A US wealth/unrealized gains tax might trigger it, because it would likely create a cascade of forced selling, with the proceeds of sales getting burned as tax revenue for entitlement programs or debt payments rather than reinvested.
When you're playing prisoner's dilemma games, and your co-player is consistently defecting, you can only play cooperate for so long. Tit for tat is the only way you don't get majorly screwed by the defector over time.
The rise of China has done a lot to destroy the neoliberal, globalist dream.
Letting them cheat the globalist system (e.g. violating IP laws, human rights violations, Uyghur/Tibetan genocide) may have been fine when they were desperately poor, but there was always an implicit assumption that they would eventually start playing by the rules and culturally liberalize. But they're not. How can we hold onto ideals like "diversity is our strength" and open borders are good when China is kicking ass and threatening the balance of power as an insular ethnostate with one of the lowest rates of immigrants on the planet?
And now they're growing to a power level that threatens to rival the US and its authority to police this global system we've created. That isn't stable, and the west would be insane to not shut China out and take a step back from our open, globalist ideals until we sort out this geopolitical game of thrones.
Cybertruck is a great case study in how people confuse form for function.
In a world where technology is advancing exponentially, aesthetics increasingly offer a poor signal for performance, and only those who obsessively look under the hood and disregard form will see through it all.
Click the link. He doesn't show the actual pictures, just talks about the photo book that a customer brought in to get appraised, and his shock when he found pictures of the rape of Nanking in it.
This blew up on TikTok several weeks ago, and I haven't yet seen any new updates since.
edit; Why the hell was this post flagged? There's nothing graphic in the link.
"I miss the time when we could trust the news to just give us the simple truth!"
Dude, that's a time that never existed. The news has always been at least as much propaganda as it is simple information sharing.
Perhaps the only reason we think it's especially bad now is that we're all aware of competing propaganda organizations pushing conflicting narratives. In the past, you might only have one local newspaper, so it was easier to believe that the local propaganda organization that controls your mind is telling the simple truth. But the modern world forces all of us to face the reality that the news has never been something we can naively trust.
This seems like a silly extra step to add when you can just purchase Mullvad service directly with monero for a 10% discount.
It might even be more likely to deanonymize you since you're forced to interact with a physical thing. It's an extra step in the obfuscation chain that adds personal information (mailing address at least) that wouldn't be added otherwise.
I suppose if you were forced to use a non anonymous crypto like bitcoin that can be easily tracked, there might be some value to this extra step.
If you're already doing this and buying an instance with monero, you're just buying Mullvad service with monero as well for the 10% discount they offer for it.
A lot of environmentalists are really just ecofascists/terrorists who would rather see the wholesale destruction of advanced civilization than make pragmatic compromises, in effect if not intent.
They occupy an incredibly infantile frame that we should be less accommodating towards if we actually want an interesting collective future.