Will this happen before or after Trump is in office? I feel like if the capitalists initiate the collapse during Biden’s admin, they could get away with a lot more stuff under Trump.
They could also be changing stocks into cash simply because they expect higher interest rates for it under Trump.
Funnily enough, the Indian Ocean territory is in charge of the .io top level domain. The continued existence of the TLD is in question, since Mauritius wants the Indian Ocean territory back.
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?
According to the USDA, Russia produced 1,185,000 tons of rice in 2024-2025.
On other words, if this bullshit is true, Russia has promised the DPRK 70% of its annual rice production. Very reasonable /s.
Now this is fucking praxis.
Efficiency depends on the actual cost of the ledger to the users, not just the energy costs. The decentralized BRICS ledger will only cost the participating nations servers and energy, which on the nation-level is practically negligible. The current U.S. system requires a percentage cost per transaction from all nations who have to send their money to a U.S. intermediary bank.
This means that overall, the BRICS decentralized system will actually cost participating nations much less than the current US system, not counting the other benefits of not relying on the USA. Calculations covered by Ben Norton here project 15 billion USD in savings from not paying the US transaction fees.
It’s the power of socialism!
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.
TLDR: Hezbollah is the main force preserving Lebanese sovereignty, and was the main group who freed Lebanon from former Israeli occupation. Far from being an Islamic extremist group, Hezbollah actually fights against Salafi jihadists like ISIS (who the US and Israel funded and assisted).
The US also used the China Initiative against white, American chemist Charles Lieber, whose chemistry prowess is second only to the scientist here. Lieber is now also looking for opportunities in China.
The anti-China shotgun blasts are hitting even non-Chinese scientists and pushing them to go go China.
They’re not made by Motorola (which is Chinese). They were made by Gold Apollo (which is Taiwanese).
To be specific, the original Motorola company split into Motorola Mobility, which is owned by Lenovo and sells phones, and Motorola Solutions, which is American, sells telecommunications systems, and definitely does work with Israel.
This was a really hard lesson for Hezbollah to learn to always buy shit from certified anti-imperialist sources and not from fake China. China should airlift Huawei devices to Hezbollah to replace them.
On the other hand, the Axis of Resistance has never had a better excuse to annihilate Israel in response.
This is a much more severe, successful repeat of what the US tried to pull against Lula in Brazil, with Bolsonaro as puppet. The new, US-backed president of Ecuador is now trying to change the constitution to allow US military bases in the country.
It seems that in reaction to the Latin American pink tide in the 2000s, the US pretty much backed and funded the entire conservative wave afterwards.
For more info on how this relates to similar events in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and elsewhere, BadEmpanada made a good recap here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrvEha9C_Js
I’m pretty sure killing the Russian president (and likely his cabinet, which would always be nearby) is plenty of justification for nuclear war.
I’m sure if Russia bombed the White House and the president, nukes wound start flying immediately.
This is a huge misconception lots of people have with nuclear bombs. All modern nukes are around 0.5 megatons, so no modern nukes are Tsar Bombas. That means each nuke cannot wipe out more than a ~5 mile radius max.
Humans have already tested more than 2000 nukes and we’re still here.
Here’s the video from Brian Berletic you mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCCh8-nE7Z0
The key source they both are referencing is the NYT bragging about CIA bases in Ukraine: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html
There is no ‘stretch’ about this if even the NYT is talking about it in the open.
The Global South cannot get nukes fast enough. The only way to deter the US is to show that it will get glassed by everyone if it tries any shit.
Luckily the US’s non-existent industry can’t really sustain a prolonged nuclear arms race (e.g. how slow even conventional US munitions are being built). Back in the Cold War, the USA used the nuclear arms race to waste Soviet industrial resources. Now, the Global South can flip the same strategy on the US.
So what if the USA loses 20%? All it does it change the calculus for US capitalists a little bit. It is still a great deal for deleting China.
You are confusing the rather ambiguous definition of a “city” in the USA with the actual distribution of people in said “city”. US city populations aren’t distributed like Hiroshima/Nagasaki, they’re much more spread out (Even then, the US’s bombs weren’t enough to kill everyone in the municipal city area). Because of US sprawl, it doesn’t take just one 0.6 megaton warhead to eliminate a city’s inhabitants, it takes 4+. For example, New York City technically has ~8 million residents, but it takes ~5 0.6 megaton nukes to cover the entire city. As cities get smaller populations in the USA, they get much more spread out, making this problem worse. As another example, take Virginia Beach, a “city” that is 100% suburbs. Just to kill all residents, it also takes another 4 nukes. At this rate, China will very quickly run out of nukes in a casualty v. casualty exchange with the USA. If we approximate that each city takes ~5 nukes, China can currently only eliminate 20% of the US population at maximum as you estimate.
The problem is that we can apply the same density-maximization to the US nuking China, in which case everything looks much worse. China’s cities are much larger, much denser, and there are way more of them. Because China is denser, the US simply gets more bang-for-the-buck per nuke. In that sense, the US could cripple China much faster than the other way around by killing many more people with way fewer nukes.
In my calculations, I assume that both nations seek full elimination of the other. As I explained in my other post, over time there are diminishing returns per nuke as nations run out of dense population targets and trend toward sparser targets. That is why I calculated using average population density.
I have already addressed the environmental destruction / nuclear winter talking point below. In short, new research, experiences from the Kuwaiti oil well fires and various wildfires, and the switch from flammable wood to nonflammable concrete and steel in city buildings combine to show that nuclear winter simply would be nowhere as severe as initially predicted in the 1980s. Fallout from nuclear bombs only lasts around a week due to short half-lives. Assuming decent amounts of prior preparation of necessary supplies and tech in hardened bunkers (which major Cold War countries did kinda do before), it is survivable, especially if China only kills 20% of the US population in certain centralized cities. At current, there are plenty of Wyoming farmers who would survive unscathed, put up some greenhouses, and weather out the storm.
Previously, China could get away with low nuclear bomb counts because it could depend on Russia and/or court the West. Now they can’t do that. Russia has its own worries in Europe, and the USA is hellbent on destroying China. The USSR has shown the number of nukes required to go against the USA alone. China is clearly responding to these concerns by building up to at least 1000 nukes, which should increase the cost to the US to ~30% of its population based on your estimates. I see no downsides with such an act.
The best part is that said continuous harassment will only drive those scientists to move to China.