bobalot @ sirboozebum @lemmy.world

Refugee fleeing the shittiness of reddit

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453

Joined

2 yr. ago

Windows 3.1 was the first one my family had.

Why back up fantastic claims when you can just circlejerk on Lemmy?

Have you always been an insufferable wanker?

I thought I was going to be rickrolled but this is better.

I pay $79 AUD for 250Mb download / 20Mb upload.

This makes so much sense.

I always thought, surely their higher ups must know this is utter garbage?

They do but it's just to scam investors.

I didn't miss that.

But I do miss the content, structure and vastness of the old internet.

Now it has been turned into a strip mall dominated by Facebook, Google, etc. and enshittenification.

This really applies to all industries.

Boeing used to put time, effort and care into building good planes. They stopped doing that, things went to shit and people died.

Airbus didn't go down the Boeing route and are doing a lot better.

Sail the high seas.

I really miss the early internet.

Similar age here.

Not into social media and Reddit now sucks.

Gaming "journalism" was always mostly crap.

Even in 1990s and 00s.

Sherman did nothing wrong.

Ok, I'll bite.

Why are weddings stupid?

This was the UK electorate with Boris Johnson.

It takes an absolute economic shitshow for people to stop wanting "change" and wanting simple good governance.

I know.

I asked if there were sources on his improvement of social services?

I know the Nazis did cut back on Weimar Republic era house building subsidies.

The common claim is they improved the economy, which I addressed above.

I'm not sure how true that is in terms of housing, healthcare, etc. Do you have any sources?

He did claim to have ended the Great Depression in Germany. While people have pointed to projects like the Autobahn, these projects only had a modest effect on unemployment.

What really brought down unemployment was massive deficit spending on expanding the army / rearmament and combined with conscription.

In addition, women, Jews, etc. were forced out of the workforce.

The problem was this was unsustainable. Nazi Germany began WW2 with a debt to GDP ratio greater than what the USA ended the war with.

It narrowly avoided a balance of payments crisis in 1934.

If it hadn't invaded much of Europe and looted it's wealth, the economy would have collapsed.

Source: Wages of Destruction: The making and breaking of the Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze.

There may not be any need for that.

The United States, China, etc. all have trade policies that are fundamentally unsustainable and result in persistent trade imbalances.

This causes all sorts of poor economic outcomes for large sectors of those countries. For example, an anaemic household sector in China and over investments in housing, huge private and public sector deficits in the United States, etc.

In the free market world of Adam Smith and comparative advantage, persistent trade imbalances should not exist.

Over the medium to long term, imports are meant to pay for exports.

If there are persistent trade imbalances, it means there is persistent under consumption (China) or over consumption (United States).

Note: This is not just limited to these countries.

At some point, there is going to be an economic crisis because it can't continue forever.

While this is true, I suggest reading "All trade war are class wars" by Michael Pettis and Michael C. Klein.

Basically, both China and America have been persuing trade policies (which result in persistent trade imbalances) which are unsustainable.

China through subsiding it's export sector through preferential interest rates (transfer income from savers to borrowers like industrial enterprises), managed currencies (transfers income from importers to exporters), weak labor laws (workers to companies), etc. which results in smaller household sector which cannot consume what it produces.

These policies primarily benefit industrial exporters at the expense of everyone else.

Note: This is not unique to China. Germany, Japan, Taiwan, America (up to the great depression), etc. have persued such policies.

American subsidies consumption via policies which encourage a higher dollar (being attractive for foreign capital), higher debt, etc. which results in an household sector than consumes more than it produces.

Note: This is not unique to America. The Anglo-Saxon economies all have this issue (noting that at times of high commodity prices Canada and Australia sometimes run trade surpluses).

These policies primarily benefit importers and financial sector at the expense of everyone else, particularly the industrial sector.

Although in America's case, being the reserve currency provides great geopolitical advantages.

These policies are unsustainable. One cannot import more than you export forever.

America cannot to grow such vast sums of private and public debt. Eventually, there is a limit.

Every other country that has persued such policies in the past have had difficult corrections. These can be quick and brutal (the great depression for the USA, where the economy shrunk 1/3 but the household sector only shrunk ~17% and thus the economy was rebalanced) or a slow adjustment like Japan (where household consumption grows marginally faster than overall GDP growth for 1-2 decades).

This issue was seen and written about during the great depression ("beggar thy neighbour" policies). After WW2, John Keynes suggested a mechanism to rebalance trade so there were not persistent trade imbalances (the USA opposed this mechanism because it was running surpluses).

Why does this matter in this instance? China is having great difficulty raising consumption and moving away from it's export driven model. So it is looking for new partners to export to (given the West and even other devleoping economies like Brazil and India are unwilling to accept more of China's subsided exports), like Kenya.

It is running into the trouble Western counties had in the 1980s with developing countries being unable to service their loans for infrastructure, etc.

China may not be popular soon because it (like the West during the 1980s) is unwilling to write off loans which cannot be paid.

Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out. If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. F*ck Hope.

• George Carlin