zifnab25

Why do you need belt and road if you plan to be usa satellite.

They'd be way out on the end of it, so... not a huge loss. I'd be far more concerned if Turkey or Egypt pulled out, as they are central to transportation in the region.

I imagine this is easy to do for a government with very little stake in long-term infrastructure development and a need to score a few quick points among the reactionary "How dare all these Chinese ex-pats move into my neighborhood!" landlord wing of the current governing coalition. But in another five or ten years, they'll be out and a new pro-growth government is going to find BRI more attractive. China will still be rolling out new connections then, and Italians will only have missed out on being early adopters.

The current western libs plan is to shoot everyone on border, make india new exploitation node, and start preparing africa to be the next superexploitation central.

That's certainly the plan. But its becoming increasingly difficult to exploit regions of the globe that are catching up industrially. That's the core threat of the BRICS coalition. The NATO states are running out of cheap labor to buy and rich countries into which they can sell. And efforts to threaten BRICS states only force them closer together, as evidenced by the Ukraine War being the last nail in the coffin for a Sino-Soviet split.

If the American dollar keeps slipping as global reserve currency, its not clear why BRICS states will even need to trade with the western bloc at all. And as countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa pull away from the imperial core, they're going to drag a lot of their neighbors along with them.

I am intrigued, but... holy shit dude this is 4 hr 44 min long.

Love to pat myself on the back for not chaining people to a post back home while I'm living a permanent leisure existence.

this is why I still buy discs

Uh... I would simply pirate the content wholesale.

You can shoot all of them

And they can all shoot back. This is the part of the game Elon can't stand.

large groups generally fail to understand anything more subtle than a hammer to the head

There's a certain amount of subtlety to the posts that you get when you're in the loop but that just look like boilerplate propaganda when you're out of it.

Large diverse groups aren't going to recognize the tongue-in-cheek irony, so they'll either see it as outright cringe or low effort pasta. I don't really see this as influencing anyone, though. Its very ForwardsFromGrandma material.

Nikki Hailey ain't got nothin' on my man. #2! #2! #2!

Putting "I'm a spooky ghost" into the backend channel of ChatGPT and convincing all my friends that it is haunted.

This isn't in the future, because it already functionally happened. The "reputation economy" of gig work combined with dating apps and social media celebrity is functionally this thing in practice. Parasocial relationships are eclipsing normal human interactions. Alienation through housing policy, employment-driven migration, and privately gated social centers have fractured and commoditized human interactions. Meanwhile, the modern media and advertising circuit is increasingly about selling you "experiences" with celebrities as a means of growing their revenues. Whether its $5 for a Patreon subscription to some schmuck podcasters or $500k for back stage passes to Taylor Swift, the human stock market is real and its here and it is wildly profitable.

• Compound interest on savings is the most efficient way to grow wealth year over year and generation over generation

• The people with the most money got there by earning money faster than their wealthier peers

Real "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" moment.

👻 Bustin' makes me feel good.