I'm not the person who responded to you, but I think of a brute force attack as essentially translatable into brute (dumb) force (effort). No thinking, no decision making, but the process is known. Here is a pile of stones, move that pile of stones from here to over there. In the case of most brute force, you think of it like cracking passwords. You have an algorithm or you have a giant pile of passwords. Move those passwords over to try them on this hash. The processor is doing the heavy lifting on the simple task.
Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details.
In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.
Climate change policy was a valiant effort to de-influence authoritarian petrostates and prevent Russia from achieving its multi-century goal of expanding its access to actual warm water ports. The major conflicts between Russia and Japan were essentially over that. It's why Japan even attacked Korea, because Russia was trying to gain influence there and it was an essential launching off point if Russia was ever going to attack Japan.
If climate has already changed so much that Russia's ports are no longer going to freeze, then green energy initiatives may just put us at a disadvantage since we don't manufacture most of the products. Solar panels, wind turbines, we don't control a lot of that supply chain which isn't healthy.
There are other advantages to renewable energy, but at the moment the USD benefits from oil reliance and transitioning away from oil while maintaining USD influence is an important goal.
At the same time, oil infrastructure does tend to have a lot of weak points, where renewable energy can be easier to spread out. Eventually I think it will be relegated to military and byproducts more, but for now there is an abundant supply.
This game came out the same year the original Castlevania did. They're different enough games, but there are a few similarities that do make you wonder if they had any particular shared influences.
You have to be corrected on a few critical things. The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for. The geographic perfection it lucked into. The allies it has (which, despite appearances, are still there.) The economic influence it has. The human talent it has soaked up from around the world as people moved to the US.
China can't replicate any of those things in the next 100 years. They are also handicapped by their ideology, which weakens their capacity to work the necessary logic for critical outcomes. They've tried and failed to achieve some kind of belt and road initiative to make up a bit of the difference in their supply chain dependencies. They've tried and failed to clone so many of our technologies, but what gets promoted are the ones they've succeeded at.
One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
China constantly contradicts itself about its ambitions. What you need to understand, from all this stuff you've been writing in this thread, is that China is no longer China. That great history, so much of its critical culture from the past. It's all trashed. China is now communist. It's now what communism wants, not what China wants or needs. Taiwan isn't about reunification with a brother, it's about communists crushing democracy.
If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism. Comintern believed that communism could not co-exist with capitalism, so communism would have to be established globally. This threatened Japanese and German sovereignty. Granted, the Japanese and Germans had their own ideological problems, but just the threat of global communist expansion was enough to start a race for global resource control.
We downplay this about WW2, but if you want to understand anything about US national strategy, it is that we have been hedging our resource control against a potential flaring up of global communist ambitions again.
Now what is China doing? They're building the largest military in history that has no use other than expanding. Xi Jinping is purging his military like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland.
The contradiction about communist ideology is that it is anti-western and anti-imperialism, but the success of communism is that it has to become western to suck less and it has to manufacture a psychological empire to succeed. Western "empires" have largely been a result of good fortune in water access. The US is the absolute pinnacle of that. Russia and China are worse off and since they are at a disadvantage there, the alternative is psychological expansion.
China is trying to make up the difference by using a massive population, but the entire logic around it is weak. China is easy to choke off and scale down. It would go the same way World War 1 and World War 2 went, except with more turmoil in each other's countries. It's easier now than ever to project power from inside enemy's countries than to need to send ships and missiles thousands of miles to reach them. The issue is that, China is more fragile in this regard than the US is in every regard despite all their social controls.
> The US' power doesn't come from it making so many weapons. The structure of the government. The principles it stands for.
This is high school propaganda. It's classic "they hate us because of our freedom" nonsense.
What principles? America was established on white supremacy, slavery, genocide, religious intolerance and exploitation. The government we formed was by and for wealthy white slaveowners.
Do you know when the last slave ship survivor died? It was 1940. Slavery survived in practice well beyond Emancipation. Forced servitude existed up until 1941 [1] and that only happened because of the propaganda threat from World War 2.
You're right about the geographical "luck" (other than, you know, the whole genocide part of it).
> [China is] also handicapped by their ideology
No, they're not. The reason the US goes after communist and socialist governments so vehemently is because any success threatens capitalism, not the other way around. If these systems were all doomed to fail, why can't we simply serve as a good example? Why do we need to militarily intervene, overthrow governments and starve countries that dare do anything different? Don't you find that odd?
China has transformed itself over recent decades and brought ~800 million people out of extreme poverty in the last century. All while living conditions and infrastructure crumbles in the West.
> One of the admirals in the Pacific said something along the lines of (paraphrasing), "China is complaining that we're trying to contain them. My question to them would be, 'well, do you need to be contained?'"
I don't know what point you think you're making with this. It can just as easily be used to justify imperialism because "we don't like anyone else succeeding". What kind of argument is that? If anyone needs to be contained, it's the US military, actually.
> China is now communist.
This isn't really true in practice. Sure it's the Chinese Communist Party and you may see labels like "socialist/communist transitional state" but what China really is is a command economy [2]. Chinese people have seen their standard of living change massively in their lifetimes. What do we do? Further concentrate wealth in the hands of the 10,000 richest people because it matters that Jeff Bezos has $210 billion instead of $200 billion.
> If you look back at World War 2, it was in large part caused by communism.
This is hitorically revisionist nonsense. Communism (if you define the USSR as such) saved Europe by defeating Nazi Germany at terrible cost. Stalin tried to warn Britain and France about Hitler and form an anti-Hitler alliance. Britain and France refused.. Japan was imperialist. Germany was imperialist. WW2 started at near the peak of the British Empire. Communism didn't cause the Rape of Nanking or the Holocaust or Japanese internment in the US.
For the rest of it, all I can say is "read a book".
You're making a lot of weak arguments that aren't based in real historical context.
Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism. You could argue there were reformers in past decades that held sway, but he doesn't want to see himself get replaced with a reformer.
There has never been a communist state, when we talk about communists we talk about movements that aspire to communism. Maybe the old CCP operated things more like a command economy, but today's China is more like planned mercantilism, which is a weaker regression from "capitalism" which is itself an inaccurate Marxist caricature of how regulated free markets actually work. The CCP leadership are very firmly Marxist-Leninist.
Industrialization amplified power potentials of trade and production, which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them both. Look at the first actions Japan took and who made those decisions and what they were concerned about. Look at the first actions the nazis took in Germany, look at who they allied with Japan against, look at the book Hitler wrote about the threat he saw, look at who he labeled and what he did with them.
Russia is the largest country on Earth, by accident? No, because it expands its empire. China is huge, because it's never expanded its empire, it was just born that way? No, it has taken over adjacent regions and expanded its culture. It even tried to expand into Russia, but Russia threatened to nuke them.
Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism. Marxist global expansion is itself a contradiction, because they hate imperialism, and yet aim to achieve the same goals. Communist International in the USSR was a prime enemy that Japan and Germany allied against. The US got Stalin to dissolve Comintern to try to deflate German and Japanese motivations, but also because the US was very anti-communist. We just saw Germany and Japan as the more immediate threats to the world.
Russia couldn't have beaten Germany without aid being shipped in from the US constantly.
What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Personally, looking at the kind of things you write, I think you should step way back, forget everything you've been taught and instead focus on the fundamentals. Go back into history and just understand the basic behaviors of countries, like they are organisms. How trade, industry, economy, military, geography, psychology, culture, communication, transportation, demographics, power imbalances, etc all contribute to the various behaviors and outcomes. Then you can say, ok, there are all of these details, but how many of the details are just....details and not the trend?
The threat that China poses is unmistakable. They have the warped ideology, societal repression, information control, massive state propaganda, most rapid military build-up in history, they have the largest global network of spies in history, they're threatening almost all of their neighbors (not just Taiwan) and so on. The list just keeps going.
If you think the US should simply sit back and watch it unfold without pushing back at all...yeah, we're not that naive.
> Xi Jinping absolutely believes in Marxism-Leninism.
Good. It also doesn't make China Communist, let alone establish that "Communism = bad" as you assert.
> ... which did leave Japan and Germany operating below their potentials, but communism threatened them bot
Are you really saying that Japan and Germany had to do Imperialism and the Holocaust because there was a Communist movement in their countries? Really? That's one of the silliest things I've ever read.
> Italian fascists and German nazis were a direct reaction to communists psychological imperialism.
Fascism is capitalism in crisis. Fascism and imperialism are the ultimate forms of capitalism. "The threat of a more equitable distribution of wealth made us kill millions" is the biggest pro-capitalist cope.
> What the US sees right now is the threat of another world war caused by communism.
Most (if not all) wars since 1945 were instigated by or materially supplied by the US. Saddam Hussein was our puppet until he wasn't. We even looked past him using chemical weapons on Kurds and feigned indignation only when he turned on us. Weird. We them fueled the Iran-Iraq war for 10 years killing more than a million. We then starved the Iraqis for a decade before killing millions more of them in the so-called "War on Terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 all while ignoring Saudi Arabia who materially supported 9/11. We even covered for the Saudi involvement.
The world would be a demonstrably better place without the US.
> The list just keeps going.
I once heard a quote that the only thing Americans know about is WW2 and they don't know much about that. You're making that point. Repression? You mean like locking up and deporting them for saying "Free Palestine"? Oh wait, that's us.
History will judge the US as the Evil Empire, with or without your DARVO.
You're ignoring things I already stated, such as communism is an aspiration. So of course China is not realized communism, because communism has never been realized at the national scale. The people in charge however, are absolutely communists.
Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out? He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1. Hitler's actual belief was that Bolshevism was a Jewish mechanism to achieve global control. Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
This is why he put Jewish people in concentration camps, because he believed with conviction that they were a threat to German sovereignty. This is also why he planned from the very beginning to attack Russia, even while temporarily allying with them. Japan also saw Marxist revolution inside China as a threat to its sovereignty, but it ended up fighting both the communists and the anti-communists.
Obviously many atrocities were committed in these wars. We are lucky that the US saved Russia and China, because they are much weaker adversaries than an expansive Germany or Japan had they conquered their respective regions.
We didn't start World War 1, but we helped finish it. We didn't start World War 2, but we helped finish it. We didn't start the Korean war, the communists did backed by Russia. We didn't start the Vietnam war, but it probably started similarly.
We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet, but Iran was a much greater threat than Iraq was and that's why we provided him weapons when he was fighting Iran. Saddam Hussein was afraid of the Islamic revolution and saw it as an existential threat. There were border fights even beforehand. Saudi Arabia also saw the Islamic revolution in Iran as essentially the next Hitler. The reason that war started, was because Iran was trying to export its Islamic Revolution into Iraq, which is the same thing it's been doing again in recent years. Yes, Saddam eventually became a problem for us, but it's more nuanced than you present it.
There are a lot of details around 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan that maybe you aren't aware of, but I don't feel like going into them at present.
Both Marxist movements and Islamic movements have these kinds of extreme radical qualities about them that countries feel the need to defend against. When a country has any sort of power, it gains some capacity to export its way of thinking through investing people, funding and even hardware into that goal.
China is simultaneously threatening to export its ideology in psychological warfare and expand militarily.
I guess you'll never believe any of this, anything else I say or research any of this objectively to decide if it has merit. I can't fix that, that's up to you.
> Do you know why Hitler blamed the Jewish people and had them separated out?
Yes, Hitler did blood libel [1], a tradition continued by Donald Trump [2].
> He blamed the Jewish Bolshevik revolutions in Germany for causing Germany to lose World War 1
Are you arguing Hitler was right? Or that it was a useful tool and a lie? Because you've blamed the Communists for WW2. Multiple times. This makes me think you've been hiding your power level and I'm usually pretty good at spotting that. I should've recognized it from blaming the Communism. It's specifically "cultural Bolshevism" [3]. That too has been recycled today as "cultural Marxism" [4]
> Bolshevism is born out of Marxism and is essentially communist. The "headquarters" of communism was Comintern in Russia. Many of the leaders of the Bolshevist movement in Russia and elsewhere were Jewish. Marxism also comes from Karl Marx, who was Jewish.
I get it now [5].
> We didn't put Saddam Hussein in power and he was never our puppet,
He was our foil against Iran. We gave him weapons to fuel the death count of the Iraq-Iran war. We didn't care when he used nerve gas on the Kurds. All of that is established historical fact.
> I guess you'll never believe any of this
No, I don't buy into neo-Nazi conspiracy theories. You are correct.
Racism was clearly an important aspect of Hitler's motivations and there is an important reason why. The reason racism is important, is because of communism. It would be outrageous to simply discard communism as if it was irrelevant, when these revolutions necessarily inflame these qualities in a society.
Communist revolution was not simply some kind of economic restructuring demand from workers. It is about eradicating religion and revolutionizing culture which in old countries is often tied to the culture of a genetic line of people. That is how inflammatory these Marxist revolutions are, that they bring rise to voices who want to reinvigorate a race and defend religion.
Marxist movements tend to redefine multiple angles of a people's identity. That's why there were also many similarities in Japan's fight against communism and its racial attributes. That's why you also see racial and religious qualities in the US rejection of Marxist tampering in culture today, though they are vastly overstated. Basically information moves so fast now, it's easier for people to see how dumb Marxism is if they weren't indoctrinated young, so plenty of reasonable people reject it without needing religious or racial angles fueling it. Despite that, it still spreads.
I do blame communists for World War 2, in combination with the power imbalances and massive opportunities that industrialization surfaced. Germany and Japan both believed they had larger potential in that environment, but communism gave them the legitimate enemy they needed to justify expanding. Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
This isn't a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory, it's just history. It's a matter of history that there was an intention to expand communism globally. Look up Comintern if you've never heard of it, which advocated for world communism.
So, you think China is building the largest military in history because of "communism". Do you recognize Chinese people as warriors? Can you remember any pro-war Chinese folklore? Communism is a relatively new flavor in their culture.
And what exactly do you think China can't reproduce in 100 years?
I'm not necessarily saying that, only that it's not an unreasonable concern given the history. Venezuela (a communist country) with Chinese ties, was going to invade Guyana before we captured Maduro. Cambodia, a country with communist remnants and Chinese ties was attacking Thailand. China has a long-standing threat to take Taiwan. It already took Tibet and helped try to take communist control of Korea.
Do you think if you were Japan, South Korea or any of those other countries, you would be sitting comfy on the belief that China has good intentions for them?
So, no, I am not _certain_ that is what China is doing with its military build up. Only that, I see it as a possibility that we can't sleep on.
Your argument about whether Chinese people are pro war isn't as relevant in a country like China as it might be in some democracy, but even in democracies war still occurs even if the population is anti-war. In China, it's just even less relevant, because they have strict social control. You could say the relevance has other angles, like more of the population has to be dedicated to enforcement and repression which takes some of that capacity away from military duties.
China can definitely reproduce a lot of technologies, but if they confirm again that they are a critical threat then there is a lot more we can do to slow their progress if necessary.
Religion and race are absolutely useless gobshite whose only physically observed function is making people kill each other, coming from this throughly capitalist person.
It's funny you say Marxism is something thats hard to imbibe unless indoctrinated from childhood, why did you leave out religion from this, marxism is merely a faulty economic system. Religion is a fundamentally wrong and violently wrong system thst encompasses the entire universe. Religion is precisely what is the first and most fundamental thing that comes to mind ehich absolutely requires brainwashing from childhood to consistently propagate.
Think of it in evolutionary terms. There is physical evolution, but there's also mental evolution, moral evolution, legal evolution and so on.
We also see education as being useful, yet education seems to not teach many critical things which we often leave up to parents. Yet, many parents do not fully teach essential morals or lessons. It wasn't that long ago that the only real kind of formal education was a sort of religious education.
Religion in a way, carries forward crystallized values that people felt were important enough. You can look at all the religions around the world and identify the various elements of how those people behave. Is the way they behave useful, logically?
Not everyone is a scientist or a computer programmer, many people do not invest heavily in their minds. We might think that religion only served a purpose 500+ years ago, because it was an inverted solution to a surveillance state, letting people police themselves from within their own minds when external surveillance apparatus was basically not sufficiently viable.
I would argue some, but not all religions, still offer value as they bring forward crystallized behaviors that serve an actual purpose.
We've all seen how easy it is for people to get manipulated, become violent, etc. That seems to happen even if they aren't religious. So, if the people who are most susceptible to manipulations are pre-manipulated into a positive format that encourages them away from violence, that doesn't sound useless.
It's true that religion has been involved in many wars, but not all of those wars were for religious ends, even if religion was used. If religion wasn't used, it might have been something else. Societal structures and law enforcement have advanced a lot since then.
No, stop trying to pull out of your bs. You said communism is something that can only exist if indoctrinated into in childhood, in a comment where you whined about religions feeling "threatened" while pointedly ignoring the elephant in the room. Just answer me a simple question in a Yes or a No. Does religion survive if it isn't indoctrinated into as a kid?
Why not, if religion wasn't available, we'd wrest one major weapon away from warmongers. They will have to search much harder to galvanize large groups of people to fight for nonsense reasons over. If they didn't have this strong identity ready made on a platter to tap into, things become much harder.
Religion is simply not worth the baggage, it posits and requires faith in the infinitely wrong. Values can be taught without religion, you don't need to be a scientist to have values. Everyone has values including atheists. I see no reason why we can't simply teach values minus religion. I don't see atheists who believe in the American constitution as a good system have by virtue of atheism any less support for it, as an example. For the tiny amount of good you may find religions have provided, on the scale of balance the bloodshed and negativity it has caused are simple far worse and not worth it. And even if you think in terms of some values religions might impart, its also again counterproductive. Almost all religions are very karen and nosy often violently so about lgbtq, so much for the values side of the equation. If a religion might be good for values, such a religion at least hasn't yet emerged.
Personally, I think you're lost in the very kind of generalizations and lack of precision that you seem to hate. You're becoming what you complain against. If you think people living that way is something to be eradicated, which you seem to, why have you become it in your own way? Is it because you're human and just as susceptible to these mistakes as anyone else?
Where did I say anything about eradication? I asked you an extremely simple question. Do you think religion survives without being indoctrinated into during childhood? Yes or No? You mentioned religion a lot and said communism doesn't survive if it hasn't been indoctrinated into, which may be correct but you ignored the elephant in the room right then and there in your own message: religion. I am not asking if you think religion is good or not. I asked a very simple question, does it survive without childhood indoctrination or does it not?
You are also making up crap about wanting "eradication" which I never wrote or said about. I simply stated facts about the vast ills religion has given us and very little to almost non-existent good. I showed you how religion is unrelated at best and an active hindrance to capitalism.
>Essentially, global communism is about controlling all the resources and leveraging them, so any country that wants to survive outside of communism has to race for resources.
I hate communism but why faslely single it out, global any group or system will want to control resources as much as possible. You seem extremely stupid to the point of believing nazism was about opposing communism fundamentally rather than antisemitism and racialism.
Again as an avowed capitalist, race is the opposite of good capitalism. I will gladly trade with anyone of any race.
Well, first you'd have to make a decent argument for why it shouldn't be singled out. You're having an immediate rejection of the idea, but why? Have you been configured to feel that?
I'm not arguing that racist motivations and beliefs didn't already exist, but the Bolsheviks were a very real cultural, economic and religious existential threat to German identity which massively amplified the validity and appeal of something like the Nazi party.
Are you arguing that's not true at all? I think that would be ahistorical.
Why would I be configured for anything, its common sense, any large powerful entity will be the same. If you think only communism attempts to control the world why is America playing oil games by invading venezuela?
It may have been a religious threat but that is not an existential threat. What do you think happens if suppose most Germans stopped believing in those fairy tales? Do they combust and die? Capitalism literally has no use for religion and nationalism. They are completely out of scope of capitalism, it is at best neutral about them, and in practice religion and nationalism are a hindrance to practicing free trade.
Of course nazis hated commies just as nazis hated any other alternative source of power, but that was hardly their main animating reason for the genocides. I don't need any "brainwashing" to know what nazis openly and proudly said about Jews and Slavs. Or what are you going to say, Poles were also "commies" which is why Germany attacked them? I think the nazi motivation part of your shtick is so beyond mentally ill it's not even worth bothering with.
I think you're a little too emotionally invested and it's preventing you from making a coherent argument.
Even if I explained the actual reasons for Venezuela, it doesn't seem like you legitimately want to know. You can be addicted to curiosity or you can be addicted to opinion, but it's hard to be both.
No you haven't explained shit for Venezuela. If you did you forgot to reply it to me, I see you have written it to someone else. There is nothing emotional about the simple fact that you are positing some utterly brain dead moronic crap out of your ass that basically goes against what nazis themselves proudly proclaimed and then whining and claiming "incoherence" instead of responding to any point.
Again its completely fucking irrelevant if you think its for a good cause or bad cause, you simply said communism wants to hoard and control everything for itself starving others.
We all know the real reason Venezuela was attacked for. Capitalism, communism it does not matter what system, anything powerful enough will want to control all resources for itself. I hate communism, I hate nazism but you give the stupidest non-reasons against it factors which are shared in any powerful system and not unique to it.
I'm not the person you're responding to, but there are some counterpoints to your arguments.
China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months and that is only assuming that nothing happens to the stockpiles or the ability to access them. China does have a lot of renewable energy infrastructure, but these numbers don't convert directly into oil not being important. Oil is still very important. Their military runs on oil and for many kinds of products oil has no alternative. A lot of their population still uses ICE cars. You can put a percentage on it, like they are 60% less reliant on oil, but these numbers are useless if they still fundamentally rely on it in critically important ways. Which, they do.
Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack, which shows China that their oil imports from Russia are not guaranteed and their own infrastructure can be reached. Being at Venezuela and Iran's doorstep also shows that oil imports from them are not guaranteed.
As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports. While Iran and Russia are being scaled down, more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon. Iran is being boxed in militarily, politically, economically, and more. They can troll, but even their trolling options are being slowly reduced. Their long range missiles can only achieve those ranges by removing the warhead and adding extra fuel. They are incapable of defending the island that most of their income flows through.
Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan and he's been purging his military just like Stalin did before he invaded Poland and Finland. They've been building out manmade islands and military bases in the sea to increase their claim and threaten anyone who would intervene.
There is also a very big difference between political or token recognition of Taiwan as part of China as a cost of doing business vs real belief. The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy which China will always be a poor example of. If the CCP falls, Taiwan might be able to serve as a new center of gravity, which was also a credible threat from Hong Kong. That is the flip side of the "One China" policy, where it's only good for them so long as the CCP survives. Even without that, travel and communications between them increases interest in a true democracy that gets compared every time the CCP fails at something. COVID, property investment, unemployment, you name it. Ukraine was a similar issue with Russia, partly because they see Russian language and culture as an encapsulation that their mechanisms of control need to dominate within.
Taiwan is in very close proximity, so even if there is a lot of leverage against China from all angles, if they put everything into it they would probably be able to do it at great cost. They don't have the capability matrix to sufficiently achieve a Venezuela. If they tried that right now, it would just start a new 100 years of humiliation if the clock didn't already start the day Xi Jinping got in.
> China's stockpile of oil is only enough for a few months
China is still getting oil from Iran. Maybe that'll change but there's still (IIRC) >100M barrels of oil in transit to China.
Aside from that, the point isn't to have indefinite supplies. It's to have supplies the last longer than other countries. This is going to create huge problems for the US beofre it creates huge problems for China.
> Russian oil infrastructure has been under attack
This is a delicate balance. Ukraine can only do so much against Russian energy infrastructure before the US and Europe, who supplies the military, reins it in because of the damage done to the global energy market. This included restricting the supply and use of long-range weapons that could be used to strike energy infrastructure deep in Russia.
Like, did you know that some countries (eg Hungary) are still buying oil and gas from Russia [1]?
> As far as Iran goes, they can harass, but they can also lose all of their income and imports
Iran can do more than harass. They're winning. There is no military path to victory for the US and Israel short of the wide-scale use of nuclear weapons.
> ... more western energy infrastructure can be coming online to replace it over the coming years even if this current situation gets resolved soon
This is just wrong. No Western infrastructure can replace 20Mbpd of crude oil production and losing 20-25% of the world's LNG supply. None. You're talking about investment in the trillions of dollars over a decade or two, assuming you can even find raw resources to extract, whihc is far from certain.
> Speaking of islands. Xi Jinping absolutely wants to take Taiwan
Sorry but no. China considers this its territorial waters. And yes I know some of these "islands" (some are just reefs, basically, that they build artificial islands on) are closer to Taiwan or the Phillipines. China considers Taiwan part of its territory so that's no issue for them. Most of the world agrees (ie only ~10 nations recognize Taiwan).
China doesn't want the US or its allies to militarize "islands" right off its coast. Can you blame them?
> The CCP sees Taiwan as a threat to harmony, because it serves as an example of democracy
This is just "they hate us for our freedom" type Ameribrainned propaganda. China does more for its people than the US does. China pulled ~800 million people out of extreme poverty. The truth is that the Chinese government is quite popular with Chinese people. How do Chinese people talk about the US? One good recent example is the "kill line" [2].
Westoids project Western imperialism on China when China has no modern history of doing imperialism. "But Tibet" is the usual rejoinder. That was 1950. Other than that? There was a dispute with Vietnam over like 50 square miles in the late 1970s. And that's it. You want to compare that to the US history with regime change [3]?
Taiwan just isn't the threat to China Westerners make it out to be. We make it out as a threat because it justifies American imperialism. It's the result of propaganda. China believes that the Taiwan question will ultimately be resolved peacefully and there's absolutely no reason to resolve it militarily.
This is a difference of time frames. Every problem we have is immediate requiring a kneejerk reaction. China operates on five year plans but more than that, China plans far mor ein the future than that.
China is only still getting oil from Iran, because we allow it. China knows that. Venezuela and Iran partially tells China, the US does have influence over your oil shipments and you can't sanction proof your oil supply chain. Stopping China's oil shipments right now would just make oil prices go even higher, but we definitely could stop them.
As for Russia, yes there is still some European reliance on Russian oil/gas, but that isn't the only issue as there can also be concern over civilian casualties inside Russia with a complete collapse of oil infrastructure which could hurt some aspects of public support for Ukraine inside Russia and in the rest of the world.
Iran doesn't produce anywhere near 20 million barrels of oil per day, and only a tiny fraction of the 30% of LNG supply is disrupted, which will be coming back online within 3 years. You could argue that Iran might expand its attacks on all the infrastructure in the region to try to take more production offline, but their capacity to do that is shrinking every single day. Even if they did manage it, that would basically greenlight a multi-national ground invasion to end their regime for all time. So just like your arguments about the limitations Ukraine faces in taking out Russian infrastructure, even though Iran is a terrorist state and demonstrating how their terrorism operates, they are still fundamentally limited in what they can do without destroying themselves.
When it comes to China and Taiwan, you need to better appreciate that China has had a standing policy to take Taiwan by force if Taiwan sees itself as independent. Increasingly the Taiwanese population do see themselves as independent and they are arming themselves for defense.
China did not magically bring its population out of poverty, the US did that, by opening up to them and allowing them into the WTC (which they then abused). We thought it might liberalize their economy, which might liberalize their politics, which would pave the way for democratic reform. It didn't happen, but that was part of the plan. The other part of the plan was to increase the dependency of China on western supply chains, because this was part of the logic to stop world wars by making everyone interdependent on each other.
Communism is freaking awful, because it is never achieved and always seems to stagnate into a permanent state of dictatorship. It then sucks enough that it cannot maintain itself naturally, so it has to repress its population and heavily control information to simply prevent crumbling. The logic is not self-reinforcing. Therefore, it absolutely, critically is a threat to freedom around the world.
Technology advancement and resource access accelerates with global trade, so if one country goes rogue, that supply chain can be cut off reducing their incentive for war. China now sees that it continues to have many critical dependencies and its current potential is only achieved as part of a global trade network. Their sanction proofing will never be complete. The concern is that they may not care that they're at a disadvantage and do what they want anyway.
USD dominance isn't going anywhere, because all of the critical metrics are still basically uncontested by any alternative. China and Russia are losing allies left and right. They're demonstrating that they support terrorism. Nobody is going to decide that their currencies are the new hot thing.
China poses a huge threat, but some of their worst advantages aren't viable. We know things they have, so we tell them things we have. If you do X, we do Y. Thus some of their big advantages are nullified, unless they get reckless. Same as the nuclear issue, weapons you've invested in yet cannot even use, because they become part of new rules.
Some of that has been clarified in the trade tug of war, showing each other's dependencies. Some is being shown by also showing how easy it is for Russian infrastructure to be hit, or how easy it is to put a choke hold on critical energy, or to simply capture a dictator for that matter. It isn't even just those things, it's also the cadence and timeframe. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia all under severe pressure within just a few months at the start of 2026.
At most we've maybe seen some limited sabotage of infrastructure inside the US and perhaps aboard a carrier, some sharing of targeting information, etc.
If Russia and China are leveraging any of their real potential for pressure, it sure is hard to tell.
I mean, Gold is an asset. Bitcoin is an asset. Those aren't currencies, even if people like to think of them that way.
As far as the Euro, Europe is not America. The European Union is also not the United States. America has geographic advantages that Europe lacks. The US has structural stability advantages that the EU lacks. People sometimes argue things like, the EU is more of a framework or general agreement, while the US is an actual country.
The amount of USD in circulation dwarfs all other currencies and makes it more cushioned against shocks. It's much more liquid than gold or bitcoin. If you need to get actual things done in the real world and you need to get them done quickly, USD is the currency you want to generally have.
It's also the least likely to simply poof or disappear. China is the only real threat the US has faced since World War 2 and we're handling it pre-emptively. You could argue we were pre-empting the CCP even before World War 2, since we were supporting the anti-communist forces inside China before Japan attacked it and unified them against it.
The outcome of a lot of wars comes down to physics. The physics are on the side of the US. USD isn't going anywhere. Iranian and Venezuelan oil will be traded in USD now as well.
the reason your encouraged approach tends to produce poor results, is that you increase the distance between the decisions that need to be made and the people who understand how to make the decision or whether a decision is even valuable to make.
it is basically an unsustainable structure. there's not much value to replacing one structure which you might think is unsustainable with something equally or less sustainable that also produces worse results anyway.
another issue is that it can dilute responsibility and someone will take more assertive control anyway which further reduces the quality of decision making. someone still has to enact and enforce the decisions, so whoever does the enacting has to obey and whoever does the enforcing has to enforce the right thing. it's easy to end up with a bunch of people influencing things for their own reasons which have nothing to do with maximizing the production of good results.
This feels like the 2026 version of "blog". A thing that didn't need a name and the name it now has contains "out of touch" qualities to it, but it spread easier under a name that got popularized so it wins out in evolutionary terms?
Unlike blog though, claw is camping on an existing word and it won't surprise me if people settle on some other word once a more popular, professional and security conscious variant exists.
I don't think operating through messaging services will be considered anything unique, since we've been doing that for over 30 years. The mobile dimension doesn't change this much, except for the difference between always connected and push notifications along with voice convenience being a given. Not using MCP was expected, because even in my personal experiments it was very natural to never adopt MCP. It's true that there are some qualities MCP has that can be useful, but it's extra work and friction that doesn't always pay off.
Total access + mobile messaging + real productivity is naturally addictive, and maybe it's logical that the lazy path to this is the first to become popularized, because the harder problems around it are simply ignored.
I do consider it unique to interface with your home lab server or personal vps through a messaging. The first time I did a version of that, I was completely blown away by that concept. I guess I just never thought about being able to talk to my computer in English via chat.
If we're talking strictly a messaging app, like ICQ, AIM, etc you could argue it's mildly different, but people have communicated with and orchestrated machines over IRC for a very long time which is where I'm coming from with it.
It is fun and feels new the first time you do it, but that aspect of it is not particularly new to computing. Back then of course, you'd interface with some flat text file database, directories, run commands or use raw sockets to scrape some website to get a result. APIs weren't a thing as much as you'd just try to replicate the queries to submit webpage forms.
You could have a music server in another room and send a message to pick the next song or open the CD drive on some machine halfway around the world. You could write new scripts that operate on a daily schedule and have them running on machines around the world. Many home computers were totally compromised back then too, so almost anything that was connected to IRC was a potential orchestration node.
Having an LLM make decisions about what to do with the machine is a natural evolution of that and not a hard thing to hack on if you have the right model, although it makes totally compromised the new default again.
1. Find out what Co-pilot's reputation is among power users.
2. Realize that Co-pilot is bad and needs to improve up to Microsoft's highest gold standards of trustworthiness.
3. Ditch Co-pilot branding inside the OS.
4. Make AI features private and offline by default unless the local hardware cannot run the specialized tiny model for that task, at which point it goes online for it. It might be slower, but if it does the thing, it's ok.
5. Allow companies and power users to provide their own local models that hook into these tasks, so they can host AI servers within the company and these AI tasks never reach outside of the company.
6. Make AI features more specific, targeted and useful instead of simply integrating it into the various functions and throwing it at users like "here, you figure out what to do with this thing, we don't know."
7. Don't expect people to want to chat with it in every app, just find a task that you know it succeeds at and expose that task rather than letting users figure out what it sucks at.
8. Don't make the AI integration APIs a case of increased surface area privacy and security risk that 3rd party system apps can hook into, to mass extract information out of every app on your system easily. Put limitations on it.
9. Add features to specify where AI can go and cannot go, just like the microphone. Folders, apps, online services. Even if it does use Co-pilot online, let users sculpt it.
10. Make it explicit and obvious when AI features are operating offline or online. If users have decades of understanding that Notepad is a private offline app, preserve that expectation as much as possible. Just because Outlook and OneNote are very online-oriented apps, it doesn't mean they want their local experience to be online in every way. If you force AI to go over all my cloud files, notes and e-mail without my permission, that is sociopathic behavior and I will ditch you, Microsoft.
Some day Co-pilot will probably be good. That isn't today. It's probably not this year or next year, but eventually. Until then, it needs to stay in a lane with freshly painted lines surrounded with sand barrels in case it wrecks.
It's not that I'm entirely opposed to some Microsoft AI feature existing in Windows, but manufacturing a user assumption that it is everywhere all the time is bad not just for Windows, but for society as a whole.
We've already seen how political and activist the public sphere became over the last decade, which reduces trust in the people who make software and services too. What do we do when Microsoft gets ideologically taken over and abuses its information access to people for political ends?
Show you can be trusted. When I put a little food bowl down for you, don't scratch me and we'll go from there.
Philosophically you could try to differentiate between the human side of the effort versus the computer side. You could also differentiate from a really dumb model and a really smart model. A dumb model just spinning its wheels and hoping it gets lucky, versus a smart model actually trying intelligent things and collecting relevant details.
In these cases I think we're assuming a sufficiently smart model making well reasoned headway on a problem. Not sure I would fall on the side of the camp that would label this as brute force by default in all cases. That said, there may be specific scenarios where it might seem fitting even when using a smart model.
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