Comments by "Snack Plissken" (@snackplissken8192) on "VisualEconomik EN" channel.

  1. The fact that totalitarian and profligate governments are the most eager to move to digital currencies should be concerning to all us little people.
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  2. This is what you get when the leadership of mainstream parties ignore issues that increasingly frustrate voters. If they had taken anti immigration sentiment seriously, voters would not have had to turn to AfD to demonstrate their anger. As AfD continues to grow, they will either be forced to adopt more serious policies to succeed, or their failure will provide an opportunity for another party to adopt the popular policies of their party. If neither happen, it will lead to protests and potential violence as the people become increasingly convinced that their demands will not be addressed through the democratic process and that will be bad for everybody.
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  3. It certainly has nothing to do with generations of isolating protectionism, causing many French industries to be about as internationally competitive as Hawaiian birds.
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  4. It's important to point out that Mao intentionally murdered every educated professional person who couldn't manage to escape China. Mao didn't even let chefs live. My grandfather had to get chefs from Taiwan for his US-based restaurant because there was nobody left in the part of China he grew up in who could cook restaurant quality Chinese food in those days. If Mao didn't even spare chefs, you can guarantee there were no metallurgists left to make the great leap headfirst into a furnace work. Mao murdered his way into his problems and then tried to murder his way out of them. Tens of millions of people were tortured, starved, and executed in one man's quest for power. It's horrible that many people in China no longer know of the atrocities Mao committed on their families and want the return of a Mao-like leader, because that will only lead to more misery and death for Chinese people.
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  5. If memory serves, the shale producers were saying that you can't heavily throttle production or temporarily stop it; that entire operations would have to be permanently shut down if OPEC tanked the prices for too long. The problem, it would seem, is that ramping production up requires years of planning and millions of dollars of infrastructure investment so there's really no way to just boost production till the prices dip back to 2019 levels. The argument would seem to be that you either have to bet your future on increasing oil demand being here to stay or sit on your money betting that politician's new-found love for oil will be short-lived.
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  6. The west tends to look at the Marshall Plan and assume it will work anywhere, but its modern equivalents have been a failure. After WWII, we were giving money to countries like Japan and Germany that already were advanced and prosperous money to rebuild to keep first world countries in the first world, rather than giving third world countries money to keep them from making the lateral move into the second world. Even countries that want to use foreign aid to advance their economies tend to have issues with perverse incentives created by aid programs. Money gained by useful trade causes more industry and builds interdependence, whereas money gained by gaming western politicians causes more corruption and builds resentment. Teaching a man to beg is never going to end the same as teaching him to fish.
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  7. It does make a difference when China has made no secret of its desire to get revenge for WWII, and America has made no secret of its love for nearly all things Japanese.
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  8. Europe: "We're happy to trade freely with you, so long as you adopt the most expensive rules that any of our countries saddle themselves with and that your trade goods never threaten to compete with our domestic industries."
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  9. As somebody who was a dirt poor high school student in a city with good public transportation, I would regularly bum rides or pay for gas when I had already sunk the cost for an unlimited bus pass to avoid spending more than 50% longer to get to a destination because of travel time to/from and wait time for a bus, so this video makes a lot of sense to me.
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  10. The biggest question going forward is whether companies will believe that tying up more money in increasing refinery capacity is a better gamble than spending it on migrating to clean energy. If refiners still believe that oil and natural gas is a doomed industry than demand will only increase outstripping supply of refinery capacity until such time as clean energy can replace it, which could be a long and expensive proposition for consumers. It would, after all, be an unjustifiable waste of people's pension plans to invest heavily in demand today that will be gone by the time that investment comes online.
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  11. I've heard/seen a lot of good explanations of how banking and fractional reserve works. This is one of the best ones. It is the first one I have seen that explains how extra money would come into existence even without a banking system per se because of the idea of future money.
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  12. Since printing money does not increase wealth, but just increases the amount of money the existing wealth is spread out over, it robs monetary savings and allows those who know how much the money is devalued to rob the people who have not yet figured it out.
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  13. Great video. I had not thought of the effects of foreign capital on currencies in countries with the curse of natural resources but it makes sense. One has to wonder if universal basic income might similarly reduce the reliance of politicians on tax revenue from the average tax-payer and further shift resources and policy preferences to the cash cows and their politically connected owners. For most of us, one of the worst possible policy outcomes is a Cyberpunk style future where a handful or oligarchs control everything and the average person is completely marginalized.
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  14. Very interesting video. In America we tend to either suggest that the recipient country is too corrupt or the donating country is too stingy but nobody does follow up to see if the aid structure might be doing more harm than good. I'd love to hear more about how NGOs can learn from past mistakes to maximize the benefits of aid money.
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  15. Increase baseline spending to appease interest groups and hope for an economic miracle to cover the costs? Sounds about right.
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  16. Adaptation is how we stopped acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. It's infinitely less cruel to the world's poor than economic abstinence.
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  17. You see, the reason why the promise of weight loss by eating sugar and lying around failed is because you trusted the wrong person to implement it.
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  18. Also consider that northern regions generally built cultures around scarcity of resources, which caused wealth to be more strongly tied to ingenuity and hard work to make new resources rather than just corralling existing resources. The "Curse of Natural Resources" puts the resources primarily in the hands of those who can take rather than those who can make, and taker economies are always weaker than maker economies, since economics is not a zero-sum game.
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  19. As the percentage of the population collecting benefits becomes a larger percentage of the voting public relative to the percentage of the population paying for the benefits it becomes harder and harder to convince voters to vote for fiscal balance. Safety nets like the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund further disincentivise politicians against angering constituents in order to take steps necessary to prevent problems during another politician's term of office by insuring them that somebody else will have to fix it later. Pensions seem to be something that can only be fixed when voters can see the end is nigh and that nobody else will save them.
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  20. So interesting to hear about the Japanese situation from a news source that does not have a domestic political agenda they are trying to push with the story. Keep up the good work.
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  21. Another major contributing factor to both the economic stagnation and the inability to reform the work culture is the Zaibatsu system. The Zaibatsus are so big that if they collapse, they will take vast swaths of the Japanese economy with them. This means that politicians and financial institutions are blackmailed into keeping them afloat, no matter how poorly run they are. This prevents the business cycle from weeding out business leaders, bad business practices, and bad businesses in general. This also means that there are a lot of incentives to create regulations that throttle the entry of small startups, starve them of capital, or to force them to join an existing conglomerate. If foreign investment goes right into the Zaibatsus then nothing will change, but I can't imagine Japan allowing foreign companies to get around the rules that have stagnated their domestic industries. But what incentive structure would cause Japanese politicians to risk the collapse of domestic industry in order to let zombie companies die and force painful reforms whose benefits won't be felt in the next election cycle or two?
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  22. New technology requires massive amounts of money to develop. There are only two ways this happens; either governments pouring millions of taxpayer dollars into military advantages or millionaires pouring their own money into business advantages.
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  23. Great video. It is proof that you don't have to be a Pollyanna to distrust the data that Moscow chooses to publish. I'm glad to hear another voice pointing out that GDP is an easy statistic to cheat. Most outlets will never admit that governments can just deficit spend their way into "prosperity" by a measure of GDP alone. The Chinese have been doing it to hide slowing economic growth for decades, and most democracies play that game too. I'd love to see a breakdown of Russian trade balances, relative prices of and demand for foreign made capital such as industrial machinery, cost and demand changes of raw material imports, and a lot of other data that Russia is almost certainly blocking. But, much like train loads of cremation urns in Wuhan, there are probably secondary statistics that can suggest how things are actually going in Russia. Russia seems poised to keep its military production high enough to keep a hold of Ukrainian territory (at least for now), but will Gen Z Russians live with vague memories of how their country used to be rich and respected? That is a very different question.
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  24. Because having large concentrations of people in general couldn't possibly have anything to do with giving cities a greater pool of human capital?
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  25. Europe has babied their industries into uncompetitiveness with protectionist regulations since the end of WWII. Europe won't let the Americans compete with their native industries on an even field, so European companies can't compete with any free markets. The only way this will change is if Europe is willing to let their sub-par companies do bankrupt and provide a more favorable infrastructural and regulatory environment for new companies to replace them. But no government (including in America, Japan, or Korea) would willingly ever let a large company with many workers and lobbyists go bankrupt just because they waste the nation's resources being mediocre. Europe won't change until the cost of their broken system finally exceeds the cost of fixing it, and by then they will be generations behind.
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  26. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day, teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for a lifetime. Give everybody a daily voucher for free fish, and you will just have more people demanding fewer fish. The problem is the breakdown of family structures and a lack of financial literacy. While the government could conceivable fix the latter by changing the priorities of the educational system, the former is generally harmed by the structure of government redistribution programs. People generally learn financial literacy from intact families who model the virtues of delayed gratification, without that reinforcement, it takes a lot more motivation to learn. The very motivation that well-meaning government programs tend to strip people of, particularly when benefits cut off the moment a recipient tries to take the first step to improve their lot, like getting an entry level job.
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  27. While I can't speak specifically for the green politicians in Europe, I know ones in America have been caught on hot mics saying the quiet part out loud, that they want to replace all privately owned vehicles with public transportation. I wouldn't be surprised if a few continental greens are also distressed that they have to build cities around the notion that the hoi polloi can go wherever they want whenever they want without so much as a "by your leave." Even if Chinese vehicles of questionable reliability take over the EV market, I'm sure politicians will ensure that the rich and well-connected will still be able to charge their EVs during prime hours on stressed electric grids, even as the poors are taxed and fined out of the private vehicle market entirely.
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  28. The American founding fathers would disagree with the notion that Somali pirates are a new phenomenon, though it is interesting to know what caused it to become the singular most talked about piece of international news for a number of years.
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  29. If it works, it could go a long way towards normalizing relations between Islamic countries and the west. Saudi's position as the holder of Mecca and Medina give it a lot of clout in the Islamic world, and if you add economic success, they could pull a number of other countries into modernizing and liberalizing.
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  30. Socially and economically, Europe has been slowly bleeding out into a warm bath for years. They aren't investing in the future because they don't plan to have one. Europe's social institutions are a shambles, they see humanity as a disease, they aren't having children because they have no hope for tomorrow, and they are sacrificing the future they have no connection to in order to pay for indulgence in the present. A society with no future goals and aspirations can only waste away. No amount of centralization of power could possibly compensate for a lack of drive at the individual level.
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  31. I think that sometimes consumers want cheaper products with shorter life expectancies for good reason. When I buy cables and adapters for electronics, I buy the cheapest I can get because they get left behind in hotels or lost in drawers, and they will be replaced with a new standard within a couple of years. I also own a two hundred dollar indestructible umbrella because I'm sick of cheap ones turning inside out during a rainstorm like they did my entire childhood, I no longer lose umbrellas, nor do I care if they are in style.
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  32. It turns out that immediately wasting any money you didn't actually earn is a fairly universal human trait.
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  33. If you think about it, stealing ideas from others and doing your best version of it is the basis of all language, culture, and invention for intelligent social animals. The English Bards and Greek Playwrights appropriated ideas from their peers the same way that Dolphins and Crows do. Patents are the aberration. Thus it would make sense to err on the side of less powerful and durable patents rather than more.
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  34. If first world countries even can compete with the third world for manufacturing, it is going to require relaxing regulations and other costly competitive benefits, which politicians are likely to balk at and the public may also find distasteful. Western societies sacrificed most of the redundancies in supply chains for decades to save money on labor, warehousing, and to take advantage of growing efficiency in shipping networks, and you can't undo all that overnight.
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  35. I like the idea by Vanderbilt University's Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs. He suggests that accreditation, which schools earn based on the work of individual scholars, should stay with the scholar him or herself instead of going to the college. That would allow scholars to offer their services in innovative and more cost-effective ways than through the ossified university system currently does. If obtaining a degree in some field of study were to become as cheap today (proportionally) as it was in the 50s, it would be much easier for people to gain degrees that are useful well-paying for middle class jobs and new programs could better align the needs of employers with that of job-seekers. I've learned more interesting and useful things about the humanities through YouTube videos, podcasts, and the works of scholars they recommended or featured than I ever did in college. Imagine how much more would be out there if scholars could offer their audience credit for engaging with their work. I think the university system is holding back the democratization of knowledge as much as advancing it today, and changing accreditation may be a key to getting both teachers and students a high educational value for their efforts and money. At the very least, it could seriously reduce the opportunity costs of education.
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  36. When the government conspires with political donors to give benefits to certain voters at the expense of all taxpayers.
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  37. Yeah, because when have corporations ever knuckled under to pressure from governments to hand personal data to that government that they have no legal rights to? Besides, we all know that no government has ever tried to claw back rights granted to the populace by their predecessors.
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  38. You need to have native English speakers check your scripts. Your metaphors are comically mixed, and you guys regularly confuse words like "more" and "less."
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  39. Even democratically elected western governments inflate their numbers as much as they think their media and financial watchdogs will let them get away with. China has way more latitude to do it than most governments do because they don't have anything like a Free Press or a Freedom of Information Act.
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  40. My money would be that, like the countries of the western hemisphere, Greek reforms will last as long as the first election after any real pain. Voters have no patience for short term suffering voluntarily undertaken for mid or long term benefits. As long as the international community is willing to prevent Greece from becoming a completely failed state, I can't see them hitting rock bottom and changing their ways. I hope I'm wrong, but countries seem to behave like addicts, they can only get better when they realize they can't blame anybody else for their problems and that they will literally die if they don't take drastic action now. When America dies from having interest payments higher than the entire national budget, the world will think longingly about the good times of the 2008 global financial crisis.
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  41. Because the solution to no longer being able to buy hydrocarbons from environmental regulation free Russia is to buy rare-earth-heavy energy technology from environmental regulation free China. It's a good thing that we don't all share the same earth, or pushing environmentally regulated industries out of your own country and becoming reliant on the cheaper products of unregulated second and third world countries would actually make climate change worse and stunt the growth of cleaner industrial processes while taking money from your own citizens and handing it to your international enemies.
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  42. There's a massive difference between corporations that are large to take advantage of economies of scale or that require massive capital outlays in order to develop and produce products and those that are large to take advantage of the shortsightedness of politicians. It wasn't free competition that produced Japan's Zaibatsus and South Korea's Chaebols. Becoming "too big to fail" and supporting regulations that create impassible barriers to entry in a market is a response to governments.
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  43. It makes sense that as new technologies drive the production of greater and greater wealth that the value of the old money would decrease relative to the new. We are no longer the same society we were in the past where hereditary ownership of land was the only determiner of wealth. Countries like Venezuela waste their resources on graft like a cocaine-fueled heiress, while resource poor countries like Switzerland or Israel create businesses and technologies that create new wealth like a college student's garage startup company. The more value that can be created with innovation, the smaller the percentage of the pie old money resource control will be.
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  44. Don't forget that, before these modern nation-states were gobbling up lands in Asia, Africa, and the Near East, they gobbled up their neighbors in Europe. Even if politicians cynically blame the capital for their own local mismanagement, you don't have to be a person of color to resent being ruled by distant people with a different language, history, and culture, particularly when you aren't rich. Unless the weaker economies of the EU turn around, I think we can expect growing calls for independence from various European ethnic groups. That the separation might just cause more problems than it solves will be a problem for future politicians.
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  45. Other channels like Real Science have similarly suggested that while the Nuclear Power Plant has the lowest cost per kilowatt-hour, they also take the longest before they start generating a profit. This is deadly when combined with the changing economic and political environment discussed in this video. Since the Small Modular Reactors deal with most of the economic and supply-chain problems of their bigger relatives, any country willing to provide political stability to nuclear power should be able to take advantage of this emerging technology. We need a clean energy source that does not harm endangered species and their natural habitats the way that windmills, hydroelectric, and solar do, and as nuclear technology improves we will be able to generate power without having to enrich uranium, which would dramatically reduce the main environmental and military threat of nuclear.
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  46. In much the same way as most of the west claimed to be founded by Trojans, there were an awful lot of western countries that claimed to continue the legacy of the Roman Empire. Some eastern countries still claim to be the successors of Rome to this day.
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  47. Trump is only asking Canada to stop helping the CCP import chemical weapons (fentanyl) into America. Trump is trying to pull a reverse Nixon and turn a weakened Russia against America’s greatest threat, Communist China. Neither of these two things is hard to understand. Trump is treating the Communist Chinese the way America treated the Communist Russians during the Cold War. Besides that, Trump is using threats of tariffs to convince “allies” to agree to reciprocal tariff rates instead of the one sided protectionist tariffs that most of them started after WWII and continue to this day. Then he has been threatening Europe to stop treating America as its private army. You never stop to think what America might think about the things your channel complains about. We’ve tried to explain the obvious to you for some time but you think the European side is the only side in any conflict.
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  48. Panelists on Germany's Deutsche Welle came to a similar conclusion recently too, but it's good to hear from a source not directly tied to the sanctions. My main concern, though, is not whether sanctions have hurt Russia but whether sanctions can be effective in countries with state control of all media, completely fake elections, and where the government imprisons and/or murders most dissenters and all rivals. Sanctions have so far failed in their stated goals in countries dictatorships like Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. The question is whether or not you can create enough momentum to topple Putin without having incipient evil dictator whom Putin thinks is safe pulling the strings.
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  49. Continuing to shovel trillions of dollars of new debt kind of defeats the purpose of raising the interest rates, while making interest payments take up an even larger percentage of GDP. Even if announced data does not look too bad, all the US economic data gets revised down months later after people stop paying attention to it. Washington lies like China, but they eventually dump the actual data when nobody is looking to avoid being treated like the liars they are.
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  50. Yeah, but what if you want to turn your economy around without reducing government spending or public corruption? Visual Economic has yet to show us that one accounting trick that the IMF hates to turn your economy around overnight with no pain or hard work.
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  51. China is artificially propping up their troubled domestic manufacturing with government support. Their domestic market is cratering and they are financing continued production with loans. History shows China will eat a fair bit more than half the cost of tariffs to avoid dropping production. If tariffs can drop EU demand for tofu dreg cars, and Trump keeps China out of the US market, they will be stuck selling at even bigger loses to the third world till their economy collapses. Once China has to drop output on their government supported new industries they will reach the tipping point and their whole economic house of cards will collapse. The CCP will prove they cannot provide prosperity in exchange for tyranny. The CCP needs to fail to free a billion people from an authoritarian nightmare. None of this will help Europe to become competitive, but Europe has no stomach to make the sacrifices to become competitive so at least they can help to end tyranny.
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  52. Maybe if Germany had listened to Trump instead of Putin, they wouldn't have reorganized their economy around currently-sanctioned Russian oil and natural gas.
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  53. My first thought, when the Euro was proposed, was that member countries would try to pawn their future debt crisis on one another and ruin the whole experiment. That has proven true. Relatively small and homogenous countries can barely agree to suffer any pain to get their economic houses in order, how was this going to work with most of a continent?
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  54. Global investors can now stop investing in developing cutting edge western technology companies because a corporation under the control of the world's leading counterfeiter claims to have done even better all by themselves for pennies on the dollar with no secret help from their government and will give the producers of valuable IP free access to their data aggregation product with no ulterior motives whatsoever. It's an offer so good, it absolutely has to be true.
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  55. It's the difference between learning how to develop technology and learning how to steal it via industrial espionage. The former is more expensive and time-consuming but gives you the knowledge to innovate, the latter sometimes fails hilariously when you don't actually understand the basics. The Chinese Communist Party lacks the resources and humility to do things the right way. That's why so many of their much vaunted electric car models are so bad they are uninsurable in China.
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  56. Chinese Capitalism has something for everyone in American Politics. A total disregard for the environment on one hand and a total disregard for human life on the other. Rampant counterfeit food and concentration camps are a small price to pay for getting rid of all those pesky values and morals. I can't imagine why so many people have risked death to flee the country with only the shirts on their backs.
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  57. The problem is not that socialism needs more data to work, but that it needs to be Laplace's Demon, knowing the position and momentum of every particle in the universe to predict the future and no amount of AI will be able to calculate the information it does not have. The free market, on the other hand, works like the balance of animals in nature. It incentivizes individuals to exploit imbalances for personal benefit and thus rebalance the system. It allows some level of inefficiency and impractical novelty because shocks to the system may cause such an anomaly to survive where more efficient organisms might fail. The push and pull of extinction and mutation cull the impractical while allowing for innovation and redundancy to protect from unpredictable future events. A top-down system, even with an unethical amount of data and the most perfect calculation, cannot know that a lab worker might accidentally spread a virus, or that a hurricane might hit an unprepared community. It cannot predict the accidental discovery of a new battery technology or a breakthrough in a stalled energy science. We should learn from the Gros Michel Banana. They were all one single plant with no genetic diversity and no variation in biological defense mechanism. The Panama Disease hit them, and the Gros Michel went from ubiquitous to nearly extinct worldwide within a decade. Companies and cities can use separate AI to help with central planning, but doing so on a state or country wide basis is asking to turn a small disaster into a gigantic one, just like the bananas.
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  58. It sounds like Canada has not treated its banks as a political tool the way politicians in America have gotten away with for over a century. It would be interesting to compare countries with relatively few and clear banking regulations and find out what the minimum rules are to ensure banking transparency and prevent fraud. I suspect many advanced countries have a large percentage of regulations that do more to help oligopolies maintain power than actually protect consumers. The more power banking regulators have, the more incentives banks have to plow money into lobbying for regulatory capture, after all.
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  59. You also have to consider that legislative majorities can override a presidential veto and cause presidents to be remembered for policies they opposed. President Clinton signed NAFTA, GATT, and welfare reform because Newt Gingrich nationalized the midterm legislative elections through his Contract with America and turned the public heavily in favor of policies that Democrats opposed. Similarly, Regan had to deal with a Democratic legislature who killed many of the president's campaign promises or forced compromises. US presidents are most likely to implement their own policies in the first half of their term if they ride a legislative majority into office, though the legislature's increasing delegation to executive branch bureaucracies and increased use of executive orders is starting to change that balance.
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  60. Japan and Rome demonstrate that a willingness to reverse engineer the ideas and technologies of stronger foreign cultures can take a poor people to a wealthy people in fairly short order if the people don't buy into notions of inherent inferiority and victimhood. Sure, Japan had bitter internal conflicts over Westernization just like Rome did with Hellenization, but it's hard to argue with the improvements in the lives of the people.
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  61. Considering that Biden has tightened protectionist policies and further cracked down on technology sales to China. It's not a material difference. Also, every president since at least the 70s has promised to return America to the manufacturing power it was in the 50s in order to bring back high paying blue collar jobs. If it were that easy to devalue the currency to revive American exports, somebody would have done it already. There are entrenched interests that benefit from a strong dollar, and they probably have a lot more sway over American policy than a new Fed chairman would. American manufacturing will never come back as long as there are countries with low wage bases, high education, legal certainty, and access to capital. Everybody knows it, but all politicians pretend they don't. Trump does all his thinking out loud and does almost none of the things he verbally brainstorms. He does it because people like you take him seriously and then panic, giving him the upper hand. TRUMP IS PLAYING YOU. You are just embarrassing yourselves.
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  62. Every country with money chooses to bribe corrupt poor countries to get policy concessions. If the poor countries don't want to be taken advantage of by rich countries, they need to switch from small coalition governments to genuine large coalition democracies because it is easy and cheap to bribe a few people to get what you want but vastly harder and prohibitively expensive to bribe the majority of a nation, even a small one. America's goal in the IMF was initially to bribe dictatorships to stay out of the Soviet sphere of influence, not to lift them out of poverty. If we actually wanted to lift them out of poverty, we would let corrupt small coalition governments fail so they have a chance to become large coalition governments and only offer aid to the extent that their governments require genuine majority support and now just that they have fake elections. But if we did that, we would run the risk of the people of these countries wanting different things than the countries supplying the money, and no voter would ever support politicians giving money to foreign countries in exchange for thwarting said voter's will.
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  63. Wages going up every year? Not even the boomers I know have ever lived that fantasy.
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  64. You guys are insane for thinking the guy who brags about threatening Putin that he would bomb the s out of Moscow if he invaded Ukraine is going to give Putin everything he wants. If you had listened to Trump when he told you to do your job and contribute your NATO minimums to defense, Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine. If you had listened to Trump when he warned you not to complete the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that Russia needed so they could invade Ukraine without the Ukrainians being able to bomb the Nord Stream 1 and cut off Europe from all Russian energy, you could have avoided the invasion. He even threatened to leave NATO to warn you to protect yourselves in case the next US president was somebody whom Putin would not respect, but you were too smart for that. You can't count on America to always have cowboys at the Resolute Desk, especially since American presidents haven't sent treaties to the Senate for Ratification since the middle of the last century, which means they have zero binding legal authority. If Europe intends to seize the position of global reserve currency, it had better be prepared to take the responsibility as world police that comes with it. The British Pound was the Global Reserve Currency during the Pax Britannia, when the UK could forcibly end the global slave trade with military and economic pressure. They lost this in the 30s, and America took over and got stuck with the obligation to protect global free trade. Europe won't even take the lead to protect Europe from Russia, let alone provide military escorts in the Bab-El-Mandeb Strait. Americans resent having to protect you as much as you resent us for having to protecting you. If you want a better position from which to push even more protectionist tariffs on America, pay for your own territorial defense for a change.
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  65. Buying off voters with debt-fueled make-work projects, command and control economy dictated from the capital organized to pay off oligarchs, kinda makes you wonder if the Nazis who fled to the Americas set them down the same path, or they just found countries that shared their economic ideals to begin with.
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  66. The fact that America's medical system tries to save premature babies at a much earlier age than in countries with socialized medicine, which simultaneously increases the number of premies who live while necessarily converting those who can't be saved from uncounted "stillbirths" into "infant deaths," is never taken into account. Also, you do realize that if you let people who are guaranteed to cost more than they pay in insurance avoid paying any premiums until they need a payout, that no reasonable person would ever pay an insurance premium while they are healthy. The entire point of insurance is to convince enough healthy people to spend years paying into the system to cover the costs of the ones who end up unhealthy, to collectivize risk. The biggest problem with abandoning a user pays system is that the person who pays is the sole arbiter of what treatment the patient is allowed to have. This is why Canada now recommends assisted suicide for anybody who wants expensive treatments, and Britain bans people from coming to America to seek treatment for conditions that are deemed terminal across the pond. In America, we let insurers kill people instead because employer-sponsored health insurance was created to allow employers to hire workers at an effectively competitive wage despite Richard Nixon's mandating maximum wage levels, which he created to try to stop the free market. Since Obamacare, most employers I have worked for had changed their policies every year and offered new policies with less coverage for more money. I keep losing my plans and regularly have to change doctors to stay in network. Before Obamacare, I had never seen my employer change their plans in the 2–4 years I worked for them.
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  67. If Covid-19 was the cause of the mass immigration into the US, why did it start in 2021, and why is it increasing as the virus has been decreasing and the effects of Covid policies have been wearing off? The immigration started ramping up when the Remain in Mexico policy was abandoned, and it rose again when the Covid Title 42 Program that allowed for the expulsion of asylum seekers ended. Legal immigration is way too hard in the United States and needs to be made easier as illegal immigration is made harder so that the delta between the two will shrink. This will make human trafficking (which goes hand in hand with drug trafficking) less profitable, while allowing higher immigration levels that businesses want. Of course, reforms in higher education to focus on useful education would reduce the need for skilled immigration and reform of public benefits and wage controls (like allowing welfare recipients to do low paid work while keeping their benefits) would help to reduce the need for unskilled immigrants without hurting the young and the poor. Also, blaming the poorest people in America, the young and underprivileged minorities, of deliberately attacking unskilled illegal immigrants by applying for entry level jobs is a morally repugnant argument. Hiring a Venezuelan to work under the table so you can avoid hiring a black person for minimum wage is the kind of thing that both the left and right find offensive, albeit for not entirely overlapping reasons.
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  68. When my grandparents were young, a college degree was a strong proxy for either being a social or intellectual elite. The percentage of positions for the elites is not directly correlated with the number of people who get degrees. This forces the elites to get more and more advanced degrees to prove their status and compete for the limited number of elite jobs, while increasing the cost of credentialing for everybody. It's precisely inflation. By making university close to universal, you just guarantee that your barista and your delivery driver have taken on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and put off family formation for several more years. The university income premium is a prime example of why the average income, with its heavy weighting of outliers, is much less important than the median. University is only worth it for people who can complete a high value major and parley that study into work in the field they studied in, otherwise it's just a debt trap to keep you out of the middle class.
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  69. Once the government gains a certain level of money and power, the only way to avoid being chosen as a loser by that government is to offer it even more money and power, creating a downward spiral that eventually ends in the state choking out all freedom and economic activity. This is why you should not allow governments to seize emergency powers. Once the emergency is over, the tyrant finds a new excuse to make the emergency permanent. It's how Rome lost its republic, and it's been how America has been losing its republic.
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  70. Such a good topic. The accreditation system is pretty bad in the US. With few exceptions (i.e. STEM, Medical, or Law), you can't really make rational educational decisions based on value. I think the best system would be one in which the schools were judged based on how successful their average graduates were, that students and lenders had a good idea how much various majors were worth in terms of expected income, and where universities could only charge what people could afford. In other words, if you know that your premed is worth a lot of money because most of your graduates get into good med schools and make high incomes, you could afford to charge more for it and would thus put more of those resources into improving your premed program. If your communications department mostly just churned out minimum wage employees, lenders would not lend for it, students would not want it, and you would either have to improve your program or drop it to focus on what your school was good at. This way, low value programs would be picked up by schools whose specialty was low cost education, and high value programs would be kept by the schools that gave students the best financial prospects. This means that worthless programs would largely disappear because they cost borrowers money in the long run, low value programs would become cheaper because no big money will chase them, and high value programs would be more expensive but have the best access to loans which even poor students could pay back when they became rich tax payers.
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  71. As a person who lives in a city where 80% of jobs are in service and retail, I imagine a four-day workweek would have a similar effect to what increased the cost of labor through minimum wage increases have had, namely increasing automation and making employment opportunities more scarce for low skilled workers particularly for the young and minorities.
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  72. Sounds like any serious attempt at competitive chip development requires special economic zones.
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  73. The worst example of a permanently downtrodden people who were forever ruined by colonization from western empires is the primitive dwellers of the British Isles. They've been in shambles even since the Romans brutally colonized them, robbed their wealth, slaughtered their people, and largely destroyed their native culture. They couldn't turn it around, so why imagine that anybody since then could?
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  74. I think the book "The Dictator's Handbook" has the right of it. Essentially, a politician's real ideology is their own political survival. If they need the support of wide swaths of the people, and can easily be removed, they will do what the people want. If they need only a few influential supporters and are hard to remove, they rule exactly the same as any other tyrant, regardless of their stated party. Every ruler dreams of pulling up the ladder behind them to ensure perpetual power, and that is why their policies change when their circumstances change.
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  75. The fact that China has decided to prop up it's economy with debt fuled make work projects like money sink high speed rail that nobody can afford to use and massive housing projects in places nobody wants to live in a society where people have children way below the rate of replacement suggests that there is no plan for how to keep the economy from stalling out in the long term and it's not like Xi will allow the market to decide where to invest capital in order to ensure long term growth.
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  76. Kinda sounds like Venezuela is dependent on Biden's energy and trade policies to be economically viable.
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  77. When have you ever seen a green ask for proof that one of their policies has actually improved any of the metrics they claim to care about? These are the people who shut down regulated domestic hydrocarbon production and then beg countries with no environmental regulations to pick up the slack. These are the people shrugged when it came out that we sent most of our "recycling" to China because their container ships would otherwise return empty and China just burned the plastic, gave Chinese people cancer, and actually did more harm to the planet than if they had just left it in landfills. These are the people who grant licenses for wind turbine operators to kill endangered bald eagles. These are the people who will force the populations of cities whose power grid is primarily supplied by coal to buy electric cars in order to create coal-powered cars. Eliminating the world's most environmentally regulated natural gas production in order to force the world to burn more coal is par for the course for "environmentalists."
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  78. It's insane to me that the people who had been cursing NAFTA for decades for killing high-paying union jobs now suddenly have a problem with protectionism while the people who passed NAFTA, were the ones who killed it. When Trump is around, nobody seems to have a single political principle that supersedes support of or opposition to him.
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  79. Degrowth is a great recipe for depriving the rich countries of the wealth to develop cleaner technology, mass produce it, and innovate it till it's affordable; as well as to ensure that the poor cannot afford to think about the future. Degrowth is a "luxury belief" advocated by those who have already gotten theirs and who won't have to live or ever face somebody who will have to live with the consequences. If the elites really care about saving the planet, instead of jet-setting across the world to be seen in exclusive brands decrying the working poor, they should be investing their wealth into developing things like carbon capture technology, small modular nuclear power plants, hydrogen power, and better battery storage technology to improve the viability of wind and solar power so they don't need coal or natural gas backup plants.
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  80. Imagine if we had solved the problem of acid rain by making more people die in poverty, instead of using wealth and innovation to fix the problem. Same thing with the hole in the ozone layer. Fewer people using CFCs forever is not a viable replacement for replacing CFCs with safer refrigerants.
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  81. Let's make it cheap and easy to build low income housing, said no politician or their constituency ever.
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  82. I've read reports suggesting that the problem for China with their African investments is that many of the loans come from provincial level bureaucrats looking to make a quick buck, rather than the central planners in Beijing, so there is no overarching plan just lots of corruption, palm, greasing, and lies about results. According to those reports, the reason why the investment is tapering off is that Xi cottoned on to how much money was being quietly lost and started cracking down on his corrupt government officials who were making the malinvestments.
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  83. The day I see a politician agree to accept even the same amount of money tomorrow for his personal pet projects as he got today, I will be ducking my head for incoming airborne swine.
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