The supply chains are so complex at this point that most people have absolutely no clue how and where anything is produced. Nor do they understand how hard it is to actually create supply chains from the ground up. The US has been trying to decouple for China for close to a decade now with basically nothing to show for it. Trump and his crew clearly don’t understand this, and think that if they just play tough with China then they’ll get what they want. The US is headed for some really bad times in the near future.

It’s also worth mentioning that US trade is only a small portion of the overall Chinese economy. So, even if Trump cut China off entirely, the impact there isn’t going to be dramatic. It’ll hurt, but not nearly as much as it’ll hurt the US https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/CHN/Year/LTST/TradeFlow/EXPIMP

The west is absolutely not prepared for a war with a peer adversary even if there was any logic to it. Unfortunately, I suspect that our glorious rulers would rather burn the planet down than accept that their hegemony is now over.

The reality is that practically everything consumed in the US is made in China or sources components from China. What the tariffs mean in practice is that input costs are going to go up across the board making everything more expensive. Given that huge numbers of people are already living on subsistence wages, they don’t have much room to absorb a sudden cost of living increase.

https://edconway.substack.com/p/globalisation-is-a-far-far-bigger

Seems like Trump uses tariffs as some magical thing. The entire idea of tariffs is to raise the price of imports for the purposes of protecting a domestic industry. Practically nothing walmart sells has an equivalent of being made in the US so I have no idea who they’d be protecting here.

Big tech companies like Google made deals with agencies like the NSA to harvest user data. On top of that, these companies will sell data to everyone else who’ll pay for it with effectively no oversight.

genocide must go on

exactly

Yeah, Signal is more than encrypted messaging it’s a metadata harvesting platform. It collects phone numbers of its users, which can be used to identify people making it a data collection tool that resides on a central server in the US. By cross-referencing these identities with data from other companies like Google or Meta, the government can create a comprehensive picture of people’s connections and affiliations.

This allows identifying people of interest and building detailed graphs of their relationships. Signal may seem like an innocuous messaging app on the surface, but it cold easily play a crucial role in government data collection efforts.

Also worth of note that it was originally funded by CIA cutout Open Technology Fund, part of Radio Free Asia. Its Chairwoman is Katherine Maher, who worked for NDI/NED: regime-change groups, and a member of Atlantic Council, WEF, US State Department Foreign Affairs Policy Board etc.