Good, make them suffer.
If only we had an ally who we could help get their territories back who would be more than happy to play for our team hmmm
You joke, but Russia is a better replacement for China than Ukraine. The territory is bigger, which means more resources, and instead of giving them aid USA can buy raw material cheap because they need money.
At least that’s the strategy I’d expect from your current administration, since everything is laser-focused on very short term profit.
You joke, but Russia is a better replacement for China than Ukraine.
Our glorious Elven Nation would never stoop so low as to ally with the vile, savage Orks. We are perfect and beautiful and clean, noble in mind and spirit, and accomplished in the High Arts. They are cruel and stupid and traitorous, incapable of speaking the Enlightened Tongue or understanding the Noble Truths. I would sooner slice off my own wrist than extend a hand to the insidious, pig-like beasts of the Slavic Kingdom.
The only path forward is one of undisputable supremacy. We must turn to the ancient weapons and unleash the hellfires on Ork and Chinese Fantasy Race alike.
Shocking. I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
What would work great is no tariffs, no passports, no visas, no countries, no religion too
It’s difficult if you try. But worth it.
The world would be absolutely wonderful with no people 🥹
And no borders?
Imagine all the people living for today!
Can you imagine, living for today?
well I am tired of living for yesterday…
And tomorrow is such a bitch! Rather give me today
These are the lyrics Lennon rejected.
They’d better not cut off supplies of fried rice and crab rangoon! We’ll have a REAL problem if they do that!
Trump really got them.
His bluff didn’t work this time. He wants to play another hand. His shifty eyes are betraying his poker face. He’ll win the next hand! Who cares anyway, he’s not playing with his money.
But have we learned from our mistakes? No.
It’s okay! We have “clean” coal! 🥲
Seems simple - just put a big tariff on war so nobody can afford it!
Just wait until the Chinese cut off basic industrial inputs like chemicals, screws, nails, electronic parts.
way to go trumpsky.
US is just lucky they didn’t start selling off and unloading US debt
According to the Trump that’s exactly what he wants, countries to sell off the bonds they have in exchange for super long term bonds that defer interest for like 100 years.
Bold optimism that the USA will last 100 of any time unit.
That’s not how it works, though? But alas… our white house isn’t filled with our best, but rapists and criminals.
Who would they sell it to?
International collection agencies? Imagine the spam.
White House red phone goes off, “We’ve been tying to reach you about your nation’s extended warranty.”
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The US have a shitstorm coming. That’s what you get when you let a toddler play with the control knobs of the country.
Another very interesting point is how China made themselves so powerful. Anything with electronics needs some sort of resource from China. China is a very big and powerful player.
We should wonder if we want t be this dependant on one country for all our tech needs. I think the answer is no…
Yeah… I read yesterday they are testing flying cars to help with reducing commute times. Wow… flying cars… dreams from my childhood that sadly we didn’t make come true, but China is testing theirs.
(re-post because strangely, my first post showed up twice, as in duplicates, then I deleted it, and they both deleted. maybe my cache or lemm.ee issue. shrug)
Don’t be fooled too hard by propaganda though. We also got tests of flying cars in other countries, it was a beloved subvention target of some german politicans as well… but it’s just not economically viable, and for the filthy rich it isn’t in any way better than a helicopter for now. They also said some nonsense about having “a train that can go anywhere” which was just a fucking bendy bus, and their infrastructure keeps falling apart due to no or absurdly bad quality control (which other countries can also do very well)… so yeah, China is just stupid in different ways. To put it mildly.
Yeah… I read yesterday they are testing flying cars to help with reducing commute times. Wow… flying cars… dreams from my childhood that sadly we didn’t make come true, but China is testing theirs.
We’ve had flying cars since the 70s, they are called helicopters.
The issue with a flying car for general use, is one of maintenance and safety. If an older car breaks down, it causes a tailback. If a flying car breaks down, it could demolish a school. The higher standards required means higher costs. That means rich people only. The rich use helicopters in exactly that manner.
Uhh we’ve had helicopters since the 30s.
True, but they weren’t really used much as flying cars till later. I might be wrong on exactly when they moved from military to “rich transport to the race track”, however.
What’s funnier is that the Americans could have dropped Chinese raw materials if they had built a collaboration before tariffing China, but the current Government have only one tactic: try to bully everyone at once. They really did make their own mess.
This is all just Japan from the 80s all over again. There are a bunch of movies from the period with Japan as the bogeyman. The peak probably being the backstory of Die Hard.
The key difference this time is the USA was paying for Japan’s defense, had a massive military base, etc. China doesn’t have that problem, so they can counter American demands with their own demands.
Interestingly, look at interviews with Trump from the 80s, he’ll talk about Japan almost with the same language that he uses for China now. The most famous was probably an appearance of Trump on Oprah.
It’s always amazing to see the media of the 80s just shitting on Japan. “Cheap mass market products that never work.” “They’re going to take all the American jobs.”
In Back to the Future 2, McFly is seen as weak for having a job with a Japanese boss and getting fired for it.
Cyberpunk has Japanese decorations and cosmetics because it was invented when Japan was the yellow peril.
At the same time, Japanese-Americans were asking for reparations from the internment camps, charged with the crime of being Japanese and having all their assets sold off without any consent.
Japan was able to help get a start on the next generation of writers with the mass production of anime into Western audiences. Now if someone doesn’t watch anime it’s seen as weird.
Right now China is that “other” nation. I wonder if in 30 more years we’ll look back at it and go “What the fuck were we smoking in hating people we never even had contact with? No Chinese person ever deported me. No Chinese person ever called me slurs.”
Can you elaborate on the Die Hard part? I recall the terrorist being German. The only reference to Japan, that I recall, was the name of the building.
That name of the building is the backstory I was referring to. That was a headnod to what was actually happening with Japanese investors moving in and buying up a lot of American real estate. I think that’s when a Japanese group bought the Plaza hotel in NYC for example and when Sony bought a movie studio (renamed it Sony pictures, but I think it was CBS movie division).
Gung Ho, staring Michael Keaton, is another movie example.
For what its worth, CyberPunk 2077 is … an alt history that diverges from our own … at some point in the 1960s I think?
Like… the Soviet Union still exists. In 2077.
Point being: The ‘Japanese megacorps taking over much of the American economy’ fear of our own 1980s is very, very much a big part of the lore/universe.
Pondsmith published the first version of the lore in 1988 as the TTRPG ‘Cyberpunk’, originally set in 2013, and this kept getting added to and expanded with subsequent editions.
Arasaka is… well hopefully without spoiling too much, Arasaka corp is basically run by a Japanese fighter pilot ace who pretty much swore eternal vengeance on America after Japan got nuked and lost the war, and his idea of how to do this includes figuring out how to become immortal, so that he can continue to run a megacorp that ultimately usurps American sovereignty and turns the country into his neo-corpo-feudal subjects.
You can get almost all of that by playing through the Corpo intro character path and actually watching the informative slideshow thing in the elevator and on walls/screens in the … megalobby, so hopefully thats not too spoilery.
Also in Die Hard it is Nakatomi Plaza iirc, Nakatomi being the name of the fictional Japanese corp.
Anyway woo random trivia.
Thanks for explaining, TIL!
I remember in the 80s several National Lampoon covers that featured this concept. One had a tagline with something like “Welcome to America, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Honda Motor Company” or something like that. And then there is the slightly racist one in this image:
The anti globalists were calling it 40 years ago and for some stupid reason it’s a freaking fascist who is destroying the system that the left was fighting against back then!
Even liberals have been saying that now in modern times. Isolationism is a prime Republican message for a reason.
The line must go up so lobbying+no spines has ensured we haven’t do anything about it. There have been are a couple rare earth mines here in the US but it hasn’t been profitable and has been heavily subsidized. We needed some other source ready before doing something like this and we don’t have it. So it’s just stupid.
We should wonder if we want t be this dependant on one country for all our tech needs. I think the answer is no…
It’s also by far the biggest market for those materials, and a massive scale industry there. The IRA did incentivize local supply chains for many materials, but the high ROI scarcity model in US, had many announced projects cancelled, and new administration’s love for fossil fuels and funding sources for tax cuts for the rich, threaten other projects. The reason projects were cancelled is that price, even after subsidy, would be horribly uncompetitive relative to China, and includes further uncompetitive processing industry requirements, that aren’t usually the same expertise as a mining operation.
trade dependence is bad
is something you can say only when global peace is impossible, but also when your country is the one that fully decides global peace or war. War is not a path for shared prosperity. Trade dependence can be very prosperous (PPP GDP is far more important measure than nominal). Markets usually function because sellers are not forced to hate buyers, instead of trying to usually be their friend.
Far crazier than OP high tech industry suicide, is food and apparel. 1930s Smoot-Harley tariffs didn’t just amplify great depression, they directly led to global famine. Farming bankruptcies and low global trade means planting less, if surplus can’t be sold anywhere. No one will import avocados or apparel this week, and that has a bigger short term impact on lives.
Luckily Europe is one step ahead:
Access to clean energy and rare earths is critical for the EU as it seeks to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 and boost its autonomy in strategic sectors.
But sizeable shares of the global mining, processing and recycling of some of the critical raw materials, like lithium, that are indispensable to the development of renewable energy, everyday items as well as defence systems, are controlled by China, from which the EU wants to ‘decouple’ due to its aggressive and protectionist trade and foreign policy practices.
Central Asia holds large deposits, including 38.6% of the world’s manganese ore, 30.07% of chromium, 20% of lead, 12.6% of zinc, and 8.7% of titanium.
“These raw materials are the lifeblood of the future global economy. Yet they are also a honeypot for global players. Some are only interested in exploiting and extracting,” von der Leyen told Central Asian leaders.
“Europe’s offer is different. We also want to be your partners in developing your local industries. The added value has to be local. Our track record speaks for itself,” she added.
Europe also tries their best to improve the situations in the other mines (some are so awful they’re basically off-limit for western companies because of child slavery and such stuff) and find new patches for example in Scandinavia or middle- and south America which could then be extracted with the respective countries.
Brussel does a lot of bullshit, sometimes phenomenally so (in the end it’s just politics as well), but in this case they really seem to try.
There are alternative sources for these . . . but the US has pissed all of those countries off too.
But not many and nor are they able to provide the required quantity, as described in the article.
Don’t worry. Russia is willing to work with Trump and Trump can say that Russia is its only ally.
their only ally is a country that plays both sides (and would most likely side with china if pressed)
this is hilarious.
Looks like coal’s back on the menu, boys! (Ugh.)
Ha ha, but for real. They’ll just turn people’s power off, tell them to ration, and/or jack the price per kWh to 500% what it was.
Team Orange let’s no good calamity go to waste. Everything is potential profit if you have no moral compass.
It’s interesting to see that the circle of profiteers gets smaller and smaller each iteration, since everybody else is losing footing in the process.
less competition
capitalism as predicted by Jack Lennon in the book that inspired 1984
The Iron Heel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel
The main premise of the book is the rise of a socialist mass movement in the United States – strong enough to have a real chance of winning national elections, getting to power, and implementing a radical socialist regime. Conservatives feel alarmed and threatened by this prospect, to the point of seizing power and establishing a brutal dictatorship in order to avert it.
It also inspired the national socialist party of Germany to “redefine socialism” as fascist oligarchism.
I am surprised I’ve never heard of this book. Will need to check it out.
it stays with you… or should I say it haunts you
