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Thanks, Dr. Freud.

Wait, I don't believe that at all, for the following reasons:

1. The opposite hasn't been true. We have seen two dramatic tax cuts in recent history which absolutely did not lead to reduced spending.

2. The majority of federal spending is for healthcare or social security. Spending in these areas is somewhat hard to change, even with the political will. It's certainly damn near impossible to decrease such spending; it would immediately cause massive hardship for the most vulnerable people in our society (and probably riots riots).

3. The U.S. has run a surplus before and somehow didn't immediately bet it all on the ponies.

Perhaps our modern politics are so dysfunctional that there is no way out.

We know how to reduce the deficit: raise taxes on the rich. It's not rocket appliances. It's just a complete non-starter given the current GOP. The people screaming the loudest about the deficit are the same people preventing any real steps to fix it.

Sure. The U.S. could run a surplus like it did under Clinton. Surplus & time -> debt paid off.

But the only way we know to get back to those days involves raising taxes on the rich. The people ranting and raving about the debt would never agree to raising taxes, so the deficit hawks will continue blowing up the deficit until things fall apart completely.

The last few times this particular form of terrorism has been tried, it has achieved little. If the people threatening us had won major victories then maybe the strategy would make a sick kind of sense. Instead they won token policy concessions at best. Causing real harm to the people whose vote you need in exchange for make-believe gains is not generally a good strategy.

But there are actually people deluded enough to say Biden was responsible for the most recent hostage-taking, so hell if know what's going on. Maybe the GOP could actually blow up the US economy without consequences.

We don't need to speculate.

>Ratings Downgrade: The rating downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance relative to 'AA' and 'AAA' rated peers over the last two decades that has manifested in repeated debt limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions.

Maybe Coinbase won't just waltz off with their depositor's money, but their business model appears to be illegal from top to bottom. The SEC alleges that basically everything they are doing is illegal. Even if the SEC is wrong, Coinbase's practice of operating as broker, exchange, and clearing agent is a massive conflict of interest.

Sounds like you need a KVM.

In the U.S., most rights are not explicitly enumerated. People are assumed to have all conceivable rights, and the restrictions must be explicitly enumerated. There is no law against lying in general.

There is, however, an explicitly enumerated right to freedom of speech. There are only a handful of recognized categories of non-protected speech. Lying isn't one of them.

You are well outside mainstream economics. The existence of market failures is only disputed by a tiny minority of economists. You can disagree with the consensus of experts, of course, but it's ridiculous to claim they don't have the "proper education".

I don't think you even realize that your beliefs are fringe.

In American law, the right to speak is assumed. It is the lack of a right to speech that is the exception. There are only a handful of categories of unprotected speech, which can be easily enumerated, and lies aren't one of them.

Fraud, defamation, perjury, and obstruction of justice are illegal. That's a much narrower restriction than a ban on lies.

Would you really trust a company that doesn't pay its rent to run your infrastructure?

Of course it will be centralized! There is no cryptocurrency that isn't. Cryptocurrencies can't scale without centralization, and there's no way to interface with the real world without some sort of trust.

This is a grift I don't understand. Obviously there is no legitimate reason for it to exist, but what is the illegitimate reason? How do the people behind this scheme expect to benefit? Is it a good old fashioned pump and dump? Do they somehow expect to profit from the biometric data? Do they expect to gain political power by setting up this quasi-government? I don't get it.

Prison for the board, too.

I got at least one inaccuracy in thirty seconds of play. I'm pretty sure Slashdot wasn't around in the '70s, yet the "Slashdot Effect" is claimed as a '70s neologism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1970s_neologisms?uses...

By "poor", I actually meant "not stupendously wealthy". This includes the merely rich.

A doctor or plumber or engineer or cashier knows how to translate their time into quality of life. A wealthy person cannot possibly do this. They don't know what their time is worth in money, and money doesn't change their quality of life.

Most people know exactly the value of their time and the opportunity cost is in things like food and shelter. Wealthy people don't work for a living so their time isn't obviously valuable at all, have their wealth tied up in stocks and so can't predict their returns, and aren't materially affected by gaining or losing even billions of dollars.

Most people don't fly private because they can't afford it. Duh.

(And when we're dealing with real people, not homo economicus, it's clear that working 100 hours a week and hiring staff to do everything else would be miserable even if it made financial sense.)

EDIT: Replaced "poor people" with "most people".

Amazon identified that people hate paying for shipping, so they deceived their customers about the price of shipping and compelled any vendor using Amazon to double-charge for shipping everywhere else. This may be clever, especially since they're getting away with it, but is hardly something to be praised.