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a mere crypto pleb: buying some hexcoin to get 100 %

a cocoa patrician: buying cocoa beans futures with 6x leverage

tl:dr buy chocolate now lol, jesus christ

Not gonna rely on twitter for this disaster

A thought experiment for Hexbears (not a spoiler for the Three Body Problem series, I’m not going to say how it played out in the books, but certainly inspired by it):

If America had launched a first strike against China that will wipe out 90% of its population, should China retaliate?

If yes, then hundreds of millions of innocent Americans - who played no part in the aggression - will be killed in a mutually assured destructive process. The retaliation will not in anyway bring back the lives of those who had been targeted during the first strike. It only adds more suffering to the world’s innocents. Worse, it will trigger a global thermonuclear war with a very high probability of wiping out human civilization altogether. The end of humanity as we know it.

In this case, does it make sense to retaliate against a first strike then? Is vengeance that important, even if it means killing millions of innocent people as a result, the end of the entire human race?

Or should the survival of the human race be upheld as the priority, or rather, the utmost priority to harm no innocent, even if it means some people had to be sacrificed in the process because of the “mistakes” of certain bad actors?

Can humanity collectively learn from such “mistakes”, if the receiving side had restrained themselves from retaliating, and thereby giving the rest of humanity a chance for survival and to learn from their previous errors?

Give me your thoughtful/spicy takes.

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202403/1309489.shtml

Bayrischer Ministerpräsident (Bavarian head of state, CSU) Markus Söder visited China. Looks like it went well.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung is mocking him.

That's a lot of pissed off settlers. It's a pity the vast majority don't have what it takes to do the right thing:
https://twitter.com/Megatron_ron/status/1774152126815429071

Ireland Prime Minister Resigns

I was surprised when Honduras made the switch. I never thought it would happen tbh. Taiwan has a lot of influence in Central America with the PRC’s presence and influence increasing at the same time. I have a feeling that more will eventually make the switch with time.

Guatemala wants to trade more with China while also being a complete US puppet that goes out of its way to accommodate Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine way more than it should be. The chances of us making the switch are likely to happen within the next ten years or so.

Denmark's Liberal Party, who makes up a third of the ruling succdem-led right-wing junta, wants to extend the "temporary" border controls at the Danish-German border. Liberal Party leader Troels Lund Poulsen claims that Russia "has previously considered to use refugees as a hybrid threat" and claims that "a very difficult and challenging situation in the Middle East" makes the threat level against Denmark high.

Although Schengen countries are supposed to have open borders internally, Denmark has had "temporary" border controls at the German border almost constantly since 2016 when refugees caused the far right to panic. Border controls has since then been a culture war issue with the far right claiming that the controls stops refugees, drugs, guns, organised crime and every other foreign boogieman from entering. For white and normie-passing people it means you will have to sit in a queue at the border and wait for the world's most bored cops to wave you through. For people who the cops think look funny it means the police will look at you documents and possibly search your car.

Russia has been targeting power generation capacity aggressively in the last couple of weeks. Previously they have targeted distribution systems and haven’t much hit generation capability until recently.

Does that perhaps indicate an intent to cripple a Ukrainian rump state rather than occupy it?

"they live-streamed 9/11?"

Putin concert shooting is intimidarion by Kiev

From the archives, RFE 2019

An Interview With Exiled Tajik Islamic Party Leader Muhiddin Kabiri (archive.is)

According to Tajikistan's government, the disbanded Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) is a "terrorist organization" with evolving ties in the global network of extremist groups. The IRPT helped recruit citizens of Tajikistan to go to Syria and Iraq and join the ranks of jihadist groups, and even recently conspired with the militant group Islamic State (IS) to carry out attacks inside Tajikistan, Tajik authorities allege.

Qishloq Ovozi: Tajikistan's government says the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan (IRPT) is an extremist group and that you worked together with the so-called Islamic State (IS) extremist group in planning attacks in Tajikistan, such as the attack on the foreign bicyclists at the end of July. How do you respond to these accusations?

…

Since the authorities brazenly and maliciously accuse us of cooperation with IS, there are logical and direct questions one can pose. For example, why would we "order" a terrorist attack against citizens of European countries when are living in European countries, where they have given us protection, freedom, and shelter? How is that in our interests? If the Tajik opposition were willing to do such a thing, why against European tourists? Why not against the criminals in government, who are responsible for the deaths, suffering, and humiliation of thousands of the country's citizens?

Apparently, most of the leadership found political refuge in Poland, which probably has more to do with Poland’s well known sympathy for right wing revolutionary Islamic parties linked to ISIS than it has to do with the geopolitics of Poland and Russia…