I like it.

Not everything empire does is evil of course but the main takeaway to what Trump is doing is liberals crying about losing that empire and I have the smallest violin to play because US was not behaving responsibly in that role. In my country that US influence can be seen via US media selecting their chosen neoliberal party and going hard with supporting them, with ruinous results as expected. Too bad it’s done mostly via WB Discovery (USAID too but to a lesser extent) so that’s going to continue for the foreseeable future.

That’s one part of the equation. The other is that for a currency to be viable for global trade you have to kill your domestic production, British Empire did something similar around 1840 (although it was agriculture then). There may yet be some unexpected benefits to US downscaling from a global power to a regional one. Whomever steps up to take this role will face similar dilemmas and compromises that those empires had to.

Dunno, the most prosperous time for the US was when it was manufacturing things. Probably has something to do with 90% tax rate on the wealthiest though too. Either way, neoliberalism taught people that they can only count on themselves so if some people voted against status quo it could have been that things weren’t that good for them.

Sure, just saying that it’s not black and white. Economics and fiscal policy have been drenched in political ideologies but they’re just tools. Some people might think that if they had well paying manufacturing jobs they’d be afford to buy that expensive domestically produced stuff. American fiscal policy since the 70s has thrown people in manufacturing under the bus (under the guidance of both parties) so it’s natural there’d be some knee-jerk reaction in form of Trump eventually.

That’s the thing though–if they can create more at any time, why bother “borrowing” in the first place?

Tying up economies of debt issuer and debt holder seems to be the reason for the US. For debt holder it’s a fairly safe way to park money but also exert some power over US if they’re big enough. Realistically what Ben Bernake is saying in that interview is that you could replace one with the other depending on circumstances but that actually threatens capital holders hence why it’s not done like that.

Deflating USD internationally is good for exports though and that seems to be in line with what Trump is promising, no?

United States doesn’t buy USD using Euro, they do it with adding account balances on computers.

Borrowing in an asset that you create at any desired amount (and allowed private entities to do so as well) seems fairly safe. Sleep safe, United Statians.

YouTube

In a society / country that’s wealthy that’s likely to be true. In a society / country that’s poor it’s likely that more are looking out for themselves only and that makes for shitty people regardless of status.

This is kind of important - I commonly see that people want to fight bigotry head-on rather than addressing what caused people to be bigoted in the first place, for example.

Fediverse does everything I require out of social media. Functionality of threadiverse is mostly there and getting better (Piefed will probably replace Lemmy as the go-to eventually), apps are better. Mastodon / microblogging was always good enough for communicating with real people, it’s when you’re an influencer you run into limitations but who cares about that. Maybe there aren’t that many people that are into this and that’s okay because we’re not a corporation that needs to report quarterly growth forever.

If being poor was a choice then maybe but there are scientific studies that show that adverse environment is likely to cause dark personality traits to emerge in people.

This is good for bitcoin.

This is good for bitcoin.

I no longer believe you can make crowds move just with propaganda without serious underlying issues affecting societies as a whole. CIA probably helped it, China probably did something similar. Both are pretty crappy in terms of civil liberties so I don’t have favourites.

Uh, HK protests weren’t that peaceful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactics_and_methods_surrounding_the_2019–2020_Hong_Kong_protests

The true lesson is that a protests won’t amount to much if you expect elites to step down on their own.

I use an iPhone and a Mac but I assume Android as a more open platform has even more of those.

„That might not be entirely accurate”.

Like those?

https://reederapp.com/

https://usetapestry.com/