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Journal by khallow
I was trying to put together some musings I had about experimentation at the society level with an eye to eventually making society better, but suffered from serious writer's block. So here's what I have.
First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.
Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".
Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.
For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.
I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).
Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).
On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.
First, the observation that we can look at a society as a bunch of humans with infrastructure. This infrastructure appears at many levels: individual biology/psychology, culture, rules and trade, the traditional sort of infrastructure (energy generation, roads, emergency services, telecomms, internet), and education/knowledge.
Today, we bring a lot of interesting tools to the table for improving society. First, we have a better understanding and knowledge of the workings of society. Second, advancing technology allows us to do things that weren't possible before. A key one is things are becoming less scarce. We may even be on the verge of the post-scarcity society where basic human needs are "too cheap to meter".
Second, it seems a fine environmental for experimenting with a variety of possibilities that would be legally and culturally acceptable to a degree.
For example, we're already trying out non-traditional relationships like same sex marriage and internet discourse with considerable success.
I wish society was more open to economic/trade experimentation (like gig economy, high frequency trade (and other automated trade mechanisms), and cryptocurrency).
Finally, not much point to experimenting, if one doesn't pay attention to the results. For example, we have vast improvement in the human condition due to the present economic system (global trade, capitalism, plus widespread democracy), but I still see people pushing old narratives that ignore that. Similarly, the economic experiments I mentioned above all have resistance from sources that usually can't be bothered to find an actual problem (gig workers are "exploited", HFT is stealing pennies from grandma every time she trades, and cryptocurrencies are for tax evasion).
On that last point, it doesn't make sense to do experiments, if you can't perceive what works or not in those experiments.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(1)
(1)
squatcho, n.:
The button at the top of a baseball cap.
-- "Sniglets", Rich Hall & Friends
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:54AM (10 children)
These are all ponzi schemes, all based on speculation, producing nothing actually useful to society in general.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:30AM (9 children)
Nope. That is not what a Ponzi scheme [wikipedia.org] is.
And speculation has its place since it's a common means of figuring out the future. As long as they're not using your money, I don't see the point of complaining about speculation. If they're wrong, then the market will take away their ability to speculate wrongly. It's a self-fixing problem.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:14PM (4 children)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:07PM (3 children)
(different AC)
Broaden that. Expansive Government and infrastructure can be considered Ponzi Schemes. The financial calculations are always reliant on a fallacious concept of non-inflationary growth. There's a reason many states can't meet public sector pension obligations or afford to maintain the roads without massively increasing the tax base through immigration. If the human condition is improved by a more affordable and higher standard of living -- we've just identified a major obstacle.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:51PM (2 children)
In the Bizzarro World it is simultaneously true that immigrants are here to steal your job and pay no taxes while also being shipped in by Soros to leach unemployment benefits and increase the tax base.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:15PM
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:30PM
It only seems bizarre to people that are too stupid to understand or (as in your case) willfully ignore the evidence. Let me give you a clue. [armstrongeconomics.com]
Look buddy, if you want to pay high real estate prices and high taxes to live among street-shitters then San-Francisco will welcome you with free* syringes!
* tax-payer funded
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:37PM (3 children)
Pedantry is your forte... Your stock market scams produce nothing of value outside of the scam and are nothing but a drain on real society that pays for all the "losses"... You just just wanna get rich quick
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @07:29PM (2 children)
Or detail oriented in other words.
That's why you should be a bit more detail oriented as well. There's no scam, drain on society, or get rich quick schemes here - rather the accusations of such. It's just hand waving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @08:06PM (1 child)
But, khallow is still a poor. Yellowstone contractors are very "detail oriented".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @08:37PM
Who knew that working in Yellowstone wasn't the fast ticket to getting rich? Yes, my job is very detail oriented. But I like it and where I'm working. I think I'll probably move on a year or two, but it's a good place to work.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:54AM (10 children)
What hath admin wrought? This is what happens when you permaban aristarchus: khallow journals. Teenager-level libertarian pablum, and fantasies about body types, and rich people. Someone please make it stop!
Alternatively, despite the excess verbiage, a khallow journal is just kind of a tilted fustakrakich journal, no? And so should be treated accordingly.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:14AM (1 child)
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:25AM
How can you know me, if I am AC? Can't be Ari, he is banned. That leaves the rest of us soylentils, outside of khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:16PM (7 children)
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:52PM (3 children)
My my, high frequency journaling (and other automated posting mechanisms)--when's the khallowkhoin going to be launched then?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @02:33PM (2 children)
I believe it's already here. It's called Dogecoin.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:23PM (1 child)
"Informative"? I was aiming for funny, but OK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @07:37PM
It's OK. Your reply just made me laugh out loud.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:24PM (2 children)
Joe Biden has directed the BATFJ (Bureau Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Journals) to report on high capacity Journals, with an eye to further regulation. No one needs a journal that can fire more than 6 rounds annually! Some journals can be fired 20, 60, 120 times a year, with one trigger pull! Journals of war and ghost journals should only be owned by the government!! California and the 9th circuit lead the way in regulating high capacity journals. THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:25PM (1 child)
Indeed. No one thinks of the children. If we had, you would have been permabanned long ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @10:59PM
Wot? From the Murder-Death-Kill journal guy? Proponent of 2nd Ammenderment Mass School Shootings? I second the call for a ban.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @08:16AM (7 children)
Nuh-uh... Muh late stage capitalism!
Just imagine how much further progress there would've been were we all living in a socialist paradise instead.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:09PM (6 children)
democracy and trade coexists well with socialism, private capitalism does not. kindof the fast,good without cheap option.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @01:30PM (5 children)
Except when they don't. You can get a lot of anti-democratic and anti-trade regulation then. For example, the US back in the 1930s created an agency, the Raisin Administrative Committee (RAC) to buy excess raisins [reason.com] in order to support farmers who grew raisins. In the linked story, this had devolved to the point that the RAC took 30% of the raisin crop without compensation.
"Private capitalism" is capitalism. The other things that are labeled similarly, like "state capitalism" aren't capitalism. Much like "real diamonds" are diamonds; "fake diamonds" are not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @02:37PM (4 children)
It might shock you to learn that much of Europe is socialist. Or were you of the mistaken opinion that much of the European economy is moribund?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:49PM (1 child)
I'm indeed of that impression. As an example, I have already presented [soylentnews.org] the case of energy policy of Germany which hasn't decreased (rather it's increased) its reliance on fossil fuels despite 12 years of effort. Several other countries are pursuing similar, misbegotten policies.
And while this isn't a problem for Germany (which has very strong private sector employment), much of the European economy is employed [wikipedia.org] by the public sector - sometimes combined with a weak employment rate (PIGS, for example). That's a strong indicator of moribundness for me.
Finally, there's the protectionism. I'll just give numerous examples I've mentioned in the past few years: here [soylentnews.org], here, here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], here [soylentnews.org], and here [soylentnews.org]. Those industries are protected at the expense of the rest of the European economy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @11:19PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:53PM
Europe isn't, strictly speaking, socialist.
In a socialist economy, you socialise your major economic functions - it is in effect a command economy with private ownership only left as a nominal rump, if at all. None of Europe really does this.
Much of Europe counts as a mixed economy (which describes Greece's sclerotic system, as well as the so-called Nordic model) in which private ownership of capital is generally accepted, though heavily taxed and in which substantial welfare states are established.
If you haven't socialised capital, or established such a strong dirigiste system that private ownership is a mere fig leaf, you don't have socialism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:13PM
Since there are zero socialist countries in Europe, it would shock us all to learn this. The only country with any constitutional reference to Socialism and a Socialist government (since 2015) is Portugal. Despite this government reducing the high unemployment and government debt resulting from the 2008 crash, Portugal has a market economy and retains the lowest per-capita GDP in Western Europe.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday March 24 2022, @02:19PM (3 children)
You're doing it again. It's amazing.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @02:25PM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @10:54PM (1 child)
True, dat! But on the other hand, repeating a true thing a lot of times does not make it any less true. You're doing it again, khallow. Just when we thought you came around on the vax and Russia!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @11:10PM
You find the truth then in that morality play crap.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nostyle on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:05PM (18 children)
What is the "added value" in any of this?
--
My pedestrian, common sense assessments of these things:
1) Gig work merely absolves corporations from costs of liability, overhead and employee benefits, shifting these costs onto workers - many of whom are ill-equipped to understand the math.
2) HFT is a scheme to exploit latency in markets to fabricate value where there is none.
3) Cryptocurrency is a method of artificially expanding the money supply, thereby driving inflation so as to enrich those who happen to hold real property and impoverish those who do not.
Then again, I am not well-educated about these things.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:01PM (17 children)
Ask the parties going through considerable effort and resources to do these things not me. My take is that the enormous effort going into these things demonstrate the considerable value to the parties undergoing the effort. And that's good enough for me. Nothing has to have value to everyone.
Except that it doesn't. As I noted in my posts on that subject, we already have regulation throughout the developed world that prevents most such gig economy work. Thus, gig economy work doesn't overlap much with regular work.
And sorry, but a worker who deals with those costs will become well-equipped to understand them in a few months to years. And that's an important thing to note. Removing oneself from gig economy work is pretty easy to do - vastly easier than quitting a traditional job.
In other words, there's value where there was none before. That's typical economic fabrication (in the non-deceptive sense of the word) of value.
There is no dearth of artificial means of inflating money supply. That isn't what drives the value of cryptocurrency! And it's absurd to claim that this somehow inflates normal inflation. Even if we were to take the entirety of the cryptocurrency market capitalization as an inflationary add on, it's only $2 trillion [coinmarketcap.com] presently. Real property is somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 trillion [institutionalinvestor.com].
This.
(Score: 2) by nostyle on Thursday March 24 2022, @06:16PM (16 children)
I do not come here to argue, so I will limit myself to a single response to your reply.
Using this logic, you could defend bank-robbery. Still your overall premise was "eventually making society better", an ideal which you seem to abandon in the passage above. I find it revealing that you cannot enumerate any value added.
...except that it does. (Here giving you as much proof as you gave me.)
Sure...either that or become broke and homeless. But if I've got mine, why should I care?...right?
...At least until all the traditional jobs have vanished and been replaced by gig work. In the end it all seems to boil down to master/slave relationships, but, hey, that's okay if all the contracts are in order, ...right?
Here you are being intentionally obtuse. I used "fabricate" in the sense of "lie about" rather than in the sense of "create". Please elaborate on
how HFT differs from graft.
I'll not argue further about crypto. I suspect there may be some value in having a convenient means of barter outside of traditional currency in the event the SHTF - perhaps better than the liquor and tobacco I am stock-piling for that eventuality. And I certainly would not refuse any offers anyone would like to proffer for an NFT of my next journal on SN. :)
--
In truth, your response makes me think that Azuma may have a point, and that your promotion of these technologies has an ulterior motivation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @07:20PM (15 children)
Indeed, I could. But there's a serious difference. It's not merely a matter of not seeing the "added value" of bank robberies - it hurts real people.
As to "value added", I find value in people pursuing and achieving their wants without notable harm to others or demanding resources from others, no matter how little those wants matter to me personally.
The two primary recent gig economy jobs are transportation in markets with severely restricted transportation options (such as ride hailing cartels), small internet-accessible tasks that couldn't be paid for before, and delivery services for goods that didn't have delivery services before. Things like Uber, Mechanical Turk, and GrubHub. There's very little overlap with most real world jobs where the gig approach wouldn't make sense and would be heavily regulated.
If that were going to be a genuine problem, it would have happened long before now. Gig work has been around forever. What's changed is that we have technology to apply gig work to roles that are otherwise poorly covered, just as I noted before.
No, I'm merely playing on the double meaning of fabrication. Now, let's consider the definition of graft. Here's a typical one [wordnik.com]:
So what's deceitful or fraudulent about trading really fast? Or even of placing and removing book orders that fast? (They can after all be traded when they exist - even if it's just for a microsecond.) Nothing at all. So right there, HFT isn't graft.
I'll note here that Canada attempted [soylentnews.org] to use the financial system to shut down a protest (the trucker convoy thing). I don't know how far along they were, but crypto transactions [reason.com] would have still gone through. Getting cut off from normal finance by a hostile government is the sort of SHTF moment that I think would make crypto very viable.
Like what? There's no point to me trying to defend myself from vague innuendo. Azuma crosses the line to complete fabrication, in the deceptive sense of the word.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @09:20PM (12 children)
Webster:
--
Wallstreet took six figures from me in 2008. No one went to jail. Fuck wallstreet. My excess all goes to charity now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @09:47PM (2 children)
Don't bother, he is pedantic when it suits and loosey goosey when he's up against the wall. Truly an epic shill khallow is, and he might even be doing it for free!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @10:44PM
-Zedd, Spectrum [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @12:58AM
In other words, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @11:06PM (8 children)
Ok. Should blow up society because someone was mean to you 13 years ago? Because I don't see the point of complaining about this in a thread about societal experimentation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @12:02AM (7 children)
Sorry, I was trying to be neighborly by engaging you in your journal, and your foolishness brought some old angst to the surface. I should know better.
As to the fate of society, I cannot avert its impending and inevitable doom. The foundations of it are shot. Enjoy it while you can.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @12:55AM (6 children)
No problem here. I'm used to neighborly on the internet.
Well, we can make that less impending and inevitable, and/or we can figure out how to put the pieces together afterward by this experimentation. It helps to know what works and doesn't work so we don't make as many of the same mistakes next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @02:37AM (5 children)
Salvation will not come by way of gig work, HFT or crypto, though, so my estimation is that you are discussing deck chair arrangements on the Titanic.
There is a quote I once read that I have been unable to find for some months now, saying something like this:
Let's run that experiment.
--
-Matthew Koma, Zedd, Spectrum (Acoustic Version) [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @03:28AM
Eureka!!! Found it:
-Baha'u'llah, Tabernacle of Unity [bahai.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @03:42AM (3 children)
So what? If there genuinely is an iceberg out there rather than your imagination, we can drop that stuff and do something more useful to immediate survival. But in the meantime, what's the point of not doing it? My take is that if we want to survive this age relatively intact, we're going to have to bootstrap our own way out. That means work and a lot of experimentation.
What makes you think we haven't? For example, this is what happens at a variety of religious retreats and monasteries, places of learning, etc. And the approach works fine for them. One needs peace and tranquility for the things they offer.
But how valuable is peace and tranquility really? Sure, destroying humanity in a nuclear war is a bad idea. Let's not do that. But what of the vim and vigor of the business world? I think it has a great mix of peace and conflict that serves us better than the above ideal would. That is in part why I tend to focus on business-oriented experimentation rather than government policy, ideals, and such. My take here is that we've already have in place a better approach than peace and tranquility for large portions of society.
Further, what are you willing to do to the souls that aren't willing to go with the program ever? There's this delusion that people just need the right learning experience and they'll be peaceful. No one has found that magic yet. And I wouldn't be surprised if (or perhaps when someone does, it turns out to be a snake in the grass (say technologically enhanced brainwashing or the like) which can and maybe will be used to destroy peace rather than create it.
Further, the quote calls for universal consensus. That's not an experiment even if we should choose to consider this possible. As I've noted elsewhere, a good experiment should be limited in extent. If it shows the desired improvements, then we can consider implementing it on a larger scale.
Bottom line here is that I think the pessimism and the demand for unanimity are both unrealistic. Neither would have done anything about Russia invading the Ukraine, for a current war example.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @05:16AM (2 children)
"That is why you fail"
-Yoda
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @07:07AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @11:31PM
A little bit like how Azuma keeps trying ta school ya.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @07:11PM (1 child)
So do your Wall Street scams with their multi-trillion dollar heists which result in higher prices every day
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @10:00PM
None of the things I mentioned counted as scams, much less enormous Wall Street ones. Just saying.
But since you mentioned it, I'll try to hurt less people with my multi-trillion dollar scams next time. Promise.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @03:24PM (4 children)
But only your kind of experimenting. Whenever someone suggests UBI or anything else on the socialism side you're the biggest protester.
Why not try it? We should copy China, they've have special economic zones where they try new ideas on mega-city-scale.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @04:22PM
"Whenever some leftoid brainlet suggests spiking inflation, anybody who understands basic economics tells them they're a moron! REEEEEeeeee"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 24 2022, @05:12PM
I thought about it and dropped that example for two reasons:
1) It's one size fits all - "universal". Experiments are by their nature limited and easily reversed.
2) We already have experiments of a similar nature. For example, US Social Security, which is a genuine Ponzi scheme [soylentnews.org], has been slowly falling apart over the past few decades as tax revenue fails to keep up with growing payouts.
3) A considerable disinterest by UBI advocates in the results of these experiments. For example, the US has had almost 90 years to fix the Ponzi scheme aspect of Social Security (by reducing benefits or increasing taxes), but it has yet to happen. It seems reasonable to expect UBI to have a similar turnaround time when it comes to the problems it generates. I don't see the point to running experiments when we're not paying attention to the results.
And that's my problem with this. Sure, we can run a regional scale UBI for a time. But will we pay attention to the issues it brings up? Or will it simply be a precedent no matter what happens to it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @01:07AM (1 child)
I thought it was pretty great when Chicago, Ontario, Finland, Denmark all tried it. It was a shame that they all failed.
Humans are lazy, have always been lazy, and will always be lazy.
The problem is you fail to accept any of the experiments already done by your own side when they fail. Every failed attempt was just "done wrong" and the people who attempted it threw under the bus as trickery by the elite to make it fail. Maybe it just doesn't work? Some ideas are just bad. Find a conservative (other than Ron Paul and his ilk) who won't agree that at the very least some restrictions must be made on capitalism. And you know why? Because the right accepted that pure unadulterated capitalism doesn't work. The best system is somewhere in the middle.
I'm for it though. Give people UBI, give them Elon Musk's tasp so they can get high on current, and let the lumpen prolitariate rot away willingly so we can have a true workers communism without having to force a genocide as Marx said would be necessary.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @01:38AM
No, libertarian and religious elements of the right strongly opposed eugenics. [spectator.co.uk]
Close but try this; "For communism to succeed, the communists must die"!
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 24 2022, @08:15PM
Can't make sense of this journal. If khallow wet? Or is Fusty still dry?
Khallow wants to gut Social Security? What is he, some sort of Republican? He's 47%, no doubt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @12:57AM (4 children)
There is no difference between the humans of today and the humans of two thousand years ago except the modern human no longer need fear the cave lion and its effect on ensuring only the strongest survive.
Here we sit, prey and predictors, constantly looking for the next cave lion to slay. At long last with all our eternal foes put in their graves all that is left is to point our spear at one another. The Americans choose to do it arbitrarily to foreigners, the Chinese choose to do it to their own kind, and the Russians choose to eat the Ukrainians for spite and pleasure.
As a chinese student famously wrote in his yearbook
More true words of human nature are rarely spoken
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2022, @01:31AM (3 children)
This isn't human nature, it's psychopathy. The entire liberal order following WW2 was founded on the principle that the West would no longer view the world as a zero-sum game.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 25 2022, @02:55PM
And it turns out there's a lot of positive sum in the new game. Maybe time to turn in those earlier narratives of woe and despair?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 26 2022, @02:40AM (1 child)
And the west lost. 1+ billion Chinese fall under Xi's rule that rejects "western freedoms". Now with this latest fiasco that kills the US petrodollar and bails out the Chinese economy as countries use its currency as the reserve instead, we will see the end of "western freedoms" in Africa that is now hopelessly indebt to the Chinese government. the ANC just sold a massive amount of land they had cordoned off as a culture reserve for nature to the Chinese to bulldoze and turn into a military port.
The west is dead, and any western derived opinions of freedom are gone with it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 26 2022, @06:32AM