Reply With QuoteYeah! Fucking LIBZ and their outrage!!!Originally Posted by RippedPhreak
Totally! Until teh libz made her ditch the sexy pumps and wear sensible flats instead. Now she looks like a librarian. A hot, Rubenesque, green librarian.
Damn it. These grievance-culture wars are giving me a headache and a hardon.
Yeah! Fucking LIBZ and their outrage!!!
The Germans are nice enough not to keep rubbing the Holocaust in your faces. They don't have two national holidays to celebrate the start of the Third Reich. They didn't grow up running around with toy guns playing shoot the Jews. They don't dress up as Rabbis for fun on Halloween. They didn't make movies and TV shows glorifying it. That's the kind of stuff we do to the decedents of the native nations we wiped out. We should know better, but we're assholes.
For some real political correctness:
Police charge director of Miss Nicaragua pageant with running ‘beauty queen coup’ plot
Every group that identifies as a group, has a culture but that doesn't make those cultures interchangeable or historically equivalent. Everyone has an asshole too, but don't borrow someone else's to take a dump, especially on a third party.Culture belongs to everyone.
Denmark outlaws burning the Quran
Offenders now face a fine or up to two years in jail after a 94-77 vote.
It follows a series of burnings of Islam's holy book that led to uproar in Muslim countries.
Denmark and neighbouring Sweden have recently seen a number of street protests over such incidents, raising security concerns in Scandinavia.
....
Back in August, when the government was proposing the changes, ministers said they wanted to send a signal to the world after witnessing over a few weeks 170 demonstrations, including Quran burnings in front of foreign embassies.
At the time, Denmark's PET intelligence service warned that such incidents had increased the terrorist threat.
Sweden has also seen a series of Quran burnings, and its security service has warned of a worsening security situation. In July, the Swedish embassy in Iraq was set alight by protesters.
Well that was a spineless pussout on their values.
Liberal democracies always bow to the most violent mob. What is the lesson for far-right folks here then...?
Hitler. Oh you mean just this incident? Ask them about bible burning being not banned?
Basically:
"We're facing threats from violent far right religious extremists. Let's cater to their wants, instead of fighting them".
What a world we live in.
I love the last line of that BBC article: "Both Denmark and Sweden have abolished blasphemy laws."
Yep, and now they're imposing new ones.
Video on Milei's economic policies for Argentina
The focus on inflation, and the idea of abolishing the central bank to end it, got me thinking that this is clearly treating the symptoms and not the core issue.
Why is there inflation? It's because there's more money supply compared to the goods that the money can buy.
This imbalance fundamentally isn't because they're "printing too much money" but because the economy consumes more value of goods than are produced.
And the way that inflation deals with that, is that inflation devalues previous work, compared to current work. So if you made money mowing a lawn 1 year ago, that money is devalued, in favor of someone who's going to mow a lawn tomorrow.
So fundamentally, it's about resource allocation, and by favoring current work over old work, it maintains the level of employment.
So yeah, inflation sucks. But look what happens when you try and ban inflation. That's actually what happened in Soviet Russia. They put price-controls in place in the 1970s to deal with rising inflation, and that lead to the famous empty shelves in stores, and a growing black market (the true value of good was higher than the store ruble-value). it was after that, that the Soviets felt the need to limit how much each person could buy. That's when you got the long queues.
If you look at the 2020 "toilet paper crisis" it's the same deal. Stores didn't want to be seen as profit-gouging on something like toilet paper, so they didn't put the price up, despite the massive rush to buy it. So for weeks in some places, you literally couldn't buy toilet paper. People panicked further and started hoarding toilet paper. It was then that stores started implementing limits on how much a person could buy. There ended up being empty shelves and even queues. The same as the footage from Russia.
Venezuela: again, the same thing, trying to "outlaw" inflation ends up with empty shelves and rationing, because if there's more demand than supply but you won't let the price rise, then you need SOME mechanism to decide who gets what.
Inflation sucks, sure, but it's a corrective mechanism, not the root problem.
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Back to Argentina, by trying to end the inflation through dollarization, they'd be (relatively) prioritizing people who have saved money, i.e. did work previously, over people who are doing work NOW. There won't be any more actual goods and services to go around, but the value of consumed goods and services will shift to retirees and the wealthy from people who are actively employed.
Models that can be look at, for how this would play out are Greece (who switched to the Euro) and Ecuador (who switched to the dollar).
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10...031-34256-1_41
Basically, because Dollarization would prioritize "old" labor over "new" labor, there would need to be pay cuts all round. Inflation in fact helps deal with the trade imbalance Argentina has, an actual underlying problem, since it means "old" labor/money is not competing in the marketplace to buy the new goods.Dollarization generates cyclical growth periods in Ecuador and high volatility in GDP variation rates. As for the trade balance, the analyzed results show that the country’s international economic relations require encouraging national exports with the intention of achieving a favorable balance of the trade balance for the country.
So without the relative devaluation of previous labor, which is what inflation represents, then the real amount of everything that is consumed needs to drop, to align with the value of exports, or they need to boost exports. Both those things would be achieved by paycuts (in the real value of the paycheck) and sacking workers.
In the immediate term, that could look like companies merely letting people go because now they have to pay in dollars, and they just don't have any dollars to pay with, so they jettison as many employees as possible to strip down to bare-bones operations, while cutting wages for anyone who's left.
Last edited by Cipheron; 10th Dec 2023 at 12:36.
I guess we should expect huge public sector job losses, a recession, a whole lot of protesting, and then he'll be booted out like Bolsonaro. As I understand it, most people's savings are valued in dollars and it's SOP to convert your pesos as soon as you can. A lot of the economy was already dollarized, especially the black market. So the currency change might not be felt as hard as the layoffs.
Iowa Republicans who supported the state's Republican-pushed school voucher program stunned when their kid's school immediately raises tuition prices by about the same value of the vouchers.
https://www.kcrg.com/2023/12/07/iowa...ion-increases/
That's literally how supply and demand works. That money is coming out of your taxes, too.
EDIT
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/11/t...unt/index.html
What a selection of upstanding members of the community. Musk is clearly leaning in to just hanging with controversial idiots now to try and drum up traffic on Twitter. It's more sad that worrying. Laura Loomer, ffs.Musk on Sunday also elevated [Alex] Jones’ newly restored profile, which had 1.6 million followers as of Monday, by engaging with him in a live streamed interview on X. They were joined by Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynistic internet personality who earlier this year was indicted on human trafficking and rape charges in Romania although he denies the claims, far-right conspiracy theorist [b]Jack Posobiec[b], “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Last edited by Cipheron; 12th Dec 2023 at 14:23.
Cripes.For the 2023-2024 school year, tuition before vouchers or any other discounts at Summit is $8,090. In the 2024-2025 school year, the cost will be $14,350.
Russia tries out AI to solve a murder case. It went as well as you'd expect
Russian hydrologist Alexander Tsvetkov was detained in February 2023, after an AI system determined that his face was a 55% match to the sketch of a murderer drawn 20 years ago by a witness.
Alexander Tsvetkov, a scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Inland Water Biology, has been living a nightmare for the past 10 months. He was removed from an airplane in February, following a work trip to Krasnoyarsk, and informed that he had been identified as the author of a series of murders over 20 years ago. Investigators claimed that he and his alleged accomplice killed at least two people in Moscow and the Moscow region in August 2002, ignoring the testimonies of multiple scientists that Tsvetkov had been with them at the time of the murders. The state’s smoking gun? An AI-powered system that found a 55% match between Tsvetkov and a sketch drawn by a witness over two decades ago…
...
According to several news sources, despite the mountain of evidence exonerating Tsvetkov in this murder case, Russian authorities chose to trust software powered by artificial intelligence. It had found that the hydrologist’s appearance matched that of the wanted killer about 55%, which was apparently enough to warrant his imprisonment
The 'Libertarian' mask slips already:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...cy-devaluation
‘Prison or bullet’: new Argentina government promises harsh response to protest
...
Human rights groups and opposition legislators expressed concern at the rules which they said would essentially criminalise legitimate protests.
“Under the promise of order [the government] seeks to suppress public protest against the effects of official measures,” said the Centre of Legal Studies (CELS) in a statement. “The measures attack the right to protest and criminalize those who demonstrate and persecute social and political organizations.”
José Luis Espert, a legislator with Milei’s party, Liberty Advances, replied with a three-word phrase: “Prison or bullet.”
...
“Bullrich announced that the government will punish the participation of girls, boys and adolescents in the protests. In this way, it criminalizes mothers and fathers who demand better conditions for their families and excludes those in charge of their care,” said the CELS in its statement.
Television newscaster Mario Massaccesi of the TN news channel recalled that Bullrich herself blockaded downtown streets in Buenos Aires when protesting against Covid lockdowns. “What authority does she have now to tell others they can’t protest?” asked the newscaster.
Protests are expected in response to the massive wage cuts and transport and tariff hikes announced as part of Milei’s “chainsaw” economic programme.
Well, that was no surprise at all. Politicians claiming to be libertarian are all turning out to be phonies, pretty much without exception. True libertarians don't want to govern others, and don't believe that most problems are solved by government, so they tend not to be interested in office. Another hard lesson from the last few years is that the politicians that talk the most about freedom are often the most eager to take some away.
Leftist "protests" are done to punish the people for voting non-Leftists into office. Basically, "you voted against us, so now you get to deal with mobs of assholes blocking the roads, throwing molotovs into buildings and so forth for the next few years." It's a threat against the normal people. Vote the Left back into power and the pain ends (until they want something more).
These protests are not genuine but astroturfed bullshit. The Left can't handle being out of power so they throw tantrums in the streets. Milei’s administration would be justified in shutting them down hard.
Shoo. You're posting in the wrong thread.
Last edited by Anarchic Fox; 18th Dec 2023 at 22:19.
Take your own advice.
Currency devaluation was unavoidable and Argentinians seem to understand that. The issue is combining a contracting money supply with shrinking government at the same time, instead of using monetary and fiscal policy in complementary ways. If Milei really does what he said he's going to do and ends up with 25% unemployment, what do you expect all those unemployed people do with their free time?
Instead of merely keeping chairs warm in government offices, maybe they could do some work that actually generates economic value.
People can't generate economic value if they can't find a job or start a business.
It's a little early to just blanket declare that Milei's changes will render Argentinians unable to start businesses or find jobs. I mean at least give it a year.
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