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If youre a normal country you are always living on credit, if for no other reason, then because it is super easy and cheap to borrow. Also you have to, to make it to the next pay check (tax collection). First your subjects have to produce and sell, then you can collect taxes.

You dont base the value of the dollar on anything. You offer it as a commodity to the market. If your economy sucks or you print too much money the dollar goes down, which can help the economy. Printing money doesnt automatically help the economy though, it just creates space and time to make it possible for the economy to improve.

Improving the economy means creating more or better products and services that are in demand at a competitive cost. Governments in non-dictatorial countries cant really do that directly, they can only create the conditions for this to happen.

Moderate inflation hardly plays a part, except as a moderator (is that a pun?) of shocks. Deflation (and a strong gold standard in a developing economy IS deflation) is deadly, it makes the economy less flexible, less able to adjust.

If you never improve your ecomomy, all you will have left will be to bitch about inflation.

What is too much debt, too much inflation, too much intervention? I wish economics was a science.

Theoretically the economy can get to be so bad that the structure collapses, there are countries which have notoriously bad historical records, and yet every time they restart they have to borrow money to get things going again. Reserves in general are useless. Production, services and a functioning market, recursive production of valuable goods and services which freely and easily find customers is the only thing you can consider a reliable pillar of civilization. Currency is one of those goods and services.

If for any reason yor currency cant freely circulate (see China or the USSR errr... Russia) you can hardly be a superpower, at least not in the economic sense.

Adopting a gold standard so strong that it would destroy the international dollar standard has no advantage for the USofA or for any developed first world country. Even just having the Euro wreaks havoc in weaker European countries economies, but that is another can of worms.

A lot of what is wrong about the gold standard would apply if a country decided to adopt bitcoin as its sole currency btw.

A superpower hardly needs to be perfect, it just needs to be good at being a superpower - science level, industry production, human resources, military, ie the stuff that China is catching up fast with or is gone already.

Quality of life, human rights and democratic institutions are nice but not vital to superpower status. They are vital for sucess lasting more than two generations though so there is hope in that.

San Marino? Iceland? Finland? New Zealand? Switzerland? Holland? Denmark? Canada? Possibly Sweden? Id give them a shot.

Funny to imagine that. Montenegro pulling the strings for once instead of being pushed away from the camera by Trump. Half the world scurrying to maps in vain, trying to find it, the other half not knowing what the fuss is about as usual. You will buy our goat milk or we will impose tariffs on your fancy gangster guns, automobiles and helicopters!

As superpowers go, the US is not too bad. Its a fairly hands-off type superpower if you compare it to say the Roman Empire or Napoleonic France. Taking a long time to even annex Puerto Rico properly.

Wondering really how China will fare. Give it 25 years. And they sure wont ask as nicely as you just did.

There was this joke about Brezhnev (which might have originated earlier but what do i know) where Brezhnev comes up with this awesome new detente initiative and proposes that the two superpowers should exchange their generals, namely that the USSR should give the US general Voroshilov and general Yegorov in exchange for General Motors and General Electric.

Show me a study that isn't by a well known Vegan doctor who, btw, helped Oprah jumpstart an entirely unnecessary mad cow disease scare back in 1996.

Give me a link from a person who isn't described like this on their wikipedia page:

"Retired physician Harriet A. Hall, who is known as a skeptic in the medical community,[23][24][25] has written that, while it is well-accepted that it is more healthy to eat a plant-based diet than a typical Western diet, Greger often overstates the known benefits of such a diet as well as the harm caused by eating animal products (for example, in a talk, he claimed that a single meal rich in animal products can "cripple" one's arteries), and he sometimes does not discuss evidence that contradicts his strong claims."

A SINGLE MEAL can cripple your arteries. One meal. This is the person you are linking me to.

I should link you to Jillian Mai Thi Epperly and her 'jilly juice' which she claims expunges Candida from the body, and so by drinking a gallon of the juice every day, one can cure themselves of virtually any ailment, including autism, cancer, HIV, Down syndrome, and homosexuality.[2] The creator also claims that the juice can regrow lost limbs.

You don't have Vegan superpowers. At best you have a slightly better chance to live longer than someone else with a similar genetic makeup. That is science, that is fact.

In short yes. but it's not superpowers. it's science.

E.g.
Vegan blood kills cancer cells https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drMyq5q0KTU

This is specifically a diet on whole food plants - a vegan junk food diet won't be anywhere near this protective. This is how you can tell I'm not being biased, because I'm not saying "be vegan" I'm advocating for a very specific diet, which just happens to be vegan.

But yes, eating a plant only diet prevents cancer in the first place, prevents it from spreading, helps with treatment, and prevents the cancer from coming back afterwards.

(I've got plenty more studies to show, but let's see we can get through this one bit of research first)

So, plant based eaters have Vegan superpowers that prevent colon cancer?

You ridicule my take on statistics, which you are wrong about as the 18% chance still ends up being a 1% chance OVER A LIFETIME, but you think that being Vegan means you will never experience pre-cancerous polyps or full blown colon cancer?

ANYONE can get colon cancer, Vegans still have a lifetime risk of 5% like everyone else. Even the link I quoted says they simply recommend choosing fish, poultry, or beans instead of red meat and processed meat. They DON'T say "GO VEGAN AND NO CANCERS FOREVER LOL".

That is why this is propaganda. The PCRM and it's lead Vegan doctor founder would have you believe that if you go Vegan that all of life's ails would simply be gone. You will never get those nasty sicknesses the meat eating brutes get...without acknowledging that diet is NEVER going to overrule genetic predisposition for certain ailments and conditions. It certainly might help very slightly in the long run, but the PCRM would have you believe that eating meat is equivalent to chainsmoking 4 packs of cigarettes a day, ie, you WILL get cancer if you aren't Vegan.

Trust me, I also understand having people that you love dying sucks. I've lost my entire biological family and many of my wife's family due to various reasons. All I have left is my wife's family and my biological mother. But I also realize that every single person is going to die. I also know that a lot of times that death isn't going to make sense or even be fair. You might be able to salvage a few years by restricting yourself from the pleasures of life, but statistically you still could die in a shitty way.

That is why I don't agree with the Vegan outlook or the ideal they promote that going Vegan will give you the longest lasting life with all happiness. There are many other diets that could provide the same minor edge in extending life, but Vegans typically refuse to acknowledge that. I view them as a pseudo-science cult, much like Breatharians.

So Pixar can't stop.

Perhaps the theme of the movie is keeping babies with superpowers entertained long enough that they don't destroy the world.

First thought,

If you find the question interesting, watch the Death Note anime(not the movie), this is more the less the premise of the entire series with a teenage genius gaining said power.

I have to say I find video presenter's approach to the question is interesting. He almost only addresses the crime of passion angle. The more difficult moral question IMO is as MilkmanDan alludes with the trolley problem. If you have essentially a superpower like this, it is not ONLY your use of it that is a dilemma, but also a refusal to use that power to help victims when you could.

Go back 10 years ago, what is morally worse, using your power to kill Osama Bin Laden, or to refuse to use your power when you could end his influence?

So we kill some of those poor people to save them and educate them about democracy?

How well has this worked before, ever? Is there a recorded case of peoples lives improving based on superpower military intervention in regime change? Outside the ones aimed at keeping dictators in power, because those do tend to work well.

What are we going to do differently this time?

That seems a bit much for comic books but i have no clue "how real" comic books get as i don't read them.

I don't see that as someone being raped. I think it's more someone who wants to feel dominated. There is quite a market for very powerful people paying good money to be dominated. I've had a friend or two (strong females) who have talked about wanting/enjoying being dominated by lovers. In the real world people don't enjoy being raped but many powerful people get off on being dominated/controlled so i tend to see it from that perspective as it seems more realistic. Although I can see how it could be seen as rape. Hard to know for sure without more background info.

However still seems odd for a comic book.

Curious if Miller has said anything regarding this? I did a quick google and didn't find anything on the implication that Superman raped Wonder Woman.
"In Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, which also takes place in the future, Clark and Diana had a superpowered daughter called Lara, after Superman’s Kryptonian mother, whom they protected from the government. In typical Miller style, the relationship was memorably… intense:" http://comicsalliance.com/the-many-loves-of-wonder-woman-steve-trevor-nemesis-batman-superman-romance/

Anyway just my two cents

Mutually assured destruction I think is often woefully overlooked as a stabilising force in the world.

I don't think it's at all a co-incidence that since nuclear proliferation we have only seen wars vs non nuclear nations. You can never really win meaningfully vs a nation that has the thermo-nuclear trump card in their back pocket.

When superpowers come to blows now, proxy wars are the only realistic option. That may still suck for the poor bastards that get caught up with it, but it does mean a world war is somewhat off the table (even if they like to rattle the sabres from time to time).

Also Starship troopers is an oft misunderstood book I think. Some people get so hung up on the underlying idea of a Military dictatorship that they miss much of the nuance and wisdom woven into it.
I'm not even sure Heinlein was even necessarily advocating such a world, but rather using it as a narrative device to explore how our societies really work once you drop the wishful pretences (especially the stable ones).

It seems like there is perhaps some intrinsic relationship between peace and the capacity for effective and controlled violence. There are few people as calm and non aggressive as the ones who truly know they have nothing to fear from you in a fight.

Argument pro plain incompetence/stupidity: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/in-the-democratic-echo-chamber-inconvenient-truths-are-recast-as-putin-plots/

On a personal note: Olberman throwing accusations at foreign governments without solid evidence while claiming that WikiLeaks "hacks Podesta's email" is not helping his credibility. He's always been prone for exaggeration, but at a time when your military is bombing people in nearly a dozen countries and you're fighting a proxy-war against a nuclear-armed superpower in Syria, going off on an almost McCarthy-ite rant is not helping.