One reason it’s important is because changes in the amount of dollars outside of the US changes the value of the US in exchange of other currencies. As long as the debt is USD-denominated, the US government can always pay it back with the result of the USD value changing (probably depends on volume, speed, and many other variables).

💯

Some European countries aren’t doing badly in that regard but it’s a drop in a bucket compared to us in NA as well as the top 1% around the globe.

And due to their economic system, they don’t have to profit maximize those coal plants or even use them until the end of their lifespan. They’re free to decrease their utilization or even shut them down as the the need decreases.

The impossibility of eternal growth doesn’t deny the hypocrisy parent highlights. The CO2 budget we’ve eaten for our development has eaten (and still disproportionately does) the global budget that belongs to all people. We’ve consumed way more of a practically nonrenewable resource than the rest of the world, we continue to disproportionately consume more of it, and then we (some of us) go to the rest of the world and say, sir no sir there’s not enough resource left, you’ll have to do with a lot less, and you’ll have to do it on your own! There’s deep hypocrisy in that, regardless of the state of the resource.

Yup. There’s probably an analysis somewhere about how much of China’s emissions are ours. I bet it’s a large fraction.

Given that the EU has 3x smaller population than China and the US 4x, the emission numbers aren’t out of proportion. Add to that the fact that both the EU and US have outsourced large parts of their manufacturing industry to China and the picture changes dramatically. If China can manufacture, mine and process what they do, with its current population, and if emissions have peaked, that would be remarkably positive. Given their massive investment in wind, solar, nuclear and EVs, it might just actually be the case.

This meme is fire.

Wow, that’s incredible. Israel won’t be happy about it. The hasbara budget can’t cover a flying palace yet.

Most of us have started from the default programming. I didn’t get a lot of what I get today when I moved from Reddit. I know it can feel shitty to keep repeating the same things and make the same arguments over and over again but that’s the process of teaching.

Layoffs face:

True. But I think to a great extent that’s the case because business funds the weak ones and spends good money to convince us to elect them. Then they keep the profits rolling. Rinse and repeat.

The mental trick that keeps on giving. When government does it - it’s automatically bad, but when a private business does it - it’s between the business and its customers. Then all the gov’t needs to do is become a customer on the B2B side.

If you buy the argument that billionaires have become such by collecting the extra value their employees create above the wage they get paid, then it’s easy to see why many consider them harmful regardless of their personal traits. In that framework, the billionaire that’s the least harmful is the one that has the fewest billions. Luckily, unlike race, there’s an easy way to become a non-billionaire. One option is paying higher wages so that you never become one. Another is lobbying for high taxes and paying them. Yet another is giving enough of money away as to become a millionaire. With race, there are no options to become not-that-race.

And so we judge billionaires as a group, as a class, because of their function and effect on society, the economy and the political system. Not because we think they’re all bad people that we have to hate. They cannot be billionaires without having these effects.

Speaking of value employees make above their wages, here’s a fun fact. If you take the average yearly net income (profit after costs) of Google and you divide it by their number of employees, you get a number around half a million per person, per year.

Stay woke ✊

Remember when he lobbied against sharing vaccine IP at the height of the pandemic?

Pepperidge Farms remembers.

The parent is being a bit hyperbolic, which isn’t useful, but that’s not Alex Jones-level tinfoil hattery, even if it appears similar at first glance. Of course you’re right that he was an Epstein bud because he liked to fuck the classmates he couldn’t in school. At the same time it’s also true and provable that uncle Bill spends his money lobbying various domestic and international organizations to further his and by proxy the owner class’es interest. I distinctly remember for example good uncle Bill lobbying the US government and the WHO against IP sharing at the height of the COVID crisis:

Global health czar Bill Gates had other thoughts. Maintaining his steadfast commitment to intellectual property rights, Gates pushed for a plan that would permit companies to hold exclusive rights to lifesaving medicines, no matter how much they benefited from public funding. Given the enormous influence Gates has in the global public health world, his vision ultimately won out in the Covax program—which enshrines monopoly patent rights and relies on the charitable whims of rich countries and pharmaceutical giants to provide vaccines to most of the world. A chorus of support from pharmaceutical companies and the Trump administration didn’t hurt.

Source: Wired Magazine

PS: Being an Epstein bud could help if you want to lobby big names with words and capital. People pay good money to sit at the table and talk to some big shots at various places.

Billionaire philanthropy is like doing 100 damage to humanity, then returning 5 health. Then the 5 health gets amplified by information channels and it gets to feel much bigger in the collective consciousness. It gets a further boost when there’s other prominent billionaires that don’t give any hp back making it stand out as the good guy. So you end up in a bizarre position where objectively the philanthropist is the good guy compared to the rest, but the vast majority of us have no hp left.

Many are new blood having no idea what Microsoft used to be. Add to that the modern good-guy MS face, funding (usefu for theml) open source and all that, and it gets difficult to convey how things used to be.

Could be worse - Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

Food should be OK, no? I guess everything helps if you need to pay more for non-food items.