I was in Finance when the first part of the outcome of that shit hit in 2008 and subsequent years (and I say “first part” because we’re still living it and it looks a lot like there are still more 3rd and further order consequences of it unfolding for people) and damn, that shit really forced me to realize just how evil and hypocrite neoliberalism and neoliberals really are.

By the way, I absolutely counted as an “useful idiot” up to then.

It’s the giving a public institution money only if they do a certain thing that can be compared to a bribe, the morality of said “thing” being irrelevant.

I think it boils down to who has the power: if they start a collection for money to expand their building to have more space and you chose to participate then it’s not you dictating what they do with the money, as all you did was see a cause that you found worthy and contribute to it - the power was entirelly in their hands since they could’ve chosen to collect for a different purpose and you were just a passive agent - whilst if you give them money with the proviso that you get to dictate how it gets used, then the power is in your hands not theirs: the former is more akin to charity and the latter to bribing.

That said, “bribe” is indeed an imperfect metaphor.

Actually, if you want to take what I said seriously, cooling liquids just have a high termal capacity and decent or high termal conductivity as well as being at the liquid stage at the temperature range they’re supposed to work in: a cooling liquid by itself it does not cool anything, it just absorbs heat from the environment on one side of the circuit, carries that heat somewhere else and releases it to the environment there and after that it circulates back to absorb some more heat and so on - the name “cooling liquid” is somewhat deceitful since those liquids work by transporting heat from a hot side to a cold side rather than making things cooler by their mere presence.

There are plenty of combustible fluids which fit the criteria and could be used as liquid coolants. Whether it would be wise to use a combustible liquid (worse, one which would burn at a high enough temperature to melt, or at least to soften, steel) for cooling computers is an entirelly different matter altogether.

The idea of a cooling liquid that’s combustible is actually the “it’s absolutelly possible” part of my post and not the “stupid” part.

By an amazing coincidence it’s pretty much the same for people attending work meetings.

Nature is truly incredible.

At least back when I lived in the UK the Greenparty were the only national party which was Leftwing, though I believe nations other than England did had more mainstream left of center parties.

I was actually a member of the Greenparty until I left the UK following Brexit and at least the people in my local are were trully well intentioned people though quite naive (IMHO). Then again in the UK I worked for almost a decade in Finance - which was pretty much Sociopath-Central - so maybe it was me being significantly more cynical and skeptical than average rather than them being more naive.

They try really hard to make the difference de facto as small as possible whilst being loudly theatrical about how “different they are” to make it seem as big as possible.

It’s why for example in the US you get loud outrage about some stupid teenagers posting a photo were they spell the N-word, but nowhere the same outrage about kids in poor inner city neighbourhoods not having anywhere the same chances in life as the rest because schools there are shit or having significantly lower life expectation because for poor people food is shit, houses are shit, healthcare is shit, even the mattresses they sleep on are shit - all of which are things which disproportionatelly impact minorities and are the mechanisms via which racism shapes lives and causes suffering 24/7.

Again and again make clown shows of morons being morons (and there are always morons) so as to avoid addressing the actual ways in which people are oppressed because those are all about money and one can’t negativelly impact the wealth and what the priviledges it buys, and if there’s one thing where both the Fascists and the Marginally-Less-Fascist are exactly the same is making sure the wealthy remain wealthy and can derive maximum priviledges of it, with zero concern for all those who must suffer for it to be so, minority members or otherwise.

Zero surprise in seeing the hard Neoliberals of New Labour siding with ethno-Fascists and silencing criticism of it even from their own party members.

For those who didn’t follow it, some years ago the Labour membership elected an actual Leftie to lead the Party - Jeremy Corbyn - overthrowing decades of total control of the party by the New Labour faction (who are hard Neoliberals, not Leftwing, and whose policies were at one point deemed by none other that Margaret Thatcher as “my greatest achievement”) and what followed was a massive slander campaign, mainly using accusations of anti-semitism anchored on statements from Israeli linked Jewish organisations, even at one point with New Labour faction politicians relentlessly keeping on the slander campaign during an election causing Labour to lose it, something they then claimed as being because Corbyn was “unelectable”, until they finally managed to bring down Corbyn and restore power to the New Labour faction who promptly went on a purge of the Labour part of any overltly Leftwing members.

Fast-forward to present times and the Neoliberals who now control the Labour party have a huge debt to the Zionists, hence their support of their Genocide (and the recent “we’re blocking some arm sales” announcement only “blocked” 20 out of 300 kinds, and was clearly just the the usual theatre so typical in UK politics)

The more under pressure they are, the sooner they lose it…

It sounds a lot like you’re letting Perfection be the enemy of Good Enough.

Should there be no UN because in a small proportion of situations it’s actually shit and is it really realistic to have no talking shop like that at all for as long as it takes for the World to somehow get together and make a perfect entity for that?

I’ve given some thought to it over the years and I think that the UN still does more good than bad, even whilst being shit at some things and having no real power other than that of influencing nations in general and the World’s public opinion.

Further, even if in the balance of things tearing down the UN and creating something better turned out to be the best thing to do, I don’t quite see how arbitrarily kicking countries from the UN that were deemed “badly behaving” at the moment would help us create the something better since those countries would need to be there too (it would certainly help tear down the UN, just not help with the actual primary purpose of getting something better to replace it).

A talking shop for everybody using the penalty of kicking members out only ever succeeds in turning itself into an exclusive club, and at the time when the only thing that existed were such clubs (which were naturally made up of nations allied with each other) was before and at the start of WWI and lead to it and to WWII.

It’s a country founded on 19th century White Colonialist ideology (this bunch of people who see themselves as Whites being Jewish rather than Christian makes no different to their victims) which, unlike the places from were such thinking hailed, has never evolved away from it, quite the contrary: just like Apartheid South Africa, with time they just become more violent and oppressive against those they see as lesser races, only Apartheid South Africa was forced to stop whilst Israel just kept doubling down on it and getting more violent.

It’s not by chance that most Israelis and their leadership say that they “have Western Values”: they do have Western Values it’s just that they’re 19th century Western Values.

Whilst I disagree with your earlier point about expelling Israel from the UN (or anybody else: the whole point of the place is as a diplomatic talking shop for everybody) I wholehartedly agree with this one.

I’m not at all denying Racism in Portugal.

I’m denying Racist Hate, even back in Fascist times: people were prejudiced about those in the “colonies” and even looked down on them but they didn’t at all hate them.

People did (and still do, though less) go around with all sorts of prejudices about different looking people or people from other places, especially “Colorism” (though, curiously, in present day Portugal it’s more the Brazilians that are discriminated against than people with Black African ancestry).

My point is that even during Fascism and the peak of the wars of liberation against Portugal in the “colonies” people didn’t went around thinking that “Africans are human animals” or that “we should wipe them out” and ditto for the figures of the Regime, whilst the shit coming out of Israel and especially from the mouths of Ministers and politicians of the governing coalition is relentlessly racist and some form or other of mass murder are common suggested as “solutions” for the “Palestinian problem”.

That level of extreme hate along racial lines is simply not the kind of thing traditional Fascism tries to indoctrinate into the population, whilst it’s the core of ethno-Fascism and its Propaganda.

This is far from a “just Portugal” kind of thing: even the most violent traditional Fascist dictatorship - that of Franco in Spain - didn’t engage in widespread violence against different ethnic groups (or, in fact, in any kind of “white supremacy” ideas) and its violence was mainly the period of Civil War at its start, which pitched mainly Spaniards against Spaniards.

I mean, if you want a present day example of traditional Fascist violence, just look at Russia in Ukraine: they’re mostly trying to take Ukrainian shit and have the Ukrainians become Russians and work for the Russian regime, not to wipe them out in Ukraine. The violence is because the Ukrainians naturally refuse and there are certainly atrocities in war by the Russians and even vengeance against civilians using missiles following Russian defeats, and that’s it. There is no such thing as a campaign to get rid of Ukrainians in by any means necessary no matter how murderous.

Absolutely, that too is evil shit. It’s however more of a nation state version of Theft and Pillaging whilst what the Zionists and other ethno-Fascists do is Extermination, a whole different level of Evil.

I’m Portuguese a country which had a Fascist dictatorship until 74.

I was very young at the time and don’t remember anything of the dictatorship directly but did heard the stories and saw what came out of it.

The country was definitely colonialist and the people and natural resources of the “colonies” (which were all in Africa) were definitely being exploited but there was no messaging of racial superiority and no racist hate even when the people over there started rebelling and there was war. In fact so little was the racist indoctrination that immediately after the Revolution all “colonies” were left to gain their independence as nations and all of them became friendly nations with democratic Portugal within a few years.

From all I’ve seen the focus of the Fascist propaganda was all about the Greatness Of Portugal (all the while it was a shithole) especially old “greatness” like the various achievements of the Portuguese during the time of the Maritime Discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries.

That shit is nowhere near what Nazis and Zionists do and even during the wars of liberation of Portuguese colonies there was never any mass targeting of civilians over there, much less a systematic massacre and a long list of babies murdered by the Portuguese Military.

As soon as racial supremacy and racist hate gets into the picture, even in war you go from an atrocity here and there generally done remotely (as you see Russia do in Ukraine) to systematic massacres with snipers seeing children through their scopes and choosing to shoot them in their heads (as you see Israel do in Palestine) - traditional Fascism has Sociopaths leading the military, ethno-Fascism has the entire military all the way down to privates acting as Sociopaths.

Just a small correction: this is not just plain Fascism, it’s ethno-Fascism (like the Nazis), a far more violent and derranged variant than traditional Fascism because it’s anchored on Ethnicity, feelings of Ethnic Superiority and the ultra racist casting of entire other ethnicities as sub-human (i.e übermenschen vs untermenschen or, as the Israeli leadership calls them, “human animals”) whilst the traditional kind (such as Mussolini’s) is anchored on Nationalism.

Traditional Fascism being based “merely” on Nationalism does have the capacity to inspire their people to such massive levels of cold sociopathic violence against entire groups of people as ethno-Fascism does.

Or, more in general, extreme racists are far more irrationally violent than mere thieves.

It’s a pretty standard technique of ethno-Fascists: the Zionists, just like the Nazis did, claim to represent an entire ethnicity and then cast any criticism of them and their ultra-racist Genocide as being criticism of that ethnicity they claim to represent.

And this is hardly the only propaganda technique Zionists and Nazis have in common: most of the tricks the Zionists use are pretty much Nazi shit with just the names of the ethnicities, places and nations replaced, down to how a lot of what the Zionists claim about Palestinians in Gaza being pretty much what the Nazis claimed about the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Being against Israel and its Genocide is as much anti-semitism as being against the Nazis and their Genocide was anti-white.

Think of all those babies they murdered: it all adds up to lots of entire human lives worth of emissions avoided.

“Family friendly UI” is “ultra-advanced” stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)

There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I’m just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.

That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn’t really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn’t even seem to have the concept of a user.

I haven’t tried Jellyfin but people’s talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn’t need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it’s not quite the same and does things I don’t really need.

That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).

Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.

It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern “media library” interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).