Russia was attrited and gave up in Afghanistan in 1989, Germany was attrited and collapsed on the Eastern Front in 1944, USA was attrited and gave up in Vietnam, etc.
The point is that attrition takes a long time and a lot of effort. It doesn't happen overnight, as the media has been claiming about this war for years now.
Afghanistan was fought by the USSR rather than just Russia. Quite a few Ukrainian soldiers ended up there ironically.
I tried Wero just now. Crashes at once on my phone.
I run Lineage is, want backups on my own NAS. I have a feeling that if I want this European payment app I need to accept backing up my data on an American cloud.
(I've nothing against Google really. But I want my backups at home.)
I've had Claude produce HTML containing SVG for graphs recently. I could have produced Markdown+PNG. Are you saying that Markdown+PNG would have used fewer tokens?
This one was released a few years ago and still seems unbroken. I'm sure it will be broken at some point, but if you have to wait a year or two from when you make a deepfake until you can post it on Facebook, maybe that's enough. Maybe even a month is enough.
Oil may be valuable stuff, but nothing compels competing energy sources to be more expensive, and the cheapest oil fields were developed first, with a few exceptions. The optimists who want to develop oil fields beneath 3km of water are IMO unlikely to sell at a price that covers their costs.
Windmills cannot produce fertilizer or plastic. Oil is useful for a lot more than just energy.
On the energy side, of course there will come a day when solar and nuclear will be more economical and plentiful than oil, but that is many decades away.
Wow, logistics to <remote place> are very expensive! We could spend that money better in the cities!
Wow, logistics in <city> is expensive! We could spend that money better in rural areas!
I read about a new road tunnel in London last year, a ten-digit price tag for about 1km of road IIRC. I'm 100% sure some people suggested that that money could have been better spent in rural areas.
The one thing you seem to be missing in your anticolonialist tirades is the fact that Tristan was uninhabited. It’s not like native peoples were displaced by the British colonists, right?
Many self-described anticolonialists forget that "self-determination" doesn't actually mean "people who live far away from the mainland should just fuck off and take care of themselves".
I've experienced it a bit as a Frenchman (and we have quite a few remote territories as well) who has lived on a couple of remote places (that were uninhabited as well before becoming French, but that shouldn't actually matter) and it's incredible how puny, short-sighted and simply egoistical some people can be.
I'm saying that it is common for some people to advocate for jettisoning other parts of their country, especially if they are far away from where they live.
No, you're correct Britain is a collection of islands in the northern hemisphere. This however is an island in the Atlantic ocean and is a British Overseas Territory.
The size of the building applied for is generally weakly related to the effort required for the application.
If you have some land, getting approval to build six buildings is often not much more work than getting approval to build one. So why not apply for six even if you only have a tenant for one. If it's the same amount of paperwork and the land is cheap (maybe you can lease the land to the farmer you bought it from).
This doesn't apply in places where land is expensive, of course. Central Amsterdam, downtown Manhattan, etc. In places like that you'd want to use your building permits PDQ.
It seems to me that if you want some sort of money creation management role in the economy, you need to restrict people's ability to lend and borrow from each other. So if you wanted to lend me money, or you wanted to borrow from me, we would have to apply for permission.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who's tried to restrict people's right to borrow from a willing lender. It doesn't seem like a good idea intuitively, but I do think it's something you must do if you want to have a money creation manager.
Lol, the bank of england is the grandaddy of them all and doesn't want people to understand how money works any more than any other big bank does.
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
you can read up on social credit (the western version, not chinese) if you want an alternate perspective
EDIT: On reading it, this is actually a reasonable description of how it works. But the idea that it's not managed by anyone is silly: the banks manage it by scrounging as much debt as they can, productive or not, and charging as much interest as they can on it (and getting bailouts when that inevitably goes sideways, which transfers the issue to the public purse). That's the problem: the money needs to be created to match the productive economy and be placed in the hands of everyone, interest free.
There's a crucial difference: in the economy we have, each party manages its own money, no party manages the overall money supply. That's why the overall money supply (M2 etc) has to be estimated: there isn't a managing authority that could report correct numbers.
To my mind that's good, it allows each of us the right to estimate future value, and the money supply is effectively a sum of our estimates.
I think you write "the money needs" because you want that to be the case, Just another sentence where "x needs" (third person) means "I want" (first person). Unless you can describe the need?
Yes, the traditional Christian understanding of usury is right about what's wrong, but wrong about what's right. Debt based and fiat currencies in general were able to expand the money supply to allow for more vigorous growth. Gold and silver were really the only other conceivable alternatives and there was never enough of it to match the productive economy, especially after the industrial revolution. I do think that the horrors of gold-backed money are oversold: the US expanded more quickly in the late 1800s under a gold backed currency with almost no immigration, but that shows that other factors (e.g. industrialization) are sometimes more important.
The thing to get your head around is: who gets the new money? My preferred system (social credit) says everyone gets a citizens dividend, rather than banks claiming surplus value via compounding (read: exponential) interest.
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