Current affairs

That Bill Gates wants to move forward relinquishing their fortune earlier to 2045 shows just how much a sham their promise is.

Bill Gates is 69 years old, and so by 2045 they will be 89. This supposed bringing forward of their end-of-fortune date is just a big scam given the unlikelihood of reaching that age. But the real problem is that the world needs a lot more help right now as delaying spending until well into the future is actually selling out the future. It is projected that to end hunger would take US$37 billion per year until 2030. Any two of the top 10 billionaires could do that and still have billions left over, but they do not. Why?

Because their billions are their power. Government leaders listen to them. It strokes their egos. This is the world of oligarchs. Giving all their fortunes away at this time would reduce them to merely ordinary millionaires that nobody is going to want to listen to. That is a real step down in prestige. So we have all these multi-billionaires holding onto their fortunes trying to tell us that they are being generous by not holding onto their fortunes for a few less years beyond their likely death than they did before. We should be so grateful for their magnanimity!

What we need from these billionaires is for them to stop hoarding their money and free it to dramatically change the lives of billions of people now and in the near future. It is that that will make humanity much better by 2045, and likely a lot sooner, than the false hope that drip-feeding us over another two decades will bring a better outcome. Just more billionaire futurism that throws the current humanity under the bus, and is really another excuse to hold onto their fortunes peddled to us as philanthropy. They are forestalling equity for as long as they can while ignoring our suffering.

The interactions of US users new to the Chinese social media app Rednote shows the extent of US propaganda.

Rednote, or its full translation of Little Red Book, is a Chinese social media app that has seen an influx of US users who were about to be orphaned by the ban on TikTok. This has allowed a lot more direct interaction between Chinese and US people, so each are finding out a lot more about the daily lives of each other. What US users are finding out is that they have been fed a lot of lies from the US government and media about life in China, but also the Chinese have found out that what they thought was their government's lies about life in the US were actually true.

While this interaction is good for dispelling cultural myths, and many YouTube videos from US Rednote users details these myths and lies, US media is avoiding any discussion about the US propaganda, and definitely nothing about how Chinese people are realising their government was telling the true about US life. It seems that the US media is still wanting to keep the US myth about the superiority of their lifestyle protected, so they will not allow their readers and viewers to know about the relative absence of lies about US life in China.

It is this fragility of exposure of the truth of US propaganda that seems to still drive US media spin. With such resistance to the truth, especially in the current US political climate, that a ban on Rednote will likely be forthcoming. It is interesting that for Chinese people, telling the truth about US life seems to them government propaganda because it sounds so crazy to them. Such revelations and reactions from the Chinese have has US users questioning the US narrative even more. All that they have been led to believe about life in China has been a lie.

When the truth about a country seems so bad to others that they take it as being lies indicates that that country really needs to get a reality on its perceptions of itself, and that its myths and propaganda is such a delusion that they are blind to how much they are missing out on that other countries take for granted. We can hope that a lot more US people see the deceptions perpetrated upon them by their own politicians and media, and coupled with the increasing evidence of oligarchs actually having too much power over them, that they do shift to rejecting the lies fed to them.

Many think tariffs protect a country from exploitation.

Tariffs are rather like sales taxes, in that they increase the prices of goods, but only those from another country. They are meant to protect the local industries from cheap foreign imports, but then the protected have no real incentive to improve their products, so quality goes down rapidly. Tariffs do nothing to change the global conditions that create the trade imbalances that lead to the death of a country's industries, which are mostly because of exploitation of the labour of other countries, usually being those that were exploited through colonialism and never recovered.

As an example of what happen when trying to protect home-grown industries from foreign competition, the banning of sales of US computer chips to China has had some unforeseen consequences. In January 2024, the release of Chinese DeepSeek reasoning AI wiped over a $trillion off many US tech companies because in not getting access to the chips that those US tech companies had used to run the training of their models, DeepSeek had to innovate and after a series of those, came up with a far more efficient learning model, showing just how much hubris was in play over supposed US AI superiority.

Tariffs are really only of use if there is actually some manufacturing capacity already existing in the country applying the tariffs. If it does not exist, it will take years, if not decades, to build enough to make it worth protecting via tariffs on such a scale. Without local manufacturing, goods have to be imported anyway, making all goods more expensive for local consumers. Trump's backers haves spent decades downgrading manufacturing in the US, and they have no intention of ramping it up now at all, making the spin of bringing manufacturing back the the US just more diversionary lies.

Like sales taxes, tariffs favour the rich because of their far greater discretionary financial reserve, and so lead to greater wealth inequality. However, in conjunction with lowering income taxes for the wealthy, tariffs become another huge transfer of wealth from consumers and businesses to the extremely wealthy, and just another Ponzi grift that everyone else is being sucked into funding.

The real way to protect a country's industries is to bring all countries to the same level of prosperity, as in equal wages and costs of services. Then there is a true level playing field with real competition, so those with something unique to offer will be able to sell to those who do not have them. Of course, local suppliers of local goods and services will have the lower costs, and so will tend to be favoured by local buyers.

This arrangement will maximise the amount of currency circulating within the same country, while allowing the exotic offerings of a country to be available everywhere. That is real free trade. Not only that, but it would allow all the people of all nations to have a decent life free of exploitation, but only if we take real measures to remove the exploiters from their power to manipulate the world's market forces for their own benefit.

There seems to be a continuing attempt to find some internal combustion engine that will displace electric vehicles, but all ignore the real elephant in the room.

The car industry is still having issues dealing with the push to reduce dependence on fossil fuels with the need to incorporate the radical change of materials and processes required to adopt the new technologies that accommodating renewable power requires. The difficulties involved are a deterrent to wanting to fully change over, so car makers are still trying to find a better internal combustion engine (ICE), with Koenigsegg being one of the latest.

However, no new ICE, even one that could even approach 100% efficiency, is ever going to match the whole-of-life lower emissions that renewables offer. That is because of the very poor efficiency of the fossil fuel production process. Being only able to utilise a third of the energy produced to make fuel is the real problem, and only being able to use even 100% of a third makes any ICE a poor choice for dealing with climate change. I doubt whether car maker executives have forgotten this, even though many ICE enthusiasts probably have, if they were even aware of it.

So safely ignore any talk of a new ICE as being considered as anything other than a desperate attempt to justify not having to actually deal with climate change, nor avoiding the killing of millions each year from the pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

There is a lot of finger-pointing between Democrats as to why they lost.

There is a plethora of Democrats who are claiming that it is their pandering to wokeness and other leftest ideas, but this seems strange when they gave prominence to such a lot of Republicans at the convention. The reality is that the Democrats proudly showed off all their celebrity and elite supporters, and thus played into Trump's hands. We know that Trump craves such support from elites but talks solidarity with society's underdogs, which is what they want to hear.

The Democrats clearly did not want to upset their rich backers, but with Harris and Walz so clearly starting their first answers in debates with what was basically a promo for their genocidal backer Israel, is it any wonder that they received such low turnouts among previous Biden-voters? How they expected that standing so prominently with psychopaths would appeal to anyone is perplexing, as it makes them totally untrustworthy to look after any citizen's interests. While Trump supports such people, they do not verbalise it in such clear terms as the Democrats did.

Other than the backing Israel thing, after some platitudes about hope, the campaign just centred upon the problems that voting for Trump would entail. While most of that would be true, that message carries no weight when uttered by genocide supporters. Other than that, there was very little that could be called woke, but the word has gained such a nonsensical meaning that expressing any sort of sympathy for anyone elicits shout-down choruses of it. The absurdity is that Republicans are spending so much time virtue-signaling about how woke about woke they are.

The political parties in the US are so intertwined with the wealthy that there is little hope of their exploitative systems ever truly serving the interests of citizens. Of course, the nature of politics is that it will attract the wealthy so that they can rig the outcomes, but the US twists itself in knots celebrating the wealthy while trying to pretend that they are egalitarian. Half are fooled by this delusion, and half are not. Until that ratio changes, the exploitation will only get worse.

CrowdStrike has been aggressively canning Microsoft in order to get customers, but has now fallen flat on its face.

CrowdStrike had a popup on their website claiming that Microsoft was so bad at security that using CrowdStrike's Falcon software was the best remedy. Well, that campaign was obviously successful, but their 29,000 enterprise customers having to send their techs to manually reboot the millions of effected Windows PCs after a sloppy update doesn't make them look good. I bet a few of them are not so convinced now.

It will take a few days to weeks to get through all the PCs to get them operational. The logistics of that will keep IT departments too fully engaged to look at what they will do in future to mitigate having to rely upon single suppliers for the core security and OS software. All the Linux aficionados will come out of the woodwork to spruik their favourite Linux flavour, even though Linus Torvalds thinks that as desktops they all suck. Even if many desktops had been Linux, CrowdStrike would still have been on them for a unified enterprise security regime in those businesses.

The general and tech news coverage seems to be featuring Microsoft and Windows blue screens in their visuals, but only mentioning CrowdStrike within the bulletins themselves, and sometimes only once. Now Microsoft has had its share of problem updates, but none having this depth and breadth of effect, nor anywhere near as costly to customers. A lot of this may be news organisations desperate for visuals when there is none for CrowdStrike, but there is no excuse for tech channels to peddle the same bias. We shall see what the fallout from all this is in the next year.

It is very suspicious that despite knowing about a possible Hamas attack for a year, bases were at half-strength around Gaza when Hamas broke out in 2023.

According to research done by The New York Times, half of the guards were off for a Jewish holiday, and combined with the lack of any plan against a significant Hamas attack, the IDF was thoroughly unprepared. This produced several hours of delay while the units defending Gaza were overwhelmed, during which many Israeli citizens were killed. There is something wrong with this picture when considering that Israel has been perennially on alert. No one leaves such a deliberately-created hotbed of discontent without sufficient protection. The whole situation is totally suspicious.

How could Israel have left themselves so poorly guarded, especially since they knew that an attack was likely? A possible reason is that the breakout was needed for political purposes, much like their funding of Hamas to have an excuse to justify their excessive militarisation to Israel citizens. Netanyahu still needs a distraction from his corruption and right-wing takeover, so having a war serves that purpose. It just took letting out a few prisoners to rampage and they had all they needed. It is not the first time a sitting duck has been left out as a temptation for an enemy to start a war.

With so many bat-shit crazy conspiracies around, this situation seems more sane, especially given the excessive IDF preparedness to take every opportunity to just stand around and intimidate Palestinians. The IDF is not so short of soldiers that they would have to totally allow their Gazan posts to be so understaffed, nor be so overloaded in the West Bank or the Lebanon border that they could not send several helicopters down to Gaza within half an hour, especially since their Southern Command is only 40km away and experts in dealing with Hamas.

Given that successive Israeli governments have kept Hamas as pet terrorists to activate when they needed a distraction, this has been just another excuse to eradicate more Palestinians and keep their own citizens on edge. This is how psychopaths work, but this time more people around the world are not prepared to sit passively by and let them continue their killing spree, and are not prepared to believe the lies of their own politicians who have been willing to overlook the genocide to advance their own country's interests. It has been a turning point that Israel and its allies did not expect.

The impeachment enquiries into Trump were about the constitution, which some have held up as somehow perfect, but it is failing to deal with the demagoguery that it was supposed to prevent.

The constitution was written in a time when the founding fathers had just fought a war with their former colonial owner, Britain, and were concerned about preventing the taking away of the ability of people to determine their own future. Consequently, they embedded a set of so-called checks and balances that were meant to prevent any one arm or level of government gaining too much power, perhaps through the influence of foreign powers.

What they didn't know was that an ideology that could span the world could simultaneously subvert the multiple arms and levels in a way that could prevent its influence being undone. That ideology is conservatism, supported by a self-serving Christian theology that promotes massive financial self-indulgence by the few as a blessing from God.

Currently, many state governors and legislatures under the control of conservatives have used their positions to favour the election of their federal colleagues by substantive gerrymanders. The original intention was that the arrangement would prevent the federal members doing gerrymandering of their own electorates. That doesn't work if they are part of the same conspiracy. The obvious course would have been to have given the drawing up of electoral boundaries to a statutory body charged with doing so fairly, as in countries like Australia. Several states have done this.

The constitution was designed to be adaptable by allowing amendments, as was done with the first 10 that form the Bill of Rights. The problem now is that the corruption of the electoral system has made it difficult to get the votes to make it fair, as amendments require fairly elected houses to get the numbers to get an amendment passed.

Of course, there is also the rampant manipulation of social media by domestic and foreign influencers that were totally unknown at the framing of the constitution. These two elephants in the room are just so outside of what was predictable back then that it is folly to think that the constitution is strong enough to properly handle them, let alone the worse challenges to come.

It is clear that rather than bogging down democracies by making so many public officials elected, many could be replaced by properly constituted statutory bodies with officials selected by means independent of political interference. However, the decades-long right-wing demonisation of government has made making such changes difficult, as public trust has been eroded. It is clear that efforts must be made to promote that a well-funded, properly directed government bureaucracy can be the best alternative for providing equity and efficient governance.