why does every live stream video even have a sign language person. it would be easier, cheaper, and more beneficial to just have someone do subtitles, tv has been doing if for more than half a century

well we all know why but you get b& for saying it

China is experiencing its worst #Covid19 outbreak since Wuhan, concentrated in northeast Jilin province.

Officials also locked down the tech hub city of Shenzhen in the south, home to 17.5 million residents https://t.co/nGgF1nn6os pic.twitter.com/0cDBDLybAL

— Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) March 14, 2022

I went to an asian market and they were the only place with most people still wearing masks

So Turkey both claims itself as the prary homeland of the Turkish people leading the other Turkish nations. At the same time Turkey claims a spot in the EU.

At the same time Turkey has land claims against Greece. It also has active rivalry with Russia if I understand correctly, and holds millions of middle eastern refugees/immigrants within it's territory.

At the same time currently Turkey is very conservative in political sphere and has seen it's economy crash due to a push to remove economic dependency on the west at breakneck pace mixed with religious ideals regarding interest rates.

Meanwhile turkeys drone program is doing very well and Turkey seems to be a key player in Military weapons development where it fills the niche for countries that either cannot afford or do not have access to European/ US weapons systems yet would like something more dependable and newer than what the Russians offer.

Due to it's geographical location Turkey acts as the gate between the middle east and Europe proper. It maintains hostile relations with Syria and Armenia at it's eastern border. With turbulent relations with Iraq.

The closest thing to an ally it appears to have at it's border is Iran, a nation itself acting as a sanction sponge with a crippled economy.

Turkey also suffered a coup attempt in 2016 and the Turkish leader is of the belief that the US is behind trying to change the Turkish political leadership via subterfuge.

This naturally places Turkey in a west antagonistic position in it's current form.

So Turkey is a nation which cannot completely rely on the west nor completely identify with the east. Which places it in a position of being a middling empire similar to Russia with very limited scope for development in a world which is still growing and moving forward.

Without taking in Turkey accepting Georgia into the EU becomes an impossibility due to lack of geographical connection, unless the western chunk of Russia was to break away and join the EU.

The other factor that comes into account is that the European bureaucracy may not consider Turkey part of Europe proper at all and may not care to add it anytime in the next 4-5 decades.

This may be useful as it geographically limits the EU to fully integrating and developing the rest of Europe first before it expands into the middle east.

However we are here to discuss Turkey.

Turkey, in it's expansionist drive, may have a high chance of success with military operations and land takeover in the bordering regions of Syria, Iraq, and Armenia. Of these Syria and Armenia are the most viable, two regions which were previously strongly supported by Russia in their claims to maintaining sovereignty via threat of force to any attackers by the Russians.

However, with the Russian economy in chaos, a doorway has been opened for years to come for Turkey to expand military operations into the East with far greater ease than ever before.

It is likely that in the middle east Turkish Iranian cooperation leads to a pseudo alliance which further limits the influence Saudi Arabia has in the middle east and thus the influence the west has in the middle east. This keeping the middle east in a further decades long limbo.

However there is another fiture risk for Turkey, which is that the European armies have seen a boost in funding as a response to Russian aggression, but at the end of the current conflict it is likely that Russia will no longer be in a position to invade for decades to come, which means that there is a large well funded EU army with Turkey as the only real rival in the region. However, once again it is unlikely that the EU would go as far as to invade Turkey, as it already acts as a gateway separating the EU from the challenges of sharing a border with the middle east.

In conclusion, Turkey's economy will likely not fully recover to past peak for 20 to 30 years, it has scope to expand into the middle eastern regions of Syria and Armenia and becoming a major player in the region, and will likely continue to maintain it's identity as a middling power with diminishing comparative strength for years to come until the EU decides to do something with it.

Disagree with something I said? Have your own thoughts that you want to add? Please do tell. Let's discuss.

!slots100

You'd think they'd be good at that too

He was also in Dark City, another pretty trippy film.

Just crush a bunch of whatever primary ingredient you were using add it to the boiling water and mix well. It will thicken It.

You are welcome. Now you know how to make thick ramen noodles.

Discuss.

The US, Europe, half of Asia, all are demographically old nations with the western world being kept aloft through constant immigration from the rest of the world.

Currently 48%of the world lives in nations with a below replacement fertility rate and this number will only continue to rise in the years to come.

So the question that follows is, where will the world get the required manpower from? How will they get the necessary skilled labor supply?

North America uses Mexico for it's supply of human labor. A resource abundant enough that it can last this entire century. Canada too manages to accept enough people from all over the world to continue to expand year on year.

However Mexico itself has reached a fertility rate of 2.1 and based on previous data will see population decline within 30-50 years. Mexico itself may fill it's own population with migrants from the south American nations, but the south American nations themselves in turn will by then be seeing population loss.

Europe would get extra bodies anytime from North Africa and the middle east. The middle east in turn has Saudi Arabia and the UAE with enough wealth to constantly bring in more people every year, with many temporary migrants coming in from Asia, yet even for them the same issue arises, the Asian nations too are in part already seeing population decline, and will themselves have to look for other sources to get more labor from.

Africa becomes the new manpower breadbasket of the world in this scenario. The only continent in the world abundant in fertility and with many children in the coming generations, but does it have the capacity to build enough skilled manpower to supply the rest of the world? Along with the necessary population?

The population of Africa by 2070 is expected to reach 3.3 billion. The global population is estimated to be 9.4 billion. Thats 6.1 billion people all in countries that need additional labor from Africa to keep things running. An Africa which will itself likely start to slow down in growth around that time period.

Assuming the rest of the world takes in 10% of Africa's population to keep running smoothly,(10%of Mexicans live/work in the US currently and are the primary source of cheap migrant labor for the US) that would mean that Africa needs to provide 944 million bodies to the rest of the world by 2070, around 25-33% of the total population of the continent. Which is on the face of it an impossible demand.

So there won't be enough people around for all societies to keep growing even if they want to keep taking people in. These societies will likely not collapse but some of the nations of the world will almost certainly wither away unless they are accepted by a neighboring territory under a larger nation banner.

So my argument is thus, two things in our future are set, there will be societies that will be stagnating and dying out no matter what we do, and there will be new nation states born as an amalgamation of shrinking nation states in an attempt to remain relevant for a few more decades.

Federations such as the US, Europe, and India aren't an ideology, they are an inevitability, and when your neighbor becomes too huge to fight on your own, wouldn't you too like to be part of a union to balance things out?

Right now US support for Ukraine's fight is at an all time high. US has had problems with Iran for decades and know that they will no take for a strategic ally for decades to come. At the same time Iran also has the GDP and the educated masses to be one of the most powerful non west aligned countries in the world if it was permitted to grow to it's full potential.

The only way to compete against Iran in Europe would be if the Ukraine war results in all the western cultural states on the continent joining the EU and a new golden age of development. The possibility of this is still low.

If the US were to invade Iran right now they could have it phrased in their propaganda as an invasion based on fighting Russia or taking down Russian allies which at this point is a line of thinking that the country would likely support for the next decade to come.

With the Russian troop casualties so high it also recontextualizes the losses taken in whatever war occurs next for the US where even hundreds of dead US troops can be marked as low and highly efficient.

Invading Iran right now would also force Israel to support west aligned troops and center them even further in a west aligned world further limiting their support for Russia.

There is a real possibility of a WW3 where the simple rules are we will supply all the guns in the world to anyone who is not in the country and we are allowed to invade every other country except each others.

This is ofcourse worst case scenario.

A more moderate outlook would be when Russian invasion stops, any country that was in support of the Russian invasion would find itself blacklisted completely, so there will be increasing aggressive economic activity against regions like Syria and North Korea and whichever country showed support to Russia.

Once an army is fully formed and has billions invested in it, it dies end up getting used from time to time, especially when the world sees how weak Russia looked because of the decay in it's armed services that nobody noticed. So expect a vast increase in military activity in north Africa and the middle east by EU nations.

The most pleasant outlook would be that to keep ahead the EU and US put hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D to make sure they have a considerable edge over the rest of the world.

The Utopian outlook would have both Ukraine and Russia joining the EU after the war is over.

Your thoughts?