How about this one

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/america-just-quietly-admitted-cant-crush-russias-economy-bw-120125

No they didn’t. PSL is not a militia. They defined their strategic boundaries and have been consistent with those boundaries for years. They do not engage in physical confrontations and they do not go toe to toe with police forces.

Telling people to physically engage ICE is not only irresponsible as a party but grounds for federal investigations and disruption of the party itself.

Oh fuck it’s Rainer coming at us. Gonna give this a read and see how far off base he is. This guy went full on PatSoc and started going after PSL in a totally disingenuous way and I can’t trust anything he’s written since.

All great points, but have you considered a National Counsel of Corporations?

The problems you raise have been solved before. The state takes over the management of the companies in order to keep the markets happy. It helps that 80% of the stock market is owned by one single bloc (https://welcometothemachine.co/)

Yes we are absolutely running up against physical limits, but again, that just means more innovation is going to be done. Sure hydrogen takes a lot to bring online, but Microsoft alone could probably fund bringing that fuel source online in a big way. To you point, they won’t because they aren’t saviors, but it’s not too far fetched to imagine the USG forcing companies to contribute to a strategic energy fund.

What’s happening right now is that people are building natural gas power plants on campus with the data centers. I can imagine coal plants coming back for the purpose.

Of course it will all run up against chip scarcity.

I think we’ve got at least 2 years before any one particular scarcity becomes a pin prick to the bubble. I think it’ll take 3 years at least given the current state of play, and in those 3 years a lot can change.

And as for profit, the USG is probably doing a lot of Keynesianisms right now paying defense companies to develop strategic artificial intelligence, so all of the startups going nowhere isn’t necessarily the bellwether of pin prick.

Also, I wasn’t saying that downward wage pressure would create the conditions for the same people to be rehired by the same companies for the same positions. I was just saying that downward wage pressure creates new economic opportunities for margins. In essence, downward wage pressure at scale creates upward pressure on the rate of profit. Certain labor jobs may become more viable if wages continue to fall. And we’ll need labor since clearly the US is way behind on factory automation.

I think China can keep labor prices low enough to make this difficult or impossible for the US. But that’s why the US keeps trying to decouple. In the meantime, I imagine the US will start doing a lot more exploitation of low wage labor in Latin America. But then, factories just can’t be built fast enough.

I think potentially what I am pointing to is that the USA might be 2 years away from a total economic collapse and there’s a large faction of the ruling class working to extend that time line via various means.

And the reason I think they are is because there is nowhere else for them to go. The only military potentially stronger than the US is China and China isn’t going to allow EuroBourgeois to setup shop fully in China (unless it’s a nice big trap).

So for better or worse, the owning class has to make it work in the US or it’s all over. And that means every single technique is going to be applied to get another 6 months and another and another.

So I think there’s a few things you’re missing.

1. There are MASSIVE capital reserves in the US right now. Something like $2 trillion in dry powder. This is what it means to be in recession - money stopped moving and went into a reserve. So even though a lot of the economic activity you see is just pump and dump schemes in the market, the money is still there. Microsoft has enough cash reserves to operate with zero revenue for the next 80 years, last I checked.

2. Keynesian interventions work, at least temporarily. The reason this is important is because Keynes would have the US govt borrow money from the owning class to get money flowing again. But if you the govt can get the capital owners to deploy their reserves, is serves much the same function as a Keynesian intervention without the sharpening effect of th debt - even if the end result is a bunch of half-finished data centers, the money will be circulating in the economy again. This may be the real reason behind Trump’s meetings with the tech firms demanding they pledge a certain amount of money to building things - literally shakedown Keynesianism.

3. When you release those capital reserves, suddenly switching costs become acceptable, startup costs become acceptable. That means that despite supply chain constraints, the demand will be high enough for expensive innovations to be undertaken and more expensive fuels to be used. Hydrogen is getting a boost now, as an example. Will it be enough to meet demand? No. But it will have an uplifting effect on the productive economy broadly, which will lessen the blow of a popped bubble.

4. The labor discount is growing. With all of this job market contraction, wages are coming down. And no just in the marginalized communities - this administration’s approach has been universal in putting downward pressure on the entire working class. That’s going to put downward pressure on costs, which will inflate profits, and also create room for competition to put downward pressure on prices eventually. It also means more people could be hired for the same dollar. The fact that all of these layoffs are pretending to be caused by a.i. means that when the a.i. narrative bubble bursts, there will be a narrative continuity with hiring more people again.

Can all of this fix the core problems? No. But my point is that there is a lot of space between the bubble bursting and the collapse of the system writ large, with plenty of mechanisms already in the works for softening the blow.

The real question is whether the contradictions will overwhelm their containers or not. There will undoubtedly be unrest - we are seeing labor movements growing and working class consciousness on the rise. We know what happens after that - violent disruption. Is this the generation where the military policing of citizens fails? Or are we in for yet another cycle of uprise, repress, recover, rebuild?

I doubt the bubble will burst because of logistical issues. There’s money to be made. More manufacturing and fabrication will be built. Scarcity pressures drive capitalist incentives and novel technologies will be built and investments will be made.

The bubble bursting will be from the total lack of value contributed to the economy by the a.i. projects. This will effect tech stocks, which dominate the stock market. However, if this process releases capital reserves into the economy it will have the effect of creating more consumer spending and there will be a counter balancing effect.

The real problem is ultimately that there aren’t enough jobs being created by all this activity to counteract all the job loss that’s happening. This can be papered over for a little while by having higher than average salaries being created as part of chasing this bubble, but that won’t last too long.

In the end, the bubble bursting will a financial event, not a social one. Many people will get financially hurt. Many institutions will get bailed out. These things are all merely the sharpening of contradictions. The bubble bursting will not cause a collapse directly. It’s when the contradictions become unsustainable that the collapse happens. It’s possible this financial event will push contradictions past that point, but it is impossible to tell.

I really can’t imagine that there’s just no money, considering money is just lines on a spreadsheet at this point.

I worry that the goal is to force the poor to take desperate actions to justify further expansion of violence.

https://www.guernicamag.com/hyatt-bass-lessons-from-cubas-incarceration-model/

You need to read about Cuban democracy. People spend way more of their daily lives in democratic formations, driving the direction of their neighborhoods, villages, cities, and workplaces than an American could even dream of.

There’s still time

No. It wouldn’t. Why are you people so willing to believe that these fascists are motivated by avoiding public scrutiny? Trump was convicted of 39 felonies. He’s not so afraid of being tied to Epstein in the public eye that he would overstretch the US military.

There are other reasons for these actions.

It could be that they were doing illegal things and that an adversary hit them with some electronic warfare. Can’t go around admitting to doing illegal things, and certainly can’t accuse anyone of electronic warfare if you can’t tell who did it.

American workers are about 6x more productive than Chinese workers based on my preliminary research. These guys are just fucking ghouls

“World hegemon says that two nations in conflict need to negotiate a peace settlement to end the killing”

Libs: “Fuck no everyone should enlist and we should be killing more and more and more until there’s nothing left and even then we will never surrender!!!” :foams at the mouth:

Downvoters better stop malding and start arguing

It’s a farce.

There are never only two choices. It is impossible to actually construct a real world situation where in there are only two choices. Even in an elementary school, given a test with only on question on it and it only has two answers, you can eat the test, scribble on it, punch the computer screen, walk out, etc.

Even in prison with guards pointing guns at you and putting you in a position to do either A or B you have options.

However, the concept of lesser evil is a shallow abstraction of the real world experience of pragmatism. Amongst all of your options, what course of action leads to the most desirable outcomes?

This is a real thing. We do it all the time. People in positions of grave responsibility have to do it with consequences and constraints that are absolutely gutting. Let’s say the war has already started, well, now you have to make decisions about how to avoid losing the most strategically important objectives, even if that means people dying. In fact, the strategies employed in war force decision makers into these sorts of choices as a matter of course - an opponent knows you don’t want to make certain sacrifices and will therefore create pressures that trade off those sacrifices with strategic objectives. Sometimes it’s not even that they believe you’ll give up the strategic objectives but the delay you have when choosing will give them an advantage, or the emotional and psychological toll of being put in such situations repeatedly over a long campaign can create substantial advantages.

Lesser evil is rhetorical sophistry or mildly useful thought experiments when exploring the consequences of ethical frameworks in academia.

This is why I am not all that excited for Zohran’s tenure. I am excited that he got the votes, but the reality is he will not have the power to do what he intends to do because realpolitik drives NYC.

That’s not the calculus here. The problem is that the NYPD has a budget larger than the DPRK’s entire military including their nuclear program. The NYPD is also a bunch of thugs, extortionists, rapists, assassins, kidnappers, and torturers

And that department runs the security detail for the mayor and the mayor’s entire family. The mayor is required to be in their proximity at almost all times. They drive him around, they escort his vehicles, they manage crowds every day around him.

The pragmatism isn’t limited to getting votes. It’s life or death.

Downvoters gotta stop malding and start making arguments

What are we, Russian?