sp3ctr4l

I appreciate the praise and sympathy both, hah!

Yeah its... well, in one way, its very, very tragic and sad, essentially just in my lifetime, the US has gone from 'sole world superpower' to 'absolute laughingstock / basket case', to see the massive amount of unnecessary harm this does to ourselves, and to others.

Once upon a time, a patriot was defined by love of one's country, one's countrymen, a broad sense of collective empathy and desire to see the maximum good for the maximum number of them.

But this is no longer the case, now 'patriotism' is, to many, either a dirty word, or a jingoist and fanatical cult that worships at the altar of the God Emperor, who sits senile and deranged atop the throne of a long dead sense of American superiority, doing and believing whatever the mad king says in a vain hope that this will somehow re-manifest a mythical, falsely remembered past 'greatness'.

But, in another way, it is fucking infuriating to people like myself, and many others of apparently uncommon intelligence / insight (for an American), who have been describing the bad trends, outlining how to fix them, then screaming that they need to be fixed soon or essentially all will be lost...

Only to be broadly gaslit and patted on the head and told 'dont worry, its not that bad, you are catastrophizing!' by most of society... as all our worst fears just objectively are occuring in realtime.

People did not realize Carlin was not joking when he said that line, they did not take him seriously enough.

... Its... its like being in a car with an overconfident, drunk or high driver and other passengers.

You ask them to slow down, to be more careful, to stop, let me out, and their responses are braggadocious, then angry, then the car crashes, and they blame you for 'distracting' them.

To give you a non American cultural reference: I agree with David Bowie, I too am afraid of Americans.

'Bogey Actual'

A goddamned armored golf cart.

That sets a new personal record of my 'most out of touch, elitist thing someone can have or do'.

...

Well, Scotland basically did invent sniping, so it does make sense that a man with a ~~tiny penis~~ fragile ego, who's been targeted by at least two snipers, would want some protection on a series of giant, open fields...

... at least it isn't painted gold.

smdh

A true model citizen.

Don't forget secured cards, which require an upfront deposit, and cards with regular monthly or annual fees, simply for having them, regardless of whether you use them or not.

Thats the kind of credit cards you get offered if you are bad with credit cards (cough most Americans are cough thats kinda the whole business model cough), or, if someone steals your identity and you either don't have enough time or money or otherwise can't sufficiently prove to credit reporting agencies / banks that that is what happened.

Debit cards typically have PIN numbers.

I know these can be defeated in various ways, but its not usually as simple as, just steal someone's card.

Also, you can just go to your bank or credit union, call them, report online or w/e: Hey, my card got stolen, these txns are fraud.

Might not be as streamlined or as fast as a payment challenge with a credit card, but its not that much worse.

If you're gonna pick a cryptocurrency, go with the one that actually keeps your identity encrypted, and is intentionally designed to make it unfeasible to farm with a huge crypto mining operation:

Monero.

Didn't he already like, steal a bunch of credit cards by breaking into cars?

"Mmm, munch, mmm, I love this popcorn!"

Economics is closer to theology than physics as an intellectual discipline. Its power is proportional to the belief it commands.

Person with degree in Econ here:

Ah, yep. This is correct.

Our theologies tend to have more numbers than most religions, but most economic 'schools of thought' pretty much are just warring religious sects, the dynamics are quite similar.

That being said, I am speaking of the kinds of 'economics' the vast majority of people will ever hear about, due to how at least in the US, we mostly only popularize and give media time to what Academic Economists largely consider to be idiot crank fraud propogandists.

There are some actually good modern Academic Economists who you'll hear from or about, from time to time, and they often are highly respected and credible because they have the capacity to consider the varying ideological/religious flavors of economic sects, and pick the parts of each of them that seem to actually be well evidenced, and make functional/causal sense, without discontinuity or contradiction.

Like uh, I myself can tell you that I find a lot of Marxist economics to be compelling and accurate, but, some of its proposed exact ideas on how prices and pricing work... are problematic.

Conversely, while I find the vast majority of Austrian economics to be voodoo bullshit, I do think they have at least a core framework of how to approach some dynamics in monetary policies that actually do track with reality better than most other economic 'schools', such as MMT.

What I mean is that they tend to pay way, way more attention to the different uh, levels, or kinds of money, and how they circulate around and interact with things like bond markets and interest rates, and from this you can get a more holistic picture of the actual state and behavior of monetary and financial systems... whereas a lot of other economists just hsnd wave away that complexity, and then come up with more ad hoc explanations for things that a sort of Austrian-derived monetary view can give you some useful predictive indicators from.

And, just to clarify, I am not an academic myself, just got to a specialization in econometrics and then went to work as a data analyst / 'scientist'.

(I always found the job description of 'data scientisr' to be largely a misnomer, we're basically just a flavor of statisticians? but sure, we are a scientist because boomers think knowing how to do stats on a computer is 'science'? like we are... discovering new truths about the world????)

I'd say if you want a crash course in some non bullshit modern economics, check out uh, Richard Wolfe, Joseph Stiglitz, Yannis Varoufakis, Robert Reich.

Also, check out Paul Samuelson, who in his time did actuslly strongly push for using more robust and complex math (for economists, anyway) by borrowing from physics.

Oh right and we cannot forget the Beautiful Mind himself, John Nash, who also did a lot of serious, basically genius level math, and more or less made Game Theory into a massively useful and applicable framework for evaluating how and why agents make which choices in basically any definable scenario.

Really, he is a mathematician, not primarily an economist, but I at least find Game Theory to be a fundamentally necesarry tool in any serious economist's toolkit, and Nash did win an Economics Nobel.

How could they plan this without Starbucks and Microsoft Teams?!

Imagine the scale of the HR department alone.

I realize this is a joke, and it did elicit a good chuckle from me, but I have two technical sort of nit picks / factoids.

As I understand these things:

To the vast majority of Catholics, the Pope is not literally a god-king, who becomes basically a minor god oh his physical death, or just literally is onenof the greater gods made incarate... the Pope is God's chosen representative on Earth, sort of like a more formalized version of many Old Testament prophets, who also leads God's church.

Also... the Amish, the Mennonites... they very much do have as part of their culture, which very much revolves around religion... that you more or less are a expected to, and by this cement that you are a good person of faith and character, that you help others by participating, often regularly, in work-gangs, to stand up at least the basics of barn or house, in what is a shockingly short amount of time, and done in a very high quality manner, with less technologically advanced tools than what is normal for others.

Seriously, if you've never seen this, go look up something like Amish Barn Raising on youtube.

They start with basically just raw materials, assemble large parts of the framing, stand em up with just ropes, set up and join the whole thing, get the outer walls and roof on and doors on, in under a a single work day.