I am never going to forgive anyone involved in the telecom debacle. We could have had SK tier internet and they just pocketed the money.

I sort of get why liberals enact half-assed means-tested versions of policies that come from their left flank, but it's a little bit baffling when they do the same thing to the policies they seem to be genuinely in favor of. You'd think they'd have put in some guarantees to sop this take-the-money-and-run looting of the public purse, if only in the name of "China bad".

Seriously, imagine having the ability to ruin/end damn near anyone and being stopped by Robert's rules of order. Almost as if his heart was never in anything other than letting the ghouls have their way.

bye bye genocide joe

we're going to go through the whole post-presidency Trump saga where every other day a Democrat has said something like "Utterly demolished. Order and the rule of law stands again. I don't see how Trump can come back from this. The mango mussolini might be out of our (non-toupee'd!) hair for good now!" while literally nothing of any significance happens

but this time it'll be with Biden, dealing with none of his actual crimes but instead like, failing to put his signature in the correct place on the form authorizing Israel to receive a prototype missile which is simultaneously thermobaric, ejects gigantic razor-sharp blades, a cluster bomb, and leaves landmines that look like child's toys, and his misplaced signature delayed the transport of those missiles by 6 hours, and Biden will therefore be called an antisemitic pro-Hamas Hitlerian monster by the Republicans and it's his fault that Israel collapsed

weird comment from that TSMC article:

obviously have mixed feelings about unions. They’re eager to remind us that they brought us the weekend—and they did!—but they’re somewhat less eager to remind us that they also brought us Derek Chauvin.

The US seems to believe that there are indicators that the threat could be growing more imminent. Last month, the White House reported "dangerous encounters between US and Chinese forces in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea" that "reflect a growing aggressiveness by Beijing's military," Reuters reported.

The third front of the US imperialist war will be in Taiwan because of computer chips, they're just going to manufacture consent for it by artificially making computers more expensive and telling the American public that the only way to fix it is to "liberate" Taiwan. They don't even have to go all the way since they've already manufactured sinophobia since Hong Kong's reunification.

Proprietary software will literally cause wars.

Don't remind me.

The work is interesting and impactful, but fuck I would get paid similar for just changing padding in CSS files

It do be like that when you gamble on a foreign country to be the main producer of chips thus discouraging American students from specializing in chip technology.

But it shouldn’t be a problem. The US will gain more talent by paying off Taiwanese engineers to come to the US and likely abandon Taiwan afterwards like a good friend

To add to your point:

I have said many times that there is no way the US will re-industrialize, nor does it have any intention of doing so. The Wall St financial planners aren’t going to let that happen.

The only way the US can possibly re-industrialize (and that’s assuming a lot of the conditions line up) is if dedollarization starts to happening in such a pace that it destroys the Wall St financial class, only then could there be a chance of industrial capitalism re-emerging in the US, and from there, the re-proletarianization of the American working class into socialist revolution.

The US as a financial empire is not going to fight China through industrialization. This is a glaring error I see many geopolitical analysts make, who still see this struggle as a parallel to how the US supplanted the British Empire in the 20th century (both were industrial empires back then). It’s going to use a completely different set of weapons: financial warfare, debt and a sprawling network global financial institutions to fight China.

Michael Hudson has always said that when he talked to Chinese economists, he was surprised that almost none of them had read Capital Vol. 3, and almost all of their knowledge about money and finance came from Western neoclassical economics. It all hinges upon if Chinese policymakers will abandon neoclassical economics and start reading Capital Vol. 3 to get themselves out of the crisis in time. (You want to look out for a global debt jubilee movement, hopefully initiated by China. That’s when you know the US empire is screwed)

Also, it’s not as if China never had a good monetary theory. Xue Muqiao’s work during the Chinese Civil War was instrumental in financing the Shandong war effort, using a currency based on commodity (instead of gold) and circulated in the form of Beihai currency/bond (北海币). All this had been forgotten in favor of Western neoclassical theory. Stalin also had a similar, if not more sophisticated, implementation of the ruble that enabled rapid industrialization of the USSR in the 1930s-50s until it was abandoned by Khrushchev in favor of more conventional liberal economics theory.

All these explain why China is so afraid of de-coupling from the US, because of how much they could lose from their export-oriented economy. This is what happens when you understand money wrong. If you don’t understand money, you don’t understand debt, and the US empire will run circles around you with its dollar.

one wonders how much is actually reaching the things that need to be built and fixed and how much is just being skimmed off the top by contractors and subcontractors and subsubcontractors etc.

I really need to get hired by these companies before the Biden checks run out. They’re gonna keep siphoning the government and I want to be there for it.