It’s because of Putin. You have to work harder, sacrifice more all because Putin is trying to invade Europe. Without Putin, you wouldn’t have had to go through this. Blame Putin, not us.

We are fast approaching a new era when people no longer have to learn anything or to make any important decision when they can simply ask a word prediction black box what to do.

Funny that so much of science fiction had predicted that humans created super sentient artificial intelligence being and got destroyed, when reality is much more farcical than that: humans start worshipping an autocomplete algorithm that sounded like a real human, and just like in the superstitious past when oracles were consulted, now we let a word prediction algorithm trained on internet garbage to rule our lives.

Trump to speak with China's Xi after hiking tariffs, White House says

The call will be Trump and Xi's first known talks since Trump took office on Jan. 20. They previously spoke before Trump's inauguration.

"It'll happen in the next couple of days," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of the latest call.

…

"China hopefully is going to stop sending us fentanyl, and if they're not, the tariffs are going to go substantially higher," said Trump. "China will be dealt with," he added.

China, which has long called tariffs counterproductive, offered relatively muted criticism of the tariffs and signaled an openness to talks.

The country's government appeared poised to seek a deal with Trump that could delay or stop tariffs, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The U.S. dollar hit a record high against the Chinese yuan traded offshore and was hovering near those levels on Monday.

Here comes the main show. The others are just side shows, sorry.

川建国 and 马一龙 are doing their jobs to dismantle imperialism from the inside.

Trust the plan, comrades!

Truckers be like: we support Trump’s border policies but we don’t like that you’re hurting our jobs and making our treats more expensive! Please re-consider!

You learn something new everyday. I was reading a China doomerism article on Naked Capitalism today which I have some issues with and won’t be commenting on, but I came across this quote supposedly from Xi Jinping:

To promote common prosperity, we cannot engage in ‘welfarism.’ In the past, high welfare in some populist Latin American countries fostered a group of ‘lazy people’ who got something for nothing. As a result, their national finances were overwhelmed, and these countries fell into the ‘middle income trap’ for a long time. Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot come down. It is unsustainable to engage in ‘welfarism’ that exceeds our capabilities. It will inevitably bring about serious economic and political problems.

At first, I thought this must be some Western propaganda smear and maybe mistranslation. Then I looked it up, turns out it’s real… It was actually published in Qiushi (CPC’s theory website) back in 2022 on an article titled “To correctly identify and grasp the major theoretical and practical issues of our country’s development” based on Xi’s speech to the Central Economic Work Committee in December 2021:

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This actually explains why China has been so reluctant to just give people money directly to boost consumption. Turns out this neoliberal brainrot is deeper than I thought (I have been defending Xi all this while and now I am getting disappointed) - they really believe that giving people money is bad and you can only create the money after earning the revenues from selling stuff first.

It makes total sense now why China has been struggling to boost domestic consumption since Covid and why the central bank doesn’t simply inject the money.

Because handout is bad! People will turn lazy if they get free money without work! What the fuck, China! How is this different from your typical GOP rhetoric?

Just give people the fucking money and at least half of the problems will be solved.