You need to do it because it’s an unnecessary blocker. That’s the point. Poor people disproportionately struggle to jump through the hurdles in place for voting, and Poor people disproportionately vote D. R loves to make voting harder under the auspices of “fraud prevention”.

Teşekkürler!

I hope where you are now is more stable.

My girlfriend and her sister are also in the brain drain. Definitely a sad state of affairs, so many of her friends and friends family’s have been either political prisoners, or had ongoing court cases, etc.

I’ve been trying to learn Turkish so we can move her family over here too and I can actually chat with them, but I fear they’ll need to work on their English so they can get around.

I was just in Göcek and Ankara and I had some wildly interesting interactions with locals when they asked me how I liked Turkey.

“I like it, very beautiful country, lovely people, great food.”

“So you’d move here?”

“Uh… perhaps not”

“So you don’t like Turkey”

👀

lol

Pretty true. I have nothing really to add historically.

Having said that, there’s nothing preventing this status quo from changing in the future if enough economies decide the risk of an erratic main trade partner isn’t worth it anymore. The reward of controlling the main global reserve currency comes with the responsibility of not involving it in undue threats.

Ok, but why do all the major petroleum producers trade in USD? Yes the US buys a lot of oil, petrol, and natural gas, but the trading volume isn’t that atypical of other wealthy, large geographic regions. They use it because it’s stable, ubiquitous, and almost always accepted. If it’s not stable or ubiquitous anymore due to these sorts of sanctions, why would the petrol producers keep using it?

The who’s who of nefarious countries: “Hey US? Yeah some of us have concerns that maybe your currency can be used as a weapon against us, so we’re gonna do a whole bunch of political showboating to try to make a point. We’re not motivated enough to actually do something, though.”

DJT: “I’ll give you something to be concerned about. Our currency that I’m ostensibly protecting the use of will be totally useless for you!”

It’s like he doesn’t realize that the US dollar is the world reserve because of the stability and reliability of it. We got there using carrots, mostly, and he thinks the stick is a good idea…

My brother in christ you have less than a TB of storage. you’re very far from being a hoarder.

I still have my first 512GB HDD from when I was in high school and I’ve got over 32TB on my latest build, plus my archive of old drives I leave off until I need to access them. Join us, it’s better.

I mean, they should block dissemination of illegally acquired, nefarious material designed as political interference from foreign interests. Just like turfing the Hunter Biden laptop leak was ultimately the right choice. Although I suppose you could argue this is more into “whistleblower” territory and Hunter’s laptop was more “revenge porn”, so maybe this is more justifiable for not blocking?

I guess regardless of the result of that debate, it’s still clear hypocrisy from Elongated Muskrat - “Twitter Files” all about how suppressing Hunter’s laptop was bad and “against free speech”, but now he’s doing the same thing for “The Good Guys”. Typical.

They’re voting Jill Stein because Daddy Putin says vote splitting is a communist conspiracy

What’s wild to me is that legal segregation was like, not that long ago at all. It always feels like it’s taught as ancient history but it was only half a lifetime ago, really… and still ongoing. It’s not like this happened a thousand years ago and “you should really be over it by now”, this was the experience of some people’s still living grandparents and parents.

The idea that an entire demographic of people should magically recover and be equals again after like 30 years of half-assed “equality” after literal generations of slavery is fucking wild.

Absolute goblin energy to not recognize the ongoing effects of such a recent thing.

The monetary supply thing in particular is why using bitcoin or any other externally managed currency as a national currency is typically regarded as a bad idea.

And also the above statements get much more complex when dealing with multiple currencies like with Russia where despite it issuing the ruble, it can default on USD debt because the ruble/USD exchange rate is such shit.

Monetary policy is very interesting.

That’s not really what “national debt” refers to… national debt is literal borrowing: “hey who wants to buy some bonds from my national government so we can invest in our economy?” Someone buys those bonds with the expectation of getting the invested amount + interest back.

What you’re talking about is most closely represented by “reparations” which is money owed by an aggressor to a victim state, and is only enforceable really by a stronger third party or by the aggressor losing the war.

As to why cities don’t take on debt the same way: they do take on millions of dollars of debt for infrastructure, but usually they’re loans from the federal government as opposed to bonds. The difference between city debt and national government debt is the national government controls its own monetary supply, meaning is defacto cannot default on its bonds. Cities can default on their loans, but typically the lender is the higher level government anyways so the repercussions tend to be political only. That’s why worrying about “the national debt clock” is typically not meaningful, but your city borrowing 300 million for a new highway definitely is.