Nah, it's just an anecdote about how life is fleeting and you might as well enjoy the little pleasures. On a linger time frame we're all the guy on the vine, we've guarenteed to fall to our deaths. Might as well enjoy a strawberry.

Not surprising, any "Marxist" who "admits he enjoys freedom of expression and other democratic rights in his home country of Germany" is already very suspect.

Fun article in the FT this weekend about Germany's military recruitment failures. Highlights:

As a podcaster and freelance journalist, Ole Nymoen admits he enjoys freedom of expression and other democratic rights in his home country of GERMANY. But he would not want to die for THEM. In a book published this week, Why I Would Never Fight for My Country, the 27-year-old argues ordinary people should not be sent into battle on behalf of nation states and their rulers — even to fend off an invasion. Occupation by a foreign power might lead to a “shitty” life, he told the Financial Times. “But I’d rather be occupied than dead.” Nymoen, a self-described Marxist, does not claim to be representative of Generation Z in Germany. But his stance — and his striking honesty about it — taps into a wider questions facing Europe as it re-arms on a scale not seen since the end of the cold war.

But, while those funds are helping to plug gaps in arms and equipment, one of the biggest remaining issues is manpower. Germany’s armed forces commissioner, Eva Högl, this week warned the country was not closer to its goal of having 203,000 active troops by 2031, as the overall size of the armed forces slightly declined last year, partly because of a high number of dropouts. A quarter of the 18,810 men and women who signed up in 2023 left the armed forces within six months.

Christian Mölling, Europe director at the Bertelsmann Foundation, estimates that German troop numbers need to rise from 181,000 today to 270,000 in the years ahead in order to reach Nato targets — and fill gaps left if American forces stationed in Europe withdraw.

While a recent survey by the pollster YouGov found 58 per cent of Germans would support a return to conscription, only a third of those aged between 18 and 29 felt the same way. Nymoen, himself a Die Linke voter, is deeply suspicious of Europe’s race to re-arm. It was all very well for European leaders to sound belligerent, he said. “The thing is that, in the end, it’s going to be me in the trenches.”

Oh no, the United States is going to start sanctioning... checks notes middle managers at random Russian arms manufacturing companies who leave Russia to take a yearly vacation in Thailand or something. Seriously, what else is left to sanction? Are they just going to complain more loudly about Russia's "shadow fleet"? Scream at Modi for continuing to buy Russian oil? Somehow cut them off from the SWIFT system a second time?

Yeah it's honestly fantastic. If you enjoyed AoE2 back in the day, I would recommend picking it up again. They've added a ridiculous amount of new civilisations and campaigns, some of which are superb.

Covered here: https://hexbear.net/comment/5970467

Basically yes, Sheinbaum is that good at handling Trump. Easily the best leader in the Americas right now, she's got an insane 85% approval rating and immediately did a bunch of Really Good Shit like healthcare.

Hideo Kojima-ass name for a boss right there.

Still a large risk on their part. Not easy to gamble when you've got ~1.4 billion people's livelihoods to safeguard.

Ah got it, yeah that's important context. I suppose I always overstate the case with the US having no manufacturing as well, so thanks for the correction!

Problem here is that Canada is already economically subservient to the United States. It's already a resource colony. There's nothing more Canada could give besides actual annexation.

The US is still the world's third largest manufacturing economy (after China and the EU), but it's not really competitive with China and as a share of GDP it's far down from what it used to be, around 30% in the mid 20th century.

No chance. For US manufacturing to be competitive you need a lot more than a devalued dollar. You also need to lower wages, which can only happen if the government internalizes a lot of these costs (like healthcare, transportation/infrastructure, pensions, etc) which is a nonstarter for the United States, and you also need to vastly expand industrial education. There are no "experts" in the United States for most serious manufacturing, so they have to import them and start learning Chinese.

Well that's my point, the US has no exports outside of bombs, oil, and soybeans. This strategy of lowering USD's value only works if you have a manufacturing industry, which the United States does not.

Another differentiated view that we have is that Trump will pursue a weak dollar policy rather than implementing tariffs. Tariffs are inflationary and would strengthen the dollar--hardly a good starting point for a US industrial renaissance. Weakening the dollar early in his second administration would make U.S manufacturing competitive. A weak dollar and plentiful, cheap energy could power a boom. The current Wall Street consensus is for a strong dollar based on the deeply flawed logic. We strongly disagree. A strong dollar should emerge by the end of his term if the US reshoring effort is successful.

These are the words of Trump's current Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, from his hedge fund last January: https://assets.realclear.com/files/2024/02/2353_keysquare.pdf

And Trump himself doesn't outright say he wants a weaker dollar, but in this interview he heavily hints at that.

Well, I think manufacturing is a big deal, and everybody that runs for office says you’ll never manufacture again. We have currency problems, as you know. Currency. When I was president, I fought very strongly and hard with President Xi and with Shinzo Abe, who’s a fantastic man—actually, you know the story there.

So we have a big currency problem because the depth of the currency now in terms of strong dollar/weak yen, weak yuan, is massive. And I used to fight them, you know, they wanted it weak all the time. They would fight it and I said, if you weaken it any more, I’m going to have to put tariffs on you. They went as far as they could with me, but I was very tough with it. Nobody talks about it now. And that difference is, you know, we have the spread is the biggest and I think they said 38 years.1 That’s a tremendous burden on our companies that try and sell tractors and other things to other places outside of this country. It’s a tremendous burden.

And I remember it’s one of the things I worked almost hardest on, to keep their currency up2. Because we, you know, we didn’t have the kind of a discrepancy that you have right now. And I think you’re going to see some very bad things happen in a little while. I’ve been talking to manufacturers, they say we cannot get, nobody wants to buy our product because it’s too expensive. You look at Komatsu and these tractor companies. They make a good product but you know—what it does is it forces, it’s going to force Caterpillar and these other companies to build, they already have plenty outside but it’s going to force them to build in other nations, which is what the other nations want. And it’s what we should want also in a different way, we should want that, we have to have that but I think you’re gonna see some very bad numbers coming over the next period of a year. It takes a while to have that happen. But it is really the discrepancy as an example between the dollar and the yen and the dollar and the yuan is unbelievable. With the dollar being high and with them being very low. I would always notice they fought very hard to keep their currency low.

Oh absolutely, there is a fight brewing between the Fed and central bankers in general vs Trump and co, because Trump has an eye towards removing the "independence" of the central banks to subordinate them to more vulgar political concerns rather than safeguarding capital long term. This is good (for us I mean) in the sense that it destroys the idea of central banking "neutrality" and pretending as if economic concerns are not political in nature.

Trump and co probably want a little market crash because then it forces the Fed to lower interest rates (they really miss ZIRP) and devalue the dollar, making American exports (lol but I swear this is the thinking) more competitive.

This is definitely not the real one. The S&P500 is still up by 12% since March of last year. The US market in particular has been on an insane tear for over a year, a correction is very expected.

How are these "weekend packages" skirting the ban on private tutoring that's been in place since 2021? I assume it's not that hard given the parents will do anything to get them and they're not online so you can structure it as a club or something, but curious what the reaction of regulatory officials has been.

The movie Z by Costa-Gavras is a wonderful demonstration of exactly this dynamic, where the government of Greece hires fascist thugs to pose as protestors to instigate political violence as an excuse to crack down. Crazy that this has been the working strategy for at least half a century and shows no signs of stopping.