scarabic

One thing that’s absolutely exhausting me is the constant overreactions to every stupid turn of phrase that dribbles out of Trump’s mouth. He says to a television audience “please go vote, just this one time” and the left FREAK OUT because he’s ENDING ELECTIONS. He says the White House interpretation of the law will prevail over that of other federal agencies and the left FREAK OUT because he’s MAKING UP THE LAWS NOW. He uses a trite phrase to aggrandize himself and people FREAK OUT because WE’RE A NAZI MONARCHY NOW.

This shit isn’t helping. Trump’s diarrhea of the mouth needs to be heard for what it is: the babblings of a deranged fantasist.

Taiwan absolutely found a niche. Its manufacturing capability is what makes it a strategic ally for the US.

Singapore’s niche is more like several niches from financial services to precision manufacturing and medical research. But it all runs on their skilled workforce. Not “politics.”

A niche will be based on whatever you have. If you have nothing but cheap labor, that’s not great, but it is something. To sell that labor to wealthy foreign corporations isn’t just getting dominated by them, it’s how China has raised millions out of poverty.

Being poor and undeveloped is a shitty hand to try to play, but that doesn’t change the game. Use what you have. Find what you’re best at.

Well, Taiwan and Singapore are able to be competitive in the world market, despite being very small and lacking major resource advantages or big militaries. They do this by developing very sophisticated expertise and pressing the few very particular advantages they have.

I may have to yield this point to you as a demonstrated authority on not understanding plasma.

Other countries starting to set up trade relationships not based on the dollar - now that’s a threat to the stilts propping up the American economy, for sure. Tariffs as well though I think many don’t believe they are truly going to materialize as threatened. When you say “gestures at everything,” what actually are the main things that you think should be sinking the economy as a whole? DOGE bullshit, federal agency heads resigning, DEI programs being cancelled, betraying Gaza and Ukraine… it’s all bad but most of it does not seem an immediate existential economic threat. What am I missing?

The stock market is a speculative vehicle whereby predominantly rich people get richer. Generally pointing at everything should indicate a lot of rich people getting richer, so what’s the issue? It’s only if you take the valuation of the stock market as some kind of core health measurement of the economy that it stops making sense. Because it’s not that.

Very hot flames can contain enough ions / free electrons to be considered a plasma but a wood campfire the likes of which cavemen built, which is what we are discussing here, do not achieve such temperatures. If cavemen wielded acetylene torches then they might have more experience with plasma.

If you were thinking something simple like “fire is plasma” that is reductive, and the cases where flame is plasma are not the everyday kind. Hence, when I said “a campfire is not plasma” I was being pretty specific. Your reply that ”fire is a low temperature plasma,” as an unqualified blanket statement, is wrong. Go read on it. It’s interesting.

I’m afraid you do not recall correctly. One of the features of American slavery is that it was population self-sustaining. You can see #4 on this UNESCO page. I like the way they put it: American slavery created a people where there was none before.

Could you try doing the same with the 90%? if life’s essentials are so easily paid for I am wondering what you think the rest is going to?

Are you saying that 10% of an economy is vital goods and the other 90% is not? Not that I have any numbers on this but 10% seems low to me.

We also did not build turbines then.

Also, a campfire is not plasma, so you probably shouldn’t be building any turbines either.