But why would they hate that? If they’re so confident in their worldview, why aren’t they glad for the publicity? /s
Honestly, Nazis and Confederates are tied for “thinnest-skinned” at this point. And at all the other points too, but especially at this point.
Modern nuclear reactors use passive safety; meaning that the default state of the reactor is off and safe, and it requires work and power to get it running. When they enter a fail state, or the power is cut, they snap back to the off state.
Presumably OP meant through bankruptcy, but that won’t work.
Debts owed to the government and judgments in fraud cases are non-dischargable by default.
None of these are a democracy problem. They’re all a dysfunction problem. You can have a dysfunctional democracy or a dysfunctional monarchy, and only one of those can be replaced without a war.
Current US democracy allowed for a (failed) armed insurrection of the government. And current US democracy is allowing that failed coup leader to run again just like Germany 100 years ago. It’s pretty obvious that democracy does not offer such protections. It requires the populous to not be idiots assuming everything else works properly.
Sure, but Russian monarchy allowed for a successful armed insurrection of the government in 1917. Chinese imperialism allowed for a successful armed insurrection of the government in 1911-1912. French monarchy in 1789 allowed for a successful armed insurrection of the government. And, lest we forget, British monarchy in 1776 allowed for a successful armed insurrection in the Americas. They all faced a problem of stability, in addition to the problems inherent in monarchies.
So you’d rather guarantee that you don’t get what you want and live in constant tribal infighting versus gambling on getting what you want now, and maybe not in the future?
False dichotomy. I want a democracy that actually works for its people, where the people who are voting have meaningful choices (more parties) with meaningful ways to make them (RCV/STV, NPVIC), and the people who are in office have no financial incentive to do things that don’t align with the values and desires of their constituents. And also where there’s a social safety net and a financial disincentive to spreading misinformation, but we’re talking about that in another thread already.
Also while all empires eventually fail,
FYI, you toss that off as if it’s not a big deal, but things get super messy right there at the end.
if it’s a well run autocracy
I can’t say with total confidence, but I’m pretty sure that’s an oxymoron.
hopefully Bernie II and Bernie Jr. Would have been brought up with the ideals of the kingdom, and carry them forwards.
Call me crazy, I’m not super into the idea of putting all my chips on “hopefully.”
Not hate, just genuinely curious.
Well, I didn’t think there was any hate motivation until you said that, lol. Now I’m curious.
But that has a basis in authoritarianism.
Oh, please, tell me more about what I want. PLEASE do.
You want a social safety net. Small government people, that make up half the US,
[citation needed]
do not.
Actually they do, they’ve just been told a lie since the 1980s that “social safety net” = “socialism,” and that “socialism” = “totalitarianism.” But that was entirely invented to justify the Cold War, and has essentially no basis in reality. And in reality, it was bipartisan: Republicans Reagan and Nixon signed EITC, WIC, and SSI into law in the 1970s. Democrat LBJ pushed the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s. FDR’s “New Deal” was an unbelievably popular governmental program in the late 1930s, and it was a social safety net.
So a social safety net is incredibly popular, but you’re a rich guy who wants that money going to you instead. What do you do?
Associate that social safety net with the country’s greatest enemy. Come up with the idea of “trickle-down economics” and buy a news corporation to sell the idea to the masses.
Boom, easy-peasy, now the money is coming to you. But wait, there are people who don’t buy it and still want the “New Deal.” So what do you do? Get them all arguing about how to implement a social safety net. Blow legitimate concerns way out of proportion and make everyone scream at each other.
Works every time. Now it’s not popular anymore because all people can hear is the shouting.
You want a cap on political spending,
As of 2015, 66% of Republicans and 85% of Democrats favor overturning “Citizens United” constitutionally. Over 77% of Americans agree that there should be some sort of campaign finance reform limiting the amount of money individuals or groups can spend on campaigns. 83% of Americans agree that political contributions should be disclosed. Campaign finance reform is a remarkably unifying and bipartisan idea.
and maybe even censorship (disallowing misinformation media), and many do not.
Making an argument in bad faith? That’s a paddlin’. I didn’t say I wanted to “censor” misinformation (though I do think that more money should be spent on media literacy). I said I wanted to remove the financial interest in spreading it; and campaign finance would go a long way toward that.
You want a country made up of people almost all like you with small differences in day to day governance but no differences in the big ticket items.
Where on Earth did you get that idea? I never said that, and I never thought that. No! Stop arguing in bad faith.
Is that achievable in a democratic Republic or parliamentary system in a modern global age? I don’t think it is.
Is a monoculture of people exactly like me achievable? Good lord I hope not. That sounds awful. But is it possible to get money out of politics to the point where our country can recover and get away from the walls? Probably not entirely, but I think we can do a whole lot better than we currently are.
But the question is really just do you want to live under authoritarianism of what you believe in, or democracy where half the people want the opposite of what you want.
Neither. I want to live under a democracy where there’s a real social safety net, and where there’s no financial interest in spreading misinformation and platforming rage, so that the breadth of opinions diffuses back into a more stable configuration (and away from the fringes) such that half the people (probably less) don’t want the opposite of what I want anymore, they just prefer slightly different paths of attaining the same goal.
The only authoritarian regime in which my ideology is 100% the law of the land would be one in which I am the autocrat. And, given the life expectancy of an autocrat, I’m not interested.
But, taking your question as it was intended: still no. Why? Because I might trust the current regime, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll trust the next one. I might trust the current regime right now, but there’s no way to know if they’ll suddenly take a shift in a couple of years and become unpalatable to me (as many Republicans are currently discovering). Even if I trust that Emperor Bernie would make decisions in good faith, I have no idea if Emperor Bernie II would have the same values, or if either of them would hold scrupulously to those values for their entire lives.
Or maybe you meant “what if you could guarantee that it’s always what you want forever?” Still no, because of the Law of Unintended Consequences. I’m not all-knowing; I don’t know what decisions I might be all for that could cause someone else’s suffering. If they’re voting on behalf of themselves, if they’re represented, there’s a pushback against the things that I want if they could harm someone else.
But perhaps you meant “what if you could guarantee that the outcome you wanted is always accomplished, even if you don’t know it’s the outcome you wanted?” And then you’re talking about…I dunno, some sort of divine theocracy or something. And we’ve tried that, to pretty awful results.
So, no.
Four casinos. He bankrupted four casinos between 1991 and 2004. One of them twice.
“I caught Clark Kent listening to Vogon poetry and he didn’t even have a minor aneurysm! I think he might be invulnerable.”
“Man does not live on bread alone.”
“Scoff. Socialist.”
I all but guarantee he’s underwater on at least a few of them. If he’s forced to divest, he may actually lose money.
That’s not how backing works…
I know that. But if I’m given the chance to change the way it works, why limit myself? Choosing a random commodity is boring and doesn’t solve the underlying problem.
you know the government’s just going to produce more cheaper and low quality weapons especially for destroying if that’s how the value of the dollar works.
Hence the destruction of weapons created before the edict, minus all weapons created or purchased.
what do you get? Do they reproduce the weapons? Do you have to destroy your own weapons? What if you don’t have any?
This is just shifting the problem forward to the endgame of a disarmed, de-billionaire’d world. In that world, currency would represent “some positive benefit to humanity,” so maybe you get a portion of a park named after you, or a tree planted in your name.
I know that there are many, many problems with this idea. I am under no delusions that this would work. But the idea is interesting, and thinking about ways that we could incentivize the governments of the world to act in the interest of the world’s people is probably a useful exercise.
But doing something just for the sake of finances…it doesn’t add anything to the world. The original question was “what do you pick?” and I don’t like the idea of picking an energy-intensive activity that doesn’t help the world in any way.
Oh that makes so much sense. I completely forgot about metamorphosis.
I would peg it to the number of weapons (manufactured prior to the change) that are destroyed by that country, plus the number of millionaires and billionaires taxed at more than 50%, less the number of weapons manufactured or purchased by that country in a year and the number of citizens living at or below the poverty line.
Now, if the US doesn’t want the value of the dollar to go down, it has to destroy three nuclear warheads and 10,000 assault rifles every year, and house 10,000 people and hike up taxes on Musk and Bezos. China could make the yen a very attractive investment by pledging to destroy their entire nuclear arsenal, driving the value of the yen way up. Russia would go broke even more quickly than they already are as the value of the ruble plummeted.
“What happens when the whole world is disarmed and everyone is housed?” Uh, I dunno, man. Mission accomplished? Like, we should be so lucky to be faced with such problems. And really, in a world without weapons or billionaires, in a world where no one is unhoused, do we even need money anymore?
If we find it still serves our interests to maintain a financial system, tie the value of currency to the elimination of a different societal ill (disinformation, maybe?). Or tie it to scientific discoveries made, or works of art created within each country’s borders.
The big problem for me was something Ben Bernanke said: the process of taking gold out of a hole in the ground (a mine) just to put it into a different hole in the ground (a vault) is a pretty terrible waste of resources. And you need to continue mining it in order to stave off deflation, which means you have to keep doing that forever; and eventually that’s just not going to work anymore. Mining gold is only going to become more expensive as time goes on.
Not to mention, our economy is too big and moves too quickly for gold to be a moderating force to inflation anymore. The numbers are just too big and moving too fast; we need a more nimble lever, and right now interest rates are a pretty good one.
All of that to say, there’s a reason every country has come off of the gold standard since the mid- to late-20th century.
$193m according to the blurb.