The Singaporean government is responsive to public opinion to some degree, but it is so they can maintain their current status of not having to worry about winning elections.
There are actually a fair number of folks that commute from Canada to the US for work. They will generally have TN Visas, it is certainly not "unthinkable" - it really does happen, although I will confess that the only folks I have ever met that did it were not recommending it to anyone else!
Fair enough on the immediate consequences.. but shutting down these plants was a long term decision, so the long term consequences are still consequences. It is certainly true that no one predicted a Russian invasion of Ukraine when Fukushima happened but Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas was well understood at the time. Which I raise only to point out that the bad things that did happen were foreseeable, the German energy system was subject to systemic risks and those risks were made worse by these choices.
It seems like the statement "No negative effect" is probably not well supported by subsequent events.
* Didn't the diversion of natural gas to electricity generation end some German industrial production completely?
* Are there not large electricity subsidies in place via subsidies for US imported LNG?
* Isn't the alternate reality where there is a surplus of electricity in German due to nuclear power a better world where Germany has more opportunity? (the AI datacentre boom is built on excess electricity, isn't it?)
Define "enough"? The article in question is about Arkansas and broad acre farming, there is 600+ million acres of farm in the midwest down to the delta 99% of which isn't close to a major population center. There is lots of pressure in areas of California and all up and down the west coast up to Vancouver.. but that is a trivial amount a farm land in the grand scheme of things (and specialized due to climate, water, and market access issues that don't apply to most farm land in the US or really anywhere)
Lots of farmers in my area owning equipment with fresh paint (well, plastic panels these days) that can't make land payments, or at least complaining about it. The ROI on new equipment is poor and when things were booming the farmers lost discipline and the manufacturers were happy to add features and cost - fun for everyone! Chickens are coming home to roost now for a lot of folks and some of them are sharpening their pencils and some of them are in denial - in my opinion.
OK, what secret information do you have from living in America that I don't have? I got people driving land prices up here too.. they have driven them up to roughly the same as Arkansas and I can still afford to buy land from time to time. Do explain.
From the article:
In August 2025, Graves sent an open letter to media and politicians, pleading for attention to eye-popping numbers. “My letter told what things are like right now. In our geography, it looks like you need to yield 100-300-300 to stay ahead,” Graves describes. “That’s 100-bushel beans, 300-bushel rice and 300-bushel corn. Basic Arkansas averages are 56-bushel beans, 166-bushel rice and 175-bushel corn. In a nutshell, we are going over a cliff. Banks are forecasting farm bankruptcies at 25% to 40%, and the dirty secret is out. Everyone knows it; everyone feels it.”
Couple of things here:
- Where I farm we grow 40-50bu beans most years, rarely hit 180bu corn and, not cited as reference points above, wheat in the 60's, Oats around 130, and Canola in the 40's. All of which is to say $400/ac revenue is a pretty easy target to hit. Our costs, besides land values are essentially the same as farmer in Arkansas and things aren't all that bad for me, so what gives?
- Who honestly thinks that 25% of Arkansas farmers are going to go bankrupt in the next 3 years? (I don't know what report he is citing or the timeline so I just picked a timeline that seems reasonable.) My bet is no one.
I looked up Arkansas land values and good ground seems to go for under $5,000USD an acre, not much different from where I farm - is there some crazy extra cost that American farmers bear that I am unaware of? As a Canadian I hear American farmers whining all the time about how tough things are and I just don't get it. Things are not as good as they were in some recent crop years but overall profitability is not a big issue.
These monopolies, if they were so powerful, would be squeezing farmers so bad that land values would be dropping, not rising... but land values keep going up. Profits are being plowed into fixed assets, which means that there are profits - that's the economics of the thing, right?
That doesn't really make sense, the vast, vast majority of farmland is not close enough to an urban area to be influenced by sprawl and get bid up to development prices.
The Europeans seem to have become more free trade curious after recent events so this doesn't seem like it will hold up as a "what if". And I expect that the coming months of US-only inflation are just going to confirm that position for them even i they face a mild recession due to US market access/demand collapse issues.
> This ignores the reality of power in the US. Presidents can't implement multi-decade initiatives.
Which is why if anyone wanted to actually bring manufacturing "back" to the US they would work with congress and pass laws that curtailed the tariff powers in a way that ensured that in the areas where you wanted long term investment the president would not have the power to change policy unilaterally. At which point the typical congressional gridlock would serve to ensure stability going forward and allow businesses to invest.
Is this an American thing? No one has ever in my life asked me "Who did you vote for?"
I have had plenty of people behave in a way that made it clear they assumed I agreed with them on political matters/issues that would have us voting the same way (sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly) but I have never been asked this question. Is it common or is it a contrivance in service of the article?
> Making the issue more political, the US edits and censors the data it publishes for its own purposes. This isn’t a secret but it taints the perception of US neutrality when making this data available.
First I have heard of this, what's the source for the US editing & censoring global sensing data?
This is an incorrect definition of relative poverty as on that basis then number of people in poverty will never change - no one interested in serious analysis would use such a definition as it is not useful.
"[Stallman] seems to sincerely believe his all-or-nothing stance"
Richard Stallman has largely been not averse to pragmatism, he is the sort that is willing to clearly articulate his stance as to what he thinks is right, but has also been willing to endorse all sorts of incrementalism. For example:
"In response to the change of license, Richard Stallman of the Free Software
Foundation says, "I agree. It is wise to make some of the Ogg Vorbis code
available for use in proprietary software, so that commercial companies doing
proprietary software will use it, and help Vorbis succeed in competition with
other formats that would be restricted against our use.""
(I am desperately trying to avoid inserting a Bernie Sanders analogy here..)
Your reply doesn't seem to address my point directly. The appeal to "time" doesn't really work given that that Moscow stock exchange has been closed since last Friday and seems unlikely to open this week.
Cuba has changed quite a bit in the last half century, I would look into it if I were you, most resorts in the country are Cuba-FDI joint ventures - it is complicated but sanctions where most of the world actually disagrees with you are a lot more difficult than this situation.
In this particular case it seems that the work-arounds are not generally available. The Russian government was not prepared to have their own reserves frozen.
"No it doesnt because is not a democratic country, why is it so hard for people like you to understand that things work very different in a democratic country than in non-democratic country?"
I sympathize with this position but I also feel conflicted because despite the enormous amount of evidence that Putin was a bad guy as recently as 2017 he had 80+% approval rating. If had not had large scale popular support for most of the last 20 years despite his anti-democratic anti-freedom behaviour would he be in a position to execute this war?
I don't have good answers for this question but just as democracy isn't just having a vote political support in a non-democracy isn't just having the legal use of violence at your disposal. It is challenging for anyone from outside Russia that wants to oppose his regime to find a way that doesn't hurt ordinary Russians if most ordinary Russians mostly have supported him.