SeventyTwoTrillion

this plus the troop kidnapping? we are so back.

hopefully Hezbollah has some surprises for us too. there were a big meeting a couple days ago in Iran between Resistance leaders and politicians and rumors were that they were escalating the war and tactics used

“Marcel was pretty secretive about his dad. He didn’t even know him well until he spent last summer in Africa,” Gonzalez said. “There’s no way Marcel had any idea what he’d be getting us into or he never would’ve offered. He’s one of the best friends a person could have.”

just guys being dudes. sometimes you accept a bet that you can do a kickflip while shitfaced. sometimes you drive up to the presidential palace of Kinshasa and try and overthrow the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. both of those things happen all the time and I'm sick of people pretending it isn't a normal part of growing up as a man

I demand less explicit metaphors of US imperial collapse, it's getting way too easy to analyze it now and I want to go back to feeling like a very smart and special boy for seeing the obscure signs.

used to be that you had to write a fully-sourced, ten-paragraph piece suggesting that the US military is secretly falling apart, but now you can just point to the two or three disasters that Western militaries have experienced this week and shrug your shoulders

"China, Iran, North Korea, and various other countries providing weaponry to Russia makes them fully complicit in the war against Ukraine. Hell, even if they only supply components that could be manufactured into weapons, we have to stop that trade by any means necessary."

"...no, Biden directly giving and boasting about supplying tens of billions of dollars worth of bombs to Israel doesn't make him even remotely complicit in what Israel is doing, what the hell are you talking about?"

Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman is heading to Iran for the first visit by a Saudi royal in two decades.

Michael Roberts wrote a piece a week ago where he talks about all the business with US tariffs on Chinese products. I think we're all familiar with the basic premise: the US is doing protectionist trade policies in the face of Chinese production of electric vehicles and renewable energy and such.

Article TLDR:

Chinese EV imports are only 2% of the US market and the new tariffs, in total, constitute only about 7% of US-China trade; so the US is still evidently unable to cut their reliance on China. The reason why the US cannot cut their reliance is that Chinese dominance in this territory is not just skin deep. China is dominant in EV production, and the battery manufacturing for those EVs, and the manufacture of cathodes and anodes for those batteries, and the refining of the chemicals that go into the batteries.

China produces 80% of the world's solar photovoltaic modules, 60% of wind turbines, 60% of electric vehicles and batteries. In 2023 alone, China's solar power capacity grew more than the entire installed capacity in the US.

Chinese firms have rerouted supply chains to the US via Morocco, Mexico, and South Korea, which have free trade agreements with the US. Most solar cells come to the US via various South-east Asian countries. In response, the US government has mandated that US automakers won't receive tax credits if any company in their battery supply chain has 25% of its equity, voting rights, or board seats owned by a Chinese government-linked company. Nonetheless, American firms like Ford and Tesla have partnered with China's CATL to make batteries, in a way that makes them compliant with that law. I mean, they kind of have to, given China's dominance in that sector. For what it's worth, Trump has expressed support for China building factories in America so long as they employ American workers.

Here's the thing: this general strategy has been tried before. US protectionist measures against Chinese solar panels resulted in an 86% drop over the 2012-2020 period, and the US solar industry received billions in subsidies from Obama and Biden, but not only has it not revitalized the industry, the market share of the global solar industry has plummeted from 9% in 2010 to 2% in 2024. China has risen from 59% to 78% over the same period.

Part of the reason is that China does subsidies much better than the US. Chinese businesses on average receive subsidies equivalent to 3.7% of their revenues, compared to 0.4% in the OECD (more or less, the imperial core). And subsidies in China are usually low-cost loans, while in the OECD it is tax concessions. Therefore, the Chinese government can maintain control while in the West, tax concessions just let the private sector fuck off with the money. Additionally, Chinese state aid focuses on boosting manufacturing and export sectors, not protecting weak sectors. The US does the opposite, which even the IMF admits is not a strategy for good long-term growth.

The US accusing China of "non-market practices" given this context is obviously hilarious; so is the US pretending to discover that overcapacity resulting in mass exports is a thing that exists but only China is doing it.

Obviously this will all have a big climate impact; reducing access to renewables isn't going to make renewables easier to build in the US. But even in an economics sense, because China is so dominant in so many industries, the protectionism just means that input costs will rise, not that new American industries will come along and replace Chinese imports. This reduces profitability, and obviously corporations will refuse to take that hit, so they'll raise prices for the working class.

Number of hostages rescued is now in the negatives lmao

As always, death to Israel
#Tradle #812 3/6
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https://oec.world/en/games/tradle

1D chess is like, tug of war

in 2050, a solid quarter of the buildings in San Francisco will be comprised of hundred of governments in exile

There's a decent potential for third parties in this election. None of them will win, obviously - and the feds will JFK her before she can get within 10 miles of the White House even if she gets the votes - but the hatred of the two party system is reaching real heights.

Will there be any meaningful result from this, even if the winner will still ultimately be Biden or Trump? I have no idea, but it's possible. I don't think that analyzing the situation electorally is productive given that the powers that be will have us voting between Dems and Reps until the sun freezes if they had their way, so I mean "results" in a more general domestic sense. Mix a few massive protest waves together with big recessions and higher gas prices and a visibly awful foreign policy and a decaying empire and who knows what comes out over the coming years. Nothing ever happens until it does.

TLDR of Simplicius's article yesterday:

• Ukraine is, all of a sudden, finding significant success in hitting Russian air defence with ATACMS for some reason. Generally, how it's gone is that Russia shoots most of them down, but one or two missiles in the salvo gets through and wipes out the S-400/300 anyway. The good news is that the Russian doomers now have something to complain about again; it was deeply harmful of Russia to deprive Rybar's habitat of bad news as it's a critical part of their diets. It won't really change the course of the war necessarily, but...
• Ukraine is also taking shots at Russian early warning nuclear ICBM sites, which is, to say the least, concerning. There's been some news about Russia doing tactical nuke exercises, but Simplicius points out that in this kind of war where vehicles and troops are generally fairly distributed and not in massive parking lots all concentrated together, a tactical nuke wouldn't achieve much that a bunch of conventional explosives couldn't, outside of cities at least. And we both doubt that Russia is close to nuking Ukrainian cities. But there's an implicit threat there nonetheless, which NATO may listen to, or may not.
• Putin's been talking recently about how Zelensky is now an illegitimate ruler given the lack of elections in Ukraine, which is interesting when combined with the information that Yanukovich was recently spotted landing in Belarus. To be fair, there are alternative explanations (many high-up figures were brought there and perhaps Yanukovich was just asked to tag along due to the whole "brotherly nations" thing) but even so.
• There have been rumors/claims recently in the media that Putin wants to freeze the conflict along the current front lines and sue for peace; this has been denied by Peskov.
• There's been a fair amount of activity in rooting out corruption in the Russian army. As I understand it, none of it is incredibly major - some bribes here, a little unauthorized action there, and some punishments for underperforming commanders. But it is still a lot, all at once.
• As always, rumors of new fronts opening up. Obviously with the whole thing in Kharkov now, I find it much harder to ignore these rumors, but an invasion from Belarus still seems a little unlikely.
• Speaking of Kharkov, the Russians are now issuing Russian license plates for the region and some officials are beginning to talk about letting Kharkov decide its future and all that jazz. Significant to be sure, but it doesn't herald any imminent attempt to seize all of Kharkov IMO, especially with Putin saying that they wouldn't try to capture it for the forseeable future and the fact that there's like a single Russian division there also indicates that the intent wasn't immediate, massive territorial expansion like with the beginning of the war. Ukraine is stripping men from both Donbass and also Kherson to face Russia up there. It looks like the Kherson front has been basically terminated, with whatever tiny gains Ukraine scraped together being abandoned and the water levels raised via upstream Ukrainian dams to prevent Russia from trying anything clever.
• Generally the tempo of escalation and mutual threats between Russia and NATO continue, but this has been a theme for literal years now (I remember at least one Putin speech in like summer 2022 warning NATO), so, unlike the new front rumors, I mostly ignore these as just saber-rattling and behind-the-scenes activity that's being aired for effect until I'm given a big reason to believe them.

It's worth noting with the ATACMS thing that some of the big pro-Russian people on Twitter are stating that Ukrainian usage of ATACMS is through the roof and they've already fired an appreciable fraction of all the ATACMS ever produced (and, in typical American fashion, they make very few per year), and that Russian losses aren't so bad comparatively (I mean, they aren't, if I understand the number of destroyed systems versus the number the Russians have ever made/can make per year - which I may not understand as I'm not a military guy). Others can work out if this is accurate reporting or cope, just saying what I've saw. But Simplicius did sound fairly concerned about it in the article. Not very concerned, but fairly concerned.