Random Rant Thread

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The US always hated the EU regulations. Still does, particularly on agriculture. Americans want to sell lots and lots and lots of meat to Europeans. Tories are probably counting on that, and want to form the US/UK alliance in the battle against the EU regulations.

And I think they are delusional if that's what they are thinking. I don't see Biden do it. There's no appetite for that. Biden won't even treat the UK the way Obama did. I'm not saying he will be "anti-UK" or anything like that. But the "special relationship" will definitely be less special.

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Chaos.

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This is objectively true, and why I dismiss lazy attempts to draw equivalency between the right and left.

Both-sides-ism on the US political development over the last several years usually only comes from the people whose sympathy leans right in the first place, as they are somehow unaware of the ridiculously obvious information asymmetry that exists there. They are unaware either because they are not arguing in good faith (e.g. It's just a political fashion statement, to be "above all the partisan shit" and such), or because they are in the right-wing echo chamber themselves.

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So, will it continue to be verboten forever to talk bluntly about how awesome a business model Epstein came up with - that is to arrange sex parties with teenage girls for wealthy people and enjoy the "fruits" of it?

"He helped rich people pay less in taxes." Yeah, right, lol.

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Nonsense like this makes me deeply regret some of the things that I said, such as the rant that I posted the other day about the US doing worse than Europe on Covid.

People like me make some excuse for them, and they try to take them all the way to Mount Everest like this, losing all nuances in the process.

Being remote is an advantage. However, setting aside the fact that Britain is literally an island too, no one swims to NZ, AUS, or England. It was 100% on the British government that the country didn't do strict border control in the spring, as MANY other countries including European ones did. No one, nothing forced them not to do it.

Both New Zealand and Australia are actually significantly more urbanized than the UK. I suppose Britons are fooled by the "more sheep than people" joke. The urbanization index matters more than the raw population density figure.

I could go on, but the point is, what has happened in the UK definitely wasn't inevitable or set in stone. It's absolutely fair to compare the UK to AUS/NZ, to assess the scale of the failure, as long as you are aware of the various factors at work. Being remote is a factor, but not even remotely as end-all as she seems to think it is.

"Metropolises," "international travel hubs," etc. - these things ALSO have to be put into the proper context.

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The UK on Covid is a classic example of trying to cut some corners and ending up taking twice as long as it normally would. Most of it is simple policy failure.

They have done much better on the sequencing/virological studies and vaccination, but mostly institutional success, and not enough to offset the previous failure anyway.

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Some interesting data from Sweden:

Age: 70+

ICU admittance: 1,490
Deaths: 10,400

Age: 80+

ICU admittance: 313
Deaths: 8,016

These are very unusual numbers, even by the Covid standards. Less than 4% of people over 80 who died ever made into the ICU.

This means there has been Major League Triage due to Covid. I don't know people are even aware of this over there.

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The Brazilian/Amazon variant seems able to reinfect the people who already got the "mainstream" Covid before. That's clear from the data from Brazil.

The pace of the emergence of these different variants suggest that it's really a race against time, mutation vs. vaccination.

The herd immunity theory and its advocates are the biggest losers of this pandemic. Remember that.

And the Japanese government will pay a high price for wasting so much time on the vaccine approval despite such a high (by the East Asian/Oceanian standards) infection level. New Zealand and Australia and South Korea can wait, but Japan can't. I warned them about the danger of not hurrying up with the vaccination, but they remained ridiculously complacent, despite the fucking Olympics. Silly fools everywhere.

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If you are wondering what all the talk about GameStop and stock market is about, you should check this out.

You always think you can get out before it falls apart
luke.substack.com/p/you-always-think-you-can-get-out?unlock=true

Doug Henwood explains it in the simplest possible terms.

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This concession machine is the man that Hillary Clinton chose as her running mate in 2016. Pathetic beyond belief.

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Note: Some of the past rants make little sense now and will make little sense in the future most likely because the tweet(s) quoted in them has been deleted.

Well, I wouldn't deny that some of them simply make little sense on their own, sure.

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It takes sheer stupidity or shamelessness or both to claim that the stock market has much to do with the real economy when Uber's market cap is $93B. That company's market value ought to be close to zero in reality.

And the investors do not hold those fraudulent stocks because they are idiots who can't see that; Well, some are, but most of them invest in those zero-profit companies who have zero prospect of making any profit ever precisely because they know what they do has very little to do with the real economy.

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Bill Clinton has aged fast. But that motherfucker's still got it.

"Grace is not the absence of anger, or resentment; It is a conscious choice not to surrender to them - a choice every human being has to make every day."


From 00:25:

Meanwhile, this guy continues to be the dumbest, saddest person in the US Senate.

So much ambition, so little substance. To think the stupid centrist media once thought this moron was the future of the Republican Party.

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There isn't much hope if even the wife of a former PM, a Remainer PM, doesn't get it at all.

Post-Brexit trading 'difficult' for my business - Samantha Cameron
www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-politics-55839256

"And I'm sure there are ways of sorting it out."

Your. Country. Is. Out. Of. The. E. U.

For God's sake, there aren't any ways. That's the point. That's what it means to be outside the Single Market.

Jesus Christ. What's wrong with these people? She talks about the "problem" as if it were just a temporary hiccup.

No, it isn't. Neither an American company nor a Japanese one have ever been able to do what her company was doing and still is trying to do in the EU market cost-free unless they set up EU distribution hubs/warehouses/etc., because neither the US nor Japan are part of the EU. And guess what, neither is the UK anymore!

I don't know if it's just the government. What about this incredible ignorance even among the elites? What were the British media doing all those years?

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