BashfulBob [none/use name]

It’s a speculative commodity. But the real value of gold is its relative portability.

Precious metals have very limited utility value. If you’re seeing resources move out of capital development and into specie accumulation, that’s a sign the leadership doesn’t have strong long term prospects for your economy.

That, or you’re getting ready to take your nation’s financial reserves and run

Hope springs eternal.

But I feel like it gets extinguished earlier every year.

It’s going to be Walz and Vance competing to declare how much war we’re going to declare on Iran

Excited to realize Walz is absolute shit and abandon all hope for 2025

I’m fairly certain they’d continue fighting regardless.

As insurgents, maybe. I doubt they’d be sending cruise missiles over the border if the US wasn’t passing them out.

It’s called tactics! I’ve played Risk a bunch of times, and everyone knows you plow through north Asia, then try to sneak a bunch of troops in to hold Australia or South America until the end of the game. By expanding the size of the front, you always get a huge advantage over your better supplied and more heavily armored opposition.

Also, it makes for some AMAZING HEADLINES as NAFO liberals get gassed up on the idea of Ukrainian troops marching into Moscow before winter.

You’ll take the salmon from my cold dead hands. Fucking love fish. Best food in existence.

Things are indeed fucked, but I’m hard pressed to get my hands on a sandwich for less than $5. And I can churn those fuckers out at home for half that.

I am perpetually annoyed at how expensive any kind of fresh fruit or vegetable is, though. Why can I buy a pound of chicken for less than a pound of blueberries? When did onions start running over $1/lb? Why is a bag of rice at the asian market twice the size and half the price of its equivalent in Kroger?

Still so much cheaper to dice up some potatoes and carrots, season to taste, throw them in a baking dish, and wait an hour than to go out of pocket $10-15 literally anywhere outside my home. And holy shit, breakfast tacos! Basically free in my kitchen. I can’t find anyone willing to sell them for less than $4 outside of my home.

“People care too much about things” has long been the message of South Park

South Park routinely trips over itself as it sprints between “only an insufferable liberal would care about things” and “why are people so unfathomably cruel to each other?” Empathy isn’t unknown to the writers. It just slips in and out of their memory whenever a punchline necessitates it.

ideals and aspirations for 15 year old edgy children and 50 year old edgy manchildren

The dirty truth of the human condition is how easy it can be for people to stop maturing (or outright regress) far earlier than we would like to acknowledge. And it certainly doesn’t help when Americans are the most propagandized people on earth.

Canadian marketing professor

I’m hard pressed to assemble a more cursed string of words.

Just do shit that needs to be done then tax me whatever you had to spend?

We don’t couple taxes with spending, so even that much is a farce. Whenever the US overspends (basically always) they simply cover the balance with new debt instruments. But then Congress needs to give the Treasury permission to issue more debt to go with the new spending. So they can write Treasury $1T in distributions but only give it the ability to cover $900B in spending, at which point Treasury has to decide what $100B goes unpaid.

And that brings us to the inevitably “Will Treasury pay your nan’s Social Security check this month?!” headlines (that never resolve, because SS isn’t part of the general fund, but what the fuck ever!)

Israel has outlawed publishing of videos that strike military targets

I don’t doubt this is true, but I’d be curious to know how it is being enforced in the modern cell-phone age.

Also, Iran has announced that this is only the first wave of their retaliation

I guess we’ll see how far Israel can stretch itself. If this blunts their incursion into Lebanon, that would be a positive sign. But I can’t imagine they’re not going to retaliate in turn, given the current pattern of behavior from Tel-Aviv.

No pets please

Something about this last bit makes me extra angry.

In fairness, this is a callback to Dr. No - the original James Bond movie. Killing a British secret agent is always a good thing.

Petrodollar doesn’t look as hot when people are migrating away from petroleum.

But also, the US Dollar has been defying socio-economic gravity for decades while the Euro and the Yen and the Ruble and the Peso all decline. “Worst since 1995” understates how overvalued the USD continues to be globally.

Also, not a good sign for anyone’s economy when you’re stockpiling gold.

Give it five days before Musk integrates a new “Bold text only for people with blue check marks” feature.

Thousands of missiles launched into Israel. No reported fatalities. Minimal injuries, primarily resulting from people injuring themselves as they rush into shelters.

I don’t understand the strategy at all.

if an industry is too important for a strike it should be nationalized

Liberals have no earthly idea what nationalization means or entails. I suspect they’d be perfectly happy with a PG&E or Fannie Mae relationship, wherein the enterprise is ostensibly managed by the state but so heavily privatized as to just be a continuous stream of bailouts for private investors.

it will crash the global economy

glances at the state of the global economy

Good?

Three Quarters of a Century of Triumph