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If turns out this is true, a decentralized currency would make a lot of sense amongst BRICS because it creates a trustless system. They wouldn't be overly reliant on each others currencies for bilateral transactions. USD was always going to be dumped as the world reserve currency. Inflation set aside, their foreign policy over the last two decades make them an unreliable partner unworthy of holding any currency from. Biden's only made it worst over the last two years.
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I am so surprised that actually anyone is surprised that there's cocaine in the White House - even the name is calling for it. Now serious, politicians in general are notorious consumers of drugs, and it is not only in the US, it is all over the world. Many times, during negotiations, they have to keep working and speaking and plotting for hours and many times these are "won" by mere exhaustion of the opponent, it is just a question of incentives that they will use "enhancers".
I was only surprised to learn the news that they found it in the WH. Because I thought surely no one would be foolish enough to bring cocaine on their person and enter security with it. The WH is the most secured compound on the planet. No one without a clearance could possibly enter with a powdery substance on them, let alone leave it somewhere on WH grounds without getting caught. So whoever brought it in went past the secret service checkpoint. And who is notorious for being a crack addict? I saw a report that suggested the coke was found near the Vice Presidential limo parking spot. Are they trying to blame the coke on Kamala? |
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Another evidence is when the continent finds itself affected by climatic changes that were not the cause of it, nor even contributed to its exacerbation. Today, the major countries are mobilizing the whole world to confront the catastrophic changes on the planet that they were the cause of and that they are supposed to bear the consequences of on their own.
You tell a bunch of Africans who are burning fecal matter to produce fuel about the climate change initiatives of other countries and they'll laugh. Africa won't be severely affected by climate change. It's within their interest to start capitalizing on as many natural resources as they can, fueled by cheap oil if they can get it. Economies thrive on cheap hydrocarbons. Seemingly every other country has developed their economies on cheap energy but Africans got the short end of the stick. Lot of their natural resources were stolen using cheap labor and exporting them out of the country. |
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On the other hand, national lotteries are known to be "taxes on ignorance of mathematics", but if these revenues financed public expenses that revert to the common good: would you agree to pay systematically 1 USD more in your annual taxes as something that ensures the right to dream of a dear life of every taxpayer?
Doesn't seem necessary that this would be a government sponsored program. Having tax payer money sponsor a lottery type program wouldn't be great for optics when some would argue the prize pool of that lottery should be used for a public utility instead of going to a private citizens pocket. |
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The debt ceiling and fed central banks been avoided collapse since 2008 but every sht coin Will have the huge crash and collapse one day and so Will be with our economy wich is exacly like some shtcoin been just pumped up by whales.
The federal reserve has been playing with quantitative easing since the collapse and they knew they were going to cause USD inflation when the money supply became to high. COVID spending accentuated the inflation effect. A pump and dump might be an accurate analogy considering spending has gotten exponentially worse over the years, and the central banks have been playing a balancing act with the interest rates for years. USD circulating supply is about 24 trillion dollars. This represents 807 million bitcoins, while all that exists is 21 million dollars.
Assuming you meant 21 million coins, not dollars. It doesn't matter how many total coins there are. The value of each coin will increase depending on demand. You could have half that amount and the price would still be proportional to the total demand. |
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Some users are mentioning Taxes and KYC as criteria for "bitcoin friendliness". I have to say I disagree. Not having any taxes on bitcoin doesn't make a country bitcoin friendly and having KYC doesn't make one not-friendly. It depends on how much restrictions the government is placing in front of bitcoin adoption. KYC could exist and yet not restrict adoption, meanwhile they could have 0 tax on bitcoin and yet shut your bank account if you use an exchange!
High taxes effectively limits Bitcoin profitability, though. I've seen some countries float the idea of a "wealth tax" on crypto meaning holding some amount of crypto and not liquidating would incur tax liability if you happen to profit from your holdings. The tax code is already complicated enough in the U.S., and most European countries have high tax rates -- it's enough to deter crypto growth. "Friendless" countries IMO are those with low regulation and low tax rates. South America and some APAC countries are far better for Bitcoin than the U.S., Europe, China, India, etc. |
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I treat gambling nothing but entertainment. I don't care to profit from it because I know what the odds are. That being said, live table games by evolution gaming are what peaked my interest along with crypto casinos. Never was interested in gambling in the past until crypto casinos became big. The early black jack tables were pretty shoddy until evolution came along and offered their live table games. Their UI was the best out there.
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I know data in US is better than most of the countries both the western and those in the west, but I don't take these data serious because most of the time they have been cooked and padded to show that the Government is working, and the economy is doing well and in actual sense the reverse is the case. It is better to look beyond all these conventional data to see the true picture of how the economy is doing
This data seems positive however right now we don’t want extremely low unemployment figures. Why? Because it will lead to inflation and higher rates. When someone has trouble finding employees they need to pay them more. By paying them more they increase their prices and drive inflation even higher and the cycle repeats. Hence why this is not a good release and means that we will get at least 2 more rate hikes. If there's a low unemployment rate, then wages wouldn't need to increase in order for employees to be retained. The federal reserve had blamed employee wage increases as a core driver of inflation. Employers were paying their employees more, and were forced to raise prices of goods/services. But the unemployment rate wasn't actually the core of the issue. The unemployment rate in 2020-2022 was higher than what it needed to be with pandemic era stimulus money. People were more reluctant to go back to work, and employers essentially had to compete with the federal government in retaining employees. With the recession fears, I'd gladly look for a low unemployment rate. If the U.S. enters recession, other economies and markets begin to slow. |
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A lot of the cities have an increase number of homeless and the solution they've put forth is just throwing money at them hoping the problem goes away.
Lots of drug addicted, mentally ill people in California. LA and San Francisco have effectively decriminalized drug use, so these homeless encampments turn into open-air drug markets. You give these people a hotel room and food and that still won't be enough. Institutionalization for drug treatment/mental health treatment might be the only option.
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Justice isn't blind. The amount of money you have and your relationship with those in power influence the type of punishment you get if you have the misfortunate of getting caught for your crimes. White collar crime routinely isn't prosecuted if you have political connections to begin with, so some people never have to worry. In America, you can't be tried for the same crime twice.  True, but if you're charged on a crime at your local state level, then the feds can still charge you for the same crime on the federal level because of dual sovereignty protection. |
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do you all agree that with the emergence of fast transportation now, the economic turnover is also getting faster, this is based on the fact that any delivery will be distributed quickly, automatically it will make the price of living necessities and kind remains stable as long as it can be distributed quickly!
It's mostly a marketing campaign by Dominos. Cheap transportation is what's critical. Increase the cost of energy, and naturally everything else will increase in price dramatically. If a country wants to spur up economic activity, subsidize energy costs for businesses and/or export energy if there's a surplus. When Europe had its energy crisis in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine, energy prices were one of the key metrics that caused businesses to increase their operating costs. |
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Larry Fink on Bitcoin: https://twitter.com/APompliano/status/1676697692636868615Refers to it as an international asset and a hedge against asset devaluation. The comments on the above tweet are particularly ignorant and I will address it here -- regardless of what you think of Larry Fink or Blackrock, it is a great news for Bitcoiners if the asset management firms adopt crypto currency into their portfolios. They manage assets to the tune of trillions of dollars. Their adoption of Bitcoin into their portfolios makes crypto more valuable and decentralized assets make Blackrock less powerful as an entity. Everybody wins. |
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Snowden's NSA leaks were not even the start of what the 3 letter agencies started doing to surveil Americans and foreigners post 2001. https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.
The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.
Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.
By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.
Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that "There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber 'weapons'. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such 'weapons', which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of "Year Zero" goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective."
Wikileaks has carefully reviewed the "Year Zero" disclosure and published substantive CIA documentation while avoiding the distribution of 'armed' cyberweapons until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA's program and how such 'weapons' should analyzed, disarmed and published.
Wikileaks has also decided to redact and anonymise some identifying information in "Year Zero" for in depth analysis. These redactions include ten of thousands of CIA targets and attack machines throughout Latin America, Europe and the United States. While we are aware of the imperfect results of any approach chosen, we remain committed to our publishing model and note that the quantity of published pages in "Vault 7" part one (“Year Zero”) already eclipses the total number of pages published over the first three years of the Edward Snowden NSA leaks. U.S. media, being as worthless as they are, covered very little of Vault 7 publications. I speculate the intel agencies explicitly told them not to cover such matters in great detail. Of course, the social media companies in 2020 were in constant contact with the FBI, so it would not be outlandish to think the government communicates with the executives in the MSM to keep them away from certain damaging stories. Also see the release of "Scribbles" - https://wikileaks.org/vault7/releases/#Scribbles CIA made sure whistleblowers would be punished. |
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It's relatively easier for China to implement whatever plans the state has because of the kind of government they have. Resistance is very minimal and it could easily be addressed. Critics and other opponents of the measure could be silenced effortlessly.
While this digital currency is obviously an attack against privacy and freedom, to a people who are already deprived of it to a certain extent, nothing anymore matters.
I would expect more resistance in the US and certain parts of the EU, such as Germany, which is a very cash-intensive country. I expect implementation to be much slower, due to inefficient administrations, and adoption much slower as well. I'm curious, is the CBDC in use the version that has an expiration date?
I would be surprised if they have implemented that already. The logical, and Machiavellian, thing to do is to wait until everyone is using CBDCs to start programming them with the controversial features, such as expiration. Europe and the U.S. residents hardly understand CBDC's and equate it to crypto currency, so expect little resistance. The Americans had nearly all their freedoms stomped on after 9/11 when the Patriot Act was passed. It essentially allowed government agencies to surveil U.S. citizens and international persons of interest without being subject to probable cause warrants. Seems worthy of outrage, you would assume. The Biden White House has spent some portion of the U.S. budget to research CBDC's and develop regulatory framework behind it, and hardly any U.S. media publications have latched onto the matter. The Chinese have no choice but to adhere to CDBC's. Europe and the U.S. will voluntarily adhere to them out of ignorance. |
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The Middle East has this exact cycle. Fragmented groups with military power inside the country will kill as many as they can to achieve political power only until the next coup attempt toples the existing regime. Then more killing until someone comes out on top and takes over the country. No elections -- whoever has the largest gun wins.
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Are we sure it isn't Joe's coke?  If it was found near the President's private residence, then it is Hunter Biden's coke. If it was found near the office buildings, then it was one of the staffers. Working for Joe Biden must be stressful, makes you want to partake in the devils dandruff. |
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He won't be buying anything major. He's already said he plans to consolidate companies into his "X" app, similar to "WeChat" in China. Given how much he sunk into Twitter, it wouldn't be too wise to make another impulse buy.
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France is experiencing their "George Floyd" moment of civil unrest. This is not a case of revolutionaries standing up against their rulers, only a case of left wing radicals raising racial tensions by capitalizing on an OIS involving a black kid. Law enforcement in France rarely are involved in shootings, so you will have to have commited a particularly heinous offense to be shot by European law enforcement. Looks like a person using his vehicle as a weapon is what prompted the shooting, an entirely justified use of force under that premise. Hasn't stopped rioters from destroying property and brutalizing law enforcement.
Macron looks particularly weak in this situation too. Last reports I've read is he's sent some tens of thousands of agents into Paris to restore order. But that's only after rioting has peaked.
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Culture is more important if you're viewing this from a political viewpoint, and of course, religion is a subset of culture.
Religious affiliation itself is going down worldwide and even then you'll find emphasis on religion during political discourse. Not necessarily because the religion itself is important, just the underlying value systems that a religion adheres to. You look at any "western" democracy and you'll find judeo-christian values will have shaped those democracies for many centuries. Naturally, the leaders of those nations have all been from christian backgrounds. The islamic theocracies in the middle east shaped by Islam have divergent paths compared to a judeo-christian democracy in the west.
Culture can be eroded rather quickly and those that find religion antiquated may not realize that it doesn't even take a generation for value systems to be shifted entirely. Not that you need religion to live a moral and ethical life, but it helps.
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I don't think they should but consider how society nearly collapsed because of a disease that had a 99.9% survival rate with hypochondriacs begging to be locked and demanding others adhere to their own delusion and big government fetishes. Some people are too fragile to hear the truth. Ignorance is bliss, they say.
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