That is not how economics work either.

Inflation is kinda irrelevant, what matters is the people’s buying power, i.e. how much they can afford to buy based on their wages.

And the wages are determined on the labor market based on supply and demand: If there’s high demand for human workers, wages are higher.

And demand for human workers largely depends on how much employment opportunities the state creates. Like, if the state just begins to randomly construct public transport and public infrastructure and more energy production sites and also clean water pipes and lots of other stuff, that creates construction jobs and drives up wages which means people can buy more stuff.

That has literally nothing to do with how much money the government prints, and it doesn’t really matter if the cost of bread is $2 or $20 as long as your wages rise just as quickly.

Money is fictional anyways. If they want to, Moscow can print literally arbitrary amounts of Rubels. There’s no way they’re gonna bankrupt.

What could be interesting, however, is see how the economic situation unfolds for everyday people.

I imagine that’s how it is/was for a lot of rulers. The feudal lord doesn’t have to be smart, he’s just a representative. The priests and diplomats and businessmen in the background tell them what to do. It’s beneficial for both sides because you can have a lot of influence without actually having to expose yourself to the public.

My guess is that they didn’t really intend to keep it secret anyways. Probably many many people knew about it (at least many thousands!) because otherwise how did Epstein get his clients? His clients would have to have known about his business, and that means that even more people (who were not clients) had to know about it too.

My guess is everybody kinda knew it but nobody bothered to tell the public, because why would you burden the public with what happens at the nobility’s castles?

Hey the french revolution was also about the fact that the government was a scandal ridden shitshow of petty internal politics and stupid interpersonal games.

tbf, most of nobility for centuries before that was a scandal ridden shitshow of petty internal politics and stupid interpersonal games. i quote 13th century italy as a nice example.

yet that didn’t lead to revolution.

so, in 18th century france, where’s the difference?

The Russian Revolution was to get rid of the tsars and make everything fair for everyone and instead they ended up with Stalin oppressing the shot out of everyone

I believe that if you allow people to get power who have killed lots of people to get there (i.e. killing all the nobility), then you’ve essentially made murderers your new rulers. That’s a big part of why Russia ended up with Stalinist terror.

Transfer of power needs to be peaceful. There must be no bloodshed during the next revolution.

does anyone know what the difference between OsmAnd and Organic Maps is?

finally. i’ve been waiting for this for a long time. finally a worthwhile software development project again.

France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands will work to develop open, European alternatives in “key areas” such as AI, cloud, cybersecurity, and – curiously – social networks.

especially social networks are important, as it allows people to connect and exchange messages outside of the influence of US big biased algorithms.

does anybody have a link to the project website, where one can sign up and contribute?

can we have fediverse mirroring of xiaohongshu?

in my opinion the civil war around 1800 did not actually abolish slavery. it just made slavery more efficient.

instead of killing your slaves through hard work (which means you have to buy new ones) you can just work them longer if they live longer, i.e. that’s why working conditions improved. at the same time, slavery got renamed into “prison labor”. it’s essentially the same thing.

It’s crazy how 13% of the world population dominate the social media discourse so much that i basically see no other people’s opinion ever.

good article overall, well researched and well written, feels very balanced when reading it.

Humans like shiny.

guess what’s also shiny? all the advertisement that companies put out for stupid products. doesn’t that make a lot of other things just as shiny?

Gold has utility

not really. IMHO gold is about as useful as aluminum or any other metal, i.e. $10/kg would be justified, but not $70k/kg, which it currently is.

like, $10/kg is real usefulness, the remaining $69990/kg are people’s irrational belief that gold is valuable somehow.

the only thing that cryptocurrency lacks IMO is inherent value. there needs to be real use-cases for something to have value, at least in my imagination. i fail to see the use-case in cryptocurrency.

edit: Actually, there are some nice use-cases. like, iirc, “doge” uses an algorithm for mining that produces protein-folding-predictions as a side-result, which is useful in biochemistry and molecular biology, which could be used for new drugs for medicine.

if society ended silver isn’t gonna be worth anything

i doubt that.

yeah :)

you’re right

haha yeah :) but no, actually, i want them to have UBI, i just want everyone else to have it as well :) that’s a difference.

Also note that script is historically mostly used for communication over large distances and times.

Historical scriptures (such as the bible) got transported across half the globe and copied and passed down for more than a thousand years. The scripture transcends both space and time.

If you only want to communicate with your neighbour, you don’t need a lingua franca. Lingua franca is exclusively for writing down, and communicating over very large distances (such as the internet). In that case, no pronounciation is needed. So it is possible to have an abstract sign language that doesn’t even have a standardized pronounciation.

This might sound absurd at first, if you never thought about it, until you realize that is how a lot of our information is already transported. There are a lot of sketches and visualizations of important data that are graphics, plots, charts, drawings, and such, that don’t have a standardized pronounciation. The information is transported visually.

everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.