oh no kidding, I didn’t realize obsidian was the dev. frankly I didn’t think it was possible that this type of game would be made by anyone but some indie studio

taking the ‘spell bourgeoisie’ challenge to the next level

for you and others that enjoyed your post, have a look at the game ‘pentiment’. it’s a little indie rpg set in austria in a small town straddling the late medieval and early renaissance and tells a story of social change.

He fundamentally seems less at home with real war than trade war or just doing violence

They’re generating so much value for society with this service

https://maps.app.goo.gl/kXP2hw8PGT7BuPVX6

Either he’s already been murdered or they don’t want him to tell his story about what he’s seeing and experiencing.

Ghana created a new state body to take over all gold sales in the country, banning foreign and other domestic interests from playing that role. This is notable as Ghana is one of the most western friendly countries of West Africa.

Look it up on google maps and look at the north side, two small buildings arranged in an L around a yard. There’s a bunch of red staining that looks like aftermath of violence.

It’s not about avoiding tariffs, it’s about cutting the cost of the import to the price of the manufacturer instead of the price of the importer middleman. Tariffs are a % of the price.

the extent to which the US/the west is behind on this stuff can’t be overstated. rare earth extraction/refining is not something that can just have money thrown at it to build capacity. one can make the case that chip technology is an area where the US/western proxies did the cutting edge research and china is catching up. even in this scenario, it’s hard to imagine the US rebuilding high tech capacity, but the knowledge at least does exist in places like taiwan/korea.

rare earth refining is different. the west has benefited from and coasted off of chinese R&D for 2 generations now. for decades, these commodities have been just that, commodities, meaning bulk products that are sold with low margins. the west has been happy to coast because capital would rather make money making huge margin on high tech/financial products and advertising apps. most high tech rare earth applications require very high purity or very specialized rare earth precursor ingredients to go into manufacturing processes. however, rare earth refining is finicky, hard, and all R&D and worker/industrial capacity for it has been in china for decades. to start rebuilding this would require focused effort to generate appropriate material scientists/PhD/researchers that have the fundamental understanding necessary, followed by focused effort and state policy to support the industrial engineering to implement RE extraction at full scale in the west. how many non-chinese people can read chinese language academic publications? it’s a paltry amount, especially as chinese academics in the west are chased out and move back to China.

if the US was run by a functional state that can do industrial policy (read: the CPC), then starting today it would take 20 years to build/rebuild rare earth extraction capacity. as it is, the US is run by a state that can’t do industrial policy and relies on market fundamentalism - that is a 50 year recipe at best.

Only someone who doesn’t understand trumponomics would ask something so foolish

Obviously it didn’t increase the trade deficit, he’s still openly white nationalist. Come on

It’s fine, who wants to build the high end value add stuff anyway. Exempt high tech goods so that Americans can compete on the lower value add end

Today I’m going to a garden work party, we grow a whole pile of seedlings to share with the community here. It’s a nice day too

Edit: we crushed it. Our zucchinis will blot out the sun

It’ll be the farm equivalent of “free range” chickens where the birds have access to a little dirt patch under the sky.

the animal agriculture industrial complex is such a huge lobby and carnists are so desperately willing to be propagandized, it’s a perfect treatler mix

Non-digital musical instruments of any kind are less in reach for non rich people now than before. The instruments themselves are expensive, many schools have axed music programs, and extracurricular lessons are not cheap.

I really hope he gives a similar quote when he makes toilet flushing use more water (read: no more woke flushing)

“my poops are the biggest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of size”

A+