It was the style at the time.

“Nice to meet you”?

Yes, for various reasons it would be beneficial to have a global government responsible for global issues. However, until such time as we have one, local currencies are going to be the best bet.

First of all, hyperinflation hasn’t been an issue in any modern economy for decades. We understand more about monetary policy than we did in the 1930s.

Secondly, economic crises did happen prior to Bretton Woods. In fact, they tended to be more common, and more severe.

Finally, it is not obvious at all that “universal currencys (sic) not run by local governments” could do better, especially given our experience with cryptocurrencies, all of which are extremely volatile and not suitable as a currency for that and various other reasons.

We need better alternatives

Why? Modern fiat currencies do exactly what a currency needs to do.

The kid’s name? Albert Einstein.

Einstein might be good at physics, but he is the last person you would ask on ecology.

Einstein was no expert on ecology, but he was well-informed about general matters. Trump is profoundly ignorant when it comes to basic knowledge you’d expect the average 12-year old to know. Like, who doesn’t know what health insurance is?

That’s fair enough. But Trump’s Project 2025 buddies have the intention to undermine Europe. Unfortunately, when America sneezes, everyone catches the cold.

Yeah, they’ve been at it even today, with JD Vance cheerleading for Orbán Viktor.

If Trump and Musk are stupid, they would be poor

This type of thinking is known as the just-world fallacy. It’s very tempting, because people prefer to believe that things happen “for a reason” and not just randomly. Yet there is no basis in reality for this type of thinking. Trump is stupid, and many of his comments can’t be explained by mere showmanship and playing to his base. The only reasonable explanation for forest raking, or negative GDP, or look, having nuclear etc. etc. is that he is a clueless idiot, and he is.

Musk is evil, and certainly no genius, but also not stupid. He has an undergraduate degree in physics, whereas Trump merely has an MBA of negligible academic standard, which certifies basic literacy at best.

The existence of markets naturally leads to an upward flow of capital from the have-nots to the haves. One of the interesting things researchers have found is that simulations with identical agents (i.e. all equally smart) and simple market mechanics lead to the emergence of extreme inequality. You can find the details in the economic literature if you’re interested.

Plenty of famous intergenerational wealthy families eventually lose their status because their descendants squander the fortunes handed to them.

As it happens, Trump did squander his inheritance, but managed to claw back his fortune, first by money laundering for Russian mobsters, then by using his political office for personal gain. Fake it until you make it very much applies here.

You may not be politically active, but they know already that you’re possibly anti-Trump because they took your social security details and other public records, and fed it into their surveillance system.

Well, call me naïve, but they are pretty cautious around this kind of stuff in Germany, I doubt the US government has access to these kinds of records.

Putin wasn’t the only KGB colonel before he became the president of Russia. He had peers and were given equal footing as him. But he had proven to be more cunning and ruthless than them so he gained power.

Putin isn’t in the category I mentioned. Even so, Putin rapidly rose up the political ranks and in the chaos of the later Yeltsin presidency ended up prime minister largely by chance.

Those low level conning salesmen you mentioned, they probably weren’t savvy enough.

The numbers don’t add up. Suppose there are a million savvy conmen. How can they all become major players on the international business and political scene? There just aren’t enough of those positions.

However, if they had been as savvy as the most successful con salesman, Elon Musk, then their fates would have been different otherwise.

Elon Musk started with a heap of money (as did Trump), in an oligarchic system heavily favouring those with money.

And well, who lived until the ripe old age of 70, while the other was murdered in cold blood with an icepick?

Not Lenin, who died of an unknown illness. I think you mean Trotsky.

Never underestimate the opposition.

My opposition, personally? That would be practically all politicians, ideologically, to some degree or other. I am not a member of any political organization.

One should also not overestimate them.

On the one hand, I think it is true that a certain kind of skill is required to read and manipulate people - the same kind of skill a conman or used car salesman needs to do their work, and that kind of skill obviously doesn’t need knowledge of quantum physics or even a rudimentary understanding of how the world in general works.

On the other hand, one shouldn’t give people like Trump, Berlusconi and Idi Amin too much credit. They ended up where they did largely due to historical happenstance, and millions of other conmen and used car salespeople stayed small-time.

The social democrats were leading a coalition in the previous government. Their leader called an early election in the hopes of capitalizing on the Greenland issue. They perhaps did not perform as well in the recent election as they hoped, but they are poised to lead the next coalition government nonetheless.

Okay, but it’s Denmark, one of the most efficiently run countries in the world.

In fact, the top rankings of global economies by living standards are completely dominated by multi-party democracies, while two-party semi-democracies and dictatorships find it much more difficult to pass effective legislation.

The logic is a bit weird though. Like picking up smoking out of solidarity because your buddy died of lung cancer.

Have you noticed how ancient religious texts like the Bible often heavily focus on financial themes, especially debt and inequality? This was long before capitalism existed. The existence of markets (capitalist or not) tends to lead to inequality. In fact, modern capitalist societies were the first to have the ability (though not necessarily the will…) to adequately address this issue using progressive taxation, as opposed to the older methods like the Jubilee, bans on usury, and later feudalism (all of which have severe drawbacks).

Funny, I have to ask permission to work on weekends since they have to pay me more for it.

(Not USA obviously.)

First as tragedy, then as farce.

Life expectancy globally is around 71 years. Only a handful of countries (Afghanistan and a few sub-Saharan countries) have a life expectancy below 60.

The amount (usually much less - unless there was some marauding army nearby) aside, it was more complicated than that. Taxation was delegated across a hierarchy of various stages; at each stage a mixture of negotiation, deception and coercion would be used to determine the taxation amount. The lowest-level tax collectors typically worked akin to a mob protection racket, and their own livelihood depended on extracting a surplus above what their employer (typically some noble) demanded.

Certainly substantially less transparent and simple than clicking through an online form in a few minutes.

Pretty sure filing taxes (taking all of 5 minutes) is a heck of a lot simpler for me than for any medieval peasant or minor nobility.

The thought “I shouldn’t mine Bitcoin because it is an immoral activity that destroys the environment and facilitates crime while not producing anything of value” never crossed your mind?