shipwreck [comrade/them]

Yes, and that’s why the US is going to make it very difficult for them to do so.

Businesses don’t just exist in a vacuum. They have suppliers and vendors and collaborators and customers, the entire chain of which most have been locked into more or less the same ecosystem, and taking a leap of faith to completely switch over to an entirely different ecosystem alone is going to be very costly especially if the US declares very stringent rules that you have to follow.

Of course, companies can opt out of doing business with the “Western world” (and I think this kind of “regionalism” is where the world is heading towards) and stick to Asian businesses that are already under the Chinese sphere, but it’s going to make a lot of international businesses think twice, whether such changes will be worth it for their businesses (we’re talking about replacing hardware, revamping existing protocols, retraining staff etc.)

And here’s the kicker: China as long as it remains an export-led economy will need to make profit from exports to maintain their growth, and if international demand for their technology is dampened for political reasons, then it ends up hurting China’s technology sector.

The US knows this, probably their only chance at creating substantial damage to China, and will play this card as relentlessly as it can.

China’a only way out is to transition into a domestic consumption economy to shake off the US control, and that’s why the US is only sanctioning Huawei, and not other mobile phone manufacturers because they want China to keep relying on export for their plan to work. Sanctioning all the Chinese companies at the same time is only going to accelerate China’s move toward an internal circulation model, which is the US’s worse nightmare because they can no longer exert their control over China.

Meanwhile, Huawei has been forced to retreat “back” to China and has been destroying its competition at home, allowing Chinese native technology to flourish, while the competitors have retreated “out” to the overseas market to displace Huawei’s position there.

This is simply one of the first steps towards US-China decoupling.

The US knows that it cannot contain China, cannot stop China from technologically surpassing itself. But the US still controls the global tech industry market, and China is still distances from transitioning away an export-led economy.

That’s why the US is specifically targeting Huawei. These targets were very specifically and strategically chosen. They want Huawei to succeed in developing their native technology and architectures, so down the road the US can simply force the rest of the world to choose between Apple/Google ecosystems, or the Chinese Harmony ecosystem, citing technical incompatibility between the two (many US government agencies already have a strict requirement regarding technology use involving Chinese components).

The global tech sector has far too much invested in and have their entire operations built around the existing Apple/Google/Amazon ecosystems so it will become very painful and costly to make the switch even if a superior Chinese alternative is available. At the end of the day, if you want to earn dollars, as a business, you’d have to weigh how much you’d be willing to risk losing (especially against your competitors) when the US declares that use of native Chinese technology is no longer accepted in your business dealing with them.

This Tiktok debacle is really just setting up the legal precedences for what they actually intend to commit to in their strategic planning down the road.

To understand the landlord empire, you need to think like a landlord. Microsoft did not dominate the consumer market because they made the best products, but because they were the best at using legal means to stop their competitors from penetrating the market.

“Russia only knew how because they copied Nazi rocket technology!”

lol I don’t know anything about milblogging but do know a thing or two about the Russian space program.

I don’t think you realize how many tons and tons of NATO weapons and munitions have been depleted in Ukraine over the past two years, not just on the battlefield, but the relentless cruise missile strikes on the ammunition depots and warehouses where all the equipments and munitions just went up in smokes.

There is no coming back from this. I have said before, the war in Ukraine can only end in the demilitarization of NATO.

I agree with the commenter below the Simplicius article that the author didn’t do his homework when it comes to Russian scramjet hypersonic missiles:

Simplicius’s assertion that the Zircon looks more like Oniks and less like Boeing’s X-51 Waverider does not have a factual basis and is purely the author’s own uninformed speculation.

Because believe it or not, Boeing’s Waverider is a direct descendent of the Soviet/Russian Kholod experimental scramjet rocket project that became part of the CIAM/NASA collaboration project in the 1990s.

In fact, NASA even published test flight results of the Kholod: 1996 results, 1998 results

(Note: NASA seems to have scrubbed these papers from their website, which were still accessible as of late 2023. Fortunately the Internet Archive has a copy of them, which I have retrieved and linked here. Interesting, isn’t it?)

From Wikipedia’s Kholod entry:

Russia would continue to research scramjet platforms under the ORYOL-2-1 program that focused on developing the GLL-8 Igla platform. The success of the Kholod program led to the development of NASA’s X-43 to further refine the mechanics of scramjets and to develop control surfaces to enable maneuverability at hypersonic speeds.

This is what NASA’s X-43 looks like:

This is what Boeing’s X-51 Waverider looks like:

This is what Russia’s GLL variant GLL-AP looks like:

This is what P-800 Oniks looks like, which Simplicius thinks is the predecessor of Zircon:

Interesting, isn’t it?

From Anatoly Zak’s Russian Space Web’s Kholod entry (a great resource for Soviet/Russian space program, and the author is anti-Putin and a strong critic of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, if that matters to you):

During the 1990s, when the Russian space program was largely left for dead, the nation’s engineers flight-tested a pioneering propulsion system that one day might revolutionize space travel. Known as scramjet, for supersonic combustion ramjet, the engine still remains a cutting-edge technology, while its early history in Russia has ended up largely forgotten.

…

In November 1994, NASA finally joined the Kholod program. During the same year, Department 101 at the KB Khimavtomatiki propulsion bureau, KBKhA, in the city of Voronezh took over the development of the scramjet engine, which was now designated 58L. (331) The engine was re-designed to withstand higher temperatures, which would result from sustained operation of the engine in a supersonic combustion mode.

A NASA-sponsored test mission, which featured an upgraded engine supplied by KBKhA lifted off on February 12, 1998. With the goal of reaching a speed of Mach 6.5, the Kholod vehicle accelerated from Mach 3 to around Mach 6.41-6.47, after successfully firing for record-breaking 77 seconds at a maximum altitude of 27.1 kilometers. (688, 331, 689) Ironically, despite its terrible economic woes in the 1990s, Russia became the first to fly a scramjet vehicle.

NASA likely used the experience from the Kholod project to build an unmanned experimental aircraft with a scramjet engine designated X-43A. The program was conducted jointly by NASA’s Langley and Dryden research centers. Not coincidently, Dryden had participated in the last launch of the Kholod vehicle on behalf of NASA. Record-breaking flights of the X-43A vehicle were first attempted just three years after the last launch of Kholod.

The summary is, Russia has been field testing experimental scramjet rocket propulsion for at least 30 years, based on earlier Soviet research. As usual, the Americans gave up on the project early, while the Soviets/Russians went on to master the technology (close cycle staged combustion rocket engine e.g. RD-170/RD-180 comes to mind).

We don’t have the full details, of course, but it is far more likely that the Zircon is a descendant of the Kholod/GLL line than that of P-800 Oniks, which is why the design that we know of bears such resemblance to Boeing’s Waverider, which is itself also a descendant of Kholod.

Simplicius seems to know a lot of military stuff, but honestly Soviet/Russian space program appears out of his depth.

To be fair, Israeli F-35s have entered Iranian airspace before. We just don’t know how many other countries are involved in the logistics, assuming the story is true,

Isn’t this the opening of The Sum of All Fears? Escobar has been watching too many Tom Clancy movies recently?

As I said, if it’s one plane going down it is very easy to pretend like nothing is happening and everyone just keeps quiet about it, especially when it is in nobody’s interest to spark a wider confrontation. This happens all the time on the battlefield.

I’m not saying the story is true, just pointing out that there could be recovery operations underway and how are we supposed to know about this if no one is reporting on it?

Planes malfunction all the time and they don’t all get reported.

Back in 2017, an Israeli F-35 was downed in Syria due to “bird strikes”, though there are rumors that it was shot down by Russian air defenses.

Generally speaking, if only one plane goes down, you can blame it on malfunction. If you have four planes in a sortie and they all go down, it’s much harder to cover up.

Russell Bentley has been killed, by the Russians.

From Telegram:

They write that our Texas is lost.

Everything.

An elderly man, a sweet romantic, who came to us from distant America, was killed by some crazed werewolves in military uniform.

I see no point in holding anything back now. On April 8, Russell was detained at the scene of the shooting [filming the aftermath of Ukrainian bombing], where the Texan came to help the victims. The military detained, most likely they were talking about tank crews of the 5th brigade. They were probably confused by his accent, and they decided that they had caught a spy. And they behaved with him accordingly, although he had both a passport and a military ID.

Just think what Texas could have thought in the last minutes of his life, who 10 years ago came here at the call of his heart to defend the besieged Donetsk, who had unlimited trust in all people in uniform, and in people in general, his usual expression was: “Bro.”

There’s a lot to be said about Texas. He was an Orthodox Christian, found love in Donetsk and lived with his Lyudmila in Petrovka. Story for the film. In his wallet he had a portrait of his wife right next to his own driver’s license photo, he arranged them in such a way that when the wallet was closed, it turned out that the spouses were kissing…

Is this what he remembered when these freaks kicked him? About your wife? Mom?

He loved his mother very much, he told me in an interview that once during heavy shelling he thought: “But if I die now, I will immediately meet my mother.”

I don’t know why we should take Kyiv and Odessa now. War must be waged with clean hands or not waged at all.

Now only two things can be achieved: punishment of the guilty and an Orthodox funeral for Russell. And a funeral is possible only when the body is given away.

Can we at least achieve this?!

There are even worse rumors about what had been done to him, I’m holding off now awaiting confirmation.

Germany cannot do anything without the dollar.

They desperately need the foreign aid to happen so that Israel and Ukraine can use those dollars to buy stuff from Europe, which in turn allowing European countries to earn dollars to then import the expensive energy since they were cut off from Russian oil and gas that they themselves sanctioned. Their economy is heavily dependent on the US flooding those regions with billions and billions of foreign aid dollars.

That’s why Germany will support the US genocide to the end. Biden is making them choose between saving Gazan Palestinian lives or saving their own. The answer is clear.

This is how American hegemony works.

Here is the circular flow of the “foreign aid”:

US legislature approves spending -> US treasury spends -> Federal Reserve creates the dollars and credit into the Ukrainian and Israeli accounts -> Ukraine/Israel buy stuff from Europe -> Europe imports American oil and gas -> Dollars go back to US companies -> Additional taxes destroyed by US treasury

Absolute masterful play by Biden. Provoking a war with Iran got the Republicans to fold on Ukraine, after dragging it out for so many months. I guess their Zionist donors got angry at them finally. I know some here still see Biden as this senile figure but this is some House of Cards level shit.

This bill has far reaching implications, allowing Biden’s tier 1 patreon subscribers to finally get the exclusive treats they were promised, the Democrats out-classing the Republicans in their capacity to hand out treats (which is a huge deal for the Republican donors) and sowing an internal division among the GOP, and of course, propping up dollar hegemony by unleashing a huge volume of dollar liquidity to the foreign sector.

This is the Biden administration fully literate about the weaponization of dollar and using it masterfully for pure evil intentions, killing three birds with one stone.

It is both incredible and appalling to witness. I was still hoping that the Republican bickering could somehow delay the funding, but they simply could not out-play Biden’s political acumen.

He’s clearly good at some stuff but has a tendency to get into debates and being defensive/hostile about topics he know nothing about. It’s one thing to spark an intellectual discussion, it’s another to stubbornly hold on to a position when you are clearly proven wrong, and not having the humility to acknowledge the need to learn from others that you deem “inferior” to yourself. That’s the vibe I got from him.

He has some weird animosity against Modern Monetary Theory (of which Hudson is a part of) and even went into a weird fight on Twitter about it despite knowing little about how money and debt work.

Whatever the insinuation was, it’s important to point out that Hudson is not anti-semitic (the accusation is wild).

If you follow his works of the history of debt, there is a lot of calling out anti-semitism in medieval Europe and giving me completely useless trivia like “did you know when Jews were expelled from England by Edward I under the excuse of “usury”, Christian bankers like the Lombardians and the Cahorsins [Italian and French bankers] that had recently arrived in England were the ones charging exorbitant usury rates that had outcompeted and even drove down the interest rates the Jewish bankers charged. So the expulsion of the Jews by saying it was due to “usury” alone clearly does not stand, it had components of anti-semitic hatred.”

It is also important to note that Hudson worked closely with the late David Graeber, whose Debt: the First 5000 Years (one of the authoritative works on the subject of money and debt, which Roderic should read) was based on the research from Harvard Peabody Museum led by Hudson, focusing more on the anthropology side while Hudson’s works focused on the economic history. They actually had a collaboration project going until Graeber’s unexpected death in 2020.

It’s funny that if you take Roderic at face value, he seems to suggest that he’s the one who knows all this stuff and Hudson is just some kind of crank who knows nothing about capitalism and Marxism.

Yes but that would mean his views might get challenged by Hexbear posters. Imagine getting torn apart by Hexbears. Personally, I have learned to enjoy this process (if you know of my other account lol), but I can understand why others might not be able to take it well.

lmao that comment of mine was way too pessimistic about de-dollarization to be a “Hudsonite” post.

To be fair, this dude wrote some good articles but I’ve also seen his past bickering with the MMT folks on Twitter before, which fully exposed the fact that he simply doesn’t understand monetary theory and when challenged, started to talk out of his ass about a topic that is clearly out of his depth.

Please read Capital Vol. 3, at the very least, Roderic, if you’re seeing this.

Not yet, the vote is on Saturday.

They simply cleared some procedural rule to allow the House to vote for the bills on Saturday. What’s funny is that usually this is done by the House majority i.e. the Republicans but because they refused to play ball, the Democrats crossed over the aisle to help a Republican speaker to advance the bill to the floor. This has deepened the Republican bickering as MTG calls for Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker, to be removed for helping the Democrats to advance the aid to Ukraine.

After the House votes, the bills (which are now separate for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan) will be bundled together and sent to the Senate. The Democrats have hinted that they will sabotage it at the Senate if Ukraine’s bill isn’t among them.

I just posted earlier that this is giving me major Ukraine war deja vu vibes: they’re going to keep poking until Iran has to respond somehow. It’s repeatedly calling Iran’s bluff until Iran is no longer bluffing.

Then they will finally get the war they wanted. Biden administration seems to be addicted to this method now.

Yes, they are putting the Iranians on a difficult position, quite deliberately.

I’m getting the Ukraine war deja vu right now. Russia was placed in a damned if you do, and damned if you don’t situation as the Ukrainians ramped up their shelling of Donbass.