freagle

Explain to me how friends, or lack thereof, changes "human nature"?

"Figuring something out"

"Finding something out"

"Discovering something"

"Break that down for me"

"Empty nesters"

"Building a case"

"Play your part"

"Influenza"

"Lunatic"

"Hysterical"

"Barbaric"

"Romantic"

Words that literally refer to mythological characters of literature but metaphorically have a meaning relating to aspects of those characters:

"Venereal"

"Hermaphrodite"

"Aphrodisiac"

"Quixotic"

"Tantalizing"

"Chaos"

"Herculean task"

"Narcissist"

"Oedipus complex"

"Atlas"

"Cloth"

"Echo"

"Erotic"

"Fortune"

"Jovial"

"Martial"

"Mercurial"

"Panic"

"Mentor"

"Office siren"

"Titanic"

FIRE makes up 20.7% of GDP.
IP-intensive industries make up 38% of GDP.

That means almost 60% of US GDP is artificially created markets.

Edit: I should add that these are not the only artificially constructed markets. Military contractors comes to mind, which another 3%. General government spending is 36%, but that's got overlap with FIRE, IP intensive industries, and the military.

I mean, it's shocking when you realize it. The vast majority of the GDP in the US isn't actually productive and isn't actually engaged in open market competition.

The Marxist perspective complicates it, by definition

All of this is predicated on countries preferring not to be tariffed in the US over trading with China and that's just not going to be the case. The US market is small and it's shrinking as the consumers are being drained of their purchasing power. If you had an exclusive choice whether to launch a new consumer product in the US or China, you would pick China 95 times out of 100. And if it wasn't a consumer good but an intermediate product in a production flow. 99 times out of 100 you would choose China.

Economically, there will be very few countries that prefer to pull their products from China in favor of lower tariffs in the US. And very few countries can choose to stop buying from China, including the US.

China cannot be isolated simply because it has intermediated the vast majority of the world's value chains and it continues to do so by intermediating more and more of the natural resources value chains by providing better options to Africa.

What can happen is the US can create maximal counter play along the lines you've described and that can mean sanctioning world leaders, embargoing small countries to deliver collective punishment to oust existing leadership, etc. That will work for some countries for some time. It will certainly create the conditions for fascist movements to grow in Europe, which I think is ultimately the only way they're going to have enough soldiers to fight China. But economically it is not enough to isolate China.

Hopefully they do, and it creates a reaction in their domestic pro-BRICS faction as well as fuel anti-American sentiment in the general population

Hellz f'ing yes, fellow penguin!! So glad I could help!

It is. I run mint 22.1 as well. The Mint team ended up with a pipewire version that was mostly contemporary but a Wireplumber version that was legacy. It made configuration a nightmare. Once I upgraded Wireplumber, I was able to actually configure it and all my problems went away

Looks like the "gonna put Russia against China" vibes might not be vibing

I think that installing pulseaudio + pipewire will be problematic, at least that's what I've read. I recommend uninstalling pulseaudio, getting the PPA version of Wireplumber and reporting back with your outcomes. Make sure pipewire-pulse is installed

Mint 22 is on pipewire now. You need to get rid of pulseaudio, go with pipewire and the pipewire-pulse compat layer. I had major problems until I installed an upgraded Wireplumber to 0.5 from ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream

After that, you may have further issues with your configuration, and I would start by looking at your syslog for errors indicating what might be happening.

I think it's more about them getting more confident in the US's inability to harm it or more confident that they cannot prevent the US from harming it by being passive.