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1·10 hours agoThat’s… debatable. Unless you’re holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth, nobody is really going to complain when you feed a valuable commodity to the secondary market at a discount.
The real pain the US has felt comes from the crimps in the Supply Chain. Yemen shutting the Suez Canal has done incalculable harm to US trade. If we saw similar pressure in Panama and Singapore?
Even beyond that, climate change is going to hit North America extra hard over the next few years. Probably the meanest thing a foreign country could do right now is whisper in the ears of every Great Lakes resident “They’re coming for your water”.
5·11 hours agoI think what the antivaxers are incapable of understanding and expressing is that they are not actually questioning the science, they are questioning the health care industry and the systems meant to keep them honest.
A lot of the opposition to vaccination reads like fad diets and self-help trends from 20 or 30 years ago. You can prevent autism by fumbles around playing Motzart to your baby in utero? Meditating during Yoga? Eating chocolate? Pick your Oprah-sponsored poison.
But, like, why are we seeing a fixation on a proven medical treatment and not some generic “don’t let your kids eat jelly beans” or “do headstands to get the blood flowing to the brain” hookum?
I think that’s where you get to people really running afoul of an increasingly dysfunctional health media ecosystem. One whose reputation is bloated with empty promises about The Perfect Cancer / Alzheimer’s Cure or Living Forever With Blood Transfusions. And then it’s colliding with an actual system that just seems to throw enormous bills at you for pain killers and palliative care.
On the one end, there’s supposed to be a recipe for perfect health if you have enough money. On the other, I can get a flu shot and still get the flu? How unfair.
I’ve found the best way to deal with a fear of needles is to scream slurs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study#Public_trust
There’s been a systematic undermining of public trust in health and safety instructions going on for decades.
Some of this distrust is earned as with Tuskegee, the bungled Anthrax vaccine, the Reagan Era response to the AIDS epidemic, scandals with weight loss drugs like Fen-phen and Redux, Oxycodone, etc.
Some of it is purely manufactured, with the CIA-sponsored agitation against the Chinese COVID vaccine being a major font of modern day anti-vax Truther Lore.
But to no-sell skepticism as just “you’re a little baby who is scared of needles” really under plays the shift in attitude nationally. We used to be a country that whole heartedly embraced a preventative for small pox, polio, and influenza. Now we’re more terrified of kids getting the shot that gives you bad grades in school than getting measels.
The obsession with a Navy that can fight three different wars on opposite sides of the planet is outdated and the product of paranoid, reactionary, imperialist foreign policy.
Our biggest trading partners are increasingly our biggest geopolitical rivals. At some point, we either need to reconcile these contradictions or surrender intentional trade as a possibility into the next century
1·16 hours agoSuccess
Why China’s property crash must be kept top secret
Cheap Housing… Bad?
Peaceful?
This analysis contends that China’s aggressive actions represent a deliberate violation of international maritime law and the South China Sea Code of Conduct.
A South China Sea code of conduct has been under discussion for over two decades.
You broke a set of rules we haven’t even defined yet!
Not doing terrible things to their citizens?
China signs police patrol agreements with nations
In 2016, an Italian police official told NPR that joint policing would “lead to a wider international cooperation, exchange of information and sharing resources to combat the criminal and terrorist groups that afflict our countries.”
Those monsters.
Slammed
slammed
If the NSA fires all it’s Transgender staffers, we’ll be lucky if the agency knows what Linux is by 2030
Roman Pagans were famously awful for women’s rights. And the New Atheist movement is full of sex pests on both sides of the Atlantic.
Toxic Masculinity exists independently of religious doctrine
Unfortunately, we saw during the health care debate that they are not. You regularly had polls showing majority public discontent with the status quo, only to see every reform policy’s approval collapse after sustained negative media and marketing.
People will tell you they hate the system. But any attempted reform is shot down as “too extreme” and “bad for the economy”
we elected the billionaire party
Hasn’t been anything resembling a free and fair election in this country since at least Bush v Gore.
You’re fooling yourself if you think “we got what we voted for” when Congress has approval ratings in the single digits
Achieving levels of “out of touch” heretofore considered unimaginable
Seems like I touched a nerve
I’ve heard “unrecoverable” for decades. I don’t see unsolvable problems, I see intractable people.
Protestors burned alive in their APC by the nefarious CCP Street Clothes division
the world of international relations established after the second world war crashed to a halt.
I would argue COVID did more damage to international trade, travel, and diplomacy than any '25 US foreign policy.
The pandemic era quarantines/economic contractions and their reactionary backlash polarized nations along the axis of preserving life versus growing the economy.
Modern Trumpism lives downstream of that crisis.
She deserves it, but how long until a Trump appointee lets her out anyway.
So demand is off it’s peak, but they’re still building about half a Cleveland’s worth of homes this year.
I wouldn’t consider that an economy which has forgotten how to build housing.
Whose borders?
Does murdering your pregnant girlfriend make you a dissident?