This speculative nonsense adds nothing:

> We know that state actors have invested heavily in understanding and exploiting these divisions. Russian active measures campaigns have been documented doing exactly this kind of work: identifying wedge issues and creating content designed to inflame both sides. North Korea has demonstrated similar sophistication in their social engineering operations by targeting academics and foreign policy experts

What about "read Twitter in between bouts of using one susceptible user's API key to spam other users for their API keys" _really_ requires the sophistication of a state-level actor? Statements like this aren't journalism, they're exactly the same kind of manipulation being used by the phishers.

Donating to reduce the government debt is such a wildly dumb thing to exist. The US is currency sovereign! It has no risk of default on any debt denominated in USD!

The only reason a site like this exists is for politicians to distract from the fact that the budget of a nation with currency sovereignty does not actually have to raise revenues with taxes in order to spend money on services (and thus, be an excuse to cut services).

> The only reason a site like this exists is for politicians to distract from the fact that the budget of a nation with currency sovereignty does not actually have to raise revenues with taxes in order to spend money on services (and thus, be an excuse to cut services).

This is not a mainstream view. This _is_ a view of MMT, which is rejected by the majority of current economists, and this context is probably important to people seeing this when it’s just presented as a well known fact

> In a 2019 survey of top U.S. economists not a single respondent agreed with the basic aspects of MMT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

Yeah donating for the debt is equivalent to literally burning money. The us’s biggest debt buyer is the US fed reserve. Bonds offered to foreign buyers absorbs loose worldwide cash. The supply of dollars is always less than demand because petroleum must be traded in dollars. And demand exceeds supply because IMF loans are denominated in dollars, plus interest, meaning that demand perpetually keeps going up because the interest keeps rising, simply because the clock ticks.

So what is the point of the debt? To convince govt should not be too big nor suck up to many of the worldwide human capital resources.

OP, if you're reading this, the animation pegs my CPU. Relying on your readers to engage reader mode is going to turn away a lot of people who might otherwise enjoy your content.

Unfortunately, scrolling is choppy for me even with reader mode turned on. Great article, though.

There is more authoritarianism in your life in the US than there is for the average person in Cuba. I know it's hard to believe, but it turns out spending almost half your waking hours selling your labor for a wage to a much richer person than you doesn't actually end up with a life defined by agency.

Cuba isn't poor because of an inefficient command economy. Cuba is poor because it has been denied access to its largest trading partner (and more) for over half a century. And people _still_ have a better healthy life expectancy in that country than in the US. Imagine what it could be like there if the US did more than pay lip service to world prosperity and peace.

They don't, this is a lie from the country that's been embargoing Cuba into oblivion for sixty years.

It's not a lie. It's well-documented, and happens outside of the bubble in which Cuba can keep its slavery quiet.

"Host" nations agree to pay Cuba for the doctor's work, agree not to pay the doctor directly, and agree to deport them back to Cuba if they attempt to negotiate being paid directly. This is slavery by anyone's definition.

Sounds like agency work with a visa thrown in. The doctor is ultimately paid by cuba, no?

The slave is ultimately fed by the slaveowner, eh?

Absolutely. I feel like the most important infographic for understanding the last fifty years or so of our economy is the one where productivity skyrockets to the moon while wage stays put.

And the most important _book_ for understanding that _infographic_ is Capital Vol. 1.

> Most of us are raised from a young age to not steal, the existing environment encourages those who do that get away with it, at the expense of those that follow ethics, morals and rules. Cheating and academic dishonesty is rampant because fraud & corruption is endemic to the system.

This is not new, but I do agree it's more noticeable, and probably will continue to be so as real wage continues to drop. People get more desperate and less socially inclined as financial stress increases, and it has been doing so with _less_ social safety net for at least as long as anyone who reads this has been alive.

What horror that it might be on the market to be bought as an owner-occupied residence instead.

When people justify landlords as providing housing, it always seems to be without consideration to the particular financing/market circumstances that make "buying a house" something that is difficult for a lot of people these days, a thing that was not true not even that long ago (and did not become true due to simply neutral market fluctuations).

It is not useful to individualize this. Even if you could make a solid argument that being a landlord might sometimes take more effort than working a job does for someone else to pay your mortgage for you, corporations holding many properties at once (with just a couple of companies holding up to 5% of the rental stock) are going to have a bigger economic impact on the market, and the small-time landlord's experience isn't really relevant to that, vis effort, risk, or graciousness to their lessees.

The term that applies here is "petite bourgeoisie". They are nominally rentiers, but without the scale of economic control given to the actual bourgeoisie by their relationship to the means of production.