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Comment by sillystuff | Hacker News Reader

The US just finished divesting itself from its strategic helium reserve in 2024 due to the "Helium Stewardship Act of 2013"[1]

But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527

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You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.

Government accounting operation on a strictly annual basis is ruinous.

It’s not, but the 10-year projections are even worse, because they count on eternally ‘temporary’ things actually changing.

Pay of the credit card bill?

You mean pay the interests on it.

Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.

cost-benefit analysis of things is important, eventually putting a number on things (services, risks, infrastructure, stock and flows, health, life, wellbeing, noise, air quality, aesthetics, user experience, fairness, and so on ...)

of course outright securitization, privatization, and other types of not-quite-unintentional ways of responsibility diffusion also should be put to the aforementioned analysis.

(there's, after all, now a (new) label for economically sound, responsible, sustainable, human-centered stewardship: state capacity libertarianism - https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/01/wh... because neoliberal became a swearword)

They started selling in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

Ya know we're doing a record emptying of the strategic oil reserves right now. Makes sense right?

Except we're giving it to oil companies for free, letting them sell at these very high prices with the promise that they refill the reserves with oil at some time in the future (when it's cheaper).

Absolutely perfectly corrupt, and American, way to go about it.

Except we didn’t even refill it last year when oil prices did fall to rock bottom.

Because the U.S. government (even generally…there’s obviously no hope for this administration) is structurally incapable of making decisions that have a benefit horizon of more than a couple of years.

Big self own here

It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.

We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.

The people in the era of unlimited resources envisioned an unlimited future that needed to be safeguarded. The people in the era of limited resources envision a limited future that any resources would be wasted on. They are not ignorant of the negative consequences of their short term thinking, they are indifferent.

In some fictional scenario, if a character were charged by some dark authority with the assignment of laying waste to the US economy, putting fools and lackeys in roles of responsibility for economic investment and oversight, of befouling public discourse to the point where only fictions are spoken, of corrupting the judiciary, and sabotaging international partnerships forged in over a century of unprecedented co-operation...

...well, you would be making a documentary instead.

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