the country is generally in favour of breaking from its old European alliances
No. I went into this in detail here: https://old.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1ir1ozg/adam_tooze_discusses_rightwing_americas_offer_to/md4y0k2/
Most believe they want to tear it down, but with this "olive branch" they aim for mere ideological capture (or reinvigoration, depending on PoV), to transform the undergirding which built the Atlantacist consensus.
Could a rebellion in eastern Congo widen into a regional war?
It already is, multiple foreign militaries are on the ground. Hundreds of Romanian mercenaries were even captured.
veqq
12d ago
It fundamentally transformed the way I think more than anything, up until getting into software engineering, which I view as an extension of formal logic.
An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus by Michaelson starts from lambda calculus, extends it through logical inference to Lisp to typed ML in a few hundred cozy pages!
veqq
17d ago
5 freshly graduated leutenants and 3 of their instructors were fired after their graduation ceremony, where they drew swords and said "we are the soldiers of Ataturk", understood as a prosecularist move against Erdogan's islamization. https://www.duvarenglish.com/turkish-military-dismisses-lieutenants-targeted-by-erdogan-for-ataturk-chanting-during-oath-ceremony-news-65613
Similarly, a historian was arrested for insulting Erdogan online. https://www.duvarenglish.com/turkish-court-arrests-historian-for-insulting-erdogan-news-65614
As do parents of a (long dead) protestor. https://www.duvarenglish.com/parents-of-gezi-park-victim-face-trial-for-insulting-turkish-president-news-65598
veqq
18d ago
losing the thread
That makes two of us! ...for the American economy, ah. I suppose not. But it kept bonds valued well on their books, working out like deferred payments. The American banks both financed the loser's payments and forwarded loans to the victors on reparations payments. I don't have access to the full period of bond values then, but I suspect their balance sheets were held up quite well until the depression.
The German government's credit wasn't really impacted, surprisingly. Somehow everyone kept playing ball with them even after they chose to hyperinflate themselves. Germans who bought war bonds etc. in WWI were the most negatively impacted. Even more surprising to me, Germany was still able to access credit markets into the 30s, even after they started issuing fake money: Öffa then Mefo bills. Chase bank e.g. went through crazy hoops and even let Americans buy German war bonds during WWII (until 1941) (at a discount, buying subsidized returnee marks taken from Jews).
veqq
18d ago
The amount of goods and serviced provided can decrease, too. Producers can't lower prices very much without losing money (there's a reason prices are sticky downwards) while consumers can't pay more to maintain consumption (with a stable money supply). So you have less economic activity for the money supply, with inflation as the proportion between them changes for the worst (just on the other side of the equation).
veqq
18d ago
We're literally talking about the opposite situation!
American banks gave Germany perhaps 4x as much as the 20 years later Marshall plan. Some was from the reparations (Dawes and Young plans) they bankrolled, without being paid back, which did not circulate in the German economy, but they loaned and invested even more (about $5 billion/year in the late 1920s, more than Germany (American bankers) paid in reparations in total (for comparison, in dollars, the total original reparation sum was $30 billion) which helped Germany grow production 30% above 1914 levels, with the 2nd largest industry in the world.)
veqq
18d ago
Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.
They were quite wealthy during the Middle Ages, e.g. Sicily under the Norman Roger II. However the south's cash crops stagnated the economy as great wealth flowed in without much need for diversification and increasing complexity (...and later the Kingdom of the 2 Sicilies banned agricultural exports!) Prosperity started breaking down in the 14th century, then in the 15th century when large earthquakes and plagues decimated the population and slave raids shifted settlements inland; the Spanish art of governance (rent seeking) also halted development (cf. Spanish literacy into the late 19th century).
Nevertheless, up to unification, Naples remained one of Europe's largest and wealthiest cities. Sicily had 3 of the most industrialized provinces in 1871 - but they hadn't changed production methods for centuries, doing seasonal labor in workshops (compared to the area around Milan which used power looms etc. from the 1820s).
veqq
18d ago
jobbskatteavdraget
Isn't it only about $200 (5%) at the 45k crowns/month pretax we're talking about (to get ~33k after tax)?
veqq
19d ago
Yes this seems Bad For The Economy
How did this impact the German economy if it never circulated (neither entered nor left it)?
veqq
19d ago
The Norse believed cats had magic powers, warded way spirits etc., carved them on things, sailed and went viking with them (and dogs).
veqq
19d ago
in the postdoc bracket (so about $3k/month after tax or a bit more
That's what an American makes at McDonalds doing night shift, or the top 25% in Sweden or top 10% in France...
Germany paid almost none of the reparations. Less than 1/6 of the 130 billion marks were paid by 1930 (after which payments were paused, then indefinitely deferred due to the great depression), almost all by American banks which Germany never paid back. (N.b. only 50B (the A and B bonds) were required to be paid.) If you calculate for inflation etc. the US actually paid Germany significantly more than in the Marshall plan after!
For comparison, after the Franco-Prussian war, France received a similar proportion of GDP, had its banks finance it within a month then paid them off within 3 years. The German Empire (the Weimar state's actual name) via Havenstein instead chose to call a general strike and hyperinflate its currency to erase local war debts the government owed to German citizens and banks.
Also, the great depression started when the US stock market crashed, spreading elsewhere.
veqq
25d ago
That's how Chinese governance works. The different regions are all allowed to have their own (radically different) policies to experiment with what works. After a bit, the winning method is spreads to the rest and they try a new experiment.
veqq
25d ago
The Colombian government wasn't rejecting deportations outright, but the specific way, wanting the US to charter seats or such (which is generally cheaper, too) hence the president offering to fly them with his own plane.
veqq
2mo ago
doesn't like the Christian Nationalist project of Fuentes, for basically the reasons given by Richard Spencer
What are his reasons/where to read them?
veqq
2mo ago
But that sounds too insane to state directly outside of rationalist circles so you have to reach for an argument that normies are willing to consider
Hasn't that been the "normie" and popular position for the past 10-15 years? It's long seemed a radical opinion with no public support to entertain the concept of moral culpability.
veqq
3mo ago
I love that Americans can look at the same scene through an entirely different colour spectrum, and all the flashing red bits just look gray to them.
The question is what value is encoded in the British lens and what Americans are missing by not seeing this worldview. Does it make Americans worse analysts when interacting with the Chinese etc or does it free them to do more, with less mental burdens or are they stupider because they're not constantly doing such social calculus etc etc Like preeminent American Timothy Dexter I'll put my punctuation at the end...,,,???????
veqq
3mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll
Everything is composed of many parts, without which something will fail. Those individual parts are not all worth the entire project, but rather some function of their rarity/cost to create and necessity viewed through a Keynesian beauty contest or such. Normal values and prices already cover everything.
Consider the same story, but where you offer people $10 to use their charger for a little bit. This removes the debt and simplifies the initial acquisition.
veqq
3mo ago
there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people
This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?
most of what we see, believe and hear about is in fact mostly fabricated
Yes, but I'm not sure what the conspiracy theory is. It seems like a paragraph or two was lost before the edit.
veqq
3mo ago
Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization is precisely about this. Here's a book review which answers your question: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-energy-and-civilization-by
Tangentially, this is why the occasional narrative that Islam needs a reformation is insane; it's currently going through a reformation, that's why it's gotten so violent (like the 30 years war etc.)
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