The reason it’s $11 for a dozen eggs certainly isn’t that the dollar has been ‘devalued’, it’s at near historic highs relative to most other developed world currencies. The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe is because of a combination of bird flu, price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats) and the fact that large, warehouse style US grocery stores cost much more to run in terms of electricity, and the US in general has far higher labor costs than the much more compact stores that exist in other countries and the workers they employ. Working class pay shot up across the board after Covid, many grocery store workers went from $9 an hour to $20 an hour, so food prices shot up because grocery stores are extremely low margin businesses in which any rise in costs is passed on to customers. If Tucker considers this a disaster, he should just come out and say it.
In general, the intellectual right have gone all in on accelerationism. They want ‘something’ to happen. It doesn’t really matter what that is, it just has to shake up ‘the system’. Unfortunately they fail to realize that ‘something’ in these cases is usually worse than the present. I’ll vote for Trump next November, but only because I personally dislike a lot of influential progressives and will enjoy the crying and wailing on social media if he wins (and perhaps in the faintest, 5% chance he might do something about immigration). He’s still almost certainly a criminal, a scumbag and will accomplish very little of what his supporters hope for if that happens.
And that is the point. Trump is the only proven vessel for any conservative faction to enter the White House since 2004. Everybody in the movement knows this. Whatever their ideological or political aims, they all depend on Trump. Whether you’re an energy lobbyist or an evangelical or a dissident rightist or a Wall Street business con, Trump is your only hope for your guys getting into the executive. A smart American elite would ensure Trump wasn’t sentenced before the election. But they too have to fight their ideological battles.
Like they protect Epstein until they have to murder him in his cell.
And Epstein probably did kill himself. He was a billionaire pervert whose main (other) hobbies were hanging out with influential people and travelling the world, and who was about to spend the rest of his life in solitary in a federal jail, without sex and without money. Many kill themselves in far less dire circumstances.
Epstein having his lawyers or associates bribe some prison staff to look the other way is vastly more likely than an assassination; if the ‘powers that be’ wanted to kill him, they would have done so discreetly long before he was arrested, especially given he was obviously under investigation for many years. There was no need to attempt an absurdly high risk hit in a high security jail in the middle of Manhattan when they could have arranged an entirely plausible accident any time over the preceding few years.
The motive is also lacking. Why would Epstein have talked? Was the US government going to give him a sweetheart deal and let him out in 2 years if he gave up Clinton and Trump? Clearly not, it’s a ridiculous suggestion (he wouldn’t have been able to provide proof the prosecutors didn’t otherwise have, so would have been accused of lying) and even if he had nothing to lose, he had nothing to gain either.
2rafa
4mo ago
Is a world in which the West drops all support for Israel likely to be particularly welcome to Israeli Jewish migrants?
2rafa
5mo ago
Do you think the woman is telling the whole truth about the alleged offer of euthanasia she supposedly received?
2rafa
7mo ago
What would the consequences for women be that they aren’t already? Women are already a main group of losers in the sexual revolution and (as I note) Redpillers already argue that women face great, dire consequences of promiscuity - eg. low social status for having a reputation as a slut, spinsterhood, hitting ‘the wall’, being an ‘alpha widow’, unhappiness, loneliness and becoming a cat lady. By contrast, Brand faced no consequences until now.
It really is so wonderfully charming how devoted Texas Republicans are to ensuring poor and underclass women are forced into having more babies than they currently do. This certainly won’t lead to problems down the road, because impoverished single mothers famously raise the most well-adjusted sons who commit crime at well-below-average rates.
Hopefully SCOTUS eventually limits this specific form of depressing ridiculousness.
The relative wages shown between England and low end US labor seems appalling.
The same is true for almost all Western Europe, it’s not a UK-specific problem.
And from the article you link:
This assumes that AI does not turn out to be a steam engine- or electricity-level invention.
Clearly this is not a smart man, as AI is vastly more significant than even either of the above.
2rafa
9mo ago
I'm not a liberal. I don't believe in universality. If it turns out for a variety of reasons that we discuss here regularly that black kids in this part of London need this extra support with literacy then I don't have a problem with the (largely black, as I understand it) Saturday school teachers doing their best to fix the issue. This is exactly the kind of stuff that, if it works, is actually worth my tax money, as opposed to so much of government spending.
2rafa
9mo ago
I don’t think it’s of no concern, I just think that the intersection of the venn diagram of:
-
Native
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Poor/working class
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Bad literacy
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Lives in this part of Haringey and attends one of the schools that is part of this program
..will be almost nonexistent. How many white working class Dutch-American boys go to public schools in the Bronx?
2rafa
9mo ago
Perhapse this is an issue of poor translation between Indian and English
actually kind of racist comment
2rafa
5d ago
Franklin considered the Saxons (whom he was discussing in this instance) to be white, but the other Germans to be ‘tawny/swarthy’ (like the Spaniards and Italians), unlike the ‘pure white’ English.
leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
2rafa
9d ago
To some extent Pygonyangification is a risk, but the current elite already has the power to ruin your life, strip you of your livelihood and take your money (something that effectively means you're going to have to move out of Manhattan anyway), so what's the difference?
2rafa
27d ago
As I’ve said here before (I think last year when we had the last big Argentina discussion) I completely agree with you that some unique quirks like the ability for state governments to effectively print money are substantially responsible for Argentina’s condition.
But I think that again you discount the weirdness of Argentina. The stagnation is unusual for a population of that quality and historic development even with severe economic mismanagement. Look at the regular catastrophic economic decisions taken by successive postwar Italian governments, for example, the endless (stupid, to appease unions and voters in the short-term) devaluation of the Lira. And yet Italy saw a huge amount of growth and was (the worst parts of the south excepted) broadly a prosperous modern country well before full Euro integration. Franco’s abortive attempt at autarky was quickly fixed. Ireland saw a huge economic boom after liberalization. Yes, these examples all have confounding factors. Yes, you can’t ignore proximity, EU economic integration even pre-Euro and so on. But the sheer mismatch between human capital and population prosperity in Argentina versus country of origin (ie Spain/Italy) is unmatched in any settler population, anywhere in the world.
Even bad politicians, provided they don’t literally abolish even the last vestiges of a market economy, which even Peron didn’t, don’t typically result in growth charts as bad as Argentina’s.
2rafa
1mo ago
True, but as long as they believe the people would vote for it it’s no more of a contradiction than any policy by the bourgeois capitalist state is. For example they probably support gender self-ID or trans bathroom laws because they believe firmly that these would be policy in the revolutionary anarchist commune, even if the laws are implemented and enforced by the hated bourgeois neoliberal capitalist state.
2rafa
1mo ago
Yes, and in general the depiction of small town midwestern USA as some kind of paradise is ridiculous. Stripmallville with a dying main street, Applebees as the best restaurant, no organic spontaneous community because you have to drive everywhere (even to somewhere a half mile away because there’s either no sidewalk or you’re separated by an interstate that goes right through the middle of town), no beautiful architecture, and the same slowly declining social trends (birthrates, single motherhood, drug addiction) as the rest of the country, just 20 years behind is not some bucolic garden of eden.
Indeed, if one lived in the Midwest and actually wanted the kind of comfortable, pastoral, low risk existence @Walterodim described they’d be best off getting their proof of German ancestry in order, applying for a visa and moving to some little village in Bavaria or Baden Württemberg with zero immigrants; at least there the scenery is much better, the architecture is better, the schools are probably better, the buses are both more frequent and more timely and you’re actually in (or nearer to, certainly) the homeland of your ancestors.
the Horizon games
She looks like a pretty-ish redheaded woman (without makeup, she'd be conventionally hot with it because redheads tend to need mascara and more defined brows to be conventionally sexy, plus lipstick would go a long way for her). Just earlier someone was lamenting that media had been systematically avoiding the depiction of redheads, Aloy is a relatively 'feminine' portrayal, she doesn't come off as hugely masculine in the games, her face model is pretty etc.
2rafa
1mo ago
So when Yass, who isn’t a ‘random Jew’ but an extremely prominent lobbyist (“organized activist” in your language) for Zionist causes, lobbies against the ban, he’s just doing it for the money. But when Friedman and Mnuchin, who has decades of experience as a private equity investor in media, gear up to bid for TikTok’s US operation and lobby for a sale it’s definitely not just about the money and must be about them bravely and nobly sacrificing their own wealth so that they can make adjustments to TikTok moderation policy?
We can attribute the timing of the ban to China hawks in Congress using some neuroticism by some Jewish organizations (often themselves influenced by reports from neocon China hawks in foreign policy and geopolitical lobbying groups) about Chinese gommunists pushing pro-Hamas material on the youth to get enough of their fellow reps on both the right and left to get the previously stalled bill across the line. The Jewish organizations are just happy to be seen doing something in front of their donors that might supposedly reduce antisemitism by whatever convoluted logic. But I don’t think this means that most powerful Zionist lobbyists in the US consider an ownership transfer of TikTok away from the Chinese in any sense a major policy priority for them.
2rafa
1mo ago
Pass laws that affirmatively teach whatever it is they think kids should know, then pay what and train who is necessary to alter the majority ideology among teachers.
2rafa
2mo ago
Those people’s views are in substantial part dependent upon Trump. If he had accepted defeat in 2020 we wouldn’t be having this conversation because his supporters would almost all have fallen in line with his views.
2rafa
3mo ago
She recently argued that Williamson was right that white working class communities of the type that voted for Trump deserve to die.
Williamson’s point was that it wasn’t wrong to say that those people can move to where the jobs are, not that the people literally deserve to die.
2rafa
3mo ago
Ben Shapiro thinks white nationalism is lame while being a hard core zionist.
So do and so are most white gentile American conservatives - tens of millions of them - what’s your point?
2rafa
4mo ago
In Singapore or Hong Kong this is irrelevant since in many cases the amount of time you need to spend outside is minimal. Even in parts of Canada (eg downtown Calgary or Edmonton) there are extensive climate controlled passages, tunnels and skyways to make sure you don’t need to experience extreme temperatures outside.
The idea that you need cars for climate control is just ridiculous. Many places have solved this problem; it doesn’t require the personal automobile.
When people have gotten tired of the bad behaviour in the ghetto, your people has usually been thrown out rather than genocided.
Yes, and now we’ve grown tired of bad behavior in the ghetto (Gaza), vastly worse than most of what Medieval Jews inflicted on Europeans (largely just reasonable interest rates on voluntary borrowing), so we’re kicking them out. What’s your problem?
The majority of the region that consists of MENA Arab Muslim homelands can accommodate them. If their own co-ethnic co-religionists refuse to accept them then that reflects rather poorly on their behavior.
It’s actually a commonly discussed topic in the global supermarket and FMCG business because the cost of fresh produce and indeed the majority of even shelf-stable goods is upwards of 50-100% higher in the US than in much of Western Europe. Identical groceries that cost $50 in the UK can cost $100 or more in HCOL regions of the US. Freight costs alone don’t explain it, the most common explanation within the business is indeed that the much larger average square footage of eg. a Kroger in the US vs a Tesco in the UK and associated higher costs are a core part of the reason, plus higher margins across the supply chain.
What’s your explanation for why groceries cost less than 1/2, sometimes 1/3 of what they do in the US in Germany?
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