Despite what it may seem, most countries do not have infinite debt. In fact, the number of countries in the world that have a fiat currency in their control is very limited.

Greece is a good example of this. No country in the EU has direct control over the Euro. So no country is permitted to just print their way out of debt unaccounted for. So when the Greek economy was crashing and the rest of the EU was strong their currency didn't devalue with their economy causing a crisis where they could not pay bills.

The US tends to be a bit of an outlier in the world in terms of currency. Since US currency is traded all over the world it's not entirely dependent on the US economy to maintain its value. This allows Congress to authorize printing a lot more currency than they might be able to because a very high amount of US currency is being traded between other countries. That doesn't mean the US has no upward limit (a debt ceiling) for how much they can spend. But it does mean that ceiling is a lot higher than most countries.

But for most countries in the world the more debt that you have, the more devalued your currency is, and the less debt you have the more value it will have (assuming all things stay the same). When a country like Britain is weighing spending their primary concern is devaluing their currency too much and making the costs of importing goods too expensive for its residents.

Sometimes this is known as the Devaluation Spiral. You print more money to pay for more things and the value of your currency goes down. So the next year in order to maintain spending you have to print even more money to pay for more things... and the value of your currency goes down. And the next year in order to maintain current spending you have to print even more money to pay for things.

And you don't want that.

As for why the UK doesn't spend more money on healthcare, it's because the people in power prioritize other spending.

It's funny they note swear words in self help books because I couldn't find a single self help book without a swear word in it. I always bring one hardcopy book with me on vacation just in case I don't have power or internet for whatever reason and all the self help books had F*CK in the title (including that asterix).

But I don't agree with the article. I don't agree that everything is exactly the same only that they've picked things that are the same.

For example when they're talking about hipster coffee. Well, in my time in Thailand I only found one hipster coffee shop. It was this one (with a logo strikingly similar to Starbucks). But then, all the top coffee shops in the area don't look anything generic.

I think if you are looking for similarities in things you're going to find them. A lot of engineering and architectural costs are reduced by using models instead of having something individual. On my street theree are 24 single family homes. 12 of them have garages attached to their homes and 12 of them do not have garages attached to their homes. Other than that, they're identical shapes and aesthetics. There's differences in tiling, roofing, and fences.... but basically setup the same.

Where you find the differences are on the insides of the buildings. We decided we didn't need a huge main floor bathroom. So it's the size of a closet with one toilet and one sink. Instead we have a pantry and a large front closet. We had two large bedrooms and a large bathroom, most of our neighbors have one large bedroom, two small bedrooms and a small bathroom.

And that's really the same with their depictions of "identical cities." They look identical specifically because you have chosen an angle to try and make them look as similar as possible. But inside these cities it's quite different.

The trick with a Space-X suboribital is having enough landing and launch platforms in the world. Currently it's cheaper to ship payloads to their one launch platform than setup closer launch platforms.

And I mean, it's an announcement about the effects of a policy they released almost a year ago when they were intending to IPO earlier. There's a lot still wrong with Reddit that'll make for a terrible public social media company. Their moderators are such massive liabilities. The corporate and country regulated subreddits are like Chinese TikTok level nightmares. And then the fact that it still has porn subreddits that really only act as an advertisement for its posters onlyfans.... like.... they got a lot of work ahead of them.

But oil isn't energy, the combustion creates the energy. Petroleum is just fuel.

And I called hydrogen fuel. Because that's what it is. Fuel is a method of storing chemical energy.

Most things we call energy are actually just storing energy. When we're talking about energy we're not talking about something as mundane solar power generation, turning turbines or internal combustion.

That's an incredibly mundane distinction. Most things we call energy are just storing energy. Gas isn't energy until we get combustion.

I look forward to all the expect opinions claiming hydrogen isn't a viable fuel source and we shouldn't be wasting our time with it.... as if their personal money was going into these non-government funded projects.

This is false. You no longer need fresh water to make hydrogen. There are a lot of hydrogen facilities coming up around the world with desalination as part of their plant.

I mean... they don't even give the real reason why a lot of these services can do this.... it's because a lot of their original content is just not being generated.

Like Google is "so good" right now that no one really cares about results beyond the first three. That gives 8-10 results that Google can now use for advertising space because no one was really going to care about those 8-10 results (although it does get absurd with travel stuff because now Google has its own booking agent).

Facebook doesn't actually have a lot of user generated content anymore between friends. Looking at the first ten friends that showup on my friend's list, one person hasn't posted in a year, eight people only seem to share stuff from groups, and one person is heavily posting for their multi level marketing business. Every time I log into Facebook I should see something new if I'm going to come back more frequently, so they fill in these gaps with advertised content, Instagram videos, and Marketplace listings.

They're slowed down and less functional because people use them differently now.

For people too young for this show. The show was being animated and voiced on a weekly basis with aggressive timelines for getting out each episode. The original show was supposed to be 24 episodes to a season but MTV decided to cancel it at Episode 13. So the final episode involved everyone being frozen with a message basically begging people to help them get the show uncancelled..... which it never did.

The show became super popular with the torrent generation and yeah... it really does look like they're targeting millennials badly on HBO Max.

You're wrong. I can see what you're saying, but you're wrong on this. They mine the bitumen in a mine then bring it to a facility where it's processed and one of the end products is slurry wastewater. Since the waste water is a byproduct of bitumen it's technically not pollution to put it from where you got it. This stuff is more toxic than the slurry ponds and more toxic than the tailings ponds.

It's called deepwell disposal and its a cost effective means of getting rid of waste water (that otherwise has no way of getting rid of it). It's not fracking (fracking loosens up material making them easier to extract), it's probably worse.

There's palm trees and a tiki bar. It's why all the rig pigs love both it and Mexico.

This isn't fracking. This is the Canadian oilsands.

It's almost worse than fracking. They inject far more fluid into the ground.

It's in the article, thus I don't have to source it. You just have to read the article.

What you're seeing here is France extending its influence and punishing countries looking to leave her warm embrace. I get sanctions against Wagner but they've expanded these sanctions to also include African companies and media.

Oh... the politics is actually SIGNIFICANTLY worse than this.

This is the second survey of its kind using this technology in Canada. The first was in Canada which found very similar results.... under estimated emissions.

Basically the problem is that the federal government has a very optimistic target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions by 2030. They are reliant on the numbers being as useful for them to get to that goal as possible. If it turned out that the oil industry was actually producing 30% more GHGs than reported.

The problem is we use a system called the Inventory System which was designed in 1997 to measure the Kyoto Goals. Instead of measuring actual pollution they just took the measure of creating a product (average) and then just multiplied it by the total product created.

It's in absolutely everyone in Canada's interest to lie about the carbon totals.

Let's say you make lemonade. You go to the grocery store and buy lemons, juice them, add a bit of water and sugar and set it in a jug outside your house with a table with "Fresh Lemonade Sale $2." You might earn $0.10 profit off of this. Which isn't enough to be worth your time. So instead you start charging for $2.50 to get that sweet sweet $0.60 per sale.

Now what if instead of having to buy lemons... the government just gave them to you? And the water too.... it would be much cheaper for you to produce so you could sell for even less. That's what happens with China. It has a lot of state owned companies in key sectors providing resources to private companies at incredibly subsidized rates. All of China's state owned enterprises are its biggest corporations. This allows companies to get supplies for assembly and manufacturing at incredibly low input prices compared to what the US would get..

But let's say you want to expand and have a second lemonade stand. You need to hire someone. But that pesky minimum wage law says you have to hire them at $10/hour. That means said person has to sell 40 lemonades an hour in order for you to turn a profit. Impossible, you'd never do that. China doesn't have labor laws that protect their workers in the same way. This makes it a lot easier for businesses to pop up when demand is hot and shut down when it's cold. Whereas with western companies it's very difficult to fire people and the process can take a lot longer.

Finally there's currency manipulation. The currency of China is called the Renminbi (translates to People's Money) and it's a suspicious currency that always seem artificially devalued. When your currency is worth less it makes your goods artificially cheaper for those buying them and it allows you to export more. Most countries WANT to have a currency worth less than the USD while also being able to roughly maintain their standard of living. How currency manipulation works is when you want to buy something you make your currency worth more and when you want to sell you make it worth less.

For example during the Christmas buying months the Chinese Renminbi crashed in price. Why would it crash in price during peak buying season for cheap Chinese goods? And then it's now up 12% since Christmas. For the sake of comparison the Canadian dollar is up by 0.5% and the Euro is the exact same price it was near Christmas.

China has been accused of manipulating their price for a long time and with the way they manage their currency your lemonade business wouldn't.... stand.... a chance

A lot of things, yeah. The problem is broadly that their manufacturing is already so expensive that it doesn't make sense to sell it without all the other parts. Like my moonroof blew out and it needed the glass, and the rails replaced. Hypothetically I could get a used part to replace those five things (four rails one glass). But no such used part existed. Instead I had to purchase the entire roof assembly and replace the entire roof. It turns out that moonroof glass is a loss leader for SUV makers.

This is in line with the automotive industry. Some products are impossible to buy just by themselves. Like most body damage involves replacing an entire part of the body.

The way incursions were introduced in the universe was via being moving between universes. This created a bridge that connected the two universes and then if one universe doesn't destroy the other... they both get destroyed.

Doctor Strange and America Chavez teleport to a planet that has survived an incursion... but was also the cause of it. Instead of beating Thanos as the Avengers did... they beat him by Doctor Strange casting a spell (via the Darkhold). Which caused an incursion. Moving between universes can cause an incursion if the footprint left is large enough.

With what Strange, America and Witch were doing in the past, it wasn't large enough to cause an incursion. But what Witch intends to do at the end "stealing Chavez's powers and travel to a universe where she has kids" it would cause an incursion. Stopping Scarlet Witch isn't just to save Chavez... but the entire universe.

It's also the sort of really bad explanation of what will end up being the main plot point for the Kang movies. Kang is going to war with other universes and can preserve his reality by destroying their's. This gives impure motives for heroes who want to fight to keep their reality but also don't want to destroy someone else's.

Yes. Well, yes but sometimes no.

They're not allowed to organize a union drive in a manner that disrupts a regular work flow and they're not permitted to do it at work.

But an employer can't fire someone the second they start talking about unions. Evidence here shows they didn't do it on the clock.

The guy before him that got punted.

I mean, it's not all the writing, it feels like it's mostly the editing.

Thor Love and Thunder was, particularly bad. The writing was all there for a very dramatic, funny and deep story about a cancer victim that would be relevant not only to Marvel fans but also to people who are suffering with cancer, have family members with cancer or those who have lost people with cancer.

Here you have history's forgotten woman, dumped and abandoned by her boyfriend and largely forgotten to the world. In her desperation she turns to every possible way to treat her cancer.... and it fails, time after time. And so where science failed she turned to magic (almost a line in the film!). She grabs Thor's hammer and becomes Mighty Thor... the hammer sustains her and gives her a boost to survive.... while the treatment is also killing her very slowly. Every time she uses it she gets closer to dying. What a great plot device! You could say that you could have a very deep film focusing mostly on Natalie Portman talking about a lasting legacy and what she hopes to leave the world after she dies. A very real thing and worry for cancer victims... something families often don't get.

Parallel to that story you could have had the story of Gorr the God Butcher... brilliantly played (and wasted) with Christian Bale. A religious man on a dying planet who has had his daughter taken from him while the gods just looked on and laughed. He plots to steal all of the children of the gods (you know... the theme of legacy works here).

These are fantastic story archs, mostly well executed. But there were a lot of small things that kept Oscar award winning performances from shining. It was all of the Taiki Waititi bullshit to try and get laughs. Like every single sad or serious moment would be broken up by a cheap laugh. That's all the flying goats were... .they bridged serious moments with light heartedness.

It also didn't have to have Thor's story in it... at all. That could have all basically been cut out and it could have focused completely around Mighty Thor and the deeper darker story of coming to terms with your own mortality and what you want to leave behind.

I think in that film you can EDIT a really great movie. I think a lot of the "writing issues" were director edits.

Yep.

Disney's old CEO booked a lot of content as being profitable that wasn't... including the Marvel and Star Wars themed shows. If you had the same subscriber count watching 1/3 of the shows they'd make way more money.

It's weird... because it really feels like there's no closing that Pandora's Box. Captain America was about stopping the Nazis from winning WW2 through technology. Iron Man was about stopping a CEO from weaponizing the Ironman platform. Thor was about a guy with daddy issues with his brother trying to kill him. Kind of simple stakes. And then you get to Avengers Infinity War and the stakes are.... half of all people dying if they fail. And every movie after that has had similar stakes.

I haven't watched Ant-Man yet. But one of the criticisms I've heard about it is that the stakes feel too small. Like we've become so used to all the stakes being about the end of the world that having stakes that are just, his daughter dies (or whatever it ends up being, haven't watched it yet) is just... too small.