Three words: steroids.






(some things don't need to be said)

This video is the exact opposite of any problem with No Man's Sky. If the universe is hugely varied and procedurally generated, of course there will be a planet of fucked up steroid dinosaurs, and one with majestic brontosauruses, and one with sentient hydrogen, etc. This video makes you think that somewhere out there there is a planet that will be right for you, and gives you incentives to build the spaceship parts to get off the rock you're on and go in search of those perfect dinosaurs instead of staying with these freakish Belgian Blues.

There are valid criticisms against NMS, but this is more like a resounding endorsement of it.

Edit: Especially when paired with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpoDZmH70S4

@ahimsa

seriously?
quoting to rebutt an obvious sarcastic comment?
is it that hard to even attempt to be even a tad original?
do you REALLY think i am promoting actual violence?
really?
and you respond with a level of pretentious twattery that you should be ashamed of.

are you even remotely aware you literally made my point on how some vegans lack the basic self-awareness to realize they are being massive hypocrites and tools?

you trot out those tired,and boring,self-effacing morality/ethics tropes as if they were written on mount sinai,and then have the audacity to not even own your own egocentric bullshit.

jesus..vegans are such intolerable pussies.

because YOUR vegan philosophy is egocentricism on narcissistic steroids,and you lack the basic self-awareness to even have the skills to acknowledge that you are literally smelling your own farts,and calling it wisdom.

there is another vegan on this site that i really wish would put his two cents in,because he at least is aware of the hypocrisy and is an absolute delight to engage with.

but YOU...
self-awareness may be too tall an order it seems.
as you rant and rail against the inhumanity and suffering of the agri-animal on a fucking machine that 10 yr olds assembled to put together in a country where they dont even have the most basic of necessities met.

sitting at a desk dressed in clothes that ANOTHER 8 yr old sewed together,working 18 hr days at 23 cents an hr and is beaten if she slacks,is late..or complains.

the list of human oppression,slave labor and human trafficking that YOU benefit from is legion,and your lack of your own hubris,privilege and hypocrisy is,quite frankly,offensive.

so you can sit there in your own little smug fart cloud and self-righteously condemn the rest of us for choosing to enjoy bacon and convince yourself of your own superior morality and purity of ethics,but the reality is this:

you don't give two fucks.
you are an over-privileged,over indulged little shit and is no better nor worse than the rest of who travel through this life..making our own choices and being responsible for them.

the ONLY thing you truly care about is your little habitat and how others behavior affects your tiny,precious little world.so you go ahead an be a vegan for "moral" and "ethical" reasons,because it gives you the "feel goods".

and i say this with all humanity and honesty:
if you are vegan for moral and ethical reasons,then good for you mate.you made a conscious choice and have stuck to it.bravo my friend.

but don't try to push your own little inane philosophy on the rest of us.we may be assholes for eating meat,but at least we are not hypocritical,contradictory assholes.

now if you want to discuss the benefits of a vegan diet.
great...i am down.
if you wish to share why being a vegan for YOU is a philosophy that works for YOU and is a choice YOU made...then great.i love understanding why people chose to do what they do.

but if you keep attempting to make this purely a morality and ethical dilemma,while ignoring YOUR own philosophical and moral inconsistencies.

well..then we have nothing more to speak about.
enjoy the smell of your own farts.

/cockpunched

ugh...watching that was painful.
reminds me of my time running a metaphysical shop with my girlfriend at the time.

she had got it in her head that she wanted to take the shop in a new direction which was in the form of similar "miracle" cures such as this.

the arguments we had were epic!

i just didnt see a need nor a reason.we already had massage therapy,aroma therapy and reiki.we made our own lotions and soaps and had a massive line of candles.why would she want to delve into supplements? that were unproven and possibly dangerous?

well,i lost that argument and after a few months i understood her reasoning=money.
good lord our customers would spend a fortune on these supplements,which made all kinds of claims (all with zippo research to back those claims up),and all unregulated.

and our customers SWORE that these bullshit remedies worked and that they felt better,more energetic and clear-minded.placebo effect on steroids.

of course my girlfriend would never actually admit that profit was her motive.that would go against her own professed morality,but that is what it was:greed.

that was the beginning of the end for our relationship.i was sincerely attempting to help people and her behavior was a disillusionment that my moral compass just could not assimilate.

i am a man of faith,and every aspect of my life is directed by that faith,from politics to personal interactions,and i had lost faith in her.

i find it reprehensible and disgusting to profit off of people when they are the most fragile and vulnerable,and i refuse to engage in that form of vile practice.

*promote the grifting!

As always, my views are just a layman's perspective with no claims to expertise.

@RedSky

You correctly point out the intent of the reform, to stop fractional banking which they diagnosed as a primary driver of volatility within the financial sector. They want to revert back to a system where the banks were intermediaries the way you described it: deposit leads to loan, in this case at a maximum ratio of 1:1, no leveraging.

Unlike the current system where bank deposits are mostly created by banks themselves -- the act of lending creates deposits. In fact, deposits are liabilities of the banks, not assets. Reserves are assets, but they are only traded between entities with accounts at the central bank. And, in normal times, are provided quite freely by the central bank in exchange for other assets.

Anyway, "Vollgeld" places the ability to create money exclusively in the hands of the central bank. Controlling the amount of money in circulation was a concept most central banks were eager to drop during the '90s, since it never worked. Demand for credit is volatile, central control is inflexible, even if they could somehow quanfity the need for it ex ante -- which they can't. Hell, they can't even do it ex post. You can't quantify the need for additional money beyond what's already in circulation if the central bank's action set the conditions for a dynamic development in the first place. You can't know in advance what increases in production need to be financed, you can't know how demand for liquidity evolves over time. The quantity theory of money was buried for a reason, it ignores reality.

Anyway, I applaud the proponents of Vollgeld for pointing out the dysfunctionalities of our fractional reserve system as well as how questionable it is, ethically, to hand over so much power to a small cabal of financial elites. In fact, I'm quite ecstatic to hear them point out that a nation with a sovereign, free-floating currency does not need to finance deficits through banks -- how very MMT of them. Go OMF!

But their proposed solutions are a fallback to "the market will stabilise itself if left alone, a completely independant central bank will keep the quantity of money in circulation at just the right amount". This hands-off approach resulted in absolute devastation whenever it was applied. They want to turn the state into a regular economic subject that has to adapt to the amount of money currently in circulation. It's (the illusion of) control by technocrats, where you get to disguise policies against the masses as "economic neccessities". Basically the German Eurozone on steroids.

As for the absolute independence of the central bank: you are right, that is not strictly part of the Swiss Vollgeld initiative. But it's what almost every proponent of Vollgeld within the German-speaking circles argues for, including major drivers behind the initiative. Can't let politicians have control over our central bank or else they'll abuse it for populist policies.

They are true believers in technocrat solutions, completely seperate from democratic control.

PS: I cut down my ranting to a minimum of MMT arguments, given that many people see it as just a different sort of voodoo economics.

Edit: Elizabeth Warren's 21st Century Glass Steagal Act strikes me as a rather promising way to solve a great number of problems with the financial industry without going back into the realm of monetarism.

agreed,to a point.the narrator didnt bother me that much,and i felt the content far more important than some random youtube channel owner.

this new overly sensitive,overly privileged with a healthy dollop of self importance being placed on the individual really needs to be addressed.

this new trend to silence dissenting opinions and demanding respect for our own,tiny and insubstantial habitats.while simultaneously disrespecting those who happen to disagree is hypocrisy on steroids.

to scream at the top of your lungs to the dean of students that his job is NOT to create and intellectual space but rather to create a home,and NOT be aware of the incredible disconnect to reality is quite disturbing.

there is REAL danger in demanding a space where only ideas YOU agree with,opinions YOU agree with are allowed,and all dissention needs to be either protected from or compartmentalized.

the reason why the free market of ideas is so brilliant and VITAL,is because this is the place where bad ideas come to die.bad ideas are challenged,scrutinized and criticized.when you remove this free flow of thought,then bad ideas can find homes in these small "safe spaces" and are allowed to breed and fester.

the new form of social censorship must be completely,and utterly destroyed.

lets get some fingers snapping shall we?

...And one more thing that I think is interesting:

In many cases, even if it is 100% proven that somebody did some very bad things, I don't personally think that should (necessarily) negate our respect for the good things they did.

Michael Jackson may have been a serial pedo, which is pretty damning in general. BUT, *that* doesn't make his music bad, or make people who like his music bad.

Cosby almost certainly did drug and have sex with a whole bunch of women, without their consent. That is a very shitty thing to do. But it doesn't make his impact on comedy any less real. It doesn't make The Cosby Show a shitty TV program, that I/we should feel ashamed of having enjoyed.

OJ Simpson almost certainly got away with murder. I think that makes him a scumbag, but I can accept that many people think/thought of him as "OJ Simpson, running back, actor, announcer, etc." rather than "OJ Simpson, murderer". And even though I personally dislike the notion that he got away with killing people, I can watch video of him playing football and appreciate his undeniable talent, or watch him in The Naked Gun and still chuckle.


Sports figures like Barry Bonds and Lance Armstrong are a different story, at least for me personally. Even though doping or using steroids isn't even remotely comparable to the objective badness of pedophilia, rape, or murder ... those two guys were respected specifically for their sports accomplishments, which they "cheated" to obtain. For me personally at least, that completely invalidates those accomplishments, which were pretty much the only reasons to look up to them. In the meantime, I might think that OJ is a terrible human being, but at least I can still respect what he did on the football field.

Maybe that is a weird distinction to make, but it makes sense to me, anyway.

8:18 – "Germany is very financially responsible".

The clip makes a few good points, twists others and omits some central issues. But I want to comment on the quote above most of all, because it forms the basis for all kinds of arguments and recommendations.

The claim that Germany is financially responsible stems from what has been paraded around domestically as the "schwarze Null" (black zero), meaning a balanced budget. Given how focused most economic debates are around the national debt or the current budget deficit, it shouldn't come as a surprise that not running a deficit evokes positive responses in the public. If there has ever been an easy sell, politically, it's this.

However, it's not that simple.

For instance, the sectoral balance rule dictates, by pure accounting identity, that the sum of public balance, private balance and external balance is 0 at all times. In case of Germany, this means that the balanced public budget (no surplus, just a fat zero) requires a current account surplus of the same size as private savings – or an accumulation of private debt. For someone to run a surplus, someone else has to run a deficit. In this case, foreign economies have to run a deficit vis-á-vis Germany, so that neither the German government nor the German private sector have to run a deficit.

The composition of each sector is another topic entirely, but the point remains: no surplus in Germany without a deficit in the periphery. If everyone is to be like Germany, Klingons have to run the respective deficit.

My question: is it financially responsible to depend on other economies' deficits to keep your own house in order? Is it responsible to engage in this kind of behaviour after having locked yourself into a monetary union with less competitive economies who have no way of defending themselves through currency devaluation?

Second point: capital accounts and current accounts are two sides of the same coin. If Germany runs a current account surplus of X%, it also runs a capital account deficit of X%. Doesn't explain anything, but it's the same for the countries at the other side of these trade imbalances. Spain's current account deficit with Germany meant a capital inflow of the same size.

Let's look at EuroStat's dataset for current accounts. Germany had run a minor current account deficit during the late '90s and a small surplus up to 2003. From then on, it went up, up, up. Given the size of Germany's economy within Europe, that jump from 2% to 7.5% is enormous. Pre-GFC, the majority of this surplus went to... yap, PIIGS. Their deficits multiplied.

Subsequently, capital of equals size flowed into these countries, looking for investments. No nation, none, can absorb this amount of capital without it resulting in a massive misallocation, be it stock bubbles, housing bubbles, highways to nowhere or lavish consumption. Michael Pettis wrote a magnificent account (Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73) of this and explains how Germany handled a similar inflow of capital after the Franco-Prussian war: it crashed their economy.

As Pettis correctly points out, the question of causality remains. Was the capital flow a pull or a push?

The dataset linked above says it all happened at just about the same time, in all countries. It also happened at the same time as Germany's parliament signed of on "Agenda 2010", which is the cause of massive wage suppression in Germany. Germany intentionally lowered its unit labour costs and undercut the agreed upon inflation target (2%). German employees and retirees were forced to live below their means, so the export sector could gain competitiveness against all the other nations, including those in the same currency union. Beggar-thy-neighbour on steroids.

Greece overshot the inflation target. They lived beyond their means. But due to their size, it's economically negligable. France stayed on point the entire time, has higher productivity than Germany and still gets defamed as the lame duck of Europe. Yet Germany, after more than a decade of financial warfare against its fellow members of the EU/EZ, is hailed as the beacon of financial responsibility.

Mercantilism always comes at the cost of others. And the EU is living proof.

More steroids for this man please.

Muscle size is pretty much limited by bone strength. Thats why there is a limit and you can only go over it by using steroids. With bigger bones you also of course get stronger tendons.
And if you have a bad muscle to bone ratio, your bone snaps in an arm wrestling match.

fuckinbg psycho Rousey, wtf was she thinking. this is not tatami, it's hard wooden floor, you steroid gulping bitch. I hope she gets knocked the fuck out in the octagon, soon

Asians are the best at choreography because look at this choreography?

Kind of like saying the reason Mark McGwire was good at hitting home runs was because watch him hit this home run.

No, it was the steroids.

Are you saying all Asians are on steroids? Is that what you're implying, @Barseps?! How dare you, sir. I'm offended.

Your video, Kangaroo On Steroids, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It's like Scalextric cars on steroids!