I tend to be pretty sanguine about these things because I'm a party man for a populist party, stuff like this is not going to make the job less necessary (its also a form of cope), but combine harvesters breaking down and not being replaced is a real [laughter stops] moment.
The threat from this supply crisis qas never a lack of "treats", but rather second- and third order effects of a cascading system collapse in a tightly coupled system. Or, in plain english: necessary economic functions breaking down due to breakdowns further up the chain.
Now stuff like this is not likely to lead to outright famine. Some individuals and families might end up close to starvation (though in some sense that goes on today as well), but this could cause permanent damage to the food growing capacity.
As in, farmers just get smashed and financially ruined by this stuff.
That will in itself have a bunch of second- and third order effects. I think bread riots in the US are looking very probable in the years ahead. They likely won't be called such (the arab spring was partly a bread riot, mixed up with a bunch of other issues), but...
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The more and more I listen to American politicians in congress and the way the beltway class talks amongst themselves on panels and so on, the more I'm coming to the conclusion that some kind of war over Taiwan is actually very, very likely.
Pretty much everyone agrees - whether tacitly or openly - that Taiwan, in and of itself, straight up doesn't matter. Semiconductors don't really matter either. When people list the ways that a Taiwan defeat would be bad, they start and end with "it would kill our empire."
In theory, a war over Taiwan is extremely easy to avoid. The Chinese have made their position fairly clear - they will go to war in the event of secession - and secessionist forces on the island are basically reliant on support from the US. So America could just choose not to.
To me, the V-22 is probably the DoD program that most symbolizes the current US military crisis. A naive belief in the idea that "progress" will solve all design challenges, married to a US obsession with "wunderwaffen" to make up for secular strategic weakness.
Tiltrotors as a concept are fantastically hard to design right, even when compared to helicopters. But there was at one point a genuine belief that there'd be a huge civilian demand for these things. But their unreliability and insane costs to operate couldn't be solved.
At some point, I think the US crossed the event horizon regarding how it thought about the role of military procurement as such. As the Germans realized they couldn't match their enemies in industrial output, they clung to the idea of winning through *more advanced* weapons.
The more I think about this tweet, the more I genuinely think it speaks to some quirk of the Polish psyche that's contributed to Poland's history being one of constant partition by stronger powers.
There is so many things wrong with this sentiment it's honestly dizzying.
First of all, there is no way to get all of this sort of stuff delivered in a timely manner in the world we currently live in. The defense industrial base is maxxed out. A lot of military kit is already on back-order, with multi-year delays in delivery for *old* contracts.
Thus, we have in front of us the classic "counting your chickens before they hatch", problem. Yes, you can order like 1000 Abrams tanks tomorrow, but the infrastructure to produce 1000 abrams tanks within a reasonable timeframe does not exist currently.
Everyone over here has basically moved on to pretending Ukraine doesn't exist, the media never writes about the war at all at this point, and people just complain about immigrants or public service television or w/e.
We're already in the early stages of realignment, a la 2015.
Like at some point the dam is going to break, just like it did in 2018, where people suddenly "discovered" that immigrants cost the swedish state a ton of money and did a lot of violent crime. Wow, what a discovery! I guess we can finally talk about this now!
Well, the current sullen, batten-down-the-hatches attitude re: Ukraine is just the same as the left's attitude re: immigration and its promises. Sooner or later, it will be "discovered" that Ukraine was corrupt, committed a bunch of war crimes, that the SBU is nasty, etc. Wow!
This is an interesting perspective, but I do wonder how Putin would modify this view today. In 1992, this argument made sense; in 2022, the big rival to the Soviets, the United States, is basically suffering from the same serious dissolution as the late USSR did.
In 1992, there was an alternative open for Russia: to become a "normal" free market nation-state.
That model is collapsing both economically and politically in 2022. Moreover the "time bomb" planted in 1917 now seems hardly unique. But when was the US "time bomb" planted?
Ironically, one of the most biting criticisms of not just the bolsheviks but of socialism generally inside the left is that for all the hopes and dreams, for all the struggle, it rarely seems to amount to anything else but an alternative path to arrive at the same destination.
All jokes aside, civil war in the US is now not only possible, but there's now a clear, realistic path for the US to get there.
The 2024 election is very likely to not be seen as legitimate by half of the population. Red states will be under immense pressures to not certify it.
If you get a circus with states refusing to certify results or send electors, the result will be a legal and political vacuum. The guy in the White House will be a democrat, but he won't be a *president*. He will simply not be recognized as such.
In this scenario, the relationship between the states and the (illegitimate) government will be vague and nebulous. In that kind of tug of war, federal agents might end up facing down national guard or state militias. That can easily produce a Boston massacre or two.