311–320 of 618 posts
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You mean the more we don’t pay back? Carrying debt generally increases credit rating.
Only up to a point, try borrowing say 50 million dollars while making 50k. Before lending money people look at your existing debt load to determine if your likely to pay it back. The same thing happens to countries, though more smoothly as they first require higher interest rates.
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China is likely to gain trillions from their belt and road initiative expanding into Afghanistan and from getting involved with the mining of the $3T in mineral resources identified previously in Afghanistan. China has already recognized the new Taliban government and the Taliban previously welcomed a new relationship with China that would protect Chinese interests, as they put it. China literally met with the incomi…
Riiiight. With all those ports, infrastructure, and nice easy mountain terrain to navigate. And let’s say China does somehow befriend the Taliban and build all this infrastructure, and import hundreds of thousands of workers that somehow the Taliban doesn’t decide are yet another empire to kick out. What do you think they do with these resources? They make iPhones. That westerners buy. And again, even if they do some…
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If the Taliban are smart they won’t do reprisals but instead will offer amnesty in exchange for service. The dumbest thing we did in Iraq was to do the functional equivalent of the Taliban doing reprisals by disbanding the military, government, and Ba’ath party. It created a mass unemployment problem and swelled the ranks of the opposition with listless now unemployed people.
Disbanding Baath was far from a dumb thing, the dumb thing was disbanding them, and then just letting them go
Instead the US had to attempt to rebuild all of those structures of command largely from the ground up anew, which takes years of time and tremendous resources. During those build years, you get constant intense chaos and instability fighting you while you attempt to make progress. It was exceptionally stupid.
Deaths 9/11 2,996 Deaths Covid-19 USA 621,000 207x Lack of understanding of large numbers is a flaw in the human mind we have to figure out how to fix.
years of expected life lost is the more important metric imo. would still be a big discrepency.
If you start doing this, you start valuing peoples lives differently, which is a horrible thing. Going just from this, you could say that an Afghan citizen is worth about 82% of an US citizen (64 vs 78 years life expectancy) or that burning down a whole palliative care unit is less bad than shooting a 20 year old (or 16 year old Afghan).
I can see where you are coming from, but this is really not a good road to go down.
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I swear dude. I cannot understand just why it is that the average person seems to be so incapable at understanding statistics and large numbers. It's mind boggling. Ever since my freshman engineering stats class, it's like everywhere I look at where there's stupid bullshit happening, a large reason as to why the stupid bullshit is happening is because people have zero understanding of statistics and large numbers. It…
I can say so for politics. Average Americans don't understand American politics. To me, the transition from Bush to Obama was paradoxal. One thing, Obama marketed himself as a change man, as well pretty much everybody. It's very generic. On the other side, his true colours weren't even hidden, his electoral programme told very candidly about his national security views, views on civil rights, and etc for which he got…
In the current system, many people simply vote for the least bad option, because voting for a party that actually represented their beliefs would make their vote irrelevant (or worse, give an advantage to the party they really dislike).
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No, you don't. You might in a state of nature, but the US has laws against prepayment penalties for mortgages. (Well, against the mortgage originator charging prepayment penalties.) You don't owe interest until it accrues.
Right, you 'owe the full amount of accrued interest'... Which is not as much as the amount that would've accrued if held to term. I think this is rather beside the point anyway!
Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).
Climate change will destabilize the world more than any "terrorists" could. Also would've been nice to have seen 6.4 trillion go into renewables tech and investments ~ 20 years ago.
We could have done so much more with that money. It is heartbreaking.
To those here riffing on the theme of “this misrepresents the volume and beneficiaries of the transactions involved” - you’re not wrong. Accurate representation of public info like this is a top organisational problem for our species at the moment. But I do think you miss the point, so aptly put by Mr Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a thef…
$6.4T over 20 years sounds like a lot of money, but the US spent $3.8T on healthcare in 2019 alone . So all of this money could have sustained the US healthcare system for barely 18 months. https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Sta...
Offhand, the entire broadband portion of the budget for the next 5-20 years was 65B.
Maybe healthcare lacks effective resource management. I sure as heck know I always hear quoted prices in other first world countries that are far less, often 1/10th of what we pay in the US.
Perhaps they should've spent this much on medical research instead. For the same money perhaps we could save a few million people dying of various diseases or cancer. It would take a whole lot of terrorist events to counter the benefits of significant R&D funding for medicine (or maybe a lot of other things).
U.S. spends $4T a year on health care (of which $171.8B is spent on research), vs. $320B a year here.
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56324
Medicare + Medicaid = 1T.