[https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1045316](piracy megathread)

Look in the Movies and TV section under Asian drama

I have to assume the bourgeoisie have a plan.

IMHO the plan is : “I want a tax cut. Therefore cut spending that doesn’t directly benefit me!”

The neo liberal agenda has always been austerity everywhere (“except where I want to blow my wad”).

The US isn’t the only source of carrot in a multipolar world.

Real talk: a lot of Americans don’t know how to farm…

Cry harder, Atlantic. Russia offered a peace deal way earlier and the West didn’t want it.

Should be renamed “The Atlantis” and get sunk into the ocean.

If they had never started the Ukraine conflict they could probably have sustained the empire for a good few decades longer. Or if they never got into these self-defeating trade wars with China. Or if they didn’t give unconditional support to the genocidal Zionist entity.

You’re basically saying the solution is they shouldn’t be an empire or doing Imperial things. Hence the “Xi does nothing and wins” meme.

Age out and die off. The West was a loose alliance for fucking over nonWest countries. Keep going down. Hit the bottom. Shatter into many pieces.

US and EU not getting along - good. US and Canada not getting along - good.

🤩 OMG. You read Pearls And Irritations too!

The empires of the past did not fall because they were defeated by external enemies; they fell because they mistook their own pathologies for the laws of history. The West now stands at the precipice of the same mistake.

Cool! 😎

That’s a good thing. Fall off the precipice. Empires are shit. Who the hell is trying to save Imperialism?

The only issue is reducing how much damage the falling empire can do on the way down.

And DeepSeek generated a Spice model of a standard oscillator design with missing connections? That’s a worry.

I am in the circuit design field. What is the reference book ?

I see the strength of LLMs as something that is for regular people to interact with. Not so much for automation of paperwork in a work setting although that is one application.

E.g. Sometimes older people don’t interact with technology well. They only see buttons and menus with very brief labels on them, which can be daunting. They’re afraid of hitting the wrong thing. Often they don’t submit forms online because they don’t want to make a mistake. With many companies/organisations using online websites as a big part of their customer facing presence, older people get alienated.

An AI that converses to guide them and answer any questions would make technology more accessible.

Byung Chul Han called it “excessive positivity” in Burnout Society. We are too smart to be obedient these days so instead we are oppressed by our own drive for achievement, praise, clout. Each individual is their own brand in competition with other individuals. Eventually it leads to exhaustion, depression and burnout.

The only question i have is whether they are really so dumb that they believe giving tax breaks to oligarchs and applying some tariffs is sufficient to bring industry back

Investment goes where money is so it has some attraction. Probably industry will come back but to a limited degree because the supply chains have not been built AND you have to train workers up. These typically take years to establish especially for stuff like cars and chips.

In the meantime the pain of inflation is going to bite even harder for regular people.

This is probably the only opportunity for regular Americans to organise and get those jobs/wages and make sure to rip off some capitalists who are high on Trump juice. The domestic market is protected by tariffs. Get the bag. Take as much share of profits from the capitalists as possible. Get the employee healthcare and max it out etc.

When those industries go belly up in a few years, those opportunities will be gone.

Reindustrialization takes rebuilding the human capital base, it takes investing into education, infrastructure, healthcare, housing…none of which are getting any better, in fact they’re only getting worse.

That’s not the style of investing Trump is probably thinking about. He’s all business so it will be business investments in terms of subsidies, tax incentives and government contracts.

“Human capital” == “handouts” in Trumpland.

I think Trump is similar to other austerity conservative economists hence the cutting of the “fat” : Radio Free Something, VOA, USAID etc etc (even military spending). The idea is to cut a lot of services which will reduce government spending, then juice the industrialists with tax breaks and subsidies. The supposed resulting growth will then help pay the debt off.

Rich people pay for their own stuff. They don’t use government education and healthcare. And they don’t consume VOA. Hence someone like Trump can basically ditch it easily when looking to cut costs. Even if he was told it’s for propaganda, he wouldn’t give a fuck about cutting it. It’s not important to him. Same with President Musk.

Honestly the EU could do a lot of stuff if they had their own interests in mind.

They could sell EUV lithography machines to China while there’s still a market for it.

They could invest in building their renewables even quicker so their energy costs can come down and they can afford to manufacture stuff in the future.

I think they won’t do that though. Warms my heart to see Europe go down the drain due to their own subjugation to America. Screw them for their geopolitical shenanigans.

Imagine if the EU spent a fraction of the money burned on Ukraine doing this stuff for the past three years.

It’s a good idea but I think the EU would still be faced with Trump tariffs reducing their competitive edge in their big export market. They already are struggling with rapid deindustrialization due to high energy costs. It all spells long recession.

I don’t see Twitter, Google etc pulling out of the EU any time but I guess it’s possible.

The EU are just going to fold. Their retaliation is not meaningful. They are economically weak.

The trade surplus they had with America is eventually going to be invested back into the US to restore their manufacturing. They’re going to just pray it all turns a profit. It kills their own manufacturing jobs but they don’t give a shit really. The capitalists survive and that’s all they care about.

My perspective would be that a government providing services like healthcare which is funded via taxation is not communist in any way. It’s just called government.

Maybe in a shithole where your government just taxes you and then you still fork out for healthcare, it might look like communism… But most people would just call it public services.

Assholes only appreciate bigger assholes.

No hope. You aren’t a reeducation camp.

Imagine being a member of a household where everyone shared all the maintenance or productive work based on their abilities, circumstances and preferences. Now expand that to a collection of households.

Mandarin and Japanese

They’re going to rename it “Bidening” at this rate.

“Sorry Ma’am. All our high chairs are being used in the kitchen at the moment.”