This is a battle between the authoritarian countries and democratic countries of the world. If you can set aside the vaguely racist tankie paradigm for just five minutes and think about which countries are democracies and which are not, you might be able to understand the world a little better.

Are you claiming there’s numbers above 9? Next you’re going to tell me birds a real…

Easiest way to spot an American posing as a Canadian is to just ask what part of Canada they’re from. The only Canadian city Americans know is Toronto, so that’s what they’ll say. If they pronounce it ToronTO, they’re American. Nobody in Canada pronounces the second T in Toronto.

Unfortunately, no one can be told what a file is. You have to see it for yourself.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the file system goes.

Even more effective given that they’re probably shooting at civilian ships.

If they were announcing Starcraft 3 (and it was going to be an RTS game) I can understand there being some excitement around it even four years in advance because there’s so few RTS games being made.

But a Starcraft shooter? Meh.

Do you mean the first time they announced StarCraft Ghost or the second time?

So this is actually the third time they’ve announced a Starcraft shooter.

Well hold on, how much money did we pump into the economic system to keep it afloat? Do you remember the stimulus checks and the insane loans handed out that were forgiven? Let’s not pretend that 20% drop didn’t involve governments giving handouts to almost everyone.

Drop in the bucket compared to bailouts to banks in 2008, and the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy. Isn’t it odd how people obsess over a stimulus check to people, but don’t care at all about tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy?

I think China has taken the lead building a sustainable energy society, and I think we should emulate it worldwide.

China hasn’t done so well on this in the last few years. They’ve built a lot of coal power plants in the last few years and are currently running them at max right now to make up for a lack of oil imports. What they’re doing to reduce oil dependency has a lot of strategic rationale to it, not so much trying to save the world. They were worried about the US doing to the Strait of Malacca what Iran is currently doing to the Strait of Hormuz. So they’re just employing their Malacca contingency now. It’s basically the only reason global oil prices haven’t tripled.

China is building a lot of EVs and Solar panels not out of altruism, but because EVs have made ICE obsolete, and Solar is the cheapest form of power. Once sodium-ion batteries are mass produced there just won’t be much reason for other forms of electricity generation.

So in short, China isn’t altruistic, they just aren’t being stupid about this. I guess they don’t have massive oil companies putting their thumbs on the scale saying EVs are bad, heat pumps are bad, solar is bad.

The oil dependency is a strategic weakness. It’s a national security concern. China understands this. The oil companies understand this too, just they benefit from continued oil dependency, and they have big pockets for lobbying and running internet influence campaigns.

That was a demand side shock, where a supply side shock of 20%, hell even 10% is a different beast. From my macroeconomics understanding the economy may need to contract relative to the oil supply that has been cut off.

We know that we can reduce a lot of oil usage by just having office workers WFH. Companies around the world put into place all of the infrastructure and software needed to accomplish this, used it for a while and then… just threw it away, I guess?

Burning oil is not a luxury, it’s how everything in modern life exists and this is the inconvenient truth.

I take public transit into work once per week. HR has sent out emails saying the policy is that people have to be in the office three times per week, going onto four times per week… this week I think? Whatever, I just don’t do it. Best I can do is once per week. Anyway. when I’m riding the bus into work, there’s very few people on the bus and I see the roads filled with cars. Most of the cars I see are fairly large SUVs and there’s usually only one person in each of them.

Given the fact that we haven’t gone back to WFH, and most vehicles have only one person in them and are much larger than necessary to transport a single person, I always think to myself “well I guess gas must still be really cheap.”

I’m not saying 100% of oil consumption is a luxury, but a significant percentage of it is definitely a luxury. I take the bus into work, my co-workers could be taking that same bus too. Probably about a hundred people where I work could be 100% WFH, but they aren’t because lazy managers just want their jobs basically like a homeroom teacher.

Are you really saying that driving by yourself in an SUV instead of taking the bus isn’t a luxury?

Yeah but you gotta pay kick a percentage up to the boss. This guy got busted, so I guess he didn’t do that.

It’s more of a dry cold though!

If there wasn’t a pre-existng culture of racism and ignorance in the US, Americans wouldn’t be so susceptible to foreign influence campaigns. Sure countries like Russia, China, and Iran are at fault for manipulating Americans towards stupid and hateful politics, but Americans are predisposed towards those politics, and American tech companies have amplified the effectiveness of the firehose of falsehood strategy by targeting the falsehoods at the specific people most susceptible.

Yes a country exhibiting the properties of another country that it’s influenced by is completely silly!

Apparently Project Mayhem failed to prevent Youtube from happening.

Yeah the US is getting to be as corrupt as Russia now. The EU had a trading relationship Russia for a while under similar conditions. How did that work out again?

Sure it was rough, but it wasn’t exactly the end of civilization either. And remember that wasn’t policies meant to reduce oil consumption, that was just a side effect. What would happen if we actually put a similar amount of effort specifically targeted at reducing oil consumption?

Unlike the pandemic, we wouldn’t be avoiding public transit, we wouldn’t need to close restaurants and public gatherings. And we wouldn’t need to drop it by 20% in a day. Also unemployment wouldn’t be a problem if people were working on installing heat pumps, building EVs and solar and wind generation.

Nobody starved to death because of the pandemic, civilization didn’t end. It proved that a significant percentage of oil consumption is not required to provide necessities. So we know that we are heading towards a climate change catastrophe (which could end civilization) because we don’t want to give up burning oil as a luxury.

Maybe we should consider looking at what has actually worked instead of debating between which failed system to implement? There’s more options than just laissez faire capitalism and socialism ya know.

We did WFH during the pandemic and civilization didn’t end. People commuting to work represents a significant amount of oil usage.

The Middle East does not supply 100% of the oil in the world. It’s a large chunk to be sure, but there’s some simple measures we can do to make significant reductions in oil usage. We’ve done it before during the pandemic, and those policies weren’t actually focused on reducing oil consumption still but managed to cut oil consumption by ~20%.

How many democracies have battle hardened drone tech we can partner with?

I’m not interested in helping whatever bullshit authoritarians that tankies have been scammed into thinking are cool. The democracies of the world have to work together against the authoritarians of the world.

Yeah I’d say there might be a bigger problem with leftists trying to associate things like healthcare programs with the word socialism that’s holding things back.

Kinda disconnected from reality when you’re saying we should do X because X is something failed systems have done. Might be more successful to say we should do X because X is good and it won’t make us into a failed state.

I can’t find it now but there was at least one guy in the Trump administration that bought bonds that would pay out when supreme court ruled Trump’s tariffs were illegal.