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The Demoralization is just Beginning
361–370 of 812 posts
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is already the brain drain destination #1. Nowhere else can highly skilled people generate comparable levels of income.
I agree. One other thing that the US has that no other country has is freedom of speech. My entire family was killed in my previous country for daring to speak up against the leader at the time. It has something that has shook me to my core. Now, even to this day, I cannot find another country besides the US who not only respects freedom of speech, but encourages it among its residents. I will not move to another cou…
> I agree. One other thing that the US has that no other country has is freedom of speech.
Unless you speak ill of america's greatest ally.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what PPP is meant to measure.
Or even better, The Economist's "Big Mac Index": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/big-mac-i...
The big mac index is quite literally PPP dumbed down to a single product that the general public can understand.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
The book you cite and more generally the arguments traced in the Deep Roots literature are not very strong and often deployed to support anti-immigrant, anti-assimiliationist views. I'm not persuaded we could recreate America even if we took any 1000 people, even people who can trace their apple pie eating back to the Mayflower, because you know, America is a country and more generally complex arrangement of stuff th…
> often deployed to support anti-immigrant, anti-assimiliationist views. So what? Immigration is optional. The people supporting large-scale migration from countries without functional democracies should have the burden of proving that cultural attitudes salient to democracy are not durable. Even in the U.S., I'm not persuaded that the Anglo-American republic as originally conceived survived the mass immigration of c…
> So what?
The point is you have a view and the after that fact have found an argument (not a particularly compelling one).
Unfortunately (for you) the burden of proof at the very minimum (or maybe more properly on everyone in this domain) is on you as immigration from non-democracies is as older than the United States itself, you are the one advocating for a departure from this historical fact.
The countries you list are actually not as similar as you might like to believe, in so far as they are similar not for the reasons you believe, but it might be your own inability to see the differences here, nor do they prove your proposition that somehow there is some determinism by deep roots (or lack thereof) of people.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#365> Back the dollar by gold [...] The second will prevent a lot of the scams. Oh boy... Bitcoin in many ways is idealized gold (unlike the real one, its supply is actually limited), yet there is no shortage of scams around it. On the contrary, a gold standard would remove one of the most essential tools modern governments have: That of monetary policy. That sounds like a good idea if and only if there's an extreme shor…
Well, bitcoin does have an upper limit, but rug pull coins don't. The exact number is ₿20,999,999.9769
I always considered that there is real possibility for that limit to be removed by hard fork. Governments can come together and tell that from block x forward reward is back to 50BTC or whatever. And only on this chain can you pay taxes.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#366The real scam was all these Silicon Valley "geniuses", who are lately outing themselves as total morons. Never have heroes.
Yes. It is all a giant scam and a grift wrapped into one repeating 1999 once again.
When this VC pyramid scheme collapses, we'll look back at this as a time where the economy and startups were once devoid from reality.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economy is still booming and busting, we just paper over it with debt like good Keynesians. The macro world is extremely nuanced. I’m someone who likes experiments. If we could give every American instant access to convert savings to gold (or bitcoin), directly in their savings accounts, it would certainly be an interesting experiment. If you have significant assets, inflation isn’t a big deal. If you are like mo…
The boom and bust cycle has required things like 2008, COVID, major wars, Brexit to create these booms and busts.
Other centuries must have been remarkably peaceful, since by your assertion they did not have bubbles, pandemics, wars, or geopolitical schisms...?
It's enough to say that fiat currency, fiscal and monetary policy have papered over the worst of the excesses and explosions, you don't need to pretend like we live in unique times. Every time is unique, but history rhymes.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#368There's an implicit assumption in the article and the comments here that "brain drain the world" is a free lunch. But does anyone think through to the end-game of that? That when you drain the most smart/productive people away from every other country, all those countries become less wealthy and more dysfunctional, leading to societal decline, poverty, resentment, radicalisation, war, etc? Aside from anything else, t…
That when you drain every smart/productive person away from every other country
This is a ridiculous premise.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US is already the brain drain destination #1. Nowhere else can highly skilled people generate comparable levels of income.
I agree. One other thing that the US has that no other country has is freedom of speech. My entire family was killed in my previous country for daring to speak up against the leader at the time. It has something that has shook me to my core. Now, even to this day, I cannot find another country besides the US who not only respects freedom of speech, but encourages it among its residents. I will not move to another cou…
This comment is not going to age well.
Aren't colleges and universities liable for any "illegal" protest on their grounds, since yesterday? Whether a protest is illegal or not will be decided by the local politburo office.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate? It’s thought provoking as a mechanism to reduce all of this zero sum (or even worse, parasitic) effort that dominates our system.
US is prosperous because it produces the world currency. Need to buy steel? Just print more dollars and buy it from any other country. Need to buy food? Ditto. Need to buy brains? Ditto. No working is required, when you can print any amount of currency and can buy anything from any part of the world with it. Yes, printing speed up inflation a bit, but unlike in any other country of the world, when US is printing doll…
> This is why linking dollar to the gold would kill US prosperity. Also, one reason is why US is so heavily militarized and is fighting wars all over the world: you need to constantly threaten all the world so that they can't even think of choosing any other mean for world trade other than dollar.
Bingo ! Many people conveniently overlook this reality. Most countries don't simply choose to trade and hold USD because it's the most stable currency pegged to a stable, rationally driven economy. No, it's because if they choose not to, they suddenly become a "nuclear threat to world peace" and we magically find non existent WMDs. It's a bullying tactic.