There was one weird agreement. During WW1, the Pope declared that a Christmas ceasefire should happen. Obviously, the Pope has no such power in these matters and the diplomats around the world failed to turn the Popes wish into any real ceasefire.

But then, a bit of Christmas magic happened. It turns out that WW1 soldier conditions were so shit, that many soldiers wanted to go against orders and proceed with the Christmas ceasefire anyway (as an act of rebellion against their commanders).

Legend has it that soldiers picked Still Nacht (aka: Silent Night), it being one of the few bilingual Christmas Carols. If both sides in the trenches started to sing the song, you knew it was safe to partake in the ceasefire, allegedly with another confirmation of Oh Come All Ye Faithful (another Christmas carol).

This all proves one thing. It’s not the leaders or diplomats that really matter per se with ceasefires. It’s the soldiers at the bottom. If they refuse to shoot, then the ceasefire will happen. With orders, or (in the Christmas miracle…) sometimes AGAINST orders.

It’s not a complete miracle, as some reports of fight / killing still happened during the Christmas Ceasefire. But there are reports of hundreds of thousands of French, British, and German soldiers exchanging Christmas gifts (coffee and other trinkets), playing soccer and more. So it largely was a success.

Heterogenous scheduler support for big.LITTLE CPUs seems like a big deal to me, especially with the Advent of P+E core Intels.

Well that’s the funny part now isn’t it?

Increasingly, the investors are other AI companies. NVidia, Microsoft, Facebook. Be it directly (ie: Microsoft buying half of OpenAI), or indirectly (Special Purpose Vehicle creates a new Data center and Facebook pays to be an owner of that and then the Datacenter pays Facebook for AI or some shit).

From people? No.

From AI. AI companies have seemingly infinite money (not really but investor sentiment is huge and investors are happy giving more and more money to AI). And banks are willing to lend money to AI. And there’s new financial instruments (special purpose vehicle) allowing even more money to come out of investors.

This ends after AI runs out of money. But they are funded by the biggest tech bros with $Trillions in valuation.

You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

Someone needs to tag this with git blame and it’d be the perfect programmer joke.

For the non programmers: git blame is a tool to figure out who on your team wrote a specific line of code. Inevitably, the answer tends to be ‘me’. Waaayyyyyyy too often.

They aren’t gonna tell you this unless you pretend to be Republican and say things in Republican coded ways to them.

The fact is: they all know that Trump isn’t a classic conservative and they all know that voting for him is a large betrayal of long standing values. They choose to vote for him anyway.

The fact is: Republicans have been working for power and see themselves as the oppressed minority who needs to resort to these tactics to hold onto whatever power they get. Meanwhile, you Democrats don’t even bring a knife to the political gunfight and are losing as the most basic levels.

I’m hoping that the Republicans have overplayed their hands. But if y’all can’t really behind a flawed candidate like Biden (when Republicans obviously can rally behind a felon for the greater good of their party), good fucking luck. Or do you think that Republicans can’t follow the news or some shit?

Trump has almost a 90% approval rating among Republican voters.

Yeah. Because he’s better than Harris to Republicans.

But go talk to Republicans about Tariffs. They kinda disagree with him on that. That’s a “hold your nose and accept it” deal. Many Republicans aren’t racists, but they’ll hold their nose and vote for racism for the good of the party. (See Latinos for Trump and so forth).

You can’t even figure out the basics of politics so you’re gonna lose again at this rate. So lets be clear: no one likes their party that much in American politics. But we all know that “the other side is worse”. Republicans truly don’t agree with much, they just believe Trump is better than the alternative.

If you can’t give that level of support to your side (be it Biden or Harris, or whoever else comes up), you’re gonna lose to the next guy again. Whoever it is after Trump. With any luck Trumpism can be defeated, but Republicans will remember this win from Trump for the rest of their lives. You’re stuck with Trumpism as a philosophy for the next 15+ years at least. I kid you not, because Republicans see and think that its working.

It’s not Republican voters, here in 2025, who have to hold their nose to vote

If you think every Republican believes and agrees with all or even most of Trump, then you are in a bubble.

Republicans outplayed you at the ground level. Part of that is religion and organization, belief and faith in greater purposes even if you vote and support something you don’t necessarily like.

You guys

Oh you’ve read me incorrectly. I’m not a Democrat. Go complain to someone else about that.

Nobody deserves more contempt for Joe Biden’s loss than Joe Biden himself.

I know you’re pissed at losing but wtf is this shit?

This is how you’re going to lose the next election again. If you can’t even rally yourside then wtf are you even doing? We’re almost one year into the second Trump admin and you still haven’t figured out the basics of politics.

The Republicans can hold their nose and vote for a candidate exactly opposite their values. And yet you can’t even support Harris as a valid alternative even as Trump wrecks our country for a year. And you expect me to stand by you and rally with you in the next election?

In any case: Harris (or Biden) would have broken up Google. Period. Quit complaining about things if you can’t even fucking rally or do the basics of politicking. You ain’t helping now.

Elections matter people.

Biden admin was pushing for a breakup. Trump admin does this

Itch.io is currently saying the problem is Stripe, and maybe Visa.

Historically (ex: https://otakuusamagazine.com/visa-and-mastercard-refuse-to-work-with-another-doujinshi-retailer/), I’d say Mastercard and Visa are both to blame. But the jury is still out on wtf is going on here.

I’m not sure who pressured Steam. But Itch.io (https://aftermath.site/steam-itch-porn-censorship-collective-shout-visa-mastercard-paypal) is claiming Stripe and Visa are pressuring them.

(Speaking with Aftermath, Itch’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, specifically cited a notice from Visa as an incident that led to the sudden deindexing of so many games).

Remember that Discover is self-banked (unlike Visa/Mastercard that banks sign up with). This means that every credit line needs to be backed by… well … A bank.

Bigger banks mean more credit opportunities, better interest rates (etc. etc). Deeper credit lines.

What’s wrong with Capital One? I feel like Discover/Capital One / Diner’s Club network is a good thing for Discover customers.

Discover and Diners Club merged a few years ago btw. Discover also has an alliance with JCB.

So Discover network is actually really, really big.

Discover has an alliance with JCB. So that’s just Discover in the USA.

Ummmm.

ACH is how you get your paycheck, and it’s being updated to FedNow.

Zelle is an independent network as well.

And of course, there is Discover and AmEx.

There is also cash, check, money order. They still work today, just people largely forgot how to use them.

IIRC some Brazilian network was getting very popular off of this. If you want to look at non-US options.

There are plenty of competitors to Visa/Mastercard/Paypal.

If there are that many mistakes here, then it’s likely malicious compliance. Someone was ordered to edit, so they edited in the most obvious manner possible.

This is quite ridiculous how shoddy of a job this was.

They already did.

There’s that ‘Raw Edit’ video that is missing over a minute of footage because they forgot to edit out the timestamps.

I point out that in the USA, a dude can literally shoot an unarmed teenager with skittles in their pocket (likely 2nd degree murder or worse) and a Jury of his Peers will acquit him.