I think even both teddybears and soap are quite regulated markets in EU, could probably require a capital to enter the market a lot larger than you would think, to get anywhere beyond the local flea market level of sales.

That’s why I wrote might

By the time it actually happens there might be a democrat in charge again who can get all the blame…

Lol Volkswagen, the company that actively rigged diesel cars to pass the tests… ? Dieselgate. The German car manufacturers are hopelessly late at EV because they wanted to drain every last penny out of their ICE. The EU setback to extend ICE is after German car manufacturers lobbied… They are killing themselves in the long run, for bit more production in the short run. They saw this all coming decades ago and made wrong choices. Now they’re fucked. The Volkswagen id (EV) sales numbers are so disappointing they had to lower production and make employees stay home.

Optimism bias. People failed to acknowledge a pandemic was happening until and even while it was happening in their own neighborhood and city…

When the tanks roll in they’ll still deny there’s an issue.

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The only certainty is that after Venezuela with 0 repercussions they now got the taste for it.

Think I read Germany is sending 13 soldiers.

Deflation is bad. Then people stop spending, postpone all purchases, economy grinds to a halt, people lose jobs and companies go bankrupt.

Hyperinflation is bad. Then people spend money like toilet paper: money becomes worthless. No one has anything left to invest or to save for pension or a big plan or dream.

The general goal of aiming for about 2% inflation is basically just there to try to prevent those two worst case scenarios from happening. It’s the least bad of all evils: money sort of keeps it’s value, evolution of product prices are rather predictable, people know what they will be able to buy with their wages. Inflation is not inherently tied to capitalism only. Socialist/communist economic experiments experience very similar phenomena.

The most powerful table in the UN is ruled by 5 nuclear superpowers, 3 of them are out: Russia, China, USA. A fourth (UK) has nukes which are not fully independent from the USA and basically lost their empire they had when they were given this prime seat, they are less powerful than they seem. That leaves France as sole UN defender. Weirdly you could even see China still being a somewhat stabilising factor. UN goal is indeed not to prevent all conflict, but it definitely was to contain conflict. 2/5 and maybe 3/5 want more conflict in the world, it is very clear, they want to prey on smaller, non nuclear armed countries.

Then you could also look at it in raw power: amount of nukes, ships, soldiers, missiles et cetera. In that case it’s waaaay more than 3/5th that are out, because USA military is so fucking massive and the guy at the top of that who should be in jail or dead just announced he wants to increase the size of that massive, non UN-compliant military machine by another 50%… Unless USA get their shit together ASAP, UN is useless for protecting all the smaller member states. The goal of mediating any conflict in UN is simply unachievable without USA, because they hold the (raw, military) power. It has become quite likely the UN will indeed die because the major security council members are ruled assholes. Who’s making deals about environment or climate when their neighbours/“allies” are threatening annexation and no big power reacts (worse, they’re the one anbexing)? Right: no one.

The UN is functionally dead. It doesn’t succeed in preventing conflict anymore, nor in saving people and the planet. And with it many other international organisations that held shit together in a somewhat predictable way since WW2.

History shows: next comes conflict. Large scale, very large scale. In fact possibly a scale we’ve never seen before.

If anything is left after that (nuclear age): the winner(s) make a new set of organisations that bring different actors together and new rules for the game.

The craziest part is that it’s the dominating USA itself pulling the plug on its own world dominating organisations…

You think he still requires triggers?

Exactly this. EU shouldn’t issue hollow statements, France/UK should just send nuclear armed vessels to the greenland area and declare they are an alliance with Denmark…

I would gladly pay my two cents in a crowdfunding to send him on his way in a rocket out to nowhere…

Because there are systems in place which enable sociopaths and psychopaths to become the richest and most powerful people in the world and the world is never enough for them.

It wouldn’t do the trick, not a single country in Latin America is nuclear armed, there is no counter threat deterrence to the biggest superpower threat, even if they would be a united military (which is already really unlikely to happen). Unless French Guyana somehow gets caught up in the mess, who knows.

Who said the guerilla will be in the southern hemisphere? It will at some point come back to USA itself, there is already large diaspora in USA from almost every Latin American country. All that’s needed is a foreign agency providing a bit of guidance and encouragement.

If ever many more countries needed encouragement to start a nuclear arms program…

Still can’t believe he got elected again.

“trick some of them accidentally” is definitely underestimating average users. In my experience 95% + of all users click consent once, all is stored forever and they’ll never see the banner again, for sure not on the same device. They don’t do adblocking, no automatic cookie deleting, in fact no browser extensions at all. The average fediverse user is a weird mix of a 1990’s internet poweruser with a today tech kid trying to make it into the future technologies on their own terms and by faaaar not an average user visiting average website on average devices with average browsers and configurations. In short: most people don’t experience this ‘problem’ like us, because they consent by default to anything you throw at them and are then in the gated tracking paradise where there’s barely any cookienagging, visiting the same handful of websites all the time anyway.