megopie

To be clear, this isn’t an end of oil exports, just refined fuels. The bottle neck in oil refining will probably result in more oil exports, which will still provide revenue. The key thing is that they’re getting pushed down the value chain, making less money on every barrel pumped. On top of that, they are being forced to sell the oil at a discount because the pool of countries willing to buy from them is restricted, and thus those countries can demand a lower price.

That foreign income is important because it is paying both for imports for the war effort, but also for imports of consumer goods. They have to scale back one or the other. One diminishes their capacity to fight, the other increases the internal unrest with the war.

If their refining capacity is reduced enough, they might actually have to start importing refined oil products, both for consumer/industrial needs, and for military needs. Decreasing their ability to import other goods.

Over all, it’s constricting their ability to mollify the relevant domestic populations AND maintain the war effort at the current level.

I think the provocative actions against NATO countries is them trying to create a situation that justifies them shifting more resources from the consumer goods side to the war effort side, ether by further mobilization of conscripts (less money on contract soldiers, thus less competition for imported goods) or by politically justifying drops in standard of living (less domestic consumption of imported consumer goods).

People liked TikTok, and it got really big, not because of the format, but because its recommendation system was optimizing for “Show people things they like”. If you change that to “show people things I want them to believe” people who don’t already believe those things will stop engaging and move away.

it may take time, but they will migrate. The network effect can slow that down, but a platform like TikTok is distinctly not one built by networks. Like, people don’t go there to fallow creators or their friends, they go there to see random stuff from people they don’t know, and it actively makes it difficult to get a consistent feed from people you fallow.

Ok, but, like, no offense, are you skilled enough to properly analyze and dig through large complicated bills? Are you a skilled enough administrator to manage an office of staffers? Are you a good enough public speaker to campaign?

I’m not saying people should want to serve in congress because it pays well, but, if the same set of skills that make a good representative could earn you 4 million a year in the private sector, then it’s going to be really hard to get qualified professionals. Instead you’ll get incompetent ideologues, independently wealthy aristocrats, or corrupt individuals intending to abuse the position.

It needs to pay competitively or else you create a bunch of perverse incentives.

Like I get the whole moralistic bent about not wanting to pay representatives big incomes relative to their constituents because politician bad and “they should be doing it for the pride of serving”, or like term limits because “I don’t like these politicians and they keep getting reelected/ serve life terms.”

But realistically, if you want skilled professionals in a field, you need to pay them competitively and offer long term career prospects. Otherwise you’re going to only get people who take the job as a stepping stone to another position, like a high paying job at a big company they passed a bunch of laws to help, or who can make money in other ways.

As it stands right now, the whole stock trading thing is largely a result of how little congress people are payed relative to the importance of the position. Like, sure, it’s a six figure salary with a great benefits package, but, that’s peanuts compared to what a modern private sector executive make, even a mediocre one.

If anything, congress people should probably have their wages increased significantly.

The thing that would get old is managing all that damn grass. That and presumably having to drive 20 minutes to get anything.

Never personally had issues with living near or even with friends. Only ever had issues with was a rando roommate I had because a friend had to move for work.

Although a lot of the tooling for manufacturing is made In Germany and the Netherlands. Particularly the lithography machines. A lot of important of the chemicals come from Japan. Japan also has a history of manufacturing chips, although they haven’t been on the leading edge node for a while.

Often time people say “oh a lot of Mamdani’s policies will fail because Hochul will block them”

But this is the thing, Hochul isn’t popular, and if she blocks popular proposals, it won’t be a case of people being mad at Mamdani for failing to deliver. It will be people mad at her for blocking them.

Hochul needs NYC to vote for her to win the governor reelection, let alone the dem primary. Her pissing off a popular mobilized voting block in NYC is an awful strategy, and probably would loose her the governorship.

“The beatings shall continue until morale improves”

Beef is a lot more expensive in Europe in my experience, but is also of a much higher quality. You can get an equivalent quality in the US but you’ll have to go to a specialty butcher or a farmers market and it will be more expensive than an equivalent cut in Europe.

And frankly the cheap stuff in the US is still too expensive for me to make it a regular part of my diet. So, if I’m going to have it, it’ll be a treat, and I may as well buy the better stuff in that case.

American Fanta is corn syrup and artificial orange flavor, Fanta in Europe is orange juice and cane sugar.

Still a soda, but like, actually a food instead of an industrial byproduct.

People weren’t banned for criticizing them, they were banned for encouraging others to misgender people if they don’t like them. I don’t think anyone was banned for not using “personal” neo pronouns.

And drag was banned from BZ for telling people to KYS, then they went and made a new account on a different instance and have continued pissing people off, now the new acount is being banned from stuff because they’ve continued the kind of behavior that got them banned in the first place.