no - money is the means by which value is traded.

A given amount of time and labor producing more and being able to get you more is progress.

Deflation brings a host of problems - but among them are it encourages hoarding (not saving), and the fact that it makes previous debts more and more costly over time.

They’re saying they like minors

Not yet. They have QR, and are working on NFC.

Switching my fairphone to e/os today

in almost all cases, a van is a better working vehicle

wasn’t the chip ban from the Biden admin?

how long is Europe going to continue to do US policy just to screw China while being directly threatened and witnessing the US lose a war in Iran?

see The People’s Republic of Walmart

my main side project is software to create libraries of things and federate them - and part of that is I’m setting up a library here in Barcelona this year.

And part of what we’ll hope to be offering is basically free tech education along those lines. Eventually I’d love to see us training people to develop, providing our own hosted LLM, and making software for the community all without the need to interact with the shitty capitalist profiteering world.

and they wonder how China keeps coming out on top

You might want to look at the hostiles of Mexico and South America.

Or, the other way, the NYPD stations in Israel.

I think most people from rich countries would still prefer the US to be dominant than China

I don’t think so anymore - even in Europe, you’re seeing large splits. Germany might be content to follow the Americans to hell, but Ireland, Spain, and others are open about seeing the US as a much more dangerous and untrustworthy entity.

and build its global hegemony on the victory in this conflict

It also built its hubris which is now destroying it.

Not only did the US immediately set aside pretenses of international law once the USSR fell, but even the illusion of shared prosperity for US workers, who started seeing their wages stagnate and decline in the 1990s went along with it.

China is, but that’s just doing nothing and winning

Sure, it was US propaganda in some ways, but it was often much more truthful about the facts than the local government news

The Russians, after seeing their lives collapse in the 1990s, were rumored to have said something to the effect of “we always knew our government was lying about communism, so we assumed they were also lying about how bad capitalism is. Turns out they weren’t.”

Nah, it’s actually the anti-tourist squirt guns in the plain - the 19th century Brits just couldn’t understand such a superior technology when they coined the rhyme.

no, just Long Dong Silver

I mean, AI matches perfectly with some of the stuff Allende was working on before he was murdered

No, it’s not. It increases productivity. But unless that’s distributed to wages or lower prices, it doesn’t go down to non-owners.