as I would have to pay hefty taxes. Letting it stand empty does not make sense.

You can always rent it for a while and think better about your situation. Just selling it and putting the money in the bank just means the bank will be using your money to possibly cause way more damage than you could anyway. Buying shares, at least if you don’t even work in the company is bad too, so holding on to the apartment is not the worst thing you could do and if you sold it it’s possible the new owner would just rent it too.

If you rent you could always see if the person living there would like to buy it from you and so you can even give them a discount based on how long they lived there if you think it’s better too.

and I’m planning to sell it in about 5 years when we’re gonna be looking for a new place with my parents.

If you already know when you need the money you can alway do the math and see what is the best option for you. Let the money stay in the bank, keep the apartment until them… And also check the risks, as in my country, as an example, the goverment has taken peoples savings about thirty years ago when the inflation was bad so who knows if they will do it again. So if you were in my country puting the money in savings would have an extra risk, while perhaps there might be countries where the goverment has made housing cheaper before and could do so again, meaning holding on to the house might not be the best idea either.

Becoming a landlord isn’t really that different from becoming an investor, for example, as to become one you need a certain ammount of capital and under capitalism no matter where you put that capital you will be exploiting others. And as we live in a system full of crises unless you have “a few million” very diversified anyone could be losing everything in the next crises or when a new goverment comes around, specially if through a coup, and changes the rules. So it’s kinda hard to ask people to give their safety net away when the vast majority are at most a few problems away of losing it all.

So I would say your question makes more sense if we are talking about how much capital a person has, rather than what they do with it (unless they are doing some even worse things with it). So someone with a second house can be a communist no problem, but someone with ten should at the very least be using some of that money to further the cause, not only by giving it to a communist party and the like but also by giving free housing to some who need it, if they consider themselves communists. If they could sell a few houses and use the money to further the cause that’s fine too, although in some countries even that many houses might not be enough to pay for something like a cancer treatment, so it’s hard to say exactly.

The same would be valid if the person had shares or companies or whatever, although if the person directly owns companies the person should definitely give everyone a good salary and let the worker unionize and try to spread it to more people too.

Probably not so much because of what they would do to Cuba but because many of the refugees would be trying to get to the US and all the problems that would lead to in the US would be clearly seen as the governments fault.

A system as deeply entrenched as the petrodollar won’t disappear overnight

It might not fall overnight but a quick devaluation of the dollar, perhaps with big US tech companies losing value due to Chinese ones and with big countries pushing for other currencies, followed by a successful military attack against the US or their interests when they can’t do anything about it could scare people away of the dollar and break it enough in a week though.

But anyway, I guess will see how it goes down. But down it will go.

Considering how Russia hasn’t really been reacting to most of what the US and co has done against them, the US likely is confident nothing will come out of it like in most of the other times they did things against Russia, thus, the US will probably escalate this within days. Like many of the other times.

And perhaps compare a leader doing it in your own country to what Stalin and ask if people would think highly of such a leader.

At least if you think such a leader would be well seen in your country.

I do wonder how much China, and others, are profiting with this since they can deliver more things between Asia and Europe faster than anyone else. And more importantly, how well is the blockade working in making things expensive for the colonialist entity.

After some searching online it takes about 40% longer for ships to get there while being serviced by smaller ships that take the cargo from Mediterranean ports to there, but I couldn’t find the actual increase in cost.

I think there will come a time- if we’re not there already- where Russia (and China, Iran, etc) will have to question if playing it cool, and avoiding escalation on their part, is actually serving their interests of reducing escalation overall- or if it is just emboldening the west to push further and further than it ever would have if it had been properly cowed in the first place.

Considering western response to the Yemenis blockading western shipping it does seem like force can get them to stop. If everyone did it at once they may lash out, but perhaps if it’s more gradual it may be possible to stop them.

I think they probably need a lot of AA first to defend themselves from aggression.

Exploitation will increase with workers rights likely being eroded.

Prices are going to increase, both due to less cheap resources and deindustrialization. Perhaps even with some companies moving to poorer countries where such industries might be in demand and also as a means to avoid potential sanctions/trying to get into better trading regions.

Massive quality of life will see people moving out, with the difference to the periphery being that many who migrated there might return to their countries.

Sanctions and might be used against the imperial core.

Interferences and coups will also lilkely begin happening as well, both from outsiders as well as the better off imperial core countries trying to assert themselves over their neighbours.

Wars are a possibility as well.

And so on.

Can’t blame only him considering the fact that Russia does nothing against it when the US is know for escalation.

It’s not good to blame the victim but when the victim does have the power to do something about it but does nothing it just makes things worse for everyone else as the agressor will take it as an invitation and double down against them and everyone else too.

I guess we will see where this leads us but I’m not sure this path is as good as one that had some resistance.

Russia has been doing a very good job so far of making everyone forget they can use nukes so I’m not really counting on them doing anything regarding this strike or the next few until things get really bad, at which point it may be useless anyway.

Would like to be wrong, or that Russia at least has a good reason to be doing things so meekly, but I guess time will tell.

It’s good to see that even bourgeois dictatorships gave up on joining the imperialist boys club and recognise that they are better off joining the China-led world of fairer trading

I wouldn’t say they recognised the best path but that even if they gave half of their country away they still wouldn’t be allowed in the imperailists’ club. So they literally had no choice but taking the path they took.

Hopefully they get better from it, but considering how long they stuck to the idea of joining the west, and the possibility that they might still want to, a lot still needs to happen for them to get better.

However, history is poised to repeat itself with a similar outcome of chaos and disillusionment. The misguided belief that language models can replace the human workforce will yield hilarious yet unfortunate results.

Even if AI can’t be much better than what has already been demonstrated, which I don’t think is the case but let’s consider it, there are already quite a few jobs which can be at least partially automated and that can already change the world by so much, even if only by having permanent unemployment at above 10-20% for every country, or by the bourgeoisie accepting to reduce worked hours to only a few so the system doesn’t collapse.

I disagree a little with the 5 years part as I can see a small chance of “a collapse” happening within that time, but as for the 30 years part it seems possible too.

As they have to steal ever more from their own populations and can steal less from the Global South they will become weaker and fractured, and if, for example, this happens in some parts before others it can lead to fascism in some countries in Europe which might see their neighbors in better shape as enemies, potentially leading to western infighting and an acceleration of their own collapse.

Hopefully such a scenario the conflicts stay internal instead of going global and they only weaken themselves while the rest of the world prosper. And in such a scenario we could even see Global Sout countries with enough power to massively influence western countries perhaps even leading to imperialism against them as the Global South is unlikely to go communist so fast.

Other scenarios might be more plausible though…

Hopefully this leads to things finally not only stabilizing but also impoving for Cuba in a concrete and sustainable way.

And from some quick online search it seems this well might be the oil deficit of the country by a few percent, so there is still a lot of work to be done but it is a good start/continuation of their development.

I know Medvedev said the french troops would be considered as elite fighters and would be priority to be hit without any chance of returning the bodies home. But I don’t know what Putin said.

If the west isn’t going to take them I hope China dumps some here in my country then. The western brands are like twice the price they should be so even if the chinese brands aren’t as low as they should they should already be much lower than current prices, as seen by one western brand lowering the price of one of their cars by 25-30% in preparation to deal with BYD getting in the market…

New robots are also using LLMs both for understanding their enviroment with cameras, rather than complicated sensors that might not understand the world as we do, and for controlling movement by basically taking in the data from the robot and what other LLMs understand from the enviroment and predicting what inputs are needed to move correctly for movement or doing any tasks.

As the LLMs get better they can also come up with better strategies too, which is already being used to some extent to have them create, test and fix codes based on output and error messages and this should soon allow fully autonomous robots as well that can think by themselves and interact with the world leading to many advancements, like full automation of work and scientific discoveries.

I was using Llama 3 8B offline and Command R 104B on HuggingChat with a system prompt to always take a Marxist-Leninist/materialist point of view and it does work quite well. You might need to play around with the wording you use when prompting but it can do a lot.

Llama 3 8B was trying to do it even for some physics stuff I was doing so I guess I either need a better system prompt or it’s the kind of things that a bigger/smarter model might deal with better. lol