Space warfare is much closer to naval warfare on Earth, so naval tactics and strategies are more transferable when applied to space. For example: taking weeks to maneuver, and firing at your opponent 100,000 of kms away.
Air sorties are typically completed within hours, because it is ultimately limited by the fuel they can carry.
All the money being lost for nothing
I can assure you that the money spent isn’t “lost” at all. They all ended up “somewhere”. There is a reason why Biden is so keen on pushing the $60 bil funding to Ukraine even though everyone knows there is no way Ukraine can win. But yes, agree with the rest of what you said.
I didn’t expect the state propaganda campaign to convince their people to accept welfare cuts and to embrace austerity to work this well.
The Wire
Once again, the DPRK was NOT an impoverished country even after it was being bombed to shit! It was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and fared closely with post-war Japan’s reconstruction. The DPRK in the 1960s had higher living standards than China, South Korea and other Asian economies that rose in the 1980s.
I wrote an entire comment here if you’re interested.
The reason the DPRK couldn’t pay off the Volvo debt was because of the 1972 drought in Europe that caused short falls in Soviet crop harvest. The “Russian wheat deal” resulted in the USSR spending heavily to purchase grain abroad on the international market, causing global grain prices prices to be inflated everywhere else. The DPRK, which as I had written on the linked comment, was severely lacking in food security and depleted much of its foreign reserves purchasing food in the early 70s with highly inflated price.
This was the reason why the DPRK couldn’t pay back Volvo. This was the reason why the DPRK would spend the next few decades going after a self-reliance policy (Juche can be roughly translated to something like “self-reliance”), trying to conquer nature and increase food production on a very cursed land that is the Korean peninsula, to much disastrous consequences.
As you should. I try to raise awareness about how dangerous the dollar can be because too many people think that the US empire is on the brink of collapse just because it is losing a few wars currently, forgetting that the US has lost near every war since 1945 except maybe for the 1991 Gulf War and still managed to dominate the world like nothing has happened.
BRICS Bank Aims to Increase Local-Currency Borrowing to 30%
But the majority of the bank’s funding — about 70% — will continue to be denominated in dollars, he said.
“The bank’s capital is in US dollars. Our reporting currency is US dollars. So the dollar is hot-coded in the DNA of the bank,” he said.
No shot. Everyone’s dragging their feet about de-dollarization at BRICS. My biggest disappointment of 2023, after all the encouraging talks about doing it during the 2022 summit.
I actually anticipated a war in Ukraine (because I had been listening to Alex Mercouris and for months throughout 2021 he was very pessimistic about the various diplomatic negotiations leading up to February 2022), I simply did not expect it to happen this soon. I thought it would be another year or so, but those who had been following closely the US-Russia summit in 2021 knew that the US was dead set on provoking a war in Ukraine.
If the dollar loses its hegemony status, then likely. But it’s going to be a while away, probably decades like you said.
This is just the equivalent of rich kids who live off their parents’ wealth throwing tantrum. At the end of the day, nobody dares to cut ties from the family wealth. Sure, some might be crazy enough to do it, but most of the time it doesn’t end well for them.
No country is ever going to give up the dollar just to trade with Texas. Literally nobody. This is how the US impose its sanctions and embargo against Cuba and all the Bad Countries.
I can guarantee you that no balkanization is going to happen in the US.
Why? Because this is no longer the time period where individual states can build up their gold reserves as a store of their wealth. No, the US dollar is unparalleled in history in the sense that it allows the US to get “free lunches” from all over the world with junk papers.
I love quoting from this article from 2022 because the Californian finance department accidentally revealed a very crucial fact:
If you look at all of the personal income tax returns that were filed in California in the year 2020, just 1% of the total number of income tax returns that were filed were responsible for more than 49% of all of the personal income tax that was paid in that year. And unlike most of us who get our income from wages and salaries, that very narrow band of taxpayers derives a lot of their income from things like capital gains, stock markets [and] bonuses that are tied to corporate or stock performance. So when the markets are doing very well, those individuals are doing very well and state revenues are doing very well. Conversely, when the markets go south, their fortunes don't do very well and the state's revenues decline as a result.
Let’s parse this paragraph: California, the richest state in the US, derives much of its tax revenues from capital gains such as stocks and bonds. Yeah, good luck losing access to the dollar, if any US state even dares to contemplate about seceding for real. Their wealth and living standards are going to plunge overnight. Good luck with that.
Lenin lived, Lenin lives, and Lenin will live forever!
Ленин жив - Lenin lives. Only two people in history have ever been bestowed with this honor. The other person is Viktor Tsoi of KINO.