It’s a measure of their insanity that leaders around the world are seriously considering nuclear war. Ivana Hughes of Columbia on what that would mean. (0:00) How Powerful Are Nuclear Weapons? (9:46) What Would Happen if a Nuke Detonated Over Times Square? (19:53) What Is Nuclear Winter? (24:56) Ozone Layer Destruction (27:06) What Would Happen if a Nuclear Power Plant Was Hit With a Nuclear Weapon? (29:08) How Many Times Have We Launched Nuclear Weapons? (33:57) The Horrifying Effects of Radiation (41:29) Is Nuclear Testing Infecting Our Food and Causing Cancer? (49:41) How Many Nuclear Weapons Exist Today? (51:14) Close Calls With Nuclear War and Lost Nukes (54:47) The Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s Attempt to Ban Nuclear Weapons (1:02:03) Why JFK Wanted to End Israel’s Nuclear Program (1:06:16) North Korea’s Nuclear Program (1:08:20) Is Iran Actually Trying to Build a Nuclear Weapon? (1:11:48) The Moral Debate About Our Nuclear Defense Policy (1:19:59) Are World Leaders Calling for Nuclear War? (1:29:50) Should America Lead the Charge in Eliminating Nuclear Weapons? (1:36:50) What Is the Doomsday Clock? (1:41:26) How Much Money Is Spent on Nuclear Weapon Development? (1:43:29) The First Step to Eliminating Nuclear Weapons Includes paid partnerships.

The $500 million daily money printing story is just the tip of the iceberg. After 30 years studying how money actually works, I can tell you that 91% of money creation since 2000 came from private banks, not government printing presses. Most economists get this backwards - they think government spending borrows from private savings, but the accounting shows government deficits actually CREATE money and reserves. I break down the 8-entry accounting system that mainstream economists miss completely. Link to full breakdown in comments. #MoneyCreation #BankingSystem #EconomicTruth #PostKeynesian #ModernMonetaryTheory

My visit to NASA was illuminating: there is this engineering rule to use a 4x safety margin everywhere. Now apply it to finance. How much $ do you need to retire? To be ~100% safe, estimate what you will spend & multiply by 4. So many retirees underestimated how much they needed as a buffer against inflation, crises, unexpected expenditure, divorce,Trump tariffs, price of Gucci shoes, etc.

TOP ECONOMISTS IN PRAISE OF SPECIAL RAPPORTEUR FRANCESCA ALBANESE’S REPORT TO THE UNITED NATIONS: ‘FROM ECONOMY OF OCCUPATION TO ECONOMY OF GENOCIDE’ Yanis Varoufakis, Thomas Piketty, Nassim Taleb, Jayati Gosh, Michael Hudson, Giuseppe Mastruzzo, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Robert H. Wade, Christopher Cramer and Nidhi Srinivas co-sign the open letter below supporting Albanese amid US calls to remove her as the UN special rapporteur on Palestine History teaches us that economic interests have been key drivers and enablers of colonial enterprises and often of the genocides they perpetrated. The corporate sector has been intrinsic to colonialism since its inception, with corporations historically contributing to the violence against, the exploitation, and ultimately the dispossession, of Indigenous people and lands, a mode of domination known as racial colonial capitalism. Israel’s colonisation of the occupied Palestinian territories is no exception. The recent report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, constitutes a major contribution to understanding the political economy of Israel’s Apartheid state, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and, now, their genocide. As such, we believe, it must be studied and debated widely and freely. In view of the virulently hostile and indeed intimidating letter from the US government to the UN Secretary General demanding the dismissal of Ms Albanese and the quashing of her excellent report, we felt the need to express our strong support for Ms Albanese and to encourage the UN to dismiss the shrill demands of the US and Israeli governments. Following a well-trodden path of genocide denial and of bullying anyone who challenges the right of the colonial power to dispossess Indigenous peoples, the US and Israeli governments, with most European governments too timid to take a stance, demand that the international community turn a blind eye to the ongoing genocide and, in particular, to the key role that multinational and national corporations are playing in maintaining the Apartheid regime and enabling the subsequent genocide. As economists we feel the duty to highlight three key findings that Ms Albanese’s report unveils with clarity and precision. First, occupation and genocide are highly lucrative for conglomerates. These include not only the usual arms and ‘defence’ big businesses (e.g., Lockheed-Martin, the primary maker of the F35s, ELBIT, Israel’s own arms manufacturer, and Palantir, the software company whose algorithms have most likely been crucial in the selection of ‘targets’ across Gaza) but also household brand names (e.g., Caterpillar, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Allianz, Chevron, BP, Petrobas, A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S). As Israel’s defence budget doubled, with the active support of the US government, it crowded in large ‘investments’ into Israel’s killing machine across this international network of complicit conglomerates in which thousands of Israeli companies are intertwined with US, European, Korean and even a Brazilian mega-corporation. This explains why Israeli equities rose by 161% at a time of falling demand, production and consumer confidence. The second finding in Ms Albanese’s report that deserves extensive study is that the Palestinian territories Israel occupies have functioned as Big Tech’s ideal laboratory and testing ground – a function that the transition from occupation to genocide has only heightened. No country, for instance, has given as much access to a population’s biometric data as Israel has given to IBM. Since 7th October 2023, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Palantir have been expanding their cloud capital services at a breathtaking pace. Face recognition software, target selection algorithms and automated execution systems are being tested in real time, at will, and with fewer ethical constraints than in the case of experiments on laboratory rats. Big Tech could not be happier! The third key finding is that top US and European universities are financially dependent on remaining wedded to Israel’s Apartheid and permanent occupation/conflict political economy. Many top US and EU institutions will face serious financial difficulties if they were to stop backing Israel’s genocide. Ms Albanese’s report must be commended for drawing this sordid dependency of stellar Western universities and research institutions (including the Technical University of Munich, MIT Labs, the University of Edinburgh among others). The peoples of Europe and America have a right to know that some of their most cherished academic institutions are financially reliant on helping Israel reproduce its political economy of occupation and genocide. In a few years, almost everyone will claim they opposed this genocide. But it is now that people of good conscience need to take a stand. As economists we stand, today, with Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur under attack by the US and Israeli governments because her recent report throws indescribably important light on the political economy of Israel’s occupation and genocide. zeteo.com/p/exclusive-top-ec…

No. That's a decade old. Bitcoin turned out to NOT be a currency. It is an electronic tulip, perhaps; not a currency.

"A private equity firm can invest a hundred million dollars to build a steel plant and potentially earn a 7% profit starting in two years, or it can borrow a hundred million dollars and buy an existing company and sell that firm’s real estate immediately and lease it back to the company it just bought while shedding labor contracts in bankruptcy. Which one is a better return on investment?" -Matt Stoller, explaining how America consciously decided to create an environment hostile to making things; instead, we take things apart for profit, leaving ashes behind. Wall Street, not China, stole America's productive capacity. thebignewsletter.com/p/monop…

That's an absolutely insane statistic: in 2024 alone a single Chinese firm, the China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), built more more commercial ships by tonnage than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has built since the end of World War II. Source: csis.org/analysis/ship-wars-…

My old friend John was right, as almost always. An article from before the Guardian was completely captured by the security services. archive.is/2024.11.07-234539…

White House Announces Appointment Of Virus As Head Of Pandemic Response

Is it me or has the quality of CIA productions got really bad? The 2000s felt like the golden age of black flags: major events, tight scripts, suspense, worthy villains. Today it's like watching a 3rd rate Netflix movie because you can't find the remote and are too lazy to look

The irony of Vivek's post is that his wrong analysis of how American culture is broken illustrates in itself how American culture is broken. I mean, how out-of-touch must one be to think people will embrace a vision where childhood must be optimized for corporate success, with less sleepovers, hanging out and fun (what he calls "mediocrity") in favor of shareholder-value-maximizing "excellence"? Especially when addressing Americans who have seen their lives destroyed en-masse by the same corporate priorities that produced this vision of "excellence". The average American family isn't choosing between math tutoring and sleepovers - they're choosing between paying for basic necessities while both parents work multiple jobs. His examples unwittingly prove the opposite of his point: shows that he describes as corrupting American culture (Friends, Boy Meets World, Family Matters, etc.) celebrate friendship, family, and community values - exactly what the US has lost in their rush to optimize everything for economic output and create an hyperindividualistic and consumerist society. That's probably why they're popular: they reflect a lost world that people aspire to go back to. He mentions China as the motivating factor here, because apparently the solution to avoid having their "asses handed to us by China" is more capitalism, treating people even more like cogs who must compete in "the global market for technical talent." That doesn't only betray a misunderstanding of what Americans want but also of China. China themselves largely hate the extreme competitiveness of their system: the people hate it and the government hates it, they all want to move away from it (hence the government banning the tutoring industry). And in any case this isn't what made China rise - China rose with a largely uneducated population, as mass university-level education is a very recent phenomenon there. No, I'm convinced that China, at a very fundamental level, rose so unprecedentedly fast for the very reason that it is one of the very few countries in the world which culture wasn't completely denaturalized by the sort of neoliberal dystopia that Vivek seems to idealize. In China's socialist system the market doesn't trump all, individualism doesn't reign supreme and, at a broader level, they still stay faithful to many of the ancestral values that have sustained their civilization for thousands of years. That's the culture that underpins it all and makes it work, not the fact that Chinese kids do too much homework. All in all, this is what makes this debate so revealing: Vivek, in trying to diagnose America's problems, has instead unwittingly illustrated them. The belief that every human activity must be justified by its contribution to GDP, that collective bonds are mere distractions from the pursuit of "excellence," and that the solution to the problems created by predatory capitalism is, somehow, more predatory capitalism.

Isn’t It A Great Thing That Covid Turned Out To Be Not A Big Deal. Also, Unconnected, Why On Earth Are A Quarter Of The Marines Medically Unfit For Duty?

The Democratic Party Exists To Make Sure Good People Do Nothing Article with supporting links. caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-demo…

As Olympic Swimming Records Stay Unscathed, We’re Desperate For Some Scientist Somewhere To Come Up With A Reason That Isn’t Covid.

EDITORIAL: It’s Time To Roll Back All Mitigations In Hospitals: Gloves, Masks, Goggles, Clean Floors, New Needles, Clean Scalpels, Everything. If We Want To Win The War On Immunity Debt, Doctors Must Do Their Duty And Infect Everyone With Everything All The Time.

Sorting through materials for my next book and stumbled on this piece outlining the influence of MMT in Chinese policymaking circles. 1/ bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

For professional programmers the most significant part of the job typically involves understanding a complex proprietary code base and how it supports the business requirements. The actual coding is a trivial part of the process. LLMs are useless in this area.

This is wild.
 
Corporate profits accounted for 54% of price increases between April 2020 and December 2021.
 
Typically, they account for just 13%.
 
While American families struggled with rapidly rising prices, companies raked in record profits.

DEI is what a civil rights movement looks like without unions.