| Yeah, looks like the go to strategy, but I may have to pass on the gold mine and go for the higher payoff of a decent living but a more spiritually fulfilling trade diplomacy In international trade there's complementary/productive trade, you have gold, we have silver, let's trade. And you also have redundant/substitutive trade, you have soy, we have cheaper soy, buy our soy. I don't believe from the bottom of my heart in substitutive trade for similar reasons I don't believe in (most) inmigration. We've conquered the americas, now we have to populate it, god won't reward desertors who revert their ancestor's decision by running back to the old continent, and the excuse of "I was born in the wrong hemisphere" is also quite petty, we rolled the dice and this is what we got. Substitutive trade isn't far from immigration, the poor want to go to the rich countries, and the rich buy the cheap labour. Where is the pride in that? In both sides. Leave your country for another with a different religion, leave your mother your brethren, and serve. Leave a war instead of fighting? Take a 1 hour bus to a fancy neighbourhood to serve coffee and wash dishes. Conversely, you can wash your own dishes, you can use a bottle of water and fill that up before you leave, we don't need a migrant washing our dishes, and we don't need to migrate to wash dishes. So I'm trying to focus on trade that is not replaceable with local labour, hopefully countries start nailing down remote work and we start locking those behind visas. And unfortunately india and philipinnes get that productive trade, they can cover night shifts. We'll find stuff to export. There's not much, as Trump said "they need us more than we need them". Local entertainment, sports and games will always be there, it's like cybertourism. there might be an argument for redundant trade as a counterweight to an unbalanced productive export. But I don't think that works long term. There's also localization services, in language and legal, but those are just costs of exporting really. Lithium is probably the lesser evil, super extractive, but we gotta pay somehow. Sorry about the super rant. Lately I've been more using forums as a way to write things that I already had drafted in my mind. |