The French will never agree.

Their stance has always been, if France is threatened we will use every weapon in our arsenal.

They do not have end the world stocks of nukes like the US or Russia so their attitude is, “Fuck with us and we will end you.”

Yes. And 75% of car driver believe they are above average as well…

Capitalism also needs a functioning environment to continue…

Well, at least the front hasn’t fallen off.

Still worthy of pity

Not from me. They are adults, they made their bed. Their children are the real victims.

To be happy at other people’s misfortune is not ok.

I honestly don’t think this applies here. This is a direct result of their own actions. No one forced them.

To me this is a case of: You reap what you sow.

and might even get better

I honestly doubt it. I don’t think it is possible for reddit to be profitable in anything like its current form.

Twitter, before the EM implosion, had managed one profitable year in the last decade.

Reddit has about 2 orders of magnitude less users than twitter.

Those users are much less attractive to advertisers because reddit knows fuck all about them compared to twitter.

Reddit surfed through the years of cheap vc money but going public could kill it.

Are we still doing phrasing?

Don’t put yourself down like that. It really was a good piece of fiction.

That’s a great story you have there, you should pitch it to netflicks.

Which China has never ruled

True, the CCP claiming The Philippines would be seen as ridiculous by the rest of the world.

Then again, the CCP has never ruled Taiwan either…

Not technically.

The country’s formal title is: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Northern Ireland is not part of Britain

Seeing that most cargo ships sail under flags of convenance, how do they plan on telling the difference between fiends and foe?

They don’t want control, only profit.

And they will struggle to get that. They will spend billions and years setting up the infrastructure to extract resource wealth of the region, which is considerable, then the problems will start.

After all, the 24 hour news cycle lives on scandals.

And because it is a 24 hour cycle, the scandal will be forgotten and replaced with a new one in the same amount of time.

Yes, because they are currently the ones with the support (or at best acquiesce) of the most of the tribes.

But the currently in the previous sentence has a very short half-life.

I am not telling China to stop, far from it. It will be fun to watch their grand plans to fall to shit the same way the USA’s did.

I thought that the billions they have already pissed away on the belt and road project would have been a cautionary lesson. But it seems not.

Well, if it brings you joy, fill your boots.

Afghanistan was an ally of Alexander as well, until such time as it was no longer beneficial to the tribes in control.

The world sees Afghanistan as a country in the modern sense, when it is actually a tribal society that is no more politically cohesive than it was in Alexander’s day.

When you are travelling and ask an American where they are from, they will often say their state, rather than the USA. To them this means a lot as they identify with their state more than with their nation but to outsiders it means nothing, we see than all as Americans.

Afghanistan is the same but a 1,000 times more intense. Ask them what they are and they will reply Pashtuns, Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, Baloch, Sadat, and about half a dozen others.

From the horse or the person swinging the stick?

(When people let their anger get the best of them they often, regrettably, start to resemble the focus of their anger.)

Take The Money and Run?

I was thinking more along the lines of: The Gambler

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

Know when to walk away and know when to run

Except they should have walked away about 4 years ago…when their chip stack was a much larger pile. Now they are trying to run with what they have left.