No, not the euro, but China did peg the Yuan to the dollar for years to ensure their exports remained cheap.

China is ok with it because they will insist the Renminbi be used as the brics reserve currency.

I am sure. Legalize all of it. Legalize it, regulate it, tax it, use half of the new income for prevention and education, one quarter for medical support for addicts and the rest fills the coffers. You take away the power from the criminal gangs, while at the same time increasing your tax revenue, adding new legal avenues of business and minimizing the health impact considerably.

Stuff like this is why I have to tell our Chinese CFO why we don’t want Huawei network devices. Yes Jeff, I know they are cheap as shit, you cheapskate, but you don’t put the cheapest solution in place to run your critical systems on!

Maybe that’s why Israel bombed so many children this time

The president or prime minister said that if China is serious about reclaiming Taiwan, it should also reclaim land that is currently Russian, as that land was also lost during the same time period.

Reddit was just a crappy website that a 10 year old could string to

Ehm, the Germans got bombed into oblivion. It was quite effective.

With Biden stepping aside and Trump being even dumber than he was (which to everyones surprise was possible apparently), I’m feeling a lot more positive about the US elections in November.

I know it as a book. I think I saw the movie once, but wasn’t impressed. The book is a very good introduction to philosophy.

Edit: I just realized that I was talking about “Sophie’s world”, not “Sophie’s choice” so ignore my comment.

Russia is a North Korean client state now.

I think the crisis moment for Ukraine has passed mostly. The threat of a breakthrough from a couple of months ago is not gone, but stalled long enough to shore up the defensive lines and have ammunition and supplies delivered from the west (and let’s be honest here, that is still for 90% coming from the US). The strategy for Ukraine should now be to hold line and hit the supply lines.

The sanctions that were implemented take time to really bite and you start seeing the results of these more and more.

One thing I think Ukraine should do is start recruiting mercenaries from Nepal and other places where Russia is recruiting. Since they’re not (or rather “probably would not”) be thrown in the meat grinder, I think that after some time they can dry up those sources too, while at the same time addresing some of their own manpower issues.

No it isn’t

I disagree with that sentiment. The West was willing to put up with a lot of crap from CCP, but the refusal to allow a somewhat level playing ground, the tying of the fixed exchange rate of the remnibi to the dollar and the growing hostility and aggression towards Taiwan caused a lot of mistrust to grow and fester. When you look at the early 2000’s, the West was willing to play ball, just as it was playing ball with Russia at that time. Authoritarian strongmen are the issue here, not the West’s attitudes towards those respective nations.

I use an HP microserver gen 8, which I bought second hand (300$) and upgraded with a better CPU (20$ from ebay) and extra ram (80$) and 4 2TB SSD’s (100$ per). I installed Windows server on it because I just wanted it to work in a way I’m familiar with, but a colleague of mine installed Synology OS on it. You can use the cd drive bay for the OS disk (with some tweaking). Since you already have the disks, this would fit your budget.

I fully support a ban on bottom trawling. It’s a super destructive form of fishing and should never have been allowed in the first place.

So we should not pay more attention to parties with a ton of authoritarian tendencies compared to a party that has one or two viewpoints that may be construed as authoritarian?

I will posit my question in the nicest way I can think off. Are you fucking retarded?!?

The best thing to do when you fall off a horse, is climb straight back up on it. Rejecting almost limitless power because of an accident almost 40 years ago is foolish to me. Luckily research didn’t completely stop and modern plants are a lot safer with a lot of medical applications for the waste.

You need to upgrade your browser skills.

I almost want to see him try, because invading Taiwan is more likely to ruin the communist party than the Taiwanese government.