“People have told me that Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with old friends. At my age, if I wanted to keep in touch with old friends, I’d need an ouija board.”
Are you immortal? Do you have an income vastly higher than the servicing cost of that debt? Do you owe the large a majority of that debt to yourself? Are you able to, if push came to shove, tell your external creditors to go fuck themselves and dare them to so much as try to collect on the debt you don’t feel like paying? If you can’t answer “yes” to all these questions, you aren’t the US and have a debt situation that has absolutely nothing in common with the US debt.
I remember users on another platform went into full rage mode when I said the stock market was just legalized gambling, telling me how SAFE!!! IT IS IF YOU DO YOUR RESEARCH!!!>
Okay. Black Friday and Too Big to Fail only happened in my dreams.
US debt is currently higher than their GDP. Even if they could leverage the entire country into only paying debt (they can’t), it would take over a year to pay off. At the current average interest rate of ~3%, that’s enough to pay for the entirety of NASA’s budget five times over.
The last time US debt was greater than their GDP was the second world war.
…or, since the federal reserve creates money, they could do quite literally 100 strokes on a keyboard at the FED and repay the debt. A state doesn’t fund itself through taxes, taxes serve many purposes but funding a state isn’t one of them.
Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…
…in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.
At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.
Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.
Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.
Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.
Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.
And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.
They said service the debt, not pay off the whole thing. For an analogy, your whole mortgage being less than your annual salary isn’t a requirement; your monthly mortgage payment being a fraction of your monthly salary is.
I use mpv but the configuration is a big pain. Just try overriding a subtitle font in mpv, there are config files to change that don’t even exist by default and they live in different places depending on mpv version and it’s a huge mess.
I still do it because it’s lightweight and for some reason has better performance for me than VLC.
I do the same because VLC has an installer on Windows while MPV you have to manually extract from a compressed folder and then run the install script from command line
I’m in the MPC-HC gang on Windows. Just so much more practical than other players. The main selling point was that full-screen the controls go away once you move the cursor off them, it was amazing. And no waiting for subs to be processed like VLC had to back then, never turned back so don’t know if that is still a thing.
the main selling point of mpchc is madvr. there’s basically no other competitors that utilize the GPU to make the media your watching better on the same level as madvr.
I recently watched ‘robot dreams’ good animation movie from 2023, setting is 90’s new york. It was so strage seeing the twin towers in the background during the entire movie. But then i realized the new generation has no first hand 9/11 experience and would probably dont even notice.
It’s because of the crappy colour grading they do to merge shot footage with cgi effects. Jurassic Park holds up because it’s from an era of cinema where they didn’t do that grungy Blue-grey shit.
Remember kids, the church still continues to shuffle pedo priests and is still telling victims to eat shit. The Catholic Church is a corporation, and they only care about money and power, no matter how much their current PR pope spews hollow platitudes, without actually fixing anything.
Empty words from a fake “holy” leader who was elected by a board room of bankers and financiers.
What. I still rember the article about the Monkeys Musk butchered with his Microchips! This was terrifying and disgusting and now he is allowed to do this to humans?! WTF.
Regulatory capture at work. If you’re the second-richest man in the world and a darling of the far right to boot, they’ll let you do pretty much whatever you want.
That’s called cooking. And we usually call it meat instead of dead animal, because it’s a specific part of the dead animal that’s tasty and nutritive once cooked.
You never had a butterflied chicken thigh? Or even a leg of lamb? The meat isnt even thickness, you gotta cook it in a way that cooks it through while keeping the thinner parts edible.
I hadn’t even seen Alien when I first saw Spaceballs, but my god this scene had me in absolute stitches. It’s the way he puts on the little hat while eyeballing everyone. It’s making me chuckle just thinking about it.
I wouldn’t say it’s leftist, though there’s a lot of leftists here. Lemmy is more like how internet discussion boards used to be. There’s a lot of people with weird opinions on things, and there’s no Reddit Karma pushing people to conform to the consensus. So people are going to have weird takes on things, and there’s not 1000 comments upvoted above the weird ones, so you’re going to see comments like that. So reply to with you your weird opinions on those weird comments.
Welcome to the version internet that’s not pre-packaged and filtered to be bland!
I don’t mind weird and different opinions on things. In fact, that’s what make the discussion interesting instead of some boring echo chambers. I just wish people wouldn’t be so aggressive about it and hurling personal attacks left and right. The old discussion board had thing called netiquete to keep the discussion civil, but here in certain communities it’s like the wild west.
I think people misremember when discussions could be blunt without being abusive, because they didn’t recognize and appreciate sensible small-forum moderation. I don’t want oversight that forbids people from using a list of no-no words. I want human beings to skim a conversation and judge when people are causing problems.
In real-life interactions, there are legitimate occasions for being rude. Civility is an ideal. It’s not a death cult. You don’t pledge your honor to never calling someone an asshole. You just try to avoid dealing with assholes.
If a forum does not want strife between users, the mods better be proactive in removing fascists, trolls, bigots, and other dehumanizing forces.
If mods don’t remove that crap, but demand everyone play nice with those assholes - the forum exists for the benefit of those assholes. Everyone else is an unwitting victim for them to play with. And any moderation against accurately and reasonably saying ‘fuck off, abusive liar’ is acting as cover and force multiplication for abusive liars.
A vulgar explanation of how someone’s incorrect is often good-faith participation. Infuriating bullshit in televisable language is not.
I’d understand if it were the kind of ‘fuck off, abusive liar’, but more often than not it’s about something so minor, certainly not worth the extra negativity added to the community.
But that’s never what happens, when rules demand “civility.” They don’t actually enforce positivity. They just punish people who are honest toward minimally-cautious assholes. Quite often without spending one moment looking at the other side of the conversation.
Reports cannot be handled correctly in a vacuum. Context is necessary. Otherwise ‘you are wrong’ is undecidable.
It’s like a generation grew up not knowing what trolling is. It’s not harsh language. It’s being an infuriating douchebag, in a way that people understandably tell you you’re an infuriating douchebag. And for all the forums I’ve seen where trolling and getting trolled are equally forbidden, every god-damn one of them treats ‘shut up, troll’ worse than being a fucking troll. Even if it is those exact G-rated words.
That’s a great point about moderation, plenty of forums outside of just banning would have mods post in the thread and say ‘knock that shit off, try to be nicer’ or whatever to discourage a toxic atmosphere.
There can be appropriate times for a range of civility like you said so having nuance is important, but I’ve rarely seen a forum outside of something like Stormfront afraid to ban Nazis or racists without question, unlike some big venues today that try to be ‘tolerant’ or ‘free speech absolutists’.
I’ve seen several subreddits insist that politely-stated fascism is better discourse than calling out fascists. In one case, with ‘so you’re a fascist’ being treated as an intolerable insult… even though being a fascist was apparently fine… and that guy was absofuckinglutely a fascist.
Yeah… but that’s what the internet is. You’re connected to different people with different points of view, but you’re also connected to assholes. Just don’t take it personally, they don’t know you and you don’t know them.
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