In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
>The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
How does are bans against consensual financial exchanges close to the "ideal" of the free market? It just sounds like you have an axe to grind about the financial system rather than describing free markets.
What makes this view more correct than say, "economies with marketing creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to marketing" and concluding that nothings a free market until we ban all advertising? After all, you can make a vaguely plausible argument about how marketing isn't really about the merits of the product, and therefore allowing it is antithetical to the free market or whatever
> What makes this view more correct than say, "economies with marketing creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to marketing" and concluding that nothings a free market until we ban all advertising? After all, you can make a vaguely plausible argument about how marketing isn't really about the merits of the product, and therefore allowing it is antithetical to the free market or whatever
Wait, so your pitch in favor of a debt-fueled market economy is that advertising is awesome and that we wouldn't want to "lose" being smothered in ads all the time?
Cause... sign me up for the non-financialized, non-mass-media-advertising-driven economy please and thank you. I'd even be ok with just nuking billboards and mass-media forms of ads and still allowing more direct forms of marketing, if we must compromise! Likely we could find some compromises around just how much of the debt world we regulate too (this should be obvious?).
(I thought the disconnect between the efficiency of competition and the market as realized in modern economies was pretty well understood and taken for granted, but I guess we all find ways to justify the system we're profiting from... even if that means we have to claim we love the ad breaks)
>Wait, so your pitch in favor of a debt-fueled market economy is that advertising is awesome and that we wouldn't want to "lose" being smothered in ads all the time?
The point is that if add random caveats to what counts as free market, it won't be "free market", only "market I like".
I'm flabbergasted that you look at the Chinese property crisis and say "only the West does irresponsible loans." No, 60% of China's economy is state-run companies and the remaining 40% need political officers. China is just as capable of making shortsighted decisions as the US, and they have already made several devastating ones.
>I'm flabbergasted that you look at the Chinese property crisis and say "only the West does irresponsible loans." No, 60% of China's economy is state-run companies and the remaining 40% need political officers. China is just as capable of making shortsighted decisions as the US, and they have already made several devastating ones.
While these are hardly shy claims, I don't see anything in them to say "only the West does irresponsible loans"?
> The West is in a state of psychosis with Debt and Monopolies under the illusion of free market.
> The Chinese markets are more free than West, you can just look at the Auto and AI industry.
or the prior post
>Usury and debt based economy creates a dynamic where being competitive in production is secondary to financialistion.
> In short, instead of market being driven by demand and productivity, it is driven by financier curving out monopolies.
> Peak Examples are Uber and AirBnB.
You can throw a rock these days and find a category where the products coming out of China are miles ahead of those coming out of the rest of the world, from a bunch of companies nobody had heard of a few years earlier. And the list is growing pretty steadily.
I would assume plenty of shortsighted decisions are also being made. But I would have a hard time characterizing the state of competition in the west as healthier or more productive when looking at the number of players and the quality of goods being produced in China.
Capital will not be hoarded and stuffed in pillows without Usury. People are happy to take bets for profit and loses, I mean, that is like the entire stock market schtick.
...except Uber STILL faces competition, and I went back to hotels after finding AirBnB too pricy.
It is good and proper that people aim to create monopolies, as long as they want to do that in a productive and legal way! Monopolies are inherently dangerous, but the truth is that acquiring and maintaining one is not straightforward unless you can get the government to ban your competitors.
Debt is generally cheaper because lenders face lower risk. Because debtors hold priority claims on assets during liquidation and receive guaranteed fixed payments, they demand lower returns. In contrast, equity investors require higher returns for taking on higher risks.
Companies also often prefer debt because it doesn't dilute shareholders which issuing new shares would do.
It is funny that usury is so evil in Islam at the same time Islam very clearly allows men to own and rape female slaves, "those whom your right hands possess" (ma malakat aymanukum).
Those slaves being raped must be so comforted by knowing that Islam forbids cash loans at reasonable interest rates.
a stranger is asking you to risk $100k on his half-baked plan in exchange for nothing, and you say "sure go ahead take my money!"? no. it doesn't work like that in the islamic world.
as a borrower who's not allowed to compensate for your lenders' risk monetarily, your access to loans is severely restricted. Essentially you have to rely on your extended family. and instead of paying for the risk with interest payments, you have to pay with loyalty and subservience.
it restricts social mobility far more than the western model. it incentivizes clan structures. which incentivize cousin marriage.
power concentrates in the patriarchs of a million little family kingdoms. which causes all kinds of economic inefficiencies.
in the US, even if you're born without any family connections, as a healthy 20 year old you can find a job (hard work) that allows you to save $70k per year and invest it. when you're 30 you have $1M and a good credit history, you can easily leverage that to get a $2M loan at low interest rates, which allows you to start any kind of productive venture you want.
and you can do all this without owing your clan's patriarch access to e.g. your most profitable clients, or your daughters hand in marriage to his retarded son, or anything else he wants in exchange for his generosity.
If you don't understand the difference between a loan for 5% interest and 7 freaking percent of your entire company then you really don't understand finance at all.
All interest is usury in Islamic Law (and the laws before it such as Christianity and Judaism). There are ways to to put free cash into productive use without exploitation.
If going by the very poor economic performance of Muslim countries I would say interest is a very good thing if limited to reasonable interest rates and fair bankruptcy laws.
That's not true. Islamic finance forbids indefinitely growing interest. Sharia finance agreements involve fixed fees or equity shares. Late penalties can be collected but must be donated, not profit. In all cases, the borrower never owes to the lender for the lender to keep more an a fixed amount determined at the strat.
I don't know about better but it's certainly different. It's painfully slow through claude code vscode extension compared to copilot but maybe "smarter", I feel like I have to correct it less using sonnet on both. I don't use opus much because of the cost but coworkers say the difference between harnesses there is also pronounced.
The best intelligence apparatus in the world missed the Oct 7 planning which Egyptian intelligence noticed, told the Israelis about directly, and still went ignored?
They're also obviously fine with breaking eggs to make an omelette. Given their history, they seem to regard breaking eggs as the goal, and making an omelette as an afterthought.
Regardless of anything else, absolutely no one is calling shin bet the best in the world at what they do. The FBI is much more effective. It's the israeli agencies that focus on transnational threats human and signals intellegence (mossad and 8200 respectively, along with other groups in the laters perview under military intellegence).
I've been and I've seen. It is a fence. A very long fence. You can't cross it with bare hands, and if you try, you will be shot.
This is not the case when dozens of bulldozers simultaneously cross the fence and many thousands of trained terrorists coming out of tunnels and cross the fence through the openings. If you don't have prior intelligence, you can't stop it.
> Gaza residents voted Hamas into power, despite Hamas’s vile charter pledging erasure of Israel and Jews and so on.
Reminder:
* The last parlimentary election held in Palestine was 2006 [1].
* The median age in Palestine as of 2023 was 19.8 [2].
* The voting age in Palestine is 21 [1].
In other words, the majority of the population today were born after the last major election, and they aren't voting age now, let alone at the time of the last election. When you account for people who were voting age in the last elections, the number of people still around today is a rather small minority. It shrinks even further when you consider that Hamas only got 44% of the votes for Parliament (alas, due to how district votes are handled, that gave Hamas 74 of 132 seats).
Given that, I'm a little less sure about holding the current population of Palestine responsible for Hamas. You could argue they should be doing more to displace Hamas, but perhaps that can wait until after they're done worrying about starving to death or being shot by IDF snipers while accepting food from aid workers.
From what I know about rebels and paramilitary orgs (like FARC), they're always supported by the local population in return for "protection", policing. Same goes for Hamas. I wouldn't say they voted for Hamas but I'm quite sure they support and offer shelter and food to Hamas fighters.
My other experiences with Palestinians revealed that they're very empathetic people and they integrate quite well into other cultures when they're not bombed or shot at.
It is well documented that Israel had heard rumblings that something was coming.
A year prior, they had documentation of a plan like what unfolded on October 7th, but dismissed it for reasons I won't speculate on. Google 'Jericho Wall'.
Approximately 3 weeks prior to October 7th, Unit 8200 produced a document based on months of research, that showed Hamas seemed to be doing a lot of training and coordinating for something.
In the days prior, Egypt warned Israel that something big was happening imminently, but again, it was ignored for reasons I won't speculate on.
The night before, the IDF identified a number of anomalies in Hama's behavior but did nothing with this information.
A number of members of the intelligence and military leadership have stepped down since, acknowledging the failures.
Anyhow, for whatever reason, your belief that this was completely in character for Hamas, seems to be at odds with the beliefs of Israel's intelligence and military community in the months and days prior to the attack on October 7th. Which is, odd, to say the very least.
Hamas are fanatics and were dumb enough to try it. They also had the tunnels, missiles from Iran. But I"m quite inclined to believe the Israeli leadership let it happen as a pretext to crush them afterwards, level Gaza, maybe even go against Hezbollah and Iran, but that's a bit too far fetrched.
That's precisely what I meant. Hamas always had these plans on how to launch an attack. Israel gave them the opening. And why is everyone forgetting the fact that Yahya Shinwar was basically a Mossad puppet by the time he was released? They released him precisely because they thought that he was milder compared to his contemporaries in Doha.
People who've been to that border in normal times know how fiercely that border is protected.
It escapes me how a Palestinian born in a refugee camp and involved into lifetime strife against Israel can also be a Mossad puppet, but who knows.
Hamas are crazy fundamentalists that Iran is using along with Hezbollah to perpetrate attacks against Israel. Just what Netanyahu needs to start another war.
They're normal people—dentists, engineers, bakers, whatever—born into an environment with no sovereignty and the constant threat of death or worse. That's enough to put a gun in anyone's hand. We must stop with this wholly inaccurate and shallow characterization. They are not Boko Haram or ISIS or Al-Qaeda. In fact, they worked with the IDF when ISIS was messing with them about 8 years ago. Are they predominantly muslim? Yes. But their struggle is for sovereignty, not fanatic fundamentalism.
That's the image they have created for themselves after kidnapping, raping, abusing and killing innocent civillians and concert goers. Compared to Fatah and the other PLO members who established themselves as political parties, they are just a terrorist organization and recently designated as such in most of the civilized world. Israel has probably discretely supported them in the past order to prevent a two state solution.
Raping and abusing? Do you have a link to what you're referring to or are you confusing them with how the IDF treats their prisoners? Because that rape and abuse is extremely well documented.
> they are just a terrorist organization and recently designated as such in most of the civilized world
I would not call the west "civilized". We're just rich. We call a lot of people terrorists and overlook our own terrorism, like basically everything the CIA & the IDF & the mossad do. convenient eh?
PLEASE read anything but western news, I'm begging you. You don't realize how insane you sound to most of the civilized world.
Every Gazan is not a Hamas supporter. Do you know the kind of shit Hamas pulls against its own people?
There wasn't any chance of Hamas being overthrown by the Palestinians either. With clandestine support from both Israel and Qatar, Hamas ensured that they were the only ones with guns on the Strip.
Yahya Sinwar was captured and imprisoned in a Mossad cell for years. Even if he weren't an active Israeli puppet, Mossad would've easily known the ways they could manipulate him into a specific action, and egged him to carry that out. It's already been established that the Hamas leadership in Qatar were in the dark with respect to the October 7 attacks when they first happened too. I don't condone Hamas either, but it's also very likely Israel is heavily complicit.
To maybe save others a google. Appen is an Australian company focusing on linguistics/translation. Different from Appin, the hack for hire service out of India.
Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.
The long term part is overstated in my experience. People move around a lot at these offshoring firms as better opportunities arise. In my experience by the time you find someone competent they’re already interviewing for a better role. Constant churn trying to find the next one.
Keysight is not very hobbyist friendly these days. A year or two ago it broke on the Eevblog forums that they were refusing to honor warranties/service contracts unless you had a corporate account with them. If you were just a guy with a scope you would be SOL.
There was a Rohde and Schwarz rep that was pretty active on those forums when I still paid attention to it, might count for something.
Hard to justify going with the legacy brands as hobbyist with what comes out of China these days. Rigol and Sient make very capable hardware although h the UI can be a bit painful if you’re used to something else. Micsig produces very capable probes for a small fraction of the cost of the legacy players even high end specialty stuff like optically isolated probes. Those are still thousands but try pricing the equivalent from tek or Agilent, it would buy you a sedan.
In debt the first 5000 years Geaeber makes the case that pure “free market” trade has never really existed in “the west”. The closest to this ideal that’s ever happened was during the Islamic golden age enabled by religious prescriptions against usury.
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