No, that’s the funniest/most enraging part. That’s Musk thinking that him carrying a chainsaw in another country lacked empathy. He is so genuinely disconnected from reality that he can’t even link his actions to the hatred sane people hold for him.
Let’s not forget the letter where the addressing clearly states “Her Excellency” but the salutation was the generic, “Dear Mr. President”.
… in retrospect it lacked empathy.
Retrospect?
RETROSPECT!!?!!???
This twat has shown no empathy toward anybody at any point in his life. His own children can’t stand him once they reach a certain level of cognition!
TACO is a nice meal anytime.
You’re missing a key point here.
Of course there’s more people travelling to neighbouring countries than non-neighbouring ones. Simple cost explains that.
But there’s no real meaningful increase in costs between flying to Europe and flying to Asia, say. Doing a quick eyeball check, ticket prices from NYC to Seoul, for example, are about $400-500. Flights from NYC to Frankfurt are about $200-300. South Korea, however, is significantly cheaper than Germany for tourism. Depending on whose numbers you go by, SK is anywhere from 33% to 50% cheaper than Germany for tourism, so the extra $200 for the tickets is more than made up for in literally two days of actually being in the country.
Costs scale roughly the same across Europe, and SK is kind of the middle of the pack costs-wise for Asia, so it’s a decent proxy. (Japan is more expensive, China and Vietnam are cheaper.)
Yet far more people fly to Europe, when they bother going beyond North America, than to Asia. Meaning far more people are flying to places that are culturally not that different from their own, comparatively, despite the fact that the latter is cheaper. By far.
(How far? A friend of mine in Canada came to visit me for two months one summer and worked out that they’d turned a profit, despite the then very high air fares, after the first month just in savings on electricity and food costs living at home.)
USAnals are very parochial (40% never having had a passport), and when they do step outside of their parochial bounds, they go to places that are very similar to home anyway, even when places that are actually different cost less.
I still remember screaming in frustration during Obama’s first two years when the Democrats controlled both houses and the court and the presidency … and accomplished only these three things of substance:
Plastic play money?
…
I JEST! I JEST! PLEASE DON’T KILL ME! IT’S MY MONEY TOO! 🤣
Most USAnals live within 160km (100 miles) of their place of birth. 40% have never had a passport which is an increasingly accurate proxy, since the border tightenings of 2007, for having never left the country. Of those who’ve actually left, an overwhelming majority have only gone as far afield as Canada or Mexico. A significantly smaller fraction have gone as far afield as Europe. A very tiny fraction have gone anywhere truly distant and alien, culturally speaking.
And yet these are the people who think they should rule the world.
Yes. Who’d expect a random anon to do more than vaguebooking an episode without links and then using that as “proof”.
You utter berk.
Translation: “I’m too lazy to back up my bullshit.”
Buh-bye.
No they aren’t. “Naming” and “seeing” are two radically different words that mean radically different things. In ancient China, for example, there was no word for green or blue. Instead there was a single word that covered both: 青. (In modern linguistics such terms are called “grue”.) You’ll find similar things in many other cultures’ linguistic history (some even extending to today!).
It doesn’t mean they couldn’t see the difference. All you have to do to disprove that is look at ancient painted beams in China and see the clearly delineated green and blue segments in complex patterns. If they literally couldn’t see blue, this would not exist, yet oddly it does. In fact all they did was classify things differently from modern English. (Today they have 绿 and 蓝 for green and blue respectively, using 青 only for colours like turquoise or the colour of blue-green algae. This is, however, very recent: literally 20th century. The characters have existed for a long time, but were used as shades of 青 for most of that history like we use “sky” and “navy” as shades of blue.)
Trying to claim that they literally couldn’t see blue because they named it differently and categorized things differently is risible on the face of it. This would be like me claiming you couldn’t tell the difference between sky blue and navy blue because in English they’re both called “blue”. It takes literally seconds of thought to figure out that this claim is bullshit using just your own language and colour differentiation as the evidence.
The number of people who believe that ancient civilizations couldn’t see blue is truly scary to me.
Point well made.
Tell me you don’t understand the impact tariffs have without saying it out loud.
Trump’s tariff deadline looms … U.S. stocks set records
That’ll do it.
Yeah. President Camacho cared about the country. He was just ill-equipped to run it.
Trump doesn’t even care.
Oh. Pity. The whisky/akvavit war was one of the more charming things in world politics.
Splitting it is OK, I guess, but … WHERE WILL THE CF’s PEOPLE GET THEIR AKVAVIT FROM NOW!?
WAY more than enough.
A sudden sale of 1% of the T-Bills in circulation would be devastating.
Japan owns 4.3% of them. (The UK has 3.1% and China 2.9%.)
Japan alone could make the US squeal like a piggy. If they coordinate with China (possible) and/or the UK (far less likely), it’s an economic nuke.
Supply and demand answers the question. When there is a large supply with no change in demand, prices drop. When there is a short supply with no change in demand, prices rise.
There’s not going to be any reason for a sudden rise in demand for US Treasury Bills, likely, at the same moment that Japan dumps its 4.3% of the US Treasury bills on the open market. And a sudden sale of 4.3% is going to cause a precipitous drop in the value of the bills. (This is going to be even worse if China takes that opportunity to dump its own 2.9%.)
And then comes the free-fall.
Because if T-bills drop suddenly in value, other holders (like the UK, with 3.1%) will sell off quickly to avoid taking a bath. Which will make the value drop more quickly causing other people to sell off etc. etc. etc. To make up for this, the US is going to have to do some serious work. With a free fall in price, the US Treasury is going to have to boost interest rates a lot to make up for it. This makes it more expensive for the USA to borrow money to finance its government operations. Interest bills on the national debt go up. (So does the deficit budget, probably, or the US starts killing its citizens instead the Trump way).
Oh, and that’s just governmental cost. Private borrowing starts getting more expensive too. Loans have higher interest rates, which will negatively impact all businesses big and small. Which will eventually negatively impact everybody.
But … this will hurt Japan (and China, say) as well, right? I mean selling off the T-bills will raise the Yen/Yuan and hurt the Japanese/Chinese economy, right?
Traditionally, yes, that would be true. But, see, the USA’s idiot of a president now has tariffs greater than 100% on China and is threatening 35% even on Japan. The damage on exporting is already done!. Because a bumped up currency hurts exports, but if exports have already been virtually eliminated, there’s nothing that a bit of a currency rise is going to really do anymore. Trump’s “beautiful” tariffs have made the sudden sell-off of T-bills more likely and given foreign debt owners (Japan, the UK, and China in decreasing order of proportion) a more powerful weapon as a result.
Combine this with the retaliatory tariffs and the US economy is being ass-fucked sideways with a rusting spiked dildo if Japan (and probably China) suddenly drop their T-bill load.
There are some persistent, no-taste losers here in China who buy Buick (and sometimes even Caddilac). Most people won’t touch 'em any longer, though.
I’m sure that the day he stops breathing is the day his investors start breathing easier, yes.