naturalgasbad

That would be horrendous because the people with social media access and intent are overwhelmingly urbanites from big cities...

And, frankly, the big Chinese cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, the Greater Bay Area) make the big American cities look pitiful. They deserve accolades for their urban planning in the same way that top European cities like Amsterdam, Vienna, Barcelona, Copenhagen do, but have the dynamism of a large city like New York City, London, or Paris. Of note is that China only achieved this at a population scale that boggles the mind (the Greater Bay Area has a population of almost 90 million and is almost triple the size of the New York City metropolitan area),

The smaller cities (Jilin, Lanzhou, Luoyang, Qiqihar) with populations of less than 5 million people aren't quite there yet, but most are improving rapidly.

Some Chinese cities are in systemic decline (e.g. Qiqihar) due to internal migration to the big cities, but this hasn't really had the same effects on the city as similar migrations have had in the US (e.g. Detroit). These cities are more likely to be represented in various critiques of government investment, but as a policy China's governments seeks to reduce income disparity and so overinvest into these struggling cities.

More social media communication is bad for the US (because it'll sow internal discontent) and bad for China (because it'll push the idea of "Chinese superiority" over "dirty American cities" and stagnate progress). China has a lot of progress left to make (as can be clearly seen by the urbanization rate, GDP numbers, rural/urban inequality, and lack of global cultural influence), but in terms of urban planning and urban quality of life it compares extremely favourably to North America.

Wait this is for China and not Baltimore

ASML is really not having a good time. For the better part of the 21st century they had an iron grip on the lithography market. Their hold on the market was so strong that they literally had a monopoly on machines for bleeding-edge nodes.

In comes trade restrictions, giving a country with the largest population of STEM graduates in the world a massive incentive to develop their own machines... In an effort to achieve a short-term gain, ASML's grip on the market has been loosened and their monopoly looks on track to being dismantled.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say that this was antitrust monopoly busting.

The unimaginable horror of cheap energy could collapse the global oil trade. Which country produces the most oil, again?

Seems like OP is critiquing "democracy" for its ability to protect "freedoms."

Fighting and terrorism follow different rulebooks in general.

A lot of people are probably extremely nervous right now. The fact that this story hit national news means that the repercussions will be magnified.

The solar farms will be torn down, people will be fined, government officials will be prosecuted, and the solar company (based in Hong Kong) will be banned from business in mainland China either directly or through a sea of paperwork that just so happens to now be required.

That's why the CIA is doing so well in China, right?

What a terrible waste of farmland. There's so many good places to build solar...

Russia is supposedly so good at intelligence that they can manipulate the elections of their greatest geopolitical rival.

Maybe, just maybe, we should be considering the impacts of increased natural gas consumption on climate change? Although direct CO2 emissions from burning are about half that of coal, natural gas (i.e., methane) is a GHG that's 80x more potent than CO2 over 20 years and about 30x more potent over 100 years.

Meanwhile, a significant proportion of natural gas is lost during transmission due to leakage... Figures, then, that the symptoms of climate change seem to be escalating just as natural gas is being used to replace coal.

Burning natural gas does have an important benefit: it burns much cleaner, which reduces particulate emissions.

ISIS isn't afraid of checks notes Iran, Russia, or Pakistan, but Israel is the one that terrifies them?

ISIS isn't exactly an organization with a robust top-down structure. In case you forgot, that was the whole point of the war in Syria.

Violence does not make an Islamic extremist. I haven't seen any of the telltale indicators of a radicalized Islamic extremist in the videos, but maybe I missed it?

Their extraction route was through Ukraine to Afghanistan. This is rather publicly acknowledged.

It's a video. The video deserves to be evaluated on it's own merits (or lack thereof).

The "evidence" picked up by Western news agencies doesn't really hold water. I spent some effort debunking it in another comment: these are some really unradicalized radical Islamic extremists.

These are the least radicalized radical Islamic terrorists in living memory.

They didn't seek to become martyrs, but instead ran away (with a well-planned extraction plan, as far as we can tell) instead of maximizing casualties
They hid their faces instead of proudly declaring their martyrdom
No screaming of Allah, no mention of Allah, no "God is great", nothing
Video shows the terrorists doing Shahada with their left index finger (which goes against the teachings of Muhammad)

‘Abdullah b. Zubair narrated on the authority of his father that when the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) sat for supplication, i. e. tashahhud (blessing and supplication), he placed his right hand on his right thigh and his left hand on his left thigh, and pointed with his forefinger, and placed his thumb on his (milddle) finger, and covered his knee with the palm of his left hand..

In fact, the controversy surrounding the issue AFAIK is relating to when the finger should be raised and whether you should be allowed to move the finger during the prayer, not which hand (which has been established).

The wildest detail is ISIS' track record.

The largest attacks committed by ISIS recently (that aren't in Africa/Afghanistan, where ISIS is actively operating) have been: Pakistan, Iran, Russia.

Not exactly the US' friends. Meanwhile, Israel, which is literally committing a genocide against a Muslim population and desecrating the third holiest site in Islam, remains almost untouched. In fact, ISIS apologized when they accidentally attacked Israel in the Golan Heights.

The attackers are supposedly Tajik. USD5418 is at least 2 years of work there.

A home-grown coalition of 11 perpetrators, working in concert, with access to weapons and explosives, and who were paid by an unknown benefactor?

Frankly, the most ideologically inconsistent part of this attack is that the attackers ran away instead of dying and being martyred. That's not in line with ISIS and much more in line with self-radicalized individuals such as in the Boston Marathon bombings.