CarmineCatboy2

every oblast, a juan guaidó

My impression is that competition for its own sake has become culturally endemic in the region and I was hoping to challenge that notion. Maybe, I reasoned, there are enough openings in East Asian universities to give everyone a chance, but crucially not enough to make that chance a reasonable one. Therefore if enrollment numbers increased even further, you'd still have competition for the top university spots but the competition wouldn't be so fierce.

However, I suppose it doesn't matter if everyone who wants to become engineers and doctors actually can when the competition is downstream from those guaranteed high status, high paying jobs.

To what extent is this caused by lack of access to higher education? Or, rather, would this problem be alleviated by more openings or are things so competitive that nobody cares to be the 2nd best student in the 2nd best med school in the country?

We saw, what, 15 percent of the country protesting? Of course the vast majority of it is peaceful. You have basically the entirety of Greece up in arms and most of them lack a molotov arm, so to speak. Even then they need to repeat the same instance of protestor violence over and over again to maintain the illusion that these people are at the margins of society.

the solution is to privatize each municipal office so that they can sue as businesses

The gist of it is that printing the world currency means your economy becomes uniquely capable of buying foreign assets as well as foreign consumer goods. Meaning that if the RMB became the new dollar China would deindustrialize the same way the US did. China also has capital controls which serve to cushion the impact of global financial crises. They'd have to dismantle all that.

Yeah, it's just marketing. You can tell it by how they don't talk about ukrainian titanium, which everyone knows about and instead wax vaguely about rare earths. I'm no industry insider, but from what I understand rare earths aren't actually that rare. Mining and refining them is moreso about technological capacity. China's rare earths supply comes from iron mining, which they do as part of their huge steel industry.

I mean, Israel has ties with virtually all great powers. They cooperate with China on miltech and surveillance. They cooperate with Russia on diplomacy. And they are the real 51st state. Not too long ago we had news of Israel lobbying the US to help Russia keep/retake bases in Syria to counterbalance HTS/Turkey, while also making public overtures towards the SDF. Israel will and does deal with everybody, including those arabs they aren't genociding like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi and so on.

The real problem is that it is not even a strategy. Import taxes are an useful and strategic measure that you can take. Just not in a blanket fashion or by themselves. Let's say you want to start hiring americans into blue collar jobs to make cars or whatever. You may or may not want to raise import taxes over cars brought in from México or China. What you probably don't wanna do is raise import taxes over everything that comes from México or China. Or better yet Canada. China/México can probably offer capital goods (machinery, etc) that bolster your competitiveness. Canada is your resource colony, that's where you get input goods and extra energy from.

Hence all the contradiction in Trump's speeches. He says that tariffs can substitute income taxes while at the same time saying they'll reindustrialize the country. That can't happen by default. If your tax base is tariffs then you're still importing everything you need, just paying for government via import taxes. If you reindustrialize then you don't have to import nearly as much and therefore needs to levy taxes some place else. The former is exactly what Trump's government wants to achieve. The most regressive taxation system imaginable, the sort which you only see in countries like Brazil.

Brazil used to do developmentist economics, even during the pro US dictatorship era. There was protectionism as part of a broader industrial policy. The 1982 onwards financing crisis triggered by the Volcker Shock made that untenable. So Brazil ended up devaluing its currency and retooling the economy away from import substitution towards being export driven. Most things tied to industrial policy was dismantled - except for a handful of things such as the regressive heavily consumption based tax system, the high import taxes and agricultural subsidies. Trump's tech-landlords seem to think even agricultural subsidies are superfluous. All you need to do is levy export taxes instead.

How did liberals forget the rapidly escalating shelling of Ukrainian cities by the Ukrainian government

We never heard about it.

I haven't seen a single news article about palestinian hostages being released.

i did not play 13, all i know about it is from internet discourse. so i am unconvinced that was a bug

the weird thing is that the power of music worked the first time around