Idk it tickles my brain in a good way. Especially this one, given Musk's history with Dogecoin.

Don't get me wrong I'm not a muskbro I just like funny acronyms and alliterations.

There are 15 million vacant homes in the US. Some of that will be simply due to homes briefly being between tenants or owner-occupants but even if that would account for the vast majority of vacant homes it still leaves enough to house everyone and then some.

There's an argument to be made there. In terms of the lived reality in the Baltics that's entirely likely. In terms of the second point though, the portrayal of westernized, there just isn't as much media or political attention on the Baltic countries in the US. In Europe there is some, given Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are EU members, but that's more on a dry international relations level.

This may just be my subjective take on it all though.

From my reading Hudson's Superimperialism is an more an extension of Lenin's Imperialism, based on how material conditions had evolved over the interim fifty years and the lessons learned from (at initial publication) the first generation or so of US dollar hegemony. To simplify it maybe too much, it adds a monetary dimension to the already established framework of finance capital being the driving force behind imperialism.

Superimperialism is indeed the same English term often used for Kautsky's Überimperialismus hypothesis. Yet apart from the initial parallel of a global cartel, ie. dollar hegemony, I don't see much of Kautsky's ideas represented in Hudson's work, but I'm also not terribly familiar with überimperialism.

There are two requirements the US ruling class has for internet connected tech: surveillance opportunities and content distribution and censorship capabilities.

That's why we saw the fuss about Huawei five years ago, and that's why there's been a fuss about TikTok over the last five years as well. Huawei isn't a US military or intelligence adjacent or contracted company, so the NSA and Co can't roll in and mandate backdoors into Huawei's networking products. The TikTok available in the imperial core, while already being somewhat controlled by the US military-intelligence apparatus already, still doesn't allow for enough surveillance and equally importantly doesn't allow for enough content control. The US ruling class knows it's losing the narrative war, and is trying everything it can to reign that in.

What politicians actually believe doesn't really matter. Some have bathed in the kool-aid, others know it's just theater. What really matters is what the capitalists believe, and they are pretty clear on what they have to do to maintain power.

Feels like a really low estimate.

That a VPN automatically makes your online activities more private.

The information may well be true, but it is missing vital context presented in the articles linked. I went into this in my other reply on this thread.

Their currency is accepted, or can at least be freely exchanged for euros, but that's not what this is about. Almost all of those natural resources are extracted by western corporations. They leave just enough of that extracted wealth behind in wages and taxes to make World Bank and IMF loans possible for the country in question so that the country can pay for food and other essentials from abroad, generally from the US. The conditions of those loans require more resource extraction by western corporations, and more privatization of every other sector. Developing local agriculture to ensure food security is forbidden, because cash crops for exports are more profitable, and a country that isn't food secure is easier to oppress, especially when the valuable resources have all been extracted and taken to the imperial core.

Same as every year now.

Norway is already run by compradors so it's not necessary.

China for example is doing a huge amount to decrease their impact, but you won't hear about anything positive in China since they must be portrayed as the enemy. That aside, the only way out of even worse global warming and the only way we can mitigate it is to move on from capitalism, and that's a non starter in the western mainstream.

Mainstream news is meant to run interference for billionaires (who of course benefit by destroying the survivability of the planet). Why would it present these issues in a clear, accurate, and understandable way?