I haven't been paying close attention, thus my first question: did they manage to factor an arbitrary number larger than 21?

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.

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.

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.

Well... and how, pray tell, the regular folk could make their voices heard? By now 2/3 of those polled who gave a yes/no answer want to Brejoin, yet your three largest parties all swear to keep out.

There's no need for a "backing", what matters is that it's impossible to "print money". Physical metal coins are only one way to do so, and not even the best (as they can be mined, and take up metals that could be put into useful work). Of course, current cryptocurriences are not that good, either -- waste of electricity, waste of disk space (Bitcoin currently needs 700GB to meaningfully participate), transaction costs, etc. Metal coins are merely the most traditional one.

Too bad, those in power (and money = power) have grown too attached to the ability to pull money out of thin air. Debasing of coins was popular for thousands of years, most countries defaulted in early 20th century (Germany 1914, UK 1925, US 1933) then successively removed remaining safety barriers (US went into freefall in 1971). And most of money from nothing is "produced" by banks rather than governments.

We are told that "inflation is good" by economists -- for me, it's nothing but a tax. Asking an economist whose very paycheck comes from inflationary measures is same as asking a christian Bible scholar whether the Bible is trustworthy.

That you don't self-identify as a racist, doesn't mean that you're not one. You insist that members of a certain race should have benefits above others, for no reason relevant to the people concerned.

DEI is advertised by its proponents as "anti-racism". And as such, it's to racism as antimatter is to matter: weighs the same, behaves the same, looks the same, has some colors flipped, acts violently when in contact with its counterpart -- but as long as all of the flipped "colors" remain flipped, indistinguishable from it.

So here's a math exercise: assuming a normal distribution (which is incredibly "infectious" as long as the scores have multiple different causes), generate a population of scores for group A and for group B, with group B having the average lower by X points. Now select the best candidates, using any of the following strategies:
* quotas: reserve A/(A+B) spots for group A, B/(A+B) spots for group B
* Affirmative Action: give every candidate from B X extra points, pick from the global population
* meritocracy: pick from the global population based only on the scores, completely blind to race/gender/zodiac sign/odd-or-even date of birth/etc
* penalty for the "inferior" group: subtract X points from every candidate from B, pick globally
* traditional racism: pick from only group A
Now compare the total score of candidates you picked for every strategy.

It doesn't matter if groups A vs B differ by race, gender, etc -- the mechanism is the same.

So just open 100 times as many? That'll bring you to the usual standard.

But, borrowing from a library without paying someone is stealing! This will stop the author, dead for half a century, from producing further works! And reading a book you own for second time without paying again is stealing, too!

If you want an actually sane replacement, made to match POSIX (rather than just bug-for-bug), try voreutils. Rust free!

Or, if you need the actual Tinyflaccid Teams client, run it in a VM? Or, if you need to use your company-provided box, give it a HDMI frame-grabber as a monitor?

The latter BTW is a nice solution if they force you to use (and lug around everywhere) a company-provided laptop that does nothing but Tinyflaccid Lookout and Tinyflaccid Teams.

Fukushima hasn't directly killed a single person; there were some deaths due to evacuation panic and cleanup efforts. Meanwhile, climate change risks billions of deaths, will probably render northern Europe uninhabitable (on the level of Alaska or frozen-brass-monkey-balls parts of Canada), etc, and short-term air pollution from power generation alone kills a Hitler's worth of people every 3 years.

So for those who don't parse your comment as irony, there's some astounding level of believing their feels rather than statistics.

Another point is that all three nuclear power plants that failed (Chernobyl, Three Mile, Fukushima) have been built in the '60s. The technology has advanced a wee bit since, and if new nuclear plants were allowed to be built...

Why would you want socialism? It has been tried in more than 100 countries by now, and every time it included concentration camps and related goodies (strictly speaking, there were close shaves like Grenada which had only disorganized killing -- but given that it lasted only 4 years in a nation with 100k people, two towns and a bunch of villages, I'll give it a pass). Also, every major brand of socialism: soviet, nazi, maoist -- includes a massive push for propaganda and social control. Are you going to suggest that current socialist countries (China, N. Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela, etc) don't use dark patterns and AI in their propaganda?

Capitalism's record isn't so stellar either, but at least it's not 100% bad and not so extreme. But then, the word "capitalism" is way too fuzzy to use in a serious discussion, we'd need to define it first. And the definition that was used the most, in countries that had dedicated universities of Marxism-Leninism and had mandatory lectures in all other university departments, was "capitalism = every economist system other than communism, including those that don't use money at all (like early kibbutzim), but excluding cavemen ("primitive communism")".

The other major definition is free market. But those billionaires you've spoken of are not so keen for free market, they prefer corporatism.

Thus: your post about capitalism vs socialism deserves to be at -1 not +4, as it brings no valid contribution to the discussion.

Well, UK has declared war on Germany on 1939-09-03, then done nothing for a year until Germany was done with Poland and France, then started attacking them for real. Thus, a "preemptive" attack wouldn't be a big deal...