At this point what they learn in business schools is the full bestiary of legal and illegal tricks and scams you can use to extract money from us cattle and contribute as little as possible to the upkeep :(

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Maybe it will get worse in the future, but what resources do immigrants require? They don’t need nannies or childcare or schooling…they just work, consume and pay taxes like everyone else. Has this ever been a problem for the US? Up to the 1930s, the US had an immigration of over 11% of population, the same as it’s been since the 2000s. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time

I won’t even mention the EU, we’re in demographic suicide here because raising kids people until they have a job and a house and stability is fucking expensive xP

Ok, fine, I hadn’t considered that and it’s a factor. None of the demographically declining countries like Italy, Japan, Portugal is doing great in terms of growth…but they don’t have deflation either. You also have the productivity growth factor into account with automation (meaning each citizen produces more but also uses more resources)

Sure, any economy can experience deflation if you have more goods chasing the same amount of currency, but the point is that most economies usually print money, that causes inflation (moderately that mimics around 2% (approx. linear resource growth) and 4% (rent extraction). Interest rates influence market behaviour that causes inflation but do not determine inflation.

Probably a typo, but currency is *inflationary, cryptocurrency is *deflationary, that’s why it’s not for spending “now” (e.g. hodlbros)

Why are you replying here? I’m talking to you upstairs. Chill out.

Sometimes it is, but even when it isn’t, “taste” by itself is not by itself what is making people stopping themselves from an adequate vehicle.

This is what I was originally replying to and I think it’s nonsense (regardless of how “refined” your taste is):

Well if Mercedes and BMW could stop making electric cars as ugly as humanly possible we would quickly see them take that market back.

Yes, I’m one of those people who wouldn’t mind living in Zion, eating nutritious slop and wearing unremarkable homemade textiles ;)

PS: but I understand many people need to brag to their friends or impress their clients or make themselves feel better by displaying their status in some material way.

I just don’t see any huge aesthetic differences between any of the cars for sale that would singlehandedly stop e.g. German electric cars from being sold: they all look like sleek solutions to a conditioned aerodynamics problem :D

Haha, yea, the only heresy greater than owning an ugly efficient car these days is riding a bus 😧, it seems.

Ugly? Why do people fetishize their cars? I want it to work efficiently, be safe and cheap to maintain…if it looks like a gherkin, so be it 😄 The problem with German electric cars is not that, it’s that atm they can’t compete with China in price and they have no tech edge in supply chains anymore. Also, newer generations in Europe aren’t as obsessed with owning a car anymore (I think).

No more cheap russian gas and oil, internal combustion engine expertise and all the associated pieces and submarkets being phased out in favour of simpler electric cars…it’s going to be a few hard years until they find a new export industry to perfect. I’d expect hydrogen-based aviation or pharma, maybe even semiconductors, they’ll figure it out.

I found e.g.

https://jezebel.com/this-is-the-pornographic-anne-frank-excerpt-thats-causi-484571352

and

https://www.dw.com/en/secret-pages-in-anne-franks-diary-reveal-her-reflections-on-sex/a-43803106

🙄 throw away a good teacher for this…if Ann was the same age as the class, it’s probably the stuff people their age gossip about anyway.

the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia.

I don’t remember reading anything about male and female genitalia in Ann Frank’s diary…😕

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The term tankie has been vulgarized, but it has a specific meaning. A tankie is an orthodox communist who puts the “dictatorship of proletariat” above any morality or any other interest, foreign or domestic. That’s how a tankie brushes away any genocide, any crime, because no value or entity is too important to stand in the way of their communist utopia, even human rights. In this sense, this group is very close in practice to nazis, you just have to replace “proletariat” with “nation” and for that abstraction anything is allowed: internal repression, invading your neighbours and allies.

But not all “communists”/socialists are like that and many mean well (e.g. Gorbachev, some anarchists like Chomsky or “democratic-communist” Lula, etc), but a good few follow tankies unquestioningly without realising the underlying inhumanity dressed as theory.

Eh, but you have examples of long-term problems created by each president: you had Clinton’s half-baked Eastern European legacy, Bush II’s middle east legacy that lasted a while, Trump’s completely polarised political landscape. I’m not sure what Obama’s main fuckup was, but there were many small neglects (maybe the main one was how he handled the 2008 crisis that Bush II left him)…the more influence you have as a country and as a person, the more shit falls on your plate to deal with :/

In fairness, these are huge problems that he inherited, but that’s what you get when you wanna become leader of any country, even more if you wanna act like an emperor.

Xi vented his frustration, pointing fingers at his three predecessors – Deng Xiaoping, Jiang and Hu.

“All the issues that were left by the previous three leaders are on my shoulders” he is believed to have said. “I’ve spent the last decade tackling them but they remain unresolved. Am I to blame?”

So Deng left the one-child policy, Jiang left financialization/inequality and Hu left the housing bubble?

If you can hardly feed and house yourself … you can’t afford to woo a wife or raise a kid :/ but that won’t stop some people trying to half-ass it I guess