No no no. China is Fake News. They don’t even make cars. If they made cars, I would have seen Chinese cars driving around in America.

“China Battery!” typically trips everyone’s “Fake News! Evil Company! Communists Killed 100 Billion People!” alarm

The way to safer is to reduce the amount of cars.

Hersey! Blasphemy! Unamerican!

Ah, so they’ve already exploded, thus rendering them safe for use.

Missing the deadline undermines your position in the firm and marks you out as unreliable for the better projects and promotions.

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t just continue working your normal hours.

Some of it comes down to real social pressure. People work harder when they’ve literally got the boss at their desk saying “We need to hit Deadline X or Consequences Y will happen”. For people past their breaking point, I tend to see them work less. If you’re already on the job hunt (or if you’ve landed a job or queued for retirement or whatever), enthusiasm for doing your current job plummets. If you think you’re about to get fired, same.

But for folks who genuinely believe they’ve got a future at the firm - at least for another year or three - it often boils down to “Do I want to be stressed forever, or just get over this hump and survive until things die down?” Hitting the deadline and getting the project over the line typically comes with a refractory period of sorts. A slowdown in work hours and a more relaxed pace. Missing the deadline means even more work and even more stress and even more of my boss at my desk (or my boss’s boss or my boss’s boss’s boss) staring at my computer and asking why the thing isn’t done yet.

Fred Durst about to sell me a $2500 commemorative edition America Bible lettered in gold ink, wrapped in rich Corinthian leather, and including a copy of the Declaration of Independence signed by our President.

Eh. When your boss has four people in the office to do six people’s jobs, and the VP just said they’re cutting headcount by two.

It’s not just about how useful the dollar is to Iran, it’s about making it less useful to other countries also.

For Iran, specifically, there’s no incentive to accept reparations payments in a currency they can’t easily collect or exchange. Yuan makes sense, because China is one of their biggest trading partners. Bitcoins make sense because they’re easy to launder and can be transferred independent of the NATO-based financial systems.

If Iranian oil is back on the market there will be a lot of interested buyers.

It’s more Qatari and Kuwaiti oil at issue. Iranians are just rent-seeking off the most expedient shipping lane.

The petrodollar wasn’t going to last forever youre right but there are many parties interested in ending it sooner than later.

The petrodollar is arbitrage between Middle Eastern raw materials and the western banking system. It could move to the PetroEuro without a meaningful change in foreign policies. Or the PetroLoonie or PetroPound for that matter. All of these countries are in agreement that the Persian Gulf states need to play a secondary role in the global economy.

What Iranians are hoping to change isn’t the primary currency of the region, but the balance of power between US/EU colonizers and local people.

The very act of securing the Straight and collecting rent on passage is a huge step in that direction, regardless of what currency they collect their fees in. It’s a material change, not just an accounting shift.

They are intention demolishing the Petrodollar.

I think Climate Change and explosion of alternative energy sources is doing that.

They’re just trying to evade Western financial restrictions. Dollars aren’t useful to a country that’s cut out of the LIBOR and SWIFT banking systems.

China is a rising juggernaut

China was a rising juggernaut twenty years ago.

They’re the lynchpin of the global economy today.

it’s for Russia

Americans shitting the bed in the Middle East every day for fifty years

“Yeah, uh, actually that was Russia. Russia did that.”

11D chess. He’s going to turn Iran into another stupid rich petrostate full of corrupt plutocrats.

Iran is going to be another Hong Kong or Singapore by the end of the century.

Spiciest food a Midwestern can handle

“Donald Trump has six kinds of mental illness and he’s on his third stroke. He will be dead by the end of the week.”

Trump goes on live TV and delivers an hour long rant about how much winning we’re doing in Iran. Emits the loudest fart you’ve ever heard in your life. His cabinet secretaries all applaud. He hobbles out the door to spend the rest of the day golfing.

“That doesn’t prove anything. Look at this grainy photo of his hand. He’s probably already dead as you’re reading this. Anything you see going forward is AI or a hologram or something.”

Like Americans need to realize that not primarying democrats means they feel safe with your vote and are thus incentivized to prioritize seeking republican voters.

Americans liberals think that everyone but them is a Republican. And, therefore, you must trick the Republicans into voting for you be appearing to be better at Things Republicans Care About than the actual Republican on the ballot.

Clinton, Obama, and Biden all did conservative pastiche and won. Therefore, Americans would never vote for a Limousine Liberal rainbow flag hugger from Fake America’s richest city if he was talking shit about veterans and fucking prostitutes in his free time. You’ve got to put John Kerry in a hunting jacket if you want to win Ohio. You need Bernie Sanders to denounce everyone in Cuba. Make Kamala Harris go on Hot Ones alongside Joe Rogan. You can’t step off a plane with your name on it or ride down a golden escalator, like some kind of out-of-touch elitist. You sure as hell can’t glad-hand the President of China or - god fucking forbid - North Korea. Anyone who did those things would lose in a landslide, purely because Real Americans hate it.

You have to play it safe. Only the safest candidates will win. That’s why Jeb Bush was Hillary Clinton’s biggest threat in 2016.

There’s a big semi-sentient computer running the government in Idiocracy, which could make it a neat stand in for Skynet.

Idiocracy -> People become overly reliant on automation and complacent to the point of self-annihilation

Terminator -> Computers decide humans aren’t worth the trouble, so they do a mass extermination

Matrix -> The conflict ends in a blotted out sky, which forces the computers to cannibalize humanity