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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-287
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
Empire:
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Other issues:
Empire:
Baloney:
One wonders how much AP was paid to publish this empty hype of another U.S. military industrial boondoggle that is clearly not working as advertised.
The Navy is replacing the non-functioning cannons of its three $7.5 billion(!) piece Zumwalt Class ships with launchers for missiles that do not exist.
Key quote:
> A U.S. hypersonic weapon was successfully tested over the summer and development of the missiles is continuing. The Navy wants to begin testing the system aboard the Zumwalt in 2027 or 2028, according to the Navy.
If a U.S. hypersonic missiles had really been 'successfully tested' during the summer 2024 why would it take three or four more years to even start 'testing' it from a naval platform?
Multipolarity:
Germany / Nordstream:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
@ 14 Love Donbass
The trouble many people have is with themselves, with mis-learning and unrealistic outlook.
You might talk of advanced economic or manufacturing ability, where I tend to look at past normality.
For example, it is possible to buy land and build by own work a reasonable sized quality house within a year for well under 50,000 in much of the west. My own project in a sought after area cost around 20,000.
That’s the price of a new vehicle roughly.
Energy efficiency allowed only small solar array.
A reliable 2nd hand vehicle is 1000 to 2000.
Costs after for all are minimal, you can go permie, small business/artisanat or whatever…I could make enough to live by just metal detecting if necessary, because the most basic costs (including food) are maybe 200 month.
It takes some discipline, confidence in self, being able to handle setbacks, but is mostly fun and is all learning.
Scroogeing with hard work for a year, and many could pay for this in that time.
People get onto the hamster wheel though, get fed through education , emerge with debt hopefully offset with high earnings , take on mortgage at exorbitant prices, and more debt, and they are then committed to that “lifestyle” indefinitely. They could not think outside that ‘organisation’ even if they wanted to….it’s a free world I suppose.
There is one problem though with what I suggested, if you are successful or just different, there are usually those around who would take you down, just because…just because ‘they have to so why shouldn’t you’ sort of thinking.
Most skills are not achieved via education, they are learned by apprenticeship, or hands on enthusiasm. The ‘next level’ offered by education might be worthy, but in reality most of it is surplus or pointless as far as the basis of ‘reasonable standard every day environment’ is concerned.
We already have all we need at our disposition, we have just forgotten how to manage , organise or think for ourselves.
The system does not tend to teach independence, it teaches conformity.
@ 41 Tom Pfotzer
That is valuable info on IP, I hope you keep sharing that.
I dislike IP, it hampers activity, but the mentality of larger businesses I have not found attentive either. Many seem to be focused on in house management and design and so are relatively closed.
For example, I offerred to forward a design idea to a reputable company for free, they didn’t attend but sent me to another department to ‘try’. Why should I chase around. The idea (this was fluid dynamics and vehicle design) emerged several years later from a competitor, and is now celebrated successful ‘next gen’ line of thinking.
From then I just published anything I came up with for free on whichever relevant forum saying I grant free use of idea to anyone, that IP is not ceded. If had known the above methods you mention I would have looked at those.
As I mention above, people in the west already have most of what is necessary. There is no reason for example that I should release ideas of a new form of wing, if the idea is good someone or other will think of it also in the future sometime. So such ideas become own projects in any spare time, but much more important are experimental projects such as on economising on or re-using energy, real world practical experience of those. Another example, to try to fit the highest productivity of organic agriculture in the smallest space….simple question, is someone able to produce all the (quality) food they need on say 500m2 of land ?
There are hundreds of fun, useful , learning examples of projects that could be found, and fortunately the amount of people independently involving themselves in various fields of learning seems always to be increasing.
There is a lot that could handle a rethinking.
Posted by: Ornot | Dec 1 2024 21:58 utc | 61
As every Econ101 student should know, a tariff is the same as a tax, as does nothing to the exporter aside from making its products costlier to buy, which contributes mightily to inflation in the tariff imposing nation. Trump’s tariff war on China was the prime source of the inflation that ravaged the Empire during his first term. Clearly, Trump didn’t learn his lesson. As Russia and China discovered with sanctions and tariffs, there are many more markets for their goods than the declining Outlaw US Empire. Trump’s threat against Mexico and Canada is a numbskull move since many parts are made there that are exported for final assembly within the Empire, and driving up their cost will cost jobs at those assembly plants thus increasing unemployment in the midst of the Depression the bottom 90% are experiencing and have since 2008 if not 1999. Here’s Richard Wolff on the issue:
Last night, apparently, President-elect Trump announced, as if he were already the president, the tariffs he’s going to hit Mexico and Canada, which would turn out to be larger than the ones he was going to do on China. Which is funny because it was literally only a matter of weeks ago that we got the reverse kind of story, that China would be the great target and almost no mention of Mexico and Canada. And one of the reasons, the main reason the president gave is he’s going to stop immigration. And there was, again, the usual language about invasion.
Well, if you put a 25% tariff, let me just do a very simple economic lesson. You put a 25% tariff on Mexico. It means all of that product that Mexico produces and ships to the U.S. will now cost suddenly 25% more, because every importer of Mexican goods will have to give a 25% tax, that’s what a tariff is, to Uncle Sam.
It’ll be American importers paying tax to the American government. Now, there’s two things you want to think about here. Number one, the Republican Party used to be thought of as the party against taxes. But it isn’t. In its new incarnation, it is a massively taxing entity. That’s what it’s doing. Tariff is a kind of tax. It doesn’t stop being a tax because you call it a tariff. That’s silly. But here’s the part I like even more, just for the irony. If you do that, Mexicans will be able to sell much less produce in the U.S. because it’s more expensive. So they won’t be able to sell. So they’ll lay off workers.
Well, if you lay off a worker in Mexico, you’re confronting that worker with two choices. You can quietly go home, lie down, and die. That’s your one shot. Here’s your second shot. Collect your family and try to migrate to the United States to get a job. This program will worsen the immigration it is ostensibly supposed to stop. And that incoherence, that’s the single most impressive quality, not just of Mr. Trump, but of Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary. What’s coming out of their mouths is more of this advertising junk that may be good for a campaign, but does not work as a policy.
And here’s what Michael Hudson had to say about the 100% tariff on China policy:
And he’s proposed a 100% tariff on Chinese goods, which will double immediately the prices of all the consumer goods through Walmart, and also the industrial goods needed by American companies of vital components that they’re getting from China, from Apple to all sorts of computer makers, to automobiles, to airplanes, right down the line.
Well, China will simply say, Well, we don’t want – I think we’ve discussed this on an earlier show with Nima – we don’t want America to get rich and have the money to use the tariff receipts from our trade to spend on surrounding us with military installations – you know – we’re going to impose our own 100% tariff on goods sold to the United States. So you can just see where this is leading: enormous rise in prices and a disruption of the American economy.
As ought to be very clear, neither Trump nor his advisors have any clue as to what their policy proposals will do to the domestic economy. And for tariffs to generate revenue, the taxed goods must be imported from those nations, and when the volume of those imports falls off the cliff as they will, the pipedream of a massive revenue generating machine will vanish into the whisp of smoke it was at the beginning. And the Depression for the bottom 90% will deepen. However, there’s one possibility: The Republican Congress will need to be the vehicle that enacts the tariffs, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll see the great fallacy in Trump’s policy, for politically, they’ll be just as responsible for the economic damage done as Trump, and most will want to be reelected.
Posted by: karlof1 | Dec 1 2024 22:46 utc | 67
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