This is probably a good day to take time away from social media. Doom scrolling won’t do anything
Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.
Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
As time goes on, the satire of Eddington becomes increasingly poignant. I'm amazed you could come up with an analogy like this in regards to holding accountable people granted lethal force in a democratic society.
They passed the DHS funding. The day ICE executes a man in broad daylight by blowing his brains out from point-blank, they get an extra $10,000,000,000 in funding.
It's a simple majority and Republicans have 53 votes without defects. Every single Republican voted for it in Congress, so clearly today changes nothing at all. And 7 democrats even voted alongside them.
How do you look at this video and conclude it’s the protestors fault?
What dystopia do you live in where a shoving match, resulting in someone getting restrained, should turn into execution of the restrained person in broad daylight?
I'm saying the administration is aiming to provoke violence from the citizenry so they can declare martial law, and that they were hoping to achieve their aim sooner. It is astonishing that no real violence has yet been inflicted upon an ICE thug, in Minneapolis or anywhere else. I never concluded that the protestor is at fault.
It used to be the big worry among climate activists that you'd never get every country organize and move in one direction. Like you'd need some global body to clean everything up.
That's very fragile.
Luckily, we're moving to a world where a disjoint, self-interested response can be an advantage. Countries decide, for their own selfish reasons, to adopt green energy. For energy independence, affordability, clean air, etc.
So when one country politically rotates out for dumb reasons, other countries pick up the slack and make a bit of progress.
There's also the case in Australia where, despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind, people power kinda took over to get the unexpectedly high penetration of home solar panel installations, going back beyond a decade, and currently home battery installations.
Both were due to government incentives, I'm not sure if both parties may have initiated parts of these incentives, but only one party significantly and constantly talked down solar and renewables (and still would, although they don't currently have the platform)
* I have to assume the reason is money (read: lobbying) for any political party to downplay Australia's potential to lead the world in solar power generation given our natural massive, otherwise mostly useless land mass and beyond plentiful sunshine. Also, Australia's dependence on petrol / oil from overseas should be treated as a national security issue. Australia does have plentiful coal reserves, however, which is where I believe the lobbyists (and therefore unimaginable amounts of money) come from.
> despite successive governments that were (likely monetarily* ) opposed to solar and wind,
What are you talking about?
> Both were due to government incentives,
How can the government be opposed to it, while also providing rebates to rooftop solar?
Anyway, it was all a big bait and switch manoeuvre, as the solar feed in tariff per kWh is only a fraction of what you pay, but it didn’t start out that way.
That continued existence of any incentive to add rooftop solar is dependent on continued electricity price hikes that out pace general inflation.
That’s how intelligent Australian voters are.
We have the world’s largest known uranium deposit, which we’re happy for others to use, but instead we voted for this shit.
Rooftop solar is a scam.
What it does is shifts the long term maintenance costs from the industrial sector, or government if you’re a socialist, to the owner of the roof owner, the residential / business customer. All the while leaving the affordability of the entire fiasco up to whichever bunch of wankers are in Canberra this week deciding the feed-in tariff.
Why would anyone think any of that is a good idea.
And I say that as someone who recently installed solar.
The (now twice dissolved) Coalition of the Liberal Party and the National Party
> How can the government be opposed to it, while also providing rebates to rooftop solar?
I'm pretty sure one government put the incentives in place, whilst another didn't roll them back, but also significantly talked down anything renewable, whilst pulling stunts like bringing a lump of coal into parliament. (from memory, not entirely sure of facts).
> Rooftop solar is a scam.
I beg to differ. I beg to differ even further when rooftop solar is coupled with a battery.
Where I may agree with you, is that solar should have been a much earlier priority for any Australian government due to Australia's abundance of space and sunshine and (confusingly, since we have so much coal) our globally quite high-priced electricity. A better strategy should have been in place for Australia's overall electrification.
I think rooftop solar is great because it's saved me a lot of money in electricity that would have otherwise been sourced from an expensive grid.
I think rooftop solar overall could be considered a scam because it advantages those who already have enough money to afford it and the ownership of their dwelling to be allowed to install it, and disadvantages those who are not in the overlap between those two venn diagrams.
Self Fact check: Australia is around the global average for electricity costs, not as expensive as I thought.
The subsidies given to private individuals and business for roof top solar would have been better off used to build grid scale solar. You get more solar per dollar spent.
Australia silent have around global average electricity costs, we should be a case study in providing the cheapest electricity, given we have the worlds largest known solar reserves (ha!), the worlds largest known deposit of uranium, and we export about the same volume of LNG as Qatar. And there’s the iron ore, the zinc, lead, aluminium, copper, gold.
Why settle for average.
No.
Every Australian citizen should receiver a cheque every quarter for their share of the revenue generated from the proper management of our natural resources.
More than 50% of cars sold in China now come with a plug, on top of the most of the buses and 2 wheelers. Most analysts say they have plateaued and will begin declining in the next few years. They also are beginning to ramp up EV exports to other developing economies.
Although it looks like bad news in the short term, China is building even more renewables than they are coal stations, with the result that the fraction of fossil power consumption in China is actually decreasing: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-coal-power-drops-in-chi...
Druids used to decry that literacy caused people to lose their ability to memorize sacred teachings. And they’re right! But literacy still happened and we’re all either dumber or smarter for it.
It's more complex than that. The three pillars of learning are theory (finding out about the thing), practice (doing the thing) and metacognition (being right, or more importantly, wrong. And correcting yourself.). Each of those steps reinforce neural pathways. They're all essential in some form or another.
Literacy, books, saving your knowledge somewhere else removes the burden of remembering everything in your head. But they don't come into effect into any of those processes. So it's an immensely bad metaphor. A more apt one is the GPS, that only leaves you with practice.
That's where LLMs come in, and obliterate every single one of those pillars on any mental skill. You never have to learn a thing deeply, because it's doing the knowing for you. You never have to practice, because the LLM does all the writing for you. And of course, when it's wrong, you're not wrong. So nothing you learn.
There are ways to exploit LLMs to make your brain grow, instead of shrink. You could make them into personalized teachers, catering to each student at their own rhythm. Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions. Only employ them for tasks you already know how to make perfectly. Don't depend on them.
But this isn't the future OpenAI or Anthropic are gonna gift us. Not today, and not in a hundred years, because it's always gonna be more profitable to run a sycophant.
If we want LLMs to be the "better" instead of the "worse", we'll have to fight for it.
I feel as though this analysis only makes sense in hindsight; in the past, when people used to say using books as a way to store knowledge outside your brain would make a similar argument, but would add a fourth pillar of memorization. Even now, a lot of people in different professions (such as law, and medicine) still absolutely drill memorization as the first step in building a strong knowledge base before getting into more practical, day-to-day used information. When people are forced to memorize a large amount of things in a cohesive subject, it forces your brain to make connections between ideas out of necessity to keep the information in your head. This definitely has an effect on metacognition and practice. So I wouldn't argree with you that the analogy with books=brain rot isn't valid.
> Make them give you problems, instead of ready-made solutions
Yes, this is one of my favorite prompting styles.
If you're stuck on a problem, don't ask for a solution, ask for a framework for addressing problems of that type, and then work through it yourself.
Can help a lot with coming unstuck, and the thoughts are still your own. Oftentimes you end up not actually following the framework in the end, but it helps get the ball rolling.
I don't buy your "theory" at all. Learning requires curiosity. If you want to know how something works you will do all those things irregardless if you saw it in a book or an AI spat it out. If you don't you won't.
There is no free lunch, if you use writing to "scaffold" your learning, you trade learning speed for a limited "neural pathways" budget that could connect two useful topics. And when you stop practicing your writing (or coding, as reported by some people who stopped coding due to AI) you feel that you are getting dumber. Since you scaffolded your knowledge of a topic with writing or coding, rather than doing the difficult work of learning it from more pervasive conceptions.
The best thing AI taught us is to not tie your knowledge to some specific task. It's overly reactionary to recommended task/action based education (even from an AI) in response to AI.
If you don't buy into the acquired, existing knowledge of neuroscience and the role of lymph nodes in learning, you can do whatever you want in your free time, but don't call it my theory, because it's neither mine nor a theory.
For the rest, maybe you're the chosen one, who doesn't need to expend any cognitive load to learn a subject, and just glide on your curiosity. Good for you. There are, to a degree of approximation, zero other people who work this way.
Right, nobody gains much of anything by memorizing logarithm tables. But letting the machine tell you what even you can do with a logarithm takes away from your set of abilities, without other learning to make up for it.
Smartphones I think did the most damage. Used to be you had to memorize people's phone numbers. I'm sure other things like memorizing how to get from your house to someone else is also less cognitive when the GPS just tells you every time, instead of you busting out a map, and thinking about your route. I've often found that if I preview a route I'm supposed to take, and use Google Street Maps to physically view key / unfamiliar parts of my route, I am drastically less likely to get lost, because "oh this looks familiar! I turn right here!"
My wife had a similar experience, she had some college project where they had to drive up and down some roads and write about it, it was a group project, and she bought a map, and noticed that after reading the map she was more knowledgeable about the area than her sister who also grew up in the same area.
I think AI is a great opportunity for learning more about your subjects in question from books, and maybe even the AI themselves by asking for sources, always validate your intel from more authoritative sources. The AI just saved you 10 minutes? You can spend those 10 minutes reading the source material.
About the phone numbers thing: I am now 35yo. Do I still remember the phone number of one of my best friends from primary school back then? Hell yeah, I do! These days though, I am struggling a bit with phone numbers, mostly because I don't even try. If the number is important, I will save it somewhere. Memorizing it? Nahhh... But sometimes my number brain still does that and it seems some weird pattern in the number. Stuff like
"+4 and then -2 and then +6 and then -3. Aha! All makes sense! Cannot repeat the digit differences, and need to be whole numbers, so going to the next higher even number, which is 6, which is 3 when halved!"
And then I am kinda proud my brain still works, even if the found "pattern" is hilariously arbitrary.
Same. Somehow there tends to be some "pattern" that stands out, but I guess it's just a mix of the likelihood of "something interesting" and our minds being tuned to pick out "anything interesting". I've memorized a few SSNs and license plate numbers this way, and some digits of pi. I like it; it feels like normal memorization with a twist, without having to resort to "hardcore" techniques.
I finally learned my wife's number last year because I got tired of being asked what her number is when picking things up for her and what not and not actually knowing it, and I've been texting her since 2007. When I learned I could just save phone numbers on my cell phone, I didn't make it a point to ever remember a phone number outside of my own number.
The worst part about smart phones is their browser/social media. Technically, even dumb phones like the nokia 3310 had contact lists so you didn't have to memorize phone numbers. And land lines had speed dial. And my family used a phonebook with a rotary dial telephone. It's not like people had memorized as many numbers as they now have stored in their telephones.
Or, irony was being employed and Socrates wasn’t against books, but was instead noting it’s the powerful who are against them for their facilitating the sharing of ideas across time and space more powerfully than the spoken word ever could. The books are why we even know his name, let alone the things said.
Arguably, with the increase in literacy, Jevon's paradox would say we need to hire more writers. Indeed, a lot more people DO write for their job.
But its not like we went from a handful of professional, full-time scribes, to 10x professional full-time scribes. Instead, the value of being just a scribe has gone down (unless you're phenomenal at it). It stops being a specialized skill unto itself. It's just a part of a lot of people's jobs, alongside other skills, like knowing how to do basic arithmetic.
Coding, like writing, becomes a part of everyone's job. Not a specialization unto itself. We will have more coders, but since everyone is a coder, very few are a captial C "Coder".
Your assertion makes way more sense than the article, and might explain why I see many excellent programmers be so averse to AI. The value of an individual programmer goes down even though the value of programming increases. The 10x scribes were probably also pretty dubious of the printing press, even though it made writing more accessible and valuable.
(Also me of two months ago would be shocked at how bullish I've become on LLMs. AI is literally the printing press... get a grip, me!)
The fact we have a system that produced a Trump-like figure, and once in power, haven’t checked him internationally, shows the US will continue to be an unreliable partner.
We have kinds of political problems, and it’s not clear they’re going away post Trump.
The funny thing is it’s all cultural. It’s not some intractable thing, the path to fixing all this has been available for a long time. It’s a well studied domain with practical solutions abound.
But enough of the US citizenry that I share the nation with seemingly can’t see beyond their own horizons. No matter how bad it is, there is still enough people who can’t possibly see the value of the government doing anything useful. Government is exclusively the enemy. And in turn those who seek to ransack the system do so under the guise of pushing back against so called “government overreach” (a deliberately vague term) and continue to give the general public the raw deal
All because the elites got too greedy and decided to destroy the only successful labor movement in America (the New Deal coalition) because they wanted more money.
This is a gradual decline. From 70% in the 90s to 60% today. Today there are more options like the Euro that didn’t exist in the 90s. People can argue over EU economic stability, but it’s there as reasonable option.
As time goes on, fewer people are alive that predate the EU and more people will perceive it as a lasting institution.
Additionally, we've now seen the EU survive the departure of a major economic power (the UK). More people are certainly willing to believe in the stability of the EU now.
Another major currency is the Yuan, and some countries may be as willing to trade in Yuan to improve relations with China, so perhaps we won't see one single reserve currency but two spheres of influence with most countries maintaining reserves of multiple currencies.
Interestingly, there seems to be more good will and amiable vibes between EU nationalities than within the US even. Even being enemies for a thousand years, I don't doubt that Swedish and Danish men would go to war for one another, or French and German. It's complicated yes, but the continent is more unified in spirit than it may seem to an outsider.
German here: I'd go to war (and likely will, with how it's looking currently) for any country that shares our values and is an ally or friend, that's being attacked by an evil force such as russia. And that of course includes my french brothers to the west.
80 years ago we were the bad guys, and far more brave people than me, from other countries, stepped up to curb the evil. This time us Germans need to be on the right side.
Thanks German brother :) I think our main issue in Europe is the lack of a common language. It makes it harder to build strong ties and realize how close our values are.
Agreed, there is always this little story to remind us of our unity - at least from the perspective of the draftees/workers back in ww1, where everyone was basically forced to fight each other by the elites
I think you’ll find that threats of violence (which is what your comment is) need to be much more unhinged to be effective deterrents. Remember you’re warning off barbarians (eg us Americans or the Russians), not civilized folk.
If he is, it won't be for very long. The most visible merc was a retired US colonel, he ran off home within weeks, got drunk on the War on The Rocks podcast and revealed the corruption and depravity of the "good guys."
Freedom of speech, democratically elected representatives, protection of minorities, religious freedom, to name a few.
I can already hear people storming out of the woods, ready to write how the EU itself is undemocratic, or how free speech isn't real in western European countries. I disagree with you.
Well, indeed, freedom of speech in the EU isn't freedom of speech as only a certain type of speech is allowed. Conveniently weakly defined "hate speech laws" (even in private conversations!) allow easy political suppression. Or just lawfare through defamation, which is happening in Germany at the moment (4,400 defamation cases by politicians, last year).
Regarding the EU, the only elected representatives don't have the right to choose which laws they will vote for. If it was in a soviet country no one would call it a democracy.
I know both people from Kiev, and people who fled russia in late 2022. I don't care for your pro-russian worldview. And I know you do it on purpose, but it's "Ukraine", and not "the Ukraine". It's a sovereign state, not a russian oblast like you have been taught by the Kremlin.
Kremlin mouth-peaces can express their bullshit worldview outside of the EU, and they do that quite liberally. It's up to society to ignore them, ultimately it's everybodys own decision. But if you come somewhere, spread propaganda while being paid by adversaries, then you aren't welcome. I applaud the EUs sanctioning of these individuals, and I don't really care to hear from pro-russian folks why that's a bad thing in their eyes.
I don't like "Kremlin influencers", that said the Streisand effect is real, and the slope is very slippery from here to include other people along the ride.
Will we also sanction Elon Musk and other pro-MAGA individuals after the current rift between the EU and the US? Why not include Chinese ones, too, who are actually quite active? Also, far-right influencers? Far-left? They are nazis/communists after all!
Or, if you are German, consider that saying something offensive about a politician is "attacking democracy" and sentence people to prison because of untasteful memes.[0]
Of course, all of this can be justified and most undemocratic/less democratic countries get along with those rules, but at least let's stop pandering to "values" that have become pious words without any real meaning.
I find the hate speech laws good. They enforce a certain decency in communication, something that MAGAs lack.
>Will we also sanction Elon Musk and other pro-MAGA individuals after the current rift between the EU and the US? Why not include Chinese ones, too, who are actually quite active? Also, far-right influencers? Far-left? They are nazis/communists after all!
Fantastic idea, unironically. But IMHO the far left is way less of a threat to humanity than the far right is right now. But extreme political fringes are never good.
>I don't like "Kremlin influencers", that said the Streisand effect is real, and the slope is very slippery from here to include other people along the ride.
The rules for not being sanctioned are easy to follow. Don't be a russian asset - that's basically it. Shouldn't be so hard.
So you defend freedom of speech, but not for the people and the ideas you don't like. That's not freedom of speech, and you have a lot in common with Putinists on that matter.
They also sanction who they perceive as western assets, by the way. And see nothing wrong sending dissidents to jail with similar vague hate speech laws that we have in the EU [0]. In fact, they even eradicated their far-right! [1] Navalny was prosecuted because he was "extremist", for instance.
So how do you feel being in such ideological proximity with Putin's Russia? Just like others, you enjoy gloating about feel-good "values" but don't believe at all in them, which would require some discomfort and radicality.
Wake me up when we jail people for holding up blank signs [0] or for demonstrating for gay rights. You try so hard to paint the EU in the same unhinged way as the Kremlin, but all your comparisons don't survive scrutiny. I can go and stand in front of the Bundestag saying "I hate Friedrich Merz" and nothing will happen, in fact people will probably want selfies with me and the sign. Try that in Russia and see how fast you have OMON splintering your kneecaps.
As for your other points: Democracy must not fall to the Paradox of tolerance.
I have many moral problems with that scenario. I used to live in the US a long time ago. The US is sick; there's a mad king at the top who doesn't have the well being of the nation in his interest, and he is driving the world towards war with every passing day while dividing his own people. War with the US isn't a clear cut "good vs evil" situation as the EU vs russia would be, it would be a utter tragedy, not wanted by neither the populace of the EU, nor the US.
That said, yes, I would defend Europe against the US, even though I think that fight would be short, deadly and decisive if it really came down to it.
What a fucked up world we live in, just because idiots voted for a convicted felon.
> War with the US isn't a clear cut "good vs evil" situation as the EU vs russia would be
I don't think EU vs Russia would be a "good vs evil" situation. Russia/US seem pretty similar to me, dictatorship/propaganda with a majority of the population being regular people not in favor of any war, and 30% of indoctrinated people.
You seem to have very little contact to Russians living in Russia or Germany. Their version of "not in favor of any war" is a very strange one – it's more a stance of indifference than disfavor.
I don't know why you believe that a decades-long strict dictatorship like Russia has more democratic support for its "evil" government than a country whose leader was elected just 1 year ago with approximately 50% of the vote.
Russians are lining up to go to war under the promise of money, around 30k a month last time I checked. Americans not so much, in particular not against Europeans. It's different in my view.
Americans don't need money to fight. I was paid $0 with the YPG and had to bankroll my own time. Lots of Americans there. I met a lot of them that didn't even really give a shit about the sides of the war, they just needed to fight something. We're a savage people.
Which historically has worked more for us, than against us.
French here: If we can send French soldiers to fight and die in Mali for years, only to end up with a military junta that prefers the Russian Africakorps, I think we're ready to send our soldiers to die defending a European ally.
Plus, with global warming, this may be the last chance for the Alpine hunters to shine.
I think the people on this continent have a lot more in common than they might first realize. We certainly have our own cultures and language but beyond that I think we all share a certain European heritage, core culture and values.
There's a certain stigma especially in Germany caused by the WW2 and the the leadership has been complacent to rely on Bretton Woods agreement. But as we're seeing now the geopolitics are doing a 180 degree turnaround and given these circumstances I expect sooner or later Europe will collectively understand the utmost importance to com together and to regrow and redevelop the military to support independence and not having to bow down to any master in the East or int he West.
The great minds that - after WWII - built the new Europe had in mind that there should never be war again, which is best realized when former enemies become friends and closer bonds are established at multiple levels: politically, economically, culturally (unions, trading exchanges, visits/open borders/teaching common European values in schools).
There is a strong political and cultural foundation in geographic Europe for the political EU:
some exemplary giants/EU co-architects:
Integrated Italy into Western Europe
Advocated supranational institutions
Paul-Henri Spaak
institutional designer, key role in the Treaties of Rome (1957)
helped design the European Economic Community (EEC)
Advocated supranational institutions
Walter Hallstein
1st President, European Commission.
Built EC into powerful, independent institution
Championed the supremacy of European law
Altiero Spinelli
Wrote the Ventotene Manifesto (while imprisoned by Fascists)
Advocated a federal Europe
Winston Churchill
A paradoxical but crucial figure: called for a “United States of Europe” (1946 speech)
Influenced Europe’s post-war direction despite UK distance
François Mitterrand
Drove Maastricht Treaty with Helmut Kohl
Pushed for the €
Symbolized Franco-German partnership
Helmut Kohl
Franco-German friendship exemplified by Mitterand-Kohl personal friendship
"Architect of modern Europe"
German reunification
Key figure behind the EU and monetary union
It's ironic that the name "U.S.E." (United States of Europe) was first proposed by a Brit, alas a smart one, and I'm sure Sir Winston Churchill would have had the oratory abilities to convince his countrymen that his idea had merit, but he did not live to see it. The Federation of Europe or United States of Europe is the logical end-point of the joint vision of all these foundational leaders.
>Franco-German friendship exemplified by Mitterand-Kohl personal friendship
Ironic to call this a "friendship", when Mitterand along with Thatcher were working behind the scenes with the soviets to sabotage and stop Kohl's reunification of Germany. It was anything but a friendship, but more of a concession.
Politics is full of such examples that look friendly to the public, but hide a lot of sabotage and back stabbings in the background. In fact, the later is the norm in politics.
Not when the competition is a zero sum game over critical resources. This isn't a game of table tennis, it's about competition over dominance.
Friendships are just the media facing image. In reality, if a country can gain an advantage over the other they see as an economic adversary, and has the means to enforce it without repercussions, they'll do it. Then they'll meet up in front of the media, shake hands and gaslight the peasants on how this benefits everyone.
The true friendships in between countries are made over decades/centuries over shared blood, heritage and culture because humans are tribalistic and have own group preference. Forcing friendships via political declarations doesn't work.
Let me explain with examples. If Portugal would get attacked a lot of Spaniards would go fight for Portugal voluntarily because of shared history and culture. But if Bulgaria would get attacked, most Spaniards wouldn't volunteer to go die for Bulgaria, even though they're both EU members.
Austria kept torpedoing Romania's Schengen entry just to extract some monetary concession, not exactly something friends do. So if Austria were to hypothetically get attacked tomorrow, a lot of Romanians would cheer rather than want to go help since karma is a bitch. These kinds of petty squabbles are the norm in the EU.
People aren't gonna want to die or sacrifice themselves for the EU flag since it's an artificial construct, kind of like the corporation they work for, not something they feel a sense of belonging and allegiance to like a specific group of people.
The lowest common denominator, racial ("shared blood", "tribal", and also "culture" in this context) perspective is exceeded time and again, and the ones that do exceed it are the most free, most prosperous, and most powerful - NATO being a clear example, but also all the Pacific alliances around China. The poorest and least safe are the ones that follow your advice, places like Somalia. Or look at the US and NATO ten years ago compared to today.
Most countries can be subdivided seemingly infinitely into groups that could find reasons to fight each other. But humans have other common 'denominators', much higher than that. Spain, the UK, the US, France, China, and many others are unions of subcultures.
You can see so much better in the world. Instead of insisting that evil is inevitable - making you a victim of it - you can work for good. Our ancestors have had great success and made it easy for us to follow.
>the ones that do exceed it are the most free, most prosperous, and most powerful - NATO being a clear example
You're beating it around the bush. Tell me how many Spaniard would voluntarily sign up to die to defend Bulgaria if shit were to hit the fan.
THat's how you measure if strength of alliances stand the test of time, or if they're just worthless pieces of paper from a bygone era of peace and prosperity wrapped up in fake nationalism under a made up flag.
> Or look at the US and NATO ten years ago compared to today.
10 years ago a lot more people in US and NATO countries could more easily afford a house and get a decent paying job with a higher purchasing power. What were you trying to prove with this?
> Tell me how many Spaniard would voluntarily sign up to die to defend Bulgaria if shit were to hit the fan.
A lot and the evidence is overwhelming. Look at wars all over the world. Russians even sign up to defend Syria, for example. Americans sign up for wars all over the world, which have always been fought with allies - WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Iraq again, Afghanistan. Georgia helped the US in Iraq, along with many others. NATO fought alongside the US in Afghanistan.
> What were you trying to prove with this?
It's evidence of my claim; see the GP.
What's amazing is, despite being handed these wonderful things that made peace and prosperity, and being born and raised in them, people are programmed to say it can't work. Those people are the problem. Instead of opposing them or quitting, get to work - it almost couldn't be easier; someone else has already solved the problem. Compare the people who had to develop the Enlightenment, human rights, the post-WWII international order.
> bygone era of peace and prosperity
The era is what you make it - you are responsible for it. What are you making it, including with these words? Why aren't you solving the problems? The people who built the post-WWII international order, based on human rights, had just been through WWI and were fighting WWII - hardly an era of peace and prosperity - and look what they did.
The major benefit of the US Dollar is that you can do things with it. Between export controls, currency controls, laws on foreign ownership, etc, china can pay me all the RMB in the world. I still can’t do a whole lot with it.
This is part of the same reason many people don't use Bitcoin- you can't actually do much with it because retailers don't accept it. But China is definitely thinking about how to fix that problem, and soon they will make it possible to pay directly in CNY in other countries. Once you can buy things with it, the CNY is attractive from a practical perspective. A lot of your stuff is already manufactured in China, once/if using CNY makes your purchase easier then it's going to gain ground on the USD.
Retailers don't accept crypto not because of the technology so much as the fact it is a capital gains event every time you transfer crypto, which means both the buyer and seller are now forced to keep a log of their gains/losses against the dollar everytime they buy a pack of gum.
Obviously that's extremely impractical and at best you're hiring a 3rd party to streamline that for you. It's a clusterfuck at tax time (edit: stable coin doesn't help here -- you must still report gains on stable coins as it is still a $0 capital gain which is different than no capital gain).
Retailers already dealing with capital gains and with high chargeback rates love it though. For instance, it's usually the cheapest same-day clearing way to buy precious metals online since credit card rates are high (chargeback), ACH takes days, and wires tend to cost $15+ with many banks.
Reticence among retailers predates the capital gains policy of the IRS. The volatility of Bitcoin's value induces excessive exchange risk. However, we don't see capital gains nor exchange risk with stablecoins. I assume that network effects are insufficient to drive retail demand for stablecoin support.
> Reticence among retailers predates the capital gains policy of the IRS. The volatility of Bitcoin's value induces excessive
The IRS policy is irrelevant, the law always required payment of capital gains. It's consistently been the hardest thing about accepting Bitcoin for payment.
The volatility of bitcoin is why there is capital gains on every trade, it has nothing to do with the IRS's new crypto policy.
If a bitcoin rises or falls by a calculable amount between when you received it vs when you spent a portion of it, you have gains/losses. That has always been required by the IRS to be reported, whether that is a BTC or chicken feathers.
You do not need to report a $0 capital gain when using stablecoins. Sure crypto can seem like the wild West with CPAs having different opinions on what little official guidance is out there but that one is simply absurd.
Funnily enough you can use Bitcoin at most merchants that use a Square PoS device, which is like 25% of merchants in the US. It just takes time for folks to change their behaviors. And why would they, if they're getting X% cashback on all purchases using their credit cards?
We've witness deflationary forces in computer hw for decades and no one is holding off their purchases. Time is scarce and it ultimately forces consumption because otherwise, what would you be saving for?
Don't need Econ 101 to understand this basic reality.
Well there is a difference between people not buying anything at all and being significantly less than they are now. Consumer goods and services is only the tip of the iceberg.
How much do you think debt would cost and how easy would it be for businesses to get credit?
Combining a deflationary currency with a growing (or at least non static) economy is bad a everyone who has a basic understanding of history prior to the 1930s can see that. Something like bitcoin would be even much worse than the gold standard.
You're forcing business to produce something valuable in real terms instead of nominal terms and you're making that calculation easier to do for economic actors because the measuring stick is now controlled by an algorithm as opposed to charlatans.
Having less of that garbage fiat short-termism is a good thing for society.
Yet having more of endless boom and bust cycles with major economic depressions lasting for years (outcomes of the gold standard was a good idea).
> You're forcing business to produce something valuable in real terms instead of nominal terms
I don't quite understand what does that mean. Pricing goods in oil or grain? (coincidentally either of which would function better as a currency than bitcoin).
Computer hardware isn't trying to be currency. Bitcoin was supposed to be, but hardly anyone who uses Bitcoin these days is using it to buy things--it's used as a store of value or a speculative asset, not a means of transaction.
Paying Chinese companies in RMB isn’t the issue. If I sell something and a Chinese company pays me in RMB, I can’t really do anything with a billion yuan. Can’t buy a company (limitations on foreign ownership), can’t buy property (99-year lease that can be canceled on the whims of the government at any time), can’t buy Chinese debt (terrible yields, very small foreign market access, incredibly opaque laws and accounting), and nobody else in the world wants it so I have no choice but to sell it back to China in exchange for a real currency at whatever horseshit exchange rate they’ve concocted.
It’s worthless money and I don’t see anything out of china that would cause that to change.
Because if I am running a business I just want to be paid in money that I can pay my bills in. I don't want to have the additional task of managing rare earths and electronics inventory. That's not "a bit more work." It's running an entirely different business that I don't know how to run.
I think OP's point is that a "99 year lease" isn't worth very much without a firm guarantee that the least in fact lasts that long. I don't really have an opinion on land leases in the PRC, but it doesn't seem facially unreasonable to suspect that a foreign lease holder's land value wouldn't be a priority for China's leadership during an economic crisis.
This is on full display with the US's Venezuela problem: no one believes the US will hold it, so oil companies don't want to invest because last time exactly this happened - they had everything seized.
Imagine if you'd invested in lithium mining in Afghanistan 15 years ago: you'd likely have paid a lot, made little money, lost employees and then lost it to the Taliban.
I guess this is naive, but can't you use it to buy (or sell it to people who want to buy) Chinese products? It's not like China doesn't have an enormous amount and range of products on offer.
This is actually an interesting point. Wouldn't it be bad for China if the US isn't the reserve currency/the RMB gains a lot more in value relative to the USD? It would proportionally, negatively, affect their export profits, no?
Germany did relatively fine though? Despite the German mark being the second largest reserve currency and their economy being heavily reliant on exports.
Mostly it’s just what I’ve read, I don’t know if it’s true, which is why I asked. If you get less yuan-people-hours per dollar (and materials cost increase for the same reason), you would get less per dollar than previously, I think?
Eventually you hit an inflection point where it’s cheaper to manufacture elsewhere. Which is why China is working Africa, huh?
I mean, you can buy goods and services within china, and you can sell those goods and services. The “horseshit” exchange rate can’t deviate too far from the real value or it incentivises laundering too much. The exchange rate isn’t _that_ bad as a result.
It's more of a payment processor issue than a device issue.
If you are in a country or area with a large Chinese population, you can usually pay easily in RMB with Alipay.
If you use Visa and Mastercard, you are subject to US regulations, sanctions, and embargoes. Many alternative payment processor exist, PIX in Brazil, UPI in India, etc.
There are several systems in the EU: Wero, Bizum, BLIK
It is urgent that Europeans coordinate to ensure the interoperability of these systems and reduce the influence of Visa and Mastercard.
In the event of conflict, this will be the first service to be cut in order to disrupt European countries.
An integrated European payments system should be very high up on the priorities list of the European Commision. I believe every EU country already has its own version of a QR code payment, I don't know why can't they connect "easily" connect them.
It's complicated, there are two types of applications and networks.
1) Direct payment systems via mobile phone, generally designed initially for payments between friends and family. They have been set up in several countries by neobanks, generally based on the Mastercard network (very common among neobanks). A Latvian neobank may expand into the Baltic countries, but is unlikely to succeed in Portugal. These systems are not interoperable with each other.
2) Systems promoted by banking networks, such as Bizum in Spain, which has expanded to the Iberian Peninsula, and Wero, which is supported by BNP Paribas (France, Belgium, Germany). These networks are independent of Mastercard, Visa, etc., but they seek to favor their members and do not seek to become widespread.
Discussions have been ongoing for years to achieve interoperability. The idea for the moment was to let the market structure itself naturally without too much intervention, other than to say “we must move towards interoperability at the European level.” This approach has worked very well for bank transfers, which have become simple, fast, and relatively secure, but it has taken a long time (Europe, consensus, etc.).
You can buy with RMB in a lot of countries outside the West, if they have integrated UnionPay or AliPay into their payment processors.
But more importantly, you can buy a lot of stuff from the factory of the world. Which is why a lot of countries don't mind holding the RMB. Just not enough for it to become a reserve currency, and certainly no one wants it to become the petroyuan.
The euro has been gaining ground ever since the financial crisis in terms of share of currencies held in global foreign exchange reserves. Less than a third of the US dollar, but still a distant second. Nevertheless, I'm still concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and how intertwined the EU economy is to countries which it has shaky relations with at best.
the yuan has major currency controls. there is a real threat of capital flight destabilization if policies change which is why nobody sane would peg tp the yuan as it is now. that said, countries definitely make bad choices.
I'm afraid you may have misunderstood. The SDR is a time-varying basket of USD, EUR, RMB, GBP, and JPY. At time of writing Afghanis are not part of SDR, even though Afghanistan owns some SDR.
Thanks for the clarification. The hyperlink you gave was to the general IMF website and did not contain an in-page search hit for "RMB," "Renminbi," or "China". Where can one find the size of the RMB allocation?
Presumably the IMF is not bound by the typical RMB capital controls that limit its utility for commercial entities and individuals.
I found that information at the top of the linked page, which I just checked again was indeed the page about SDRs. Maybe they're doing some stupid redirection that's browser dependent.
I partially agree. But the EU is in a pretty unstable state as incomplete government structure over a collection of peers. "Unstable" does not mean it's going to fall apart. It means it's going to fall apart or coalesce into a single thing (a new country). Or maybe a little of both (a new country with some fringe members leaving).
It might not be in 5 or 10 years but it's inevitable. It's not going to operate like this for 50, 100 years.
Just run a mental simulation of WW2 playing out except Europe had the EU.
So while I agree the EU is becoming more an more normal and important to the average citizen, there will come a time when it has to either solidify further or break apart, and I think it's basically a crapshoot to predict how that will go now when we have basically zero info.
I wouldn't describe integrating further to the point of becoming more like the US as "unstable". And that's the most likely outcome, which should make the EU more trustworthy as a partner, not less.
I would argue that not only is it not the most likely outcome, but that it's practically impossible. When the colonies united they all spoke the same language and shared the same culture as the descendants of recent British colonists. Furthermore, they had just fought and won a war of independence together. The first presidential election was unanimous with every single electoral vote backing George Washington. Do you think an EU presidential election would play out like that?
Also, when the colonies united, the government they agreed on was by today's standards extremely small and decentralized and there was absolutely no welfare state. Revenue was mostly from tariffs on imports with zero income tax. Merging modern European governments would be a massive undertaking in comparison. And the wealth levels between countries are so lopsided that any such merger would mean massive transfer payments out of the rich countries to the poor. And what about tax rates? Low tax countries will not like this one bit. When the US colonies merged under the constitution, you could very truthfully go to the average citizen of any colony and say "basically you won't even notice any changes." Whereas for the EU, you have to say to the voters "your taxes will go up and we will now be sending $100 billion Euros per year to people in other countries."
Sure the contexts are different, and you can also look at the federalization of German states as yet another example with a different context, but not all of the factors are unfavorable. For example, the countries of the EU are already more integrated than the colonies were. Plus it's a very different time now, we've had the UN for a long time already, etc.
Also, I was surprised to learn how heterogenous the different regions of the US were from the very beginning, in origin, character and motivations. The Puritans, Quakers, Cavaliers, French nobles and traders etc.
Just re taxes: why would anything need to change on that front in the event of federalization of the EU? There already is a union, it already has money, money already flows from richer countries to poorer countries—what would federalization change?
And until the first entitlement programs during the New Deal it made no difference because it was entirely the poor state's problem. Only after the country had been a political union for over 150 years did they have any sort of welfare transfer program. If New Yorkers had been told in the late 1700s that joining the union would mean taxes coming out of their paycheck to send money to people in Georgia, they never would have joined.
I meet a lot of people do enjoy their nation's sovereignty especially as a shield from EU's poor and unpopular decisions that they don't get a vote in, and see the common currency and freedom of movement as just the right amount of integration. Making english an official language would be even better IMHO, but that's about it. I enjoy different countries having different politics and takes on topics, as it would be shit if all EU was a just a homogenous groupthink.
And I've never met anyone who thought the likes of Ursula and Kaja should be trusted with even more power and control over nations.
>I wouldn't describe integrating further to the point of becoming more like the US as "unstable".
More like the US, as-in a country? So also more like Germany, China, South Africa, etc. You are making a false equivalence - being like the US in one extremely non-US specific way does not mean you must be like the US in every other way.
I'm not sure you even understand what I'm saying - this has nothing to do with the US vs. the EU or if the US is reliable.
I was referring to the possibility of the EU becoming a federal union which acts like a country. Yes, like the US and Germany, but unlike China and of South Africa I don't know enough to say.
It doesnt have to be a federal union. Probably a logical step but I didn't prescribe it. Regardless, I dont see how it could persist in its current form through lots of conflict.
Yeah, there are already major opposition parties advocating EU exit in many countries already. Try to centralize further and their support will increase. Contrast that with the US when it unified. George Washington won the election 69-0 in the electoral college. And that's not even getting into any of the other massive problems with EU unification.
> Additionally, we've now seen the EU survive the departure of a major economic power (the UK).
I don’t really understand the impact of Brexit on the euro, as Britain wasn’t on it.
But clearly they were a key part of the EU. It’ll be interesting to see which side regrets the move more.
>In June 2025, 56% of people in Great Britain thought it was the wrong decision
It's not so clear when you consider that 48.1% of the original referendum voters wanted to stay in the EU. I'm honestly very surprised by this poll, 8% change is pretty minimal considering the turmoil the country has gone through since 2016.
How much of this can be explained by older voters dying in the intervening 10 years, I recall that demographic skewed much more heavily Leave in 2016
Half the issue is the definition of ‘voter’. Turn-out is abysmal and polling has been crap in major ways. Calling someone eligible to vote a ‘voter’ is probably only right 50-60% of the time.
Agree, that's a good point. Perhaps many who would have voted remain just didn't think it was a chance it would pass so sort of stayed home because of that.
But only 56% in a poll? Is that enough for another referendum and guarantee rejoin? EU politicians have made it clear, ALL UK opt-outs will be gone if UK rejoins, whether it is UK opt-out regarding budget (like paying billions less in annual EU fees like UK did before), to special fishing rights pre-Brexit, to forced to adopt Euro currency and drop Pound sterling.
Rejoining is seen as politically too risky in the short term. As you observe, the UK would not get back its privileged position, there are probably some bargains to be struck but a track to the Euro currency is almost certainly mandatory and that'd be unpopular because people really like our banknotes for some reason and the Euro deliberately just looks like play money, the illustrations deliberately don't show real structures to avoid associations with the nations where those things were built.
But while "Leaving was a bad idea" isn't enough to seriously push for actual re-entry to the EU it's certainly a good sign for the EU and for the Euro. The EU is a massive bureaucracy, and I think we underestimated how much "a massive bureaucracy" might be the thing we wanted in this role..
I don’t know if you can confidently claim that the vote represented the view of the population at the time.
There was a small pro brexit margin, and loads didn’t vote. I don’t dispute the vote result, I just wondering what the result would have been if there had been higher turnout.
And to add on (rather than edit my comment), I think the saving grace that keeps USD around for a while longer is the last section of the article, "Deposit dollarization in emerging markets"
A lot of growing economies don't/can't trust their local currency and they overwhelmingly use USD instead of EUR or CNY. As those economies grow the USD gets a boost that will sustain it for a while over the increasing competition of CNY. But this can't sustain it forever and the US is not doing anything to offset the lost ground in global trade and forex reserves.
The Yuan is not a freely convertible currency, so not really an option here. The Euro isn't terrible, but it has structural issues in that member states all must take out debt in what is for monetary policy purposes a foreign currency. This generated a debt crisis 10 years ago, which has been papered over, but the structural issues remain unresolved. Also, the Euro has been around now for 25 years. That's not long enough to convince anyone of long term stability.
Saudi Arabia was privately discussing de-dollarization way back in summer last year, when the irrational tariffs were imposed, followed by the Israeli-US strikes on Iran. Make of that what you will.
Sweden just haven’t completed the stabilization and alignment criteria to formally switch over, arguing that it is voluntary.
We had a referendum on the euro back 2003 with a clear mandate to not adopt it and the politicians don’t want to poke the sleeping tiger that is the euro question.
There is a very sudden shift though - those options have existed but not generally been seriously considered. The US was seen as a bastion of stability and while sanctions could drastically impact a country's ability to trade due to the reliance on US currency exchange it has arguably been used relatively scarcely.
The change is that suddenly the US isn't a bastion of stability and having an independent trading currency could ensure more internal stability for other nations.
The U.S. is as stable as it gets. It has been one continuous republic and has 250 years of legal stability and a history of paying its debts. It has 4.2% GDP growth, with the largest economy in the world and growing.
Your ruler is no longer following the rules of law, nor the foundational constitution. USA ended with their declaration of dictatorship and the failure of your houses/legislature/military to act against that and defend the Constitution.
I can't see how, since the end of habeas corpus, you can claim legal stability.
Your leader is World renowned for reneging on debts and is demanding bribes for companies to operate.
Isn't borrowing through the roof to pay for things like your stasi?
Daily those stasi are murdering and disappearing people seemingly attempting to foment an excuse to escalate the violence.
I don't know how that knife edge can look anything like stable to you.
It's a very grandoise (or alarmist, depending on your perspective), but this isn't super new. The US has been "unstable" with rulers breaking their own laws domestically and internationally for many decades.
My money is that influence campaigns are active on HN and try to mold the discourse. The whole internet is manipulated to hell, and HN is a prime target, you have a bunch of smart people that probably have oversized influence, how could you NOT try manipulating this place?
This is most certainly happening. A lot of US-critical articles also get flagged to death, even when they have a lot of upvotes and healthy, civilized discussion.
I don't think mostly is true? Obviously it depends a lot on the time of day, but there are also a lot of Europeans on the site. Also, most comments here seem to be critical towards current US policy. So, I think there is quite a lot of manipulation going on, since the downvoting/flagging does not really match the comment section.
I think it's true. There is a significant audience here from other areas but this being an english language forum and one focused on tech means that the US is always going to have a dominant presence[1]. The US dominance also means that the news is highly focused on US events when it wanders out of tech which further reinforced the audience.
1. I believe Canada does have an outsized presence though!
The problem is the AI bubble, without it it is speculated that the US economy might actually be in a recession [2] - effectively, that web of investments, deals, ownerships, purchase contracts and god knows what is nothing more than wash trading that will come crashing down hard.
That is why for the 99%, the economy doesn't "feel" like 4.3% of growth. If you're not in AI directly or at least adjacent (e.g. datacenter or utility construction), you don't feel any of that money.
The U.S. chose to abandon the rules based international order that has made it a bastion of stability since WW2 when they decided they wanted a return to the monroe doctrine and that it was okay to arbitrarily invade countries and take their resources based on the impulses of a single person. The same person outwardly stated, "Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace". If you think this is "as stable as it gets", then we're living on different planets.
There more to stability than continuity of government. Though, that definitely is important.
It’s bad enough that America’s foreign policy lately swings wildly every four years. More recently, it’s been acting aggressive toward allies, and making very strange and unpredictable moves.
The USA’s tariff policies are, frankly, utterly insane. Yes, I do mean the tariffs are irrational and incoherent. The approach to the tariffs has been overly aggressive. They’ve been changing almost daily, at times. Now, tariffs are specifically a thing that must be stable and predictable on a multi-year horizon. This must be, at least, off-putting to other governments, and to any companies wishing to do business in or adjacent to the USA.
Monkeying with the Fed is dangerous and basically unprecedented. This is going to make people nervous because it marks the end of an era of stability in monetary policy. We may be at the start of a new era where interest rates, much like the tariffs, change frequently for bad reasons or for no reason at all. Who can say?
America was never a stable country. That 250 years includes:
* A decade of chaos under the impotent Articles of Confederation.
* The deliberately engineered election of George Washington to create the illusion of political stability, a reign which only ended because George stepped down voluntarily.
* An immediate constitutional crisis the moment a competitive election happened, causing the election of a President and Vice President from opposing political parties (imagine a Harris - Trump presidency). The ensuing chaos resulted in SCOTUS unilaterally declaring itself the final arbiter of the law.
* The Thomas Jefferson presidency, which in many ways is the alpha release of Trump.
* The Civil War, started specifically because the losing faction of slaveholders was angry at losing, and ending with the losing faction losing so hard the counter rolled back into flawless victory. They surrendered, then assassinated the President and got his party to give up on everything he stood for.
* Economy-destroying Smoot-Hawley tariffs, which are basically what Trump is doing now.
* A spectacular near-miss in which the country's business elites attempted to assassinate a Progressive president and only failed because the Marine they selected as their Hitleresque dictator ratted them out.
* Widespread civil unrest deliberately created to force America to reckon with its racist past and undo what the South had managed to convince the North to allow them to do after Reconstruction.
* The Richard Nixon presidency, which in many ways is the beta release of Trump.
* Too many foreign invasions to count.
In the entire history of America I can think of maybe 3 brief moments of political stability that weren't outright engineered fantasies. The two that are relevant to modern times are the 1950s and the 1990s. Both of these were the result of America winning a war of conquest.
There's an excellent and eerily prescient novel that attempts to portray what such a "tipping point" might look like, and when it could arrive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mandibles
EU can easily pull the plug on Euro as a reserve currency if they confiscate the money of a certain country and give it to another one. That would be the "front fell off" moment for Euro.
Except they didn't and instead borrowed money for the other country. But more importantly, there seems to be a process in place, where a collective of rational actors makes choices, rather than someone who states he can go to war because he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize.
(Still disappointed that the winner of the FIFA peace prize wants to go to war /s.)
the fed has been doing a pretty good job for the last 100+ years. I'm not a fan of the 'we'll let's just try it this other way, we haven't in awhile' argumentation.
Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.
Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
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