ClaytonB
Member

tl;dw -- some notes on the overall topic: To paraphrase Mises on the matter of the divisibility of the monetary medium (gold, silver, etc.): Any total amount of money is as serviceable for the use of the monetary medium as any other amount. That is, there is never a need for "more money". For coinage, we do want more of the monetary metal as population grows, simply because coins can only become so small before they become too small to handle. However, there are solutions to this, such as using non-precious metals for very small transactions, which is why copper used to be used for pennies, nickel for 5cent coins, and so on. Thus, even if you had just one gold bar for the whole world, it would still be possible through subdivision to give every nation in the world their one small piece of that gold bar, and that small piece would be the gold reserve of the nation. Obviously, that is an exaggerated situation. In reality, as population grows (thus, increased demand for coinage) the demand for precious-metal mining for coinage also grows, and so more resources are invested into that, and the low-dilution mining sources that were formerly unprofitable, become profitable. IIRC, there's vastly more gold dissolved in the water of the ocean than all gold ever mined by humans added together, many times over. Obviously, the cost of recovering that is very high, but if the population really grew to be so enormous that the amount of gold available today would not suffice for coinage, then it would become so precious that mining it directly from the ocean, even at great expense, would become profitable. The assumption that gold is no longer money is not correct. Gold is no longer popular money in the West, that is, it is not used hand-to-hand by most people, most of the time. But this is not actually historically unique, as bimetallism in Britain and Europe caused many gold outflows during the era where those laws were being imposed. Sometimes, gold would disappear from a bimetallic economy and silver would have higher legal value than gold, and vice-versa. So, yes, it is true that people don't use gold very often in hand-to-hand transactions in the US/West but this says nothing about whether gold itself is still money. Go to Dubai and find out whether gold is still used as money. It is commonly-used money there. While less common, it is still used as money in India, among the upper-class. They do transactions in gold. In Russia, it is used as money for large transactions. In Africa, it widely used for all kinds of large transactions. In Switzerland, it is actually used as money in purchase transactions. Gold never completely stopped being money.

Yes, that's another aspect of being pro-life. Trump believed all the lies that the vaccines were safety-tested, that they were 100% effective against COVID-19, and, most egregiously, that he was responsible for the success of getting the vaccines out through "Operation Warp Speed." He gambled with the lives of desperate Americans, and like you've said, to this day, he prides himself in getting the vaccines pushed through.

Yes, I know that Trump has done way more public engagement than Kamala. My point is Trump was outsmarted by a really stupid candidate because he allowed his own ego to get the best of him and fell into her traps. And it's his ego which will be his undoing, just as his ego kept him from being judged by Republican Primary voters in his refusal to participate in those debates.

It's a single issue which is connected to a network of other positions. That single issue is pro-life. To be pro-life means that you care for the preservation of innocent life both inside and outside of the womb, and that incorporates the prohibition of conflicts and wars which will lead to the unnecessary, if not, unethical, termination of civilians who have nothing to do with posing a national threat. It has been shown countless times that the nation-state of Israel is using certain events to justify a campaign of genocide towards an ethnic/national group of people who are not terrorists. As a Christian, I'm against any candidate who will support another nation killing my people (that is, Palestinian Christians) for political and religious reasons. Trump's unadulterated support of Israel offsets his commitment to end the conflict over in Ukraine and Russia, even if he claims, "I just want the dying to stop." He wants to stop the killing of Ukrainian and Russian lives, but he's okay with Palestinians (and even Israelis) being killed because "Israel needs to be feared by her enemies again." Therefore, as a "sInGlE-iSsUe VoTeR," I feel justified in not supporting Trump at all, and I'm sick and tired of people like you trying to justify "voting for the lesser of two evils."

A time is coming when the mask is going to come off. On the one hand, you can choose pure, absolute, boundless evil and eternal hatred in slavery to the Antichrist, forever; on the other hand, you can choose Jesus of Nazareth, the only man who conquered death, who gave his life to save the world from sin and to provide salvation and eternal life in the fullest possible sense of the word "life", forever. The middle road -- the modern myth of material life where you work, you die, and then sleep forever in non-cognition -- is going to vanish. There will be exactly and only TWO options. This is prophecy and God will certainly fulfill it. And whether or not the unmasking of Antichrist comes in our generation, your appointment with God your Creator, who reveals himself to us most particularly in Scripture is coming soon. At most, it would be delayed maybe five or six decades from now, if you're very young, and Jesus does not return before then. The Gospel is not trifling. I am a witness and I am informing you: the Gospel is not trifling. There is a war on, and you're in it, whether you want to be or not. Pick a side!

^THIS "You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Occam's Banana again."

Call it "poetic justice." Trump dodged all of the Republican Primary debates, because he was so proud that he had a commanding lead with Republican voters (in the polls and in the eyes of the mainstream media), and he felt that Republican voters didn't need to hear his positions challenged and scrutinized with the other candidates. Now he lost what is probably his last debate to a candidate who, like him, dodged the public, flying high on the polls and favor of the mainstream media and would-be voters. Trump is an arrogant person whose ego got the best of him against a woman who memorized her script and played him by leading him into all the traps that Trump's persona couldn't help.

I'm against Zionism, not Israel because, theologically speaking, the Church is Israel (those who are covenantally united to Christ by faith and through baptism). So I am pro-Israel, in the Biblical sense of the word, not in the nation-state sense of a country which is Atheistic in its entire ethics, civics, etc.

If you're voting for Trump, then don't complain about the conflicts in the Middle East and Israel's campaign to wipe out an entire demographic due to their ethnicity. Trump is a staunch supporter of aiding Israel in all of her military campaigns.

Lehto asked for a meme... wish granted...

Mask-slip. They really do believe this. All he has to say is that he "felt" there "might have been" some kind of illegal activity going on, and that's enough. He will be cleared of everything and will be promoted. I assume the family will file a lawsuit and it's possible they might get some damages out of it. But it still won't have been worth turning their entire life upside down for 2-3 years. So, he still wins the argument, no matter how wrong he is "legally". I can't speak for other Americans, but I have an ocean of fury at the boundless cowardice of policing in post-911 America. "You were trying to intimidate me." As she immediately retorts, perfectly, "I'm intimidating??" She's probably a buck, soaking wet. He clearly has small-man syndrome but even if there was an actual fight, she wouldn't stand a chance. Police department policies specify conditions in which police are permitted to use force, and those extend beyond physical contact -- verbal threats, verbal assault, intimidating behavior, and so on, are all possible reasons that a police officer might reasonably escalate the use-of-force. But the problem is that these exceptional conditions are then turned by the police into a game of dictionary-definitions, so that "she stepped within my personal space and raised her voice" becomes a carte blanche to assault and cuff her in her own home despite his illegal entry, refusal to leave when trespassed, and outright cowardice. I call it "pig-mind". The pig-mind, even when it is caught in blatant violation of the law, does not back down. Instead, it immediately begins scheming on how to flip the script. In his case, he saw that she was already emotionally agitated, so refusing to leave and ratcheting up the emotional confrontation might lead her to pop off. And while she didn't actually pop off, he only needed her to step forward to then have a pretext to say it was his interpretation "in the moment" that she was popping off, or about to pop off. And so he's 100% justified under "PD policy" to then attack and cuff her. Once she is arrested, it doesn't matter how much he was breaking the law because, in the end, "he was right", that is, she really was a dangerous criminal who wanted to resist an act of arrest, for which crime she was then charged. That's how the pig-mind works. The pig-mind is all over the place in modern society, I encounter it everywhere. It's not just in police, although policing seems to attract pig-minded people by the droves. You can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices; the moment they know they've screwed up, their entire existence has one and only objective, and that is to somehow trip you up, and make it out like you were the bad guy all along, ex post facto.

A moment of honesty: I'm worried about where this is going. The very fact that Trump conceded to have this debate on ABC and get gang-stomped by the "moderator" and Kamala in absolute cahoots, shows that something isn't right. Trump literally dodged a bullet in Butler, PA but be honest: a network of actors who are desperate and capable enough to take a crack shot at a former US President and current Presidential candidate (and, by all rights, should have blown his head off) isn't going to stop after they miss, no matter how frustrated they may be at having missed the shot. Remember, just being able to set up a shot like that is practically impossible. No "lone 20-year-old gunman" could just "somehow" arrange to even get in position for a shot like that. So, whoever did that had not only the motive but also the means to create that opportunity. The debate was basically the verbal equivalent of an assassination in respect to how absolutely one-sided it was. Kamala came out looking rational. She did not come across as her usual airhead schtick. It doesn't matter how astroturfed it was behind the scenes, 90+% of Americans are utterly clued out to that kind of thing. All they see is the broadcast itself. Soviet propaganda works. That's how you get communism, duh, because the propaganda actually works. So, if you're pinning your hopes on Americans "seeing through the lies", I suspect you are in for a desperate disappointment. I don't know how this election will turn out, but I rate the chances of Trump winning fairly and the results being honestly acknowledged, to be less than 1%. The potshot in Butler, PA was a stretch-goal, meaning, it wasn't their main hope. Throwing the 2024 election is the main goal, their last line of defense. And if they throw this one again, 40+% of Americans will wake up to what's really going on. But this time, it really will be too late. All that is left to do is to pray...

Weaving along a graveyard footpath -- dusty and unkempt, bristle-dry grass on either side, too long and snapped like slender, desiccated straws by some passing beast of the night -- I spied a curious headstone sunken into the ground as though a chute into the underworld had been plugged to stop the world from draining away into the abyss. Unable to resist its gravitational draw like a planet falling into a passing black hole, I drew closer. Kneeling and sweeping aside the collected dust and leaves of years which had composted onto its face, I read the following: The United States of America Born July 4, 1776 Died September 11, 2001 "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave"

Well, that escalated quickly... :astonished:

I feel bad for Nvidia, they seem to be a solid company overall, but this correction was inevitable. AI has been in an unprecedented hype -- an absolute mania bubble -- for years now. The bubble was already in the red-zone by the time ChatGPT was released but after ChatGPT, the whole AI market went positively stratospheric. And while I do think that current-generation AI is going to have a truly revolutionary impact on technology and the economy, it's not the return-of-the-gods that the Spock-eared transhumanists have been claiming it is. In my view, that is the single biggest factor contributing to the Nvidia stock-price collapse.

Open-source model set to clean ChatGPT's clock....