Tankiedesantski [he/him]

Dedollarization and constant US imperial overreach are the two factors which are most likely to break US imperialism in the mid to long term.

American economic dominance is propped up by the ubiquity of the dollar in general trade as well as the Petro dollar. In general trade, more and more countries are pivoting to trading in their own currencies or Euros and Yuan and Rubles because of the destruction of confidence in the US dollar as a neutral reserve currency due to recent sanctions against Russia. In terms of the Petro dollar, the trend of decarbonization means that oil will be a less critical commodity over time and even now we see the likes of Saudi Arabia agreeing to sell oil to China in Yuan. Without US dollar dominance, America will not be able to print as many dollars to service its debts, which will lead to either inflation or debt default.

America, like the UK and France before it, doesn’t have the ability to fight all of its repressed imperial subjects at once. The cracks are starting to show at the US giving up against the Houthis in Yemen. The US and EU has also pegged its military prestige to the war in Ukraine, which is also starting to turn. Not only are they taking a reputational hit with every picture of a burnt out Abrams or Leopard, but lesser US allies are also starting to see that full US support doesn’t guarantee victory. Even within US policy circles there is some acknowledgement that defeat in Ukrain could lead to some sort of Suez moment for the US and NATO.

Biden is Hamas.

we are forced to live in a society.

The PRC chip industry doesn’t need to develop exponentially. TSMC is not developing exponentially either.

Monopoly pricing is not just broken when w 1-for-1 peer competitor at the same price appears. Monopoly pricing can be broken by a less performant alternative at a cheaper price that is suitable for the vast majority of applications. You can see this in a number of industries where incumbent players are being displaced by new Chinese suppliers who don’t quite make cutting edge stuff but can sell at a fraction of the price.

Hell, you can see it now with older chips at bigger physical nodes where China is now a significant portion of global production.

Will the PRC chip industry face many challenges? Of course it will. However, the PRC’s track record of going from nothing to 5nm in a few years cannot be ignored by TSMC.

TSMC knows full well that its monopoly (or oligopoly, depending what you think of Samsung I suppose) is on a timer with the development of the PRC’s chip industry.

The rules based order actually just means “we rule with an iron fist”

Damn, Mars rovers suffer from incremental SUV bloat too?

“Anyway, liberal democracy is the best because I get to choose the bad faith actor who will fuck me over.”

They are parroting Russian propaganda.

As a LLM (Leninist Language Model), I am programmed to parrot Russian propaganda at all times from the basement of the FSB Building in Lubyanka Square.

Beep Bloop.

I’m not sure if you’re calling Putin a stupid man that is easily manipulated or incompetent. No politician ever in their lives did anything in good faith, Putin included. You must be very naive to think that.

Very cool that the argument boils down to “of course we were going to trick you, you are stupid for being tricked.” I guess the lesson the world should learn is to never trust a Euroid and to respond to European peace overtures with uncompromising force.

No doubt. Russia placed too much faith in the OSCE and France and Germany approaching the process in good faith. Merkel later came out and said that the Minsk process was just a time-buying exercise so that NATO could arm Ukraine as a proxy against Russia.

Ukraine, of course, knew that it was being armed and trained and had the carrot of NATO and EU membership dangled before it. Circling back to the original point, the fact that Ukraine was being armed and trained at such a rate is good evidence that Ukraine absolutely knew what was about to happen.

Skill issue. Were I the Ukrainians I simply would have negotiated a better treaty.

forgot to ask Ukraine

After how many Minsk Agreements mediated by the OSCE would you consider Ukraine properly “asked”?

Ukraine: “I consent.”

Denmark: “I consent.”

Russia: “Was there somebody you forgot to ask?”

The myth of consentual flights of F-16s into Russian territory.

Just don’t eat like Kirby.

Author definitely isn’t mad that China mediated the Saudi-Iranian normalization while the US has been pushing for Saudi-Israeli normalization without success.

The active tense of Xi personally invading an entire sea vs the passive tense of a Palestinian hospital exploding after bombs dropped.

Anglo Charlie Kirk

That rumor is so stupid it doesn’t even begin to stack up. Paying medical bills sucks, but killing someone even unintentionally puts you at risk of jail time. Vanishingly few people are going to choose a decade or more of hard labor in jail over paying a debt.

The only thing this whole rumor proves is that people will believe the most irrational things about China as long as it makes Chinese people look bad.

Magic Carpet pointing to the first word of its name emphatically