news

Fast food chains are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices

Hotel chains are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices

Meat processors are using algorithms to cooperatively fix prices

Landlords are using algorithms to cooperatively coordinate rent increases

Amazon is using an algorithm to specifically coordinate cooperative price rises with Target

The current era of inflation is due to capitalist GOSPLANning.

US Special Envoy to Yemen: "We favor a diplomatic solution, we know there is no military solution."
They won.

GUANGZHOU, China, April 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in China's southern factory hub of Guangzhou on Thursday with a tough message to Chinese officials: you're producing too much of everything, especially clean energy goods, and the world can't absorb it.

China is unleashing a flood of electric vehicles (EVs), batteries, solar panels, semiconductors and other manufactured goods into global markets, the result of years of massive government subsidies and weak demand at home. Global prices for many goods are tanking, pressuring producers in other countries.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-faces-tough-road-chinas-excess-capacity-problem-2024-04-04/

lmao

30,000 Palestinians are killed

The West:

a couple white people are killed

The West:

English summary of the Biden-Xi phone call

If the U.S. side is willing to seek mutually beneficial cooperation and share in China’s development dividends, it will always find China’s door open; but if it is adamant on containing China’s hi-tech development and depriving China of its legitimate right to development, China is not going to sit back and watch.

ngl feeling pretty traumatised by 6 months of watching a genocide play out in detail while the entire state and bourgeois ideological apparatus tries to gaslight us into believing literally anything but the truth. nothing compared to what the Palestinian people are going through ofc but it's really done awful things for me to hear and see dreadful atrocities being perpetrated every single day for months.

Huaweii Shared 10,7 Billion WITH ITS EMPLOYEES , NOT THE SHARHOLDERS

Remembering when an Iranian cleric on live television said that the only reason Iran would struggle getting payback against America for assasinating Soleimani is because America has no heroes.

"Think about it, are we supposed to take out Spiderman and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large land mass, but it doesn't have any heroes, all of their heroes are cartoon characters, they're all fictional."

https://x.com/AsraneOfoghTV/status/1213570084918177793

The US-backed zionazis bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus.

Addendum: this constitutes an attack on Iranian territory because it is part of the diplomatic mission of Iran. This is not a normal attack.

the 'Israeli' aggression led to the destruction of the entire Iranian consulate building and the martyrdom and injury of everyone inside it.

In case anyone was wondering why the US just sent their outpost twenty five F-35's, the answer is clear. They don't need stealth jets to attack Gaza. They need stealth jets to carry out an air campaign on Lebanon and Syria because Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Army have modern air-defenses.

This regional war will escalate much more before it calms down.

Blinken says Ukraine will join NATO.

NATO chief says a full NATO-Russia war is ”a real possibility“.

Reading about the JDAM/F-35 sales at the same time reading about what they are uncovering at Al-Shifa.

God damn America. I no longer give a single rip about any domestic policy in this evil country. I don’t care about Trump vs Biden; whatever infinitesimally small advantage Biden may have in domestic policy is completely irrelevant. Saying this as an American with kids.

I hope myself, my family, my comrades, and all marginalized people are spared in the future. But the reality is that America deserves hell on earth. There were many good people, working class people who died in the WTC on 9/11; they did not deserve it but America absolutely deserved it. And 9/11 doesn’t even represent a small down payment on what America actually deserves.

Death to America and death to “israel”.

The details are emerging on the IDF strike that killed the World Central Kitchen aid workers, including American/British/Australian/Polish citizens, and it is (unsurprisingly) extremely clear it was (yet another) very specifically targeted assassination. I'll post the thread below, but the info comes from Haaretz here.

The IDF's early explanation re the killing of the World Central Kitchen team is in - per "security sources" speaking to Haaretz. Before we get to the putative pretext for the attack, they also disclose a harrowing detail - the drone bombed the convoy THREE TIMES in succession..

because team survived one hit and tried taking cover in another vehicle, and then survivors moved to a third - and were finished off there. Deliberate, repeated targeting of convoy, making sure no one was left alive. And this actually doesn't stack up w the alleged pretext:

"According to sources acquainted with the details of the incident, the Operation Room in charge of securing the route identified an armed person on the truck and suspected this was a terrorist. By the time preparations were made for the attack, the truck arrived....

at the warehouse, together with the three WKC vehicles carrying seven volunteers... minutes later, the three vehicles left the warehouse, without the truck on which an armed person was allegedly sighted. The cars traveled on a route already confirmed to WKC by the IDF. The IDF

was also made aware of the timing of this particular convoy. At some point, while convoy was traveling on the authorised route, the Operations Room ordered the drone operator to strike one of the vehicles. Some passengers were seen leaving the stricken vehicle and moving...

to the other two. They had time to alert superiors they had been attacked, but seconds later were struck by a second missile. They began moving wounded to 3rd car, and that's when the 3rd missile hit. All seven volunteers were killed." This is actually far worse than I imagined.

The first and last vehicle targeted were over 2km apart:

Background info on the Vietnamese president who just recently got purged. The tl;dr is that he's a liberal worm who tried to undermine Vietnam from within:
https://nitter.poast.org/darrion_nguyen/status/1776809036123672765

Israel must be dismantled as a state and its leadership executed

CW:torture

After clearing them of terrorism charges they're just dropped back off in Gaza.

Absolutely sick reading this, it's basically a medical torture camp.

Apartheid in South Africa ended with a one state solution where Blacks and Whites are equal citizens under shared government. Why should there be any difference for Palestine, especially now that Israel has destroyed most of Palestine's infrastructure. Israelis owe Palestinians generations worth of reparations. Wouldn't an endorsement for two-state solution be an endorsement for a literal ethnostate?

Israel has just re-opened the Beit Hanoun/Erez crossing for the first time since 7 October. As repeatedly noted, Israel is so utterly dependent on the US it literally takes just one phone call to reverse Israeli policy 180 degrees.

https://x.com/MouinRabbani/status/1776023464056443122

a couple white aid workers died, Biden makes a phone call, and like magic they're opening the border and allowing more aid in

‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

I actually think I'm going to throw up

McDonald's is buying all of its restaurants back from the Israeli franchise owner due to the negative impact of the boycott of McDonald's on its Middle East revenue. McDonalds missed it's revenue target for the first time in 4 years because of the boycott.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/04/05/israel-boycott-mcdonalds-will-buy-all-225-restaurants-from-franchise.html

Found an article on CNN dated April 14, 2022 - so that's about 50 days after Russia began the SMO. I'll just paste the headline and the first few sentences, that's what matters:

Biden calls atrocities in Ukraine a ‘genocide’ for the first time

President Joe Biden said Tuesday the atrocities being uncovered in Ukraine qualify as genocide, a designation he’d previously avoided but that he now believes is warranted as scenes of devastation emerge from towns once overrun by Russian troops.

“I called it genocide because it’s become clearer and clearer that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is just trying to wipe out even the idea of being Ukrainian. The evidence is mounting,” Biden told reporters in Iowa after using the term earlier in a speech.

“It’s different than it was last week, the more evidence that’s coming out,” he continued. “Literally, the horrible things that the Russians have done in Ukraine – and we’re going to only learn more and more about the devastation.”

“We’ll let the lawyers decide, internationally, whether or not it qualifies,” he concluded, “but it sure seems that way to me.”

The Genocider-in-Chief couldn't wait two whole months to declare that Russia was committing a broad genocide. He won't even condemn Israel much less say it's a genocide. Russia, on the other hand, gets that label with nary any actual evidence.

Went to uni with a guy who was both an outspoken communist and an even more outspoken zionist (only in germany )

I checked his twitter shortly after October 7th and he was doing hasbara like a good little doggy, ticking all the boxes.

Checked his twitter again last week and his tweets are now protected. Aww, were people mean to you cause you defended the fucking Nazis?

Traore is looking to be Sankara reincarnated and the Sahel alliance might become a pan African union with how its looking

good things coming from africa

also with the EFF rising to 3rd largest party in South Africa, the future of african socialism looks to be very very bright

I'm a bloomer today comrades

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/german-jewish-voice-peace-bank-account-blocked-berlin-bank

Berliner Sparkasse Bank demanded that Jewish Voice for Just Peace in the Middle East disclose list of members, including addresses

"Ja, bitte release the names and addresses of ze members of zis Juden organisation, its for your own protection of course, we must fight against anti-semitism"

Major new article from 972 mag. Israel is using an AI bot to identify and target Hamas. This is apparently how they came up with the 37k Hamas number. The AI's list was apparently treated as an order, with the only oversight being to check if the target was male.

Perhaps more significantly, Israel had/has also given full permission to bomb suspects in their homes. The number of acceptable civilian casualties per strike is 20.

I still cant get over that Amerikkka is clearly trying to pit Vietnam against China and globe emojis LOVES to talk about how Vietnam loves America only for Joe Biden to state "we must get our POWs back!", in that national vietnam veteran day or something.

National Vietnam Veteran Day? More like Loser Cope Day.

I'm not sure if it was mentioned in the last thread, but I thought it was worth including small but bright spot of recent good news from TERF Island:

Palestine Action activists have officially managed to permanently shut down another Elbit factory (a targeting & weapons component manufacturer who sell to Israel) after a sustained campaign of blockades, occupation, and damage.

The company blamed a massive increase in security costs, resulting from the actions.

The factory is now owned by a new company who stress that they do not contribute to military or arms manufacturing projects. Another one down.

I've been running into more Chinaboos lately. They treat China the same way weebs treat Japan. Saying random Chinese phrases they learned from Chinese films, lusting after Chinese men and women, talking about how badly they want to move there, and talking about how they're living in the future. It's weird to see from someone who grew up in a time when Japan was getting all the attention and anything Chinese was deemed uncool or cheap.

They're largely leftists but a good number of normies have also been doing this, most of them being younger.

I would vote for Joe Biden but liberals keep telling me to write in this dude called "99% Hitler" instead. Seems like a weird choice but I don't know anything about politics so I guess I'll trust their judgement.

Analysis of World Central Kitchen's broader role in Gaza:
https://twitter.com/AliAbunimah/status/1775112575006511404

Statement from World Central Kitchen saying that they will halt operations in Gaza:
https://wck.org/news/gaza-team-update

This is completely by design. The IOF assassinated them in order to:

1. Create a chilling effect on aid workers to the point where aid workers will refuse to go to Gaza

2. Wage psychological warfare against the Palestinians in order to demoralize and destroy their resolve to fight

Doomer take: Biden has opened the Pandora’s box where the interests of American capital are now directly tied to de-stabilization from global geopolitical conflicts.

We know all this already: Inflation and high interest rates are sucking in international capital from abroad. Stock market is at an all time high. Oil and gas, military industrial complex, financial institutions raking in excessive profits from the war in Europe. Billions of aid money to Ukraine and Israel that are being laundered back to cronies.

There is no going back from here. Let’s say Trump, or someone else, succeeded Biden as the president, how will they ever convince that they can also deliver the same amount of treats to the American capitalist class, but without stoking wars and conflicts across the world?

This is all the American empire can do right now. Causing chaos everywhere. It has fully transformed itself into a landlord empire, and Biden has found a way to turn on a giant vacuum hose that sucks in global capital to slow the empire from undergoing its own decline. It seems more and more likely the conditions that will eventually spark WWIII are becoming ripe as this decade unfolds.

A man was arrested today in Casa Rosada (literally Argentina's White House) after he tried to enter the building armed with a machete while claiming "I am God, and I am going to kill the President".

Source

Also he will meet tomorrow with the commander of the United States Southern Command, General Laura Richardson. Imperialism done with a lady in charge, feelin' the future and the inclusiveness here!

Left pan-africanist Bassirou Diomaye Faye won the presidential election in Senegal. Another country in west africa to watch

‘Simply mind-boggling’: world record temperature jump in Antarctic raises fears of catastrophe

An unprecedented leap of 38.5C in the coldest place on Earth is a harbinger of a disaster for humans and the local ecosystem

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/06/simply-mind-boggling-world-record-temperature-jump-in-antarctic-raises-fears-of-catastrophe

The Israeli Agricultural Industry: A Strategic Weakness

Excellently researched article. I shared only the conclusion below.

The structural change in the Israeli agricultural industry not only affected the composition of workers in the industry but also had repercussions on food policy in the entity, which became more reliant on importing foodstuffs. This was due to the slowdown of growth of the agricultural industry, which coincided with a significant expansion in the population, compounded by the political desire to lower prices, which opened the door to imports [11].

As mentioned earlier, the slow growth of the industry in the 1980s was the result of inflationary recession factors that affected the Israeli economy during that period, coupled with the neoliberal policies followed by Israeli governments since the late 1970s, which reduced the amount of government support for agriculture. Consequently, population growth, over time, became faster than agricultural production growth. In the 1950s, the annual growth rate of production was about 12.8%, compared to a population growth rate of 4.6%. However, this dynamic shifted in the 1990s, the decade when population growth surpassed agricultural production growth, remaining so until now, with the former reaching 2.8% while the latter reached 2% [12]. This led to dependence on food imports to meet the increasing local demand. The result was that the entity became completely dependent on imports of sugar, vegetable oils, oilseeds, animal feed, and grains [13]. Moreover, domestic production of animal products relies on imports of feed and live animals.

This coincided with the neoliberal transformation in the Israeli economy, where the focus in the 1990s shifted towards high-value industries, especially the technology industry. Even agriculture took a significant share of this industry, with a focus on developing agricultural technology surpassing interest in agricultural production itself. At this stage, Israel chose the neoliberal model based on export orientation. The purpose of this policy was to improve the current account balance—reducing the deficit or increasing the surplus—attracting foreign direct investment, reducing external debt, and building foreign currency reserves by the central bank [14]. In contrast, other industries, including agriculture, saw declining growth rates, and their products lost competitiveness, even in domestic markets, due to the high production costs.

It is not sustainable to be a First World Country—meaning a country with an economy focused on high-value production while abandoning quantitative production, especially concerning basic goods like food—in a hostile region that does not accept you. No matter how significant Western support may be, there are economic rules in the real-world economy that cannot be bypassed or ignored. Consumers need consumer goods, and herein lies the strategic mistake committed by the Israeli entity during the formation stage of its modern economy, specifically after the neoliberal transformation it underwent in the late 1980s. Under export-oriented neoliberalism, the focus shifted to enhancing the economy’s status on the international stage. In this context, “Israel” was able to achieve its goal. However, it simultaneously relinquished a crucial aspect of its security, which is food security.

Amidst the brutal war that “Israel” is waging against the people of Gaza, other fronts have opened up. The attacks carried out by Yemen in the Red Sea imposing a blockade on Israeli ports from the early weeks of the ongoing war have proven that the anti-Israel camp is capable of reducing its ability to import. This poses an even larger problem in the event of a broader regional war. While today only the port of Eilat is affected by the blockade in the Red Sea, the situation could worsen if a war threatens other Israeli ports, especially those located on the Mediterranean Sea. This could trigger a food security crisis in “Israel,” which abandoned a fundamental element of its survival amidst the transition to neoliberalism.

"how long you been on the news mega?"

"I remember when 72Trillion's pfp was just the number 72"

"..."

"so like a year ago"

"yeah but it feels like forever ago"

Milei ends a press conference where he announced that he's giving the USA a naval base in Argentina by screeching his stupid ass catchphrase. No one else joins in, the US ambassador laughs at him, and he leaves the stage to no applause.

Reddit president

https://x.com/NukedFirstWorld/status/1776111198070510061

Biden when the IOF murders tens of thousands of Palestinians:
A ceasefire is out of the question Jack.

Biden when the IOF murders seven workers from a Western NGO:
Biden demands Netanyahu accept ‘immediate ceasefire’

Where are the British politicians saying that Israel has the right to kill British citizens? If they don't assert that right, they're being anti-semitic

Gaza journalist Yousef Fares

"Terrifying horrors and atrocities in the al-Shifa complex. They buried people alive, tied up and executed the injured, buried dozens of wounded and trampled them with tank treads and bulldozers, they destroyed hundreds of houses with their residents inside in the vicinity of the hospital. They changed the face of the region... Dear Lord"

Summary of why IOF intelligence failed to thwart October 7th from their perspective:

• https://twitter.com/revolutionaryem/status/1774649149981700572

• https://twitter.com/revolutionaryem/status/1774649163378221493

• https://twitter.com/revolutionaryem/status/1774649170684735551

Highlights:

1. Hamas intelligence was able to log in to the Israeli webcams because they didn't bother changing the original manufacturer password that came with the webcams.

2. Hamas intelligence also catfished horny IOF dudes and got them to install spyware on their phones on top of just general opsec breaches.

3. The article constantly copes about Hamas intelligence capabilities "not being that good but merely adequate acktually."

4. There's also a bunch of malding about Tiktok.

José Andrés Says Israel Targeted World Central Kitchen Workers ‘Systematically.’ "This was not just a bad luck situation where ‘oops’ we dropped the bomb in the wrong place," the group's founder said in an interview on Wednesday.

This is pretty big. Andrés is an uber-lib, like the Pod Save varieties. He's done a lot of charity stuff that he gets PR for, but he's tight with the Clintons and Obamas and has, of course, been accused of stealing tips, advocating against workers, and working with ICE.

This very well could be a breaking point for the petit-bourgeois lib.

Israel has the right to kill international aid workers, as long as they do it within international law

China de-orbits a satellite into the middle of the ocean, Reddit reaction: FUCKING BACKWARDS CHINESE FAKE SPACE PROGRAM INTERNATIONAL THREAT

NASA kicks a battery pallet off the ISS and the part of it that doesn't burn up actually hits a house in Florida, Reddit reaction: heckin big chungus battery throwing American heroes!

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545

The US is the largest oil producer in the world, cracking the Russian and KSA records in 2018 and exceeding their production by a comfortable margin now. Up from a recent low of 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 13 million barrels per day now.

Definitely a Thanks Obama moment. I recall when that asshole talked about this being the moment that sea levels would stop rising when he won the primary in 2008. 8 years later, US oil production was just about double to 9 M barrels/day. That fucking asshole.

The US has become a much more significant oil exporter now too, especially since 2022.

https://archive.is/TArzr

See also the American consternation about Chinese green tech, eroding the world demand for oil.

Biden 'outraged' by Israeli strike that killed aid workers in Gaza

"This conflict has been one of the worst in recent memory in terms of how many aid workers have been killed," Biden said in a statement. "This is a major reason why distributing humanitarian aid in Gaza has been so difficult — because Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians.

Biden knowingly provided unconditional military and political support for the Nazis in israel as they spent almost 6 months slaughtering innocent Palestinians (which the WH administration expressed concern about as soon as October 11th), killing record numbers of journalists and aid workers in the process, and now he feigns '"outrage" on day 180, days after he rushed to send the Nazis billions more in bombs and jets.