Spring planting was about to begin. Then costs jumped. Fertilizer more expensive. Fuel more expensive. One reason: Hormuz was shut.

…

The real pressure builds somewhere else. Fertilizer.

Strip it down, and the system depends on three things: nitrogen, phosphate, potash. The Gulf plays a central role, especially in the first two. Around 50% of globally traded ureapasses through that region, moving mostly by sea. One company alone, Qatar Fertilizer, produces roughly 5.6 to 6 million tons a year, about 14% of global supply. That flow depends on open routes.

…

A core ingredient in fertilizer, heavily dependent on natural gas. The Gulf produces around 30% of global ammonia, and that production relies on gas flows now under pressure. About 20% of global LNG exportspass through this region. Qatar alone accounts for roughly 19% of the market.

…

Phosphate follows the same logic. Its production depends on sulfur, and about 45% of global sulfur exports move through Hormuz. Disrupt that flow, and prices react quickly. Farmers are left with difficult choices. Use less fertilizer and accept lower yields, or stop planting if the economics no longer hold.

…

Pull the camera back a little further, and the picture widens. It doesn’t stop with food and energy. Qatar produces about 63 million cubic meters of helium a year, nearly a third of global supply. Helium is used in semiconductors. In MRI machines. Disrupt that, and the effects don’t stay in tech. They move into healthcare. The same applies to petrochemicals used in pharmaceuticals. Any shock in oil and gas runs straight into that sector as well.

…

That thread is mildly hilarious with the people snarkily saying if someone doesn’t like it, fork it and remove the AI slop and develop from there — and then people admitting they don’t have the skill to do the software development/they don’t want to learn/they wouldn’t be able to recognize the AI generated code from the human written code/they’re not going to fund AI free development and generally glossing over that these are unpaid hobby projects and they’re getting mad at a volunteers free work. Like damn the community gardens volunteers keeping the plants alive using unnatural big agriculture’s chemical products rather than dedicating even more of their free time to the community garden I want to consume

A bunch of these people I’m certain would not work for free and make that a moral and political statement about the value of labor but not extend that energy to the work of open source software developers. The guy works on a project that I’m certain would have a low ceiling for amount of monthly donations. People whining about him using AI who themselves won’t contribute any more than words of affirmation. So pretty much worthless. Absolutely worthless after like half a year of a demanding user base whose only contribution is prey much like a kid grumpily saying, “well I said thank you! You happy!? Now can you do what I said!?”

Does the US even have refinery capacity to make a cost difference for power customers like data centers

Like the other person, in the west it’s being pushed as a Christian thing but it’s pretty indiscriminate. Heavily rural conservative Christian pastors, evangelicals, southern baptist, etc - really push the idea of Nigeria as some christian genocide thing to push fear in US christians and probably drive attendance and donations

These days it’s more about tradition nomadic groups vs the settled towns. Similar issues along the Sahel like in Sudan with the janjaweed groups in the past to today’s civil war. Nigeria has a significant problem with bandits and those pastoral nomads that come into heavy conflict with their staunch beliefs in their rights to have their animals graze as has been tradition for who knows how many thousands of years.

I think it’s to a degree recognized in law for pastoral rights for nomads but it’s pretty non-compatible with modern city/property rights society and they’re hyper aggressive to a point where it’s probably many taking advantage of historic rights to pretty much be bandits. Nigeria has an insanely complex web of different violent dissident groups throughout the country

Someday the evangelical Muslims may be the primary aggressor again in the future but today it seems to be the pastoral nomads and generic bandit groups. Boko Haram is way smaller than it was like 15 years ago. Maybe a backseat these days to the ISIS affiliate that’s spread around the surrounding countries substantially like if I recall correctly, Burkina Faso and Mali. ISIS in Nigeria isn’t to the degree as those two. Not even close yet. ISIS or Al Qaeda affiliates. Incredibly complex and hard to keep up with

This has been simmering for like 30 years it was just easy to ignore because US politics is like a spectator sport to feel good about your own country. Should be no surprise that white and/or Christian nationalism wouldn’t look much different in Europe

The Nobel peace prize has got to be one one of the most nonsense rewards in history. A prize legendary for giving it to warmongers and war lords

For those that don’t follow the going ons in Africa. Kagame is pretty much a dictator with western backing. Rwanda funds rebel groups in neighboring countries that happen to staff a lot of well armed, trained, uniformed “rebels.” These rebel groups happen to rapidly take mineral rich regions and adjacent cities. Those minerals then manage to make it to Europe and the US. African countries that oppose Rwandan expansion happen to be treated as examples of despotic regimes in Africa that need to be sanctioned

They pretty much do the same thing as Israel where they use the military and financial support of western countries to pilliage neighbors to build up tourist attractions and market themselves as the beacon of democracy in Africa

edit: I still want to clarify that although almost every historical post-1950 dictator/genocidal despot in Africa pretty got their start as a puppet of Europeans, the politics extends much more than just Europeans playing the great game in Africa. Like the whole Ethiopia-Eritrea-Somalia conflict exists regardless of Europe. Al Shabbab and other rebel groups in Nigeria exist regardless of Europe. Sudan though - that’s a very multifaceted proxy war involving western Europe, Russia, USA, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, UAE, … The whole Francophone Africa is currently exiting the trainwreck era of French dominance and racing towards another trainwreck

Regardless what happens in the future, maybe this time we won’t fool ourselves into some more white savior nonsense and end up setting whole regions back another century by playing kingmaker for another resource puppet king

You can buy the cheapest brand and run a different OS than the companies software. Like I have a TerraMaster NAS. Use what you want on it

At least 200 years of making everything worse. At least starting with Afghanistan/Durrani

I have a 2 drive TerraMaster. I’m no advanced user of NAS’s. It was easy setup and use for me

they’re worried about that? It’s a country in Europe. It’s a war in Europe. These countries back Ukraine but to the minimum they believe they can do. Why wouldn’t it at a minimum be a major failure of other European countries to fail the objective of Russia losing in Ukraine

What physical export would even be competitive with domestic industry? Software services the same. What’s better than their domestic or US services? Agriculture, I’m pretty sure latin america, south and southeast Asia would dominate over european

It’s always been delusional to think organizations run by public people based in any country wouldn’t abide by laws and government orders. They can hop countries and this will always happen. There is not a single jurisdiction in the world where any company will legally be safe from censorship, government coercion. Tech has to be designed and adopted for its resilience to state coercion and risk for loss in leadership

Yes. Need the kind of love desktop hardware got for Linux with mobile hardware. I don’t need tap to pay and mobile deposit. That can come when the ball really gets rolling and the user base is too large to not service. For now I’d be happy with consistent phone/text support, signal application, a mobile Firefox, and the phone dockable to run full desktop applications. Strong enough hardware. Google are a bunch of jackasses. Need more phones to support PostmarketOS or something

Most apps I can replace with a web browser but the mass market has shown it’s preference for an app store. Got to get payments integrated into Flathub

Sweet. I have really high hopes for cosmic and system76 for making inroads with mainstream users someday. Cosmic is way more stable compared to a year ago. It will probably be good enough for 26.04

Not truly leftist but in times of frustration people look for a group to feel acknowledged so even if they’re not an ideologue, they’ll comingle and the not true leftist, opportunistic “leftist”, outnumber the ideological leftist. Has to be watched out for in caution of them hijacking organizations to drum up a populist anti-immigrants/racist movement that adopts some leftist terminology for marketing.

Corporate/imperialist Republicans courted evangelicals for votes but didn’t want to enact policy of evangelicals until evangelicals took over enough of the party positions. That’s a caution for socialist commingling with labor activist that are really just about their paycheck rather than being about labor. I’m all about labor unions but I know labor unions are filled with people happy to pull up ladders and scapegoat out groups

This. I always side eye people when they rag on Japan for not being publicly repentant about WW2 atrocities. I never hear Europeans tip toe and apologetic about Africa and especially not Asia. Americans are verbally repentant about slavery but not Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, … Native Americans are mostly ignored and native Hispanic may as well not exist. Afghanistan and Iraq are referred to mostly as a waste of time and money rather than as terrible atrocities committed by us. Zero concern or feelings of responsibility for latin American imperialism by the US. Presumption of practically any immigration Muslim men of being problematic but little to no concern for the imperialism of their homelands that made them want to leave

I get annoyed at leftist meetings where people get annoyed at immigrants and their children for being successful because they must have come from money for their family to immigratr to the anglosphere or Europe. What money are modern people thinking people from Afghanistan came here with. The families from Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia that came in the 70s-80s. China didn’t really become wealthy until the last couple decades and most Chinese people in the US are from before the 90s. Insane poverty back then. Very interesting times in the west these days. Conservatives are crazy but leftist are starting to get a bit xenophobic and ignorantly presumptuous and blaming of immigrants in my opinion too. I’ll add that I don’t hear resentment about immigrants being successful from the former Yugoslavian states from back during the Yugoslav wars in the 90s

I do think it’s Gaza. For decades until the last couple of years, the plight of Palestinians have been mostly ignored. The whole of Europe and algosphere in the middle east have had active or passive public approval for middle east policy for the past century. Vietnam war reporting soured the public on far east colonialism and war reporting went softball afterwards and that softball unraveled in the 2010s and now Gaza is the modern day Vietnam war for reporting on disregard for life from pretty much ourselves. Israel is an ally of our countries.

So now government policy is incredibly misaligned with public opinion now and what was a steady grind at enacting internet control is suddenly a mad rush for governments. Israel is a line in the sand for the powerful like Vietnam was in the 60/70s was for media control/influence

Minisforum V3 from what I’ve read seems good with Linux now

I remember in 2019 my workplace was doing large guest lectures from experts teaching how to work with millennials entering the workplace. The teacher early on tried to emphasize that most millennials at that point were late 20s up to almost 40 so everyone’s been working with them for a good amount of time now and the crowd was not interested in that.

Just venting about their teenage children who were gen z but wasn’t a term used much for a couple more years. Just as entertaining were old millennials in denial and certain they were gen x. Not as entertaining were old gen z that thought they were millennials but learned they were actually gen z and it was a moment of shrug shoulder and pretty much being like, “neat.” Like thinking your astrological sign or zodiac animal was one thing your whole life but was off by one.

Similar to like 2021/2022 when I started hearing about how terrible gen z workers out of college were because of growing up on tiktok. Gen z in the workforce at that time grew up on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat. Twitter was genz and millennials tertiary social media. When TikTok came out they had been working for years already or just about to finish undergrad college. 2021/2022 gen z who had the brain rot got that well before TikTok became popular