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[Max™]

Apparently the trumposphere response is it was to "prevent leaks," because, you know, it's not like people need to know who their boss is.

LONG LIVE THE NEW  BOSS!

Privatization and free trade aren't the answer - that's how you asset strip a place. Places that were made to do that by IMF aren't actually in good shape now.

Rich nations actually have high government spending. All rich nations. Sure, some made a lot of money through exports but you'll find the successful nations of that type had heavy government intervention.

The only exceptions to that are some tax havens / one-city trading ports and the like, but they really skim off nearby much larger nations while avoiding the costs of having a large population to take care of.

But you want to trick poor nations by force into lowering their spending and slashing taxes. It's a case of "do as we say, not as we do".

Poor nations are generally poor because of post-colonialism.  The west, the first world, the developed world, whatever you want to call it, we had over a hundred years refining resources.  The rest of the world spent half that time only harvesting, not refining.  Two fundamentally different cases.  Remember, most former colonies have only been free since 100 years ago, many with WW2.  Sort this list by date for your reference (note that includes both colonies and not colonies).  What works for us is fundamentally irrelevant.  Hell, what worked for us when we were still developing industry is also irrelevant, do to the changing nature of globalism.

Remember, a lot of former colonies struggle to even raise taxes or recruit trustworthy ministers because their people don't have nationalistic sentiments yet.  Many of them consist of competing ethnic groups, in some cases with a minority put in power over a majority, or several other majorities.  Many struggle with under 50% literacy rates.  You just can't compare that to the US on any meaningful level.

As for the idea we should intentionally make governments poorer so they can't fund terrorists... yeah.  I'm sure a bunch of failed states with weak militaries will be such a blow to Al Queda  .  We can see this again and again in history, a weak government is prey for NGOs.

Don't get me wrong, I have no idea what the path is for, say, Rwanda to become a wealthy developed nation.  Its an open issue, what works will probably be decided by historians in a hundred years.  But I must say, "lol steal oil for their own good" is certainly one I've never heard before.

I was gonna say this, as nobody had specifically pointed it out, but eyyyy, you got it for me.

Though it isn't quite that cut and dry either.

[Neonivek]

Quite a bit of people believe that the UN should be demolished and rebuilt...

Ask these people about precisely what the propose be done with the replacement, and you'll see why it fails.

They don't want anything in particular

They just want the UN except better.

[chaoticag]

But better at what? Typically, it sounds like these people have one job in mind when in reality, the UN has several functions that are key to maintaining world stability not just through diplomatic means but also through it's various organizations such as the WHO. I don't think it's enough to say that we should break down the UN to make an even better UN without first examining what these people think the function of the UN should be and how it would be better while addressing what would be lost.

[Reelya]

I think rural areas are in fact analogous to third world economies actually. Both are effectively resource-extraction based economies and they have some similar issues, e.g. non-investment and ending up with lots of people becoming economically dependent on aid. They also have other similar issues: agribusiness conglomerates replacing independent farms in one case, and multinational resource extraction companies in the other. And the fact that both seem to elect leaders who are idiots.

That's really why government spending is what makes the difference. Government spending ensures liquidity in the local market, thus prevents you from becoming just an export economy with a low level of local consumption. e.g. take food stamps away from e.g. Kentucky. Do you really think that's going to cause a boom in Kentucky as people realize they should be working harder. Working harder doing what? Especially since at that point you've uncreated a lot of jobs that existed in feeding people. Farm profits don't stay in Kentucky, that's the basic issue here. When there's no money flowing in the economy things stop happening. The problem is that this won't revitalize Kentucky, it will just cause people to leave faster.

Consider that the US economy does about 15 trillion in trade a year, then consider that the federal government spends about 3 trillion of that. If you stop spending that, then the economy contracts quite a lot. People might say "ah but the tax savings will allow people to spend more" but it really doesn't work like that. The lost liquidity will in fact put a downward pressure on both prices and wages, as will the reduced bargaining power because of not having the option of welfare at all. While the saved money will just be vacuumed up by the savings accounts of the 1%. I'd argue that a closed fiat-currency economy without cash redistribution to the bottom of the hierarchy isn't actually stable, because more money inevitably ends up in the bank accounts of the rich, and it has to come from somewhere.

That's also why a minimum wage is a really good idea. Any commodity standard such as the gold standard is flawed because gold is finite and doesn't necessarily scale with the number of people. If gold was the standard then eventually wealthy people have all the gold and all the power, because if your wealth = gold then you want to minimize the amount of new gold that's mined so that you "get richer for free". But a minimum wage pegs the value of money to time which is something that increases linearly with population, and nobody can corner the market in time.

[PTTG??]

While I agree, it's too close to the end game. When full automation happens in the next decade or two, wages won't matter.

[smjjames]

Probably not 'full' automation, there are lots of things that AI isn't able to handle and likely won't for some time, mainly things involving direct human interaction.

And of course, there will be the jobs created by it and it's also likely that automation won't replace all jobs, but rather it'll enhance some jobs.

Either way, it's going to be a crisis, societal, political, and economical, since we're transitioning into a stage that we've never been to before. And it's happening fast.

[PTTG??]

Paywalled source

Broadly, Trump's forecasting 3.5% growth, which is way above the biggest growth forecasts by professionals. The failure to achieve these goals will be attributed to "enemies of the people" such as democrats and the media.

In other news, fully legalizing marriage was correlated with a 7% average drop in suicide attempts by high school students, and twice that decrease for gay and lesbian students in particular. For this conversation, I'm going to assume that it's a causative link.

Pursuant to full consideration of relative hazard, let's take a quick look at the figures. Wikipedia states that there were over 5,000 teenage suicides in the United States in 2014. The 2015 nationwide adoption of full marriage rights has saved, roughly, 700 lives among teenagers over the past two years, and prevented a larger number of attempted suicides, which is itself good.

That means that despite massive strides, there is more than one 9/11-level death from suicide among teenagers alone in the USA. Annual deaths attributable to all kinds of terrorism in the USA remain at sub-cow levels. Hell, solar power kills more people than terrorism of all types.

So I guess this is a reminder that whenever someone tells you they're trying to stop terrorism (unless they're continuing an existing program), what they're actually saying is that they want to use terrorism to get you do do something for them.

[Telgin]

Hell, solar power kills more people than terrorism of all types.

Oh, goody, another reason to hate and try to block clean power sources!

In all seriousness though, I've been shown memes about how the U.S. doesn't have a gun problem because guns had killed so few people compared to other things.  If I ever see that again I'll be responding that we don't have a terrorism problem either.

[PTTG??]

Also, legalizing gay marriage saved more lives than everything trump could possibly do to prevent terrorism.

EDIT: Honestly if that's what it takes I'm willing to give up on gun control. Or possibly just make it a municipal issue. Going to the city? Leave your six-shooters behind. Going to the country? Why not try firing a bazooka down at the gun range? Gun rights can be the olive branch the liberals offer to the conservatives.

[sluissa]

If people are committing suicide over a marriage certificate, that's indicative of a deeper psychological problem that I assume will spring up later, possibly in worse and more violent ways.

I'm not saying it's a good thing to limit gay marriage to weed these people out... but...


(See how easy it is to use assumption logic to lead to your own ends?)

[Neonivek]

Hey why isn't America metric yet?

[Sergarr]

Well someone is sure feeling under pressure: Trump's lawyer has told 4 different stories about the Russia-Ukraine 'peace plan' debacle.

For people who haven't paid attention, it's a "peace plan" of the "Munich agreement" kind of variety, i.e. Russia coups Ukraine via a corruption scandal, puts an extremely pro-Russian President in power, who makes a Ukrainian referendum on whenever to lease Crimea to Russia for 50 years or for 100 years "in exchange" for Russian removing its troops from Eastern Ukraine, basically making Russian takeover legal and eliminating the technical reason for sanctions, which makes it easy to remove sanctions themselves to enable mutually beneficial (for Russia and Trump administration) deals a la Tillerson's oil deal.

It's kind of a clever little plan, unfortunately it seems the Trump side has screwed up the OPSEC and it has been revealed by pesky New York Times journalists a while ago.

[Max™]

Hey why isn't America metric yet?

I am, it's 16 C on the other side of the window which is a bit under 3 meters away, and I'm typing this with keys that are right about 1 cm²!

If people are committing suicide over a marriage certificate, that's indicative of a deeper psychological problem that I assume will spring up later, possibly in worse and more violent ways.

I'm not saying it's a good thing to limit gay marriage to weed these people out... but...


(See how easy it is to use assumption logic to lead to your own ends?)

Also I think the first problem of the assumption logic hypothetical argument is the whole "you're literally being told that you aren't entitled to everything everybody else is, because other people have decided to ride a bandwagon based on their being something wrong with you and who you love" counterpoint, as I think that is a far more reasonable explanation for there being a correlation between suicide rates and gay marriage bans.

Dealing with that while you're in the middle of the "who am I as a person, what am I going to be, why do people keep telling me it's wrong that I can't stop thinking about Tony next door and how much he looks like a young David Tennant?" stages doesn't sound like something I'd want to go through, much less my kid, or even just some random kid I don't even know, just saying: Tennant is gorgeous.

Wait, is that what I was saying? What?

[TheBiggerFish]

Hey why isn't America metric yet?

Behind the scenes the government uses it.  People like feet though.

[martinuzz]

Well someone is sure feeling under pressure: Trump's lawyer has told 4 different stories about the Russia-Ukraine 'peace plan' debacle.

For people who haven't paid attention, it's a "peace plan" of the "Munich agreement" kind of variety, i.e. Russia coups Ukraine via a corruption scandal, puts an extremely pro-Russian President in power, who makes a Ukrainian referendum on whenever to lease Crimea to Russia for 50 years or for 100 years "in exchange" for Russian removing its troops from Eastern Ukraine, basically making Russian takeover legal and eliminating the technical reason for sanctions, which makes it easy to remove sanctions themselves to enable mutually beneficial (for Russia and Trump administration) deals a la Tillerson's oil deal.

It's kind of a clever little plan, unfortunately it seems the Trump side has screwed up the OPSEC and it has been revealed by pesky New York Times journalists a while ago.

If Trump really plans to go along with a corruption scandal coup, it will create a major international incident, and likely a breach of relations between the West and the US.
I do assume however the good people of the US will impeach him before it comes to that.