World News

"Apple assures users new iPhone with neural implant won't take over their mind while asleep to be used for data collection and ads placed in dreams"

"Glock assures customers it's new model of handgun'definitely will not shoot backwards at the person firing it', more at 11"

Well if I wasn't 100% sure that's exactly what they do before, I am now.

People have been saying shit like this for 30 years. It’s not inevitable, but there is a risk and they want to be prepared for it.

There's a very serious game of brinksmanship going on right now in the South China Sea, with China playing this (to me) weird and bitchy game of using military vessels to damage other countries' vessels or people, but with the "not weapons" parts of their military vessels (water cannons or flares or etc). To me it is just fuckin weird pussyfooting "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you" behavior, but they're doing it to countries like the Philippines that have defense agreements with the US which is the kind of thing that has the potential to escalate in sudden and unplanned fashion sometimes. This is a pretty good overview. I agree with you that it would be terrible for both countries, but sometimes weird and unplanned shit happens when weapons and big nations are involved.

Also, this statement from the OP article I don't think is fully accurate:

Neither side budged from their longstanding positions on Taiwan — which China claims as its own and has not ruled out using force to take

The US doesn't have a longstanding position on Taiwan, other than that we give them weapons and like to talk loudly and pointedly about democracy and how much we like them. We've spent 60 years refusing to say one way or another whether we think they're part of China, or whether we would defend them if China attacked them with military force, and for some reason that's been working so far. Diplomacy is weird.

While this is true, the fact that war would be a bad idea doesn't necessarily mean it won't happen. People make bad decisions all the time.

We said the same thing about Putin invading Ukraine. We somehow believed that the neoliberal globalized economy would allow only wars to destabilize certain regions to make resource exploitation easier for the global powers. Well turns out eventually the global powers are facing off with each directly after running out of proxies.

I mean, it would probably be a good opportunity for a handful of really rich people to further their control and ownership globally...so as long as our billionaire overlords value human life over their own personal power we should be good.

We've been shifting imports out of China for quite a few years now. If you look at "made in" labels, I'm sure you've noticed that they've changed from China to Taiwan, Thailand, El Salvador, hell I got a shirt recently that was made in Jordan. I'd never seen that before.

While a lot of stuff is still made in China, that shift means it won't cause a huge destabilization, at least for the US. Of course it will still cause problems, but they're already trying to limit the potential damage.