This is perhaps one of my most important Geo-political posts. Much bigger things than Ukraine is going on RIGHT NOW. Much, much, bigger.
- Africa is unifying.
- The Third-world is rising up against the West.
- Russia is supporting the Africans.
- The United States is playing the same old games
Guys, Africa is the sole remaining supply of energy supply to Europe. The USA blew up Nordstrom 1 & 2, fully expecting to get gas from Africa. Now Africa says NO!
So Europe is looking to go BLACK.
Europe (via France) is up for a fight, ha! Take on Africa, China and Russia? The situation is very dicey.
Key areas are [1], [2] , [3] and [4].
The first point…
[1] Africa just SHOCKED the world with this and Putin is watching
Oh MY GOD. The shit is really hitting the fan.
You all must watch this. It is happening right now.
Everywhere I go I see “Help Wanted” signs. None of these jobs pay minimum wage anymore and yet they go unfilled. What’s happening?
Minimum wage in my state is $12 an hour. Which is multiplied to make $24,960 for full time. To “rich” to disqualify taxes.
With that, I have to live frugally to an impossible extreme. After taxes, no benefits I might bring home $13,000 at best.
Now I’m including federal state, local, gas, food, registration, safety inspections etc etc. all the things to stay legal and manage to work in a rural place where transportation is 100% required and not supplied by public methods. If you fail to meet these requirements, Law Enforcement is likely to levy more taxes. (Poor tax)
So less then $1100 a month. I’m single. My rent is $650 for a 1 bedroom. Now I have $450. Somehow I’m buying food to last…(which I almost entirely make myself.)
What if my already paid for clunker breaks down. what if I get injured, can’t afford the “benefits package” offered.
I’m not even going to break down $15 an hour. I CANT work for less then $20 and figure it out. The job market and employers don’t get it. “No one wants to work anymore” is what I hear. I have a job paying $16. Umm sorry.
I do better these day, worked hard to get there. My sense of compassion hasn’t left from those hard days, however. I live in a rural area with a lower cost of living, but…
For comparison purposes…
In China, a bottle of ketchup costs 10 yuan. (Roughly $1.40).
Keanu Reeves REFUSED To Sell His Soul To Hollywood
This video calmed me, and erased some earlier strife that I experienced today.
What is the best unethical “life pro tip” that everyone should know?
In 2013, a US company was running a routine security check and noticed that someone had been constantly logging into their system from China. Straight away, the company believed it was hackers and hired Verizon to root out the problem and secure their systems.
It didn’t take them long to realise it wasn’t hackers, it was actually a US employee of the company who would only be referred to as Bob.
The quiet and unassuming programmer was outsourcing his job to someone in China. Bob hired a programming firm in China to do the work for him and paid them one-fifth of his 6 figure salary.
Over the years, Bob earned the reputation as one of the best developers in the whole building and received outstanding performance reviews for his well-written code.
As they delved deeper into their investigation, they discovered that Bob had a very relaxed workday. Work at 9 am, where he surfed Reddit watching cat videos. Lunch at 11.30 am, and then at 1 pm, he would browse eBay. From 2.30 to 4.30 pm, he was browsing Facebook and LinkedIn. Finally, sending an email to update management before leaving.
What is the craziest thing you have ever said or done at an interview and still gotten the job?
Originally Answered: What's the craziest thing you ever said at a job interview and still got the job?
The interviewer, a very senior technical guy, asked me, “So, do you have any questions for me?”
I thought about it for a moment and said, “What’s the worst thing about working here?”
He thought about it for a minute, then got up and closed his door, and told me. For like half an hour, in painful detail, getting more agitated as he went. Then he was done, and sent me on my way saying I’d hear back soon.
The next day I got called back in. Seems that after he talked to me, he went and resigned, and the HR rep asked what happened in our interview.
After I told them, in detail, I expected to hear nothing further since I would have been reporting to him. Instead, the CTO came in to talk to me, and asked if I would be interested in coming aboard to help him fix all the things that seemed to be wrong with the organization (and solve some cool technical problems as well).
So I did.
Life Lessons
- Nobody cares about you, your plans, your goals, or your little dramas. So stop pretending they do, or getting upset when they don’t.
- When it comes to reaching your goals, discipline is more important than motivation. If you don’t have discipline, you’ll never stick to anything.
- You are the only person capable of changing your life; no one can do that for you. The easiest way to change yourself is to change the things you do each day.
- The biggest threat to your progression in life isn’t something or someone around you; it’s you.
- The key to a successful life lies not in what you know, but in what you do with what you know.
- Failure is just a stepping stone on the road to success.
- You can’t change the past, but you can still fuck up your future if you repeat it.
- Success is not about what you accomplish, it’s about who you become in the process.
- Your comfort zone is a barren place. Nothing ever grows there.
- Anything in life worth achieving will not be easy to get. If it were, everyone would get what they wanted. Most people give up on their goals when things become too difficult. Don’t be like most people.
What is the significance of China’s currency, the yuan, plummeting to a near 15-year low?
I have been hearing that China is doing dollar-yuan swaps with countries like Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, etc.
These countries are having difficulty getting dollars to pay back loans because the US Fed has set higher interest rates, drawing US dollars from overseas back to the US. China wants to cut back on its dollar holdings. So China is offering these countries’ central banks US dollars to pay back the dollar-denominated loans. These countries would pay off their dollar loans, and then pay back China in Chinese yuan.
My guess is that in order to get rid of US treasury holdings, China is offering favorable yuan exchange rates to these borrowing countries.
Locking in low exchange rates also helps China because it promotes Chinese exports because they appear to be cheap. Since China is the manufacturing nation to the world, it is very important that Chinese exports be as competitive as possible, especially while the west is trying to set up China-free supply chains outside China.
China has seen the results of the terrible mistake the US made by de-industrializing and letting the dollar rise in parity against other countries’ currencies, hurting US exports, and is likely determined to avoid that mistake.
ASML Not Needed World Shocked as China Makes Domestic 28nm DUV Lithography Machines!
Nothing can stand in China’s way when it comes to technology like it or not!..
Best Macaroni and Cheese
This is the tastiest, easiest and fastest macaroni and cheese you will ever eat. DO not skimp on the Colby cheese. Use as much as you can afford.
Ingredients
- Macaroni (as much as needed)
- Colby cheese (lots)
Instructions
- While the macaroni is cooking in salted water, dice the Colby cheese up rather small.
- As soon as the macaroni is cooked; drain it well. Keep it, covered, in the same pot in which it was cooked.
- Add the diced Colby cheese and stir it in. Cover immediately and let it sit for about five minutes so that the cheese melts.
Pilots Report SWARM-LIKE Objects In Military Zones Amid UAP MOMENT
The Hill is a USA Washington Insider publication. Never the less, watch the intro and discard the rest if you want. Point is that swarm drones are fling in and around American bases inside of the USA.
China urges U.S. to stop utilizing South China Sea issue to sow discord
Source: Xinhua
Editor: huaxia
2023-08-07 22:56:30
BEIJING, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) — China on Monday urged the United States to stop utilizing the South China Sea issue to sow confusion and discord, respect China’s territorial sovereignty, maritime rights and interests in the South China Sea, and respect regional countries’ efforts to uphold peace and stability in this region.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson made the remarks in response to a U.S. State Department statement criticizing China for obstructing Philippine vessels that sought to deliver new troops and supplies to a grounded military vessel at Ren’ai Jiao and firing water cannons.
The U.S. statement says such actions are “inconsistent with international law” and “threatening regional peace and stability” and calls upon China to abide by the South China Sea arbitration award issued in 2016. The statement indicates U.S. support for “the Philippines’ lawful maritime operations” and says an armed attack on the Philippines’ Coast Guard would “invoke U.S. mutual defense commitments under the U.S.- Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.”
The State Department’s statement, in disregard of the facts, attacked China’s legitimate and lawful actions at sea aimed at safeguarding its rights and enforcing the law, and the statement also voiced support for the Philippines’ unlawful and provocative behavior, the spokesperson said.
“China firmly opposes the statement,” the spokesperson said.
For some time, the United States has been inciting and supporting the Philippines’ attempts to overhaul and reinforce its military vessel that was deliberately grounded on Ren’ai Jiao. The U.S. even sent over military aircraft and vessels to assist and support the Philippines, and repeatedly sought to threaten China by citing the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty. The U.S. has been brazenly bolstering Philippines as it infringes upon China’s sovereignty, but those moves will not succeed, the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson said Ren’ai Jiao has always been part of China’s Nansha Qundao and the historical context of the issue of Ren’ai Jiao is very clear.
In 1999, the Philippines sent a military vessel and deliberately ran it aground at Ren’ai Jiao, attempting to change the status quo of Ren’ai Jiao illegally. China immediately made serious démarches to the Philippines, demanding the removal of the vessel. The Philippines promised several times to tow it away, but has yet to act. Not only that, the Philippines sought to overhaul and reinforce the military vessel in order to permanently occupy Ren’ai Jiao, the spokesperson said.
On Aug. 5, in disregard of China’s repeated dissuasion and warning, the Philippines sent two vessels that intruded into the adjacent waters of Ren’ai Jiao and tried to deliver the construction materials for overhauling and reinforcing the grounded military vessel. Such actions violated China’s sovereignty and the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (DOC). The China Coast Guard (CCG) vessels stopped them in accordance with law and warned them off through appropriate law enforcement measures. Their maneuvers were professional, restrained and beyond reproach, the spokesperson said.
The South China Sea arbitration was a pure political drama staged in the name of the law with the U.S. pulling strings behind the scenes. The so-called award contravenes international laws, including UNCLOS, and is illegal, null and void. The U.S.’ attempt to make an issue of the illegal award will not affect China’s firm resolve to safeguard its territorial sovereignty, maritime rights and interests in accordance with the law, the spokesperson said.
Col Macgregor: War With China Is A STUPID IDEA
The (Relative) Failure of the US Elites
| Roger BoydAug 8 |
There has been much written about the failure of the US elites, with three recent thoughtful cases being that of Aurelian and Charles Hugh Smith and Harold Robertson.
While all three make excellent contributions to the discussion they make some incorrect assumptions and miss important contextual drivers.
All of them seem to assume that at some point in US history the nation was led by a highly competent leadership, rather than by a relatively weak leadership which again and again had its wars fought for it, fought relative weaklings, or had its main opponents commit fratricide while luxuriating in a vast continent full of resources far away from its main enemies.
To put it bluntly, the US elite has never really been tested against a peer competitor.
Let’s start with a little history.
From the founding of the British colonies in North America to the independence struggle the colonists relied on the British Army, and British military leadership, to do its fighting.
Only when the British army had thoroughly vanquished the French in Eastern North America could some of the colonists start dreaming of a safe independence.
The War of Independence would not have been won without the extensive support from France (money, arms, men and the containment of the British fleet), a lack of coordination between the British armies, and a Britain that was engaged in a world war with France at the time; later, the US proved incapable of subduing Canada.
In the next century, the US battled a much weaker Mexico and Spain to take vast swathes of territory, purchased the middle of the country from the much-weakened French, and ethnically cleansed the Amerindian population.
Its elite also made fortunes from Opium in a China subjugated by the European powers and Japan.
All this while its heartland was safe from threat, with vast deposits of every mineral possible – including coal, oil and then natural gas.
At the end of the century it jumped on the decline of the Spanish colonies to grab The Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam and dominate Cuba.
Also, by the end of the century it was an economic powerhouse with a thoroughly dominant capitalist bourgeoisie. It would be surprising if it hadn’t been.
Then its main competitors committed fratricide over a three-decade period. For most of World War 1 the US sat back and made huge profits from supplying the war. By the time it did enter the war, the main protagonists were absolutely exhausted, and it was at the margin that the sheer number of US troops coming to the front tilted the balance.
The actual performance of the US military was awful, committing all of the failings that the other belligerents had at the beginning of the war; with massive casualty rates the outcome.
But the Germans knew that more and more would be coming, no matter how many they killed, and the German home front was in absolute collapse.
The compulsory licensing of all German patents provided a massive scientific and technical windfall to the US in the post-war period.
For more than two years, the US sat out WW2 while again making money out of supplying the conflict. When it did enter its contribution was nowhere near what is celebrated.
Its Pacific campaign was one of limited numbers of soldiers fighting other limited numbers of Japanese for one island after another, while the vast US industry turned to war production.
The Chinese were fighting the vast majority of the Japanese army, which they had been doing since 1935.
Late in 1945, as the two nuclear bombs (developed with extensive help from foreign scientists) were being dropped on Japan, the Soviet army showed how to carry out large scale operations by utterly destroying the Japanese armies in Manchuria and Sakhalin within weeks.
They were poised to invade Japan proper, and a case can very much be made that this was the reason for the Japanese surrender not the nuclear bombs, even the US establishment journal Foreign Policy published a paper taking this position in 2013. In Europe, it was the Soviets who destroyed the Axis armies and the most probable outcome without the Normandy landings would have been Soviet dominance of the whole of Europe.
The forces landing at Normandy fought a force significantly made up of divisions resting from their mauling on the Eastern Front, while having overwhelming air and artillery superiority.
As Big Serge puts it so well, the US “recipe for victory was simple: dispense of a superior volume of sustained firepower. Or, as George Patton would have put it: ‘Shoot the bastards.’”
With the end of WW2, the US experienced its first unipolar moment, as the Axis powers and Japan were destroyed and occupied, most of the European continent, Russia and China utterly devastated and Britain utterly bankrupt.
A financial system favouring the US was set up, and the US once again stole much of German scientific ingenuity though the Operation Paperclip that provided scientists central to the development of such projects as the moon landings. The “father” of the H-bomb was also a Hungarian Jew who had fled to the US from Nazi Germany before the war.
The US was good at covert operations but failed at “shooting the bastards” in Korea and then in Vietnam.
At the same time, its industry flourished until the Europeans and Japanese recovered enough to become real competitors; after which many leading manufacturing sectors had to be rescued by subsidies and tariffs (e.g. the car and computer memory industries).
So, then the game changed to a reliance on the reserve-currency status of the US dollar, the offshoring of US manufacturing, and the movement of elite extraction from the US Empire to the home country itself.
Anyone thinking that the US military was full of brilliant leaders should consider the laughable invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 against no opposition, where nineteen US military personnel died and others were wounded as shown below (starts at 27 minutes).
Another would be the blowing up of the US barracks in Beirut also in 1983, which killed 241 US military personnel.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had much more to do with the decay of its institutions and the demolition-style policies of Gorbachev than any US pressures, removed the US strategic competitor; handing over Eastern Europe on a platter.
Together with the opening of China and the end of the Indian License Raj, it provided the second US unipolar moment. An overwhelming win without a fight.
It is from this period, with the extensive neoliberal policies carried out by the Clinton administrations, that we can point to pure hubris among the US elite.
In addition, these massive new market opportunities covered up the failings of the US elite in building a strong domestic base to support their global empire.
At the same time, two underlying trends were eating away at that base. After WW2, the US state and the US foundations (Ford, Rockefeller etc.) worked hard at supporting the development of a non-communist critical theory, which became a non-materialist post-modernist critical theory.
This really took off in the academy in the 1970s, and then from the 1990s in gender theory (e.g. Judith Butler). This theory “world war” has been documented by Gabriel Rockhill, here and here, and while removing class as a central precept of critical theory (as planned) also spread throughout academy and undermined the modernist assumptions upon which it was based.
At the same time, US universities and corporations utilized H1B visas to keep the remuneration for scientists down through an influx of foreign nationals (and also IT offshoring), reducing any incentives for US students to enter scientific programs. Instead, programs in law, business and the social sciences in general rapidly grew and the escalating cost of a university education produced a customer (as against student) mentality in the student body which was supported by a growing administrative bureaucracy.
Once again, the US benefitted from the output of foreign schools and universities to bolster their research and development activities. At the same time, the native population was continuously denuded of these skills as they focused on the social sciences, the professions, and business.
This was the time of the fad of the “Virtual Corporation”, where everything except finance, sales & marketing, design, and legal could be outsourced, and extra profits could be made through financial subsidiaries (e.g. G.E. Capital). Business groups could be treated like a portfolio of stocks, with laggards pruned brutally, “cash cows” milked, and money thrown at growth areas, and continuous mergers and acquisitions done to hone the portfolio.
No need for experts in production, IT, logistics etc., that could all be outsourced and offshored. Generic CEOs could run any corporation, epitomized by Jack Welch and the many GE spin-off executives that helped break corporations such as GE and Boeing.
Welch’s massive expansion of GE’s finance arm (GE Capital) proved utterly disastrous during the GFC. “Greed Is Good” was the motif of the US executive, epitomized by the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, as he pumped his stock options with stock buybacks and paid himself exorbitant amounts.
Wealth extraction not wealth creation, handing over industrial leadership to a China who was much more focused on national renewal and far more proficient at playing the hand they had.
The US sleep-walked through two disastrous occupations (both after campaigns against extremely weak opponents) which swallowed vast amounts of money and resulted in the growth of Iranian power in the case of Iraq, and an unceremonious exit in the case of Afghanistan.
Something started to change near the end of the first decade of the new century, as the US economy crashed in the GFC, Russia started to re-establish its sovereignty and strength (and won the proxy war against Georgia), and China emerged as a massive industrialized nation.
Since then the US economy has been on the life support of QE and near-zero interest rates, and the US elites have been struggling to deal with the new geopolitical reality.
After the success of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that focused on class struggle, the “woke” thermostat was turned up to boiling by the elite-controlled media, the elite-controlled state and the elite-controlled corporations; the classic divide and conquer tactics that had always worked in the past, this time on the basis of “identity”.
But this let rip the toxic post-materialist, post-modernist brew throughout a society where so many were damaged by nearly four decades of neoliberalism, stripped of their identities as well-paid competent workers with futures, or even stripped of the hope of that for the younger generations.
Desperately competing with any weapons available for the few remaining “good” jobs.
The wealthy may have been always “not like you”, but as Charles Hugh-Smith notes, decades of financialized asset inflation have separated the asset holders by a yawning chasm from the not so lucky.
With interest rates now rising back to more normal pre-2000 levels and the US dollar slowly losing its reserve status, much of that wealth may prove to be a mirage while the massive debts racked up against that wealth will not.
It’s the courtier class that stand to lose the most from the end of the financial bubble, and even billionaires can lose everything when they are leveraged. With the bubble will go many, many of the “bullshit” courtier jobs that currently pay so much as they extract rather than create wealth.
Robertson points to a change from a “systemic selection for competence” to a “systemic selection for the ideologically compliant” through diversity politics.
He misses the fact that the political-economic base of the US elite has changed, and that they see many of the “competent” jobs as no longer necessary in a world centered around financial and symbol manipulation.
They believe that “competence” can be simply outsourced and anyway they will be long gone before any consequences are felt.
When he goes on about “diversity” hiring, he makes invisible the legions of mediocre rich kids and kids of faculty that get into the elite schools every year.
He also makes invisible the Nigerian-Americans who are one of the richest and most successful ethnic groups in the US, and the Asians-Americans disgustingly discriminated against in US universities, and the Indian-Americans who are also extremely successful.
The issue is not “diversity” hiring, it is a general selection bias for the skills required in a “virtual” corporation where specific knowledge is seen as old fashioned, a trend that has been going on for decades.
Aurelien focuses on the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), but does not understand that these are just the courtiers to the really powerful – the owners. Of course, the owners won’t want competent financial crimes prosecutors when so much wealth today is based upon financial crimes.
A Professor of Human Rights is very useful in creating excuses to invade or regime change another country so that its wealth and ongoing income can be extracted by the US ownership class.
The real “diversity” problem stems from the post-Occupy Wall Street identity politics mayhem that has now invaded so many institutions.
Deep down the US elite has now ruled nearly effortlessly for so long it cannot comprehend of a real competitor, as Russia will be soon be “rubble” and China will “inevitably” collapse.
So, no problem with letting loose an extremely disruptive identity politics as long as the ownership class keep owning. The owners are slowly waking up to the fact that Russia and China (and Iran) are not following the script, and therefore we may see a rapid reversal of the worst aspects of identity politics.
The departments whose name is an anagram for DIE may be doing just that over the next few years. As Aurelien has noted though, there are now legions of PMCs who have happily failed upwards as their failures have served the owners (messed up foreign nations can be very profitable for example), but they are not so useful when the homeland needs to be rebuilt and allies strengthened.
They are the troops of the last war of the US on easy street, but now the street has gotten rough and a much tougher breed are required. But they are generally not available, and any that are may want to go back to their own nations given the increasing racism and state-aggression toward Asians.
The US has been lying about the size of its economy in greater and greater ways since at least the 1990s. Costs (financial system fees) are counted as value added when they are pure rentier taxes, inflation is manipulated downwards, and rent imputed on owner-occupied houses, among many other tricks.
US official GDP also counts value added that is produced in other nations as created in the US, when US corporations such as Apple can capture that for themselves through the control of global value chains backed up by intellectual property, financial and legal control, and state help in the destruction of competitors when required (i.e. the Huawei handset business).
What happens when that disappears, and those nations get to keep that value added? What will be left to fund the US military and stability at home? I tend to agree with Simplicius that actual US GDP, and therefore GDP per capita, is about half of what the US states it is.
If Australia is called the “lucky country”, perhaps the US should be called the “really lucky country”. Its elites have never had to deal with a real competitive threat and have never had to fight a direct war against a peer competitor. The “best army in the world” is really only as good as its ability to overwhelm the opposition with “shoot them” power.
It won’t have that against the Russians, the Chinese and even the Iranians.
Without it, it will be seen to be a shadow of its well-groomed reputation. At home, the US really only had a period of economic dominance in the post-WW2 period which quickly faded as other countries rebuilt their economies.
The US elite may have become significantly worse in the past few decades, but they were never the best.
It’s easy to appear to be brilliant when you have a gun in your pocket and your opponent has a plastic fork.
The US elite have never needed to be brilliant because they have been so lucky; that time is now gone.
The Russian, Chinese and Iranian elites have certainly not been lucky, and therefore their competence level is far, far higher.
There has been much written about the failure of the US elites, with three recent thoughtful cases being that of Aurelian and Charles Hugh Smith and Harold Robertson. While all three make excellent contributions to the discussion they make some incorrect assumptions and miss important contextual drivers.
All of them seem to assume that at some point in US history the nation was led by a highly competent leadership, rather than by a relatively weak leadership which again and again had its wars fought for it, fought relative weaklings, or had its main opponents commit fratricide while luxuriating in a vast continent full of resources far away from its main enemies.
To put it bluntly, the US elite has never really been tested against a peer competitor. Let’s start with a little history.
From the founding of the British colonies in North America to the independence struggle the colonists relied on the British Army, and British military leadership, to do its fighting. Only when the British army had thoroughly vanquished the French in Eastern North America could some of the colonists start dreaming of a safe independence.
The War of Independence would not have been won without the extensive support from France (money, arms, men and the containment of the British fleet), a lack of coordination between the British armies, and a Britain that was engaged in a world war with France at the time; later, the US proved incapable of subduing Canada.
In the next century, the US battled a much weaker Mexico and Spain to take vast swathes of territory, purchased the middle of the country from the much-weakened French, and ethnically cleansed the Amerindian population.
Its elite also made fortunes from Opium in a China subjugated by the European powers and Japan.
All this while its heartland was safe from threat, with vast deposits of every mineral possible – including coal, oil and then natural gas.
At the end of the century it jumped on the decline of the Spanish colonies to grab The Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam and dominate Cuba.
Also, by the end of the century it was an economic powerhouse with a thoroughly dominant capitalist bourgeoisie. It would be surprising if it hadn’t been.
Then its main competitors committed fratricide over a three-decade period. For most of World War 1 the US sat back and made huge profits from supplying the war. By the time it did enter the war, the main protagonists were absolutely exhausted, and it was at the margin that the sheer number of US troops coming to the front tilted the balance.
The actual performance of the US military was awful, committing all of the failings that the other belligerents had at the beginning of the war; with massive casualty rates the outcome.
But the Germans knew that more and more would be coming, no matter how many they killed, and the German home front was in absolute collapse.
The compulsory licensing of all German patents provided a massive scientific and technical windfall to the US in the post-war period.
For more than two years, the US sat out WW2 while again making money out of supplying the conflict. When it did enter its contribution was nowhere near what is celebrated. Its Pacific campaign was one of limited numbers of soldiers fighting other limited numbers of Japanese for one island after another, while the vast US industry turned to war production.
The Chinese were fighting the vast majority of the Japanese army, which they had been doing since 1935. Late in 1945, as the two nuclear bombs (developed with extensive help from foreign scientists) were being dropped on Japan, the Soviet army showed how to carry out large scale operations by utterly destroying the Japanese armies in Manchuria and Sakhalin within weeks.
They were poised to invade Japan proper, and a case can very much be made that this was the reason for the Japanese surrender not the nuclear bombs, even the US establishment journal Foreign Policy published a paper taking this position in 2013. In Europe, it was the Soviets who destroyed the Axis armies and the most probable outcome without the Normandy landings would have been Soviet dominance of the whole of Europe.
The forces landing at Normandy fought a force significantly made up of divisions resting from their mauling on the Eastern Front, while having overwhelming air and artillery superiority.
As Big Serge puts it so well, the US “recipe for victory was simple: dispense of a superior volume of sustained firepower. Or, as George Patton would have put it: ‘Shoot the bastards.’”
With the end of WW2, the US experienced its first unipolar moment, as the Axis powers and Japan were destroyed and occupied, most of the European continent, Russia and China utterly devastated and Britain utterly bankrupt.
A financial system favouring the US was set up, and the US once again stole much of German scientific ingenuity though the Operation Paperclip that provided scientists central to the development of such projects as the moon landings. The “father” of the H-bomb was also a Hungarian Jew who had fled to the US from Nazi Germany before the war. The US was good at covert operations but failed at “shooting the bastards” in Korea and then in Vietnam.
At the same time, its industry flourished until the Europeans and Japanese recovered enough to become real competitors; after which many leading manufacturing sectors had to be rescued by subsidies and tariffs (e.g. the car and computer memory industries).
So, then the game changed to a reliance on the reserve-currency status of the US dollar, the offshoring of US manufacturing, and the movement of elite extraction from the US Empire to the home country itself.
Anyone thinking that the US military was full of brilliant leaders should consider the laughable invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983 against no opposition, where nineteen US military personnel died and others were wounded as shown below (starts at 27 minutes). Another would be the blowing up of the US barracks in Beirut also in 1983, which killed 241 US military personnel.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, which had much more to do with the decay of its institutions and the demolition-style policies of Gorbachev than any US pressures, removed the US strategic competitor; handing over Eastern Europe on a platter. Together with the opening of China and the end of the Indian License Raj, it provided the second US unipolar moment. An overwhelming win without a fight. It is from this period, with the extensive neoliberal policies carried out by the Clinton administrations, that we can point to pure hubris among the US elite. In addition, these massive new market opportunities covered up the failings of the US elite in building a strong domestic base to support their global empire.
At the same time, two underlying trends were eating away at that base. After WW2, the US state and the US foundations (Ford, Rockefeller etc.) worked hard at supporting the development of a non-communist critical theory, which became a non-materialist post-modernist critical theory.
This really took off in the academy in the 1970s, and then from the 1990s in gender theory (e.g. Judith Butler). This theory “world war” has been documented by Gabriel Rockhill, here and here, and while removing class as a central precept of critical theory (as planned) also spread throughout academy and undermined the modernist assumptions upon which it was based.
At the same time, US universities and corporations utilized H1B visas to keep the remuneration for scientists down through an influx of foreign nationals (and also IT offshoring), reducing any incentives for US students to enter scientific programs. Instead, programs in law, business and the social sciences in general rapidly grew and the escalating cost of a university education produced a customer (as against student) mentality in the student body which was supported by a growing administrative bureaucracy.
Once again, the US benefitted from the output of foreign schools and universities to bolster their research and development activities. At the same time, the native population was continuously denuded of these skills as they focused on the social sciences, the professions, and business.
This was the time of the fad of the “Virtual Corporation”, where everything except finance, sales & marketing, design, and legal could be outsourced, and extra profits could be made through financial subsidiaries (e.g. G.E. Capital). Business groups could be treated like a portfolio of stocks, with laggards pruned brutally, “cash cows” milked, and money thrown at growth areas, and continuous mergers and acquisitions done to hone the portfolio.
No need for experts in production, IT, logistics etc., that could all be outsourced and offshored. Generic CEOs could run any corporation, epitomized by Jack Welch and the many GE spin-off executives that helped break corporations such as GE and Boeing.
Welch’s massive expansion of GE’s finance arm (GE Capital) proved utterly disastrous during the GFC. “Greed Is Good” was the motif of the US executive, epitomized by the corporate raider played by Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street, as he pumped his stock options with stock buybacks and paid himself exorbitant amounts.
Wealth extraction not wealth creation, handing over industrial leadership to a China who was much more focused on national renewal and far more proficient at playing the hand they had.
The US sleep-walked through two disastrous occupations (both after campaigns against extremely weak opponents) which swallowed vast amounts of money and resulted in the growth of Iranian power in the case of Iraq, and an unceremonious exit in the case of Afghanistan.
Something started to change near the end of the first decade of the new century, as the US economy crashed in the GFC, Russia started to re-establish its sovereignty and strength (and won the proxy war against Georgia), and China emerged as a massive industrialized nation.
Since then the US economy has been on the life support of QE and near-zero interest rates, and the US elites have been struggling to deal with the new geopolitical reality.
After the success of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that focused on class struggle, the “woke” thermostat was turned up to boiling by the elite-controlled media, the elite-controlled state and the elite-controlled corporations; the classic divide and conquer tactics that had always worked in the past, this time on the basis of “identity”.
But this let rip the toxic post-materialist, post-modernist brew throughout a society where so many were damaged by nearly four decades of neoliberalism, stripped of their identities as well-paid competent workers with futures, or even stripped of the hope of that for the younger generations.
Desperately competing with any weapons available for the few remaining “good” jobs.
The wealthy may have been always “not like you”, but as Charles Hugh-Smith notes, decades of financialized asset inflation have separated the asset holders by a yawning chasm from the not so lucky.
With interest rates now rising back to more normal pre-2000 levels and the US dollar slowly losing its reserve status, much of that wealth may prove to be a mirage while the massive debts racked up against that wealth will not.
It’s the courtier class that stand to lose the most from the end of the financial bubble, and even billionaires can lose everything when they are leveraged. With the bubble will go many, many of the “bullshit” courtier jobs that currently pay so much as they extract rather than create wealth.
Robertson points to a change from a “systemic selection for competence” to a “systemic selection for the ideologically compliant” through diversity politics.
He misses the fact that the political-economic base of the US elite has changed, and that they see many of the “competent” jobs as no longer necessary in a world centered around financial and symbol manipulation.
They believe that “competence” can be simply outsourced and anyway they will be long gone before any consequences are felt.
When he goes on about “diversity” hiring, he makes invisible the legions of mediocre rich kids and kids of faculty that get into the elite schools every year.
He also makes invisible the Nigerian-Americans who are one of the richest and most successful ethnic groups in the US, and the Asians-Americans disgustingly discriminated against in US universities, and the Indian-Americans who are also extremely successful.
The issue is not “diversity” hiring, it is a general selection bias for the skills required in a “virtual” corporation where specific knowledge is seen as old fashioned, a trend that has been going on for decades.
Aurelien focuses on the Professional Managerial Class (PMC), but does not understand that these are just the courtiers to the really powerful – the owners. Of course, the owners won’t want competent financial crimes prosecutors when so much wealth today is based upon financial crimes.
A Professor of Human Rights is very useful in creating excuses to invade or regime change another country so that its wealth and ongoing income can be extracted by the US ownership class.
The real “diversity” problem stems from the post-Occupy Wall Street identity politics mayhem that has now invaded so many institutions.
Deep down the US elite has now ruled nearly effortlessly for so long it cannot comprehend of a real competitor, as Russia will be soon be “rubble” and China will “inevitably” collapse.
So, no problem with letting loose an extremely disruptive identity politics as long as the ownership class keep owning. The owners are slowly waking up to the fact that Russia and China (and Iran) are not following the script, and therefore we may see a rapid reversal of the worst aspects of identity politics.
The departments whose name is an anagram for DIE may be doing just that over the next few years. As Aurelien has noted though, there are now legions of PMCs who have happily failed upwards as their failures have served the owners (messed up foreign nations can be very profitable for example), but they are not so useful when the homeland needs to be rebuilt and allies strengthened.
They are the troops of the last war of the US on easy street, but now the street has gotten rough and a much tougher breed are required. But they are generally not available, and any that are may want to go back to their own nations given the increasing racism and state-aggression toward Asians.
The US has been lying about the size of its economy in greater and greater ways since at least the 1990s. Costs (financial system fees) are counted as value added when they are pure rentier taxes, inflation is manipulated downwards, and rent imputed on owner-occupied houses, among many other tricks.
US official GDP also counts value added that is produced in other nations as created in the US, when US corporations such as Apple can capture that for themselves through the control of global value chains backed up by intellectual property, financial and legal control, and state help in the destruction of competitors when required (i.e. the Huawei handset business).
What happens when that disappears, and those nations get to keep that value added? What will be left to fund the US military and stability at home? I tend to agree with Simplicius that actual US GDP, and therefore GDP per capita, is about half of what the US states it is.
If Australia is called the “lucky country”, perhaps the US should be called the “really lucky country”. Its elites have never had to deal with a real competitive threat and have never had to fight a direct war against a peer competitor. The “best army in the world” is really only as good as its ability to overwhelm the opposition with “shoot them” power.
It won’t have that against the Russians, the Chinese and even the Iranians.
Without it, it will be seen to be a shadow of its well-groomed reputation. At home, the US really only had a period of economic dominance in the post-WW2 period which quickly faded as other countries rebuilt their economies.
The US elite may have become significantly worse in the past few decades, but they were never the best.
It’s easy to appear to be brilliant when you have a gun in your pocket and your opponent has a plastic fork.
The US elite have never needed to be brilliant because they have been so lucky; that time is now gone.
The Russian, Chinese and Iranian elites have certainly not been lucky, and therefore their competence level is far, far higher.
The Astonishing REINCARNATION CASE of Patrick Christenson
Children usually remember a past life experience when they’re between the ages of two and seven, then as they get older, the memories begin to fade or the children lose interest where they become less interested in the past and are more involved in the present. About 70% of reincarnation stories involve violent or unnatural deaths and most of the lives that the children described took place about 500 km away from their current location.
Why does China have nearly all the rare earth elements that are needed for modern electronics manufacturing?
It doesn’t
China has two huge advantages :—
- Cost
- Scale
China has so much manufacturing that China is able to extract rare earths from their Industrial waste by products from the Nuclear or Aluminium or Steel Industry at a fraction of the cost that it would take say Canada or US to extract the same from a fully developed Industrial procedure
China can produce Gallium at roughly 6% the cost that it would take the Canada to produce the same
That is 17 times cheaper
Likewise China extracts so much rare earth metals and has such a huge scale of processing and refining that it can deliver finished rare earths at 25% the price that it would take the nearest competitor to achieve
That’s China’s advantage
Not having Rare Earths
Many Nations have as much or more Rare Earth Raw Materials or Ores than China does
Using these technologies, China now has unique technology in making Rare Earth components that no other nation has due to PROHIBITIVE COST
Example we imported Rare Earth filament sheets for 260,000 Yuan in ISRO from China
Had this been processed and made in US and imported from there at 0% tariff the cost would have been 1.76 Million Yuan
So commercially China has a huge cost advantage that even 40% tariffs cannot stop or mitigate
And they also have the cost effective technologies that no one else has or even tried to develop knowing that the cost would be simply prohibitive
Deadly Chinese Fighter Jets Which Can Fly Before 2030
What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?
I am 67 years old. These are among the best things I have ever learned:
- You spend your first 20 years worrying what people think about you. You spend your next 20 years swearing that you don’t care what people think about you. You spend the next 20 years realizing that they aren’t thinking about you. A liberation!
- Any day on this side of the dirt is a good day. Some people didn’t make the cut last night. I was hit by a speeding taxi as I was walking to a bus stop. I spent a month in rehab with two broken legs, a brain injury, multiple back injuries and other fractures. The night before I was hit, a young, married couple was also hit. They both died. Practice gratitude.
- A woman I know spends most of her time thinking about how much she hates her thighs. She can give you a detailed report on what is wrong with them. She forgets all the places those legs have taken her, all the miles they have walked for her. It doesn’t occur to her that when she gets up in the middle of the night to pee, those very thighs walk her to the toilet. Spend more time appreciating what you’ve got— a heart that beats, a way to pick up your cup of coffee, the eyes that see that cup and know what color it is. Blessings abound.
- There are two kinds of people in this world – those who believe there is enough to go around, and those who don’t. Here is an example: If Margo is leaning up against the car kissing her boyfriend, and I think how nice that must feel, do I try to steal Margo’s boyfriend or do I go out and get my own boyfriend? I go out and get myself a boyfriend. I don’t need to steal Margo’s. I know that there is enough to go around.
- An old Native American woman was asked why she was always so happy. She said that she has two wolves in her heart and they are both hungry— one wolf is angry and evil, the other wolf is filled with love, and that’s the only one she feeds.
This Is Why We Ran Away to China!
BOTS HAVE TAKEN OVER NEARLY HALF THE INTERNET
Published: August 10, 2023 |
Article HERE
Encountering an online robot, or bot, is as frequent as discovering a pair of shoes in your closet.
This occurrence is intrinsic to the internet, yet users have reached a crucial juncture: A growing multitude of individuals are losing their capacity to differentiate between bots and humans.
This is a circumstance that developers have cautioned about for an extended period, and its rationale is easily comprehensible.
A recent study has determined that bot-generated content now constitutes 47 percent of all internet traffic, marking an uptick of over 5 percent from 2021 to 2022. Concurrently, human activity on the internet has recently hit its lowest point in an eight-year span.
Combined with advancements in AI-driven human-like interactions, nearly one-third of internet users are no longer able to ascertain if they’re engaging with a human being.
Senior US China Diplomats Meet to Decide How Biden Should Apologize!
WTF? Yes. I want to know more.
What are some unknown facts about Vladimir Putin?
The owner of the Patriots has five of his Super Bowl rings, and Putin has the sixth one, and you won’t believe how he got it. In 2005, the owner of the American Football team the Patriots, Robert Kraft was in Russia visiting a friend Sandy Weill who was president of the Citi Group. They were attending a press conference with heads of state in Russia, and at the time Kraft’s team the Patriots, had just beaten the Eagles at Super Bowl 39, and he was showing off the Super Bowl Ring he had just received. That’s when someone had the bright Idea to show Putin.
Putin admired the ring, before he put it on his finger. He loved how it looked on his hand and joked about how he could kill someone with a ring like this and proceeded to put the ring in his pocket.
Kraft held out his hand expecting to get his ring back, but three body guards surrounded Putin and he left. To avoid international conflict the White House urged Kraft to say that the ring was a gift. Although, he didn’t want to give away the 4.9 carat diamond ring, he goes on to say
“Its a great story I get to tell my friends and I can’t believe my ring is in the Kremlin.”
Officials from the Kremlin responded and said if Kraft wants his ring back so badly we will send him one like it as a Gift from Putin.
Putin isn’t a Fool – The Mother of all Miscalculations | Dmitry Orlov
Man oh man, this is a really excellent interview. Wow.
Beef Turnovers (Empanadas)
You can use the discos or make your own turnover pastry. I’ve done both, and they’re equally as good.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
- 1/2 pound ground beef
- 1/2 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
- 1/4 cup tomato sauce
- 6 stuffed green olives, finely chopped
- 2 tablespoons sofrito
- 1 packet sazon with coriander and annato
- 1 teaspoon minced garlic
- 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
- Ground black pepper, to taste
- 1 (14 ounce) package Goya discos (yellow or white), thawed*
- Vegetable oil, for frying
Instructions
- Heat oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add ground beef and cook until browned, breaking up meat with a wooden spoon, about 10 minutes.
- Add onions and cook until soft, about 5 minutes more.
- Stir in tomato sauce, olives, sofrito, garlic, oregano and black pepper. Lower heat to medium-low and simmer until mixture thickens, about 15 minutes.
- On a lightly floured work surface, using a rolling pin, roll out discos until 1/2-inch larger in diameter. Spoon about 1 tablespoon meat mixture into middle, fold in half to form a half moon; moisten edges with water and pinch to seal closed, or seal with a fork.
- Fill a deep saucepan with oil to a depth of 2 1/2 inches. Heat oil over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking (350 degrees F on deep-fry thermometer).
- Cook turnovers in batches until crisp and golden brown, flipping once, 4 – 6 minutes.
- Transfer to paper towels to drain.
Notes
* Flattened dough for turnover pastries all rolled out and ready to fill – in the Mexican refrigerated section. Make sure you buy the larger ones.
As far as sazon, you can really use whichever flavor you like. Goya now makes a salt-free version of their seasoning. Or, if you don’t want to use sazon for any reason, just use a good seasoning salt, to taste.
Life in China vs. Life in the USA
Can the USA compete on renewable power and electricity generation if the USA is at 15% and China has just passed 50%?
The lack of renewable energy in the US is not a lack of ability, but a lack of will.
The US is a post-industrial nation. Sure, a few holdouts of heavy manufacturing exist, but for the most part there aren’t any high-density factory regions in the US. Nations at this point in the industrial chain are most likely to wean off hydrocarbons, but the US is an anomaly. It puts more and more eggs in the hydrocarbon basket.
The reason is there are too many entrenched interests. People want to take the path of least resistance, and the US is no exception.
Moving to solar, wind, hydro, or nuclear requires the US to get its entrenched hydrocarbon industries to keep up with the times. But of course they don’t want to. It’s far easier to just sit on your behind, open your mouth, and have everything spoon-fed to you. And because the US refuses to actually have a government with power, the result can be seen even by a blind man – power flowed from the public to the private. When you give Exxon-Mobil power, do you really think you’re going to be able to move away from hydrocarbons?
—
And that’s how things are. The US will continue with its “but it’s not economic!” excuses, even though anybody who’s studied a cursory amount of history knows no nation ever developed by doing things that are profitable. Want to know why the Qing Dynasty couldn’t industrialize? Just look at the US today.
This is SUPER GOOD.
Former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter reacts to the Biden’s failed diplomacy with China and points to the ongoing threat of US interference in Taiwan as a major point of tension between the two countries.
What is the dirtiest fine print you’ve seen in a contract?
Some years ago I was involved in a traffic accident. The insurance carrier for the car which hit me tried to ignore the whole thing, until I filed suit against the owner of the car.
Insurance settled, and then a few weeks later, I got a call from a secretary at a law office which was working for the insurance company.
She asked me if I was satisfied with the outcome, and I replied that I was.
She then told me that to close out the file, they would like me to sign a document stating that the case was closed. I said, “sure, no problem”.
She sent me the documents, which I read carefully.
Then I threw them in the trash.
In the fine print, the documents stated that I accept full responsibility for the accident, and that I would repay the insurance company plus reimburse insurance company for all the other payments they’d made for the accident, AND I’d pay this attorney’s fees!
All this was very thoroughly hidden in lots of pages of gibberish.
I have learned to NEVER sign anything that I haven’t studied in detail.
[2] Another dispute in the SCS – here’s what’s really happening
As typical for the United States, it is trying to ignite a war (where people die) so that it can obtain “opportunity” to loot, steal and gain control.
In this case, fools (prodded, imbecilic fools, greedy, or drug addicted) are typing to claim this “island” as their own territory. As Philippine citizens, they hope that the resultant Geo-political disputes ignite a conflict where they will be the personal victors. They do not expect to be killed in the process, but rather either [1] forcefully removed, or [2] allowed to stay and claim ownership of the island. Thus making each one multi-millionaires as they lobby China for “rights”.
Stoking this issue is the United States.
What is that all about?
Come one, a group of young men, took a derelict ship and rammed it into a Chinese island, beaching it. And now the United States is using this situation to ignite a war between China and the Philippines.
Complicating this matter is the fact that this ancient pile of rust and shit used to be a commissioned military vessel.
And the United States WANTS to claim that it is still in active duty. Thus, any Chinese activity concerning it will be a “military conflict”.
Like I have said; the USA is “chomping at the bit for a war”.
This is how The Guardian reports on this matter…
An international row is growing between the Philippines, the US and China over a rusting ship that has been turned into a crucial military outpost in the South China Sea.
Tensions have intensified under the current Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, with the country increasingly accusing China of aggression and pursuing closer ties with the US, with which it has a mutual defence treaty.
On Saturday, China provoked condemnation from the Philippines, the US, the EU, France, Japan and Australia after its coastguard directed water cannon at a Philippine coastguard vessel. The Philippines was trying to deliver food, water, fuel and other supplies to its troops stationed in the grounded ship, the BRP Sierra Madre, on Second Thomas Shoal in the Spratly Islands.
On Tuesday, the US defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, underlined the “ironclad nature of the US-Philippines alliance” in a call with his counterpart, the Philippine secretary of national defence, Gilberto Teodoro Jr.
Austin reaffirmed that the treaty between the two countries – under which the US would defend the Philippines if its public vessels and forces were subjected to an armed attack – extended to those of the coastguard in the South China Sea.
And there you have it.
A pre-packaged provocation is hot, ripe and ready to ignite.
…
I say DO IT. Sink that festering bucket of rust.
Show the world that the USA is a toothless, loud-mouth bully.
China bans Mongolia from using Chinese ports to export rare earth minerals to US
Uh oh! It’s playing “hard ball”.
How did the Jews have such a formidable military so quickly just a couple years after arriving in the Middle East they have to have had help?
I am not sure you are familiar with this device. It is an automatic soda siphon, known as the Sipholux. It was very popular in Israel in the 1950’s and 1960’s. It uses disposable co2 canisters which are simply broken open in a way that injects the co2 into the water.
How it is related to your question? Okay so this is how:
When the British left Palestine in 1948, they left behind them lots of military equipment, from military clothes and tents, to army vehicles and even some fighter airplanes. Not wanting to leave this equipment in combat ready state, the tried to cripple it in all kind of ways, and then sold it as scrap.
The young Israeli army was putting in much effort and creativity into putting as much as possible of this equipment to use, in any way they could, which sometimes brought to pretty amazing stories.
One of them is about 20 Auster Autocrat airplanes that the British left behind them. The airplanes were disassembled and with most of their fabric made body cover and major parts of their engines and other mechanisms missing. The young Israeli air force aquired them, hoping that maybe they can build 2 or 3 operational airplanes from all the pieces. The work was done secretly in the former underground Templar wine storing chamber in Sarona. Eventually the Israeli engineers got 18 airplanes to go back to fly. An operation that took enormous amount of innovation and resourcefulness.
In one of the airplanes, the mechanism that starts the engine by rotating the plane’s propeller by hand, was missing. There was no way to rebuild it, but one especially brilliant engineer figured out that all they have to do is to compress the air in the pistons to make the engine start. So he made a device that allowed to “fire” compressed air into the pistons from bullet shell like canisters. The same canisters were used later in the Sipholux.
So how did Israel had such a formidable army right ftom the start? It did not. It had a bunch of extremely brave and creative people, and more importantly, there was something it didn’t have: any other choice.
[3] Niger CLOSES AIRSPACE Amid Invasion Threat
American military power… European Energy… and the future of BRICS+ is “on the line”…
Many Chinese economists, including Chinese scholars, acknowledge that China’s economy is getting worse and worse as of August 2023. Why do the Chinese on Quora insist that China’s economy doesn’t have any problems?
The 2023 growth rate of several indicators such as exports and industrial profits has slowed down, and economic activity has weakened. Looking at the world, geopolitical tensions are intensifying, global inflation is running high, and the central banks of the United States and Europe continue to tighten monetary policies, …, etc. The International Monetary Fund predicts that the global economic growth rate will hover around 3% in the next five years, which is at a low level in nearly 30 years. In May 2023, due to factors such as the rapid increase in the base of the same period last year, the growth rate of the exports from China turned from positive to negative year-on-year, and downward pressure on external demand emerged.
The industrial upgrading and industrial chain integration in China have been absolutely fruitful. Our world today is reshaping the industrial chain, redundant production, and capacity backup. What can expand aggregate demand in history is actually related to technological progress. The expansion of demand for new energy vehicles is brought about by technological progress. New energy vehicles are indeed easier to drive and smarter than petrol ICE cars.
In an unsafe anti-globalization world, whether it is for security, for the possibility of war, for market expansion, or for long-term prosperity, technological progress is required. In a globalized world, there may be more. The demand in the anti-globalization world may be more autonomy, and the development of technology may also be linked to security. Logically, China must persist in long-term transformation, but the key is how to avoid all the short-term major risks before reaching long-term success.
Inflation is too low because China is still actively destocking. China is still very motivated to leverage technological progress. The end of the active destocking in the manufacturing industry, the natural recovery of the service industry and the slow recovery of the consumption scene can still be counted on. The employment pressure of 10 million college students every year is always there, and the number of workers required for industrial upgrading has decreased. In the future, the development of the service industry must be required to absorb employment.
Actually, China’s economy in 2023 is not too bad.
Needless to say, China had always been getting worse and worse since 1949 according to the foreign media.
China has been predicted to collapse since May 20, 1988, when the high-tech industries in China have started to be developed.
China focused on exponential economic growth potential through ideas and how to add and export value out of automobile ideas. China succeeded to graduate in creating economic value out of a domestic flow of knowledge and ideas.
Industrial upgrading and technological progress are definitely the road that China must take in the modernization, but this road is definitely not smooth. How to deal with bumps is something that the market and the government need to think about and set a model for. The government has to formulate monetary policy based on the long-term economic growth trend line and favor industrial policy and credit policy for high-tech industries. It is estimated that China’s monetary policy, fiscal policy and credit policy will be the basis for many years to come. Monetary policy also plays a role in preventing financial turmoil.
Markets may still be too pessimistic about the economy in China. China’s economy is in the stage of development from quantitative change to qualitative change. People should not only focus on changes in quantity and speed, but also on qualitative changes. China’s economy continues to transform and upgrade in response to pressure. Although the current market demand is insufficient and the internal driving force needs to be strengthened, these pressures and challenges will not change the long-term positive trend of China’s economy.
Some college students and older low-skilled workers have difficulty finding employment, and some industries and enterprises face a shortage of high-skilled and compound innovative talents. Vigorously developing advanced manufacturing clusters and national strategic emerging industry clusters, promoting the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and the cultivation and growth of emerging industries will effectively enhance the role of economic growth in driving employment.
From a rational perspective, a lower level of inflation leaves more room for macro policies to stabilize growth, employment, and prices. The decline in prices at this stage is staged and temporary, and its impact should not be exaggerated. Deflation mainly refers to the continuous negative growth of prices, the money supply also has a downward trend, and is usually accompanied by economic recession.
The overall supply and demand of the economy in China is basically balanced. The monetary conditions are reasonable and moderate. The expectations of residents are stable. There is no basis for long-term deflation or inflation.
China’s real estate industry will not pose systemic risks, but there is indeed an imbalance between supply and demand at present, and structural reforms must be carried out in the long run. Preventing and defusing risks is an eternal theme in the financial industry.
Only by coordinating development and security can people ensure the stability and long-term development of China’s economy.
What’s been the most mind-blowing example of incompetence ever displayed by one of your coworkers?
Originally Answered: What’s been the most mind blowing example of incompetence ever displayed by one of your coworkers?
Here’s a good one. Not exactly “incompetence” but just a failure to grasp a simple concept.
The warehouse I worked in stored a whole variety of weird and wonderful things that were in bags, boxes and steel drums of varying sizes. The way our warehouse worked was that the computer would allocate the oldest stock first (obviously) and then the lowest numbered location first if there was more than one pallet of a particular item. Easy enough.
Here’s a pallet of 40 by 25kg bags. 5 bags on a layer x 8 layers… That’s 1000kg… a tonne.
99% of our customers would order one or multiples of full one tonne pallets. Easy. Grab fork-lift, go to pallet, grab pallet, place on the wagon or in a line ready for loading.
Occasionally a customer would only want half a pallet, or even just a few bags which obviously meant some manual labour but it was easy enough.
We may end up with a pallet with, say, 35 bags on it instead of 40.
The next order would come along and it would be for 40 bags… a full pallet.
The first pallet that the computer wants to allocate is… yes you guessed it… that pallet with 35 on. The computer would instruct us to pick 35 bags from that location and 5 bags from the next location along which had 40 bags in it.
OMG what do we do? It’s so complicated I can’t cope! The drama! The physical exertion!
Actually all we used to do was grab the next full pallet of 40 bags, then relocate the pallet with 35 on to where the pallet with 40 used to be. Easy. No physical work required. It was quicker. The computer’s stock figures are correct and we could only do it if the batch numbers and every detail were the same. Easy-peasy.
Then one day the foreman, Mike, spotted Terry and I doing what we called a “swapsie”.
He’d ambled over for a chat about last night’s football because his beloved Wolves FC had won a game.
Mike – Hi lads. Good result last night for the old gold and black eh.
Me – Yes very good Mike. You’ll be as good as the mighty Albion one day.
Mike – Pah!
Terry appeared out the aisle on his fork-lift with a full pallet.
Mike – What order is this?
Terry – It’s a swapsie for Megachem.
Mike – A swapsie? What’s that?
Me – They want a full pallet of 40 bags but the computer allocates 35 from one pallet and 5 bags off the next one. We do a swapsie as we call it.
Terry – Yeah we do them all the time.
Mike – I don’t like the sound of that.
Me – The sound of what Mike?
Mike – You guys swapping stock all over the place. You should pick stock from where it’s allocated, not just to make your life easier.
Terry – The way we do it means just two movements with the fork-lift instead of manually moving bags by hand. It’s easier and quicker.
Mike – What is the “swapsie” bit then? Sounds like you’ve swapped some stock around to me. Come on lads, I’m not thick.
Me – We take a full pallet of 40. Then move the pallet of 35 to where the 40 used to be. That’s the swapsie bit. The system shows that zero is left where the 35 used to be and 35 where the 40 used to be. Go and look and you’ll see that’s what is left.
Mike went to look and examined Terry’s paperwork. He scratched his head a few times. If only Terry hadn’t used the word “swapsie” we wouldn’t even be in this pickle, but it was a word we used so often it was normal.
Mike – I don’t like this at all lads. Something is wrong here.
Paul the supervisor appeared at this point.
Paul – Come on lads. Hurry up with that Megachem order for fuck’s sake.
Mike – Ah Paul. I don’t like what’s been going on here. This “swapsie” nonsense that John and Terry have been telling me about sounds like a swizz to me. Fiddling the stock figures is not acceptable.
Paul knew exactly what a swapsie was.
Paul – A swapsie is perfectly fine Mike. We’ve been doing them for years.
Mike didn’t want to know and wouldn’t listen to Paul’s explanation. He said we had to stop doing swapsies. Paul tried in vain to explain the mathematics of it. We even put the pallets back where they were before we started and ran through the whole swapsie process again, but he simply couldn’t grasp what went on at all.
He banned us from doing swapsies and pinned a notice to the board to that effect.
We all continued to do swapsies and totally ignored him.
== added on 13/7/2021 ==
I’ve added this image and further explanation to illustrate better what we did. I don’t think I was crystal clear enough.
Obviously in a real warehouse there are hundreds of locations and many different products but hopefully this will help eliminate any confusion.
The computer system would instruct us to pick 40 bags of Batch A for a customer. It would pick the lowest numbered locations first. In this example it has instructed us to pick 5 bags from location 2 and 35 bags from location 3 which has 40 bags in it. Doing a “swapsie” meant that we picked the full pallet (40 bags) from location 3 then relocated the 5 bags from location 2 to location 3.
Therefore we picked 40 bags for the customer, there was nothing left in location 2, and 5 bags left in location 3 which is exactly what the computer system would show.
We would and could only do this operation if every detail regarding the product was identical. We wouldn’t throw a few bags of Batch B into the mix for example.
Therefore no physical work was required, only fork lift movements. We didn’t do this because we were lazy. We did it because it’s quicker, easier and less stress on your back if you were doing many of these movements in a day
[4] Niger DEPLOYS WAGNER Soldiers For MILITARY INTERVENTION Prep
Good move. These are brave African leaders and this is a noble cause.
What is the most epic way you have seen a coworker resign or quit?
Myself, not a coworker. In 1997 I was an assistant manager at a Taco Bell. The gerneral manager spent his days oogling the teen girls and not doing his job. On my day off, at around 8pm he called me said he had something come up and needed to leave, and can I cover him? Sure, I like money, I’ll work. I get there to find out he had already left, and dismissed another employee for the shift as well. That left me, a great guy named John, and a teen cashier who couldn’t stay long. We closed at 10pm. There were already mounds of unwashed dishes, filthy floors, stuff to put away ect ect… at 950 pm, a high school football team came in, about 15 of them. They ordered, ate in, trashed the lobby, left around 1030 pm. My cashier had to leave, he was young, there were work rules ect… So now its just me and John, with EASILY 4 to 5 hours more work ahead of us cleaning and getting that place ready for the next day. Our shift was supposed to be over at 11pm. This wasnt the first time it had happened. I said screw it. Told John we were leaving, didn’t clean anything, and left it all for the manager that screwed me over to fix the next day. They were supposed to open at 6am, they opened closer to lunch time. That was with 4 staff it took them that long to clean up and prepare.
The Slime People (1963) PYSCHOTRONIC
Full movie. Perfect for a lazy Saturday Summer afternoon. Get some iced tea, and light snacks…
Quirky and fun, fun, fun!
The look on the West’s hegemonic faces are priceless right now. They thought their reign would be eternal. They thought they could get the whole world to kowtow to them and their disgusting order.
But look at them now. Thousands of years of egregious control and exploitation ends here and now
Where I live (suburban midwest), a large bottle of house brand ketchup costs about $1.30. We recently traveled to a somewhat more rural area a few hours away. I didn’t look at ketchup (I should have), but I couldn’t believe how much more expensive everything was. A lot of things were twice what they were at home. I have always thought generally of urban areas being most expensive, followed by suburban, then rural, but have things possibly reversed? Transportation/fuel costs? Just a theory, I have no idea. If those prices come here, we won’t be able to afford to eat anymore.
Whatever, it might be localized for now. But I do see this trend expanding. And it is truly disturbing.
Have a small garden. Learn to can and preserve food. Have chickens and grow eggs. Learn to fish. Do not wait until it is too late.
I never imagined this day would come.