Convolutional

> maybe stop tweeting images of guillotines when our employees are anxious about their next paycheck?

I've been watching Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Jason Calacanis and on and on rant for the past weeks/months/years about the homeless in San Francisco, how students don't deserve student loan relief etc.

Now you're finding a lack of empathy galling? These prep school scions and maladroits, mostly wafting in angel/VC parasitism suddenly do an about face and beg for a government bailout. Of course they have been paying the piper and we hear before the weekend is over that their sweetheart deposits have been bailed out by the full faith and credit of the US taxpayer.

The structure of all of this points one way, and the intentions of a handful that are "outspoken about disagreements with the techbro culture" has no effect on that.

The reckoning did not come this week but it is coming, tweeted images and all.

First, I shook my head at the same sentence. The railway union whose potential strike was recently broken by the government and railroads levels the playing field (and works to evert things like the Ohio toxic train derailment). Silicon Valley Bank does not level the playing field.

The sob story about the partner at the VC firm did pull at my heart strings though.

The CEO of SVB spent half a million dollars to roll back banking regulation five years ago. Hoisted by his own petard...well not really - bonuses went out hours before the seizure and he was selling shares like crazy before the collapse.

Now David Sacks and all the tech bro libertarians want the taxpayer to bail out the SVB depositors beyond the FDIC limit.

The fraction of land the Crown Estate owns, plus the land it gains when an estate is intestate. Plus the reversionary rights of the Crown Estate.

You are correct in what you said, but as I said, it works in China like it does in the UK (with of course some differences naturally). If you consider how the Crown Estate works in the UK, China works in a similar way.

The US has spent $100 billion in the Ukraine over the past year, with more on the way, it is sending billions a year to Israel and Egypt, is involved in Iran, China, Venezuela etc. It just stopped spending a ton in Afghanistan. All the money spent there seemed to have no positive effect.

The US seems to have money to throw all over the world for this kind of bloodthirsty waste, if it cuts it can cut there. People getting back money they put into Social Security should be the last thing to go.

The US spends hundreds of billions on these wars of choice, that can be cut very easy.

> technically people can’t own land in China, they’re just leasing it from the government

So it works like land in the UK, which is all owned by the King of England, but which is "leased" from him?

I have been watching videos of the dead fish, chickens and animals, killed due to the toxic fumes from the East Palestine, Ohio train crash last month. I wonder how that will affect thing there in the coming decades.

> China is in a state of terminal decline

People have been saying this 1949.

It did in 1953 when Prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US and UK launched a coup to stop that and installed a dictator (who was initially reluctant to go along with this and had to be convinced). Then SAVAK cracked down on domestic secular left opposition for decades, aided by the CIA.

The US nuclear industry used to run magazine ads in US magazines in the 1970s celebrating that Iran was building nuclear power plants - https://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/200... .

Some Americans don't like the influence of Iran's mullahs, but the UK and US supported the mullahs and Shah in 1953 when the secular prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US backed the Shah and mullahs and SAVAK's brutal campaign against Iran's secular left into the 1970s. Then Iranians turned against the Shah and US imperial influence and here we are.

That link mentions something not mentioned here - that the Iranians were sent their own money.

The reader might question why the poster neglected to mention to them, that the $400 million transferred was Iranian money.

> the function of a union seems like it wants to force the company to associate with it whether the company wants to or not.

The company might not want to associate with the union, but it seems that the workers working at the company do.

In 1976, in Washington DC, the Chilean secret service assassinated the wife of an American economist, as well as a former minister of the previous Chilean government (which had been overthrown in a Nixon backed military coup).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Orlando_Letel...

Maybe she will wake up to the fact that she's been tossed out of the arena by the guy she was being sycophantic to.

> people thought a union meant they'd get what they wanted. But unions can only get you what they have the power to force employers to give up. And when you only unionise one store that is basically nothing...

You should write news copy for stories on HN startups. "They thought they would have big success, but they only acquired one customer so far, which is basically nothing".

Not really, they're being killed off by mining companies.

Marshall Sahlins studied hunter gatherer bands, and many work less than forty hours a week. Programmers I know can't figure out how to get down to a forty hour a week workweek to survive, but these hunter gather bands in sub-Saharan Africa and the Amazon seem to have figured it out.

What do you think the Dust Bowl in the US was?

What was happening in the American south at the time, where senators were holding up lynching bill?

> The economy runs on heroism. If you don't believe me, see how central planning went in the last century

Ok...when the US and Europe were mired in depression in the 1930s, the Soviet Union was going through breakneck growth, to where US and European workers were going to the Soviet Union in droves to make money. Then virtually all of continental Europe invaded the Soviet Union and were beaten back to the Elbe River. Then it launched satellites, men into space, and other innovations.

Of course several decades into this growth, when Khrushchev decided to cut capital spending, that is when the trouble started - the same with Ulbricht.

In the people's republic of China, decades of central planning and five year plans have led to it becoming the second largest, and by some measures the largest economy in the world. The policies swing back and forth, planning was very centralized for decades, then Deng Xiaoping did some decentralization, but as pretty much every western media source acknowledges, Xi has been centralizing more.

Also there is an odd mythology in places like the US. A mythology where transistors did not take off due to the central planning of the US government and armed forces, who allowed centralized monopolies like Bell which invented the transistor, and then funded firms like Fairchild with large orders, before transistors were commercially viable for consumers and businesses. In this mythology the current stock market is mot going up or down due to heroic innovations, but due to the announcements of the federal reserve chairman.

Glad he's doing important work.

> democratic mandate

Democratic? Two million Palestinians live in the West Bank and have had no vote in the Israeli parliament since the occupation started, an occupation condemned by multiple UN resolutions.

Thorvald was defense minister. His son had interactions with the student peace movement as a teenager. If the son passed information to the father, and this was passed to the CIA - then the CIA would have known of him from his teenage years.

Norwegian papers were filled in recent years with the massive intelligence operations against Norwegian student anti-NATO groups. The US was terrified Norway would follow France and start pulling back from NATO.

As bin Laden was holed up 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, it seems more likely that he was captured by ISI and/or the Pakistani army, as opposed to trying to hide from them there.

ISI dealt with bin Laden in the 1980s, and has good intelligence in the region bin Laden had been rumored to be holed up in.

It takes more of a leap of faith to believe bin Laden was hiding from the Pakistan military/industrial apparatus 800 yards from the Pakistan Military Academy, than that some high officials knew he was there.