[reform] public procurement … and financial control

So, fire-sale public assets to BlackRock?

the general opinion of Lemmy go from “Slava Ukraini, fuck Russian Nazis, here’s some footage of Russian teenagers getting blown up with drones, Trump bad for not wanting to give aid” to “Zelensky is a fascist war criminal and also a Nazi and dumb American liberals are bad for siding with them” seemingly overnight. The switch happened a while ago but it was apparently unanimous.

Lemmy has always had people who took the second position, and still has people who take the first position. There has been a general shift, but it was neither sudden nor unanimous.

Chinese is the most popular ‘foreign’ cuisine in India, and some popular ‘Chinese’ dishes were actually developed by Chinese merchants living in India.

Also Southeast Asia has a lot of Indian influence, except Vietnam, so that’s a bit wierd.

Do you expect me to remember how to spell boorshwaasee? Also, ‘Epstein class’ is much more clear about the problem - it is not just that some people are obscenely rich, but also that the money has insulated them from people to the point that they have lost all humanity and social sense and behave like wild animals.

It’s the regime against the people

Iran is bordered on one side by Afghanistan, and on the other side by Iraq. Anyone with two brain cells can see what happened there after the Epstein regime invaded. Trying to help the Epsteinites kill your own people goes beyond even treason; it is some sort of death wish or misanthropy. I cannot blame the Iranian government for cracking down on this.

Also the sanctions are international

No they’re not; they were imposed by the Epstein coalition with the threat of secondary sanctions, and sometimes even violence.

the regime could get rid of them at any time

Yes, but the Epstein regime wants those sanctions, so as to hurt Iran’s economy.

It’s just that war and nuclear weapons are more important to them.

Nuclear weapons are, sadly, one of two things the Epstein regime fears, so they are a necessary evil if you want to be a sovereign nation.

And we all know who started this war.

Plus they run a very corrupt and inefficient economy anyway.

A very corrupt and inefficient economy that somehow produced enough weaponry to drive the biggest military in the world out of West Asia. I suppose when your efficiency stat is too low, it underflows and becomes insanely high?

Apple stuff are mostly Veblen goods, whose demand increases with price. That’s why this is interesting.

It starts to make a lot more sense if you stop thinking of his tweets as diplomacy and start thinking of them as stock market manipulation.

‘This month, I feel gay.’ - Gianni Infantino

You can’t do a PhD without an advisor. It is possible that the advisor doesn’t care, and signs off on everything their students write, but an advisor has to exist, at least on paper.

public executions were regarded as entertainment

I think it was usually more of a warning. But I’ve read that this was apparently a thing in Shakespearean England.

a mass (rather than elite) phenomenon attending the gladiator games was

‘Ordinary’ Roman citizens were still above average in the Roman caste hierarchy.

most gladiators who fought to the death were condemned criminals for crimes considered exceptionally heinous

Yeah, like getting caught defending their countries from the Romans.

Imagine if Donald Trump kidnaps a bunch of random Iranians and forces them to fight alligators for the entertainment of ‘ordinary’ US citizens. That would be the modern equivalent. (And why does that sound like something he would actually try to do?)

It’s no wonder that the Obama and Trump deals would be similar, since it’s the same countries, with the same leverage, and all the same goals.

Same countries and goals, yes, but Iran has a lot more leverage now. So I really don’t think the US will get such a favourable treaty this time.

Some historical societies had public executions, but it was a punishment, not a ‘game’ for the rich and powerful to enjoy.

people who don’t hate their parents are rare.

As someone else pointed out above, people who have good relationships with their parents generally don’t talk about it.

Have you tried switching your government off and on again?

Even by empire standards, (Western) Rome was particularly barbaric. Not many empires made people fight each other to the death for sport.

Devaluing the US dollar benefits the US and hurts countries that hold a lot of dollar, such as Japan, the UK and … China.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, steal from him.

NATO might be led by idiots, but luckily they do draw the line at starting WW3.

I don’t care what economic system Russia uses. That’s their internal matter. What matters to me is that they’re the only country with 6,000 nukes, and therefore the only country the US fears. So for my country to be independent, we need Russia to act as a counterweight to the US. (This is also true for many other countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa.)

since that has the longest track record in failure

Failure in achieving what?

A natural disaster would be handled by regional or national disaster response agencies.

How would there be a national disaster response agency without central planning? Who would fund it? Who would run it?

Since after the industrial revolution, the high productivity of cities has been subsidizing the wealth of the suburbs and rural areas to the significant detriment of overall productivity.

Are cities actually more productive, or is their higher productivity subsidised by rural areas?

you will find that the wealth and productive density per person will balance according to the inherit environmental factors to a much larger degree.

Perhaps, but is that what you want? The resource-poor societies of Central Asia lie between theresource-rich China and Europe. Would a theoretical Eurasian government not want to subsidise people living in these regions, so that they can service the trade routes between China and Europe?

a lack of central control and planning does not prevent collaboration and coordination from occuring between entities.

Who mediates disputes, and who enforces their decisions?