Space warfare is much closer to naval warfare on Earth, so naval tactics and strategies are more transferable when applied to space. For example: taking weeks to maneuver, and firing at your opponent 100,000 of kms away.
Air sorties are typically completed within hours, because it is ultimately limited by the fuel they can carry.
All the money being lost for nothing
I can assure you that the money spent isn’t “lost” at all. They all ended up “somewhere”. There is a reason why Biden is so keen on pushing the $60 bil funding to Ukraine even though everyone knows there is no way Ukraine can win. But yes, agree with the rest of what you said.
I didn’t expect the state propaganda campaign to convince their people to accept welfare cuts and to embrace austerity to work this well.
Once again, the DPRK was NOT an impoverished country even after it was being bombed to shit! It was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and fared closely with post-war Japan’s reconstruction. The DPRK in the 1960s had higher living standards than China, South Korea and other Asian economies that rose in the 1980s.
I wrote an entire comment here if you’re interested.
The reason the DPRK couldn’t pay off the Volvo debt was because of the 1972 drought in Europe that caused short falls in Soviet crop harvest. The “Russian wheat deal” resulted in the USSR spending heavily to purchase grain abroad on the international market, causing global grain prices prices to be inflated everywhere else. The DPRK, which as I had written on the linked comment, was severely lacking in food security and depleted much of its foreign reserves purchasing food in the early 70s with highly inflated price.
This was the reason why the DPRK couldn’t pay back Volvo. This was the reason why the DPRK would spend the next few decades going after a self-reliance policy (Juche can be roughly translated to something like “self-reliance”), trying to conquer nature and increase food production on a very cursed land that is the Korean peninsula, to much disastrous consequences.
As you should. I try to raise awareness about how dangerous the dollar can be because too many people think that the US empire is on the brink of collapse just because it is losing a few wars currently, forgetting that the US has lost near every war since 1945 except maybe for the 1991 Gulf War and still managed to dominate the world like nothing has happened.
BRICS Bank Aims to Increase Local-Currency Borrowing to 30%
But the majority of the bank’s funding — about 70% — will continue to be denominated in dollars, he said.
“The bank’s capital is in US dollars. Our reporting currency is US dollars. So the dollar is hot-coded in the DNA of the bank,” he said.
No shot. Everyone’s dragging their feet about de-dollarization at BRICS. My biggest disappointment of 2023, after all the encouraging talks about doing it during the 2022 summit.
I actually anticipated a war in Ukraine (because I had been listening to Alex Mercouris and for months throughout 2021 he was very pessimistic about the various diplomatic negotiations leading up to February 2022), I simply did not expect it to happen this soon. I thought it would be another year or so, but those who had been following closely the US-Russia summit in 2021 knew that the US was dead set on provoking a war in Ukraine.
If the dollar loses its hegemony status, then likely. But it’s going to be a while away, probably decades like you said.
This is just the equivalent of rich kids who live off their parents’ wealth throwing tantrum. At the end of the day, nobody dares to cut ties from the family wealth. Sure, some might be crazy enough to do it, but most of the time it doesn’t end well for them.
No country is ever going to give up the dollar just to trade with Texas. Literally nobody. This is how the US impose its sanctions and embargo against Cuba and all the Bad Countries.
I can guarantee you that no balkanization is going to happen in the US.
Why? Because this is no longer the time period where individual states can build up their gold reserves as a store of their wealth. No, the US dollar is unparalleled in history in the sense that it allows the US to get “free lunches” from all over the world with junk papers.
I love quoting from this article from 2022 because the Californian finance department accidentally revealed a very crucial fact:
If you look at all of the personal income tax returns that were filed in California in the year 2020, just 1% of the total number of income tax returns that were filed were responsible for more than 49% of all of the personal income tax that was paid in that year. And unlike most of us who get our income from wages and salaries, that very narrow band of taxpayers derives a lot of their income from things like capital gains, stock markets [and] bonuses that are tied to corporate or stock performance. So when the markets are doing very well, those individuals are doing very well and state revenues are doing very well. Conversely, when the markets go south, their fortunes don’t do very well and the state’s revenues decline as a result.
Let’s parse this paragraph: California, the richest state in the US, derives much of its tax revenues from capital gains such as stocks and bonds. Yeah, good luck losing access to the dollar, if any US state even dares to contemplate about seceding for real. Their wealth and living standards are going to plunge overnight. Good luck with that.
Read my response to the other user.
Biden’s proposed corporate tax is supposed to take in $222 billion over 10 years, and his billionaire tax $440 billion over 10 years, so let’s make that $66 billion per year.
Biden’s Fed rate hike has pumped out $1 TRILLION dollars to the rich people in 2023 alone.
You can tax corporations and billionaires all you want, but the rich people all know who benefit them the most. The numbers don’t lie.
Trump’s tax cut is a joke compared to Biden’s Fed rate hike that has pumped out $1 TRILLION dollars to the rich people in 2023 alone.
Biden’s proposed billionaire tax is supposed to rake in $440 billion over 10 years, and the corporate tax $222 billion over 10 years, that’s $66 billion per year, while $1 trillion is given back to the rich. How is it even comparable between the two?
Biden made S&P500 gone up 50% higher than Trump’s highest point in just 2 years. If you owned stocks and bonds like most rich people do, you’ve just been made much much more wealthier than during Trump’s era.
We’re not even talking about all the wars that have massively benefited the military industrial complex, the oil and gas industries, and the financial sector.
What’s more, Biden made white people richer and black people poorer:
Source: Federal Reserve, 2023
This matters a lot to the white racist conservatives. Trump knows how to talk big but he cannot deliver. Biden proves that he can get things done.
Honestly polling shouldn’t be taken seriously after the debacle of 2016.
Biden is going to win for the simple reason that the bourgeoisie want him to win. Simple as that. The American people decide nothing.
People who still think Trump has a shot, don’t understand that capitalism doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
Here’s a couple to start:
http://pdf.dfcfw.com/pdf/H3_AP201810081209197493_1.PDF (Macro research on the DPRK economy from a Chinese investment firm)
https://www.essra.org.cn/view-1000-3081.aspx (Research into the DPRK economic structure and development)
I remember coming across some Chinese article years ago talking about the North Korean economy and actually went back and dug up more information about it.
In other words, it’s easier if you know Chinese, but even then not all information is accurate and some are quite sensational.
I am reposting (and expanded on) my comment from another thread because I see so much misinformation about North Korea.
I think people have seriously underestimated North Korea.
Let me remind you that in the 1960s, North Korea and Japan were the two Asian economies that mattered! North Korean GDP per capita in the 1960s was higher than the GDP per capita of China and South Korea.
When Japan colonized Korea, they divided the country into the North and the South regions, with the North prioritized on industrialization (concentrated mostly in North Hamgyong, South Hamgyong and Pyongyang) while the South focused on agriculture. After Japan surrendered, the Chinese Civil War ensued. Mao was so adamant about capturing the Northeast province of China (Manchuria), where the Japanese heavy industries were situated, that he was willing to give up all the bases across China just to get to the Northeast. After the Chinese communists controlled the Northeast, much of their industrial and mechanized supplies came from the industrial base of North Korea.
North Korea in the 1960s to the 1980s was a confident, industrialized nation. South Korea did not overtake the North until after the mid-1970s.
The post-Korean War rebound after being bombed by the Americans was real. East German media in the 1960s called North Korea an “economic miracle of the Far East” and compared favorably with post-war Japan’s reconstruction.
By the late 1960s, North Korean rural villages were fully electrified.
(Let me give you some perspective here: the per capita electric consumption in the 1960s was 5 times that of China’s! The first Chinese province to be fully electrified was Shandong province in 1996, and nationwide electrification was only achieved in 2015 - the last province being Qingdao)
By the late 1970s, North Korea achieved food self-sufficency, and realized free education and healthcare for all its people.
By the late 1980s, 70% of North Korean agriculture was fully mechanized.
In the 70s, North Korea produced 6 million ton of grain annually. By 1984, it broke a record of 10 million ton of grain production! In case this was not clear, they almost doubled their food production in just over a decade!
The North Koreans built the Nampo Dam (West Sea Barrage) in just 5 years, from 1981 to 1986, with a cost of $4 BILLION dollars. An impressive feat of engineering, and they were so confident and proud of themselves that they proclaimed the West Sea Barrage as the “8th Wonder of the World”.
The West Sea Barrage was built was to prevent the intrusion of seawater caused by the tidal floods of the Yellow Sea into the Taedong river. The salinity of the water supply has always caused issues for irrigation of the farmlands, and a dam that blocks the intrusion of seawater was critical to supply fresh water for their farming activities (the Nampo Dam itself is a reservoir that stores up to several billion cubic meters of fresh water).
Why is this important? And where did it all go wrong?
Well, we have to understand the problem with the Korean peninsula. The North in particularly is cursed with mountainous regions, with only less than 25% of its land flat enough and suitable for large scale agriculture.
Fun fact: Pyongyang (平壤) literally means “flat land”. Imagine a country with such mountainous terrain that they named that one place “the flat land”.
Food self-sufficiency is an inherent problem for North Korea. This is a problem for the South as well, but to a lesser extent, and they chose to industrialize and use their export earnings to import food. For the North Koreans, they chose to tackle this critical issue head on. As such, as the DPRK achieved their industrialization goals of the Chollima Movement (the “thousand-li horse movement”) by the 1960s, they began to turn to resolve their food insecurity problem.
With so little area for agriculture, the North Koreans began to clear the forests of the mountainous areas to implement terrace farming. This large scale deforestation would lead to severe consequences later as the soil erosion from such steep angled terrains (really cursed place) resulted in the loss of fertile soil and serious degradation of agricultural output decades later.
At the same time, owing to their industrial base and with the support from the USSR and PRC (the DPRK maintained a fine balance in its relationship with both countries after the Sino-Soviet split), they began to implement mechanization of their agricultural economy. Farming output shot through the roof, reaching 10 million ton of grain production by 1984.
However, there are severe issues that accompanied such rapid development. Apart from the deforestation of the steep terrain that caused ecological issues and loss of fertile soil, North Korea itself does not have energy self-sufficiency. Its farming activities were highly mechanized, which means that it needs to consume a huge quantity of fossil fuel to sustain the agricultural production. North Korean economy thus became over-dependent on fossil fuel, which it doesn’t produce itself. (They did have coal mining but you can’t use them to power mechanized equipments.) This was not a problem when the USSR was able to provide ample supply of cheap oil to the DPRK, however as the USSR became entangled in the war in Afghanistan and the Middle East in the 1980s, its dwindling economy could no longer support the North Korean economy as it used to.
Following the collapse of the USSR in the 1990s, fuel export to North Korea plummeted, and the North Koreans soon found themselves in a crisis of energy shortage. Trade plummeted from 53% with the USSR to merely 3% with Russia in 1995. By that time, food production had already substantially fallen and the DPRK fell back to food insecurity once again, and never recovered from that. Food and energy crisis both at once is the bane of any industrialized society.
Famine ensued in the 1990s (the March of Suffering). The series of floods in 1995 was particularly bad, exacerbated by the deforestation decades earlier, and caused much destruction to their arable lands, mining industries, and various economic infrastructures. The UN estimated the cost of destruction to be at $15 billion.
There have always been questions and debates about whether the DPRK had over-invested in their agricultural policy. The West Sea Barrage was a huge undertaking and financial investment, costing $4 billion dollars. You can clearly tell that their motives were obviously heavily influenced by the socialist mentality of “man will overcome nature”, but perhaps sometimes the conditions simply weren’t there, especially in such a cursed place as the Korean peninsula. South Korea avoided this problem by largely focusing on the manufacturing sector and turned to importing food instead (agriculture comprised only 2% of South Korea’s GDP, but it never went below 20% for North Korea). I don’t have a good answer but it is certainly an interesting part of history that should be examined deeper.
The F-35s were made for profit and have a distributed supply chain over a dozen countries so they need the sales first to keep the contractors paid and happy and their factories running, even if it means there are major defects that may or may not be fixed in the future.
The Su-57s were designed and built as a handful of prototypes intended for rigorous testing to work out all the kinks before even starting a serial production on it. The process takes longer but you have a more or less robust aircraft by the time serial production begins and have far less defects and flaws to worry about.
Very different mentality here.
That’s not exactly Marx’s critique of religion. Marx was saying that by surrendering to a “higher power”, people who are miserable under capitalism forget that it is the human agency that drives societal change.
This is the materialist critique of religion. It is an impediment to progress not because it is “backward” or conservative, but because people have to give up their agency in the process.
Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live forever!
Ленин жив - Lenin lives. Only two people in history have ever been bestowed with this honor. The other person is Viktor Tsoi of KINO.