That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
> That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
That’s chicken feed compared to the amounts that have been wiped off the stock markets.
I mean on their own those are nice numbers, but you also have to add in the extra military costs of blowing crap up and it starts to seem like chump change to me. We just had a 1.5 trillion defense spending proposal.
Trump, if the US makes it through this administration, might be a boon longterm if it wakes up the populace. The blatantly obvious corruption and grift might just do the trick. Those are some pretty big ifs though.
I don't think he's arguing for rural, just expressing concern about the *biggest* cities.
> entertainment, variety, walkability, and many other benefits that rural places don't provide
I appreciate all of this as well, but at the end of the day, I moved to a city with 80x the population of my hometown because of a (specific) job. Rent is also significantly higher, and if I had to consume my savings to survive here, I'd surely move out. Entertainment and walkability have secondary importance compared to putting food on the table and saving for retirement.
> As a result they now can't book a hotel, use credit cards or access everyday services. As Nicolas Guillou says 'You are effectively blacklisted by much of the world's banking system'
Totally agree that this is absurd and disportionate, especially as a consequence of a US decision.
I mean, it's one thing to sanction a foreign billionaire: freezing their assets, thus preventing them from wielding their power in our borders is perfectly reasonable... But for a normal citizen living within your borders, freezing everything and preventing them from working is disenfranchising them and denying them all personal property rights (without judicial process!)
There are a bunch of examples of people in Europe who have also been sanctioned because of their political work. The first two that come to mind:
If we're moving away from USA tech, I hope that we're not blindly trusting stuff simply being hosted in EU, but rather use the opportunity to spread our eggs in more jurisdiction baskets (rather than only the EU basket)
Who is 'we'? Which data are you referring to? (If you mean e.g. Samsung Galaxy with GrapheneOS, by all means.)
We need to consider a few factors.
If you are from EU, and you want GDPR to be enforced, you need to work with countries which follow your local law. The USA is hinting at no longer doing so, since it retaliates with sanctions.
Now, where would you host, and why? Norway seems like an interesting target, since they are very high on renewable energy. Norway isn't part of EU, but part of the EEA. Latency with Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia isn't going to be ideal. But if the company behind it is from there, and they have a local presence in Europe, why not? Could even work with proprietary software. FOSS can help here.
Hardware is a difficult target. It is near impossible to avoid China in this regard. And if you do, you often end up with US products. OSHW can help, but it is rather uncommon. We also have a constraint: we need energy efficient in Europe.
It it's something public/political like a Lemmy/Mastodon instance, I would pick a foreign jurisdiction which is unlikely to enforce something like the UK's OSA or USA and EU sanctions... I don't know where it would be best, some country in the Balkans, maybe?
If it's a service (even commercial) meant to be used only by a few people that I have direct (personal or business) relationships, I'd just ask their preferences (and bias towards the cheapest jurisdiction for hosting).
If it's something B2C, hosting exclusively outside of Europe would probably just make things more difficult to me, so it'd probably be within the EU (Hetzner?)
Besides the appeal of "though people", the idea that we're also in a cycle, of which the current phase is the worst one, is also basically the Kali Yuga concept, popularised by openly nazi figures like Julius Evola and Savitri Devi
If people are unhappy about their current society, they'd be better off learning about the economic causes, rather than esoteric memes.
I think, on top of the cycle aspect, there's also an aspect that the people who trot out that quote think they're part of the few "hard men" of current times. Eg They (and their ideas) are the solution to our problems.
That’s not a ban of nvidia chips though. It’s for a few of the biggest companies, and is specifically telling them not to buy a made-for-china SKU:
> The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) told companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, this week to end their testing and orders of the RTX Pro 6000D, Nvidia’s tailor-made product for the country, according to three people with knowledge of the matter
BlackBerry hasn't been OEM for their last few phones - the KeyOne, 2LE, and 2 were all outsourced to TCL, who is still making handsets. This would also fit with BlackBerry's security image, and even pull in the OnwardMobility vapourware.
I'm every bit as skeptical as you are, and in no universe is BlackBerry the OEM in question, but I would like to live in my delusion until GrapheneOS proves me wrong - I want a keyboard, dammit!
> I doubt even someone as big as Samsung will be willing or able to develop their own alternative OS
Huawei pulled it out with HarmonyOS (I don't know how good/bad is it, and if it'll have staying power, but other companies are putting in the effort)
PS: btw, Samsung already had its own, non-Android OS with Bada (of course, developing a new OS is only the first step, getting it to be successful wouldn't be easy)
Huawei has a whole-ass Chinese government behind it with quite a lot of incentives to move away from Google. Samsung does not. Heck, China's making its own GPUs and x86 CPUs. They're not great, but when the incentives over there are that strong, the market forces are clearly in a whole different universe compared to the rest of the world.
Bada lasted, what, 3 years? So it did better than Firefox OS (unless you want to count KaiOS as the same thing), but not by much? Not a great look I'd say. And things haven't gotten any easier during the past 15 years, with Apple and Google's positions being more entrenched than ever.
> Huawei has a whole-ass Chinese government behind it
I don't like how Chinese companies systematically get reduced to "it's because the government can help them". The US TooBigTech get a ton of help from the US government, starting with political pressures when other countries want to regulate them.
Huawei have really good technology and very competent engineers. It's not the Chinese government that does the engineering.
DJI is years ahead of everybody else technologically, and that's again not the Chinese government doing the engineering. Let's stop believing that the US are superior in every single way and that someone else doing better means that they must be cheating.
Equally lets not forget that china sees this as a key strategic necessity for a forced reunification attempt on taiwan, both for national security and the ability to produce chips solo.
Two things can be true. They can have great engineers and government money. Theyre not mutually exclusive.
Governments all over the world try to support their economies. It's not just a Chinese thing. How much does the western world invest in LLMs? But for some reason, we only call it "cheating" when China does it and is more successful than us.
What an outburst lol. I didnt call it cheating. Its just as worth noting as when it happens elsewhere. Perhaps you should stop reading what isnt there.
(I'm not sure how many Vietnamese actually love USA, vs how many don't... I just want to remind that different people in the same society might hold different opinions, and the sentiment is certainly not monolithic)
I never really looked into it, but it looks like the vast majority of Vietnamese were born after the war so US culture and trade are way more important contributors to opinion. Vietnamese are some of the most pro-US people in the world.
Vietnam had such massive population growth that there are very few people who even remember the war. On the other hand China was pretty much always ingrained into their “national consciousness” as a permanent massive threat.
The most recent example include the profits from Venezuelan oil:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgn7p7g79wo
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/trump-administration-manda...
That money is held in a US treasury account. In February the estimated price from the first 50 M barrels was $2.8bn... with the USA+Israel bombing of Iran, the price of course would have increased since.
> It is not clear what portion of the revenues from the sale - which analysts expect to raise about $2.8bn (£2.1bn) - would be shared with Venezuela.
But let's assume that the USA is going to retain "only" 5% of it: that's still 140 million $ of money flowing in, in perpetuity.
Not to mention that having control of the whole 2.8 billion $ also buys further room for loan and deals made on the USA's preferred currency and preferred terms... Or the expropriation of CITGO.
Of course, that money flowing in will be mostly in the pocket of Trump itself, of the billionaires surrounding him, of the military industrial complex (you have to replenish the weapons stockpiles, after all) and all of the federal contractors (that includes most of the FAANG!)... Lots of people in the USA "labor aristocracy" are going to see material benefit from it.
Ultimately, there's still going to be lots of poor people in the USA who won't be able to afford insulin, and there's going to be lots of resentment abroad (not only in Venezuela)... And one could split hair that Maduro's kidnapping is in the USA's interest, but not in its "best interest" (or similarly trying to argue a no-true-scotman for the definition of "USA's interest")
Not to mention, but it's not only Trump's: it's everyone who he surrounds himself with: JD Vance, Pam Bondi (until a few days ago?), Pete Hegseth, the military generals that didn't get kicked out by Hegseth, etc.
They're all complicit, and they're all going along with him.
And of course, if the Democrats will return to power in the next few elections, I don't expect them to relinquish the leverage and resources that Trump got them, just like Obama and Biden didn't pull out of Afghanistan for several years.
Of course, we saw with AIPAC and JStreet that US lobbying is seeing tons of money from abroad: but those are two different faces of the same medal: the oligarchs and the bourgeoisie have common interests across different countries, and the USA is definitely influencing politicians abroad as much, if not more, than moneyed interests abroad are influencing politicians in the USA.
The problem is not only Trump
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