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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The source lists yield in thousand tons. I think you forgot to tack on those three extra zeros.

    Raw rice grains are made up of a white grain surrounded by a bran and inedible husk. Rice is milled to remove the husk to make brown rice. It can be milled more to remove the bran to make white rice. Obviously, this process will cause the rice grains to lose ~30% weight, reducing the milled yield weight from the raw yield weight.

    I think your choice of 700,000 tons for Russia’s total edible yield makes more sense. If Russia gave the DPRK raw rice, the DPRK would have to mill it all anyways.

    Either way, this supposed deal is very silly. Russia barely grows any rice, and this list says the DPRK actually grows more rice than Russia.

    Perhaps the propagandist misspelled wheat as rice?







  • Comprehensive49toMemes[Insert title]
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    7 days ago

    The House of the Spirits has characters that fit this description to a tee. The book was written by Isabel Allende, a cousin of Salvador Allende, and is a stylized retelling of life through the transition in Chilean politics post-colonialism through Salvador Allende to Pinochet.

    The book ends with the character and narrator Alba saying that, despite previously organizing for Allende’s socialist party, and getting raped by the military coup forces after, she will not seek vengeance on those who have injured her, choosing to believe in the hope that one day the human cycle of hate and revenge will be broken.

    Yes, let me lie down and let myself get run over by capitalists because then maybe they won’t also run over my children.

    Because of her simplistic writing on ‘cycle of violence bad’ while ignoring Marxist analysis, Isabel Allende seems to be a darling in liberal circles. Obama gave her a Presidential Medal of Freedom.






  • This is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem. Oil-producing nations don’t want to join the BRICS financial system if the benefits and usage of the new system are not better than the current system. This wasn’t an issue with the first US-created system because no international financial system existed before.

    That’s why BRICS is courting Saudi Arabia as a member, and will definitely have Iran join eventually. Having Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers, as a member definitely helps this along. Russia, China, and Brazil combined already produce more oil than the USA.




  • Please take the effort to understand blockchain before immediately denouncing it. It is useful in extremely specific conditions of low trust between a low number of equal peers. The one special thing about blockchain is that all users keep a ledger, a record of all transactions, and cross-verify it with one another.

    In most scenarios, this feature is completely useless and a waste of energy because all users have to spend electricity on verifying random transactions by other people. For example, with you and your bank account, there is no reason to use blockchain because your bank is the one trusted entity and already keeps all the records of your money, so they can just use regular server infrastructure for all their customers. Using blockchain here would be unnecessary; if you did, you, your bank, and all the bank’s other customers would waste energy verifying each other’s transactions.

    However, for transactions between nations, there is no one trusted entity because all nations are essentially equal in their trust level, or at least would like to be treated as such. The main problem with the current financial system is that the US has positioned itself (and its puppet the IMF) as the one trusted entity and wields its power indiscriminately and with abandon. Thus to fix this, BRICS must ensure there is no need for one trusted entity in the global financial system, so this is where blockchain comes in.

    Basically, the BRICS plan is for every participating nation’s central bank to keep a blockchain ledger, such that when they settle debts and do global transactions between each other, all of the transactions are recorded and verified on every other nation’s central bank blockchain ledgers, so that no one nation can insert a bunch of fake transactions into its ledger to steal money from or attack other nations. Because there are way fewer nations than people in the world, the system physically cannot suffer from the same kind of blockchain inefficiencies of too many users verifying too many transactions simply because there will never be as many users making transactions on the blockchain. Also, because BRIC’s blockchain system is backed and used by nations, the entire system will obviously have much higher security than a random blockchain made by some scammer in their garage.

    No matter the inefficiencies of blockchain, the BRICS blockchain system is vastly more efficient than the current financial system of every nation sending their money to a US bank, paying the US bank a transaction fee, and then the US bank sending it to the final destination nation.

    Ben Norton made a great video overviewing the comprehensive new financial system Russia is proposing here.


  • This paragraph is hilarious:

    This programme is cogent as a national strategy, but unfriendly to financial investors. The emphasis on investment means that supply will always run ahead of demand, leading to deflationary pressure, which is bad for corporate profits. Even the favoured high-tech sectors face intense competition that will erode margins.

    In normal language: According to western economists, investing in manufacturing is bad because it decreases prices (as goods become easier and faster to manufacture) and increases competition (due to more goods being made), making price gouging harder.

    This is a textbook case of the falling rate of profit due to capital investment.


  • Good stuff. This video raised a debate on r/TheDeprogram over GDF’S supposed ‘antisemitism’ based on his comment section.

    I don’t really see anything particularly antisemitic with the video though. GDF’s overall argument is that, while today the USA wholeheartedly backs Israel because the relationship is mutually beneficial, early in Israel’s existence this was much murkier. Thus there was a need for the Zionist lobby to forcefully align US interests with those of Israel.


  • I don’t know where y’all get the idea that I want humans to escape from Earth. That would be incredibly stupid.

    We need to go to space for resources to increase living standards at home and avoid further ecological destruction. For instance, the only good sources of helium-3 (an excellent fuel for fusion) is mining from the moon or gas collecting from gas giants. Nothing is alive in space, so there aren’t downsides to mining there like there is on Earth. Socialism is also the only way to prevent space resources from only bulking Jeff Bezos’ (or his childrens’) pockets.

    I, for one, do not think socialism means forever stalling at 2030s-era tech.


  • Eh, it’s a matter of investment into the technologies required for bulk space transport. Infrastructure like space railguns (basically a really long Hyperloop section that points towards the sky to shoot payloads into space) are feasible today (and China is researching them already: https://newatlas.com/space/china-railgun-spacecraft-orbit/ ), and more out-there ideas like space elevators are a matter of time. In order to reach full communism without strip mining the entire Earth, getting resources from lifeless space is essential. That will require lots of people in space.

    The interesting thing to see at this time is if China can show another way to sustainable population management. Capitalist countries seem intent on shrinking their overworked populations into nothingness. South Korea’s birth rates have only decreased further, even as their population keeps shrinking.





















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