How subservient are engineers to their finance guy bosses? I.e, did AT&T reject ARPANET funding requests because thr finance guys saw the internet as a threat to their telephone business model, even while Ken Thompson was working for them?

What makes you think I wasn't myself using irony in my response?

What if they acknowledge it's a hallucination under questioning, unlike hallucinating economists, who just get emotional and ban me?

"If your basis for judging research is truth in propaganda why would you trust science from the USA?"

Who says I do? What if it's just lies and trolling all the way down?

Wait a minute, isn't this whole "China is ahead of the US in the hard sciences" article political? Are you trying to pretend that politics doesn't pervade every aspect of science, because every measurement is a social act?

As for Tiananmen, can I say that I visited it a lot before the actual incident, seeing lines of stone-faced Red Army soldiers guarding the Great Hall of the People, but I did not see violence coming because the guards were unarmed? Can I add that the day of the incident I was on a train to Harbin with some American friends in a touring rock group, but we heard about it and were met in Harbin by US embassy officials who told us to leave the country immediately and offered C130 transport? How stubborn was i to continue traveling (my friends took the transport), heading for Hong Kong, because all the Chinese were saying "mei shi" ('no problem'), indicating how willing they were to accept the government's crackdown?

But why did the government have to crack down?

"on the pain of getting ostracized and exile."

What if this has already long-since happened to me because I did not agree with Obama and Clinton on protecting borders? Does your strawman collapse if I tell you I voted for Perot over Clinton, Jill Stein over Obama, and Cornell West over Harris?

Is there a fence? Do scientists and hunters regularly do these things? Where is absentee ownership enforced by paid third parties, in nature?

How can you seriously compare border enforcement of a psychological entity to very localized self-defense of personally occupied land?

Are you saying banking shenanigans ended for good three years ago? What are you smoking?

Quick search reveals:

"On August 22, 2025, it was reported that the Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland had fined private bank J. Safra Sarasin CHF3.5 million ($4.3 million) for aggravated money laundering. Also, A former bank employee received a six-month suspended prison sentence in the same case."

"July 30, 2025: 6:07 am ET
HSBC Faces Money Laundering Probes in Switzerland and France"

If Zimbabwe had the same few billion dollars, could they have avoided their crisis, which didn't rise to an acute crisis level either, on the world stage?

Am I wrong in interpreting that quotation as saying that by jumping on the potential crisis quickly (i.e. what the Fed failed to do with Lehman's), they averted a much more significant draw on the swap line?

Is it so unreasonable to think you are downplaying the psychological significance of having unlimited Fed backing, such that you don't actually need to use it to benefit from it?

If I have a rich uncle who's promised to bail me out, can I live like a pauper, yet be significantly better off than a pauper with no backing whatsoever? If I run into an expense I can't handle will my creditors treat me different because of my implied backstop, than they would treat a beggar with no backstop?

This how happy is the SNB to have the unlimited, permanent currency swap line with the Fed? Is it fair to say that if they hadn't in 2008, the Credit Suisse hing would have been a much more serious crisis (if the country was even still around)?

Why should the Fed care about making money, when it can and does simply print (digitally) more?

When a country enforces bans against facts like the Tiananmen Square incident (which I witnessed in person, as a Chinese language school student), what won't they lie about?

When labor is 5% of sticker price, how can you ignore arbitrary margin as much more significant factor?

" It is not a free market where supply and demand rule pricing and sales figures."

What happens to rational price theory when you drop assumptions like the Law of One Price?

Did you just make the case for state banks and wealth funds?

"society devolves into chaos."

How chaotic is society now for those who piss off Trump? Would Venezuela like a word? How about Ukraine?

Also why not consider that global fertility is declining because even with all that health care, life just isn't fun when you're forced into suboptimal choices by the capitalist system?