Close-to-home fallout from the Gulf war: I *was* planning on taking @feorag back to Japan in September for her birthday (a significant number one), but thanks to Netanyahu and Trump that's probably not happening now. Grump. (Jet fuel has nearly doubled in price in the past two weeks and it's not coming down any time soon.)
Even if the AI bubble *doesn't* burst we're in for a series of supply chain shocks as bad as 2022. And it'll probably get much worse than that.
@cstross @feorag there's also a massive impact on safe flying zones that don't involve transmitting the US.
You can't fly over Russia, Ukraine, Iran, most of the rest of the Middle East, and even Pakistan is looking iffy.
Most of the direct routes from Europe to Japan go through that corridor. It's long enough as it is without going the other way round.
#Pakistan is in a different war, with #Afghanistan, declared the day before the #IranWar and largely overlooked. They're currently in a 5-day ceasefire for #Eid.
https://mastodon.scot/@JdeBP/116154050773877473
Very few European and U.S.A. news services are devoting major coverage to this, the second of three on-going wars involving the world's nuclear powers.
As for #Japan: It has more problems than just jet fuel prices. Its strategic reserves are at best 254 days. Japan Times reported that it released the first month's worth of that this week.
So my thinking is to watch for Japan seriously considering switching from the #PetroDollar to the #PetroYuan to get its oil supply back; because its other choice is military. Neither sits well.
@JdeBP Great Power competition is a cooperation contest.
The US has many structural advantages, material and historical and institutional. What we're all seeing in US politics is a takeover by people who recognize that the US could maintain and extend and use those advantages at the cost of becoming less and less white supremacist, less and less patriarchal, and more and more decarbonized. They are setting out to burn the world to prevent any such thing happening.
@cstross It's all a cooperation contest, and right now the only thing preventing "kill these idiots" from being the global common cause is a lingering belief that such things shouldn't happen to Americans.
The visible to a casual observer rate at which the middle-of-the-road middle-aged middle class white women in the US are shedding their (comprehensive, extensive, and brutally applied) "illegitimacy of violence" conditioning is something to behold.
I suspect you're right.
Charlie Stross
James Kemp
JdeBP
Graydon