Cheap chinese copies are getting out of hand at this point, at least for large appliances and furniture the newest trend appears to be making them just well enough that they last a year (To get those genuine good reviews) and then fall apart irreparably. Combine that with a lot of stockers not bothering to seperate the fakes from the originals (Particularly you Amazon) and even buying from a good brand can result in you getting shit anyway.

Ironically its even affecting chinese brands themselves, there are some good ones in the mix but any that break into the western market immediately fall victim to the exact same copycat shit. Trying to replace a dying washing machine right now and its downright scary trying to find one that isn’t a 50/50 lottery of getting what you paid for or getting an appliance sized lump of E-waste.

The US has an extreme left? the US has a left!?

The US used its soft power to pump the dollar, part of that was selling bonds to other countries to help secure its place as the reserve currency. Japan is threatening to dump that pump.

Its weirder than that, had someone on lemmy try to convince me that deportations, purity tests and fascism are all far left policies. Its like they’re trying to shift all their own shit onto some imaginary other.

Doesn’t the UK also have one of the highest living costs in Europe as well as some of the lowest wages? I mean the starting salary for teachers here is half of what even america pays.

But tankies almost universally want authoritarianism and dictatorships? those are far right positions. The left tends to want some flavour of socialist democracy. Tankies are left like China is communist.

Tankies have almost nothing in common with the far left outisde teenagers who haven’t worked out the fundemental flaws with communism yet. Beyond those teenagers most left wing folk consider tankies to be pretty right wing.

You’re making it sound way harder than it is, The US has like 4? substations that if they all went down at once it would cascade fail about 90% of the grid, they aren’t in bunkers or surrounded by armed guards or anything, they’re random ass substations with chain link fences around them.

Nah patriotism is fine, its the ‘I want to make my country better’ attitude, nationalism is the ‘my country is already the best’ one.

Unfortunately only 48% of us ;-;

I’m not sure how it works in Switzerland but in the UK I believe the government is required to provide some legal settlement sites as a form of cultural preservation, many municipalities don’t of course which results in illegal settlements. I know a lot of people dislike travellers but the issue always seemed to be an artifical one and classic example of creating an issue in order to take advantage of the outrage.

Also most british products kind of suck… (British person here)
That said I’m still up for avoiding american brands because its hard to talk about animal rights when you’re being mauled by a bear.

Its a shit system, really it just means the rails are privatly operated but they get to send a huge chunk of the maintenance bill to the taxpayer.

Japan has been gradually easing off on that for a while now and had a fairly substantial self defense force.

So a tariff is like punching the other guy but also punching yourself, only the US is doing that to a lot of people so all the other countries get hit a few times sure but the US is beating itself black and blue.

Iirc the dirty secret of rare earth metals is that every country has them in at least some capacity even if there’s variability in how easy to access those deposits are. The dirty part is that the countries that produce them less so have a particular abundance and more so have a lack of environmental regulations.

Doesn’t this scenario essentially cut off the US from advanced chip manufacturing? The chips are made in taiwan and the machines for making the chips are made in europe.

Isn’t Europes combined military budget halfway to the moon at this point? Last I heard 180 billion and climbing not including induvidual countries efforts. Missread is a bit of an understatement.

except MAGA level idiots

Crys in being British and missing out on the resurgance of European unity because our PM prefers to felate Trump.

Not making a choice is also a choice.