FBXL Social

I suspect that if the government was no longer sticking its fingers everywhere, a lot of very rich people would very quickly find themselves destitute. None of them have ever had to run a business where they weren't being chosen as a winner because of their connections to the largest and most powerful state in the history of the world.

It's so ingrained into the systems of the moment, we're both writing this on a global network built almost exclusively on government money.

"I uh found 17 trillion dollars in redundancies" - Actually increases spending by 1 trillion

God damnit elon...

Liz Truss is in trouble because she just stepped in and tried to do the conservative playbook. Cut taxes, ignore spending. The problem is that neither the progressive playbook nor the conservative playbook are going to work in this environment. You're gonna need austerity, tax increases and spending cuts.

Nobody is going to be happy, but the budget must be balanced because credit is finite again. You actually need to convince someone to buy the debt, and nobody is going to accept unlimited debt purchases at rates under inflation.

Many countries in the past have discovered this, but the UK is just one of the first and won't by far be the last.

Sort of interesting that 1lb of gold was 5 years of a legionnaires wage, but that would represent about 23,100 USD today, or less than 2 years at minimum wage (presumably a legionnaire would make more than federal minimum wage)

>tfw people complain about mods and admins on a distributed platform anyone can host

Not just vaxes but lockdowns.

https://susankatzkeating.com/doug-ford-net-worth-age-height/

"Ford’s net worth in 2022 is believed to be around $50 million. What is surprising is the fact that it jumped more than 15 times from his $3 million recorded net worth in 2019. During Covid-19 pandemic his net worth increased as well."

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-net-worth-nearly-doubled-154225312.html

"Fauci’s Net Worth Nearly Doubled during Pandemic"

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/the-stock-market-made-nancy-pelosi-rich-now-she-wants-to-ban-her-colleagues-from-trading/

"The speaker also reaped a significant return during the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing her estimated net worth jump from $106 million in 2019 to $171.4 million in 2021, an increase of 60 percent."

You don't double your money on a new prophylactic rotavirus vaccine. You double your money by shutting down the entire productive economy and holding it hostage until your demands are met.

Politicians wanted to use what appeared to be the biggest crisis ever to gain more power. The more power they have, the more they can sell favors. The more they can sell favors, the richer they get.

May politicians increased their net worth by orders of magnitude during the pandemic.

And I'll give you that they weren't rounding up the unvaccinated, but you get to a certain point where the audacious abuses of power put anything on the table. The camps did exist, they bragged about it. They were threatening to cut off unvaxxed from the economy altogether, to keep unvaxxed lockdowns in place for years. There was just a tiiiiiiiiny line they hadn't crossed yet, but they did cross all those other lines.

Ffs....

Debt is a force multiplier. Successes get blown up, and failures also get blown up. That's one reason why most booms and most busts are centered around monetary factors. During the gold standard era, many of those booms and busts centered around bank policies, using silver or gold as coinage, or people playing around in markets to limit or cause excesses of money.

Usually, some stuff will be going up and other stuff will be going down and it all sort of balances out, but with debt you can have massive booms because lots of people with lots of money rush into one slightly profitable thing making it insanely profitable, but when it becomes less profitable suddenly everyone is rushing with their borrowed money to get out and it crashes, and because there's so much borrowed money involved not only does that thing crash, but the people who lose borrowed money need to pull out of other stuff to make up the difference and so it causes other parts of the economy to choke up as well.

Of course I'm not suggesting we end debt, but it's an instrument that must be used carefully, and there's nothing careful about the past 50 years.

>Making shit up
Oh yah?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/08/26/australia-has-begun-building-covid-concentration-camps-n2594763

>Thinking their results could have been faked to a significant degree amounts to not much less than believing in the Illuminati.

Thinking that a situation where so many people had so much to gain from the favorable results couldn't possibly result in results that were faked to a significant degree amounts to believing in santa claus and the easter bunny.

>Maybe you should learn to read more than just the headline of an article

Don't lie by structure if you don't want to be accused of deception.

>I'm too tired and agitated to deal with this level of bullshit.

Same. I'm done with this conversation.

"Durka durrrr I don't remember nothing! Nobody ever said anything! Oh, you proved what you said happened happened, often with sources that are hostile to your position? Well suddenly I'm a 300 IQ critical thinker who will do a deep dive on sources to prove you're ackshually wrong!"

yeah yeah yeah. Doesn't even matter anymore. After all, the authoritarians won. Congratulations, I hope you bake a nice state approved cake.

That goes to something I was discussing with someone else today, that they do things that make the numbers always go up, but the numbers in the aggregate don't tell the whole story. They kept the numbers going up for the past 15 years, but what that's looked like is cost of living becoming impossible, factories and the like shutting down, and the economy being people shuffling around million dollar apartments in Toronto.

Keynesian prescriptions are a failure. Debt during bad times and saving during good times does not work. Politically it turns into debt during bad times and debt during good times. If you want proof, look at the years since 2008. More debt run up than ever before, in every economy around the world, during what was called the longest economic recovery in history.

So what really needs to happen is a recession. A bad one. It'll suck, and a lot of people will get hurt for a while, but perpetual economic stimulus is very bad. It means that on paper the numbers only go up, but it also means that people who have only ever see their numbers go up, and people who have nothing end up priced out of ever having anything. Kids are living in their parents basements because they can't afford anywhere to live in the second largest country on the planet with one of the lowest population densities on the planet.

We need our capital going towards productive work, not towards bidding up 100 year old houses or other non-productive rent seeking. If changing that means our numbers go down for a while, so be it. If we don't fix this obvious problem, then political extremism is going to continue to grow because there's no opportunities for anyone who doesn't already have a foot in the door to just lead a normal life. Then the numbers will really drop, and they probably won't recover for a long time.

It used to be said that "say what you will about the fascists, at least the trains ran on time". Over the years I've come up with a corollary to that: "if you're going to be fascist, the trains better well fucking run on time"

The idea being that if you end up taking absolute power, everything that happens good or bad is on you. Most of those governments don't operate that way, they will take credit for all of the good things happening and blame someone else for all the bad things that are happening.

Sort of like engineering the worst inflation at any point that I've been alive, and then instead of blaming their own policies which anyone with basically economics could have predicted, they blame Russia.

Doesn't just apply to governments either. I've seen authoritarian bullies in positions of power at work, and as long as everything is going fine, the authoritarian can take full credit for all the good things that are happening, but the moment that things aren't going good anymore everyone turns on that leader.

I might have agreed with you 600 billion dollars ago, but the current government has spent more debt than every other government before it combined in a very short period of time. Eventually, you got to put the crack pipe away.

I get it. Especially Southern Ontario. You've already got new york, why would you want more New York?

You think most of Canada would fight back against the Americans at this point?

Make a good offer, you can have a new US state tomorrow in Alberta.

You don't seem to remember a whole lot about the pandemic. People who weren't getting vaccinated were being referred to in the same way that you might talk about an insect infestation or rodents. The rhetoric was downright genocidal. Our prime minister asked whether we should continue to "tolerate these people" and ominously ask whether we should allow them to continue to "take up space". We were talking about a head tax for those people in some areas. In australia, they were literally being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. In the meantime, the government lockdowns were being entirely blamed on the unvaccinated, even in places where most people were vaccinated. (Of course, the establishment media in the pocket of government will tell you that yes the camps exist, and yes they're there to concentrate people who are more likely to get covid, but they're totally not covid concentration camps)

Go figure, clinical trials run by companies that stood to make billions of dollars ended up finding exactly what those companies wanted to find. If you'd like, I can dig up all of the studies sponsored by cigarette companies that say that cigarettes don't cause cancer.

By the way, let's not forget here that the entire process was streamlined via Trump's Operation Warpspeed. They didn't run the same testing as they would on any other vaccine, that's why they were able to get it done in less than a year rather than the 10 years it normally takes to have a vaccine approved. It takes 9 months to make a baby. It does not matter how many women you put on the job, or how many men you put on the job, it takes 9 months to make a baby. It doesn't matter how much money you put into the process, it takes 9 months to make a baby. Similarly, it takes a long-term to complete long-term studies. The other thing that you need is the freedom to speak truth. If you wanted to end your career in medicine, a really good way it would be opposing the official narrative on covid. The massive corruption in medical science was on full display for all to see.

That moving of the goal posts that you're supporting here is required because of the expedited schedule and reduced testing. There were no long-term tests, so they didn't know how long protection was going to last, they didn't know what the long-term effects could be. "Just get two doses of the vaccine and covid will be beaten" has now turned into "get a shot every 3 months"

I keep on bringing up stuff that actually happened, and you keep on saying that you don't remember it. How about this 2020 article that said the vaccine is 95% effective? One of many.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/coronavirus-pfizer-vaccine-is-95percent-effective-plans-to-submit-to-fda-in-days.html

I'm afraid that given the authoritarian measures taken, you can't separate what you remember from the political. Not when all of the news organizations and all of the social media companies were directly being dictated policy by the government. That's the cost of authoritarianism. You want to control everything, you get all the credit and all the blame.

Ironic that the same authoritarianism that China has been trying to export to the rest of the world eventually harmed China.

Authoritarianism is a lottery ticket you purchase by giving up both kidneys. If you win then you'll be fine, you'll get new ones. If you lose, there's really nothing to do but die.

Unfortunately, as the Internet becomes more mainstream, its ability to function as a system outside of other systems will continue to be reduced.

Funny how internet access is a human right right up until someone isn't using the internet to support megacorps.

Reminds me of a lot of people saying "We're not in a recession"

...

For a lot of people, there's never not been a recession. The numbers keep going up, but if you're not in the 0.01% that doesn't matter.

No other vaccine used the same technology, so of course there were more risks. Instead of using tried and true vaccine technologies, the drug companies took the opportunity to use this new technology for the first time ever. Most vaccines operate by presenting the body with either weakened viruses or parts of a virus that has been destroyed. By contrast, mRNA vaccines operate by having your own body assemble pieces of the virus, then your immune system attacks those cells with the foreign proteins that the vaccine induced them to create. It should be self-evident that there are different risks involved between introducing a weakened or dead virus into the body and having the body manufacture pieces of a virus and attack itself.

When I took the vaccine, I did so fully aware of the fact that there were different risks, but at the time governments around the world worked with communications providers to suppress information about those risks. When I got covid later, huh it turns out that despite their claims of 90% protection pretty much everyone who got the shot also got covid!

The politicians around the world violated people's basic human rights by shutting down any speech that didn't follow exactly what they wanted said. Anyone who believes in liberal values who lived through the pandemic came out the other side with their faith in virtually every institution destroyed. And you will never make me forget that people's ability to pay for food, to pay their mortgage, to support their families was taken away by my government for having the gall to demand policies that the same government ended up implementing a mere eight months later. All the while people like me were called racist sexist misogynistic transphobic homophobic American Russian bots, again, for demanding policies that the exact same government would implement eight months later.

I will never forget that. I will never forget that my donation to a charitable cause I believed in was reversed twice under the pressure of government under no law. I will never forget that politicians who opposed the status quo were arrested.

My grandfather fought in world war II to oppose tyranny, and those same countries that he fought for around the world spit on his grave. If you ever want to know if the Holocaust could happen today, we just proved that it can at any time.