China is going to flip the script very soon.

They’re one of the few rapidly developing economies left, following the post Soviet stagnation.

But that just introduces another superpower on the world stage. It doesn’t eliminate the US in any material capacity.

America’s only real power remaining is the military

America’s biggest card to play is the Petrodollar. The military has facilitated destruction of competition. But our ability to dictate currency flow and command global trade via a monetary system our federal bank controls is so much more important.

Everyone keeps saying Europe and Asia will go their own way. Let me know when they finally do. Because I’m still waiting.

according to data from the American Enterprise Institute

Don’t ask who pays their bills

If y’all don’t want it slapped, leave that cake in the kitchen. Men just asking for it. We see how you’re dressed.

Americans are greedy people and a coordinated effort by China, Japan, and the UK could sink the US economy.

These three countries aren’t aligned, much less in alignment ideologically. Hell, they aren’t even aligned internally. The US isn’t the only county that reverses directions every four to eight years.

Bo Xilai was very nearly China’s Premier and would have taken the country in a radically different direction absent his expulsion in 2013.

Nigel Farrage’s Reform UK has a totally different plan for the country than Starmer.

The US economy will likely collapse on it’s own if it continues on the path it’s on.

The county cycles through recessions every 10 years or so. If anything, we’re overdue. It doesn’t end after a bad business cycle.

The BRICS aren’t outside US sphere of influence. India is squarely within it. South Africa is very friendly. Brazil is friendly. Russia had been friendly under Bush and early Obama. And China’s our number one trading partner - hardly an enemy, except in the fevered imagination of anti-China hawks.

The US is clearly in a state of decline and the soft power it’s able to wield today is considerably less than it held in the past

I gotta disagree. Absent a serious geopolitical rival - the USSR - we’ve rapidly expanded our influence across Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia.

India’s a great example. They were squarely in Soviet influence in the 80s and fell out rapidly with the disintegration of the Soviet sphere.

Same with Argentina, Yugoslavia, even Cuba and North Korea. Countries that flirted with Socialism prior to '91 fled from it afterwards. Countries committed to Marxist Leninism thawed to capitalist experimentation. All that came out of American think tanks and propaganda mills and lobbying firms.

While it’s true that the US was pretty brazen in invading Korea and Vietnam, it was also able to control the narrative better and did things either covertly or had some sort of pretense for it, and the postwar order also involved significant economic investment in places like Europe, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, all of which helped generate soft power.

The US lacked global financial and technological dominance in the 60s and 70s. The catastrophes of Korea and Vietnam were far realer in the moment. It wasn’t until Reagan and Clinton they they were massaged away.

The US gained influence and continues to gain influence through it’s corporate expansion. The US Federal Government might be losing its grip, but that’s less and less the seat of real material authority.

it’s something Putin would greatly enjoy

Why would Putin enjoy a heavy US naval presence in the contested Artic Circle waters?

strategically it greatly benefits his aims in Ukraine for the EU to have its attention taken by the US

The Danish are not meaningfully contributing to the Ukraine conflict. And there is no reason to believe the big EU militaries would stop feeding supplies to Ukraine if the US invaded Greenland.

And in some of the stories Lex Luthor loses his hair because of his kryptonite experiments.

In Smallville, the spacecraft carrying Superman brings a kryptonite meteor swarm with it. Lex’s exposure to the meteors is the cause of his premature baldness and a partial reason for his resentment of The Alien.

In fairness, Doomsday beat Superman in a straight knuckle dust up, no kryptonite required. So that’s also a Superman weakness.

Why do liberals continue to assert American fascists acting on behalf of international finance and the O&G industry are always and forever a cat’s paw for the Evil Foreigners?

Is it really that hard to believe American plutocrats might be the primary beneficiary of an American campaign to expand America’s territory?

“We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense,” Trump told The Atlantic in an interview published Jan. 4, describing the island as reportedly “surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships.”

The content slop for the hogs.

But it’s also something Steven Miller has been sincerely lobbying for

First Amendment was always a polite fiction of the regime. Americans get to pretend they have it until they upset someone with actual power.

But you’re always free to run scams, to slander the weak and vulnerable, and to rally bigots into a lynch mob. So the idea of Free Speech remains valuable to demagogues and unscrupulous marketing goons alike.

Cunnalingus appreciators win again

I mean, the title may be true, but I’d hardly call this a crazy law. Draconian censorship is routine and endemic globally. It’s the Free Speech policy that’s “crazy”.

As more media is heavily monetized, the real appeal of censorship is as a revenue source. Surveillance, draconian administration, and targeting of dissidents all become income streams for the platforms.

Nothing unusual about that, either

Any decent business wants dependable people who will follow the processes and work in a team.

I mean, they want people who can do the job. And most businesses don’t need a guy who can program fantastically complex solutions in obscure languages at a breakneck pace.

They also don’t want to pay above the “going rate”, which is inevitably less than what the market actually demands.

So while programming contests are fun, they don’t do much to improve your pay scale. Much better to climb the management chain and lead programmers than excelling at the actual work. Then you get to take credit for whole teams and land an outsized bonus as a result.

The more the US tries to use force to make countries fall in line, the more people look to alternatives.

That’s never actually been true. US force bent the world after WW2, from the Years of Lead to the Jakarta Method. Vietnam is the exception that still proves the rule - we were doing profitable business with Vietnam barely twenty years after the last helicopter left Saigon. Similarly, we fully control the Sunni Triangle in the south of Iraq, we’ve flattened Libya, overthrown Syria, and we’re currently strangling Iran to death.

The world has never been more beholden to the US than it is today. Trump hasn’t changed that. If anything, he’s accelerated it.

I think losing an aircraft carrier would give the US serious pause. Outside that, no idea. Maybe we finally pull the trigger and nuke someone, and that scares the rest of the world enough to start actively sanctioning us. Maybe not, though.

It does seem like most of Europe, Canada, and East Asia are happy to be in the pocket of US financial interests. Even folks who don’t like Trump haven’t bothered to break away from JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs.

Nobody wants to risk fucking with the money of the global hegemon. And so long as the US is the wealthiest nation on Earth, what’s going to deter them?

Intel implemented significant layoffs in 2025 as part of a major restructuring under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan, aiming to reduce its core workforce by about 25,000 (roughly 15-20%) by year-end to streamline operations and cut expenses

Then you’ve got Kalshi… paying $110-140k, then working you to the bone on Christmas Eve.

Like, you’re better off as some schmick front end developer at a midcap company than a “top tier” developer at a code mill in Silicon Valley.

Bad people don’t die

Selection bias. Bad people die all the time, and then we forget about them (or never learn about them) because they stop being in the spotlight.

Nobody talks about the Koch Brothers or the Waltons anymore, as they’ve degraded to irrelevance. Nobody talks about the Carnegies or Fords or Hoovers anymore, for the same reason.

Steve Jobs was an evil fuck and he’s gone now, so he’s off the radar.

Meanwhile, nobody had Lucky Palmer pegged as a sociopath ten years ago and now he’s doing James Bond Villain tier war crimes.

You can, but you’re going to want to have him in your sights before you place the bet

This is an interation above simply taking a few hundred stuffed into a potato chip bag.