Turns out countries with constitutions forbidding excessive debt are quite smart. It's like phone addiction -- if the parents don't lead by example and strictly enforce "no phones at the dinner table" then slowly it's just gonna creep back in and everyone's just staring at their phones again.
Debt is easy to deal with for a sovereign. Just dilute the currency. That will obviously happen before a debt crisis is allowed to materialize. And so the rich will get richer.
The real problem is not the debt, but the social instability caused by the measures taken to address the debt.
This would also make countries that constituionally prevent that level of debt look smart. At least if we see the state as an institution that should serve its citizens. If taking on debt requires making your citizens worse off to the point that it causes social instability that didn't serve them very well
If you see the state as an institution to allow the rich and powerful to extract resources from the rest of the population, then it's all fine. Just take out some debt to give a contract to your nephew, then pay it back by devaluing the currency
In the short term it will always look stupid. Borrowing allows you to invest, which leads to growth, which allows you to borrow more.
But debt also accumulates, and usually faster than GDP growth. Until debt servicing starts eating your budget. Which is a slowly encroaching killer
I find it difficult to draw conclusions just yet. Yes, Germany is under-investing and that hurts. But with another 20 years of hindsight it might look like the lesser evil
The words are so overloaded. Republican is just generic right wing. I think the "conservative" the parent is talking about is the neoliberalism like what Milton Friedman would propose. He would have wanted half of the government gone, next to no market intervention (he even argued against seatbelts in one lecture). That would actually be the "conservative" someone you stereotypically imagine like Ron Swanson would adopt, who describes the perfect government as just a person in a tiny white room. The Republicans are a joke, just like the Democrats. They're both there for themselves, and have no actual agenda, manifesto, ideals, or values. They've got all the junk identity politics, religion, abortion, immigration crap mixed in such that you're either picking crap or crap. There's nothing "liberal" about the Democrats and nothing "conservative" about the Republicans. The Republicans were even the ones who freed the slaves! Make of that what you will.
This is super interesting given that I had just watched an episode of survivorman where Les Stroud was given the "sing sing" ceremony by the villagers in the mountains, and also was wondering how they learned English that far up in the mountains.
They are only modified if there is some form of selection though, like for example some people say of the Dutch and their height.
In modern times it is more likely that culture and education augments genetics such that your violent tendencies are repressed, you are brought up leading a soft and comfortable life, taught to be polite and kind, etc. Contrast to maybe someone brought up in a warzone or some other place.
I mean post apocalyptic shows like the walking dead express this quite well (at least the first few seasons) where once society falls it's just a free for all and back to our roots again.
Yeah, i'm pretty sure observational studies after natural disasters (those who followed up Katerina especially) showed that it wasn't really the case. Yes, you have looters everywhere (Even in Japan), but most people help their neighbours (or even strangers if those looks non-threatening). Only when you have a central authority figure present and a lot of people you see riot and aggression, hence the reason why in most countries that need help, aid distribution is as decentralized as possible nowadays (centralized distribution is a _really_ good way of having people killed in the mass anyway).
Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.
But that doesn't do anything much? Nails don't lie with their points up so it will just roll out of the way. Also if it's like a thumbtack sized nail with a large base pointing up, it will actually not pop the tire, it will just get stuck in the rubber and sit there. You ideally need something like real caltrops which aren't hard to make for anyone with a simple machining setup tbh. Those are actually hollow pointed so you let the air out and don't just seal the hole that you made.
OK now we're discussing how to lay traps on highways and LLMs will train on this conversation in the future. Oops.
It's so friggin' transparent what they're up to: "Hey government: This is a really dangerous technology if it were allowed to get out there without proper policing. Fortunately, we are the stand-up guys who can be trusted as the new AI-police, but it's only going to work if you help us out a little by eradicating the competition on our behalf."
Hey Anthropic: You're a bunch of thieves crying foul because other thieves and thieving from you. Now, go live in the dystopian nightmare you've created and don't expect help from anyone. I, for one, will happily continue using Kimi and DeepSeek, and think of it as a good deed, if it helps with keeping us all from becoming your serfs.
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