#poor south to rich north

[thoughtlessarse]

Tensions in the lower house of Italy’s Parliament erupted into a fistfight over a controversial government proposal that opponents say will further impoverish the poor south. One opposition politician was taken to hospital. Video of the fight on Wednesday showed politicians converging on Leonardo Donno, of the 5-Star Movement, who opposes the changes, after he tried to hand an Italian flag to regional affairs minister Roberto Calderoli. Mr Calderoli, a firebrand politician from the Lega party with northern roots, drafted the contested expansion of regional autonomy which would mostly benefit regions like Lega strongholds of Veneto and Lombardy. Italian media reported that Mr Donno was taken to hospital after being hit in the head and the chest.

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The far-right League (Lega) is a party of the north. It sprang up on the idea of independence for the richer north of the country from the poorer south so that its seeking to enrich the north at the expense of the south should come as no surprise. This is the second time in recent weeks that League has tried to take money from the south.

[neechees]

I realized that like, Little Women is the antithesis to Gone with The Wind, but Little Women is actually more accurate and was written by someone who actually lived through the Civil War, but GWTW was written by someone who only heard biased secondhand accounts from their relatives

[multidimensionalsock]

I am in the northern England Defence squad, the north is nice, I like it more than the south. IF I HEAR ONE MORE SOUTHERNER

[around-your-throat]

i always thought that when people say "countries in the global south" they meant countries below the equator and weren't counting my country. i just found out that it actually means EVERY developing country... this might be the first progressive term that actually pissed me off

[normanemilioleongoodworlds]

FRANCE 24: "Black Panther" II : la France condamne la représentation des soldats français

FRANCE 24: "Black Panther" II : la France condamne la représentation des soldats français.

Oeuvre de fiction romancée sinon romantique contre démenti officiel des autorités françaises.

Que dire sans prendre un parti pris dans cette controverse qui se voudrait historique ?

On croit percevoir le dépit américain face au relatif désengagement occidental en Afrique subsaharienne en contrepoint d'avancée supposée indienne, russe et chinoise sur ce continent important en terme d'influence dans le monde.

Les Etats-Unis ne peuvent s'investir militairement en remplacement des français sur le terrain sans risquer un conflit direct synonyme d'un syndrome vietnamien potentiel.

Ils reprochent comme échec aux opérations Serval et Barkhane cette perte d'influence qui serait dûe à un mélange malsain entre intérêts économiques nationaux et sécurisation militaire stratégique face aux incursions islamistes qualifiées de terroristes sur ce terrain !

Ces reproches mal voilés s'explique par l'impreparation occidentale face à la tournure que prennent les évènements actuels. Les divisions dans le camp de l'occident semblent réapparaître au plus mauvais moment.

Le pillage des ressources immenses que recèle le continent africain ne sont pas l'apanage des français mais de tout l'occident.

Ce qui aiguise peut-être les appétits d'autres puissances.

On reconnaît dans ce différend narratif l'arrogance américaine et un certain amateurisme français.

Le résultat reste le même : échec à l'occident européen et américain en Afrique...

Emmanuel Macron doit assumer l'héritage d'opérations militaires initiées par ces prédécesseurs Nicolas Sarkozy et François Hollande, où la confusion entre intérêts économique de la France et lutte anti-islamiste mettant en danger ces intérêts a pu expliquer la fin de Barkhane et Serval.

CQFD.

Ce qu'il faut démontrer au risque de démentir les faits ainsi énoncés !

Amateurisme ?

Disons que Nicolas Sarkozy comme François Hollande semblent avoir sous-estimé la complexité des situations en Afrique à cause de positions de rente historique.

Ces opérations militaires ont été montées à la va vite sans réelles considérations géopolitiques et stratégiques pertinentes c'est à dire en tenant compte des réalités actuelles et non d'évidences appartenant à un passé historique. Le monde a changé, l'Afrique aussi.

D'autres intervenants se font jour, ainsi naît une sorte de concurrence géopolitique dont il faut tirer parti plutôt que d'en être victime.

La concurrence Islam monde chrétien en Afrique de l'ouest ne doit pas occasionner un biais anti-islamique nuisible à nos alliances historiques.

Pour le Sahara, l'expression politique des populations touaregs ne trouve pas de réalisation institutionnelle ce qui peut expliquer un recours systématique à la violence armée.

Sous estimer la complexité géopolitique pour tout mettre sur un islamisme mal digéré et régler cela à coup de fusil et d'opérations militaires relève d'une politique simpliste !

Le rôle de l'Algérie n'aurait pas dû être mésestime dans ces crises subsahariennes.

l'Algérie est une création artificielle du colonialisme français, ce pays n'existe pas réellement, il s'essaie à l'existence.

l'Algérie est l'homme malade de l'Afrique du Nord.

On ne réalisé pas l'existence tridimensionnelle de l'Algérie, il y a trois pays en un.

Les généraux de la côte ne lâcheront pas le sud à cause de son pétrole et de son gaz, le pétrole et le gaz appartiennent principalement à Gardahya et Tamanrasset.

Ceux de la côte pillent les richesses du sud à leur profit exclusif, c'est une exploitation des hommes du sud par ceux du nord.

Une division nord sud interne à l'Algérie, entre riches et pauvres !

La rivalité avec le Maroc doit être entendu comme une diversion pour masquer cette terrible réalité.

[sayruq]

Amid Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, maternal healthcare faces excruciating challenges. Deliberate and systematic Israeli attacks on hospitals and medical centers, and critical shortages of humanitarian aid, including medicine, have created a crisis that is endangering the lives of both mothers and newborns. The situation is critical. There are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and some 180 births every day. Israel’s decision in October to prevent food, water, fuel and electricity from entering Gaza created a desperate situation. Inadequate nutrition, exposure to cold and hot weather, the absence of clean water, and poor sanitation weigh heavily on the wellbeing of women and children. The circumstances force them to consume contaminated water, heightening the peril of dehydration and waterborne diseases, particularly among vulnerable groups such as expectant mothers, new mothers and young children. Fuel shortages and the constrained capacity of the few remaining medical facilities exacerbate the difficulty for women in labor to access hospitals. Um Amin, a mother with a few children, confronted with the harsh reality of displacement, recounted her family’s struggles during Israel’s aggression. As bombs relentlessly fell on their neighborhood, reducing their home to rubble, Um Amin had to seek refuge at a school run by the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in the northern Gaza Strip taking only very few belongings. She was pregnant. And in the school there was little by way of basic necessities such as clean water, food or even clothes for her children. She considered moving south, where food might be a little more accessible. Her husband refused, causing conflict between them.He feared not being able to return. And while she believed that the Israeli army was attempting to force them to leave, she also felt it was a matter of life and death for her children. “It was heart-wrenching to witness my kids fighting over scraps of bread. My 4-year-old started stashing away bread in his pocket for later. I was shocked. Before the war, I never slept without knowing my children were fed. Now, most of the time, I am certain they never feel satisfied.” Her entire motivation to carry on became a matter of feeding her children She denied herself food for their sake, but had also to remind herself of the child within her. “The baby inside me is also a priority, so I had to eat too.” She found the balancing act incredibly challenging, an unbearable burden of motherhood. “I am going to share something I’ve never told anyone I know: I contemplated suicide to escape the weight of this responsibility.”

After the Israeli army unexpectedly stormed al-Rimal, a Gaza City neighborhood, for a second time, Um Amin panicked and fled again, this time going from the UNRWA school to a relative’s house. But her fear caused her to enter preterm labor. A doctor, at the nearby al-Sahaba medical center, had to resort to a cesarean section. It was hell, Um Amin said. There was insufficient anesthesia and she could feel the scalpel cutting into her body. There was no electricity; the doctor had to use a handheld flashlight to see. Um Amin’s cries of pain could not drown out the crashing of shells around her. The operation left her utterly drained. She couldn’t believe she was still alive.She needed nourishment to recover what she had lost during the bleeding and to breastfeed her son. But hunger was stalking Gaza. Food was scarce, there was no white flour in the markets, and Israel was blocking aid trucks from entering the north. “All I had to eat was bread made from animal feed and water. When I had my other children, I relied on foods rich in animal proteins, but it was impossible this time. The price of meat was five times higher than normal.” Unable to adequately breastfeed her child, she had to find infant formula. But the price was multiple times higher than it used to be and more than she could afford. Eventually, she was forced to buy formula that was past its expiry date. “You might blame me, but there was literally no other option. I didn’t have enough money. It wasn’t clumped together, so the doctor told me it could still be used.” She would never find out. Due to the lack of clean water, she prepared the milk with non-potable water from a well. The baby refused to drink.

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Walled World consists of the U.S. and Canada (in North America); Japan and South Korea, plus Australia and New Zealand (in the Asia-Pacific region); plus basically the entire European Union (2); and also Israel. In 2009, that club of nations represented just 14 percent of the world’s population but earned 73 percent of its income. Conversely, the “gray areas” outside the walls were home to 86 percent of humanity, who scraped together just 27 percent of the world’s income. The average monthly income inside the wall is around €2,500. Outside, it’s just €150. Money may or may not buy happiness, but it does buy quality of life. The yellow dots, which represent the world’s top 50 cities in terms of quality of life, are almost all inside the wall — only Singapore is outside, and that relatively wealthy city-state should arguably be included inside the wall anyway. In other words: the poor are many, the rich are few. That’s not a new phenomenon of course, nor are the migratory pressures it causes. That’s where those barriers come in. The map lists some examples, the locations and the circumstances of which are all different — but which are all pieces of the same puzzle shown on this map.

[enbysiriusblack]

super helpful tips for non-english fic writers writing a marauder fic (set in england):

the characters can never say 'mate' too much. (especially if they're working class). there is no limit to the word 'mate'.

slag is a much more common word to use than slut or whore

you could drive an hour away and no longer understand anyone's accent. there is a lot of english accents

non-londoners think londoners think they're better than everyone else

the north/south divide is still existent but was much more so in the 70s. northerners saw southerners as posh wankers and southerners saw northerners as poor and dumber. the midlands gets ignored.

everywhere is hilly. you think there can't possibly be a hill? there is. flat ground is nonexistent.

sometimes it doesn't rain. we go to the beach and talk about how great the weather is (even if it's still cold. at least it isn't tipping it down)

wetherspoons (affectionately known as 'spoons') is not just a pub/restaurant. its a lifestyle. it's home. it's also sticky, always filled with middle aged men drinking pints, and you have to walk a mile and go through a maze to find the toilets.

we're strangely obsessed with lidl bakery and greggs.

in terms of the middle class and upper class marauder characters- idrk, but my old friend was rich and she had a bear skinned rug and ate a lot of quiches, so do with that what you will

[bestanimal]

Round 2 - Chordata - Petromyzontida

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Petromyzontida is a class comprising one order, Petromyzontiformes, commonly called “lampreys.”

Like their closest living relatives, the hagfish, lampreys bear a cartilaginous skull and rudimentary vertebrae. Adults lack a jaw, and are characterized by a toothed, funnel-like, sucking mouth. They have elongated, eel-like bodies reaching up to 1.3 metres (3.9 ft) long. They have one nostril atop the head, seven gill pores on each side of the head, two well-developed eyes, and two parietal eyes. Only 18 species are predators or scavengers, the rest (all freshwater species) do not feed as adults, instead living off the reserves gained as juveniles. Carnivorous species are marine, though 9 of them migrate into freshwater to breed. They use the suction cup around their mouths to cling to rocks or prey, using their tongue to either rasp blood from prey or algae from rocks. They also use this suction cup to climb up rocks when migrating upstream to breed.

Adult lampreys spawn in nests of sand, gravel and pebbles in clear streams. After hatching from their eggs the larvae, called ammocoetes, will drift downstream with the current until they reach soft and fine sediment in which to burrow, taking up an existence as filter feeders, collecting detritus, algae, and microorganisms (image 4). Their eyes are underdeveloped, only capable of discriminating changes in light. Lampreys spend the majority of their lives as these filter-feeding ammocoetes. Most species spend up to 8 years, though some may spend as little as 1-2 years. The ammocoetes will then undergo a metamorphosis which generally lasts 3-4 months, during which they do not eat.

The oldest fossil lamprey, Priscomyzon, is known from the Late Devonian. Other stem-group lampreys, like Pipiscius, Mayomyzon and Hardistiella are known from the Carboniferous. While they appear relatively unchanged, stem-lampreys lack the specialised, heavily toothed discs with plate-like laminae present in modern lampreys, and their larvae resembled the adults, rather than having a distinct stage. The earliest lamprey with the specialised toothed oral disc typical of modern lampreys is Yanliaomyzon from the Middle Jurassic.

Propaganda under the cut:

Many species change color as ammocoetes, becoming dark during the day and pale at night.

Lampreys have been extensively studied because their relatively simple brain is thought to reflect the brain structure of early vertebrate ancestors, thus providing insight into our origins.

Lampreys are valued as food in the Northwest United States, throughout Europe, in Russia, Japan, and in South Korea. King Henry I of England is claimed to have been so fond of lampreys that he often ate them, late into life and poor health, against the advice of his physician concerning their richness, and is said to have died from eating "a surfeit of lampreys".

In the county of Nakkila (Finland) and Carnikava Municipality (Latvia), the European River Lamprey (Lampetra fluviatilis) is the local symbol, found on their coats of arms.

The legend of the Lambton Worm from County Durham in North-East England concerns a lamprey being fished out of the River Wear by a young boy skipping church. He declares that he had “caught the devil” and disposes of it down a nearby well. Over the years, the lamprey grows into a giant, poisonous Worm, wrapping itself around a local hill and terrorizing the village. Hijinks and witch-curses ensue.

Lampreys were highly appreciated by the Ancient Romans, not only as food, but also as pets. Lucius Licinius Crassus was mocked by Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus for weeping over the death of his pet lamprey, who he was said to have adorned with earrings and small necklaces, training it to respond to its name and swimming up to eat what was offered. Crassus retorted that Domitius had lost three wives himself and Crassus had never seen him shed a tear.

Publius Vedius Pollio was reportedly an exceedingly cruel Roman soldier who kept a pool of carnivorous lampreys to which he would feed slaves who had displeased him. This went on until Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus was visiting his mansion and witnessed Pollio about to dispatch a slave who had broken a crystal cup. Augustus had all of Pollio’s cups destroyed, as well as his mansion, and filled in his pond. This is likely an urban legend, but honestly, I feel like it should have ended with Pollio going down with the lampreys.

Dams and other human development have made it hard for lampreys to migrate upstream to breed. Some scientists are hoping to design ramps that will utilize lamprey’s climbing ability so that they can bypass dams.

[moneer-raed2005]

Palestine is a geographically significant region with great historical and religious importance, located in the heart of the Middle East.

It stretches along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, bordered by Lebanon and Syria to the north, Jordan to the east, and Egypt to the south. Among its most notable cities is Jerusalem, a city sacred to Muslims, Christians, and Jews, housing landmarks such as Al-Aqsa Mosque, Dome of the Rock, and Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Palestine boasts a rich history spanning thousands of years, having witnessed the rise of numerous civilizations like the Canaanites and Phoenicians. In modern times, it endured British occupation in the early 20th century, followed by Israeli occupation since 1948, leading to the displacement of millions of Palestinians and the intensification of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Despite ongoing challenges, Palestine maintains its cultural and historical identity 🌍. It is renowned for its natural diversity, including plains, mountains, and valleys 🌿⛰️. Most importantly, its resilient people continue to strive for freedom and justice ✊🇵🇸.

Our Story: A Family's Journey Through War

My name is Mounir, and I am part of a family of seven.

We used to live a simple life in Gaza, before the war changed everything. My father, Raed (47), my mother, Amani (39), my older sisters, Rasha (22), who is married, and Rana (21), who is also married, my brother Mohamed (16), and my little sister Sham (4), we all dreamed of a safe and stable life.

When the war began, we were forced to leave our home due to heavy shelling nearby. We took shelter in the shop that was our only source of income— a sanitary supplies shop where my father, brother, and I worked. We could only stay one night before leaflets were dropped from airplanes ordering a full evacuation of the area.

We had no choice but to move to Al-Shifa Medical Complex, where we lived in a tent for a week. Then, another evacuation order came, and we were told to head south of Gaza.

With no relatives to take us in, we ended up in an unfinished school building in the central area. The 90 days we spent there were the hardest of our lives— no water, no food, and nothing fit for human life. We had to walk more than 1.5 kilometers just to buy a small amount of food to keep us alive. After this long ordeal, another evacuation order came, but before we could leave, the school was bombed. It was terrifying— we narrowly escaped death, leaving everything behind.

We fled to Rafah, a place that seemed safer at first, but there too, we found no shelter. We had to live in a tent, in the freezing winter cold. We had no way to keep warm, and we nearly froze to death.

My mother, who suffers from chronic asthma, was in a dire situation because we couldn’t find her medications. She ran out of the medicine that helps her breathe, and she started having painful attacks. The smoke from the fire we used for cooking and the terrible smell from the lack of sanitation in the school made her condition worse.

My little sister Sham is also suffering from skin rashes due to the unsanitary conditions, and she has diarrhea and vomiting because the drinking water is contaminated. We are living in inhumane conditions, and we don’t even have the clothes we need to survive the coming winter.

My brother Mohamed and I carry a heavy burden— we fetch water from faraway places, and we search for food to ease our hunger. My married sisters and their small children are also in desperate need of baby formula, clothes, and diapers. Even the food that reaches us in the school from charity kitchens is barely edible due to poor cooking.

This is our life… fear, hunger, cold, and bombing.

We live in constant terror and uncertainty.

We desperately need your help and support— any donation can help save our lives and ease our suffering.

[gothhabiba]

[bypass paywall]

[Northern Africa] has been experiencing some of the most intense heat waves in recent years, but in many cases they’ve been under-reported due to misconceptions about Africans’ ability to withstand them.

“Africa is seen as a sunny and hot continent,” said Amadou Thierno Gaye, a research scientist and professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “People think we are used to heat, but we are having high temperatures for a longer duration. Nobody is used to this.”

North Africa, the Sahara desert and the Sahel, a semi-arid belt north of the Sudanian savanna, are some of the most vulnerable areas because they have larger land masses relative to the rest of the continent, meaning they tend to heat up faster. Scientists have attributed the unprecedented temperatures to a combination of human-induced climate change and the return of El Niño, a natural phenomenon that alters weather patterns. 

The Sahel, for instance, has been heating at a faster pace than the global average despite being hot already. Burkina Faso and Mali, both in West Africa’s Sahel, are among countries that are set to become almost uninhabitable by 2080, if the world continues on its current trajectory, a UK university study found. Its people are especially vulnerable due to shrinking resources, such as water, and poor amenities, and a dearth of trees and parks means there are few options for places to cool off.

[...] Elsewhere on the continent, the crisis is also being felt. In the Horn of Africa, at least 43,000 people died in Somalia alone last year as a result of the worst drought in four decades. A study found that global warming is changing rain patterns and bringing more heat to Somalia and some of its neighbors, for longer stretches of time. Further south, unusually destructive cyclones in 2019 claimed more than a thousand lives in Mozambique and Zimbabwe alone. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The CHIPS Act treats the symptoms, but not the causes

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/07/farewell-mr-chips/#we-used-to-make-things

There's this great throwaway line in 1992's Sneakers, where Dan Aykroyd, playing a conspiracy-addled hacker/con-man, is feverishly telling Sydney Poitier (playing an ex-CIA spook) about a 1958 meeting Eisenhower had with aliens where Ike said, "hey, look, give us your technology, and we'll give you all the cow lips you want."

Poitier dismisses Aykroyd ("Don't listen to this man. He's certifiable"). We're meant to be on Poitier's side here, but I've always harbored some sympathy for Aykroyd in this scene.

That's because I often hear echoes of Aykroyd's theory in my own explanations of the esoteric bargains and plots that produced the world we're living in today. Of course, in my world, it's not presidents bargaining for alien technology in exchange for cow-lips – it's the world's wealthy nations bargaining to drop trade restrictions on the Global South in exchange for IP laws.

These bargains – which started as a series of bilateral and then multilateral agreements like NAFTA, and culminated in the WTO agreement of 1999 – were the most important step in the reordering of the world's economy around rent-extraction, cheap labor exploitation, and a brittle supply chain that is increasingly endangered by the polycrisis of climate and its handmaidens, like zoonotic plagues, water wars, and mass refugee migration.

Prior to the advent of "free trade," the world's rich countries fashioned debt into a whip-hand over poor, post-colonial nations. These countries had been bankrupted by their previous colonial owners, and the price of their freedom was punishing debts to the IMF and other rich-world institutions in exchange for loans to help these countries "develop."

Like all poor debtors, these countries were said to have gotten into their predicament through moral failure – they'd "lived beyond their means."

(When rich people get into debt, bankruptcy steps in to give them space to "restructure" according to their own plans. When poor people get into debt, bankruptcy strips them of nearly everything that might help them recover, brands them with a permanent scarlet letter, and subjects them to humiliating micro-management whose explicit message is that they are not competent to manage their own affairs):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

So the poor debtor nations were ordered to "deregulate." They had to sell off their state assets, run their central banks according to the dictates of rich-world finance authorities, and reorient their production around supplying raw materials to rich countries, who would process these materials into finished goods for export back to the poor world.

Naturally, poor countries were not allowed to erect "trade barriers" that might erode the capacity of this North-South transfer of high-margin goods, but this was not the era of free trade. It wasn't the free trade era because, while the North-South transfer was largely unrestricted, the South-North transfer was subject to tight regulation in the rich world.

In other words, poor countries were expected to export, say, raw ore to the USA and reimport high-tech goods, with low tariffs in both directions. But if a poor country processed that ore domestically and made its own finished goods, the US would block those goods at the border, slapping them with high tariffs that made them more expensive than Made-in-the-USA equivalents.

The argument for this unidirectional trade was that the US – and other rich countries – had a strategic need to maintain their manufacturing industries as a hedge against future geopolitical events (war, but also pandemics, extreme weather) that might leave the rich world unable to provide for itself. This rationale had a key advantage: it was true.

A country that manages its own central bank can create as much of its own currency as it wants, and use that money to buy anything for sale in its own currency.

This may not be crucial while global markets are operating to the country's advantage (say, while the rest of the world is "willingly" pricing its raw materials in your country's currency), but when things go wrong – war, plague, weather – a country that can't make things is at the rest of the world's mercy.

If you had to choose between being a poor post-colonial nation that couldn't supply its own technological needs except by exporting raw materials to rich countries, and being a rich country that had both domestic manufacturing capacity and a steady supply of other countries' raw materials, you would choose the second, every time.

What's not to like?

Here's what.

The problem – from the perspective of America's ultra-wealthy – was that this arrangement gave the US workforce a lot of power. As US workers unionized, they were able to extract direct concessions from their employers through collective bargaining, and they could effectively lobby for universal worker protections, including a robust welfare state – in both state and federal legislatures. The US was better off as a whole, but the richest ten percent were much poorer than they could be if only they could smash worker power.

That's where free trade comes in. Notwithstanding racist nonsense about "primitive" countries, there's no intrinsic defect that stops the global south from doing high-tech manufacturing. If the rich world's corporate leaders were given free rein to sideline America's national security in favor of their own profits, they could certainly engineer the circumstances whereby poor countries would build sophisticated factories to replace the manufacturing facilities that sat behind the north's high tariff walls.

These poor-country factories could produce goods ever bit as valuable as the rich world's shops, but without the labor, environmental and financial regulations that constrained their owners' profits. They slavered for a business environment that let them kill workers; poison the air, land and water; and cheat the tax authorities with impunity.

For this plan to work, the wealthy needed to engineer changes in both the rich world and the poor world. Obviously, they would have to get rid of the rich world's tariff walls, which made it impossible to competitively import goods made in the global south, no matter how cheaply they were made.

But free trade wasn't just about deregulation in the north – it also required a whole slew of new, extremely onerous regulations in the global south. Corporations that relocated their manufacturing to poor – but nominally sovereign – countries needed to be sure that those countries wouldn't try to replicate the American plan of becoming actually sovereign, by exerting control over the means of production within their borders.

Recall that the American Revolution was inspired in large part by fury over the requirement to ship raw materials back to Mother England and then buy them back at huge markups after they'd been processed by English workers, to the enrichment of English aristocrats. Post-colonial America created new regulations (tariffs on goods from England), and – crucially – they also deregulated.

Specifically, post-revolutionary America abolished copyrights and patents for English persons and firms. That way, American manufacturers could produce sophisticated finished goods without paying rent to England's wealthy making those goods cheaper for American buyers, and American publishers could subsidize their editions of American authors' books by publishing English authors on the cheap, without the obligation to share profits with English publishers or English writers.

The surplus produced by ignoring the patents and copyrights of the English was divided (unequally) among American capitalists, workers, and shoppers. Wealthy Americans got richer, even as they paid their workers more and charged less for their products. This incubated a made-in-the-USA edition of the industrial revolution. It was so successful that the rest of the world – especially England – began importing American goods and literature, and then American publishers and manufacturers started to lean on their government to "respect" English claims, in order to secure bilateral protections for their inventions and books in English markets.

This was good for America, but it was terrible for English manufacturers. The US – a primitive, agricultural society – "stole" their inventions until they gained so much manufacturing capacity that the English public started to prefer American goods to English ones.

This was the thing that rich-world industrialists feared about free trade. Once you build your high-tech factories in the global south, what's to stop those people from simply copying your plans – or worse, seizing your factories! – and competing with you on a global scale? Some of these countries had nominally socialist governments that claimed to explicitly elevate the public good over the interests of the wealthy. And all of these countries had the same sprinkling of sociopaths who'd gladly see a million children maimed or the land poisoned for a buck – and these "entrepreneurs" had unbeatable advantages with their countries' political classes.

For globalization to work, it wasn't enough to deregulate the rich world – capitalists also had to regulate the poor world. Specifically, they had to get the poor world to adopt "IP" laws that would force them to willingly pay rent on things they could get for free: patents and other IP, even though it was in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term interests of both the nation and its politicians and its businesspeople.

Thus, the bargain that makes me sympathetic to Dan Aykroyd: not cow lips for alien tech; but free trade for IP law. When the WTO was steaming towards passage in the late 1990s, there was (rightly) a lot of emphasis on its deregulatory provisions: weakening of labor, environmental and financial laws in the poor world, and of tariffs in the rich world.

But in hindsight, we all kind of missed the main event: the TRIPS (Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights). This actually started before the WTO treaty (it was part of the GATT, a predecessor to the WTO), but the WTO spread it to countries all over the world. Under the TRIPS, poor countries are required to honor the IP claims of rich countries, on pain of global sanction.

That was the plan: instead of paying American workers to make Apple computers, say, Apple could export the "IP" for Macs and iPhones to countries like China, and these countries would produce Apple products that were "designed in California, assembled in China." China would allow Apple to treat Chinese workers so badly that they routinely committed suicide, and would lock up or kill workers who tried to unionize. China would accept vast shipments of immortal, toxic e-waste. And China wouldn't let its entrepreneurs copy Apple's designs, be they software, schematics or trademarks.

Apple isn't the only company that pursued this strategy, but no company has executed it as successfully. It's not for nothing that Steve Jobs's hand-picked successor was Tim Cook, who oversaw the transfer of even the most exacting elements of Apple manufacturing to Chinese facilities, striking bargains with contractors like Foxconn that guaranteed that workers would be heavily – lethally! – surveilled and controlled to prevent the twin horrors of unionization and leaks.

For the first two decades of the WTO era, the most obvious problems with this arrangement was wage erosion (for American workers) and leakage (for the rich). China's "socialist" government was only too happy to help Foxconn imprison workers who demanded better wages and working conditions, but they were far more relaxed about knockoffs, be they fake iPods sold in market stalls or US trade secrets working their way into Huawei products.

These were problems for the American aristocracy, whose investments depended on China disciplining both Chinese workers and Chinese businesses. For the American people, leakage was a nothingburger. Apple's profits weren't shared with its workforce beyond the relatively small number of tech workers at its headquarters. The vast majority of Apple employees, who flogged iPhones and scrubbed the tilework in gleaming white stores across the nation, would get the same minimal (or even minimum) wage no matter how profitable Apple grew.

It wasn't until the pandemic that the other shoe dropped for the American public. The WTO arrangement – cow lips for alien technology – had produced a global system brittle supply chains composed entirely of weakest links. A pandemic, a war, a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or Houthi paramilitaries can cripple the entire system, perhaps indefinitely.

For two decades, we fought over globalization's effect on wages. We let our corporate masters trick us into thinking that China's "cheating" on IP was a problem for the average person. But the implications of globalization for American sovereignty and security were banished to the xenophobic right fringe, where they were mixed into the froth of Cold War 2.0 nonsense. The pandemic changed that, creating a coalition that is motivated by a complex and contradictory stew of racism, environmentalism, xenophobia, labor advocacy, patriotism, pragmatism, fear and hope.

Out of that stew emerged a new American political tendency, mostly associated with Bidenomics, but also claimed in various guises by the American right, through its America First wing. That tendency's most visible artifact is the CHIPS Act, through which the US government proposes to use policy and subsidies to bring high-tech manufacturing back to America's shores.

This week, the American Economic Liberties Project published "Reshoring and Restoring: CHIPS Implementation for a Competitive Semiconductor Industry," a fascinating, beautifully researched and detailed analysis of the CHIPS Act and the global high-tech manufacturing market, written by Todd Achilles, Erik Peinert and Daniel Rangel:

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/reshoring-and-restoring-chips-implementation-for-a-competitive-semiconductor-industry/#

Crucially, the report lays out the role that the weakening of antitrust, the dismantling of tariffs and the strengthening of IP played in the history of the current moment. The failure to enforce antitrust law allowed for monopolization at every stage of the semiconductor industry's supply-chain. The strengthening of IP and the weakening of tariffs encouraged the resulting monopolies to chase cheap labor overseas, confident that the US government would punish host countries that allowed their domestic entrepreneurs to use American designs without permission.

The result is a financialized, "capital light" semiconductor industry that has put all its eggs in one basket. For the most advanced chips ("leading-edge logic"), production works like this: American firms design a chip and send the design to Taiwan where TSMC foundry turns it into a chip. The chip is then shipped to one of a small number of companies in the poor world where they are assembled, packaged and tested (AMP) and sent to China to be integrated into a product.

Obsolete foundries get a second life in the commodity chip ("mature-node chips") market – these are the cheap chips that are shoveled into our cars and appliances and industrial systems.

Both of these systems are fundamentally broken. The advanced, "leading-edge" chips rely on geopolitically uncertain, heavily concentrated foundries. These foundries can be fully captured by their customers – as when Apple prepurchases the entire production capacity of the most advanced chips, denying both domestic and offshore competitors access to the newest computation.

Meanwhile, the less powerful, "mature node" chips command minuscule margins, and are often dumped into the market below cost, thanks to subsidies from countries hoping to protect their corner of the high-tech sector. This makes investment in low-power chips uncertain, leading to wild swings in cost, quality and availability of these workhorse chips.

The leading-edge chipmakers – Nvidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, AMD, etc – have fully captured their markets. They like the status quo, and the CHIPS Act won't convince them to invest in onshore production. Why would they?

2022 was Broadcom's best year ever, not in spite of its supply-chain problems, but because of them. Those problems let Broadcom raise prices for a captive audience of customers, who the company strong-armed into exclusivity deals that ensured they had nowhere to turn. Qualcomm also profited handsomely from shortages, because its customers end up paying Qualcomm no matter where they buy, thanks to Qualcomm ensuring that its patents are integrated into global 4G and 5G standards.

That means that all standards-conforming products generate royalties for Qualcomm, and it also means that Qualcomm can decide which companies are allowed to compete with it, and which ones will be denied licenses to its patents. Both companies are under orders from the FTC to cut this out, and both companies ignore the FTC.

The brittleness of mature-node and leading-edge chips is not inevitable. Advanced memory chips (DRAM) roughly comparable in complexity to leading-edge chips, while analog-to-digital chips are as easily commodified as mature-node chips, and yet each has a robust and competitive supply chain, with both onshore and offshore producers. In contrast with leading-edge manufacturers (who have been visibly indifferent to the CHIPS incentives), memory chip manufacturers responded to the CHIPS Act by committing hundreds of billions of dollars to new on-shore production facilities.

Intel is a curious case: in a world of fabless leading-edge manufacturers, Intel stands out for making its own chips. But Intel is in a lot of trouble. Its advanced manufacturing plans keep foundering on cost overruns and delays. The company keeps losing money. But until recently, its management kept handing its shareholders billions in dividends and buybacks – a sign that Intel bosses assume that the US public will bail out its "national champion." It's not clear whether the CHIPS Act can save Intel, or whether financialization will continue to hollow out a once-dominant pioneer.

The CHIPS Act won't undo the concentration – and financialization – of the semiconductor industry. The industry has been awash in cheap money since the 2008 bailouts, and in just the past five years, US semiconductor monopolists have paid out $239b to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, enough to fund the CHIPS Act five times over. If you include Apple in that figure, the amount US corporations spent on shareholder returns instead of investing in capacity rises to $698b. Apple doesn't want a competitive market for chips. If Apple builds its own foundry, that just frees up capacity at TSMC that its competitors can use to improve their products.

The report has an enormous amount of accessible, well-organized detail on these markets, and it makes a set of key recommendations for improving the CHIPS Act and passing related legislation to ensure that the US can once again make its own microchips. These run a gamut from funding four new onshore foundries to requiring companies receiving CHIPS Act money to "dual-source" their foundries. They call for NIST and the CPO to ensure open licensing of key patents, and for aggressive policing of anti-dumping rules for cheap chips. They also seek a new law creating an "American Semiconductor Supply Chain Resiliency Fee" – a tariff on chips made offshore.

Fundamentally, these recommendations seek to end the outsourcing made possible by restrictive IP regimes, to undercut Wall Street's power to demand savings from offshoring, and to smash the market power of companies like Apple that make the brittleness of chip manufacturing into a feature, rather than a bug. This would include a return to previous antitrust rules, which limited companies' ability to leverage patents into standards, and to previous IP rules, which limited exclusive rights chip topography and design ("mask rights").

All of this will is likely to remove the constraints that stop poor countries from doing to America the same things that postcolonial America did to England – that is, it will usher in an era in which lots of countries make their own chips and other high-tech goods without paying rent to American companies. This is good! It's good for poor countries, who will have more autonomy to control their own technical destiny. It's also good for the world, creating resiliency in the high-tech manufacturing sector that we'll need as the polycrisis overwhelms various places with fire and flood and disease and war. Electrifying, solarizing and adapting the world for climate resilience is fundamentally incompatible with a brittle, highly concentrated tech sector.

Pluralizing high-tech production will make America less vulnerable to the gamesmanship of other countries – and it will also make the rest of the world less vulnerable to American bullying. As Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman describe so beautifully in their 2023 book Underground Empire, the American political establishment is keenly aware of how its chokepoints over global finance and manufacturing can be leveraged to advantage the US at the rest of the world's expense:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

Look, I know that Eisenhower didn't trade cow-lips for alien technology – but our political and commercial elites really did trade national resiliency away for IP laws, and it's a bargain that screwed everyone, except the one percenters whose power and wealth have metastasized into a deadly cancer that threatens the country and the planet.

Image: Mickael Courtiade (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/197739384@N07/52703936652/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

MORNING NEWS WITH ASMI! 12 Oct '24

GOOD MORNING MAGGOTS ONCE MORE IT IS NOT MORNING (WELL, IT'S MORNING IN CALIFORNIA AND THAT'LL DO)!

JERRY, HOW ARE WE FEELING?

JERRY WHO TOTALLY EXISTS: WONDERFUL, ASMI! OUR VIEWERS ARE UP BRIGHT AND EARLY AND IT'S TIME FOR THE NEWS!

WELL SAID JERRY WHO TOTALLY EXISTS!

THE NEWS:

REDDIT THE BIRD FLEW AWAY WHEN I WAS TRYING TO GET IT DOWNSTAIRS TO AN ANIMAL RESCUE BLOKE. IT FLEW PRETTY HIGH RATHER THAN JUST HOPPING AWAY (THE WAY IT USUALLY DID IF MY SHOULDER GOT TOO WOBBLY) SO I THINK IT REALLY WANTED TO LEAVE.

WE FOUND OUT LATER THAT IT BELONGS TO THE CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEXT DOOR AND THEY SPENT ALL NIGHT LOOKING FOR IT, WHICH IS SAD, BUT AT LEAST IT WAS SAFE? AND I HOPE IT DECIDES TO DO WHATEVER IT WANTS, GO BACK TO HUMANS OR LIVE HOWEVER.

I HAVE NOT YET FOUND A RICH TWINK HUSBAND TO LIVE MY TROPHY HUSBAND DREAMS WITH.

I DREW A LOT OF GAY PEOPLE.

THE WORLD CONTINUES TO BURN IN INTOLERANCE AND POOR INFRASTRUCTURE AND NATURAL DISASTER AND CRIME AND WAR AND WARCRIMES.

I AM GAY.

OBAMA SAID A LOT OF BLACK MEN NEEDED TO DO BETTER BECAUSE THEY WERE VOTING FOR TRUMP JUST BECAUSE HARRIS IS A WOMAN.

YOU ARE SO LOVED, ACTUALLY.

ALRIGHT NOW JEFFERY WHO EXISTS WITH THE WEATHER!

TOTALLY-JEFFERY: THE WEATHER (I WILL NOT FORGET EUROPE THIS TIME LIKE ASMI DID HAHA!)

SHUT UP JEFFERY JUST GIVE US THE FORECAST.

ASIA: CLOUDY WITH THE OPPRESSIVE HEAT OF THE DARK SIDE OF TRADITIONS.

AFRICA: WET. VERY WET. (NOT /AO3)

SOUTH AMERICA: GETTIN' WARMER BBGS.

ANTARCTICA: GREEN. FUCKIN' GREEN.

NORTH AMERICA: STORMY WITH A HINT OF POLITICAL DISARRAY

EUROPE: PUMPKIN SPICE LATTES.

THE ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY'S CROSSWORD:

YOU GOTTA GIRD THESE FUCKERS: LOINS

ANOTHER WORD FOR SOMEONE WHO IS CHERISHED/OF WORTH: YOU

HOW DO YOU ___ LIKE YOU'RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME: WRITE

DIFFICULTY PROCESSING NUMBER BASED INFORMATION AND MATH: DYSCALCULIA

WHAT DOES THE BRAIN SAY BEFORE THE EXAM? I'M ___: NERVOUS

AND TODAY'S BELOW THE CUT:

(OR HERE'S THE LINK IF YOU PREFER)

FAREWELL FROM JEFFERY AND ME I LOVE YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY

[normanemilioleongoodworlds]

Guerre en Ukraine : ce qu'il faut retenir de la journée du vendredi 23 décembre

"Guerre en Ukraine : ce qu'il faut retenir de la journée du vendredi 23 décembre" https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/europe/manifestations-en-ukraine/guerre-en-ukraine-ce-qu-il-faut-retenir-de-la-journee-du-vendredi-23-decembre_5560692.html

Comment interpréter le conflit limité à l'Ukraine ?

How to understand the limited conflict to Ukraine ?

Comme la division au sein du monde russophone, au seul profit d'un extrême occident peu regardant sur les moyens d'y parvenir ?

Like division inside russophonic world, only to benefit of the United States with little regard on the means to address It ?

L'objectif, commun à la Russie et aux Etats-Unis, serait d'affaiblir durablement la capacité d'émancipation politique et économique d'une Europe débutante sur la scène internationale.

The main task for jointly United States and Russia could be to low down the economic and political emancipation of a beginning Europe on the international scene.

Et... Pour une Europe, sous leadership allemand, conséquemment de reprocher à la France un suivisme atlantiste incompatible avec cette Europe libérée de toutes entraves.

And... For Europe under German leadership, consequently, diminishes a too atlantist France not in phase with a freed Europe from all brakes.

La Russie et l'Amerique seraient d'accords pour garder une Europe non libre, soumise à leur bon vouloir...

Russia and America agreed to stay Europe without freedom, submitted to their free will...

Cette rivalité orient-occident, qui date de l'Égypte et de la Mésopotamie puis de la Grèce antique et de la Perse ancienne, puis encore de Rome et de l'Ottoman, masque mal une forte opposition nord-sud, entres riches nations et pays pauvres avides de richesses et d'accession au pouvoir, entre abolitionnistes de la vie et esclavagistes, les uns éliminent leurs adversaires irréductibles, les autres font des prisonniers, font chanter ceux qu'ils jugent propres à défendre leurs intérêts.

Tout cela a trait à la conquête et au gouvernement du monde.

This east-west rivalry, from Egypt and Mesopotamia then antic Greece and ancient persan world, then more Roma and Ottoman empire, is hidding a strong opposition between north-south, rich nations and poor ones motivated by richnesses and access to powers, between abolitionists of life and slavers, the ones eliminate their foes, the others make captives, blackmailed those they think are properly good for their own interests.

All is about conquest and government of the world.

Après Rome et Constantinople, Paris et Vienne restent les deux seules villes libres d'occident. Convoitées par les pirates de la mer ou du désert et de la steppe, les anglo-normands et les turco-mongols, du sud ou du nord, pillage de ressources plutôt que création de richesses.

l'Europe est appelée à relever le flambeau d'occident abandonné, contraint et forcé, par les Amériques. Il faut lutter, défendre et contrer l'offense qui nous est faite !

After Roma and Byzance, Paris and Vienna stay the two only free cities of western nations. Rovers of the seas, desert or steppa, the anglo-northmen and turco-mongols, from south or north, pillards of ressources rather than creators of richnesses.

Europe is called to be the flag of the western nations lost, constraint and forced, by America. We have to fight, defend and battle offences which are addressed to us !

[an0nymousmessenger]

Next Time We Meet

Synopsis: To go North or South? tags. fluff, angst, gn!reader Word Count: 1.9k Ao3 Link

“Yo.”

“Gah!”

Geto laughs, his voice deep and rich as he watches Gojo choke on air, “How rude, and right after seeing me.”

Gojo shoots Geto a look that says 'Really? This is how you greet me after so long?' and slumps back in the airport seat, spreading out without any regard for personal space. He frowns, looking up at the ceiling with a sigh. "No way. Could things get any worse?"

You snort from the other side of where Gojo sits, legs crossed, supporting your face with your hand. "C'mon, is seeing your old friends again really that disappointing?"

Gojo flinched at your sudden voice, his laidback body language suddenly tense.

It was as if he couldn’t believe you were here. Whole and well.

You notice, and tilt your head while asking in a teasing voice, “Hm~? What’s wrong?”

However, he recovered quickly, answering only a beat late in his whiny voice that it was hard to wonder if it ever happened at all, “You don’t get it!”

“Does it matter anyway?” Geto asks.

Gojo complains, "I told one of my students that when you die, you die alone! Now I seem like a liar!"

You laugh at how despite waking up in another place with his old friends, the only thing on his mind at the moment was something he told his students in passing, and that his only concern was how it made him look bad.

At the sound of your laughter, Gojo finally turns his head to look at you. You were so busy laughing at Gojo’s suffering that you missed the way his blue pupils seemed to shake as he soaked in the sound of your laugh, and the subtle trembling of his lips so faint it was barely noticeable.

“You speak as if you aren’t one,” You manage between fits of laughter.

He crosses his arms and pouts. "I've told you before! I'm an honest man! Isn't that right, Suguru?" 

Geto, however, only shakes his head while laughing softly.

You smile, thinking to yourself that you really have missed this. It was nice. It was warm.

“And there's the matter of his father," Gojo continues, "but I've already asked Shoko to handle that."

"Poor Shoko, you make her go through too much," Your voice is full of sympathy for your mutual friend.

Gojo dismisses your concerns with a wave. "It's Shoko; she's strong."

Still, you wonder if she's okay.

"So, how was the King of Curses?" Geto inquires, hands in the pockets of his school uniform.

Gojo waves his hand, “Man, he was crazy strong! Plus, he didn’t even go all out.”

You saw, after all, you and everyone here was watching him.

“Stronger than you?” You ask, turning your head to look at him with your brows raised, wondering if fighting the king of curses was the solution to flattening his inflated ego.

Gojo became silent.

His face seems to suddenly fall, as if in deep contemplation.

You meant it as a joke, a jab at how in his youth, he only flaunted his power and never experienced loss. You didn't intend to upset him.

"Told you, it's because I'm the strongest."

You roll your eyes, feeling irritation rise as you retort, "Cheater."

He grins, adjusting his glasses while examining your battered state. His pristine school uniform remains untouched with not even a blade of grass. You on the other hand are covered in sweat and dirt.

"Am I?"

"The worst."

He feigns hurt, hand over his heart. "You wound me."

You vow never to spar with him again.

Before you can address your earlier remark, he answers in a soft, uncharacteristic tone: "If you and Suguru were there, I think I could've won."

You had forgotten, you think to yourself. Forgotten that at the end of the day, he was only one man. And that at one point he had only been a boy, a boy who had the world thrust upon him.

And so, with this in mind, you give him one of your best smiles, “We’re always cheering you on, Satoru.”

Gojo seemed to want to say something to you then, but then he seemingly decided against it. Instead, he points out, “I’m just glad I didn’t die of old age or illness, but rather because of someone strong.”

You don’t miss the way he started avoiding eye contact with you, nor the red creeping up his neck.

It was then that Nanami cuts in, “No one thinks like that. Nowadays that’s creepy.”

“Huh!?”

Gojo turns around to roughly ruffle Nanami’s hair, a scene that was a bit too nostalgic for your liking, but all the same, you couldn’t help but want the moment to last longer. Hearing Gojo whine as Nanami scolded him, but Geto smiling in the background and Haibara’s cheerful voice was something you didn’t think you would witness again. 

Just you guys, back in the prime of your youth laughing underneath the summer sun.

Just a little longer, you silently plead, just a little longer.

But time is short.

You listen silently as Nanami and Gojo’s conversation warps up, and it is only then that you decide to finally speak up.

“So, have you decided?”

Gojo turns to look at you, “What do you mean?”

You smile, “Your decision. To go north or to go south.”

He stares at you for a long time before finally breaking out into a grin, “What? Did you get sick of my presence already? I only just got here!”

Rolling your eyes as you fight back your amusement, you remind him, “You don’t have much time, you know? You in a place where you can still–”

"Yes, yes, I know," he interrupts with a pout.

You sometimes can't believe his audacity, wondering how you had managed it through Jujustu Tech. Here he was, acting upset when you're trying to save his life.

Bringing a hand up to your head, you sigh, feeling a type of headache that you only get when he is around coming up.

“Can’t I stay a little longer?” He asks, this time his voice betrays the feeling he had been hiding behind that carefully crafted mask of his. It sounded of longing, sprouted from the fear of losing everything he had again.

It was Geto who answered him this time, "It's your choice, Satoru," his voice gentle. "But I think we all knew the decision you'd make the moment you woke up here. In fact, you've already made up your mind, haven't you?"

Gojo fell silent because he knew Geto was right. Geto always understood him well.

It was because Gojo still had unfinished business.

He still needed to live.

You stood up and walked over to Gojo, offering him a hand. You knew he would stubbornly sit there until the last minute, and you'd had enough all-nighters to know that leaving things to the last second never worked out well.

He took your hand, and you pulled him to his feet.

“It’s not your time yet,” you say in a steady voice.

“At least tell me you are sad to see me go,” he grins, his opaque glasses blocking the top of his face, but you knew from the way he looked at you that the frown didn’t reach his eyes.

"We'll see each other again; waiting has never been an issue for me."

He rolled his eyes and frowned. "Is it really so hard to say you're going to miss me?"

You sighed. "Gojo—"

"Satoru."

"Satoru," you began again, giving him your famously tired look. But all he did was grin back. "I'll be looking forward to meeting you again, okay?"

He smiles a victorious kind of smile, as if him getting you to say you will miss him was a greater achievement than winning against the king of curses.

It was a kind of smile that told you that he’d steal this moment away for himself.

Selfish prick.

It was then that an announcement came on from seemly nowhere: We are now making boarding announcement for Flight 0010 to the final destination ‘—.’ Passengers are kindly requested to proceed to gate 06 for immediate boarding.

“I guess that’s your flight.” 

Your voice trembles.

A mishap in the wall that you built to suppress your emotions because without it you don’t think you could stand to watch him leave.

If that wall were to come crumbling down you think you would have clinged onto him, begging him to stay a little longer.

Gojo continues to look at you before seemly to make a final decision, “Hey, There’s something I–”

If this was the last time he'll see you again, to get to talk to you again then-

You shake your head, laughing silently to yourself as you start to push Gojo towards his gate.

“Hey- hey wait!”

You come to a sudden stop as Gojo stubbornly rooted himself to the tiled floor.

“Hurry. You will be late-”

Gojo grabs ahold of your hand, his black glasses falling to the tip of his nose, revealing his starking eyes. He stared at you, stared at you as he tried to tell you all the things he’d always been too much of a coward to say.

He wanted to tell you before it was too late like last time, something he has yet to forgive himself for.

“There’s something I haven’t told you yet. I need to tell you before I go-”

Stupid. Stupid white-haired man.

Your lips tremble as you look at his desperate face, his mask falling apart as well. But instead of clinging onto him like you so desperately want to, you smile.

"Tell me next time then."

Gojo stops stumbling over his words.

"I–"

Last call for Flight 0010–

"Go," you urge him.

Yet he still stands there stubbornly, refusing to leave.

Stupid Satoru.

What a greedy man, you think to yourself. The corners of your mouth curve upward as you stand on tiptoes and press a quick, soft kiss on his forehead.

"Go," you say again. "Tell me next time all the things you’ve yet to say to me, okay? Go and win for us...for me."

He brings a hand to the spot where you kissed him, a certain look crossing his face before finally saying the words you want to hear, "Okay, I will."

"Swear it."

"I swear on it."

And you believe him.

Because who are you to say otherwise in front of his grinning face? Who are you to think otherwise when he smiled so brightly? His eyes were bright and confident, softly grazed by his white hair as if he'd bring you the world if you asked.

Then he seemed to cast everyone one last glance before turning his feet to start running the other way towards his gate.

He doesn’t think he could stand to leave if he were to stop.

"Don't miss us too much!" Haibara calls out after him.

"Try not to die again," Nanami mutters.

"We'll still be here," Geto states.

“Don’t come back too soon! Okay!?” You shout to which he lifts an arm and waves, his neck a dark shade of red.

He laughs, “Just continue to cheer me on!”

You stand there, watching as the gate closes with Gojo behind it, listening to the loud hum of the air conditioning in the airport.

You'll wait, just like you've been doing. You'll wait as long as it takes for him.

a/n : I promise I'll write pure fluff next time ( maybe )

[octuscle]

Hi Chronivac or Suitcase people! I'm looking for a change in my life like working with my body rather than with my brain, living in the north rather than in the south, being poor but happy rather than wealthy and unhappy, being a player rather than the relationship-guy and so on. I hope for your help

Dude, seriously, if you're going to do it, do it! Why only half the cake? Why not work with your awesome body, live on the beach in the south, be rich and happy and take everything that comes along? Somehow that sounds much better… At least for me… I have another suitcase for you, labeled MVD. Filled with everything you need for a basic jet-set influencer beach vacation. Beachwear from Vilebrequin, sportswear from Balenciaga, a little something for the evening from Prada and co. And a hotel voucher for The Grand Hotel in Punta del Este. Just for the weekend. After that, it's off to Buenos Aires for you and then you'll have to see…

Shit, the brand new iPhone alone, which you're holding in your freshly manicured hands, costs more than you've paid in rent for your miserable apartment in six months. You don't even want to know what the entire contents of this suitcase cost. But how do you get to this Punta del Este now? And where is it anyway? You look at your new cell phone. Your tickets are in the wallet. First to Madrid, and then on to Montevideo. Premium Economy. Sounds great, you've never had that before. Should you put something on straight from your suitcase? Better not. You should take it easy on your clothes. But maybe one of those T-shirts from Balenciaga. A quick look in the mirror… Okay, better not, maybe a little tight around the hips. You're not changing.

When you check in your suitcase, the ground staff lady flirts with you. She asks why you've joined the queue with all the tourists. As an Emerald customer with oneworld, you should have been allowed to use the first class check-in. She asks if she can upgrade you to Business Class as compensation. You don't say no.

You can get used to the lounge. It's better than waiting outside in the aisles. The toilets are also better. And when you look in the mirror, you think that they must be playing tricks with the light. You look younger and more relaxed. And were you wearing that immaculate white shirt just now? Somehow the champagne seems to be going to your head. You almost missed the boarding call.

The lounge was cool, but flying in Business Class is really awesome! There aren't many passengers up here. But somehow you get the impression that everyone is just looking after you. Like a real VIP. You take a selfie of yourself and the purser. Later for Instagram. The Iberia logo well placed. You have to show your appreciation somehow. In Madrid, you send the two pictures out. The second one with the pilot. He says it was an honor to fly you. They're getting a bit carried away… They're making fun of you!

When you go through passport control at the terminal change, you first think you've put the wrong passport in your pocket. Cool picture! But it doesn't look like you. You check it out as best you can in the reflection of a window pane. Yes, the angular features, the piercing blue eyes… It all fits.

It's getting better and better. Instead of your connecting flight being called for boarding, a member of ground staff comes by in the lounge, takes your bag and accompanies you to the gate. You're already in the mood for a glass of champagne. But alcohol is only compatible with your six-pack to a limited extent. Besides, it's already late and you should get some sleep. You have more than enough room. So apply your night cream, put on your sleep pods and put on your sleeping goggles. And when you wake up rested after almost nine hours, you hear the first signs that the breakfast service is about to start. You hear the flight attendants gossiping. One of them says that you looked like Cupid while you were sleeping and that you could shoot him with your arrows. They obviously have no idea that you speak Spanish. You let them believe that you don't understand them.

Actually, you would have liked to have taken a closer look at Montevideo. But you don't have time for that. The season in Punta del Este is as good as over, so if you want to boost your mid-season business, you need a few pictures of the sunset. And you get paid quite well for boosting the mid-season business a little.

It's actually a bit too cold at the end of March for topless shots. But your nipples look even better this way. "End of a hot day, beginning of a hot night at the most beautiful end of the world" you write under the picture. 3K likes in half an hour. You are worth your money!