Almost all US banks have had upside down Texas ratios since 2000. Used to be savings accounts paid the rate of inflation, but not paying inflation and driving investments into riskier classes is the way they are driving revenue to pay off their bad debts.
With covid, the likelihood of bank failures has risen considerably as the savings money is drying up or moving out of cities and investment risks have raised considerably. Historically, whenever banks got systemically over-levered and they try to avoid a systemic banking collapse, they come for the commoners assets. Last time around they did gold confisaction. I remember in 08 they were talking about confiscating 401k money into the stock market.
This is no different. This is a creepy article full of trite anecdotes and observational BS that demonizes anyone that uses cash as a drug dealer or sex trafficker and doesn't mention the root issue.
US has energy independance due to Fracking so it's pulling out and leaving behind all sorts of toys while handing the Taliban a political victory. China is dependant on ME energy imports and Russia due to its collapsing demographics only cares about taking the Carpathanian mountains and a chunk of Turkey to have a defensible border.
The Chinese need to take Taiwan to break out of the first island chain to secure energy Imports, but even if they take Taiwan this year or next, they now have to deal with a Taliban 3-5 years down the road that have American training and arms and all of whom have experience fighting Americans for the last 20 years. So if they take Taiwan they'll end in a direct conflict with Japan, Indonesia and India while the world shifts it supply chain to India whom has healthier demographics than China, and even if China manages to maintain its energy supply chain, it has to deal with disruption in the middle east and has to ship troops over to fight an arguably better equipped and more experienced adversary.
Should be interesting to see how this one plays out.
The Russia take makes no sense. They already have physical defense. They’re just trying to re-carve their sphere that they had.
China has no need for invading Afghanistan. They’re just gonna make clever minimalistic deals with the Taliban to extract rare metals and such. That’s all they need there.
China’s Achilles heel is their burning desire for Taiwan and to always save face, as well as their imports of oil. Other than that they’re a tough enemy.
I’m glad Biden recalibrated towards taking on the CCP since they’re clearly our largest threat and also the free worlds.
Was going to go back and edit my (now flagged) post in this thread since after seeing a few videos of the MSM my subcutical vitriol didn't sit well after a thought hit me. Figure'd I'd post this. Feel free to flag it too, these opinions are my own and not that of HN, I own them.
So the issue with MSM reporting and this specific article is the habitation of publishing without applying basic principles of news literacy first. Editorials and Opinion pieces are all too often confused with stories of fact, and Questions about interests, data, and how conclusions are all often buried or require way too much time to discover and determine or we are asked to take it at face value. I won't say what puppies the MSM have killed but I will say in the last couple of years, they've killed a few publicly; the overton bubble has begun boiling and the Frog is wondering which pot is actually safe at this point. In this article I have to click on 6 or so links and read seperate articles to find out what was proposed here is an opinion piece, then do google searching. I shouldn't have to proove out the authors statement myself.
And that has become a bad habit for many people, and it's infested the education system. The net impact of that is to destroy the capacity of a country to utilize reputation and sound reporting and lets be really honest here, there are institutions that even in this pandemic and well before it have prooven trustworthy.
I would reccomend anyone reading this that REALLY doesn't like what I'm saying to assume I'm full of it but do yourself a favor. Take a news literacy course.
FAANG hasn't been innovators for a long time now, closing in on almost half a decade. They started out that way but have moved full bore into politics. Politics is what happens when the rest of society tries to figure out what to do with the innovators inventions, an when orgs don't innovate, they die, usually a pretty violent and shitty death over time.
MLK recognized that people are, and are always going to, judge others as they are and like people who are similar to them. This is human nature, and it's important for our survival. People are always going to be different, but they can however, make a decision to treat others with basic dignity and respect, to set boundaries around dignity and respect, and not use those diffrences as a reason to persecute or take advantage of them. It was that humility and basic desency that he advocated for.
It's easy to look at someone and pass judgement. It's expensive to get to know someone, especially if they are very different than you are. Learning to judge someone by the content of their character is a difficult thing to ask of someone.
Imagine having to get to know Ed Gein. At the very least if you listened to the mans life, you'd be questioning if there really was a god or if nature really had any sanity, given the developmental trauma he experienced. It's way easier to see a guy wearing his mother's skin on his face and go "yep, crazy". It's harder to look beneath that and go "How the hell did society fail you?".
That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.
>That is the reason why his message resonated so well. Not because he was color blind, that is naieve. It is because he pointed out, and very rightly, that ignoring the black community or any community of people over racism creates a lost opportunity.
What did or didn't resonate well is not really the point of the discussion but now that you bring it up, you'll remember one of King's least popular positions was one of his least color-blind ones: worker quotas.
Sensationalism generates extremist beliefs as a consequence of its operation.
The mainstream media\media monopoly has two deeply engrained habits; one, the belief in distributing free news, two, in sensationalizing every story to maximize ad revenue.
Technology reduces cost, ergo, when costs reductions meet these two habitations, the net result is training the audience to accept sensationalisation itself as a brand and if they do so, you tend to polarize an audience in unpredictable ways as a consequence of operating your media empire.
Think about it this way. The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising, and to the advertisers, we are products the MSM is selling to them. What do you do with products once you are done with them? You throw them in the garbage. Once we're used up we become trashed.
It's the belief that sensationalism itself is trustworthy that creates this trashing, and I would encourage anyone to learn to detect sensationalism as the psychological baseline for stimulation has risen to such an extreme these days.
In this instance, the moment we refer to any kind of warfare operation as "whack a mole" is when you begin rolling your eyes as the author is not treating people with respect.
Good, accurate information is expensive. If you need proof of that, talk to a historian.
>The reason the MSM puts out news is to sell advertising
I'm pretty skeptical about that. The major media outlets have significant influence over the political ideas that circulate through the electorate. In a democracy, that means having a lot of influence over which candidates are viable in elections, which, given how powerful governments are, is worth quite a lot more than ad revenue.
Why do you think Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post? Do you think he was after the ad revenue?
If they had the kind of sway over the public you say they had, then Trump wouldn't have recieved a record 72 million votes in 2020. They spent 4 years lambasting him over every single thing they could and the impact was an election about 90 million people in the US Think was rigged.
Nor does Zuckerberg spending $500 million on ballot harvesting initiatives and skirting the law where he could. The one thing this last election prooved is that when rich and powerful people feel threatened with losing power or fortune, they often decide to use whatever power they have and spend whatever fortune they've got to maintain what they have. We'll find out, as the forensic investigations drag on, exactly how compromised this election was. Suffice to say, an awful lot of people on the left are acting like they have nothing to lose which is a strong signal indictments and convictions are on the road ahead.
Free news is done to sell advertising, which also finds its way into their subscription businesses and even if you pay for WSJ, the articles are often paid for or done as political favors.
I said they have a lot of influence over which candidates are viable, not total control. Before becoming president, Trump was a very famous and interesting billionaire, which takes away a lot of the media's tools. The famous and interesting part makes it so people want to hear about him and will pull their eyeballs away from any media outlet that doesn't talk about him (which the media companies obviously care about because that takes away their influence), and the billionaire part gives him the ability to buy a credible campaign effort.
Certainly there are considerable numbers of people in this country that totally distrust the major media sources (for very good reason, in my opinion), but they still have considerable viewerships and therefore considerable influence over the thoughts and therefore votes of many.
Again, do you think Bezos was looking for the ad revenue? Or was he looking for political influence?
The core base of the Democratic party; Pelosi, Schumer, Feinstein, and their ilk; have been in power in their jerrymandered districts for decades, and in line with accusing others what what they themselves are doing, they accused the Republicans for over a year with planning to usurp power for the mortal sin of making a fuss over Mail In Balloting, something most western countries have heavily restricted or outright banned.
In a country with more firearms in civillian ownership then every other countries military combined, Nobody in the Democratic party believes there was actually an insurrection. If there were, there'd be no place for congress or the senate to hide from the nationwide guerilla warfare.
As has happened so many times in politics, political parties get hijacked. The Democrats have been hijacked by foreign interests, the Republicans are in the process of being hijacked by domestic populists.
Getting a massive army to go for years of guerilla war is quite a different proposition from getting a small, committed group of people to storm a building and start taking hostages, especially if there is a rump that supports them.
So you don't need a massive army to engage in an insurrection but you do need a massive army to engage in Guerilla warfare? What sized army do you need to engage in terrorism?
Your own scenario was a large percentage of gun owners rising up, wasn't it? I'm simply telling you I think that's far harder to pull off than an alternate version of the Capitol raid where they managed to get their hands on representatives.
Each response is broken up into 6 to 14 syllables prose between comma's and periods. The translator intentionally wrote the responses to take advantage of metered speech so the reader doesn't make full thoughts as they read. This is the worst kind of sensationalized news, and as far as I'm conserned, if it's sensationalized and free, it's fake.
It doesn't seem particularly sensationalized in that it doesn't make ransomware seem any scarier than it already is.
If anything, it seems like it's meant to make the ransomware people look like cool guy Robin Hood types. Staying out of geopolitics ("we could, but we don't") while hitting the fat cats where it hurts, that sort of thing.
Other than that, I thought this was interesting at the end of the interview:
...I also think we will expand this tactic to persecution of the CEO and/or founder of the company. Personal OSINT, bullying. I think this will also be a very fun option. But victims need to understand that the more resources we spend before your ransom is paid—all this will be included in the cost of the service. =)
Even if this particular interview is fake (how do we know it's actually fake, and not just the interviewee lying/exaggerating?), this I think is a real threat that a lot of people don't consider. Most people (myself included) are very easy to dox and harass.
I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but maybe if we start getting high-profile cases where individuals are targeted for extortion leverage, maybe we'd finally get people to start caring about software/data security and data privacy.
Metered speech is a speaking and writing pattern whereby you pause after so many syllables in order to prevent your audience from grasping the full idea of what is being said. Let me demonstrate this for you.
Metered speech, is a speaking, and writing, pattern whereby you pause after so many syllables, in order to prevent your audience from, grasping the full idea, of what is being said. Let me, demonstrate this for you.
It can also be done with matter of fact statements, Dripped one after the next.
This is commonly done by the MSM on news websites.
Typically the articles have no more than 20 sentances in them with no more than 2-3 sentances per paragraph.
They drip the text one line at a time.
Again, the entire point is to cause you to pause for a second before reading or taking in the next point.
This is an incredibly common writing and speaking tactic that's been around since the dark ages if not earlier and was in common use during the fire and brimstone days of the church. The objective of speaking like this is to prevent the cognitive mind from evaluating information by throwing roadblocks in its place, and to get the limbic system to instead keep track of tone and base subject matter.
As a modern example, go listen to Cuomo Appologize for whatever his latest political situation is. Don't listen to the content, just listen to the pacing and delivery. It's all a manufactured production.
If you want a great demonstration, go to any big MSM news site, copy and paste the articles into a text editor and start removing paragraphs and comma's and apply 8th grade writing rules (minimum 3 sentances to a paragraph). Heck go to the article, copy and paste the responses into a text editor and begin removing comma's.
It is important to keep in mind this is a media production tactic they teach in marketing and sales courses and when you see production decisions being made they are clear signals as to the accuracy of the content.
I'm not convinced that metering your speech in this was has a specific, universal effect on an audience. (ie, I dispute the claim that metered speech prevents the audience from comprehending.)
To be clear, I'm equally skeptical that the mainstream media is attempting to deceive people by intentionally adopting this method. But even if they were, I simply don't believe it could be effective.
Google has a pending antitrust case heading for it. No secret Big Tech has been spending Billions trying to influence this election.
With that said.
DCPD failed to inform FPS\SS of the protesters breaking through 5 barricades and into a building designed to withstand seige until the protesters were almost in the chambers forcing them to flee. The factual narrative here is there was a compromise of congressional security and trust in DCPD.
How we end up, instead, getting the hyper-critical over-the-top insurrection narrative from every MSM company and all the heavy-handed fallout of that narrative without even evidence of busted doors I just don't know, but 4 dead and a handfull injured doesn't even amount to a weekend in Chicago.
Antitrust litigation and Caps on personal and private equity fund wealth.
Bezos and the staff at amazon are not hero's even if their platform was very useful in this pandemic; they stand on the shoulders of giants and were only able to build their platform because of the kind of economic system the US built.
There is exactly zero expectation that even if the current group is honest and decent people, that once those staff are retired, die off, or move on, that their successors won't imoverish, abuse, mame, posion, threaten, intimiate, assassinate or kill the next generation of garage geeks inventing world changing technology. Quite to the contrary, that is exactly what monarchs do, and exceedinly rich capitalists always tend to eventually become robber-barrons and monarchs. One only needs to look at the scope of E-bays' cyberstalking campaign to see the threat companies like Amazon represent.
Furthermore, the US and EU governments use antitrust only when there is no other resort for the market and when the companies' entroachment into government is not sufficient to purchase political favors in order to cement their monopoly which many brand-name companies have done.
We need to view income as a form of power and need to cap personal and private equity income as a form of power the same as any law. You can start with a ridiculous number, say .1% of GDP for a company and .005% of GDP for an individual, which comes out to 200bn annual revenue for a company and .005% for an individual. For the company, once they hit that number, they get antitrust laws enforced. For the individual, if they hit that number in net worth\asset valuation, you impliment an absolute tax (no further income can be acquired, you pay all earnings in tax). If they want to keep the game going and not pay it to uncle sam they can give it away or just not save that much and instead spend it.
With covid, the likelihood of bank failures has risen considerably as the savings money is drying up or moving out of cities and investment risks have raised considerably. Historically, whenever banks got systemically over-levered and they try to avoid a systemic banking collapse, they come for the commoners assets. Last time around they did gold confisaction. I remember in 08 they were talking about confiscating 401k money into the stock market.
This is no different. This is a creepy article full of trite anecdotes and observational BS that demonizes anyone that uses cash as a drug dealer or sex trafficker and doesn't mention the root issue.