I'm thinking probably no one should listen to this guy about anything
The Demoralization is just Beginning
511–520 of 812 posts
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#512Steve Jobs told Obama something similar once. The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities. Basically give those workers a visa along with their diploma. Obama thought the idea was intriguing and mentioned it multiple times to his advisors. It never went anywhere though. Brain draining the rest of the world is one of the main reasons for America’s succes…
> The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities Some EU countries offer scholarships to attract good foreign undergrads and grad students to their universities. The whole point is that they stay afterwards, and they try really hard to keep them. It's been proven to be quite economically profitable, see e.g. [1]. I've never understood what's the point of a…
Colleges want international students because they pay full price and don’t get financial aid.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
German police raid homes of activists for making anti-Israel social media posts https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/german-police-raid-prop... (Trump also just tweeted that activists will be imprisoned)
Your link doesn’t state that.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are trying to pin a currency to a standard, gold isn't great. Its value is almost entirely speculative and it lacks meaninful intrinsic value at this point. If you demand to leave fiat currency, an aluminum or steel standard might make more sense. Rare earth metals, or even just petroleum would be my proposal. Maybe someday we will have a duterium pinned currency.
I think this shows the problem of non fiscal pegs - the value of rare earths or duterium is going to be impacted by technical change. For example let's say that a new processing technique means that a rare earth can be extracted at 20% of the current cost, or a new deposit is discovered. The whole economy is now flexed around this change... which has nothing to do with the economy. I don't think that there is a fixed…
Helium? Finite supply that is only going down until we get off planet.
It seems like the actual value of gold is that it is useless, and thus not used up, and all the easy gold is extracted. We could just use numbers instead.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#515[dead]
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are multiple cases in Germany (where I live). I cannot find them all, but "Pimmelgate" is a famous one where one guy on twitter (that's what it was called at the time) told a local politician " Du bist ein Pimmel " (in English: "You're a dick") and the next day the police showed up at his apartment and searched it. The issue is the harassment. Most of these cases are baseless and get dropped once presented to t…
My question was specifically about being jailed for expressing their opinion? Is this something that happens all the time in Germany (from what you wrote I would say no. It's a hassle but at most you get a fine that you can appeal, right?). Americans seem to think that people post a meme and end up in an american style max-security federal prison or something, while actually the offender gets a minor slap on the wris…
It doesn't happen, unless your opinion is something very specific like holocaust denial and you double down on it multiple times. People do not get jailed for posting memes.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't even start out interesting. The main product of the US is weapons not "the dollar". Electricity generation is a metric for what exactly? China's popoulation is rapidly urbanizing. That's all that shows. But the killer is the gold standard. The author seems to be confusing this with fractional reserve banking. Interestingly, they're anti-crypto, which is kinda odd because most gold bugs became crypto bros. C…
He doesn't even see that the value in gold is what we assign to it. Almost no different to the value of cryptocoins. He doesn't notice the contradiction: > Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto) Gold is worth so much in dollars because everyone thinks everyone else also wants it. Sure you can process it for some industrial use, but most of the worth is because "Someone else will also find this wort…
To be fair, you can't just manufacture more gold. I mean you can dig more up or buy more but you're limited to how much gold there is. That's the argument used. There seems to be over 200,000 metric tons of it ever mined.
What many gold bugs and crypto bros don't seem to understand is that:
1. The US dollar was never 100% backed by silver (originally) or gold;
2. What really backs the US dollar is the US military. This was true with the gold standard and it's true now;
3. The ability to manufacture more dollars and thus control the money supply is a feature not a bug;
4. Fractional reserve banking is so stunningly successful, it's impossible to ignore; and
5. A lot of the problems detractors point to are really symptomatic of unfettered neoliberalism, not abandoning the gold standard.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t worry about this too much. Brain drain, despite the name, is not really a zero-sum game. The people who move rarely lose all contact with the host country. They gain invaluable experience, know-how, and contacts that some of them eventually bring back to the host country. I know of more than one example where someone has been “brain-drained” to the states, who has subsequently moved back to start a success…
> The people who move rarely lose all contact with the host country. They gain invaluable experience, know-how, and contacts that some of them eventually bring back to the host country. How many Europeans who emigrated to the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries returned to their countries after making it big in America? Is any of Europe's economic development since then attributable to them?
My ancestors were fleeing from Russia to USA and certainly wouldn't be looking to return.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2... These things seem abhorrent to Americans who have nearly unlimited free speech protection.
The two UK cases: - Nazi pug man got a fine of £800; no jail. - Cheshire people; in the context of rioting and the consequences of rioting. For the record I think (personal view only) that the Nazi pug man should never have been prosecuted, I personally find it grossly offensive but I think that the harm of stopping people saying these things is greater than the harm of the idiot saying them. The Cheshire thing I fin…
>Also, what about folks like Snowdon and Assange? I mean if freedom of speech is absolute in the USA why can't they just tell the CCP about USA nuclear control?
Why do people constantly and intentionally misconstrue arguments? It's so obnoxious and intellectually dishonest. I didn't say it was absolute. It's like people can't even have a conversation anymore without dealing with this.
>I think that the harm of stopping people saying these things is greater than the harm of the idiot saying them.
Oh, so you're a Nazi sympathizer? See how annoying that is when people intentionally misconstrue arguments?
I know it's a habit these days with the news and I don't mean to jump on your shit, it's quite common; but it's bleeding into person to person conversation and you just can't have any meaningful conversation this way.
Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
It didn't even start out interesting. The main product of the US is weapons not "the dollar". Electricity generation is a metric for what exactly? China's popoulation is rapidly urbanizing. That's all that shows. But the killer is the gold standard. The author seems to be confusing this with fractional reserve banking. Interestingly, they're anti-crypto, which is kinda odd because most gold bugs became crypto bros. C…
He doesn't even see that the value in gold is what we assign to it. Almost no different to the value of cryptocoins. He doesn't notice the contradiction: > Back the dollar by gold (not socially constructed crypto) Gold is worth so much in dollars because everyone thinks everyone else also wants it. Sure you can process it for some industrial use, but most of the worth is because "Someone else will also find this wort…
Gold has a limited supply and it's a precious metal, so it has nice properties, can't be easily destroyed and lasts forever.