Nah, social division of labour is almost as old as civilization itself. It’s not possible to do everything by yourself, if you’re lucky enough not to die of hunger in a few weeks, you’ll die of a preventable disease within a few years.

Capitalist exploitation of it (combined with faux individualism) is the issue.

Translating to this scenario, there would be no issue if we had community kitchens with cheap/free food and well-paid workers. The issue is the capitalists extracting surplus value from a basic necessity, partly by convincing everyone to hate their neighbours and eat alone.

Nazis took inspiration for holocaust from manifest destiny, soo…

I don’t expect altruism. Stability and economic prosperity in the region is directly beneficial and profitable to China.

Please put an NSFW tag on that image, it can get you in trouble if you accidentally show it in public in many countries, for good reason.

Nah, I mean that what they’re doing isn’t charity (so they are doing the debt trap thing on some level), but it’s also beneficial for populations of countries they invest in, and better than whatever the fuck IMF is doing.

China has successfully withstood US intervention and helped communist forces prevail in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. They also semi-successfully done the same in Korea.

They don’t fear US intervention much, it’s just that their modern foreign policy is targeted at stability and growth rather than immediate overthrow of capitalism.

¿Por qué no los dos? I mean, if you actually go to developing nations you will see that they are investing into real infrastructure that improves the standards of living dramatically. They also intend to turn some profit off of it. Most likely much of that profit will be in building long-term economic relations, rather than immediate rent-seeking, which can be viewed as “trapping nations in debt traps”, or as “investing into development”. They also invest with much fewer strings attached compared to IMF, which is a win comparatively speaking.

China nowadays has the capacity to steamroll half of asia into compliance. Instead they build alliances/partnerships via trade, even with countries they ideologically disagree with. It’s less profitable in the short-term but leads to more predictable and stable development in the region, which benefits them massively in the long-term. Crazy what you can do if you think in centuries and not quarters.

If you look at the history of military operations performed by both countries, it’s pretty clear which one is the more likely option

Just another “free thinker” who believes that a country of 1 billion people, with good quality cheap/free higher education, a massive industrial base, and half a trillion dollars of annual R&D expenditure, can’t develop tech on their own. I’m sure there’s industrial/military espionage going on, but China is also pulling ahead in many research areas independently. With the way US is treating its scientists, I fully expect in a few years China will be the dominant STEM player in the world, US being second or third after europe.

Would they benefit from having an F-35 to take apart? Yes. Will they build a relatively competitive fighter jet without any F-35 tech for half the price or less? Also yes.

Pigs are very smart (smarter than dogs), empathetic to their kind, and above all are extremely adorable and cute. So it is also ok to call someone a piggy as a mutually consensual term of endearment.

Russia is basically a slightly less shitty US. Same brand of reactionary pseudo-christian dictatorship of capital, with hints of fascism. Except Russia still has free healthcare and good public transit, inherited from the soviet times. And since russian oligarchs have less cash than american oligarchs, Russia has done significantly less damage with its imperialist wars so far.

It’s like a clown. Funny to watch it goof about from afar, but when it comes to you OH FUCK OH SHIT THERE’S A CLOWN STARING AT ME FROM THE WINDOW AND PLOTTING A RIGHT-WING COUP

Yeah, agreed, for now it is the case.

BTW at $DAYJOB I am currently working on software & documentation that would allow you to set up a complete source code mirror for all software in Nixpkgs. If you would be ready to maintain that kind of architecture (hundreds of TBs of storage, plus some compute to keep it up to date), it would allow you to be resilient to total internet failure (as long as you still have the electricity+compute to rebuild from source, of course).

The main US dependence is actually GitHub. You don’t have to depend on any of the NixOS Foundation-run infra, since Nix is source-based-first. You can just rebuild everything you need by yourself, provided you have a beefy enough machine (a modern developer desktop machine will probably suffice). The issue then becomes source availability, both for Nixpkgs itself (the main hosting is on GitHub, and there’s no official mirror anywhere else) and for all the software packaged therein. A lot of software, including some really critical stuff, is hosted on GitHub nowadays, so if it goes down/becomes (even more) hostile, then that’s an issue.

very outspokenly pro-American

This might be his worst quality actually

Can’t wait for the Satanic Temple Primary School to apply for vouchers too

Communism is the antithesis of religion. The former is based on materialism, the latter is idealism incarnate. Soviet republics turned churches into cinemas and warehouses and other cool shit, while capitalist countries were betting more and more on religious propaganda to calm the masses.

Cancer doesn’t care how big your mamms are, though.

It kind of does, but only quantitatively. The bigger the more likely. But yeah even cis males with relatively normal hormone levels do get breast cancer sometimes.

If you pour enough money/resources into anyone, you can get them to win an election. Trump was just the easiest one to pour money into: he’s easily swayed, even more easily bought, and has a certain… shudders charisma (?) that makes him more electable than a rando mild conservative.

What you’re witnessing here is just capitalism. People with a lot of money and power wanted to gain even more money and power. Trump a convenient vehicle for that. So they poured money into his campaign and he won.