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Joined 17 days ago
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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • Let’s say Nigeria signed a predatory loan offered by the US to develop infrastructure. The terms of this loan is that they must pay $xxx USD per year until the loan is paid off with xx% interest. The contract will explicitly state they cannot pay in resources or other currency besides USD (and related bonds) in order to create dependence.

    China could offer a loan that gives Nigeria Treasury bonds equal to their total loan to the US, allowing them to pay off their loan to the US in exchange for less total debt to china.

    This would change the debtor, but also usually the terms so Africa can now pay the debt however they choose, rather than a specific currency.

    Or, more simply, Bob loans Jim twenty Bobbucks and only wants Bobbucks back in the future. Chen has twenty Bobbucks and want Jim’s help in the future, so Chen gives Jim the Bobbucks in exchange for a favor or some moneyary debt that isn’t Bobbucks. Solving the issue.


  • Africa has borrowed from everyone. But mostly from the US and EU in the form of USD, usually in contracts that require them to pay back in USD. With the belt and road initiative china added to Africa’s loans with much better terms. China could offer additional loans at pennies on the dollar in exchange for the us Treasury bonds, which Africa could use to pay off its loans to the US and EU.

    This would effectively shift dozens of countries away from the dollar permanently, while being the single largest anti colonial action in history, while giving china pretty extensive mineral rights across Africa.

    Everyone wins in this scenario long term except the US and EU; and china is only hurt in the short term by underselling their us bonds.


  • For the us; it would end the US economy overnight. There isn’t a product manufactured in the US or service done in the US that does not involve something from china. Even at ridiculously high tariff prices there’s simply no alternative infrastructure for replacing those imports. Even the trump regime are slaves to capital given that’s the only thing backing the legitimacy of the US.

    For china; the only thing imported from the US are luxury/private sector items. It genuinely does not affect the core industries (60% of Chinas gdp is in the public sector) of china, and with China’s welfare system, private industries can fail without the employees ever becoming homeless or starving. There simply isn’t a reason to go that far and needlessly escalate.

    Tl;Dr nothing the US can do economically can realistically hurt china, just small parts of its private sector. China, however could cripple the US since the US allowed its companies to offload so much core industrial work to china. None of the actual adults in the US will allow trump to piss off china to the point of cutting off trade entirely, and china isn’t petty.




  • The gap has been getting smaller every year, and thanks to stagnation from amd and Intel, it’s nonexistent in the consumer and business market. Chinas consumer grade CPUs are on the same performance as five year old chips, roughly speaking. Most people don’t upgrade their CPUs that often and genuinely don’t need to these days.

    The biggest difference is in cuda-like and similar chips, but thanks to ridiculous levels of foreign investment that gap is also narrowing.

    The Linux kernel already supports them by the way.

    China has been planning for a us led export ban on all computer components for three decades now, since Clinton originally started talking about it. There’s a reason Taiwan is still allowed to be an autonomous region, and it’s not because China thinks it would damage the chip fabs during an invasion.





  • For rare it’s fine to be red in the middle. Given how much it’s cooked on the outside it’s likely either this person fucked up, or the color balance was messed with, as it shouldn’t be quite that red when you already have grey forming way past the crust like that.

    Pink is what you get at medium temps. If it’s pink in the center, you’ve hit medium, if it’s still a bit red in the center, you’re at medium rare and did a good job for most steak eaters; assuming you limited the amount of grey formed during the sear.

    If this is unedited, they went for rare but didn’t cook it enough and tried to fix it by searing it too long, so its slightly over cooked on the outside and slightly under cooked in the center compared to a perfect example of rare.











  • It just takes someone popular. Under Bush jr, Biden’s patriot act was passed and brought the US into the early stages of outright fascism. Under Obama state and corporate power fully combined when people had to start paying corporations for the right to have healthcare or be fined. Under trump this all has only expanded.

    Fascists don’t need a useful idiot, they just need someone popular. And guess what’s just a popularity contest?