201–210 of 282 posts
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To nitpick, much of that is probably due to halting refining for export and drawing down reserves. But of course the point stands that they are rapidly electrifying and expanding renewable generation.
Also tons and tons of coal. Hopefully just a stopgap.
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What you point out here is a major weakness in the typical US citizen's understanding of where US wealth and power comes from. The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills. T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by chan…
That said, it's not necessarily a great deal for the US middle class anymore, due to the Triffin Dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma This 2020 piece by Lyn Alden is a great explainer: https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/ (Not that I think anything Trump has done has helped the situation even accidentally.)
Sure, there was a serious conversation to be had about this at some point, but it was probably before stacking up tons of unsustainable debt that directly depends on that part of the shell game. And there are many things that can/should change, but in a certain way and at a certain time to avoid pain and chaos. Arguing "this was always bad for us, fuck it" is kind of a pattern now, right? When someone wants to change some things, great, everything sucks. But when someone wants to tear down every status quo, and especially the ones that they apparently benefited from while saying "everyone after me doesn't need it", then it's a pretty clear sign.
US is now a lot of crazy old people finding new ways to eat their children and trying to see the world burn before they check out. They created the bulk of the debt, benefited from it immensely, propped it up with collateral that was always kind of imaginary, continue to increase the debt. Not great, but now we are also proposing to just destroy what's left of that thin collateral? I don't know how to explain that with greed or stupidity even, it just seems like spite.
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I guess I'm not seeing anything tying the trade deficit to the destruction of unions, to the massive reduction in top tax rates resulting in higher CEO compensation, etc. The piece puts increasing trade deficits next to lots of stuff about increasing inequality, but it does not make the case that trade deficits are the cause of increasing inequality. There's a person that had a job making physical things, but they ar…
> Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world How does this not correspond directly to reduced trade deficits? In this scenario the US is either sourcing more of what it needs internally, and thereby importing less, or it is more competitive globally and therefore exporting more, or both.
But manufacturing is not a way to decrease inequality unless there's massive massive other sorts of changes going with it.
In fact destroying the higher paying jobs to replace them with lower paying jobs in the US will heighten the inequality. And that's what's happening right now.
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China is "trustworthy" in the sense that they have obvious, rational, consistent motivations and very stable government.
China's government is "very stable" until it's not. As a society, China has a long history but the central government has essentially collapsed or experienced violent revolution in 1976, 1969, 1949, 1927, 1911, 1850, 1796, 1644, etc. Perhaps we have reached "the end of history" and the Chinese Communist Party will now maintain stable control forever. Or maybe it will all fall apart again in a few decades due to resou…
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One important detail here. When you buy gold, you purchase based on the amount of gold, not the total amount of alloy. This is true in both markets. This difference in standard is practically not a big deal because you very rarely physically move the gold, as moving gold requires a lot of security and is a risk.
> requires a lot of security and is a risk and has a cost
Just a reminder: The Netherlands' 612 tonnes represent 0.28% of all gold ever mined and 1.7% of central bank reserves. Because gold is insanely dense (19.32 g/cm³), all the gold mined in human history fits into about ~340 shipping containers A standard 24,000-TEU cargo ship could hold every ounce of humanity's gold using under 1.5% of its physical volume. So the Dutch portion is a rounding error of global gold that f…
That shipping container could not be easily lifted, right? The bottom would simply rip off under so much weight.
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is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration. Ugh, your concept of EU is closer to the USSR or maybe current Russia than to the actual EU. I sincerely hope that such nightmarish concept will never prevail over the relative sanity that we have now.
As a British person who was born in the EU and spent 35 years of their life as an EU citizen, the treatment of us since Brexit has felt like it. Naturally the standard comeback can be “yes but you all voted for Brexit this is your fault what did you expect” but I’m just reflecting what it has felt like and the difficulties thrown up towards people who even believed in the project of Europe who suddenly found that the…
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Gulf of America, Lake America, ...
What’s the problem? We took nationalist names (Mexico, Ontario) and used the hemisphere appropriate term. If anything we’re more culturally progressive for doing it. See? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575360 Were not Americans, we are United Statesians!
Don't be a ghoul.
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England is definitely a European country. I'm tired of people constantly making this political abuse of language of conflating "the EU" with "Europe". (And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
The pedantry of being angry at the US for being the only country that actually has the word "America" in its name and yet calling itself American is almost comical in its ineptitude. Nobody shakes their metaphorical fist at the Central African Republic for daring to use Central African as its demonym. It's simply understood that the surrounding countries are also African, yet simply do not have the name of the contin…
That is not the reason.
People say that Columbus discovered America. They don't mean the country, they mean the continent. The people in the continent of America are called Americans. About a century ago, US Americans came to view America as two continents.
Many countries still hold to America being a single continent, but there's no name for the people of America because US Americans stole it. The is very equivalent to how the EU is stealing Europe/European.