A German mark had value….until it didn’t. Your opinion of “fiat money” isn’t universal by any stretch. You say it’s universally better. I wholeheartedly disagree, and point to Germany and Venezuela as proof. They aren’t outliers either, (looking at Africa).

Gold is useful and valuable. Digital footprints aren’t. Paper notes aren’t. Printed circuits, connectors, anti oxidation, actual physical money, jewelry, etc. gold has intrinsic value, a dollar bill has about 13210 joules, so its intrinsic worth is about 1 small 1 gram stick as kindling and little more….no matter if it’s a $1 or $500 bill or a check for billions. Again, see Germany, where bills were more valuable as firewood than money.

This deflation idea again. Give me 3 examples of deflation harming/ending a nation on the gold standard please, I’ve never heard of it happening. (Edit: as far as I can find, I’m no economics professor, for the most part the gold standard was abandoned worldwide in the early 1930’s and the last remnants removed in the early 70’s by Nixon)

Explain how unsecured notes guard against speculation….don’t just claim it. I don’t see it, people made a mint short selling Venezuelan (and other failed) dollars….speculating they would crash….they did. What?

GDP is the metric that imparts value to unsecured notes offered by countries.

I think you had a mini stroke, the paragraph starting USofA is a word salad with no meaning.

Name 3. I named Germany post ww1….they didn’t get to borrow or ignore their debts. What are you talking about?

So, the only ones that don’t/can’t borrow are all the ones that need to.

Pretending basing your dollar on Bitcoin is the same as basing it on gold is outrageous idiotic bullshit. Just nonsense. Utterly moronic and pure fantasy. Don’t try moving the goalposts, that’s what you said.

Yes, the fed will take gold. They don’t take Bitcoin, do they? How about shells? Pebbles?

Jesus, you just want to argue. You’re rambling, switching positions and going off on tangents.
It’s not about whether someone might accept it, it’s about whether it’s universally accepted at one value and about holding its accepted long term value. People once gladly accepted beanie babies as payment….stupid people.
Arcata Ca printed up Arcata dollars….you could get them cheap, businesses took them. Wanna put your nest egg into them? You say that’s good money, as good as dollars. I’ll sell them to you for gold, and let’s see who’s doing better in 10 years. Or I’ll sell you pebbles for gold. Any currency you want, I’ll sell you for gold. How’s that working with pebbles or shells? Can you buy currency with them?

It has everything to do with how much it’s worth. Stop jumping subjects because your point is failing to convince. An economy based on pebbles fails because their neighbors don’t value pebbles, but if their pebbles are gold, they succeed because gold is valued universally.

What are you talking about, the gold standard’s ability to keep up? Huh?! No keep up necessary, no slow down required, gold trades exactly as fast as everything else. What is this nonsense?!?

You mean you can’t overspend and go deep into debt?! And that’s bad?! In your opinion, not many economists….and what makes you think you can’t borrow against gold? Secured loans are easier and cheaper to come by. WHAT?!?

Yes, unsecured paper money can just be printed forever, you CAN “sell the universe”. (Or sell dollars who’s overall value is based on your country’s value) over and over, then print more and sell 9/10 again, print more, sell again. Eventually that money is worth less than it costs to print, and your creditors get paid off in dollars worth a tiny fraction of what they lent you. Not if it’s backed with gold.

Miracle cure?!? Quote it. I think you misread. Secured notes being better than unsecured notes is not “miracle cure” or perfection, it’s just measurably better, safer, and more stable. No system is perfect.

A dollar has value if you can buy shit for a dollar.

Gold likewise has no exchange value if you cant exchange it for goods and services. Its rare and chemically stable and good for memorial coins, has many technical uses and looks cute, but otherwise it hardly matters what symbol for money you choose. There is 200 years of experience with fiat money and gold and silver standards and fiat money has been better, not just usually better or better in some scenario, universally better.

Symbolic money is practical and facilitates quicker turn around prevents deflation makes speculative runs on currency harder and smoothes the economic bumps in the road in general.

GDP is just a metric. Not a bad one but not the actual goal.

USofA is teh most developed. Should have used growing. Deflation in an economy that is growing kills growth.

Restarting countries not only get to ignore their debts, they immediatelly start borrowing again.

The only countries that dont borrow are countries no-one will lend to and countries so rich in some silly resource they can float high in the international currency system without borrowing. Borrowing is good for bussiness.

What is outrageous idiotic bullshit? Believing pegging the value of your paper note to some hoarded luxury makes it a better representation of the mean value of goods and services bought and sold? I could do without gold except for the jacks on my audio cables (just kidding). It does not matter what I exchange for food and gas, if it gets me food and gas, its good money.

Money is what you can pay taxes with. Do they take gold?

If you insist your dollar has the value of some weight of gold how does that influence the willingness of someone else to sell you shit? Unless they specifically intend to buy gold at a fixed price they dont care. They are going to use your dolar to buy some other shit from someone else. So if you take the actual currency out of the equation, when you decide on buying and selling shit you are intuitively comparing that decision with all the other decisions about buying and sellin that you know of. The currency is just a good way to count the measure of usefullness of a product or service and compare among many. Pebbles, bottletops, dollars, gold, pearls, all just a number.

A dollar could be backed by gold or it could not, this has zero impact on the transactions made. What matters is how many transactions are made, at what value, and how much money is available to the entire marketplace in a given period of time. Transactions quickly pass the ability of a gold standard to keep up. If you want a gold standard you have to slow transactions down because you dont have the money for them.

This is why markets need some regulation, otherwise someone might sell the universe twice and then default on one. But a gold standard, at least the type of gold standard I believe was talked about in this thread as a miracle cure, would be too limiting.

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.

No!

A gold standard provides none of the perceived advantages.
There was never any stability under a gold standard.
Unless its just a Bretton-Woods type "gold" standard where the gold is symbolic. The fed printing money is what keeps economy swings moderate.

I certainly hope so, 0-.25% doesn’t cover administrative costs for basically free loans.
If they go slow, it shouldn’t stall….cool off a bit, sure. That’s acceptable.

Personally, I think it all became funny money when Nixon dropped the gold standard, and I would support returning to it, painful as it would be. At least the dollar would have some permanent fairly predictable value. (And the fed would be forced to stop printing more money to pay government debts, which causes inflation).

I know….let’s cut public school funding and let some parents take more with vouchers that partially pay for private schools many can’t afford. That will solve it. Just have those neglected students pick themselves up by their bootstraps and just do better. Problem solved.

Public schools are awful, but the solution isn’t to just defund them. The solution is simple….more, and better teachers, and real standards for grade advancement. That requires more money.

There’s a difference between “racist” and “biased”. IMO, that’s what Bill is saying.

(To be clear, the difference I’m standing on here is racist implies it intentionally targets one race, biased in this context means while it may inadvertently impact one group, that is not the intent.)

Standardized testing is biased towards those with better educational opportunities….not any particular race. It just so happens one “race” is far more likely to have fewer educational opportunities on average….but that’s not the test’s fault or design, nor the student’s, and is not MEANT to target anyone by race. It just measures what you know….what you’ve been taught.

When it comes to SATs, they don’t take into account the educational opportunities people may not have had, and so aren’t a great measure of a student’s ability to learn, but are a measure of what they’ve learned. As such, they are a good metric for colleges to use in admissions, but are also sorely lacking when it comes to identifying ability. That means they should not be the ONLY measure used in admissions, but are still a useful tool for colleges.

I’m all for color blind admissions, if they measure ability as well as wrote knowledge, finding a way to measure how well they made use of the opportunities to learn they were presented….no matter what their skin color or economic status. So far, I don’t believe any such measure exists.

Really, I’m all for free jr college for anyone. It’s cheap, $150 a semester the last time I went, probably double that now, still a bargain. Most people drop out before year 3, so that’s a great way to allow everyone the opportunity for higher education without the expense…and frees up 4 year colleges to eliminate year 1&2 and teach more people who might graduate.

Oops….how did I forget Marjorie Traitor Green, the ringleader?! Mea culpa.

Sounds like the two who testified also delivered corroborating documentation to prove their accusations to congress.

She isn’t helping by going on Bannon’s show and saying the coup was justified because the Declaration of Independence says we should overthrow tyrants (by which I guess she means the elected but not yet sworn in Biden, her tyrant to be). I guess she’s too dumb to understand that she just admitted the riot WAS an attempted coup, and that she fully supports the attack against democracy she helped plan. D’oh!

Possibly charges coming….but you are correct when you said congress won’t throw them out. Republicans don’t believe in the law, personal responsibility, or consequences for your actions, and with Republicans refusal to have any standard besides red=good blue=bad, the technical majority Democrats hold isn’t enough to enforce the law.

He is being a bit of a dick to them, but Cops should be held to at least the standard of a middling-quality restaurant staff.

Cops are the ones who need to show respect. They don't like getting shot? Guess what? If you act politely and take each relationship as it comes rather than starting with an adversarial approach you don't anger people and it's that combination of anger and helplessness that leads to many cops getting shot.

So, Cops need retraining badly. If someone swears a blue streak at them it should be, "Yes sir. You have a good day too, sir. You're under arrest sir, please step this way and give me your hands so I can put these shiny bracelets on you."

If Cops REALLY were concerned about the dangers of the job they'd act like it instead of turning every single interaction with the public into a conflict that could end in a life or death situation.

An aside. One you can’t answer?

I had already responded to your last. Has wittle Bobby lost his uneducated dishonest voice? It would be more productive to debate science with Jethro Clampet.

You’re in rare form today, can’t keep track of your own arguments, of who hasn’t answered who, of what your standard is.



So I’ll ask again, without a hint of changing the subject but as a separate side question that only takes a yes or no from you, you aren’t so blatantly hypocritical that you are both anti choice and anti mandatory vaccination, are you?

..then you can get back to not responding to my last question…If you are implying I I should shut the fuck up because (you assume) I have no first hand experience seeing 6 week old cell clusters twitch, why are you talking about anything?

There can be no heartbeat without a heart, which takes another 6-8 + weeks to form chambers, and 16 or more more weeks to develop valves and functional muscle tissue and actually pump blood. There is no heartbeat at 6, 8, or even 10 weeks by any definition, there's a twitch in the place a heart will one day develop.

This abdication of the state's duty to private citizens has been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court when states allowed churches to veto liquor licenses and bars challenged them and won. The government cannot deputize the populace to enforce a law, nor can it pay them with the state imposed fines even if they call it a judgement...You cannot pre set a judgement amount in a law for a civil case.

There has been no medical breakthroughs that change the standard, if it can't survive outside the womb, it's not viable. Period. End of discussion. That's what not viable means.

"Mutually incompatible"!? Nonsense. Legally there is no baby to be harmed, that's the law this is trying to end run around. Covid harms everyone. It's a paper tiger argument, a total fake red herring, there is NO public health danger if a woman has an abortion, you cannot catch abortion. Covid you can catch, and spread, and it's deadly to actual, real, fully cooked legal people AND embryos.

One wonders if the Texas legal system has nothing to do and had this passed as job security...because it's the only kind of civil case they'll be hearing now.

One also wonders if the state has too much money, because there's apparently they weren't smart enough to include exemptions for the state if they help facilitate any abortions by, let's say, offering bus service, maintaining roadways, or supplying electricity and water to the buildings. Any of these is grounds to sue them for $10000. If you live in Texas, file your case now before there's no money left and they rewrite the law to just target liberals.

They'll have to defend every case filed costing another $10000+ in legal fees (they'll have to pay the plaintiff's costs too). Pair that with the companies fleeing the state to avoid boycotts, Texas is going to be so poor they become America's Hati soon. Yee haw!

You have to take into account of the population difference (AUS ~25.6 mil vs USA. ~328.5mil), standard of living, GDP, taxation, etc. etc. to make a fair comparison. Going by a straight currency exchange & population diff. of 1 AUD = ~ .73 USD, a very generalized equivalent would be about asking a 3.7~3.8 trillion war chest budget for the USA.

“This family”?
This isn’t one case, Bob. It’s department policy and has been for a long time.

Agreed, it SHOULD be a big payday for these families… unfortunately that’s at taxpayer, not the police’s pension fund’s, expense….but so far in the years of this practice if the victims got anything it doesn’t seem to have payed enough to get the local government to stop it, or enough to excuse blatant and rampant abusive harassment of law abiding citizens as standard policy, even a revenue generator.

How much is the daily harassment of your children, wife, co workers, family, friends, and business contacts at their work and in their homes late at night for years by dozens of aggressive armed men trespassing and peeping in windows and threatening arrest and continued harassment if they can’t come inside to “talk” at 3 am, all because they know you….without you ever being convicted of a crime….worth?….guaranteed none of the victims of this policy have been paid that much.

It is nice to know you at least say you don’t support DeSantis style policing…so I guess you don’t support his candidacy?

Also interesting you love to dismiss constant violent civil rights violations like this by just claiming the victims will get a huge settlement and that makes it ok (most don’t, police have immunity from all but the absolute worst illegal violations, they don’t even pay to repair the doors they destroy breaking in homes with no warrant or the pets they kill while trespassing and spying on citizens….not even for the innocent people they murder when breaking into their homes at 3 am, and when they are brought to account, they often fight cases for decades first, forcing the victims to sue them over and over and over and over....expensive lawsuits against city hall that most victims can't afford to start)….but when it’s a public health issue where they’re considering forcing you to not become a biological viral lab, stopping you from mutating new viruses to release in America, suddenly your rights to be dangerously idiotic and anti science are sacrosanct, no amount of money could make up for a little ouchie, fuck those other people you kill and disable.
Anti vaxers should not only be denied insurance, but also be forced to pay for treatment of their victims.

what's beef w/the Hilter youth?

can't abide w/the kill all the baby adolphs vibe. seems extreme. even by WWII standards. just the bare fact that children were used to defuse bombs isn't what one would call kosher. if that was the right of the winning side, one hell of a lot of bombs lying around in Laos and Vietnam - what about sending our Boy Scouts over to take care of the US mess they left?

anyway - not meaning to be mean - at 14 most are not at the level of being correctly called 'idiots'. if you don't know - you just f'n' don't know!

christ on a cracker...know folks who now question what they were thinking joining the Young Republicans - - - AND THEY WERE OF COLLEGE AGE!!!

what is freaky is the line "If the majority of Germans weren't complicit, the Nazis would have never come to power."

2016 mean anything? and that's the MINORITY of Americans!

christ on a cracker...what's the situation on the COVID vaccines? on voting bills? on any f'n' bill or issue in this land? the MINORITY is having their day keeping the rest in the dark.
[2nd Amendment but screw the other 26...or 24...cause 21 cancels 18 = 0]

as you said "History isn't nearly as cut and dry as it's presented, neither are war crimes"
as he said, "And as with most things, particularly in times of war, it's complicated."
but just can't get my head around putting children in a minefield. no matter the justification. that'd be just as bad as anything the nazis could ever do: lose any sense of humanity.

Arizona secretary of state, Katie Hobbs sent a letter to the Arizona attorney general yesterday asking him to please investigate Donald Trump. And of course his close allies, Rudy Giuliani, and possibly even Sidney Powell for possible election interference in the state of Arizona.

Here's what happened in case you missed it last week, it was revealed that both the Trump white house and Rudy Giuliani on separate occasions and on multiple occasions made phone calls to officials in the state of Arizona following the November election, trying to get them to stop the counting, begging to be called back. In fact, it got so bad, the Arizona Republic detailed two separate attempts by Trump to reach Republican supervisor Clinton Hickman in the weeks after the election, as the president's allies sought to alter the election results in a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden at the time, Hickman was chairman of the board of supervisors, the elected body that oversees elections in the state's most populous county, Maricopa. Hickman received the first call from the white house switchboard on December 31st while he was out celebrating the coming new year with his wife and friends, he let the call go to voicemail.

Second call came on the night of January 3rd after the Washington post published a recording of Trump's hour long phone call with Georgia secretary of state Hickman sought to avoid talking to the president because of ongoing litigation, any let the call go to voicemail and yes, for the record, the Arizona Republic does in fact have those voicemails where you can hear what they were trying to do. Then of course, Rudy Giuliani steps in, he starts emailing or I'm sorry, texting and calling the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican party, trying to get her to somehow interfere, stop the counting of the votes. Honestly, it is pretty much identical to what these idiots were doing over in Georgia, trying to get them to stop the vote, trying to get them to go find the votes as Trump said, and let's not forget... Trump is already under criminal investigation in Georgia. I know we all get distracted with New York, but there have been two grand juries empaneled in the state of Georgia regarding Donald Trump's potential criminal election interference in that state. That's a big deal that everybody seems to have forgotten about.

And now the same thing might happen in Arizona. There's a catch here. Arizona's attorney general, a Man by the name of Brenna Vich Is running for US Senate as a Republican. So he's got a lot, uh, got a lot at stake here. He can't PISS off Republicans by investigating Donald Trump.

Brenna Vich did, in fact, support Arizona's sweeping new voter suppression laws.

Edit: btw, multiple Republicans including but not limited to McConnell have gone public with their plan of hoping they can cause maximum chaos and division for the next 18 months because it will help them successfully block any and all legislation, then they can blame the gridlock on Democrats during the election. Total nationwide chaos with the corresponding rise in crime and damage to the economy....that's the Republican plan for victory. True patriots. 🤦‍♂️

Better donate to the Trump Twitter lawsuit quick before they manage to destroy your investment portfolio with the planned chaos...Trump can't sue social media without your cash donations because he's really a billionaire so he needs your cash...pay no attention to his standard microscopic fine print explaining that he may, at his discretion, use your donation for personal debts. Doesn't matter, DONATE NOW. He needs your money....to fight the invisible fight against those paper tigers and windmills. Please don't remember when he did the exact same thing begging for money to fight for the "election fraud" fraud in court but then pocketed the money and fired his (now disgraced and disbarred) lawyers without filing a legitimate lawsuit.