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Comment Re:It won't matter. (Score 1) 39

Yeah, its goofy. BRICS has no future.

India, Brazil, and South Africa wanted in because they want loans the IMF won't give them for really pretty reasonable reasons.

Russia and China have imperial ambitions... neither of whom are willing to give out the money on the scale and on the terms these other countries want it at.

Its a laughably incompetent and hopeless gathering of conflicted interests.

Comment Re:It won't matter. (Score 1) 39

India is per capita richer... any search for growth on that shows that feature.

As to india being poor, they have a huge population which is the same thing that gets companies interested in selling to china.

Further, if we ignore the third world growth sectors and just focus on the rich first world... china is having problems with that. Its going to be the third world that will be most persuaded by low prices.

As to China selling to the rest of the world, same logic applies to the rest of the world that applies to india. You have huge populations but low concentrations of wealth. IF that logic holds, then my point about india also holds.

Vietnam is growing rapidly right now and gdp per capita is similar to india.

As to what is news to me... We'll see, pal. You're simping for fascistic regime that literally uses slave labor and mostly steals IP.

If that's your vision of the future, I'm very happy to disappoint you.

Comment It won't matter. (Score 3, Interesting) 39

India has already blacklisted China... US and EU are going to limit imports to a minimum. Agreement in this is broad.

US and EU production is flooding out of China to anywhere else. Factories are idling throughout the chinese economy as their struggle with DEFLATION.

The people that think this is going back to business as usual have not been paying attention.

Comment Re:The free passes are killing mass transit (Score 1) 362

Its worse than most people appreciate as the years of narcotics abuse has in most cases caused brain damage. This means these people are in most cases incurably insane or retarded due to the neurological damage.

We basically need to reopen the asylums again or create reservations for them or something. Volunteer workers in Los Angeles have been reporting that when they get them off the drugs they are frequently too damaged to actually do anything productive ever again. They will not be able to show up on time for a job for example or remember instructions.

Its a horror show.

The asylums likely need to be reopened... obviously with more ethics and oversight than in the past. And then some serious thought has to be given to the drug problem as it will continue to destroy lives and generate these damaged people that will have to live at public expense to some extent... if we don't go with the "chinese" option... which is to just kill them all.

That sounds horrific... and it is... but the numbers are increasing and that is making the unthinkable inevitable if it does not stop. We had 50,000 of these poor people in my city a year ago. Now it is 75,000 with no end in sight.

Comment The free passes are killing mass transit (Score 1) 362

Whether they're officially free or not, many people that can't afford to ride the bus in the United States are given free bus passes.

Whilst this sounds nice, unfortunately incidents of drug abuse correlating with homelessness is often in excess of 90 percent. In practice, this means that mass transit is full of puking, psychotic, drug addicts... that frequently are violent towards anyone near them.

This is a politically incorrect fact. There will be some upset with my daring to voice the point. Regardless, the consequence is that ridership on mass transit in the US has collapsed with former users citing safety and cleanliness issues aboard the trains or buses.

Absent some mechanism to address the issue, the mode of transport will be increasingly avoided to it seems the total financial ruin of many of these networks.

BART in San Francisco is in serious trouble and so is is the New York Metro. These systems are expensive to maintain and often operate on subsidy even when ridership is high. Given that ridership has collapsed... these systems will either have to scale back operations radically which could easily lead to a cascading economic doom loop for the systems... or increasingly tax starved cities due to capital flight are going to have to take diminishing resources and increase subsidy to the transit systems.

In "this" context, you want to talk about making the subsidy 100% permanently? Why not. The system is already melting down... might as well remove what lifelines it has left.

Comment Carbon Fiber sub (Score 1) 70

I'm not an expert... just a guy... but my understanding is that carbon fiber is strong in tension... and has basically no compressive strength of relevance.

The compressive strength of that hull would have been the epoxy resin... basically plastic... which given the process would have been impregnated with a zillion little bubbles from the laminating process. Very small bubbles that normally wouldn't matter but given the depths those would have to create stress points throughout the laminations.

I'm not an expert... but I'm confused as to how it got that far. The whole design of the sub seemed unsupportable.

Can someone help me out here and explain why this isn't as stupid as it looks to me. Because as a novice I don't see how the hull is taking compressive loads... what is the point of using carbon fiber in this case? They might as well have used conventional fiberglass from what I can see.

If they were making a carbon fiber balloon... where the fiber would be under tension then I could see the logic. But I don't see how this makes sense in compression.

Comment Re:Cite the full model with data... (Score 1) 41

Yep, as expected... snarky comments that have zero substantiation or basis.

I could as easily say "burning women at the stake is barbaric" and you could infer I'm in league with demons.

If you have something besides insults... now is your moment. If that is all you have... then you're just supporting my point. ;)

Comment Cite the full model with data... (Score 1) 41

The full data is not disclosed. The models are not disclosed.

Absent that... there's no discussion. You can't hand wave it. You publish it all so it can be actually reverse engineered by third parties or this is just politics.

And you can see that by the people that get excited about this... same crew that told us we had to wear four masks and forcibly vaccinate children against covid.

Same group telling us there is no such thing as a woman.

I'm sorry... but a lot of people are just tribal political animals that have no regard what so ever for truth. And they've sadly gotten into a lot of powerful institutions.

And until that is addressed... the "trust the science" argument is going to remain highly suspect.

I know... I know... I'm the heretic... Burn him... well, the people that have that view are barbarians. Its all quite sad.

Comment Re:Not enough at this point actually. (Score 1) 109

Consider the counter point of Detroit or Chicago... and yet no ground swell for republicans despite decades of fraud, failing institutions, and incompetence.

Sometimes the doom loop just takes a place... and then like the monkey that orgasms every time he presses the button wired to his brain... the whole community... country... people... just keep pressing the button that leads to ruin until someone else comes along... and conquers them.

I'm seeing a lot of doubling down on a lot of stupid things. People standing up in city council meetings to complain about declining safety in the city... shouted down by city council people and mayors saying things such as "I will not be lectured to by a descendant of plantation owners"... mayor of New York said that to a woman who's family immigrated to New York after surviving the holocaust.

No recovery or learning or enlightenment or humility or shame... just... the same dysfunction over and over again whilst everything around them withers.

Comment Offer reform with the bailout (Score 1) 365

The main problem with these programs is that you're not actually solving the problem. You're just kicking the can down the road by excusing debt without reforming the process that allowed it to be a problem in the first place.

Naturally, the socialists will just say like... the five year old children they are... "just use public money"... which naturally is as infinite as inflation is a myth.

However, what needs to happen is that the scale of the loans must be reduced to what can credibly be repaid. And it must not be raised above that that threshold. Period. Otherwise it isn't a loan, is it?

Then people will say "but then they won't be able to afford X". Incorrect actually, the loans are creating the the cost inflation in the first place. The more you offer the higher the universities charge. So it doesn't matter. You lower the loans and they'll have to lower rates or the universities themselves will go bankrupt.

Further, universities professors are paid if anything less than they were in the 1960s whilst college fees have increased at least by a factor of four times. Four times at least adjusted for inflation. It isn't going to the professors which are the only part of the education that really matters... where is the money going? You know where it is going. An infinity of waste and corruption.

So. Lower the loans to what is credible. Then insist upon reform in the universities themselves. We can put a lot of pressure on them by making it easier to use automated classes. These have a bad reputation but that reputation is promoted by the universities themselves which naturally have a conflict of interest.

We are tech people... this has a tech solution. There is no reason why a college education has to cost even as much as it cost our parents much less four times what it cost our parents.

This is insane.

And a bailout of existing loans is not a solution.

Comment Not enough at this point actually. (Score 2, Interesting) 109

Stores will have to use "membership" programs and other mechanisms of verifying ID more explicitly. Along with automatic doors that only open once ID is validated.

Too many stupid people not appreciating the consequences.

And anywhere "this" doesn't work... prepare for a complete wasteland. No one is going to sell you things if you all you do is steal.

Also, as risk is going up, all the prices are going up.

And unemployment is going to go up for obvious reasons.

Play stupid games... win the stupidest of prizes.

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