Back in my day senior pranks generally involved naked dudes at school in some form or something destructive that cost the school plenty of money to fix. I approve of the current generations senior pranks.

What I don't understand is how this controls for other factors? People who have a high Vitamin-D tend to be healthier in general. If you give unhealthy people Vitamin-D supplements -- that won't help their outcomes.

Hate to see the oil burning.
Love to see Russia get a little blowback.
I fully support expanding Ukraine’s border 100 miles into Russia to create the kind of “buffer zone” Russia tried to turn Ukraine into. 100 miles of no man’s land, all Russians must move. Ukrainians may settle there. Turnabout is fair play, and they deserve every inch of lost territory.
Then they should retake Crimea.

In a second story today, Russian troops are evacuating the Chernobyl area after poisoning themselves with radiation sickness by digging trenches, driving tanks, and generally disturbing the highly radioactive soil there. Those soldiers are in for a gruesome death, Russia can’t afford to treat thousands of cases of acute radiation poisoning.

In a third report, Putin’s ploy to demand rubles for Russian oil has already fallen apart on day one. They continue to accept euros…euros they can’t transfer to Russia because of banking sanctions!

"I fart in your general direction." -French soldier

LMFAHS!!!
Still no answer?
Still can’t say who she slept with to advance to the second highest elected position in the land besides her husband, who’s not in politics, but you still say she’s a whore who could only sleep her way up because she’s a woman….but you don’t think you’re sexist!?! ROTFLMFAHS,! You utter moron, what do you think “sexist” means?

Elected Attorney General twice, Senator once before being elected VP. How many public offices did Trump hold before president? How many women did he sleep with while married? How many women did he rape? How many children age 13? The answer to three of these questions is not zero.

Compared to your messiah’s abysmal record of failed businesses, various crimes, racism, sexism, rape, theft, pedophilia, tax evasion, bank frauds, and an allergy to the truth and fact, (and now an aversion to democracy) she’s insanely over qualified to be president or VP. Enjoy, she’ll probably be in the whitehouse for the rest of your life.

There isn’t a Republican in office that is elected official material. They’re all anti American, anti democracy terrorists that should be shot in the face as enemies of the state who give aid and comfort to other enemies of America constantly. You know it well, comrade.

I’m guessing we haven’t heard from you for a week because both anonymous and the American cyber warfare division have attacked Putin’s troll farm and you can’t get online.
Hope you like borscht….it’s all there will be left for you.

Edit: lemme guess, Jackson (3 times confirmed by a bipartisan congress) is also unqualified and slept her way to the top of the judicial branch, right? You don’t know how, or with who, but you just know it’s true (because a black woman could never accomplish what she has)….but not because you’re a racist sexist troll….you say that for some other reason you just can’t articulate.
But Barrett, with zero judicial experience before Trump nominated her and obvious overt religious bias that she has let dictate her decisions despite saying she never would, you had no problem with her, right?

It’s amazing to me how so many believe themselves incapable of doing “X”, but when asked it turns out they just didn’t follow (or even read) the instructions.

Figuring things out on your own IS satisfying, but when that fails, instructions are really useful. If only more people could remember that, people in general would be much more competent in many more arenas.

Ah... yeah I can certainly see how that would complicate things. I still prefer kb+m for gaming in general as it's what I've trained myself to be good at over the years, unfortunate that it isn't a viable scheme for all PC games

Constant unAmerican, anti democratic, Russian propaganda.
Do you know how many flags have flown over the US in that time? To name just a few….French, British, Spanish, Mexican, Every state (before their statehood), dozens of different US flags (changed every time a state was added), hundreds of indigenous nations, even Canada. Remember 6 flags over Texas? Does that make Texas less part of America? I guess Mexico should take it back. No need to defend it I suppose.
What idiocy. Jesus, bob.

I recall how happy you were when we assassinated an Iranian general in an unprovoked act of war against a Russian backed country, so why was starting a war fine with you but keeping our clear obligations agreed on by an international nuclear disarmament treaty is bad? *crickets*

I’m not saying you are definitely a Russian America hating troll, I’m just saying there wouldn’t be a single letter changed in anything you post if you are, and there’s not one shred of evidence that you aren’t one.

Love the way you want to walk away from our treaty too….so no country will ever negotiate based on a promise by America to defend them. Ukraine would still have nukes if we hadn’t agreed to permanently secure their borders, and Putin would never have invaded a nuclear nation.

At every opportunity you are anti democracy, Bob. You’re so blind you don’t see how that makes you look. I thought you hated socialism and communism….so why do you support it being forced on others?

🤦‍♂️

Edit: have you been listening to super racist failed diplomatic appointee and Fox “invasion expert” Douglas MacGregor, a Trump appointed Russia Propagandist on Fox who’s suggesting Russia should be more aggressive, borders should just be redrawn (without Ukraine), Zelinski is a terrorist, and claims people in the west and Europe and China all support Russian expansion? Sure sounds like it.

Sky News!? That’s like Fox on meth without the pretext that they’re pro-America. Foreign Anti American propaganda from an anti democracy anti America foreigner.
Love the way you love those who absolutely hate America so consistently.

Sorry, @bobknight33….the only reasons Trump didn’t start any wars (and boy did he want to) are 1) his advisors repeatedly talked him down from most, but not all provocations (how we avoided war in Iran I’ll never know, multiple assassinations often lead to war, especially when you murder generals and their entourage on foreign soil.)
And 2) he never contradicted or stood up to our enemies, he courted, praised, and capitulated to them completely. Why would Russia go to war when we completely ignored their invasions and expansion and took their word over our own intelligence community?

Derp….the pipeline Trump’s whining about was cancelled by the Germans. How great an idea to have them spend billions then cancel certification!

I know you have the memory of a meth head gnat, but come on, Bobby. Are you really that clueless….oh wait, yes you are. You just claimed Russia didn’t invade under Trump a day or two ago.

You didn’t just fail current events and history class here, Bob, you got a 12% average. Once again, you make it impossible to believe you graduated from an American college, difficult to believe you graduated high school. So sad.

trump salute NK generals like a cuck. putin emboldened by watching cuck trump. republicants can cuck on this: Biden has completely outsmarted putin. undercut every pretext putin had to justify an invasion, leaving the world, and especially russian people, without any plausible explanation for invasion AND biden unified democratic allies to support ukraine’s defense and russia sanctions.

putin started playing checkers and biden turned it into a game of chess. this wont end well for putin and, unfortunately, russian population.

the scenes from ukraine are heartbreaking

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.

I said this before.

In broad terms...

Endless welfare is wrong,
I'm also against 40+ years of Social security- Its a pyramid scheme.


Should be 1 system where all get say 15 years of benefits.
Should be able to take it a monthly amounts.

Should not be able to start collecting till at least 25. This will make you get a job, get skills and become less dependent.


If you 30 and have a kid and want to take 6 months off then deduct it from those 15 years.

if 50 and burned out. take a year off go to school or such and refresh. Deduct that from you 15 years. Now you have 14.

You get in a wreck and laid up for a year, loose you job, no problem. Use 1 of your years.


I dont want strings if you want to buy drugs, travel, or go to school does not matter.

When you 65 and only have 8 years left of benefits your should keep working. Maybe taking a lessor job. maybe take those 8 years at full rate take it at 1/2 rate as a supplement.


Its you life you know what you need not government.

Also in general, This should not apply to , mental illness patients and those who truly can not function on their own. or their care takers if family members.

Republicans aren't assholes we just don't want chronic dependence.

Yeah, the crutch of it for me is the UBI moniker.

What you describe at the end of your post, minimum income, is really just a rewording of the existing social security and welfare systems across the western world. I know they look different in each, but here in Canada what you describe is more or less our already existing system's design goal. Welfare money exists for those that straight up can not work, and an employment insurance system exists to protect those inbetween jobs, meanwhile other multiple programs are aimed at distributing financial assistance to the lower income groups.

Despite all of that already existing, UBI is still being heralded up here in trials as well as a replacement. The problem being that for the needy the UBI pitches are generally a step backwards.

Eg. $500/month is the UBI pitch, and they say it'll be great because everyone gets it no matter what so it's simple and fair and nobody is left behind. The trouble though is that the reality is the truly in need people were already benefitting more than the $500/month under the existing systems, and the cost was much less because it was targeted.

I here UBI and get very worried about folks just selling snake oil 'solutions' that in the end are just a demand to adopt their own particular flavor of wealth redistribution.