Ideological idiocy, the dismantling of anything public turning into private hands is ideologically pure for libertarian-inclined folks, no matter how strategically stupid it might be.
Neoliberal capitalism is founded on absorbing parts of libertarian thinking. The "capitalism" moniker of today used by ideologues is coupled to the meaning of it given by neoliberals.
It's been coopted, not necessarily capitalism means "everything should be private", the current flavour of capitalist ideology wants that but other versions of capitalism don't put that as a foundational Ideological tenet.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
It was inflationary but would spread out the pain over the recovery period after the crisis, the other option was to allow 100% of the pain to be felt immediately: economy shutting down, people losing their jobs, diminished household spending, less money circulating in the economy, businesses still running having fewer orders/customers, more people being laid off, all the way until the crisis passed.
Between the latter and the former I believe the former was a much smarter choice in the medium to long term.
It's incredibly naïve to think regime change supported by the people is actually the objective. It's a good thought but which is absolutely out of control of the military actions by Israel or the USA.
The main objective is to neuter the Iranian regime to diminish how threatening it could be to Israel, behead the government, destroy military targets, destroy its lifeline from the oil industry. If regime change happens because conditions worsen it's a good bonus but without forcefully removing the regime with boots on the ground it's just wishful thinking that it's the main objective.
Iraq was also under a brutal dictatorship with Saddam, it took more than a decade of ground operations to actually change it. Iran is more populous, has a much more loyal regime security force, is more ideologically driven, and has a much worse geography for any ground invasion.
When the bombing stops there will be so much destruction that the regime can point towards the USA and Israel that it will keep having loyalists behind to defend them, the IRGC will absorb the more loyal ones and grow to keep stamping out revolutionaries.
The US leadership knows they can't destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program or cause regime change. The objective seems to be mainly destroying lots of missile launchers, boats, and drone factories (which Iran demonstrated could do enough damage and use up enough interceptors to make Israel stop attacking them and sue for peace during the 12 day war). When the bombing stops and Iran restarts production, the US will go bomb them again. The US also didn't seem to expect that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, and currently has no plan as to how to get it safely back open.
In essence the war is about making Iran less of a threat to Israel no matter the cost to the US or to the rest of the West.
> South Korea and the Philippines are both "capable allies" in the sense that Israel and the UAE are, and in the sense that much of Europe is not.
Most of Europe combined (meaning the EU + the most closely aligned non-EU countries) are a much more formidable force than the UAE or Israel... You can't compare using individual European countries since in a hot scenario the vast majority of the EU countries would band together, and the movement towards military integration has already been started.
The US never had a period without flexing its muscles after the Cold War, you can't say that there were 20 years of "soft power is all you need" while keeping wars like Iraq/Afghanistan for 20 years, keeping spending more on the military than the next 10-20 countries combined.
The trouble is that the US has lost the plot, there's no value or vision to defend, it hollowed itself out with hyperfinancialisation since the 80s, the consequence is that there's no rallying inspirational point anymore. It doesn't have a "hook" to attach its vision of the future, I have no idea what's the vision of the USA for the future except for "generating wealth".
As a nation it just seems to be lost, butting heads while moving backwards.
Mm. Reminds me of something I saw a while back, can't remember enough to search for it though.
During the Cold War, there was an easy "US good, USSR bad" pattern for the world to be inspired by, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, the rest of the world no longer needs to (or even can if it wanted to) rally around a call of "hey, at least we're not the USSR".
Now we don't have the USSR in the picture, what does the USA offer? Much of the rhetoric I see from it these days is "We're not China", and true, you're not, but when we're looking in from the outside there's a loss of scale and rightly or wrongly the ICE detention camps and exporting of people to CECOT, looks much the same as Uighurs being put in Xinjiang internment camps.
Meanwhile, increasing fractions of my hardware, from injection moulded widgets to laser welding kits, from 3D printers and PV to computers and smartphones, is made by Chinese firms, so China looks increasingly like the place where stuff actually happens, and conversely the USA looks increasingly like the place where grand visions are pronounced only to fail from lack of awareness of how to engineer anything or what customers really benefit from (e.g. Juicero, Metaverse, Cybertruck).
>The trouble is that the US has lost the plot, there's no value or vision to defend, it hollowed itself out with hyperfinancialisation since the 80s, the consequence is that there's no rallying inspirational point anymore. It doesn't have a "hook" to attach its vision of the future, I have no idea what's the vision of the USA for the future except for "generating wealth".
I'm not entirely sure I buy this. Everything you said feels true, and it's happening in the moment. But I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The way you wrote "hyperfinancialisation" makes me think you are European (German?)
I'd imagine a vision for the country would be explained at places like World Expo right? In 2025 their booth (developed during Biden years even though it launched during Trump) gave a "semi" okay idea of where the country is placing its vision. Was it expressed well at the Expo? Not entirely sure, but it was there.
Historically, they didn't need to really do much at these Expos because who doesn't know the U.S.? And who doesn't know what the country is about? But I guess with the increasing decline of the U.S., they now have to 'advertise' themselves and explain to people what the underlying vision is.
In the end, the underlying theme seems to be "optimistic collaboration led by American innovation". Yeah I know its hard to picture this in the moment after everything that has happened in the last year but as the Biden years ended this was the thinking among government officials.
Watching this video a year later, it just seems so comical that this whole vision of "collaborative innovation": of the future being a collaborative project, with America wanting to lead it but not alone, and the slogan 'Imagine what we could create together' just seems comical after everything that's occurred in the last year. I guess it remains to be seen if this vision will hold once Trump is out of office.
> I'm not entirely sure I buy this. Everything you said feels true, and it's happening in the moment. But I think you're missing the forest for the trees. The way you wrote "hyperfinancialisation" makes me think you are European (German?)
I'm Brazilian-Swedish, living in Sweden.
> I'd imagine a vision for the country would be explained at places like World Expo right? In 2025 their booth (developed during Biden years even though it launched during Trump) gave a "semi" okay idea of where the country is placing its vision. Was it expressed well at the Expo? Not entirely sure, but it was there.
A vision for the country is something that's built upon, across governments and party lines since it's "what the nation is about" more than what policies are being voted on by diverging ideologies, it's something to tether a nation's spirit onto. Advertising something on a World Expo is just advertisement, it's the actions over a longer period of time that can be linked to a vision that actualises it, and that's what I don't see from the USA at all.
> In the end, the underlying theme seems to be "optimistic collaboration led by American innovation". Yeah I know its hard to picture this in the moment after everything that has happened in the last year but as the Biden years ended this was the thinking among government officials.
That line couldn't reek more of corporate-speak than it does, it's something you'd read on a PowerPoint slide from McKinsey. It doesn't inspire anyone, reading it doesn't make you feel "yeah, I want to buy into that". It just cements more of my thought that the vision is "get wealthy", it just states an end without inspiring any of the means for it.
Also, the Biden years already feel long gone, it could've been the beginning of re-steering the ship into a brighter path, barely a bit more than a year without Biden and nothing from the previous USA is recognisable.
> Watching this video a year later, it just seems so comical that this whole vision of "collaborative innovation": of the future being a collaborative project, with America wanting to lead it but not alone, and the slogan 'Imagine what we could create together' just seems comical after everything that's occurred in the last year. I guess it remains to be seen if this vision will hold once Trump is out of office.
Exactly, it's comical that it was kept as a pitch given everything we are seeing from post-Trump USA. It's really hard for me to imagine coming back from this, even more if it does last for another 3 years.
It's a real problem that Trump himself and his movement seem incapable of articulating a positive vision of America. It's an equally serious problem that the opposition are equally negative about the country, its history, its promise and potential. Both factions seem to be serving as negative emissaries. No one has less vision of America than MAGA; and no one hates it more than the Democratic Socialists. This isn't really an accident, in my opinion. And it's not just due to "hyperfinancialization" or growing economic inequality or racial disparities - all of those are issues.
Call me paranoid, but I think it's due to one of our greatest strengths being hijacked. Our free speech laws and the openness of our society, the total non-filtering of information - which I support - have created a fertile ground for sophisticated propaganda from China and Russia, Iran and Qatar, to overwhelm the brains of a lot of people on both sides of our political divide through massive social media psyops that have gone on for a decade.
It's reached the point that very few people in America can state why America is a good thing, even for its own citizens, let alone for the rest of the world.
But not very long ago, this was not the case. And there are excellent arguments to be made for why America should remain the keystone of the global order: It's inclusive, it's progressive, its system has been a miraculous engine of economic growth for everyone in its orbit. But the easiest and most banal reason, one which no one says out loud is: If not America, which country would you rather have exercising power to create some kind of international order? The people who think everything America does is automatically evil haven't really made much study of what life is like under the realistic alternatives to that question.
> If not America, which country would you rather have exercising power to create some kind of international order? The people who think everything America does is automatically evil haven't really made much study of what life is like under the realistic alternatives to that question.
Ideally no country of course but a multilateral organisation like the UN.
Definitely not the unilateral bully that is the US right now. That's not even the least bad option anymore. It is what the US was during the second Iraq invasion, everyone knew it was based on lies but we went along anyway because the US still had soft power. But Trump has thrown all that away.
>It's an equally serious problem that the opposition are equally negative about the country, its history, its promise and potential.
I don't buy that at all. Mamdani's election is the latest example of a progressive left that is slowly making inroads and provides an extremely positive vision for the future based on inclusion and respect for all peoples. He is definitely rising to the occasion as well. His win was a 15 years of struggle starting with an extremely disorganized movement in Occupy Wall street, with many events in between to him getting elected as a democratic socialist in the finance capital of the US. His vision pursues economic justice as a way to empower people to build a positive future.
But we don't need to just use him as an example. AOC was also pushing an extremely positive message in her famous campaign ad: a positive vision for the future: Green New Deal, efforts to invest in people and not just corporate graft and the same respect for people of all backgrounds(given her district has 50+ languages spoken there). She knocked out the guy that was the Democratic party's main money man link to the financial institutions that bribe both parties.
Her victory followed decades of struggle of Bernie Sanders's vision who went from being a completely dismissable vision back in his days of trying to become Mayor of Burlington to now being a figure that the Democratic party is forced to recon with because he has built a solid movement in the next generation that has the drive to implement his original vision.
> Call me paranoid, but I think it's due to one of our greatest strengths being hijacked. Our free speech laws and the openness of our society, the total non-filtering of information - which I support - have created a fertile ground for sophisticated propaganda from China and Russia, Iran and Qatar, to overwhelm the brains of a lot of people on both sides of our political divide through massive social media psyops that have gone on for a decade.
Yeah this exists but at the same time are you seeing whats happening on the ground off the internet? Its people using whatever strained institutions are left to slowly hold people accountable and also driving towards a new vision by raising people like Mamdani. Everyone was surprised by his win...except the people on the ground who saw him go on a hunger strike years earlier to help taxi drivers committing suicide because they were trapped or working through the corrupt system to actually get a free bus line funded and helping real people.
I personally won't allow full control for a long time.
On the other hand LLMs have been a very good tool to build bespoke tools (scripts, small CLI apps) that I can allow them to use. I prefer the constraints without having to think about sandboxing all of it, I design the tools for my workflow/needs, and make them available for the LLM when needed.
It's been a great middle ground, and actually very simple to do with AI-assisted code.
I don't "vibecode" the tools though, I still like to be in the loop acting more as a designer/reviewer of these tools, and let the LLM be the code writer.
No, it doesn't, I only run agents in a dedicated development environment (somewhat sandboxed in the file system) but that's how I've used them since the beginning, I don't want it to be accessing my file system as a whole, I only need it to look at code.
Don't think a web-based dev environment would be enough for my use case, I point agents to look into example code from other projects in that environment to use as as bootstraps for other tools.
Power users can use CLIs quite easily on macOS. The official documentation is geared towards the non-power users but information about most tasks a power user wants done in a CLI are available, it just requires a power user skill of searching for it.
It's a good filter, keep it simple and easy for the vast majority of people, and have tools for the advanced ones to use.
The best use I got from my Apple Watch was to use the companion app of my gym routine tracker (to track current loads and personal best) and play music so I didn't have to bring the phone to the gym.
That was it, I got extremely annoyed by notifications so over time just disabled them. Also for some reason the heart rate monitor glitched a couple times, got alerts about my BPM at 180+ while I was sitting on the couch.
Eventually I just stopped using it and now sits in some drawer.
You are quite grating on how you reply to people. Be more respectful, even more when insulting someone as having "teenage angst" while acting like someone suffering from teenage angst when replying.
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