901–910 of 913 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mark Carney is a great orator, I was impressed just a few days ago by his speech after meeting Xi Jinping in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLasfU4l__A
Not only a great orator, but look at his resume: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Carney This man is clearly one of the leaders of the new free world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please make the case that the UK should have (and could have) stayed neutral during WWs 1 & 2 and gained from it.
What the guy below said - the UK would have become more like switzerland, much richer, not had a lot of its historic architecture destroyed and two generations of young men slaughtered. I think it's actually really difficult to make the case for entering either war
Related is the PM of Canada’s speech at Davos today. I don’t think that I have heard such a blunt assessment of the past and future from a politician, ever. This may be a historically significant speech. https://www.youtube.com/live/dE981Z_TaVo?t=100
He is pissed. Damn. This will take a very long time to clean up… Assuming it’s reversible.
He should be pissed. Not as a Canadian, but as someone who understands the benefits of a global system of rules that has made everyone who cooperates rich, which has included himself.
What we have witnessed under 47 is that a small group of the world's rich ideologues were so maniacal and myopic that they screwed it up for everyone.
As a relative "poor", this pisses me off as well, as peace and prosperity will likely, at least temporarily, devolve for us all as Pax/Oeconomia Americana unwinds. Utter insanity.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is pissed. Damn. This will take a very long time to clean up… Assuming it’s reversible.
I have been thinking about this speech and your comment for a couple days now. He should be pissed. Not as a Canadian, but as someone who understands the benefits of a global system of rules that has made everyone who cooperates rich, which has included himself. What we have witnessed under 47 is that a small group of the world's rich ideologues were so maniacal and myopic that they screwed it up for everyone. As a r…
Honestly as an American I'm just happy to see some open talk and movement by world leaders. This breakdown has been clear for at least 10 years, maybe 20 if you're smart, but nobody did anything. I hope Europe can learn to work with China here. I don't think the whole system is dead, they just need to find other dance partners.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find the hate speech laws good. They enforce a certain decency in communication, something that MAGAs lack. >Will we also sanction Elon Musk and other pro-MAGA individuals after the current rift between the EU and the US? Why not include Chinese ones, too, who are actually quite active? Also, far-right influencers? Far-left? They are nazis/communists after all! Fantastic idea, unironically. But IMHO the far left is…
So you defend freedom of speech, but not for the people and the ideas you don't like. That's not freedom of speech, and you have a lot in common with Putinists on that matter. They also sanction who they perceive as western assets, by the way. And see nothing wrong sending dissidents to jail with similar vague hate speech laws that we have in the EU [0]. In fact, they even eradicated their far-right! [1] Navalny was…
As for your other points: Democracy must not fall to the Paradox of tolerance.
[0] https://www.newsweek.com/russia-ukraine-war-invasion-protest...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Sorry, I don't understand any of what you are saying now.
If a sovereign government declared bitcoin illegal, it becomes illegal. There is nothing unique about any asset to stop this because the rules are all made up and can change anytime.
When they called in the physical gold, people could squirrel away their $10 and $20 coins in wallsafes and shoeboxes to trade with trusted partners later. Declaring the coins illegal didn't cause them to disappear from people's hands directly.
Crypto doesn't have that physical anchor. If a major world government declared it illegal tomorrow, how would you, as a resident of that country, access the value in your favourite blockchain wallet?
Law enforcement could monitor the remnants of the network and trying to trigger transactions is obvious probable cause. That assumes the remnants still function-- they aren't being blocked by DPI/filtering, or just the functional destabilization caused by a large number of participants being unplugged from the network.
At best, you'd have to go off-ledger and trade talismans (handing over a document with the private keys for an existing wallet like a bearer instrument and hoping they didn't run off multiple copies, or just trying to keep records of transactions and balances elsewhere and hoping to resynch eventually)
This is also why the paper dollar is so important to its reserve-currency status. An enterprising bank in the developing world might say "we offer USD-denominated accounts, all digital, it's 20xx" for customers who don't trust the local currency, but those are a lot easier for the local government to deactivate than a coffee can full of greenbacks buried in their backyard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For us individually. For us collectively it was a horrible thing. We lost the means and incentive to produce anything durable, including a healthy, educated, sustainable society.
People planning the post-WWII system wildly overestimated how how disciplined Americans could be. The whole point of the US transitioning to a service economy was that it would upskill the workforce into the world's Delta Force team of highly educated scientists, engineers, researchers, etc. The rest of the world would handle the boring stuff like actually manufacturing the beautiful inventions designed by the US. Th…
Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".
The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")
The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:
* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.
* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you defend freedom of speech, but not for the people and the ideas you don't like. That's not freedom of speech, and you have a lot in common with Putinists on that matter. They also sanction who they perceive as western assets, by the way. And see nothing wrong sending dissidents to jail with similar vague hate speech laws that we have in the EU [0]. In fact, they even eradicated their far-right! [1] Navalny was…
Wake me up when we jail people for holding up blank signs [0] or for demonstrating for gay rights. You try so hard to paint the EU in the same unhinged way as the Kremlin, but all your comparisons don't survive scrutiny. I can go and stand in front of the Bundestag saying "I hate Friedrich Merz" and nothing will happen, in fact people will probably want selfies with me and the sign. Try that in Russia and see how fas…
You cherry-pick an example: posting online or holding a sign with "Merz is a liar" would expose you to a lawsuit and jail. Just like saying the N word in private in France. You get jailed for crimes without a victim.
Each territory has forbidden speech: in many countries, for instance holocaust revisionism is forbidden and punished with jail sentences. It's tolerated to justify the murder of Palestinians, including in national media, of Jews, it isn't.
It's funny that you mention protests: French military police commonly kills or cripples protesters with semi-lethal weapons, and the government uses similar tactics as the Russian one to justify crackdowns (forbidding problematic protests).
The issue with such thinking is that, just as the frog in the kettle, the water will heat up and heat up as politicians increase their use of this very convenient tool, just like Putin did. Singapore is an advanced version of this, where problematic criticism of the government action is met with diffamation lawfare.
You can see this happening in Germany, with the drastic increase in lawsuits against the AFD, or diffamation against politicians. Same with the UK, which before was good example of spotless freedom of speech.
By the way, I hate to mention this but since you are German, I'd like to remind you that the Weimar republic had stringent hate speech laws and censorship. It didn't work at all. When will you start to learn?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prior reserve currency failures involved currency collapses. I think Gresham accounts for this. Looking at the particular mechanisms of collapse, I think they all involve a failed transition to fiat. Can you name another example of a currency that survived the transition to pure fiat (i.e. not backed by metals in any respect)? The dollar did this in the 70s and continued to increase its dominance in the decades that…
I agree the dollar is uniquely successful, but the Pound ended convertibility in 1931, and limped as a reserve currency into the 70s. While not a reserve currency, another example is Chinese currencies like the second zhiyuanchao going off silver convertibility, which lasted for a bit over 50 years.[1] When the Dutch for example did try to go off a metallic standard it was essentially a last ditch effort as they were…