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.

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Yep the South was invested in agriculture, to this day a labor-intensive sector, largely due to advantages in climate and geography which were basically fixed. So how again would slavery have spontaneously ended in the South again? It’s a question - please answer it.

Agriculture still has not eliminated manual labor, son.

Marijuana 1 is Cortana’s cooler younger sister.

“Good” and “bad” aren’t very useful here.

A friend who does not engage in any way is simply not a friend. They don’t become an enemy or whatever: they just drift away until they are simply a person you know.

To be a friend means to engage. It doesn’t have to be texting, though that is now a dominant communication medium and not some fringe thing anymore that people can just wave away as a modern fad.

You can engage in person. You can engage by talking on the phone. You can engage by playing games together. But to not engage at all… it makes me wonder what you think friendship is.

I am “like 50” and I no longer think of friends as “people who are on my side” or “people who know the real me” because all of that can be true even if you haven’t talked in 5 years. If that’s all you want, for someone on earth to be on your side, theoretically, then you’re good.

But that’s not friendship: you have to engage. If you don’t, you will find that you miss out in growth and change in their lives, and after a very short while, they don’t “know the real you” anymore and you don’t know the real them.

Life is to be lived. It’s a thing you do.

“Free trade” means letting everyone do what they’re best at and then exchange the goods they produce. This is so that everybody is focused on what works best in their country, everything is done as well and as cheaply as possible. However this makes no guarantee about any one country’s ability, at the end of the day, to stand alone without dependencies on others for vital goods. In fact if anything it works against that.

I don’t know why Trump talks about globalism as some Democrat thing. It’s his own party that has been driving for free trade since forever.

Finally we can begin to chip away at BlackBerry’s dominance.

How exactly would slavery have died out “naturally” in a union made up entirely of slave states who’d just fought and won a war to defend it? I get your point about letting the south stand in its own so it could fall, but you are too casually sweeping aside the issue of slavery. “Yeah yeah - that would pass naturally - now let me tell you my MAIN point….”

Personally I think this resurgence is a highly specific cultural moment that is coming as religion dies off and the white population of America teeters toward minority status.

Since the US birth rate began to decline (natural phenomenon that happens to all developed nations) its strong immigration has held it up. But that has had an accumulating demographic effect. White people lost their official hegemony a long time ago but now they are facing the prospect of losing their simple majority and it scares the living shit out of them. It’s not just because privilege sees equality as oppression. It’s also because they know that they have treated others incredibly badly, and deserve to be castigated should they lose power.

That’s why this Trump admin is so ugly. It’s the death spasm of a dying culture. That’s why this Trump admin is hollow at the center: it’s backed by a group that has no future and can only harken back to the past. This is why this Trump admin is openly undemocratic: they no longer have the numbers to play the game.

This too shall pass, but at great cost. The USA is the greatest political prize there has ever been and it won’t be let go of lightly.