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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
That's not relevant to my argument. You could have pointed out to many other bad things done by the US, or the West. The fact remains that migration flows tell us where people actually want to live.
The US had an official dual currency from 1914 to 1933. There were gold dollars, and fiat (inflated) dollars. There was an official, fixed exchange rate between the two. The two started out at parity in 1914, but things diverged steadily until in 1929 a gold dollar was worth 85% more than a fiat dollar. Like all such systems where the relative values float but there's an official exchange rate, this eventually collap…
> We have a dual currency today - when you pay a "convenience fee" for using a credit card instead of check or cash, that's what is going on (as the credit card taker gets charged 3% for those transactions, and passes it on to the credit card user). Barring a few gas stations that give a cash discount, that's very much not the way it works. It's the cash users getting screwed; they pay the same price as credit card u…
The times they won't give a discount, I pay with the credit card and get the "cash back".
The proprietor, though, will nearly always give a discount for cash, because it's money ahead for him.
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The actual elephant in the room is 60 years of brutal communist dictatorship.
Good old times of right wing dictatorship, when cuban dictator was USA friendly. No embargo. Nobody cared.
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Starlink’s first version will require ground relay stations within the overlapping spot beams (the inter-spacecraft relay lasers aren’t until later) and also likely intends to comply with local laws in all places it is offered for sale. I had high hopes here too, initially.
I think they have outright said that they will only operate through local resellers and local ground stations, so all laws will need to be complied with. Even then I think US-hostile nations would ban starlink on suspicious of eavesdropping, or simply because they don't want everyone connected to the internet.
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The Spanish were, as far as we can tell, dramatically more brutal.
Than the Aztecs who used human skulls as construction material?
Also, it's interesting to see the parallels with the Petro. I'm thankful that it mostly failed, minus some money laundering by the government and pensions (this is Maquiavelian, they pay part of the pension and bonuses in a controlled electronic currency to elderly people who mostly don't have access to the internet and maybe even electricity, but good for propaganda). From the last quarter of 2018 we went from talking about dollars being illegal to a heavy push towards defacto dollarization where a lot of party and army people opened bodegones (mostly imported good stores, they pay 0% taxes by presidential decree) where they mainly accept USD (sometimes EUR) and sometimes Bolívares (the official currency). The government tried to push the Petro to them, but failed to convince even it's own people who want hard currency and not useless monopoly money. And now even some state run stuff is marking prices in USD (some elite government places stopped accepting Bolívares)
I actually went to Cuba on holiday, and I used the tourist dollars. It's incredible how this separates society into haves and have-nots. Basically everyone wants to be near the tourists. They'll invite you into their homes for food, they'll offer to take you around town, sell you some cigars, and so on. Since you have tourist bucks, you also have access to the tourist nightclubs, where you run into some regional cele…
> most of the island is mired in poverty the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.
A more extreme but reasonable comparable would be North Korea.
List of dictatorships [1]
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> most of the island is mired in poverty the elephant in the room is the 60 year old embargo and its third-rail effect on American politics.
The 'Elephant in the Room' is 100% Fidel Castro Inc. and his militarized island empire, and totalitarian suppression of everything and everyone. A more extreme but reasonable comparable would be North Korea. List of dictatorships [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regimes