely can, but the price of the workers for these kinds of things are way higher in the US as opposed to China. Also, if Apple could automate away manual labour to the point it would be economically viable they sure as heck would’ve done so already. Price increases using US-based manual labour are inevitable - its one of the major reasons why the global market is as it is today, cheap labour in developing countries.

  • @[email protected]
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    -47 days ago

    So you people finally admit you want and need slave work to satisfy your petty desires?

    Good, good! Baby steps

  • @[email protected]
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    1907 days ago

    Good luck getting all the materials needed for that now that China has stopped exports to the US.

    IPhone 17:

    Brick phone

    • @[email protected]
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      Only $4000 for the entry model. That’s how much it costs once the tariffs on the semiconductors that you simply cannot produce in the country for at least 10 more years even if you tried has been covered, the salaries high enough to motivate people to willingly work the assembly lines now that immigrant workers are gone, and the markup needed to cover the cost of completely creating an entire supply chain from scratch as well as paying back the insane debt that results from the outrageous high risk investments this would require and that frankly no investor would want to touch with a 10 foot pole.

        • @[email protected]
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          -27 days ago

          Or the Google tax of a few hundred bucks for the OS. Which could happen. Google is worse than Micro$uck at this point and I say this as someone who returned their OEM license before. See Revolution OS https://youtu.be/k0RYQVkQmWU

          Even Linux is now weaponized for profits over anything else…:.::.

          So argument invalid

    • @[email protected]
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      37 days ago

      Don’t threaten me with a good time.

      I’d looooove a return of the brick phone. Modern phones feel small and dainty in my giant hands. Meanwhile, battery life absolutely sucks. I’d love a modern brick phone that does calls, text and nothing else. And a battery life of a fulm week.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 days ago

        I’ll take my Motorola Razr back from the early 00s.

        Whether I do Captain Kirk impressions with it in the privacy of my own home is my business…

      • @[email protected]
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        97 days ago

        Had a Sony Ericsson W580i back in high school. It was a slide phone. 15 hours talk, 570 hours standby. That’s nearly 24 days of standby. I charged it maybe every two weeks. It was tiny(So not great in your hands I guess). We don’t need unwieldy huge phones for good battery life. Still had a basic browser and was part of the ‘Sony Walkman’ lineup so was a decent enough music player. Modern phones are just power hungry cause they have about ~12x the power of my first desktop computer.

        Crap photo but shows many angles.

        • @[email protected]
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          57 days ago

          Sure, plenty of small phones with good battery life back then. Owned a new phone every three months or so, innovation went that fast in the 90’s.

          But those small phones have a few drawbacks. Too small for my hands and you can’t really shoulder it like we used to with landlines.

          I also mis proper flip phones like the Motorola Startac. You could snap those closed with authority. Can’t quite do that with those modern folding screen flips.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 days ago

          Oooh! I had this back in the day. It was absolutely fantastic. I would love for this to come back again. I miss physical buttons and being able to do everything on the phone with one hand.

  • Singletona082
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    1457 days ago

    I’m genuinely surprised Trump killed the CHIPS act, when he could’ve let that roll through and taken credit for it as the whole POINT of that was to improve US manufacturing.

    Also reintroduce the build back better with whatever re-branding.

    If he were truly interested in american manufacturing he’d have gone all in on these.

    But no. he wants company owners and worldl eaders to come to him and beg for exemptions.

    • @[email protected]
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      07 days ago

      I’d have to look into it more, but my gut tells me the CHIPS act & ‘Build Back Better’ was filled to the brim with pork & bullshit. You’d have to parse through, line by line, and take out all the shit. And hope all the changes get passed & implemented, and of course you’re still touting the worthless name of a project that your people hate that you didn’t even create. Or just blindly trust your opponent’s judgment calls & let it roll through, based on “just trust me, bro”. Nooooo thank you. Why bother?

      With stuff like this, it tends to be easier & more expedient to take it behind the shed & shoot it. Replace it with your distinctly different, branded equivalent.

      However. If this is true, it appears that Trump didn’t fully raze the CHIPS act & merely revamped it, is taking credit for it. Like you said. CHIPS must have been pretty true to cause.

      • Singletona082
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        17 days ago

        Oh I’m sure there was pork there, but to just dismissi t out of hand is kinda disengenouls especially when all the politicians (mostly republican) that voted against it tried snapping up credit come time for the ribbon cutting and new construction to aged infrastructure.

        Granted Manchan and Senna opposed the build back better initiative and both were explicitely paid off by fossil fuel industry wonks… And i figure if they’re in opposition, ‘I want it even more out of sheer fucking spite to you greedy assholes that make money killing the planet my niece is going to have to live in.’

    • @[email protected]
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      477 days ago

      He wants to get rid of everything associated with bEYEden and also wants to stick it to CHAIna.

    • @[email protected]
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      357 days ago

      I’m not surprised.

      The name of the game here is to destroy America, not build it up. (Russia wants a USSR-style fall of America. The Cold War never ended for them.) And Trump wants to stay out of jail. Everything you see Trump or his admin doing can be attributed to those two things. Destroying America, or keeping himself out of Jail.

      • @[email protected]
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        7 days ago

        Eh, I think it’s more that Trump wants attention. The CHIPS act is bad because Biden gets credit for it, not Trump. Tariffs are good because Trump gets to force other countries to come to the US to negotiate with him. Whether the deal at the end is good or bad is irrelevant, what matters is that Trump’s name is in the news and attached to those deals.

        Trump isn’t going to jail, so I highly doubt he cares much about avoiding it. He mostly cares about people talking about him, and it’s working.

        I think Musk is the same way, but he does seem to care about the tech his name is attached to as well. So that’s likely to cause huge issues soon as Musk and Trump butt heads more and more.

      • @[email protected]
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        -107 days ago

        As a European I fully support comrade Trump in his successful endeavor of destroying the imperialist and fascist US state.

          • @[email protected]
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            -17 days ago

            that doesn’t apply.
            It’s better to distance ourselves from them before we get caught in their dumpster fire and also get burned.

            • @[email protected]
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              47 days ago

              And how do you plan on doing that today? You are also delusional like Trump if you think you can just cut ties and happily watch US go up in flames. That simply isn’t gonna happen, certainly not before his current term ends.

              • @[email protected]
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                17 days ago

                It can happen pretty fast, look what Russia did with those sactions.
                The EU, their neighbour, simply got replaced.
                We can certainly do the same with the US.

                • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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                  16 days ago

                  The USSR was not thoroughly embedded in the world economies. Nor did it have as staunch of allies in major positions in EU government as the US does today. Don’t get me wrong, despite being in the US, I do think that countries divesting and becoming less dependent upon a slave state, like the US, is a good thing. However, as the “Great Recession” demonstrated, EU economies are very much entangled with the US economy, with few lessons seeming to have been learned in the last decade and a half.

                  Sure, the US might be more impacted, but the EU will not be unscathed, if there isn’t more effort to decouple and ditch neoliberal policies. That kind of stuff can’t happen overnight.

        • @[email protected]
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          Don’t talk nonsense. Trump will destroy America and take Europe down the same path if he gets the chance.

          The breakdown of trust in the Atlantic alliance alone is one of the worst things that could have happened to both sides and this is just the beginning. They’re going to fuck themselves and they’re going to fuck us in the process.

          • @[email protected]
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            67 days ago

            I hope our EU government get some sense and stop acting like the vasals they are.
            This could be the push we need.
            The US never were our friends and this ‘alliance’ is nothing more than being in their sphere of influence and serving their interests. Bcs they are losing power in the world they are now canibalising their own side.
            Who said ‘there will be no more Nordstream’?
            And then in a pure act of terror blew it up forcing us to buy 8x more expensive US fracking gas.
            Not one peep from our sell-out leaders.
            We needed to drop this horrible country long time ago, regardless of Trump.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 days ago

      Trump is a personality cult. It’s not rational and whatever. It’s about him and always has been.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 days ago

    not to mention one of the reasons we eagerly off-shored electronics fabrication in the first place is because it’s a toxic nightmare

  • @[email protected]
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    647 days ago

    Instead of Vietnamese children making t-shirts to sell to the USA, they want American children to make t-shirts to sell to Vietnam.

    This makes absolutely no fucking sense even from a nationalistic standpoint.

    • @[email protected]
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      197 days ago

      Nah man, they’ll start using the prisons for more then menial labor. You don’t have to pay them at all

      • @[email protected]
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        87 days ago

        But then they have to fill those prisons with more and more people. How can America just increase the crime rate on a whim?

        glances briefly to American history

        Oh right, shit.

        • Gormadt
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          Slavery never ended in the US, it just got better PR.

          “Only prisoners can be sentenced to slave labor.”

          Makes a while bunch of stuff punishable by prison time and makes prison sentences longer.

  • @[email protected]
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    7 days ago

    Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.

    and no doubt at the same time their oligarch fantasy-wealthy overlords will preach to them about Spartan values or something. Ultranationalist Jingo Ghouls will talk about how its tough times create strong men, or about how we all have to prepare for war with China or something.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 days ago

      will preach to them about Spartan values or something

      Spartans kinda invented separation of branches of power. Not all bad things.

      But since they were a slave-holding polity, where actual citizens of Sparta were the occupiers and the helot population hated them with passion, that didn’t last for too long.

      Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR, you can trace the ideas and how it was built architecturally, didn’t work too well. Of the “layers of citizenry” too, their workers turned into poets, their warriors turned into slaves, and their philosophers turned into thieves.

      USA in any case just can’t be that, not in this century.

      • @[email protected]
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        46 days ago

        Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR

        ???

        You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.

        • @[email protected]
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          16 days ago

          Basically a group of Marxist revolutionaries captured power in a big enough country, and their intention was to build a new society, a new world order, without capitalism as they saw it, and by means they could somehow devise.

          So - I’m too dumb to expand well on this, but see the (formally dead since late 20s) concept of a soviet (a council) in the initial intended system. Citizens would both decide the fate of their polity and be inseparable from a collective, so soviet system is very simple - an atomic unit (a house, a factory line) elects their representative, on the next level (a factory or a street, for example) such representatives elect ones for the next level (a district or a town), and so on. A polity can retract their representative any time, they just need to vote on it. That works for all levels, so if the new representative decides to retract polity’s vote for the level after it, there’s a new vote, and a chain effect is possible of removing the highest representatives.

          This would seem OK and fine for you, but in fact it means that a lower polity can be pressed\intimidated\deceived into doing what I described any time, and so on. Which is why during Stalin’s ascent to unchallenged power he didn’t even break that system, just put a little bit of social pressure more via speeches than via threats.

          So - this mandatory grouping seems to me in idea similar.

          One can see some similarity between Soviet education not system, but rather pipeline, and the age cohorts in Sparta, say, toddlers were “consecrated” or “accepted” into “oktyabryata”, in 12 (if I remember correctly), into “pioneers”, schools and universities and technicums all had that strong grouping in activities, say, schoolchildren were sent in groups by age to mandatory competitions and warlike games (“Zarnitsa”, BTW, actually a good thing, teaches one orientation, coordination of movements of large groups of people, use of radio for communication and detecting communications of others, - all useful), students were sent in large groups to construction sites or harvests to work, etc. There were both rituals and actual mechanisms similar.

          OK, I guess I’m just trying to find something

          • @[email protected]
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            16 days ago

            I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.

            Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.

            When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.

            I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.

            Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.

            The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.

            I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.

    • @[email protected]
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      16 days ago

      Its looking more and more like the end result is just going to be millions of Americans will have to do without, Live with less.

      Phones are the de facto platform for two factor authentication of everything; I don’t see how society is going to walk backwards to phones being an optional luxury item.

    • @[email protected]
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      7 days ago

      Bold of you to assume that Trump and Company won’t put the average American to work for almost nothing. The planned economic recession is to convince the people to do so.

      The new generation of American children will not spend most of their time studying in school, but rather working in factories for a handful of peanuts. That’s Trump’s America.

    • @[email protected]
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      47 days ago

      China has a lot more leverage to increase this price. Export tariffs on US listed companies to US, and perhaps to countries that choose to further increase sycophancy to US empire. Prevent US manufacturing with more export controls.

      The problem with decades of propaganda/smearing is that too many people believe it. Bessent yesterday said “They only have a pair of 2s” as cards. No one in the room has not been programmed to “repeat that China is on brink of collapse for all of the last 20 years”. Hitler couldn’t win war because generals had to be loyal to every syphilis inspired thought of the dotard.

    • @[email protected]
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      17 days ago

      shouldn’t affect sales though because apple fanboys will sell their grandmother to buy the latest status symbol phone