UnderpantsWeevil

American businesses will spend millions of dollars to hold an event almost no one outside their little circle of friends will even hear about in order to tell the public to do a thing they have no real choice in.

$37T and counting. But nobody seems to want to ask who is on the receiving end of that pile of notes.

• $15.16 trillion (42 percent) is held by US private investors and entities, mostly in the form of savings bonds, mutual funds and pension funds.
• $7.36 trillion (20 percent) is held by intra-governmental US agencies and trusts.
• $4.63 trillion (13 percent) is held by the Federal Reserve.

Among individuals, Warren Buffett, through his company Berkshire Hathaway, is the single largest non-government holder of US Treasury bills, valued at $314bn.

Just something to think about when we hear how we've got "too much" debt and people start worrying about who will get paid back first.

Learn about early American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and the period shortly before it.

The Regulator Movement in North Carolina, also known as the Regulator Insurrection, War of Regulation, and War of the Regulation, was an uprising in Provincial North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials who they viewed as corrupt. Historians such as John Spencer Bassett argue that the Regulators did not wish to change the form or principle of their government, but simply wanted to make the colony's political process more equal. They wanted better economic conditions for everyone, instead of a system that heavily benefited the colonial officials and their network of plantation owners mainly near the coast

During the American Revolution, many prominent Regulators became Loyalists, like James Hunter who fought at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. ... The Regulators notably were never against the monarchy - their issue was with local corruption and elites abusing them.

Dunmore's Proclamation was formally proclaimed on November 15. Its publication prompted between 800 and 2,000 slaves (from both Patriot and Loyalist owners) to run away and enlist with Dunmore. It also raised a furor among Virginia's slave-owning elites (including those who had been sympathetic to Britain), to whom the possibility of a slave rebellion was a major fear.

Later British commanders over the course of the American Revolutionary War followed Dunmore's model in enticing slaves to defect—the 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation, which applied across all the colonies, was more successful. By the end of the war, at least 20,000 slaves had escaped from plantations into British service

Shays's Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, Massachusetts merchants' European business partners refused to extend lines of credit to them and insisted that they pay for goods with hard currency, despite the country-wide shortage of such currency. Merchants began to demand the same from their local business partners, including those operating in the market towns in the state's interior. Many of these merchants passed on this demand to their customers, although Governor John Hancock did not impose hard currency demands on poorer borrowers and refused to actively prosecute the collection of delinquent taxes. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands of merchants and the civil authorities, and some began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures.

Just remember that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that failed to address many of the underlying economic conditions plaguing the colonies from the outset. Yes, the American merchant class beat back the British Monarchists. But no, that wasn't a happily-ever-after for the proletariat of the nascent nation.

Celebrate the Birth Of Your Country By Blowing Up A Small Part Of It

China Has Invested Heavily in Rwanda’s Healthcare and USAID’s Closure Opens More Doors for Chinese Influence

Invoking, once more, the evergreen adage

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates did this joke already.

Write an Op-Ed about how they aren't taxed heavily enough. Then spending millions to prop up conservative political campaigns dedicated to cutting taxes.

Quit buying this horseshit. You'll know a millionaire is lying when their lips are moving.

Stalinist approach

Capitalist prole looking at a private media institution managed by unpaid laborers intent on maximizing profits for a gaggle of overpaid administrative flaks and their indolent shareholders: "God damn, this is like when the Russian guy ran a Communist newspaper."

Nevermind that these people think women can have dicks

Anyway, here's why Reddit is broke. Too. Many. Trans-Friendly. Leftists. Amirite, folks?

Fucking 4chan. Just stay dead already.

Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.

Maybe. Microsoft's biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don't see that failing them anytime in the next decade.

But retail consumer spending? That's something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I'm more thinking in a discrete sense... "saving money" versus "owing money"... rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

He’s not exceptional at his job either.

He's won the Presidency twice and he's forced the opposition party to make enormous concessions to his ideological end goals both times.

His job isn’t to get elected

It is to get elected and to get allies elected. And now he's President again with a Congress even more MAGA-pilled than in 2016.

If you’re talking about enriching himself, and you think that’s the primary or sole job of a politician…then sure?

A system's purpose is what it does, and it sure looks like the thing elected offices do is enrich their office-holders. So in that sense, he's done a stellar job.

LOL, man, what are you trying to even discuss here?

If you go back up to the very tippy top, I'm noting how "stupid" gets flung around as a pejorative, which inevitably leads opposition groups to underestimate people and play into their hands.

Reagan, Bush, and Trump have all been excellent instances of this. Hell, Clinton, too (Bush Sr had him pegged as a know-nothing hick). Obama as well, if you consider how Hillary got fleeced in the primary.

There are also people who have actual values and do not believe in continually violating them in order to achieve whatever their objective may be.

Values like "Greed is Good", "AIs are superior to humans", and "Israelis are entitled to a militant ethno-nationalist enclave state". They're the ones currently running the country.

If you think that’s stupid, that’s like your opinion, man.

There are some very, very good poker players who cannot tell you the name of the state they took all your money in, because they could not be bothered to learn the name.

It is asinine to insist they are stupid and you are smart when you're the one wearing the barrel-with-suspenders.

That's a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you'll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn't a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

Look at the numbers on AI.

They're pushing it out relentlessly. I don't think you can fault anyone for lack of name recognition or (initial) adoption. The numbers don't make sense for revenue, but this is hardly the first time a tech company has been underwater for a decade before coming out as a profit squeezing giant.

It doesn’t matter because those evaluating them are also a combination of stupid and complicit

They're also in sales. The big news media periodicals are fully just Native Ads now.

You keep insisting that winning an election means you’re “smarter” than the opponent.

People who are exceptional at their jobs are traditionally described as "Smart", at least within their fields.

by your own weird equating of intelligence and electoral results Joe Biden is smarter than Donald Trump

A claim I heard endlessly in '21. He was the only guy skilled enough to beat Trump, which is why everyone else had to drop out and clear the way during the '20 primary. Also, why he refused to step down during the '24 primary.

It might have held up, if he hadn't flubbed it and dropped out after one bad debate.