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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I’ll give you a non-US example - Mutti Merkel and Putin were pretty close. But I think the reverse is more informative - that these kinds of conditions tend to prop up ugly figures around the world. E.g. Nigel Farage in the UK. Geert Wilders in The Netherlands. Pierre Poilievre* in Canada. Etc. This isn’t random. The typical policies that arise as a solution to wealth inequality that don’t tackle inequality tend to be about finding scape goats and turning society against them. Now what kind of person does it take to either honestly believe that some part of society should be repressed, or doesn’t but works to convice people to hate for a living? It tends to not be the empathetic, nice kind.

    * Oh god Pierre is a truly disgusting human being.





  • Lots of US and EU billionaires are working in deep cooperation with China. Tesla’s, Apple’s, NVIDIA’s (until they got cut off recently), Ford’s, VW’s, and many many others. Heck, Taiwan’s billionaires are all-in with China. There is however an intra-class competition for profits. If Elon was able to buy up all the major American and Chinese companies and collect profits from them, he would. Their current owners wouldn’t like that. My claim is that this is the major driver behind what sometimes appears as ideological or geographical misalignment. Depending on who’s billionaire political reps get in power, there’s a “shift in ideology” which serves to legitimize the state promoting that billionaire’s interests.

    “EU is too far left. It’s overregulating AI and not paying its fair share for NATO” - an ideologically structured message that translates to Big Tech and the American MIC currently own this government. They want access to the EU market for cloud services and they want the EU to buy more weapons. If you pay close attention you could even catch how the ideological disagreements change depending on the state of negotiations.

    At the same time this class works to reduce the share of profits labour gets among other class war fights anywhere they operate since that’s a common interest. Another common interest is not paying taxes. Or offloading negative externalities on the working class.

    I recall recently when the EU decided to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs, VW started lobbying against the tariffs. I was initially baffled. VW said that the tariffs, protecting EU workers, many of which VW workers, would hurt VW’s bottom line because of expected losses in China, due to likely counter-tariffs. Think about that. There’s no Western values VW cares about. They’re ready to throw out meausres that would save their European factories in order to keep their Chinese factories running and selling product. They act internationally and prioritize cooperation with whichever jurisdicrion yields the highest profits. In this case cooperating with China and their Chinese competitors.

    This is why leftists and unionists say that labour organization has to work internationally to be truly effective. Because the owner class cooperates across borders.

    For me, this theory of the world has given me explanations with fewer contradictions and significantly better predictions. That’s a sign of a good theory and I’m sticking with it until it breaks. 😊


  • I understand that feeling. If it’s strong enough to drive to using a different base I wouldn’t care much even if it’s more work. The staffing and funding is the real difficult part.

    From technical perspective, other than perhaps the software license choice, there’s nothing in AOSP that I’m aware of (not the closed source parts) that’s driven by the oligarchy. I’ve been involved with AOSP at the OEM level for some ten years, some in the early 2010s and then since 2020. AOSP has been fairly well isolated from non-technical decisionmaking at Google, in part due to how many third parties heavily depend on it, and in part because of how pluggable the APIs are. The plugability allowed all anti-features so far to go into installable components that don’t need to be a part of the OS. I think this bullshit with the app “sideloading” changes is the first major change that has no technical basis whatsoever that I’m aware of and requires AOSP surgery to accomodate. There may be more to come from here on out.

    I guess you could chalk up the lack of open source app development as part of the oligatchic shitfuckery. I guess it is, but the base apps really are separate from the OS and they’re a pretty small effort compared to the rest of the OS and frameworks.

    Anyway. I’ll get this next Jolla phone to try out. Sailfish is an evolution of MeeGo which was the most promising Android alternative in the early 2010s. 😁


  • Sure but that no longer matters if you have say Igalia staff a 200-people team with EU funding to develop NOSP (Nondroid Open Source Project) a hard fork which no longer accepts any changes from Google. All the decisions happen without Google’s direction. Since that would be already compatible with hardware in the near term, the EU could mandate manufacturers who want to sell in the EU to ship phone variants based on NOSP.

    The APIs and OS infrastructure that already exists in AOSP is enormous. I develop system software for AOSP, for a living. It’s been stagnant becauase the OS is basically complete. There’s no major gaps of any kind left. You don’t want the OS to move much unless there’s problems to solve or gaps to fill.



  • On the software front, our fastest way to independence is a state-funded software org to fork Android and begin development and maintenance full-time. Whether one goes with non-Android or Android OS, it always comes down to funding development. Starting with Android would likely be significantly cheaper since a lot of work has already been done. And if you fund its continued development away from Google, then Google isn’t a factor anymore. Make an independent app store, Play Services replacement, etc. As I said in another thread, the social infrastructure (people, labour) is more important than the exact technology used. If we have that, we can make a usable phone out of Android or Sailfish, or anything else. It’s a matter of doing the work.

    Having independent software with PRC-hardware isn’t a bad compromise. Especially in the near term.



  • We really need an Android alternative with no involvement from American or Chinese companies.

    This won’t occur without state intervention. The market has already decided to move design and production of phones and phone components to China (and Vietnam to some extent). In order for a European phone to be made, in Europe, the necessary supply chains need to be buit. But there’s no market for them as their output would be more expensive and the market already figured the maximum profit is in the China-Vietnam manufacturing mix. So the state would have to create these supply chains. Minerals, displays, diodes, MOSFETs, ICs, caps, PCBs and small cells. Once that’s in place, creating a European phone manufacturer becomes possible. That’s a decade long process that simpy won’t occur without deliberate and persistent state support. I think it should be done, however you may find a lot of opposition by free market fundamentalists, or interest groups that represent capital in other industries receiving state support.



  • Yup. This idea of geographical, ideological alignments or lack thereof between blocs or countries entirely misses what’s actually going on. It’s why it’s rarely revealing and it fails to create useful predictions. Instead I find that looking at the owner class as acting against the working classes domestically and internationaly provides a much better picture of the world.