China is successfully preparing Russia as a vassal state of China. Putin and Kim Jong-Un will be sitting next to each other as equals at the kids table at a meeting in China in the years ahead.

“Give me a meme and a message board on which to post it, and I shall move the world”

-Archimedes

That morning, the man’s wife safely gave birth to their first child. He was stopping by Whole Foods to get that expensive fruit drink that she loves so much, but won’t buy for herself because she say’s its too expensive. Everything he looked at he saw with a shine of promise for the happy future for his growing family. He lost his mother to cancer when he was 14, and worried about what kind of parent he would be without being able to grow into adult with his mom in his life. Today though, he had no doubts. He looked in his newborn’s eyes and knew he’d move mountains with focus and determination just to make her dreams come true. For a moment he felt his mother’s fleeting presence, and her pride in her now adult son with a child of his own.

He was standing in line to pay holding two small bottles of overprice fruit juice and notice the woman in front of him sigh as she pulled out one credit card out of her wallet, pausing, and then put it back pulling out another instead. He could see in his minds eye that years ago this woman’s father looked down at her on the day of her birth and felt that immense love that he did for his own newborn daughter. He wanted to tell her just how much her father had to have loved her on that day and still did to this day, and would until he left this Earth.

“How are you doing?”, he asked her. She glanced at him.

“Ok. How about you?” she said slightly annoyed as she gave him a side eye. He wanted to gush about how beautiful life was, and how happy he was to be alive. He opened his mouth and closed it again, catching himself and slightly smiling instead.

“It is beautiful in my soul today” he said. She paid for her purchase without looking back leaving the man to his joy of life. He never knew if she could sense his joy or the intense connection to humanity he felt in that moment.

Or I’ll go all out and redirect Youtube to lemonparty.cc for his account.

I wouldn’t go that far. The goal is to cause him to complain to other employees/managers that Youtube is too slow. You want the question forming in other people’s heads “Why is he watching so much Youtube here at work that this is a problem?”

Even better is if he is using the company internet/equipment to consume content that isn’t safe and appropriate for work. If it can be shown his behavior is legal liability then the company may decide he’s more trouble than he’s worth.

He wants to sit on his ass and watch Youtube for another 5 years.

Set up a bandwidth restriction policy against his devices. Choke it down to 100kps for video sites so that watchability is garbage with low resolution and constant buffering.

Okay, so you see what works to fix the problem, you could have a conversation with him about how his skills are wasted in HelpDesk and that he should be making more money by doing job X in department Y. If he has enough dirt on the CEO, he can get his promotion.

Reply with:

“Teamsbot-AI v1.3 says: ‘Hi! I see you’re looking for user $User. They haven’t seen your message yet. Go ahead and send the rest of the message about your need or what you want to talk about and I’ll send it onto them to respond.’”

You don’t need a bot or software, just literally copy and paste this response in to them. They’d never know the difference.

There’s an “office politics” solution here. Sounds like Ed needs a promotion to another department.

So this new general is joining a long line of no-longer-useful 2nd in commands just like Trotsky, Ernst Röhm, and Prigozhin.

Full disclaimer, I’m not a finance professional.

Thats the theory, but I’m guessing in real world applications it won’t quite shake out like that.

As I understand it, existing bonds paid for past deficit spending by the US Government. New bonds are issued at regular intervals by the US for two reasons:

• to replace those bonds that have matured, but the debt still exists
• to generate new cash to pay for even more deficit spending.

Buyers for US bonds have two place to buy US bonds from:

• the US Government
• existing bond holders on the secondary market

Existing bonds that Europe holds have a fixed rate of return from when they were bought. So if Europe collectively started dumping US bonds in quantity, the value of the bonds would start to decline rapidly, but that wouldn’t dry up the market for new bonds issued by the US Gov.

This would mean, that selling more bonds would become expensive for the US.

True!

The US Gov would have to raise the rate of return on newly issued bonds so that non-European investors interested in holding bonds would find the new US bonds more attractive because of the higher rate of return.

Potentially they won’t find enough buyers to fund their government.

Unlikely.

This will cost the US Government more to service the debt, but unless the entire world decided to stop buying US bonds, the US would not run out of money. As dystopian as the US government is right now, its still one of the best investments in this category. The USA has never once defaulted on its debt. The worst that has happened has been Quantitative Easing (aka “printing money”) for a short time during the 2008 financial crisis, and once again in March 2020 during the worst (for financial markets) of COVID. Even then the US government reversed that with Quantitative Tightening (aka “shredding printed money”) to raise the value of each remaining dollar in the system. Even with these historical actions, US government debt has been one of the worlds safest investments. Time will tell if that holds up or if trump blows that up too like all of our historically hard won alliances and soft power investments.

So existing bond holders worldwide would be hit hard. I’m guessing there wouldn’t even be enough buyers for Europe to sell all their bonds at once, and they’d only be able to sell a fraction of them before the value of them plummeted. Europe could continue to sell what bonds they had, but they’d be losing significant amounts of money because they’d have to discount them to the point that the lower rate of return for those existing bonds was still a compelling investment for a bond buyer.

So what happens if you let the elderly fall off that cliff? How will society look then?

The elderly will starve to death or die from neglect significantly shortening their lives. That’s the physical effects. I can’t imagine the psychological effect of middle aged adult sacrificing everything to try to keep their extended family alive and having to choose who gets to eat or get care. Alternatively, the government has to make these choices, but the result is the same. This most of an entire generation will die in poverty, or malnourished, or from neglect.

Do you just not understand how governments and societies work to feed and care for their elderly?

Moron.

Yep, we’re done talking when you can’t use adult words anymore and your resort to name calling. People that do what you’re doing don’t usually do it to one person. I looked at your post history and see you’re toxic in many of your conversations frequently resorting to name calling when someone disagrees with you. This is especially true when someone is correcting your uninformed opinions. You do you, I suppose, but I won’t see it anymore you’ll be doing it on my blocklist. See ya!

My bold claim was saying that Denmark chose the side of Western imperialism and now will have to suffer the expected consequences of it?

Are you trying to say your claim isn’t a negative thing? In all accepted parsing of the English language, I don’t know any other reasonable conclusion from your statement.

Since it is negative, you’re implying there was a better choice. So what was your implied better choice?

And I never said they made a mistake?

Oh? Then are you now clarifying that Denmark made the right choice?

But what Soviet aggression could they have had if they had been Soviets themselves, for instance?

Look at the history of Soviet actions in Poland, Lithunaina, Lativa, and Estonia for your answer.

You don’t need to answer. I think I’ve seen enough to lose hope in your posting in good faith.

they cozied up to the big baddy like the rest of Europe did, and now we’re alone, solely at their mercy.

In 1945 Denmark was liberated from Nazi occupation by the British. Britain itself was in no shape to rebuild continental Europe after itself suffering from the Blitz and toward the end of the war repeated V-1 buzzbomb attacks. The USA was the untouched ally that helped rebuild Europe with the Marshal plan. Up until trump, the USA was a good ally to Europe even in modern times especially against Soviet aggression. To say the Danes made a mistake “cozying up” to the USA is to deny actual history and reality. There was no better great power ally to Europe during the post-war years.

And I don’t have to provide better alternatives for something that could’ve happened in a different version of history

Yes you do when you’re saying the Danes made a mistake. Otherwise your criticism and your argument are empty if you can’t say what they should have done instead.

You know, you argue like the troll user UniversalMonk. You make a bold claim divorced from reality, then when challenged with facts you handwave away any parts that completely invalidate your original claim. Is this a coincidence or do you need to cycle out to a new alt again?

What I’m saying is pointing to the old vs young imbalance is disingenuous because ANY system that attempts to limit population growth will experience the same “sudden change”.

You’re treating this as a binary situation “growth” or “decline” but its not nearly that simple. The important factors are the amount of growth or decline and at the rate that is the problem with China’s implementation.

We shouldn’t discount all systems that want to limit population growth like this because ones with better metrics could actually work.

No one is suggesting that.

And as we’ve seen, this program DID WORK. It lowered population. Just not in socially healthy ways.

…and…

It’s just not logical to complain that if you have less of a growing population that your elderly population outnumbers them. That’s LITERALLY THE PURPOSE OF POPULATION CONTROL.

That is empty logic, because it follows the letter of the goal* while entirely violating the spirit of it. Using that same logic we could fix global climate change just by murdering every human on the planet. See? It “DID WORK”. Climate change fixed, but like China’s situation, the cure is worse than the disease because in fixing climate change this way would mean there would be no humans around to benefit from the fix. But hey, it “DID WORK”, right?

Of course the elderly from before will outnumber them - you weren’t controlling their population!

Again, binary thinking. A complete stable system is okay if the elderly outnumber the young by a small consistent percentage over time. That isn’t what is happening in China. They are falling off a demographic cliff! Both match your statement of fewer young to elderly, but one is a sustainable controlled decline and the other is a crisis!

In the absence of God, Europe could’ve been a continent of commies and maybe some fraternity, solidarity and class conscience would have been built amongst these ever-warring nations, maybe?

That sounds like a cop out answer to your comment above. You’re criticizing Denmark of allying with the USA. What was their better ally? Here’s your chance to back up your claims.

Are you suggesting Denmark would have been better served joining the Soviet Union, which were the closest “commies” around them?

It should be obvious that if you suddenly cut population growth you’d end up with this elderly vs young imbalance eventually as the generations that reproduced freely age out.

The problem is they did it too quickly. There’s a huge number of aging people that won’t be producing anything, but they will be consuming in their old age. The amount they consume will be far greater than the younger, smaller, population can produce. Additional, the young must produce goods and services for themselves to live their own lives.

This additional preasure on the younger generation is already also reducing birth rates accelorating this demographic crisis to a worse degree. The young aren’t having kids in any significant numbers so there won’t be enough to support the current young when they get old.

This is part of the adjustment as things reach equilibrium.

That is a massive understatement for what will be the hell that the aging population will encounter when they go unfed or uncared for when they need it the most and have no option to do for themselves.

Ideally you’d have a 2 child policy to actually replace parents 1:1 with kids. But the point is, this imbalance was bound to happen regardless and you really won’t see equilibrium until every person alive was born under the restricted policy.

2 child policy would still result in population decline. Equal replacement rate is 2.1. Some kids will die before having kids of their own. Others will grow to adulthood and choose not to have kids. So you’ll need some sets of parents to have more than 2 kids themselves to make up for these shortfalls.

This is still too early to call it a failed experiment. It’s right at the most crucial part.

The “soft landing” point was a couple of decades ago probably back in the late 80s or mid 90s. Its going to be brutal in the future for China.

we burned bridges around the world by cozying up to the biggest murderer in the land,

I’ll be the first to say the USA is a shitshow right now, but if you were to go back in time, which other nation would you have the Danes “cozy up to”?

Sadly, the number of times I’ve had to reboot windows two or three times to fix an issue lately has been increasing.

This sounds like your organization’s group policy is too large or your connection from your machine to a domain controller hosting your GPOs is too slow. There’s a timeout period. If all the GPO contents are not pulled down to the local machine, it stops downloading them, and lets the user continue to the Desktop. However, for lots of orgs GPOs are how they deliver settings or software, so you have to reboot again and on the next login, it will pick up downloading where it left off. It could still timeout again if there is more GPO data (or the connection is too slow). So you may have to reboot multiple times, and on one of those it will finally complete the downloads, and then suddenly everything works because all the right data or settings from the GPOs are on the local machine.

I addressed how you can get more pay with this in other posts in this thread.

I don’t even get to the point where I ask ask my manager about priorities, I just tell people that my plate is full and they need to go talk to my manager and have them let me know if I’m to work on your problem.

The danger here is you’re letting someone else frame the situation and present their own narrative. They could just as easily go to your boss and say “Passerby6497 wouldn’t help me when I needed it”. Sure, your boss can and should shield you, but you’re creating more work for your boss.