Thailand has signed an MOU with US on rare-earth minerals. While domestically this has caused an uproar on sovereignty as it gives US access to mineral rights and a say in regulations in Thailand, Thai government is positioning it as a tariff bargaining chip.

Thailand's reserves stand at a paltry 4,500 tonnes per its government while China has 44 million tonnes. Why would US be seeking an agreement with Thailand? The answer is it's not the production from Thailand, but Myanmar.

Earlier this year it was reported that Trump administration was seeking various ways of obtaining rare earth minerals from Myanmar, the third largest producer of rare earths in the world, in order to reduce its dependence on China. However it faces a devil's choice of either directly dealing with the illegal military junta or the guerilla group Kachin Independence Army or KIA which controls most of the rare earth mines and thus inserting itself directly into Myanmar's political affairs. That also would anger China in the process as China sees Myanmar as its exclusive sphere of influence.

But US found the perfect conduit into Myanmar as it had in the past: Thailand. It was through Thailand that US supplied and supported Chinese republican army as it occupied eastern Myanmar while attempting to fight the communists in China. It was CIA which began opium growing in Myanmar in the 1950s as a way to raise funds for the Chinese republican army.

Thailand has long served as the gateway for illegal exports from Myanmar be it opium, illegally exported precious gemstones such as rubies jades emeralds, or teak wood, or meth, and now rare earth minerals.

Thais now seek to position themselves as a player in this important strategic mineral industry as a key processor and exporter. With a little help from Burmese mines.

bangkokpost.com/thailand/gener…

rareearthexchanges.com/news/th…

Gov. Jeff Landry is urging lawmakers to reject the City of New Orleans’ request for a $125 million loan from the state.

The city’s deepening financial crisis has raised the possibility that officials may go unpaid. Last week, Chief Administrative Officer Joe Threat alerted city leaders that the cash flow problem could prevent payroll from being met for the rest of the year. In turn, city council unanimously passed a resolution to apply for a $125 million state bond – a temporary solution.

In a post to X Tuesday morning though, Landry said “It’s imperative that the [city] address its financial matter promptly. I urge [Louisiana House Republican Legislative Delegation] and [Louisiana Senate Republicans] to deny the city’s request to accumulate debt o the backs of its citizens.”

Landry says he and the legislature have worked “diligently” to establish financial stability for the state. Landry is also calling for an emergency meeting of the Fiscal Review Committee and if necessary, the appointment of a fiscal administrator. Attorney General Liz Murrill confirmed the meeting will take place at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday.

Murrill released a statement last week, saying her office has authority to step into a municipality's finances if they're unable to manage their own affairs.

"We have some authority to kind of impose a fiscal administration on municipalities that can't manage their financial affairs," Murrill said.

WWL Louisiana has not confirmed whether or not she is considering taking the action.

Should the bond request be denied, it’s unclear how the city will be able to make payroll.

Somebody shared this image on Bluesky (I'd link to their post but it's not available to public access).

And, aside from it being an interesting social experiment, I have absolutely no idea why it's relevant to anyone. You could also do an article "48 Hours Without HTTPS" about how it's hard to find websites with HTTP access, or you could do "48 Hours Without Non-GPL Software" which would make Richard Stallman happy. At any rate…who cares?

At least the subtitle does express a distinction between "machine learning" in general and "generative AI" in particular, but that's not just a casual distinction. It is everything.

I have no problem with ML. I think ML is great. I am very happy that when I open up my Photos app and search "mountain" I see pictures I took of mountains. I'm very happy that when I type "out of" in a text box it suggests "the blue". If Netflix wants to recommend something to me based on analysis of my previous watch history on Netflix, OK whatever. Things like that are perfectly fine.

What is not fine is treating LLMs like workers, like artists, like creative minds who can produce novel output. At best, an LLM is only good at providing extremely fuzzy search results through a vast content space. There are valid uses cases for that, only they're very niche and probably only helpful for expert data scientists and other highly-skilled technical people. There also need to be strict rules around the direct sharing of LLM output data as it's almost certainly remixes of illegally-obtained copyrighted material.

That's at best. At worst, LLMs and related genAI technologies are, well…what we have in the tech industry today. It is anathema to be abhorred, rejected, and fought against with every fiber of our being.

It's really crucial we keep the separation between "machine learning" as a valid programmatic discipline and "generative AI" as a crap marketing term very, very, very forefront in people's minds. Because what happens is when you say, hey, y'know, genAI sucks, somebody's going to be like "well it's going to detect your cancer so you're an idiot!" And the problem is they're the idiot because they're conflating vertical industry ML deployments, which are nothing new at all, with Sora. We need to be really, really, really careful and deliberate with our messaging and keep hammering home how one is not like the other.

When Joe Porter, a 29-year-old video editor, moved into his 400-square-foot studio apartment in Los Angeles four years ago, his bills for water, trash removal and pest control were bundled together into one monthly payment that came out to about $60. After the first few years, Porter said, his bill increased to about $200.

When he asked his landlord – the giant real estate investment trust Equity Residential — for an explanation, he was told billing was done by a third party and that Equity could not provide a more detailed breakdown. Like many landlords of multifamily buildings, Equity uses a billing method called ratio utility billing systems (RUBS). Landlords who use this system divvy up the costs of the building’s total utilities usage according to each unit’s square footage and number of tenants.

Porter had no luck getting more of an explanation from Equity. “Because I was on my own, management didn’t pay any attention to me,” Porter says.

But late last year, Porter and others who live in Virgil Square Apartments formed a tenant association and began organizing their neighbors. After launching a RUBS strike in June that involved dozens of tenants refusing to pay the bundled utility bills, they’ve secured some big wins.

Equity agreed in August to decrease tenants’ monthly RUBS bills, acknowledged that the tenants were being overcharged and issued a total of $25,000 in refunds. But tenants are still on strike, as their demands include Equity providing a breakdown of the underlying utility costs and the formula it uses to calculate bills. They are also pushing the city to mandate that landlords be more transparent in tenant utility bills.

Porter attributes the strike’s success thus far to collective action. “The only way we accomplished that was by organizing, by collectively making noise, collectively withholding payments and doing it together. Because individuals have tried stuff like this, and management has not responded at all,” Porter says.

Want to wade into the spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, everyone!)

I have collected comic books for almost fifty years, and my collection is quite varied. I own many of the big-name heroes, but I also have a shelf full of independent and third-tier characters that are not worth much money but mean a lot to me. When I began studying philosophy and literature at Western Carolina University, I started to analyze comics more critically. This was around the time of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, two books that redefined how we think about power, morality, and civic order.

In an older paper, I argued that Superman represents Kant’s categorical imperative in action. He does good because reason demands it, not because he expects reward. He treats others as ends, not as means, and his restraint gives him moral authority. Yet this restraint also exposes a paradox. When a hero decides what justice requires, he becomes a private legislator of moral law. His virtue may align with reason, but it operates outside democratic consent.

Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns shows this danger clearly. Its Batman is not a servant of duty but a billionaire acting from conviction. He imposes his moral vision on Gotham through force, reshaping society according to his private code. The story’s satire of the media and street culture of the 1980s highlights how powerless citizens become in the shadow of such authority. The Mutant gang and the frightened public represent chaos, while Batman’s brutal order becomes the only alternative. The result is visually striking but ethically uneasy, a reflection of the Randian hero who saves the world by dominating it.

Alan Moore’s Watchmen takes that authoritarian impulse and tears it apart. Moore approaches the superhero through a deconstructionist lens, exposing the ideological machinery that keeps the genre alive. In his view, the superhero is not a liberator but a symptom of moral anxiety. The costumed vigilante exists to restore order, not to challenge injustice. Even when dressed in moral idealism, the hero’s function is to defend the status quo through violence. Watchmen dismantles this illusion by pushing each character to their logical extreme. Doctor Manhattan becomes a god who no longer cares about humanity. Rorschach turns the language of moral absolutism into cruelty. Ozymandias reimagines the heroic intellect as a technocratic despot willing to sacrifice millions in the name of stability.

Moore’s vision is that the superhero genre, as long as it depends on the fantasy of the righteous savior, carries within it a seed of fascism. The uniform, the mask, and the symbol all promise unity through obedience. Watchmen reveals how that myth perpetuates a culture of submission rather than liberation. The citizens of Moore’s world do not gain freedom from the heroes; they live beneath them, grateful for protection they never consented to. The so-called peace Ozymandias creates is the perfect metaphor for Moore’s warning. It is peace through domination, the victory of order over justice.

Both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns are products of the Cold War, but their influence continues because the same questions still haunt the genre. When democracy fails to protect its people, the fantasy of the savior returns. The superhero becomes a moral substitute for citizenship, a symbol of control masquerading as virtue.

That myth has now escaped fiction. During and after the Trump administration, political propaganda began using the same heroic imagery once reserved for Superman or Captain America. AI-generated memes have multiplied across social media, depicting Trump as a golden, muscular savior descending from the clouds, his face transfigured into an icon of divine strength. These images borrow the language of comic book heroism to sanctify authoritarian power. The savior complex that Moore and Miller examined as fiction has become a political instrument. When citizens begin to see leaders as superheroes rather than public servants, democracy shifts from shared governance to spectatorship. The people stop acting and start watching, waiting for rescue.

In Kantian terms, this is where moral law collapses. Superman embodies the categorical imperative, acting from duty and recognizing the moral worth of others. Batman represents its distortion, transforming reason into will and autonomy into control. Watchmen completes the descent, showing what happens when the illusion of moral law persists after its foundation in empathy and consent has been lost. The superhero meme of the strongman leader is the final expression of that decay. It replaces reason with spectacle and moral autonomy with idolatry. What remains is order without virtue, authority without duty, and a public so in love with the image of power that it forgets what freedom costs.

Capitalism, of course. Every dollar going to an employee doesn't go to a shareholder.

The Lockheed strike was part of a wave of labor unrest that swept America’s military-industrial complex over the past year. On May 1, about 4,000 workers went on strike. Nearly 1,000 of them worked for Lockheed Martin, both at Tejada’s facility in Orlando and at another complex in Denver. It was the first labor strike at the Orlando factory since 1963. Another 3,000 employees went on strike in Hartford, Conn., against Pratt & Whitney, which makes engines and other critical components of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet. In mid-May, about 2,500 employees of General Dynamics nearly went on a strike at a nuclear submarine factory, before reaching a last-minute deal that kept them on the factory line. Last fall, 33,000 workers went on strike at Boeing, affecting production of both commercial and military aircraft and winning a 38 percent pay raise after seven weeks.

Something is going wrong on the assembly lines of America’s arsenal of democracy, and it’s happening at a moment of crisis. The White House, Pentagon and America’s overseas allies are all demanding that defense companies ramp up production to meet the needs of a dangerous geopolitical moment. America is running short of missiles, munitions and battleships. Allies are waiting years for deliveries. Even the Pentagon has to stand in line and wait for delayed shipments of major weapons, like Hellfire missiles, Javelin rocket launchers and sophisticated air defense interceptors. America is trying to surge its military capacity to produce more munitions, missiles and ships, but to do so, it must rely almost entirely on a group of five Fortune 500 defense companies. And none of these companies seem to be on war footing.

Instead of hiring more workers and paying workers more in an effort to retain them, these companies are far more focused on meeting the demands of Wall Street, trying to entice investors and boost their stock price by cutting costs, as well as using billions of dollars in revenue to pay handsome dividends and buy back shares of stock. Last year, for example, Lockheed Martin gave $6.8 billion in buybacks and dividends directly to its shareholders, which amounted to nearly 10 percent of the company’s total revenue and was larger than the $5.3 billion it kept in profits. The same year, RTX (formerly called Raytheon) paid $3.7 billion to shareholders, General Dynamics paid $3 billion and Northrop Grumman paid $3.7 billion. The billions of dollars they send back shareholders each year means that there is less money to go toward paying, hiring or retaining their employees.

cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6540421

cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/3950

There are still 15,600 Palestinians, many with conditions like cancer, awaiting a medical evacuation, officials say.

At least 740 Palestinians in Gaza died over a period of 13 months while awaiting medical evacuation that never came, the UN has reported, as Israel denied tens of thousands of Palestinians of this crucial lifeline.

This death toll includes at least 137 children who were on the evacuation list and died between July 2024 and August 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported this week.

“These patients cannot wait for the healthcare system to be rebuilt. They need urgent care today,” wrote Médecins sans Frontières International President Javid Abdelmoneim in an open letter this week.

“These were preventable deaths — not only because of the destruction of hospitals, but due to political inaction,” Abdelmoneim wrote.​

Israel has nearly totally destroyed Gaza’s medical system, and there are no treatment options for chronic conditions like cancer or kidney failure, or for those who are in need of complex treatments for injuries inflicted by Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation campaign.

The UN and other aid organizations have called for Israel to open all crossings into Gaza in order to allow a surge of aid and medical evacuations. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the BBC that no evacuation flights have taken off for the past two weeks due to Israeli holidays.

Israel has refused to open crossings into Gaza and allow for full humanitarian access, violating the ceasefire deal signed on October 9. Palestinian officials reported that, as of Monday, the 10th day of the ceasefire, only 986 aid trucks had entered the besieged territory, despite the deal stipulating that 6,600 trucks should have entered at that point.

“The situation still remains catastrophic because what’s entering is not enough,” said Tedros. “There is no dent in hunger because there is not enough food.”

Meanwhile, UN Population Fund Executive Director Andrew Saberton said this week that there is no longer such a thing as a “normal birth in Gaza now” and that pregnant Palestinians are being forced to give birth in the street.

“​​They often don’t even have access to a private space in a tent. We have stories of women giving birth actually in the rubble, beside the road,” Saberton said.

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