That's the thing: it isn't. Those are monetary movements that exist only on paper, not realized. Company A "invests" $x on company B, which invests $y and $z on companies C and D, with C then investing $p back into A and $q into D, with company D then investing $r back into A and $s on B, and B also investing $t on A, etc. It's a Ponzi scheme, but in the form of a maze rather than that of a pyramid.

The purpose of those movements is to leverage stock prices. A company valued at $hundreds of billions that gets re-evaluated at $trillions due to all this paper-shuffling sees its stock prices rise. Executives and shareholders profit by exchanging their overvalued portfolios for actual money, and whoever is left with those shares on hand when the bubble pops and the market crashes (read: pension funds) loses.

The last prediction I saw on this said people are likely going to see half their lifelong retirement savings disappear almost overnight when that hits, all the while the billionaires who sold at the right moment will see themselves catapulted into almost trillionaires, with a few becoming outright trillionaires.

Democrats wouldn't let those companies die either. Can you imagine all their hawks being content letting Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Nvidia cease to exist, and with them the global leverage those companies provide the US? No, they're all "too big to fail" no matter who's in charge. That's pretty much a bipartisan thing.

The problem for Russia is they're running out of money. Even with suicidal infantry being cheap, those still need lots of equipment and logistics to keep going, and there's nowhere else to source all of that from, whether from within or without. And it isn't like Russian pseudo-allies are really helping.

China, in particular, is double-dipping on them by demanding that oil and gas it purchases from Russia be sold at extraordinarily low prices, with the exact same heavily subsidised prices Russia sells them to its own population, while at the same time selling everything Russia needs for military use at the highest price it can charge. Russia cannot say no to either demand, so that's depleting Russian coffers even faster than they expected. And it isn't like China minds Russia becoming weaker due to this strategy. The more dependent Russia becomes on China, the easier it'll become for China to, someday, demand Russia give back all the Chinese territories the Russian Empire took from them when China itself was weakened during the 19th century.

Ukraine, on the other hand, has developed its military technology in-house, and with such a high level of competence, it's now exporting it and even building drone factories in other countries, countries that are in turn becoming heavy customers of Ukrainian tech and dependent on it for their own military uses, which in turn is paving the way for that technology, that doesn't depend of people on the ground walking toward the meat grinder while making it even more of a meat grinder, to advance at a faster and faster pace.

At this point, there's little Russia can do that'd turn things around other than going nuclear, and even that isn't guaranteed to go well for Russia, as Ukraine has very likely been preparing for that contingency for the last four years. If anything, going nuclear would precipitate the entire world attacking them.

And then to China taking back its former territories even earlier than they expected to.

Tyrants in general, from Putin to Trump, Xi to Kim, and everyone in between, practice seeding waves upon waves of contradictory lies mixed with a handful of truths with the very deliberate goal of causing exactly that emotional reaction: exhausted cynicism. They promote contradictory lies at home, so their people become accustomed to the notion that factual truth is hard or even impossible to achieve, and then convince their populations to generalize that cynicism so that they also start believing it's the same everywhere. That generates apathy toward politics in general, and by extension mistrust of those who are genuine in their activism, the latter being "felt" as nothing but agents of so many hidden interests, actors faking conviction in exchange for under-the-table benefits. People tune out and, as the saying goes, if one opts for neutrality in a dispute where one side is more powerful than the other, then one's siding with the powerful against the weak. And tyrants absolutely love that attitude: it's a huge factor in them maintaining their power unchallenged.

There are ways out of that. The heuristic I personally follow is to side with the weak side in any direct dispute with the powerful unless I have access to extremely trustworthy information showing that specific case is one of the very, very rare instances in which that doesn't apply due to extreme circumstances.

Hence, in Ukraine vs Russia I'm with Ukraine, because Ukraine is the weak against the strong and Russia is the attacker. Were it NATO attacking Russia, or China attacking Russia, I'd be with Russia. Were it the US attacking China, I'd be with China. Were it China attacking India, I'd be with India. India attacking Pakistan, I'd be with Pakistan. And so on.

Ditto for internal contexts. A Christian government in a Christian-majority country against small religions of minority groups, or against LGBT+ people? I'm with these. Muslim fanatics in Islamic-majority countries attacking Christian minorities? I'm with the Christians. Chinese attacking Falun Gong cultists or Vatican-loyal Catholics? I'm with both of these. Etc.

Take the side of the immediately weak against an attacking directly immediately strong, and you will rarely be on the wrong side of that specific dispute.

You're welcome. I only act aggressively in discussions when I'm attacked first, or the other deliberately acts with intellectual dishonesty. If that isn't the case, then my rhetoric may be at times ironic and even sarcastic, but it's always serious and on topic.

Capitalism is about people benefiting from improving capital, which is basically private property rights.

Money != capital.

For the same price you can get a much more capable machine in the Mac mini

It's rough carrying your monitor around with you.

With the Neo you are not going to be able to do much more than browse the web, use web application, play simple games, and use it as fancy typewriter.

Heavens, what ever did we do before the 2020s? Play simple games and use fancy typewriters I guess. Although I do wonder where the first web app came from, the one that let us make all the other web apps.

That's impossible. Narcissistic egos cannot understand the meaning of "no".

If Russia wins? Yes, since it'll be the same dictator governing both countries.

Yep! Chaos, followed by a unified Empire (the Roman one), followed by chaos, followed by another unified Empire (Christendom in its different imperial incarnations), followed by chaos, followed by the currently newly forming unified Empire, followed by chaos, followed...

The current incarnation is following the "perpetual peace" playbook as devised by Kant. 300 years to start reaching fruition, but such things take time.

The key sentence being "for the time being". In your list I'd only kind of agree with Iran not being expansionist. Putin has declared many times he wants conquest, having followed closely Dugin's "foundations" outline. China indeed isn't expansionist in the same sense, but in classic Chinese fashion it wants to be surrounded by wholly vassal states.

That means little. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine all claim descent from Kievan Rus, but they've culturally diverged within that common ancestral origin. And yes, as a good Russian propagandist I know you toe the (Duginian) line that Ukraine doesn't have its own distinctive culture because ${mythopolitical_nonsense} and therefore "should be" this and that and the other thing, whether willingly or by force. Ukrainians clearly disagree, so more power to them.

Guessing the the non-local part is telemetry for training and ad revenue?

Ah, there's no need for that. Ukraine learned to be like Afghanistan, a land where Empires go to die. Even if Russia were to win, it would see no peace until it gave up, likely under the next dictator, who won't have the same commitments as the current one does to his pet projects.

Me neither, but that's mostly because the US may have left by then, or been expelled, and Europe will reorganize into its own anti-Russian-aggression coalition.

Yep. Those were lost opportunities for all the involved.

Nope. Have you seen how the regions in Russia bordering China are filled with Chinese companies and businessmen, Chinese language everything, and more and more dependence on China itself? This allows China to use the same trick Russia used in Ukrainian regions of, whenever it so wishes, declare that any kind of Russian effort to make sure China doesn't take control of Russian strategic resources is "anti-Chinese persecution", and declare a special military operation to "protect" ethnic Chinese minorities "oppressed" by Russia, thus justifying taking back to tasty, tasty cities and mineral resources.

Remember, the Century of Humiliation didn't happen only on the Southern Chinese border, but on the Northern too. And China remembers, ah, how it remembers!

And yet they're not only not winning, but approaching defeat. And not to NATO itself, in its full might, but to Ukraine, with very minimal NATO support, and several opposed moves by the US.

A better, and much easier, solution, would have been for Russia to have applied to join NATO, and thus get all that support for themselves, so that down the line China doesn't take back the many disputed territories they have with Russia. Too bad the end result will be Russia losing to Ukraine and becoming so weakened they'll also lose to China.

You know Russia could simply pull out and stop invading others' countries, right?

And the number of times you opt out won't appear on your performance reviews, or factor into raises, bonuses and retention - double pinky swear ...

You're doing your calculations wrong. Do the numbers per capita per year for programs.

About higher education, every person with a college degree contributes on average about $14 million the economy during their lifetime, versus about half that when they have less than college education, so having people get degrees is a net benefit of $7 million per person. So you need to compare that increase in total national wealth to the cost of causing it to determine whether it's worth it or not.

Don’t they hate the government meddling in their affairs?

Yes. They love it when it meddles in other people's affairs though. Demand it in fact.

More like going from Slashdot post to Java. Truthy sounding but incorrect proofs that suck up people's time aren't just an AI thing. Mathematicians have been arguing for 15 years whether the ABC conjecture has been proven or not.

Rather than working with Congress, Trump likes to rule by fiat and his executive orders are his royal/holy decrees.
Most aren't actually worth the paper on which they're printed.