Korean proxy war is the loss.jpg of modern conflicts cmv.

Fucking embarrassing tbh. We’re going to decimate the global north because somebody said no to our ethnostate pal.

So here’s my question: what happens when Israel finishes swallowing Palestine and there’s no more land left to steal? What then? Are they going to start shit with Jordan or Egypt to steal their land next? At what point does the US let them know that we’re not going to let them drag us into WW3 just because they need to steal some land.

It’s a regional dialect, that’s what he calls genocide.

When I’m in a worst takes competition and my opponents are Lindsey Graham and Dmitrey Medvedev

A really good point I heard is: this was likely a state actor attack, so how many others just like this are out there, undiscovered?

I’ve met this bird. It only prioritizes issues as urgent; when interacted with, it’ll say “yes, this is part of MVP”

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I can read some Cyrillic, fuck knows what it means. What I can see is:

ЛИВЬ…(Possibly a я here, hard to tell)

ЧЕВУРАТОР

Which roughly transliterates to

“Leave(ya?) Chyevooraitor”

That’s probably not it exactly, I read Cyrillic better than I pronounce it. Russian has its roots in Greek, so there’s sometimes some similarities to English/romantic language where Greek roots have been bastardized in, and there’s also places where they’ve borrowed our words. I’m going to take a very, very wild guess and say that the top word is something to the effect of “liberator”.

It is 1990 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2001 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2003 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

It is 2024 and the media serves the interest of the state in promoting war.

Don’t make me tap the sign:

Authoritarians owe their allegiances first to hegemony, and second to murder.

That’s how Israeli state officials can vibe with actual fucking Nazis and still turn around and say that you’re a Nazi if you want them to stop murdering non-combatants in Palestine. If they see it as helping to enforce hegemony, to create civilization out of the barrel of a gun, they can (temporarily) set aside the murder they plan to do to each other.

tl;dr: prices =/= costs, price is cost + what the market will bear.

I have an anarchocapitalist friend who is convinced to his core that prices are driven by costs, which any economist will tell you is not the case. He believes, therefore, that lowering wages, lowering taxes, and lowering costs on businesses in a truly fair and free market will make things more affordable. And maybe he’d be right if we had a spherical cow kind of economy, with perfect competition and elastic demand for everything, but that’s not we have, and most sane economists will agree that that’s not the way things are.

In reality, any MBA can tell you that prices are independent of costs insofar as you just have to be bringing in more money than is going out. The role of a corporation is to make money (to make a return on investment), and this has been especially true since the Friedman doctrine (tl;dr: the sole moral obligation of a company is to its shareholders) has been the dominant school of business thought. So if your costs are a dime and you can sell for a dime and a penny, then you sell for a dime and a penny. If you costs are a dime and you can sell for a dollar, then you sell for a dollar. If your costs go down to a penny and you can still sell just the same for a dollar, you don’t lower your prices nine cents. The only force that drives down prices is competition, because in a spherical cow economy, if your costs are fifty cents, you can’t sell too much above that or your competitors will undercut you and murder your profits, so you have to be very careful about price increases and constantly seek new means of cutting costs. In reality, there’s very little competition and demand is highly inelastic for a lot of important things like housing and healthcare, so it’s pretty easy for prices to just go up until so many people get priced out that the price increases yield a negative return. I think we’re already there, and have been for a while, but not to worry, we came up with a solution: debt and subscriptions/payment plans.

Few people can swing $40-80,000 for a college education, you might have to settle for lower prices to get the volume you need, but if you say “not to worry, we’ll just have you pay us back later,” you can suddenly charge a lot more and still get a high volume. If you charged $100,000 up front for lifesaving care, people would just die because nobody has that laying around, but if you just make it debt, well, hey, nbd, charge whatever the fuck you want and worry about it later. You can’t sell a $60,000 truck, or a $1500 phone, but you can sell a $600/mo truck (apparently, as much as that amazes me) or $35/mo phone. We’re seeing this same phenomenon at work with the latest push towardss 40-year mortgages amid continuously insane housing prices.

So, to answer your question, it’s going to keep getting worse as long as production is highly centralized, as it is continuing to be, because investors need their profits. Who’s got odds that we’ll see an egg subscription plan before the year end?

P.S. this is why tax breaks for businesses never translate into more jobs, higher wages, and/or lower cost goods and services. There’s no obligation whatever to pass those savings on to the customer or re-invest them into jobs or technology, so they just turn into stock buybacks or dividends (read: gimmes for the investors). That’s why stock buybacks got so popular after the Trump tax cuts.

Tbf, long term goals are a good thing. National planning having a lifespan of 4-8 years is fucking insane, and probably contributes non-trivial to federal expenditures and waste. We’d be better off if we could follow long term goals. But you’re right, though, it was performative planning by and large.

So they drove the 40 km armor column to just outside of Kiev on a, what, sight seeing tour? I expect the plan was to try and make the Zelensky govt shit their breeches and run so that they could install a friendly government and put a bow on the operation.

I have some doubts here.

Ameribro here. According to Wikipedia, BILD is a German right-wing tabloid. So, this is a little like somebody citing Breitbart, maybe? And then there’s other points here that seem like they may have been deliberately taken out of context.

The Ukrainians don’t want war with Russia. Only insane people or people who don’t know war want war. Zelensky (and many Ukrainians) didn’t believe Russia was actually going to do it, and the Biden administration was desperately trying to convince him that all of our intel said it was happening right up until it actually happened.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/21/why-ukrainians-dont-believe-in-war-with-russia-distrust-west

But Russia didn’t just um… What do they say? De-nazify? Donetsk and Luhansk. They tried to push all the way to Kiev, they tried to take the whole damn country. It’s not like Ukraine invaded Russia, it’s the other way around. Is it possible that the Ukrainian state is being coerced? Could be, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. All of the Ukrainians I’ve met from well before this conflict started seemed pretty adamant about having a distinct cultural and national identity from Russia. I find it hard to imagine that they’d be happy about joining the new Russian imperial project any more than Iraq was (our Mexico would be) about joining the US imperial project.

“We’re a democracy”

“So that means you’ll stand up for the universal rights of mankind, right?”

“You’ll stand up for people’s rights, right?”