I’m enraged.
Mandel is going to be a Senator, tho
i this point it’s becoming a close race which state has the dumber senators, alabama or ohio.
Did he answer the kids question or just go into a rant about AOC and the whackos? (obviously the latter)
I searched google for “How do solar panels work if they’re covered in snow” and got answers including tilted surfaces and brooms with lots of good info.
And I think it should be pretty obvious that solar panels don’t produce electricity when it’s dark - and I doubt that took the scientists and engineers by surprise.
An opportunity to educate your child but you chose instead to show your ignorance and just scoff. Congratulations you pathetic luddite.
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Apparently, if we’re to believe Twitter, his child is in his ex-wife’s custody anyway, and he made the whole thing up.
Historically there doesn’t need to be a replacement readily available for a country to lose reserve currency status. The reason why I think it’ll be a basket-of-currencies approach is because the rest of the world is already asking for it.
As to the currency controls I desperately wish I lived in a country that had that much control over it’s wealthy. The Chinese government still has control over it’s wealthiest citizens, who while they aren’t subject to the exact same rules as regular people very much are not above the will of the government. In contrast the rich people in the US have so totally captured our government that global trade policy was written for their exclusive benefit with absolutely nothing expected in exchange.
You’re probably more aware than I am about the problems in China, which is saying something because I am quite aware that there are a lot of them… but China historically is the most important country in the global economy by quite a large margin, and big picture I think it’s pretty inevitable that they return to that. They aren’t required to be problem free, and in fact are getting pretty dystopian with pretty serious demographic problems… but the US is a late stage failing empire that is probably going to have a right wing authoritarian government by 2025.
dude too bleak. strictly speaking empires were mostly only ever totalitarian/authoritarian, and their late stage wasn’t associated with a turn towards strongmen, or even one party. we currently might even consider their peak to be a certain period under one leader, which US may yet to fully experience.
what we think of as empire is also fluid, like you could think of russian tsarist or soviet empires which had qualitatively different mechanisms for failing, but they don’t project well onto present day US, even as they map quite nicely to present day RF as a diminished empire.
there is a need for more reserve currencies because of the total pool of weath has grown even higher than the prelude to the housing crisis. it’s much too big to be invested in only US dollar. for a currency losing reserve status late stage, you would probably need to look at whether big chunks of wealth are fleeing investments in that country, and it’s simply not happening. as pandora papers revealed, the exotic tax haven of north dakota is as attractive to money as the caymans, and even money that made it offshore is still mostly invested in property or consumer markets in the US through a string of shell corporations.
it doesn’t insulate US dollar from problems or guillotines obviously, it just means that other countries are truly terrible places to park amounts on the order of 1%+ of GDP of a region. even britain is susceptible to brexit, and that political campaign cost less to pull off than we thought.
money is fleeing places like russia and china though. russia faced the double problem of its oligarchs putting it away in the west, AND the west saw that their money could just be confiscated by putin if they brought it to russia. china has a different problem in that they have such tight monetary authority, that even its oligarchs aren’t allowed to invest in china or outside without the government controlling the eventual venture. not to mention the ineffectiveness of some china’s big projects.
Our military is no longer a credible threat after demonstrating an inability to get our way a single time since WW2. Our spending mostly goes to defense contractors to build equipment that doesn’t have much to do with actually projecting power in the real world.
Our currency is a swimming pool we keep shitting in to avoid our wealthy having to pay taxes.
And don’t kid yourself nobody is ever more certain of their invincibility than the upper class of an empire that is about to collapse.
We’re entering a period of significant class conflict between the workers and the wealthy that is going to last for a long while. A lot of promises have been made to people and a significant number of them won’t be able to be kept.
There are only a few real options for resolving the economic situation. Austerity, which is not an option because we already cut everything domestic to an embarrassing degree and the guys with the guns clearly aren’t going to accept cuts. Redistribution which is blocked entirely by the wealthy totally capturing the government. And devaluation of the currency which is already happening and fast.
Devaluation is fine in the short term because it doesn’t have as many clear domestic losers (besides people on fixed incomes and other rent seekers) but internationally it’s not OK for a reserve currency every other country has to hold significant amounts of to stabilize the values of their own currency to devalue to a massive degree. These other countries were already unhappy with our treatment of the reserve currency before we decided to print a few thousand train car loads in response to COVID.
When we lose reserve currency status the demand for treasuries is going to absolutely collapse and the fed will either have to start printing even more money to cover the shortfall at these low interest rates or allow interest rates to rise to a point where there is enough demand.
The Boomers have really got us into a jam. We’ve promised homeowners insane prices, we’ve promised shareholders insane prices, and we’ve promised bond holders safety from inflation. We’re already giving it to the bond holders without lube. All of this was built on taking the workers share of the economic pie, cutting it down as much as possible, and distributing that to everyone else. That was possible because it was easy for our corporations to go to the least developed place on earth and get essentially free raw materials and labor. Then they outsourced even that to the Chinese and now the Chinese are going to consume that cheap stuff domestically instead of shipping it on to us.
It’s GG.
dude, i understand how all of what we talk about on UP can turn into an impressionist hellscape in my head, i believe it’s ok to feel that sometimes. just catch yourself before it depresses you into inaction completely. maybe a vacation is in order.
i’m currently following some pro democracy activists who had to flee russia. russia has advanced to fascism much more than the us since 2001, and they started from a place that was closer fascism to begin with, and yet the activists give me a pretty big dose of optimism that fair elections and open public debate will ultimately prevail over Putin’s reich. if progressivism ultimately beat back jim crowe, and then fought for half a century for civil rights and gay rights and trans rights, being depressed because of reserve currencies is just kinda shallow.
giving up and failing to vote when american democracy is in trouble, because we might lose or because it might be stolen from us, is also kinda insulting to those who are still in prison for writing or liking a tweet that calls out an incumbent with an authoritarian streak.
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incidentally i kinda wish our military wasn’t such a threat to everyone, so losing credibility is probably fine in the long run.
on the other hand, besides ammunition and missiles and defense contractors, the REST of the military budget is spent employing and supporting the families of a large chunk of people who didn’t land in a different profession. when they are not running around killing people, the army is socialism. compared to even 50 years ago, more of the US military’s mission is humanitarian, and if i were to draw a trend, in the next 50 the army will be deployed a lot in climate disaster areas without guns, hopefully more often than armed conflicts.
Time to nuke some hurricanes!
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This guy is a fucking fed
At least he posted that in the lol Dems thread
https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1482909643131211777
chaser:
https://twitter.com/AdjectiveNouns/status/1482910216308109317
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I mean in terms of people that actually like the Democrats they aren’t wrong. In terms of people who vote for democrats, lol.