they walked it back day of

massive market rout, tencent gaming was down like 10% or something ridiculous and people just couldn’t handle it

tbf i can sort of see why brian berletic takes this stance and i agree that normalization would probably have been the easier regional W for the anti-imperialist bloc as well as likely the better option for overall development in the region, but telling me that normalization is the best way to pressure israel to provide a two state solution def smells like

i know fuck all about the middle east but at least to me normalization here is uncomfortably close to capitulation and the end of palestine as a polity.

pentagon defense procurement paper from last year

conclusions:

• no commercial application for missiles makes them unprofitable
• china makes everything
• nobody wants to invest in domestic manufacturing
• nobody wants to work in manufacturing, much less for the DoD

apparently pakistan couldn’t quite finish financing the last bit of an IMF loan, so they ended up just selling a bunch of weapons to the US to make up the difference after they couped khan?

the naked capitalism article i think is a bit sensationalist regarding the fate of CPEC after this revelation since i’m of the opinion that it is actually somewhat in china’s interest for the ukraine conflict to drag out as long as possible, but perhaps this is the opening salvo of financial capital’s asian counteroffensive. intercept article for deets

fuck, this never even occurred to me

this is probably the best answer actually

this is also my experience, i always make the mistake of thinking that people want explanations from first principles when in reality the socially correct explanation is usually first order causes. my SO once asked me why some water bottles go glug glug instead of sploosh when you pour them out and then they made a face at me when i tried to explain what a stress tensor was

the correct answer here was that some water bottles have wider bottlenecks than others

in less serious news:

so a couple years ago there was a legendary thread on the lying flat tieba that had a guy livestreaming drinking a bottle of homebrewed spirulina algae. the user got banned, presumably for evangelizing about potentially unsafe ‘nutritional independence’ (drink nutritionally complete and calorically sufficient spirulina errday instead of getting a job to buy food) and the tieba itself got banned a while later for having negative vibes i guess? dude got a few police visits for his trouble as well

after getting banned from tieba, he apparently spent his off time making a bilibili account and posting about his continuing efforts on spirulina research, including attempting to grow it in a literal piss ditch he built next to a river. as of recently the guy has gone viral again, by making a video purportedly cleaning up a small pond in his local park by dumping batches of bacterial supplements, spirulina and fish into it over the course of two months (which is around the amount of time a new body of water needs to cycle itself regardless). dude’s gonna get another police visit soon i bet lol

anyway, reflection on these events has caused me to wonder if perhaps the 70:30 ratio applies to most instances of dudes rock as well. as further food for thought, i note that the golden ratio is closer to 60:40

imo tpp was the US’ best shot at a comprehensive and future proof anti china platform, best thing trump did was take it out and the US has been on the strategic back foot ever since

will be interesting to see the real meat of the biden counteroffensives though, while it seems the initial probing attacks in the tech sector have been bogged down, i feel like brandon’s best chances in the economic sector will be in the latam/africa directions. problem is that those places are currently just good for raw resource extraction, value added work there would be risky due to political instability and low quality of human capital. which basically just leaves the imperial core itself.

problem is that the imperial core has all these domestic problems that seem to be nigh unsolveable barring some kind of a fascist yakubian messiah. how are barely literate, obese, mentally ill military rejects with 900$ rents and a 57 minute commute going to be able to work iphone factory shifts long enough to prop up the falling rate of profit?

the imperial core should join the BRI, have china build infrastructure for it, then eventually force majeure everything back with a manufactured humanitarian crisis. at this point hopefully latam/africa have developed sufficiently to support supply lines beyond raw resource extraction, at this point the core can then just implement the new monroe doctrine deal and regenerate its labor aristocracy

subprime jet fuel futures mediated deflationary meltdown in skibidibeam economy

pretty good series of essays on chinese local government financing vehicles written by a investbro twitter guy from the anti-michael-pettis camp.

he’s also probably not a marxist, so be sure to make three offerings to the michael hudson shrine in your closet before you indulge in bourgeois economism.

allah syria and bashar

we are your men bashar

worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us

this is my pet concern as well and it’s always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it’ll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won’t evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.

patchwork-chimera had a good thread on lcd from about a year ago regarding the taiwan situation and in it iirc he said something along the lines of the US hypersonics program being a bit behind in some places but ahead in others. obviously i’m not privy to the specifics but just from the PR it doesn’t seem like shit’s going great. there are like a billion different projects that keep getting cannibalized by each other or going MIA and nothing but failed launches and tests for the ones that don’t go underwater, wtf is happening?

you get the impression they’re swooshing their missiles around in wind tunnels doing pugachev’s cobras at reentry speeds but haven’t figured out a reliable ignition mechanism yet. real cart before the horse shit.

bruh the way radhika enunciated ‘shithole’ on that last geopolitical economy hour… i didn’t know old indian aunties were built like that daaayum

idk if its relevant but i liked this video

it’s mostly in line with your previous posts, i got the original framework from some guy on r/sino a couple years back. my modified thesis is now:

• bubbles cause looming US instability
• US hikes rates, bubbles deflate while capital flight from foreign markets begins coming in
• capital flight causes economic instability in foreign markets, US incites geopolitically advantageous conflict
• instability from conflict further increases capital flight to US, new bubbles begin inflating
• US decreases rates during conflict, multinationals expand outwards and redollarizes world
• stabilizing period as conflict ends and domestic bubble formation accelerates by way of continued low rates
• repeat

as an aside for the less econobrained, it should be noted that the capital flight represents the surplus value gleaned from workers in the rest of the world by their national bourgeoisie; rich people from other parts of the world get scared and like to park their money in the US where it’s safe and won’t get taken away from them when things around them start getting hairy

They can’t stay in stocks and bonds forever with so much interest income being paid out, so if Biden is smart, he would direct them to the foreign sector and dollarize the world once again.

on the international angle: i think this is still the most probable turn of events, but i also think many countries are becoming more aware that dollarization is directly connected to the question of sovereignty which may give them some room for pause, particularly with climate change looming on the horizon. my question here was more about the specifics: where and how are they going to invest? i guess the trivial answer might be in low level resource extraction to support eventual US re-industrialization? are they just going to buy out the BRI? can they even do that?

moving on to the domestic possibilities, this is also where things start getting really fuzzy for me. i understand this interest rate situation as the US suddenly having an excess of money lying around, and again i have questions: i get that bonds are not profitable in this environment, but why not stocks? what happens if the bubble doesn’t pop (revolution ig)? if biden invests in domestic industry/subsidies, why would they not just keep doing buybacks with the money? what is so unattractive about domestic investment vs foreign investment aside from keeping the world dollarized?

wetware based half-chinese room

@[email protected]

i too am a disciple of bidenomics but am a bit confused when i try to put everything together. my basic thesis was thus:

• US incites conflict somewhere
• US hikes rates, existing bubbles popped
• instability causes capital flight into US markets, creating new bubbles
• previous conflict stabilizes
• US decreases rates to incentivize investment in foreign assets
• dollars flow out, world is redollarized, wait for assets to mature, repeat

having a hard time fitting it to ffr data though, and it looks more like rates tend to spike before major conflicts/geopolitical events and are actually trending down as the situations resolve themselves. i’m looking at post-volcker spikes around plaza accords 1985, gulf war/soviet dissolution 1990-1, dotcom/afghanistan 2000-1, gfc 2007-8. yugoslav wars and asian financial crisis were excluded because the mid-90s were mostly flat, and i attribute this to america’s relative stability during that period, no need to increase rates to look more attractive.

at this point i’m sort of leaning towards modifying the thesis such that high rates are used to help precipitate conflicts while rates need to be lowered as the conflict resolves itself in order to snap up as many assets as possible (both of these feel off to me and i think the second is the more off of the two). i am working with absolute values here and i wonder if % rate change would be more enlightening. it is notable how the current hikes aren’t in line with previous ones wrt the conflict in ukraine in being pumped up prior and getting slowly wound down during, but rather increased after the fact and have yet to come down. makes me think things will continue to be drawn out and perhaps larger support packages may still be in the works to disrupt the stabilizing market and clear the way for near future predatory investments globally.

this is the ffr data i used.

the nikkei article is a few days old but so fucking funny

Thus Xi’s rough summer began. After receiving the unexpectedly harsh criticism from the elders, Xi huddled with close aides he has promoted to key posts. According to information that has begun to trickle out, Xi vented his frustration, pointing fingers at his three predecessors – Deng Xiaoping, Jiang and Hu.

“All the issues that were left by the previous three leaders are on my shoulders” he is believed to have said. “I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”

Another major factor behind Xi’s G20 absence is that no breakthrough in stalled relations with the U.S. appears on the horizon. While there is hope in Washington that the visit to China by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo late last month served as one step toward a more stable relationship, this is not how the Chinese side sees it.

The butterfly effect of Chinese politics never ceases to amaze. On Thursday, days after the Beidaihe meeting is thought to have closed, former Premier Li Keqiang made his first public appearance since being forced to retire in March.

The former No. 2 was smiling broadly when he appeared at the World Heritage Mogao Caves, also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, along the ancient Silk Road in Gansu province.

He was greeted by fans who chanted “Ni hao [hello], premier! Ni hao!”

tldr; xi gets bullied by ‘party elders’ and skips g20 to come to terms with his hurt feelings, huawei sales rep gina raimondo does nothing, non sequitur about li keqiang being greeted by chinese people in china using the chinese language because vibes based reporting with a side of orientalism from a japanese rag no less

any corroboration for this claim that niger is now selling uranium at normal canadian rates of 200 euros/kg instead of the original 0.8 euros/kg? fucked up if true