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.
Imagine all the people living for today!
And no borders?
The world would be absolutely wonderful with no people 🥹
It will happen eventually. We may be accelerating how quickly that is coming
The Drax plan.
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.
Hahaha!
Just give me money, that’s what I want.
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can.
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.
The fact I read this in the voice of an high elf speaks volumes of the old tongue.
Just wait until the Chinese cut off basic industrial inputs like chemicals, screws, nails, electronic parts.
But have we learned from our mistakes? No.
It’s okay! We have “clean” coal! 🥲
Damn! First it was higher tariffs now this? How will MAGA ever get their swag gear?
They’d better not cut off supplies of fried rice and crab rangoon! We’ll have a REAL problem if they do that!
My local oriental market has their business up for sale…
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.
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…
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.
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.
Schrodenger’s Douchebag: a guy who says something highly offensive to see how everyone reacts, then decides if he’s going to say “Oh I was just joking.” or not.
All the crap they’re doing with downsizing of federal agencies, they just wave a hand without knowing what they are doing and when the protests get loud enough they take it back.
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.
I have always thought that it makes the most sense to import your non-renewable resources regardless of whether you have them domestically or not. Then, if the SHTF, you’ve got what you imported, the exporters don’t have it anymore, AND you have your domestic sources to develop.
Accusations of dumping are an easy political attack based on lower costs than you. A good response to any imagined dumping is to buy it as a strategic reserve. Subsidizing domestic production can have a national security benefit to have plants exist, but it is actual steel that is national security, and cheaper steel makes better manufacturing inputs. Buying “their” steel makes their manufacturers pay more for it.
It’s good to have production capacity ready to go, underutilizing input streams. Things like steel can do this very well, things like state of the art microchips? not as much.
It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible, if we could buy the bulk ores and just have our own mines ready to start producing if the ore shipments ever stop, that’s the ideal circumstance - but going at it like that is a little transparent.
It’s the natural resources in the ground that we should be using as slowly as possible
Iron ore is available everywhere. Steel production is more of a bottle neck, even if emergency development of a new mine might take 1 year (but increased production from existing mines is much quicker). In US, more iron ore is exported than used in domestic steel production.
I mean, if people will pay us for gases extracted from the atmosphere, I’m all for that. And iron ore doesn’t seem to be nearly as concerning as things like copper, cobalt, lithium (though I bet the “lithosphere” has much more available lithium in it than we currently know.)
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.
With 4x as many people, they can be 4x more kinds of stupid…
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.
Seems simple - just put a big tariff on war so nobody can afford it!
US is just lucky they didn’t start selling off and unloading US debt
Who would they sell it to?
International collection agencies? Imagine the spam.
There are alternative sources for these . . . but the US has pissed all of those countries off too.
Don’t worry. Russia is willing to work with Trump and Trump can say that Russia is its only ally.
Shocking. I am shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
way to go trumpsky.
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.
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
