Mind Management
24.3K posts
@YwanC
Comfort is overrated. Interlocking problems with mutually incompatible solutions~ Ophuls.
Goodbye, dollar milkshake theory. In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise is part of a team which prevents crime before it can happen. Fed swap lines being expanded to cover all US allies (non-allied countries have already de-dollarized their economies) prevents funding stresses before they become funding stresses. Ergo, there will never be any "sucking" of liquidity from the global financial system into the US dollar even in a severe crisis, which means the dollar will lose its safe haven bid in times of stress. If the world is short dollars, and the Fed supplies them, there is no consequence to being short dollars. You are actually encouraged to use dollars for carry trades, much like Abenomics did to the Japanese Yen. The eventual outcome is the dollar becoming more of a transactional currency and less of a store of value. This is great news for Asians. It means the end of permanent currency depreciation, making local equities more attractive relative to US assets. Pair high growth rates and favorable demographics with currency stability, and you have the perfect setup for an EM resurgence. The Treasury Secretary does not understand the long-term implications of this Empire ending move.
🚨Former Israeli Peace Negotiator Daniel Levy: ‘Israel is on a SUGAR HIGH of death and destruction, it’s not clear to me Zionism can RE-INVENT itself.’ ‘America may be feeling less pain, but America’s threshold for pain, certainly when it’s economic and it translates into political, is significantly less than it is for others. And this is where this question of how Netanyahu will respond is where it looks like many of us maybe used to watch cartoons, where the cartoon character goes off the edge of a cliff and then they stay in motion until they look down and then they’ve got nowhere to go, they can’t go back. And it feels like Israel may be going on that journey, that it has simply gone too far. The question for many is, well, why isn’t there an establishment inside Israel that’s stopping this? And that’s why I’ve tried to suggest that it’s not just Netanyahu, the country has gone off on this sugar high of death and destruction, that all that, all that was built up for decades has now come into play.’ @afshinrattansi: ‘So would it unilaterally attack even after Trump saying no?’ Levy: ‘This is where you bump into the reality that America has tremendous leverage over Israel. And so I think if America wants this to stop, just as it has in Lebanon said enough. Although Israel is still physically inside Lebanese territory, it’s still ceasefire Israeli-style, which means you still kill the other side. But I think if America says stop, then Israel stops. But the question is, has Israel given itself an alternative path to pursue, or are we seeing that actual existing Zionism as practised by the State of Israel has nowhere to go now? And either you radically rethink what is the future for the Israeli Jewish community, not in a regime of an ethnostate, but as some kind of normal way of interacting with those in its midst. That is a very different future. And, it’s not clear to me that the project, the Zionist project, can reinvent itself.’ Watch the full interview in the quoted post below👇
Can you imagine if the Spurs drafted Knueppel instead of Harper? Even if Harper ends up better long-term, there's no denying Kon's elite shooting, versatile scoring, creation, and intangibles would've lifted San Antonio to another level today. Kon is already a top 50 player.
LEBRON JAMES TIES THE GAME AT 101 🤯 13.1 SECONDS TO GO ON PRIME.
11 points on 1/8 shooting, great league Adam Silver
I’ve seen this argument over and over. “You’re assuming that they are rational.” What is required for analytical purposes is a very weak form of rationality: the politician or the military man wants to win, wants an advantage; not that he is not going to make serious errors. More importantly, assuming irrationality is an analytical cul-de-sac. As a piece of rhetoric, it is no better than a get-out-of-jail-free card. What analytical purchase do you get by assuming any actor is irrational? To get analytical traction, you need a model of their irrationality. You can say that such and such is ideologically-motivated to do such and such. Eg, the Nazi regime poured scarce resources into the liquidation of European Jewry because it was consumed by the idea of a world Jewish conspiracy. My biggest disagreement with Gopal was precisely on this question of irrationality. Specifically, he was worried about US and/or Israeli first use. I explained that this worry was unwarranted. Not because the Bibi and Trump governments are rational, cunning actors; although they are. But rather because the threshold for first use is so high. At the minimum, the decision-maker must ask: what happens if we do this? how will the enemy respond? how will others respond? Can we get away with it? The answer to that is very clear. Iranian retaliation with dirty bombs on Tel Aviv cannot be prevented. Hormuz cannot be reopened by first use. The gulf cannot be saved in the event of first use. A great depression becomes a certainty with first use. The end of Israeli nuclear monopoly in the region becomes a certainty with first use. The use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine becomes a live possibility. Diplomatic isolation becomes a virtual certainty with first use. It’s not a solution, and certainly creates a lot more problems than it solves. In order to argue that first use was a real possibility, you need to provide a picture whereby the decision maker considers first use to be the least bad option in a difficult situation. Fighting for a bully boner does not cut it. There is a reason why all attempts at nuclear coercion have failed. There is not a single case, just as there is no case of a state capitulating under aerial bombardment. To his credit, by the time we finished the whiskey, Gopal came around.
THE MOST IMPOSSIBLE MELTDOWN. THIS WAS MATHEMATICALLY OVER.
