Telegraph

Yeah, the signal to noise ratio is worthless from that paper, on the subject of China’s comparative strength.

Per other sources, the picture is mixed, although China obviously has more growth potential in the long run, if they don’t ruin it.

No. The absence of them every time we look for them is very, very suspicious.

And honestly a lot less is left unexplained than most people seem to assume. Or maybe just most believers.

Hmm, the graph given is sus. The trend starts before the AI sector was really a thing, like literally 2010.

If I just look at the extra degree to which it came back after covid, it’s maybe double the dotcom bubble and a lot smaller than 2008.

Ah, it’s part of the picture! That makes more sense.

Yeah, it’s just weird that it wouldn’t be via our own air force or NORAD.

Was there like an open bid on goose self-defence guides? Lol.

So why is it the US Airforce, but also UoWaterloo?

I’m not sure I’d call full nationalisation of an industry “simple”, especially when it steps on American toes that much. But I guess yes, it is an option.

Okay, it’s just that the argument you wrote out there has implications far beyond the mail.

In practice, very little. People who are in unions tend to be a lot of other things first. Historically unions have endorsed the NDP, but the NDP never got close to actual federal power.

They can stop work. That’s close to the only thing they can do, and they usually don’t want to.

Yeah, it would appear their plan was just to amputate everything except the NE, maybe because it would be indefensible.

It seems legally dicey anyway, for the exact reasons they mentioned. Going on strike is a charter right, and it’s clear by this point the power will get used pretty much every time.

Unions have pretty limited purview, so I’m not sure I could ever describe them as “corrupt with power”. At worst they become stuck in the old way of doing things, which this seems like an example of.

So are you one of those people that want no taxes or government? Like, sure, mail delivery isn’t a human right, but neither are things we all agree someone should care for, like a transportation network of any kind.

Seems like a reasonable thing to bet a whole economy on. /s

I mean, back when it was a huge, poorly understood leap past previous technology it maybe was, but we know now that this is pretty much as good as it can do, just by scaling.

Hey, that’s really neat!

I wish it included a combined whole world graph, though. 6% or whatever drop in US trade sounds small, but that’s such a huge market for us, while even a sliver more trade with, I dunno, Cameroon will amount to a big jump. I don’t know whether it’s going up or down overall.

An honest interlocutor would consider the possibility that either could be the alternate reality.

Hilarious of you to say this when the entire western world is imploding on itself.

Which time? A lot of stuff has happened; WWII is still closer to present than to Das Kapital.

Ooor everyone else is right and you’re a zealot reading what you want into a holy book.

his union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

It’s been more than a few years, and I’m not sure Marx’s imminent revolution is any more imminent.

Don’t hold your breath, they’re pretty mid at their actual job.

What you claim is a common misreading of what Marx wrote about money.

Sooo it’s not just me, lots of other people read it this way too.

In other words, the need for money arose from the economic system, and gold just happened to be the best material to fill that role at the time. It’s a functional argument, not a dogmatic one.

Sure, which is entirely reasonable if you’re writing in the Victorian era, and no other kind of money has existed to your knowledge (Europeans didn’t pay much mind to what the deal was with cowrie shells). As was the thing about the spread of railways leading immediately to global communism - it was a huge, unprecedented shift at the time. Scholarship advances, though.

I’ll just skip the return poo-flinging, since you’re right, we might be alone. If you mistake that for weakness that’s your problem.