Yes. The PetroEuro was Iraq trying to move away from USD and take advantage of interest rates and the rising Euro. The US invaded and overthrew Hussein, forcing Iraq to switch back to USD.

I think the point of the BRICS currency is to give stability for global trading. Something that currently Trump is threatening with all the dumbass financial and trade moves to MAGA. BRICS isn’t trying to collapse the USD. There’s just less demand for USD when BRICS trade with each other using currency swaps as they do now.

I don’t have a good understanding of how gold is going to back this BRICS currency so I am interested in what the next moves are.

As for Europe and UK, fuck em I reckon austerity nuts are going to cut all sorts of government spending. I don’t see any big moves to save themselves economically.

The reason the US moved away from the gold standard was due to the limits of gold supply back in the 70s. It’s interesting that BRICS is trying to go back to using gold.

For the petrodollar, I think the US is seeing the Triffin Dilemma in effect:

The more popular the reserve currency is relative to other currencies, the higher its exchange rate and the less competitive domestic exporting industries become.

If the US has to provide a certain amount of USD so the rest of the world can trade oil with each other, it has to print more currency leading to domestic inflation.

If alternative currencies become more dominant, it actually could help the US reduce inflation. For the rich US capitalists, it’s going to be worse because their assets won’t be flying upwards in price any more. But for normies, it might provide some relief.

Could they theoretically store or just bury the yeast as a means of carbon capture ?

The US government fear the loss of a sanction weapon more than anything USD price related. If a BRICS currency happens, they can’t freeze out their enemies from international trade.

State capitalism is what libs call socialism whenever it’s objectively doing too much better economically than their own shit.

Soothes the butthurt to also puff some copium.

About a fifth of the world’s total oil consumption passes through the strait, or roughly 20 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil, condensate and fuel.

“You thought my tariffs on everything would be inflationary for the US? Well hold my beer because guess how unconditionally supporting our 51st state in another war in the Middle East is going to affect global oil prices?” - Big Brain Trump

There are bugs in every system. AI will just create different types of bugs. It’s the nature of technology.

The hype money being thrown at AI is making the F35 of software out of this shit though. Big Tech accumulated so much cash and had nothing to throw it at after VR didn’t take off.

Then we get Skynet.

Basically the US government has been trying to fight a tech war for their Big Tech buddies over about a decade. It’s gone fucking terrible.

So I say just keep going like lemmings!

China tech looks like more Star Trek and the US looks more like Mad Max but somehow the analyst from the Heritage Foundation thinks China is copying the US homework.(E.g Huawei Cloud Matrix uses optical interconnects that NVIDIA doesn’t have.)

It’s analysis like that which created the shit strategy that is losing the tech war. But when you listen to idiots for advice and lose, who’s really to blame?

I don’t think that was their vibes.

From article:

the point is not to let ourselves be replaced by AIs, but to use them to improve ourselves and our productivity

My take:

The role of the programmer is ultimately to solve the problems. There are many ways to skin the cat. The better solutions comes from the better programmers.

Bosses under capitalism have less understanding of the pros/cons of a particular solution. Hence they will often use their decision making powers to choose the quick solution rather than the best.

LLM/AI is at arms reach from the people, no matter how much money Big Tech puts on Datacenters. The scary part is what Google always used to do best, lobbying for monopolization. Aside from that, we’re safe.

I think there’s potential danger from other angles.

Capitalist bosses are looking to downsize their workforce. AI is marketed by Big Tech as the new “outsourcing”. Bosses are dumb enough to pay for that. This is the SW version of a manufacturing robot.

In the meantime, we kill a lot of atmosphere on the data centre electricity to make this slop.

As I said though, AI is CURRENTLY a service as offered by the big tech oligarchy. Just like the search engine tool is dominated by Google. They use Search as a means of extracting money from the economy. It’s a form of rent.

DeepSeek broke the service model. Others are following in their footsteps. It’s just a matter of sticking to open source models to kill off the profitability of an AI oligarchy.

The threat I see is the dominance of AI services provided by an oligarchy of tech companies. Like Google dominance of search. It’s a service that they own.

Thankfully China is a source of alternative AI services AND open source models. The bonus is that Chinese companies like Huawei are also an alternative source of AI hardware. This allows you to run your own AI models so you don’t necessarily need their services.

You’re thinking of class war. There’s only one proven way to win that war: The working class rises up, kill some MFers and takes over. There’s no point smashing the loom - kill the loom owners and take their looms.

How does Revolution work?

You kill some MFers and take over. Think we’ve seen plenty of revolutions throughout history.

“But I can protest about how shitty my bus is!” - some lib

And I’m chiefly concerning myself with critiquing the product, the AI art, from an artistic lens. It’s my belief that much of how AI is used results in art that isn’t very good.

It’s based on the human decisions behind using the tool which is AI. The creative choices from the human is what makes it art. If there’s absolute zero human involvement, it’s just an audience observing a chaotic result of nature.

If the AI user doesn’t respect the craft, then they don’t make informed artistic choices. Hence the result is shit.

AI is more like the canvas at the moment. We haven’t been able to teach it creativity.

The other aspect of art is finding your audience. The recently deceased Michael Leunig was a political cartoonist from Australia. He drew a very simple style that AI could replicate but his art was enjoyed because it was him.

AI won’t be stopped any more than the printing press and the internet before it. The machines aren’t the enemy. The owners are.

There’s a hype machine that is trying to shoehorn AI into places where it isn’t mature enough currently. Which is why the rush to market is a problem.

The owners of the machine think the machine can do more than it is capable of. This leads to the enshittification of the product. It is the customer that suffers.

In terms of art content, there’s already a tonne of it. WAY MORE than audiences even want to consume. If anything, AI is pouring more shit into an overflowing cup.

The machine has been abused because the owner doesn’t understand where the value resides.

In the meantime it’s burning a lot of fossil fuels to make shit.

I am saying China was less industrial an economy than USSR in 1989. I agree China is more industrialized now.

My point being that China had a lot of challenges to industrialise back in the 80s because it was far less developed than other socialist countries. The USSR fell yet China continued to develop industry due to solving a lot of different economic issues.

Politics can take some of the blame for USSR falling but I would argue that economics is a major factor also.

The US is now trying to industrialise more and facing its own challenges. Even if it suddenly turns socialist (as the article suggests in the conclusion), the US still faces the same economic challenges as would if it remained capitalist.

Exchange rates and the government bond markets affect every country that trades.

TLDR: skill issue.

The US could reindustrialize but like any large undertaking, it will take time, resources and a lot of planning/thought.

Trump doing some drastic action like tariffs is not only insufficient. It is actually detrimental.

Ah well. Sucks to be the US then…🤪

Maybe next time actually get some broad public consensus on what the fucking plan is and the time frames/resources involved!

Both socialist and capitalist systems still have to deal with the intricacies of global economics. Not all socialist countries managed to pull off what China did. The USSR fell when it was far more industrialized than China was.

“I am willing to pay more as long as there are NO cheaper options (and I will grumble about it).”

Germany scored 105 out of 100 on the Trolldom House index. One day America will get back there with a lot of soul searching and work…