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Comment "capitalism" (Score 1) 51

Every single use of the word "capitalism" means the poster spews propaganda rather than logic. The word has become useless.

There are two main definitions:
  * the most used one (by several orders of magnitude!): "any economic system other than communism, including even those that don't use money at all (like early kibbutzim), except for neanderthals ("primitive communism")". This meaning has been used in communist countries to refer to the outside world; we had entire universities devoted to such concepts.
  * free market economy. This one would exclude eg. current USA as they have devolved into corporatism. Stuff like bailouts is an anathema to free market. Free market has its flaws (see eg. late 19th century USA) but makes most of current USA ills impossible: high insulin prices? New makers will pop up in months! As long as the govt deals with monopolies and fraud, it's a sane system.

But here... the pokemon card market is currently saner than stocks.

Comment Re:Why are they transplanting? (Score 1) 18

That's too much future tech, but for now -- why not install a titanium plate? At least it won't cause rejection issues, and functionality wise is no worse than current transplants. And, instead of on-lookers getting revulsed, you'll get looks of awe. Severely disfigured wetware makes people say they offer compassion, but in reality they're severely disgusted and feel an urge to distance themselves from you -- because biologically, looking ill means something potentially transmissible, which our instincts try to protect us from. A visibly artificial face avoids all that.

Comment Re:Raise the costs even more! (Score 5, Interesting) 54

Assuming equal regulatory burden, fission power is cheapest, not most expensive. For example, for an equivalent safety level, coal plants would need to capture every bit of reaction products (which currently are vented into the air), store them safely, and place somewhere where they'd no longer cause harm if released. Which for combustion products means forever. The plan itself would need decade-long studies wrt its localisation, many rounds of votes among the regional population -- etc. And throw in another 10x cost factor of bureaucratic costs.

The reason? Completely banning nuclear power was unfeasible politically, but adding layers after layers of "safety" was easy to be voted in.

Result? Hardly any new plants have been built. A good part of existing installed power dates back to the first generation -- which was indeed unsafe (as expected of any new technology). All three plants that failed have been built in the '60s.

Comment Re:Worse than you think (Score 1) 21

Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by entrenched bureaucracy.

Not if the party in question has been repeatedly caught concealing malice. You'd be a fool to trust, or even assume good will, when dealing with anything by Microsoft, NSA, Facebook, etc.

Here, we have something that looks bad and has been done by a prior offender. Thus, it needs to be viewed with suspicion by default.

Comment Re:Stable Coin (Score 1) 62

No. Economy is movement of value, not of money. That's just speculation.

As little kids in a socialist country, we got fed the following tale:
Heating fuel in a mining town was very expensive. So the protagonist took a cart and a friend, went to the other side of a forest to buy wood cheaply, and with much effort, hauled it home. When asked why he won't haul another load and sell it at home, the guy answered: "I'm a worker not a speculant".
Abstracting from the nonsense of the price difference of wood being so high on two sides of a forest, the commies who produced this piece of propaganda inadvertently produced a nice example why trade is good despite not producing something by itself: the value it creates comes from moving goods to where they're appreciated (ie, needed).

Thus: economy is the movement of value (goods, services) between different owners who value those goods and services differently.
On the other hand, movement of money or similar tokens (eg. a wash trade) isn't valuable by itself.

Comment Re:Stable Coin (Score 1, Insightful) 62

If inflation is not a tax, then where does the value of newly printed or fractionally lent money come from? Money has no intrinsic value, it's a mere token -- if you add more tokens, the value of every existing token is suddenly lowered.

People not spending money is bad... how? This doesn't slow the economy any, nor does it freeze any value -- all it freezes is some _money_. Any money that's temporarily out of circulation increases the value of any actual assets that are in use.

As for borrowing costs, you got that reversed: if there's inflation, borrowing gives you an advantage by having the real cost decrease as time goes. With deflation, you need to actually pay to borrow.

Comment Re:Stable Coin (Score 1) 62

Yet the world's average inflation goes around 5%, not 1%. Surely, they wouldn't be so incompetent if they meant it?

They don't claim that an inflation of 20% is good, indeed -- but only because with the economy hurting so much even financial institutions can't reliably make money. But, their claim is that any deflation, even of 1% or lower, is worse than a runaway inflation. And that's pure bullshit.

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