631–640 of 657 posts
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NATO does nothing to resolve an active occupation between member states (Cyprus). NATO only does things when it benefits the US.
> NATO does nothing to resolve an active occupation between member states (Cyprus). What are you talking about? Turkey's 'occupation' is not of a member state.
Why 'occupation' and not occupation ?
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If you give me a choice between Ukraine being a second Belarus and risking WWIII or a nuclear exchange, my answer will be easy to choose.
Be careful guys, this is Russia's "Final Warning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China's_final_warning
I feel sorry for any startups looking to innovate in this space. It's hard enough competing against established players without them getting billions in free money. Intel has had the resources to build out fabs in the US for decades. Instead, they've chosen to build elsewhere, and now they're rewarded for it? They recently announced their $20b facility in Ohio is being "put on hold": https://www.tweaktown.com/news/96…
Imagine announcing you're going to build a plant in Israel in the middle of Israel committing a genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Evil company https://bdsmovement.net/Press-Release-BDS-Launches-Boycott-I...
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Be careful guys, this is Russia's "Final Warning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China's_final_warning
The fact that the probability of WWIII or a nuclear exchange is increasing is undisputable, warnings and empty threats beside.
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> US led NATO expansion lead to the war in Ukraine, and Europeans are paying the price. This is the Russian propaganda of 2 years ago, and we know it is a lie because Putin went on camera and told us so himself. When asked by Tucker Carlson why he invaded Ukraine he gave a half hour history lecture telling us about its history of Russian occupation. Putin justifies his murderous invasion by pointing to former borders…
You cannot dismiss something as "propaganda" or with a reason "Putin said so". In the same interview Putin said that if the US had not broken the promise to Gorbachev to not expand the NATO eastward, the war would not have happened. I am not an American with no serious understanding, I live in an area that used to be Soviet Union. Everybody knows you should not corner a wild beast.
Gorbachev called that a myth in 2014 when Putin used it as an excuse to invade Crimea. USSR's minister of foreign affairs Shevardnadze and minister of defence Yazov have said the same thing. Source, excerpt from an interview to ZDF: https://twitter.com/Jesuitchild/status/1749887239226617873
This talking point is a shining example of propaganda. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze have gone as far as explaining why even in theory, such promise couldn't have been made. It's a complete fabrication.
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Acknowledging the complexity inherent in how the U.S. gov't finances initiatives. However, eventually , the buck stops at the taxpayer. Yes, the federal gov't issues bonds to finance their activities (i.e. deficit spending), but the creditworthiness of the U.S. is intrinsically supported by the federal government's capacity to collect taxes from its citizens. Eventually, "we the people" foots the bill. It might be am…
I'm honestly not sure if that is the case anymore. With a purely fiat system we really can't afford to pay off the debt, doing so would remove money from the money supply and could lead to an economic contraction. I'm no sure what would happen economically if we paid off federal debt in any meaningful amount. I'd be really curious if you have any insights into what that would look like.
When it comes down to it, it'll be a political choice between cutting Social Security benefits (absolutely no way this happens) and a highly progressive tax on the country's wealthy.
I don't think the first one is going to happen, and our two party system is so totally dominated by the country's wealthy population that we'll never even see a vote on the second during peacetime.
One route is to "grow" our way out of debt, and those hopes are pinned on some blend of nuclear fusion and "AI, AI, smth smth, AI".
Failing that strategy, I think that spiraling U.S. debt is one of the features that greases the slide towards WW III. :/
Last time around, we needed WW II to rebalance power between asset owners and renters in this country – it literally required a global, existential struggle to get wealthy people to pay taxes. I'm afraid we're on the same track today.
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> NATO does nothing to resolve an active occupation between member states (Cyprus). What are you talking about? Turkey's 'occupation' is not of a member state.
You are right, my bad. I mixed it up because of the UK bases present in Cyprus and the Turkish aggression towards Greece. Why 'occupation' and not occupation ?
I also think that Western international institutions are systemically biased in favor of Greece and other more western nations, which is pretty obvious by the disparate response to Greek invasion of Cyprus vs Turkish.
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Laws are just words on paper. They are irrelevant without people to follow and enforce them. It is very common for Constitutional laws to be suspended in the event of war. Even without suspension, all it takes is a leader with enough support to ignore the law.
Nearly all Prime Ministers and their cabinets in recent history have suffered overall unpopularity and especially so in anything that might even remotely imply the potential for using the JSDF beyond its nameplate purpose. Which is to say, no: No Japanese leader has had the kind of support necessary to ignore the law.
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I'm honestly not sure if that is the case anymore. With a purely fiat system we really can't afford to pay off the debt, doing so would remove money from the money supply and could lead to an economic contraction. I'm no sure what would happen economically if we paid off federal debt in any meaningful amount. I'd be really curious if you have any insights into what that would look like.
I do think we can pay off the debt. It would require an increase in taxation that would cause an S&P 500 contraction. When it comes down to it, it'll be a political choice between cutting Social Security benefits (absolutely no way this happens) and a highly progressive tax on the country's wealthy. I don't think the first one is going to happen, and our two party system is so totally dominated by the country's wealt…
I was very worried about the huge deficits from the Reagan era. But when Clinton was elected, and he raised taxes, I thought we were done for.
Surely, raising taxes would cause the economy to contract more, which would lead to even less government revenue, a higher deficit, ever more impossible to service, etc etc....
Well. Imagine my surprise a few years later when the deficits turned into surpluses.
What I had forgotten to take into account is that raising taxes causes the interest rates to go down--if the government isn't borrowing billions and trillions of dollars, i.e., if the demand for debt goes down, the price of debt (i.e. the interest rate) also goes down.
So an upper middle-class guy may have gotten his taxes raised by a few thousand dollars--but he just refinanced his mortgage from 10% to 5% and saved a thousand dollars a month. (Yes, interest rates for mortgages were that high, and higher. My Dad bought a house at $14% interest rate in the 80's).
I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal by a guy who was scared to death of the surpluses--in a few decades, he said, we'll no longer have any 30-year government bonds. How will Fannie May and Freddie Mac be able to subsidize 30-year mortgages? How are we going to use Black-Scholes to calculate the correct value of derivatives if we don't have a measure of the zero-risk interest rate??
Alas, the supreme court threw away Gore, and installed Bush as president, where he solved those "problems" in very short order.
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Why do you assume it must be driven by subsidies? Changes in demand can move the needle too, if our consumers prioritize domestic production it wouldn't matter if technically someone could import it for cheaper. If you are going government intervention, they could reach for tariffs and import taxes rather than subsidies. Forcing prices high enough for domestic production is painful at first but would eventually work…
I meant "subsidy" in a more general sense. All goods will be more expensive. More people will be in poverty Imagine how much more expensive everything would be, and now imagine the cumulative amount of money that represents. Money that could be used to fund education or improve people's lives, or even build armaments if you really are worried about the commies. You're in effect paying an huge "tax"/premium indefinite…
Its overly simplistic to assume that a subsidy will increase prices and harm the economy. We have been subsidizing corn for decades and it has kept prices artificially low. Prices for corn and downstream products like beef are artificially low specifically because of federal subsidies.
If a subsidy creates domestic jobs it could have a net benefit. The ultimate question is what metrics are impacted and at what rate. If domestic jobs are created fast enough to increase demand for employees, wages could rise faster than prices.
I have no idea what the end result would be, but that's ultimately my point. Economic models are just that, models. Models are based on analysis of past events and assumptions if the future. We don't know what we don't know, and we often don't recognize how inaccurate models are when we simplify them down to a handful of measurements.
To your original point, hospitals do seem reasonable to focus on with regards to stability through simplified supply chains. Chips may help there, our hospitals are dependent on a huge amount of tech today. Paper, silicon, and metal products would also likely be high on the list as they are often treated as consumables - the consumable nature of those products may make them more important than chips.