Holy crap that’s so close. Like not much past 150 meters.

They aren’t. This opinion article sucks. It’s certainly a version of the story but it’s not a good one.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/7/why-are-kenyans-angry-with-the-imf

Kenya has budget shortfalls because the previous government borrowed from China and others like they never had to pay it back. The IMF extended them a small line of credit (compared to their existing loans) at I believe a 0% interest rate. It was to help them stabilize their budget temporarily and pay off other loans with interest coming due. Because helping Kenya is way more beneficial to everyone than letting them collapse.

The IMF made recommendations for a bunch of ways Kenya could start digging out of the hole they’re in. One of them was tax changes. Kenya’s leaders chose to simply increase taxes and say the IMF is making them to shift the blame. Instead of deploying a variety of suggestions IMF made.

That pissed people off of course. So now they’re going to try other suggestions the IMF came up with. Like eliminating government administrative waste. Such as no longer covering unnecessary travel costs and ending monthly allowances for spouses of politicians.

Lot of whatabout NATO is in there somewhere

Also, Russia did like the exact opposite of that. They emptied out their worst criminals into Wagner because they knew they’d have no qualms about what Wagner does.

We need to bring back communal psychedelic rituals. Will fix most of these people.

Yeah the amount of Finding Out possible from this decision has high schadenfreude potential.

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It’s not that weird given that account is one of the idiotic “bOtH siDeS” posters.

Depends on how much subsidization they’re getting

All good. It’s a pervasive myth that on the surface seems plausible. There are other examples of what you mentioned that probably were a false flag or manufactured consent. Extending a conspiracy like that to Pearl Harbor takes a lot of credit away from Yamamoto’s strategic genius.

That take on Pearl Harbor is not historically accurate though. US Naval command had Japanese radio transmissions as well. It was more hubris and incompetence than some secret desire for an excuse to join the war. The US was already preparing for war with Japan. And Japan was crazy enough to skip straight to attacking US Naval command in Hawaii head-on as an opening move. Whereas US command assumed they’d take smaller targets first and try to stretch the fleet across defending many locations.

Japan ironically was both more and less successful than intended because of US mistakes. US carrier groups were sent west out near Wake Island and the Marshall Islands to cut off the attack that was thought to be coming. But Japan sailed around Midway approaching Hawaii from the North. They even had their planes loop around to fly in from the East to cause extra confusion until it was too late. What they found was less resistance than expected because the carriers weren’t there. It didn’t end up being the kinda suicidal knock out blow Yamamoto was going for.

Congress demanded multiple investigations over the years after. They all bore out a similar conclusion that US command and intelligence fucked up. They went looking for the fight in the wrong place. Assuming the attack on Hawaii intelligence had to be a ruse.

And people should have known Iran was working on ways to help create a distraction for Russia. Hamas had been planning and building up for this attack for a while. They even intentionally chose October 7th which is Putin’s birthday. But I get downvoted all the time as some crazy person for pointing out how easily it was to predict Iran’s proxies were going to act up to help split US attention away from Ukraine.

Pandemic accelerated it a lot. Couple projects I was on were to move production lines out of China to Mexico, Malaysia, and India. The move to India was pre-pandemic to avoid Trump tariffs. The other two were during the pandemic to avoid Chinese lockdowns.

He fired his PR team a few years ago. That’s been the difference.

He said plenty of dumb shit prior with people cleaning it up. One of my favorites was probably 10 years ago now. He claimed Model 3 assembly line automation would move so fast they’d have to worry about wind resistance.

My friends and co-workers still laugh about that one now. It’s such an absurd “business” mentality of go fast = good. So go crazy fast = more good. With a technology that doesn’t exist and kinda doesn’t need to. It makes more sense to increase system capacity (multiple lines) when you’re chasing throughput like that. But what makes even more sense is accurately forecasting your production so you don’t have to slap a full car together in 30 minutes to keep up with demand.

Sure dumbass. Way to discount all the labor wins the UAW has fought for recently.

They won’t because part of it is slave labor.

Now this I can get behind. We should fight back by subsidization of production as heavily as China is theirs.

That $10k Chinese car cost $20k to make. A competitor undercutting the market that much leads to monopolization. When that competitor is being bankrolled by a foreign government it’s potentially even a hostile act.

People have been mad for decades about what Walmart did to retail in the US. Taking steps to prevent that from also happening with the auto industry should be appreciated.

Hell just say NATO is a defensive alliance and they go off the rails. I’ve picked up a few long bans for that alone.

Russia’s air defense had a backbone of Cold War era tech before the war started. Ukraine has been consistently plinking away at it. Most of it is naturally positioned near borders to prevent penetration. If you sneak past the coverage thins out quickly. Russia is a huge country so it’s also understandable to not have high density coverage throughout.

At one point Russia had a great setup. But that time was long ago. And oil money going to modernization efforts means less yacht money. Air defense also isn’t that critical when you’re mostly concerned about beating up on small countries like Georgia and Chechnya that can’t fight back.