If the US loses it’s Reserve Currency status because too many international investors are existing it, more printing will directly translate to Inflation.

So whilst technically the US can’t go bankrupt, it most certainly can end up with Hyperinflation and all its problems if the printers start going full steam (metaphorically speaking, since nowadays most currency is digital) to stop the bankrupting of the US following Trump/Musk fuckery and foreigners (as well as larger local investors) refuse to buy those new Dollars and actually accelerate their the exiting from positions in USD (and that’s not just going to be cash positions but also USD-Denominated assets such as Stocks, Bonds and Treasuries) which seems to have been started happening already judging by news such as this.

USD denominated bonds are by definition 100% exposed to the USD and it has been falling consistently (with but a single dead cat bounce) against other major currencies since Trump took over.

International investors are probably avoiding the Dollar (and hence Dollar-denominated assets) in favor of other currencies.

This would also explain why Gold keeps on beating records almost daily: it’s sort of a “traditional” currency hence benefits from outflows from major currencies.

If this turns into the end of the Reserve Currency status for the USD, expect massive problems in the US with Inflation and servicing the massive US National Debt (if Treasury auctions have lower demand, Treasure yields have to go up in order to sell them, which is equivalent to say that interest rates on US Government loans go up).

Back when I lived in Britain and participated in the comments section of The Guardian, I had a local “Feminist” literally tell me that it was more important to flatten the 23% difference in income between the cleaning lady and the night watchman than to flatten the 30,000% difference in income between both of them and the CEO.

That very same crown generally focused on “breaking the glass ceiling” (i.e. get upper middle class and upper class women such as themselves into those 300x minimum wage positions) and I have never once read a concrete suggestion about addressing the gender inequality for the poorer social classes.

That last box of the meme matches exactly my own experience with “Modern Feminists” in Britain.

(Mind you, I lived in other countries and also met older Feminists and they’re generally different and their version of Feminism is actually Egalitarian, though I’ve seen some young women were I live mindlessly ape this Anglo-Saxon neoliberal “Feminism”).

The graph doesn’t even make clear if it’s using inflation adjusted USD (which is the only fair way to compare trade numbers over a period of decades) or just nominal annualized USD (where 1 USD represents quite a different amount of worth in 1990 than it does in 2025).

That is not a positive indication on the competence of the people doing it, and it seems unlikely that they fucked up something as basic as this whilst at the same time being professional enough to dig up and include information on estimated rerouted trade flows (which would be a lot more work to obtain).

Mind you, inflation adjusted USD wouldn’t really change the trend, but it would change the steepness of the growth over the years, plus it’s just the proper way to represent such data.

Yeah, I think you’re right.

It’s the Find Out stage that follows his Fuck Around rather than any sort of him being bullied.

When extremely wealthy and powerful people knowingly ruining the lives of tens, hundreds of thousands or even millions, them getting some well deserved opprobrium from everybody else, that’s Fair Consequences, not bullying.

That use of “only” before “15%” is a serious underestimation in absolute terms, but wholly appropriate when those 15% are relative to the US’s self-inflicted trade damage: it’s still immensely better when 15% of your trade goes to a trading partner which has picked a fight with you than when 100% of your trade goes to trade partners you have picked fights with.

Further, in the last 2 decades or so China has both been growing its internal market (so that its Economy is less dependent on exports) and diversifying the countries they export to, likely in preparation for the death throes of empire as the US falls from its top position, which were entirely expected for decades, as was that they would include some form of trade pressure on its closest adversary.

Absolutely, this is going to hurt China in the short-term (and possibly mid-term, depending on how easy or not is to redirect those exports to other destinations), but the Trump trade war with the World is going to totally fuck up the US and it’s the kind of harm that gets worse the longer these measures remain in place because it will be further eating away at the US brand (so even after the tariffs are removed many customers won’t be coming back) and accelerate the demise of the Reserve Currency status of the USD (which will in turn be reflected in massive inflation as those dollars flood back in and way bigger deficit related problems because the costs of debt servicing will go up when there is little demand for US Dollars abroad).

This has been the case since the Patriot Act was passed during Bush’s Presidency after 9/11.

And let’s not forget the massive civil society surveillance aparatus that Snowden revealed…

The US has been moving away from Democracy and into Authoritanism for a long time, all with full bipartisan approval.

Trump or somebody like him getting elected and taking the gloves of the whole authoritarianism aparatus that was built and supported by previous Administrations, was always going to happen.

Afrikaners are an etnic group specifically from South Africa so “South Afrikaner” would mean an Afrikaner from the south part of South Africa.

(The word Afrikaner is derived from the Dutch word for “african”, because most Afrikaners are descendants of Dutch Colonists who went there centuries ago, so maybe that’s a source of confusion for people who speak Germanic languages!?)

Considering other people’s hurt in one’s own actions is a social contract and those who have no consideration for the hurt they might/do cause others with their own actions don’t deserve that others to take their hurt into consideration in theirs.

Musk is very much an extreme example of somebody who couldn’t give a rat’s arse about the hurt he causes to others so it’s absolutely Ethical and Moral for others to reciprocate it.

You can keep on seeding after downloading and your torrenting program will still manage to upload to any member of the swarm for that torrent that it connected to (even if only to check their status) during the download phase.

This should be enough to get you consistently above a 1:1 upload to download ratio for any popular public torrents, though for those with very few leechers you might never get there.

The lack of port forwarding is only a problem for remote machines your program has not connected to during the current session for a torrent (i.e. not yet seen machines that try to connect to your client), which means you can’t seed at all in a purely for seeding session or upload to machines that joined the swarm after your download was done in a mixed session.

If your pattern of usage is that of mainly a downloader of public torrents who tries to give back to the communy at least as much as they took and whose not mainly into obscure stuff, it works fine.

It massively depends on the country - it’s probably fine in Southern and Eastern Europe but not for example in Germany were if I’m not mistaken copyright violation is even part of Criminal Law rather than Civil Law as in pretty much the rest of the World.

Personally ever since I lived in the UK - which has the most insane levels of civil society surveillance in Europe, including of Internet usage - I got into the habit of doing pretty much everything behind a VPN, which also helps with peace of mind for the whole torreting thing no matter which country I’m living in at the moment, plus I pay 5 euros a month for the VPN which is less than a single streaming service, so in a way it pays itself (it’s funny how piracy compensates for the costs of protecting myself from dragnet surveillance).

I’m Portugal now, so with the luck I have an American invasion of Europe will land here within the next couple of years.

Well, I guess it’s one way in which one can have “life experience”.

Had I’ve been given a choice, I would have preferred other options.

Religion really isn’t about knowledge and Science really isn’t about personal moral and motivation, which is probably why (from what I’ve observed from the handful of Christian Scientists I’ve known), it only ever works well when they’re kept apart and neither is used in the domain of the other - it’s perfectly possible to want to “discover the wonders of God’s creation” and “be a good, moral person” at the same time as practicing Science as long as one does not believe that the words of the Bible are literal and actual “knowledge” in the Scientific sense.

“Studying” in madrasahs is literally just the rote memorization of a version of the Koran in a language that students don’t even speak and don’t get me started on just how Christian belief was so thickly weaved into medieval university teachings that being against the Aristotelian earth-centric view of the Universe was cause to be burned at the stake (the medieval times aren’t called the Dark Ages for nothing and during the time of Medival Universities Europe actually went back a lot on technology and scientific knowledge)

Having studied Physics at university level in a country which still back them had quite a bit of religiosity, I have come across a handful of people who were both true believer Christians and Physicists and the only way to manage it was basically to keep them apart except for the single point of contact which was “by discovering the wonders of the World, I’m discovering the wonders of God’s creation” which is not a logic link in any way form or shape, just an attempt at getting two very different perspectives to be side by side, never really touching.

Religion simply does not inform Science in any way form or shape (and vice-versa), not in terms of logic, not in terms of information or knowledge and not in terms of methods - at best some people manage to have personal motivations to practice Science include Religious motivations, but any actually “knowledge” they have from Religion does not feed through into their Science because it doesn’t obey even the most basic criteria to work (for starters, it’s just “belief” rather than actual measurable or at least detectable effects that could not be explained in any other way than divine intervention).

Religion is absolutely fine when it’s about how people feel, but it ain’t fine when it tries to intervene into the domain of Science: back in the Medieval times the most advance civilization was Arab and mainly Muslim (such as the Moors, who invaded and occupied the Iberian Peninsula) - they were the true inheritors of the knowledge of Ancient Greece and Rome - but at some point in the 15th century within Islam the idea that all that Man needed to know was contained in the Koran spread, hence why Madrasahs are “schools” were people rote learn the Koran and why those nations have been going back Scientifically and Technologically ever since.

There has been a lot of “lying” about stock princes over the last decade but quite indirectly so: for example the ultra low interest rates have allowed many companies to get loans merely to buy their own stocks, which pushes stock prices up whilst loading the company with more debt (and bad debt rather than good debt: not having been taken for investing in productive and marketing activities of the company, those loans will not lead to the increase in profitability needed to pay the debt back plus interest).

Similarly, because the wealth has been concentrating in fewer and fewer hands there has been a lot more money floating around looking for investments (every extra dollar in the hands of a poor or working class person is one extra dollar that goes into consumption, every extra dollar in the hands of a rich person is one extra dollar that’s looking for investment), which has pumped up bubbles from realestate to crypto, and that includes stocks.

It’s not “lying” in the sense that one person moved the markets by telling porkies, it’s more of a mix of economic manipulation and an emergent system (in the Mathematical sense) transforming the actions of the various agents under these manipulated financial conditions into a big picture of stocks (and other “investment” class assets) going up in price even though no real increase in their underlying value has happened (the companies aren’t really profiting so much more that it justifies their market cap increases, the houses whose prices are going up have no actual improvements to justify the higher prices - the value going up is basically justified by the value going up).

I’ve moved most of my savings to Gold since around 2010 partly because I was in the Finance Industry during the financial crash of 2008 and saw how the “fixes” done back then weren’t at all fixing the problems, just kicking the ball forward on the backs of people whose income mainly comes from work (hence the growth of inequality, slow down in social mobility and insane various bubbles including realestate that kept on getting inflated for the last decade) something which has been fueling the growth of the far right (people are feeling the pain, getting pissed of and lots of money has been put by very rich people into political entities and the newsmedia to spread the idea that it’s outsiders who are to blame for all this rather than very wealthy insiders plundering an economy which has ground down to a halt its growth, in collusion with local politicians).

I was also in the Tech Industry during the tech crash of 99, which probably made me even less trusting in the current system’s long term stability.

Gold is a pretty old fashioned way to try and retain some value on one’s savings, especially in countries where government management of the Economy and the local currency is pretty bad (in my own country of Portugal it used to be pretty popular to get it in the form of jewelry for that purpose, though not anymore, and it apparently still is in India and most of Asia including China).

(Basically, it’s the “oh shit” option for when the Economic situation gets very bad and people fear the value of state issued currencies themselves won’t hold)

I can tell you that even though Gold has been mostly just kept up with inflation for the last decade and a half (with an uptick when Russia invaded Ukrained), Donald Trump’s actions really made the value of Gold in most currencies (especially USD) take off like a rocket, or in other words, that the value of most currencies is falling hard compared to what up to 71 was treated worldwide as the reference “currency”.

IMHO, it’s a pretty fucked up sign, especially for the US Dollar (which has the extra nasty bit that it stops being the World’s Reserve Currency, all the benefits from it will unwind and if that happens fast - within a year or two - we might see shit like hyperinflation in the US).

PS: And if I may gloat a bit, I was living in Britain back when Brexit happened and did call it successfully and saved my savings by having most of them in Gold and Euros when Brexit crashed the British Pound by about 30% vs the Euro, something it never really recovered from. Maybe I was lucky but I remember that at the time and even before the Leave Referendum I felt that the Austerity in Britain was stretching the political environment in the country and that it wasn’t a safe place to hold my savings, even though back then all my income was in GBP.

Well, it fits the “look at how foreigners are worse than Brits” angle, which seems to often dictate which stories the BBC runs and the spin they put on reporting of events abroad (that spin is very noticeable if you read the same story from a newspaper in another country).

Mind you, Americans are maybe the only ones generally excluded from that treatment, so this is special.

Fascism is literally all about doing what’s best for the IN Crowd, in other words Cronyism, the very opposite of Merit.

If your selection criteria for people supposed to manage anything is who is mates with whom, what’s their skin color, what’s their gender and what’s their sexual orientation, rather than, you know, managerial qualities, it’s only natural that they suck at managing things.