i did not play 13, all i know about it is from internet discourse. so i am unconvinced that was a bug

the weird thing is that the power of music worked the first time around

Making some assumptions about that Other vote, and also assuming the indigenous vote would still rather González over Noboa then maybe the center-left will win this time around?

We are certain. American economic collapse is orders of magnitude worse than a recession or a trade war. Like starkillerfish said, the entire world’s economy is geared to supply american consumers and industry with cheap goods. However that doesn’t describe collapse in its entirety. If the US economy were to collapse it would take the world’s financial system with it. It would be as if the entire world was placed under Russia style sanctions all at once, necessitating a rapid and complete overhaul of, well, everything. Only most of the world is nowhere near as self sufficient as Russia.

It’s not so much that there’s no alternative. Of course there is. Its just that none of them are easier than the status quo. Much is written about how a country like China wouldn’t want to take over the financial system. In part because that means becoming the new US, the new exporter of junk cash and therefore the new importer of cheap goods and exporter of jobs. In part because Chinese capitalists have their assets priced in dollars. The point is that China is doing what it is currently doing while it has options. An American collapse robs everyone of options.

if anything its an impressive level of shitty costuming

I think the canadians drank the cool aid on this one.

This has nothing to do with drugs or whatever. Mexico is the USA’s new sweatshop. Canada is the resource colony that supplies the US and Mexico. There’s a pecking order there - because its all owned by american capital, it all serves to strengthen the US. But while import taxes would be mutually destructive to everyone involved one of the trio deals in manufactured goods. What is Canada gonna do? Build a pipeline to Europe?

Nobody here has the full set of data required to truly answer this question. The adage that economists are wrong 95% of the time is true because everyone who tries to predict the future is essentially making bets. Regardless of how or why.

Will these high import taxes on the american economy strengthen the dollar and drive up imports anyways? Will this (relative) closing of the american economy serve as a perfect excuse for inertial inflation / monopoly profits to rise regardless of the calculus involved? Will people and companies find novel ways around the import taxes? Will the import taxes mostly just eat into the profits of US importers? Will foreign export economies make up the shock by relying on new, growing markets around the world? Will the import taxes be mostly just a means of picking winners and losers in the US economy, so that imports still happen its just that profits are funneled to a narrower sector of the oligarchy? Will tariffs be used to just browbeat countries into submission, to be unceremoniously dropped as soon as certain oligarchs get whatever they want from, say, México?

I don’t know. I don’t think anybody really knows.

Last I checked Brazil is one of the few countries in the world that has a trade deficit against the US. Which didn’t matter to Trump. He still put tariffs and minor sanctions against Brazil’s industry even after diplomats pointed to him that Brazil’s steel is made with American coal. But I think that’s a red herring. The key issue will always be, I suppose, the fact that the US and Brazil are competitors when it comes to exporting agricultural goods to east asian markets.

Worst case scenario it will be like the last time around, when Bolsonaro’s moronic sons were insanely racist towards chinese officials online, triggering a momentary freeze of soybean imports - meanwhile Trump ‘forced’ China to buy more american soy. Best case scenario Trump looks at the USA/BRA balance of trade and decides to mostly cook everybody else while scoring an aesthetic victory against Brazil by being tough on a made up issue.

The issue of reciprocity on the other hand really is a double edged sword. There’s less trade between the two countries than you’d expect. Its mostly things like Brazil exporting a lot of crude and the US exporting a lot of refined petrol. Or plane components being made in both countries. You raise import taxes on both sides and nobody wins. You just have lower return on investment for american capital.

The really key aspect is how the tariff agenda is used to pick winners and losers. Trump seems personally obsessed with the notion that if your trade balance against someone is negative that means you are ‘losing’. So its pure aesthetics there. In practice however you have what you always have in economies that have high import taxes. A mixture of protection and privilege. A company like Tesla, for an instance, might be given the effective monopoly of EV consumption in the US. After all you shut the Chinese out of the market. However that doesn’t mean Tesla has no access to Chinese manufacturing: since Musk is now a part of the american government, his company might the the only EV manufacturer permitted to import cars or car parts from China.

That’s why Tesla’s stock jumped on election night. The markets were factoring in the obvious potential for corruption.

Add in Trump’s personal perspective and something has to give. Some economic sector that is equally reliant on the global economy will have to go bankrupt to pay for Tesla’s monopoly profits. So yeah its a farcical ‘Nazi Privatization’, in the sense that the US is a capitalist regime where corps that are close to the government get to triple their profits on the backs of a closed, monopolized economic model.

I don’t think there was much more to it, it was just a more verbose version of this.

ah thats just an alternate name for the orions

that said i maintain vulcans are real and roddenberry was the only human capable of surviving their weird sex ritual thing

There are grains of evil in each of new trek’s productions, only before this it was more hidden. I wrote a big post about this before. But, to me, one of the more interesting things about Star Trek is the story of how humans achieved utopia and how historically contingent it is. In TOS you have a lot of that 1960s vibe, with the cold war and space alien cults that were all the rage in the zeitgeist. So humanity’s elevation comes from a mixture of WW3 and vulcan solidarity. The TNG era keeps all those plot elements and shift them around a bit. The real notable points though is how DS9 made utopia about political action (the Bell Riots), and how Enterprise made it clear that it wasn’t just techno-wizardry (reiterating that neither humans nor even vulcans had replicators before their foray into deep space).

What does Picard do? It makes humanity’s bright future hinge entirely on magical microbes found on space. That’s it. Nothing else matters. If humans don’t find a techno-magical solution on Jupiter or whatever, it will fall to climate change, WW3 and it will become the biggest genocidal empire of all time in a series that already featured multiple versions of space fascism. New Trek already threw the lack of replicators out of the window way back when. I’d argue that Picard is when it all goes from clueless, cynical people bumbling about to them showing the evil of their beliefs.

To be clear Enterprise had military apologia on it. Half the show’s plot hinges on a 9/11 allegory and you’ve got Special Military Forces Guys serving alongside the normal crew from that moment on. Even then I’d wager nobody came out and showed their asses like this. The entire thesis of the DS9 Section 31 storyline is that Section 31 shouldn’t exist. Its a rogue agency. Its genocidal moves don’t even win the war. The minefield, the Prophets, the romulan plot and the cardassian defection are what win the Dominion War. At best you can say that Section 31’s virus gave them an in as to avoid a costly final battle. Even so its circumstantial, as it was in no way Section 31’s intent or its plan.

It doesn’t even require an assumption that American companies have access to more powerful chips than their Chinese counterparts. If Deepseek and now Alibaba are that much more efficient than OpenAI’s stuff, that just means you can run exponentially more AI services on more advanced hardware. So, yeah, if the underlying LLM industry is viable then Nvidia should still be raking in cash. Unless they no longer have access to Taiwan’s fabs.

next-day emergency too

this is where bipartisanship comes in

From what I remember the princes of the yen docu gives off those feelings. You had a generation that built a system - fully cognizant of its strengths, weaknesses, contradictions and outright bluffs. Then two generations later you get true believers, who can’t help but mismanage it down the drain.

So maybe food for thought.

i’ve made this joke before, but he can’t settle for being anything less than the tony stark of videogame timewasters.

I felt the federal grants thing was weird enough to call everything else into question. Tariffs, greenland, attacking TSMC before chipmaking is up and running at home, etc. Ok I can find some reasoning for every one of these things. But copy-pasting a heritage foundation memo on blocking up to 3 trillion dollars in federal spending? What. There must be easier and more targetted ways to purge the government.

Resistance takes many forms. The question is what you want to achieve. Historically speaking the last time Latin America had a good deal from the great powers was when the United States itself supplanted the British Empire’s economic hegemony in the region. That was towards the early 1900s. It took a great deal of time of silent american growth under very boring presidents, and it took decades of american trade primacy to create conditions for that to happen. Even so, the British had to be in an inflection point - WW1 - for the US to make their move and break the British financial stranglehold on the continent. After that, it was between WW1 and WW2 Latin America had a lot of opprtunities to seize vis a vis american interest.

I do not think Latin America has the human and demographic resources nor the political will to stop being a peripheric region in world production chains and finance. That is not to say Latin America doesn’t trade in high tech, rather that its population by and large is not harnessed towards a full blown industrial revolution. However, as long as there’s at least one other game in town - China - then its best choice for resistance is to build ties with the chinese, to defend its public services as well as it can, and to appropriate as many funds as possible for state driven infrastructure.

Just look at México. It has become an industrial middleman between China and the US. It has a 600 billion USD export business of mostly industrialized goods, 80 percent of which or so is sent into the United States. Should it resist in a way that meaningfully endangers that? Of course not, thats how those AMLO/Sheinbaum reforms are financed.

Good reminder of the adage that <country> subreddits are mostly online outposts of fascist canadians.