Ironic enough that the country that is running amok with their own currency is trying to "regulate" other currencies. Printing trillions of dollars with no assets to back them up, giving away pallets of cash to foreign powers, increasing taxes and increasing the tax office to collect ever more, to then waste it into departments and institutions with no oversight that never get audited.

And they want to regulate other currencies.

They could start with the USD first and "regulate" that so it doesn't inflate to the moon, finally gainst state-of-the-art security against counterfeiting and then maybe, just maybe give it an asset base to back it up other than "government says so" and "cannon boats will come if you don't like our currency".

If that's in place and working, then they can start regulating other currencies to prevent poor innocent speculative lunatics from gambling away their money. Right now, it seems the US is more bent on preventing any other currency from becoming a viable alternative to the inflated funny money dollar.

It's all that and MUCH worse.

A digital dollar means the government and all it's ministries get full access and knowledge of every purchase made and the ability to put all of these under their political whims. So in fact, the government can then track all spending and cancel every purchase, if it deems them to be wrong - and what is "wrong" can depend on every single piece of political ideology there is.

It means the government can prevent you to buy merchandise for the opposition candidate. It means the then-current administration can track every dollar and cent that are donated to the opposition. It can switch off and confiscate all money owned by a dissident AND track every single business transaction they did. The government can levy every fine whenever and wherever they want, with immediate effect. You cannot ever store any amount of wealth that cannot be taken away with the click of a button.

And most likely, they will use it to track CO2 emissions "caused" by purchases and limiting them accordingly. So the government will determine how much fuel you are allowed to buy, if you can book the flight you want etc. and if you protest against that, they will remove all your wealth and prevent you from doing business with anyone ever again.

If that sounds scary, imagine Trump or Biden or whoever you dislike most being in control of this mechanism. It would be hell on earth on a scale of the Khmer Rouge. For real.

The only thing the dollar has strengthened against is OTHER currencies. Measured against tangible assets, the dollar has depreciated on insane rates. We call this "inflation", but it is exactly that: the purchasing power of the dollar against tangible = actual assets. Since all assets have different developments in their scarcities, one cannot just track the dollar vs. gold, silver or oil prices and call it the value of the dollar, but our inflation levels show how much the dollar has lost in purchasing power against the average of all relevant goods. It just lost a little less than all other currencies, but that only means the US is sinking more slowly than the other economies. Only a fool would use "sinking more slowly than the next guy" as a measure of success.

Any crime prediction algorith is one of two things:

A) bound to be called racist
B) bound to deliver very inaccurate predictions

A crime prediction mechanism, whether it is people or systems must always look at what IS, and disregard the WHY. What IS is that crime is highly predicated on racial and ethnic factors (in addition to a lot of other factors, who are also confounded with racial and ethnic factors, so much that their linkage is inextricable).

This is seen as "racist" in today's society, because society regards the WHY of these differences to be rooted in racism and therefore prohibits the observation and attribution of observations and patterns.

This is a fundamental problem in law enforcement, because law enforcement cannot and should not care about the events, systems and developments years before a crime that caused the perpetrator to become criminal. When a system is leading people into different paths according to their racial background, with one becoming criminal and the other not, it is a societal problem per se, but at the time law enforcement becomes involved, it is far too late to care WHY the person became a criminal. And society somehow tiptoes around this distinction and demands law enforcement, when the crime has already happened, to somehow rectify all problem society as a whole couldn't resolve in the last two hundred years.

Mostly, this shows how utterly terribly useless those sanctions are.

What regimes are mostly sanctioned by the West:
- Iran
- North Korea
- Cuba
- now: Russia

And it has done WHAT to their regimes?

Nothing. Jack Shit. Nada.

All these regimes are still in power, with absolutely no signs of losing power.

Sanctions are crap. They seem to make regimes stronger and belligerent countries more self-reliant and thus being more able to wage war.

Of course I want to scan a trillion items with my smartphone when I purchase groceries for the family. There's nothing else to do with my copious amounts of freetime than to slowly waddle through the dairy aisle and painstakingly scan and check each and every item, cursing twice because I locked the phone out of habit again and the in-store wifi being too slow and 4/5G being shielded by the metal siding of the building as usual.

Really, no problem whatsover with linking my identity, location, device type and purchasing habits to each and every individual carton of milk, or not do it and rolling the dice if it's still fresh tomorrow.

We should use QR codes everywhere, maybe force people to be scanned for their personal ID and digitally proving their identity and listing their entire medical history before entering a building or commencing any activity.

Your nation has a horrible public transport infrastructure. It is not a fault of the country per se, it was deliberately, methodically and exhaustively destroyed by the oil and car industry.

Take for example New York City. This city is of course comparable or superior in population density and wealth to Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, and of course also to Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Brussels. And yet, NYC public transport is so much worse in terms of price, comfort and interconnection of different lines. I have been to all the cities listed and used public transport there extensively, and it was horrible. Taking a bus to a subway station, taking a train there, switching to a different line and taking a bus from there was utterly and truly horrible, I have no other words for that .Walking from the bus to the train takes ages, finding the bus stop coming from the train station is difficult, traversing several intersections on foot and waiting for the green light to do so takes ages, and above all, everything and anything is dilapidated, dirty, dysfunctional, stinking, rat-infested and occupied by the local vagrant population.

Every other city of the US I've seen is as bad or worse in terms of public infrastructure EXCEPT Washington DC and San Francisco downtown. DC and SF downtown public transport work exactly like they should, are usable and switching trains and buses is straightforward and effective.

And all other modes of transport are just as bad, even flying. The airports are run-down, the airlines re-schedule their flights willy-nilly, passenger rights are non-existent, so they can easily schedule the flight two hours earlier and shaft you if you can't make it, or schedule it half a day later, forcing you to take an expensive hotel and abadoning the hotel in the destination city you already booked etc.

And don't get me started on American cars and motorcycles. An Internet billionaire who started car manufacturing as a hobby has done a better job than all of the US car companies have in the last 100 years, and the Japanese car manufacturers have ascended from the laughable ToyoPet to being the largest car manufacturer in the world, during several decades when American car firms have invented and developed absolutely nothing new.

Walking at the end or switching buses / trains is only a problem for old people and Americans

Taking precautions that hinder burglars, psychopaths and other dangerous people from getting too much information about your whereabouts is paranoia.

Of course.

It's free, it's stupidly simple and it has literally zero downsides for me. The actual effect may vary or may be low, but it is not zero, but my costs and efforts to prevent it are much closer to zero than that.

Risk = probability of an event (very low, but not zero) * severity of the event (very high, most states calculate one human life as a 5-10 million value)

Risk > 100 USD (if it was lower, door locks would be a bad investment, and we all have them, so...)
Cost of prevention 1 USD (less than the time it takes to write this post)

Spending less than 1 USD to protect against a risk larger than 100 USD is not paranoid.

Please become familiar with this theory: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes...

Every single person has a very low probability of being a psychopath. Every single person walking by your home has this probability. You and me, and we all are under a constant threat of severely mentally ill psychopaths that will threaten, maim, torture and kill people on every random Tuesday just because they are bored or they thought some voice in their head told them to. There is nothing you can do to stop them short of second amendment and castle laws, but that is something not all are able or willing to play, and it is a constant threat, and we humans cannot be on alert constantly.

That said, the rest is a numbers game. The number of people who you are exposed to linearly raises the probability of meeting at least one psychopath. Every Internet person, every celebrity has at least one, to further underscore this theorem.

People walking by your house is a very low number compared to people being able to access the Internet. The probability of meeting a psychopath in your street is low enough that almost all of us will never meet one in their lifetime. Please do never think they don't exist, because you didn't meet any.

The Internet harbors a million psychopaths. Shielding yourself and your home from them is essential.

The Streisand effect is very demanding on the attention span of the general public.

They will do it for Barbara Streisand, but not for John and Jane Doe. And certainly not for 1 million Doe's

Nothing in the world cannot be fixed with five injections of a safe and effective mRNA vaccine that was testen on 50 rats and 300 patients before being distributed to five billion people.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." George Orwell, 1984

Your first assumption is that the riches billionaires of the planet owning and controlling trillions in assets pay the same annual interest rate as you and I do on their mortgage, and not just a little over the Fed rate of currently 0.25 percent, but you expect them to pay 16 times as much at 4.00 percent.

That alone makes every conclusion you draw on financial matters highly dubious.

Unless you have a solid source on what the richest people on the planet pay in interest rates for their mega projects, it is absolutely ridiculous to expect them to pay something a regular Joe pays on their mortgage or credit card. Never ever is that going to be the case. Elon Musk could found and staff his own private littel bank complete with a 100 lawyers and a furnished office building on 5th avenue with that 1B in interest rates he saved when drawing his own credit from the Fed at 0.25 percent, and he could fire and re-hire the lawyers and burn and rebuild the build several times over per year and still retain a little profit.

So, there will be banks who offer Musk interest rates juuuust a little over the Fed rate, just so much higher that the loan is cheaper than founding his own bank.

Just like the protective effect of vitamin D, the rapidly waning effect of the vaccine, the unending rapid vaccine schedule to keep protection adequate, the fact that the vaccine doesn't prevent infection, doesn't prevent transmission and does not keep the vaccinated out of the hospital nearly enough and certainly not out of the morgue, either. Please don't try revisionist history with me, we have Mr. Gates, Mr. Bourla, Mr. Fauci, Mrs. Walensky on video claiming one hundred percent efficacy of the vaccine, and not a single percent less. Do not claim they didn't say that or that it is a conspiracy theory. They did say that, it was televised and recorded and we all have seen it and the tinfoils among us have saved the video, thankfully.

And the failed prediction that the fourth vaccine doesn't really protect any better and that masks and double masks don't, either. If in doubt, ask Kamala Harris when she has recovered from her Covid infection next week, despite her having all of that.

I repeat that all the time: Sweden did almost nothing against the coronavirus and did have a mortality lower or on par with the countries with the strictest covid policies and the highest vaccine rates worldwide.

Then there's this Danish study this week that seems to show all-cause mortality rising among the vaccinated, surpassing the live-saving effect the vaccine had against covid, making it a bad call for everyone who took it (as they now have far less covid risk, but a far higher all-other-cause risk).

Biontech informed their investors two days ago that they might not make the final FDA approval and with ending emergency use authorization, their vaccine may actually be withdrawn and stopped before the end of the year.

The vaccine, that so many institutions tried to force into people's bodes, may actually be illegal to administer before the year is over, becaue of a safety risk and too low efficacy. Think about that. (And search Biontech investors page, if you doubt my claim, their page is horribly slow since yesterday for some reason)

And then wait for the televised heart failures. It's not long. July 1st, the Tour de France will start. In the last 10 years, a total of 2 riders died on the tour from any cause, I think it was one heart attack and one traffic accident. This year, all riders will have to be vaccinated, France made that mandatory in January. If we see 2 or more athletes die from heart problems, or more than 4 quit. July 27th, the TdF will be over and we'll know. And then there's the World Cup in Qatar in December, if you had any remaining doubt. We already have had more soccer players collapsing on live television in the latter half of 2021 than we have in all of 2000 to 2020 and top athletes dying during the competition will be a sad but common and real thing from now on.