baconandeggs

If your answer is "so what?" then I assume you are not interested in my answer.

The law should be the leader. Sadly we have forgotten that.

As sad as it is, I say we have to accept reality, and that means that a person with disabilities will not be able to do certain things, which does not mean he/she has nothing to do. Maybe he won't be an athlete but he can of course be a novelist.

But we first have to accept the real world and get off this childish notion we are all born equal because as you pointed out, we sadly are not.

Will it? People will just say we need better mental health treatments.

I don't think there is a good argument against UBI that they'll accept. But of course, they don't answer the real question which is who's gonna do all the producing?

The ones producing are clearly gonna be the ones being taken advantage of on UBI, even if it works 100% as expected.

And that is why it will fail.

Fairness is not about everyone getting the same amount just for existing, for that in itself is not fair. Real fairness is everyone playing against the same rules and being treated the same under the law. Sadly governments and politicians are too corrupt to implement real fairness and have decided instead for the populist way out while keeping their insane advantage intact.

Inflation is wealth inequality. It benefits disproportionally the rich, and when done as part of QE it goes straight into assets like AAPL.

Sadly education is not historically a factor, as highly educated people are among the first to flee a doomed economy while government 'economists' keep assuring everything will be fine.

Isn't this what already happens?

Hot salsa is not optional.

How long until it's you the one that needs to be banned?

I sincerely hope there is someone there to stand for you.

> Should we end small business programs because not everyone's wealthy enough to own a small business?

The job of financing ventures should be done by private parties and the banking industry, not by government, but since they are too preoccupied chasing assets with cheap money they can't be bothered to.

You seem to be the one upset.

Storing gold consumes energy, printing money consumes energy, using credit cards and maintaining a bank's data centers consumes huge amounts of energy; they have been doing it for decades, and with far dirtier energy than the one we use now. There is no payment method or currency that does not consume energy in one form or another.

Everything consumes energy. You by being awake are contributing to global warming. Every shower you take contributes to make the planet warmer.

Because oddly enough, you can't buy classic cars as investment if you don't have the money.

Hence why they shouldn't do it.

You don't have to give your IP away. US "business" men willingly gave the Chinese their IP in exchange for cheap labor. You don't have to do that, that is not the only other option. Enforcing current laws is enough. And if it's not, IF, you enact new constitutional laws.

Is the chinese "law" the law in the US now? Should we get rid of all government branches and just copy what they do?

What are you talking about? All countries protect their industries. Are we forgetting about Bombardier? All military contractors are almost part of the US government at this point. And Apple, and now Microsoft apparently are leveraging Trump to gain every bit of advantage they can. The US forces entire countries to give favorable deals to american companies and has for decades.

> One party produces oil, a second party consumes oil, and the third party is just there to take his cut because he thinks he's smarter than everyone else.

One party produces oil and a second party consumes oil, but those events do not occur at the same time. A third party 'stores' the oil meanwhile and charges for it. You are welcome do it for free, I'm sure you'd be a hero to society.

Sure, neither can paper money be eaten. Well, it can, but it is not nutritious. All the problems of gold are the same with paper money, there's no need to type the wheelbarrow story again. And gold might've not been useful in germany, but other places did take your gold. No one took Reichsmarks.

If you are storing a million 'dollars' in assets then you are not storing a million 'dollars', you are storing assets currently valued at one million dollars OR also 500oz of gold.

Because the dollar is the reserve currency of the world, it will hyperinflate if and when the international community begins transacting en-masse in other currencies or even in gold, and dumping us bonds. Then all those dollars outside the US, which are most dollars, will go back to the US and hyperinflate. This could happen if the current instability in the US continues.

The problem of storing gold is the same as the problem of storing paper money, there is no difference. Have you tried storing a million dollars in your own home? It is not for the faint of heart.

There is no difference except that in a crisis gold will retain its value, and the stacks of paper money will only remind you of the better days.

Now, of course neither of them is optimal. The best way of maintaining your purchasing power is with a competent government. But that is even more rare.

Prices do go down. Smartphones for example, or clothing, tvs, music and entertainment via netflix, etc. Even food is now more attainable than ever. Technology and efficiencies in production naturally generate deflation, but for some reason governments insist on enforcing an inflationary policy.

Gold price soaring represents the failure of the political establishment to manage a fiat currency. Populist proclamations via money printing, corporate welfare, and the corrupt dismantling of the rule of law (basically stealing TikTok for example) will only aid in the descent of the current fiat system into new lows and hence take gold into all time highs.

It doesn't much. But you could own actual, uhm you know, gold.

The interests and the dividends come from someone, they don't magically appear from the heavens. That person had to add value to the system in order to be able to pay the interest, maintaining the zero sum.

> You would have thought printing 6 trillion would have changed something but not really.

I know these are crazy times, but that money did something: it delayed the inevitable by keeping alive zombie companies that should've gone bankrupt the minute the crisis started, if not before. The whole point of printing 6 trillions was to maintain the status quo, not change it, to maintain it and not face economic reality. It didn't work 100% as a lot of that money went directly into assets such as TSLA, AAPL and HTZ(??), some of it went to gold and bitcoin and a lot of it went into bribes and corruption, which prevented companies who could've used that money to stay afloat for a few more months to do so. But because it's a zero sum system it will crash eventually, just that for now it appears to be holding if we stay completely still and don't make any sudden moves.

It is zero sum because it adjusts, no matter what you do. If you pump more oil from the ground, the prices will fluctuate until they reach the new zero-sum level that takes into account the new production level.

A pegged dollar is the same, it only takes a little longer. When they print they dilute the value of the current dollars in circulation but not immediately, because of the peg. But eventually, because it is zero-sum, so much pressure is pent-up trying to maintain that non-zero-sum peg that the system begins to crack and they have to re-peg it. Which happens often with pegged currencies.

This does not mean there are no winners and losers, personal finance is of course not a zero-sum game. And because the adjustments are not instantaneous there is a lot of room to profit if you know what is happening, which gives the impression of it not being zero-sum.

Now that you've reached the point of calling everything theft, there is nowhere to go. Congratulations.

> whereas the other two just wanted to actually trade goods.

They wanted to trade excess goods, in other words, unrealized profits, for something usable to them to realize the profits of their labor.

Everyone's intention is to profit, that is the reason you sell to the market.

It is zero sum in the sense that all the money has to be equal to all the stocks. Not in the sense of perceived value.

A speculator does one thing only: takes assets not in (peak)demand today and bets they are gonna be in demand in the future. He takes a calculated risk and a lot of times it doesn't pay off. Everybody involved is getting paid and all the transactions are voluntary.

If you think that is theft then I don't know what to tell you.