The US slowly realising that bank notes don't just morph into objects
this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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One of my favorite stories of the year has to be EU's attempt to convert money into artillery shells. They allocated a bunch of money to this and thought that shells would magically appear. Instead they created a situation where there's a limited supply of a commodity with a market flush with cash, and as anybody with even a modicum of economic understanding could've told them this resulted in prices going through the roof. So shells went from around 2k per shell to 8k per shell. 😂
The west is run by literal evil clowns.
Hey, it means that GDP got bigger! Who needs real things if line went up?
Were EU governments bidding against one another?
I'm guessing companies just jacked up the price and the governments wrote blank cheques to them. I imagine corruption is likely a factor here too.
look understanding that things don't just magically appear at the shop is marxism
that is very succinctly putting into words as to why I'm going crazy at my job
but look at all this paper GDP (not even paper it's just 1s and 0s on some computer) we have over China
I feel like, a while ago, we've entered some weird sort of alienation from work event horizon where the people at the top absolutely forgot you need "person who does stuff" eventually. Like it's so many levels and excel spreadsheets and white papers and what have you removed the idea that the people who produce things aren't some aetheric blob but like, actual people doing things, is forgotten.
Only when the last process has been streamlined, the final KPI hit, and the final downsizing accomplished, will we realize we cannot build from money or something
It's not that the US can't afford it, they can't not afford it, the entire western economic system is built on exploitation. It's subduing people and taking their shit, including their labor for cheap. It knows no other way. So it may not be able to afford war, but even more so, it can't afford not to do war.
It's stuck unless it changes its economic system.
That's all true, but the immediate issue for the west is that it's now largely deindustrialized and isn't able to keep up industrially even with Russia, let alone China. This is not a problem that has any clear solution either. Building out an industrial base requires huge up front investment, it requires an education system that can produce the workers, and engineers who would build it, it needs a huge long term commitment from the government, and so on. None of these things are possible under the current political and economic system that the west champions.
extremely critical support to Thatcher Reagan and Pinochet in their ongoing campaign to destroy the west
😄
It also would require giving labor a lot more power which is a major contradiction with neoliberalism
Exactly, depriving labour of power was the major drive behind the neoliberal globalism push.
I agree with everything you are saying. We are on the same page here. I am also saying that they are utterly devoted to the mode of economics that is based on exploitation and that can only go on for so long. They need a long term commitment to change that but without a complete change in mindset and mode of economics, they need conflict and that is not as successful anymore vs the Victorian era.
Do these fucking useless crakkkers ever consider that there is enough war, genocide and oppression going on? Capitalism is already on the way out, an no matter how many more F-35 submarines the U.S. creates, China and Russia now have the technological, material and supply chain upper hand.
Lol, you just assumed they care about material reality or other humans!
The death and destruction they reap is not real to them because they conveniently never have to see it or have reality put their beliefs to question.
Honestly? At this point I fully believe that the only way humanity can move past this wretched age, is for the west and particularly the US to eventually get a taste of its own medicine, and then hopefully be suppressed forevermore. There can be no remotely peaceful, equitable coexistence so long as the legion of white supremacists still exists, IMO- it's just a matter of when (or if the west can be de-fanged and neutered, and if things can be delayed until the west crumbles of from its own internal contradictions).
I'm an atheist and ex-Catholic- but if not, I'd say that the US is undeniably the antichrist- when Iran calls AmeriKKKa "satan," or when people from the Caribbean call it "Babylon," they're if anything understating it. Not because of the LGBT rights, etc (if anything those are some of the brief glimpses of humanity in the west) but because of their political systems and ideology- the US is the enemy of humanity in my POV, if there is a "great filter" - for humanity, IMO it's the imperialist west.
Good.
This is a recent photo of the 155mm shell assembly line at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant. Worn down machines on a grimey line. What struck me is how dark the lighting is; I've been to ordinary Chinese factories (ones not handling high explosives) which were much better lit.
If you slapped some skulls, parchments and stained glass windows here and there this could easily passed for grimdark warhammer 40k manufactorium.
That does look grim as fuck.
Squeezing every cent of profit out of this shitshow.
Because war is a racket
Gosh i hope that's true and not some Raytheon ghoul mucking around with chatgpt to make another moar subsidies plz plea in a paper of record
Considering the lack of ammo to send to Ukraine and Israel and the production ramp up that hasn't happened yet, I'd say the MIC's interest in keeping margins as high as possible stays supreme.
I think they'd be complaining about the lack of funds if that was the case, and not about the absolute hubris of not being able to make more weapons because you moved your industrial base to China.
Moves industry to China. China becomes more industrialized. You start cold war with China which now has all your industry. You can't do anything to match their industry because you have no industry. Surprised Pikachu face.
I have the money to buy a titanium bicycle. They just don't build one cheap enough.
On a side note, the video starts from "America want to buy thousands of drones to counter China as an opportunity for a game changing shift" - this is exactly what underdogs in every arms race ever said as they pushed some jeune ecole plans - and it was basically never right because those "new paradigms" were either cope from the start or the dominating opponent also quick catched the real shift and produced more and better of the new weapons. It's pretty interesting that USA military adopt loser speech and think patterns.
Exactly, if there's some new innovation that's actually effective then everyone will quickly adapt to it.
Especially you can already notice many countries to be very excited by cheap and fairly simple drones successfully used against very expensive vehicles. For example Iran being actually on the forefront of that tech now and embracing it with eagerness (to be fair, Iran had keen interest in drone warfare for years by now, so it's logical). Sure, in case of Russia it is effective because Russia have good military infrastructure, doctrine, logistics and support to base those on, but those still look like some measure of equalizer.
I agree, the drones Iran developed are a really good example of an innovation that's being rapidly adopted now.
If they thought it was that game changing would they really be talking about it?
Why not since everyone know that already. Ukraine war proven that not as much changed in the peer warfare since WW2 as Usians would like when they focused their military on imperializing much weaker states by the aerial warfare, but the mass drone usage is pretty much already acknowledged as the biggest change that came out of that war. And US analysts are probably burned by this since US previously concentrated on big and expensive drones being essentially unmanned planes, like the Reaper for example.
But they do have reasonable hope of this particular tool of warfare to turn to their favour since US is after all pioneer in aerial electronics. What they missed though is one key factor that makes that mass drone warfare effective, it the "mass" keyword, Ukraine, Russia and countries paying attention like Iran all are manufacturing those drones pretty cheap compared to their usefulness, but US MIC will never be able to do that. I mean sure they will make a lot of drones, but not nearly enough and every one of them will be overengineered and also US military will pay for it the usual multiple price.
“You didn’t build that”- Obamna
Lol. Lmao even.