dsomers

Yes you do. I elected my European member of parliament, and I elected my EU councillor. The elected EU councillors select the commissioner, a bureaucrat, and the elected parliament can block anything the commission puts to a vote. That’s two elected offices, and one bureaucrat that’s appointed, but can’t act without consent of the elected officer. Just like many other democracies around the world. It’s democracy, just with some responsibility delegated to bureaucrats, who can still be overridden or removed by elected representatives. What’s so hard for you to understand about that?

> Shitty country

How rude. They were economically shattered by being occupied by the USSR for decades. Lay off.

That’s still on the GP and the general public health policy of Australia. If I go to my GP with a cold here in the Netherlands, there is a snowball’s chance in hell that I get prescribed antibiotics.

It’s from his butt. Which makes it just as valid as how everyone else does estimates.

I for one have built enough Linux kernels from scratch, and patched enough Linux drivers into working — thanks, so no one can call me an average Joe when it comes to tech. However, I mostly left all of that behind outside of work years ago, I’m desperate for time, not money, and I have way better things to do with my time than dick around with a custom android build, thanks. You do you, but Apple provides me with a ‘good enough’ service that saves me a lot of time.

Exactly

> Maybe, but the latest Fed action violates a 40-year downtrend in interest rates, so it was exceptionally improbable from a historical perspective.

imo this is very flawed thinking, a once in a 40 year event is almost 100% likely to happen in an average persons life — maybe twice. I think when it comes to either your life savings or gigantic amounts of money like banks manage it’s irresponsible to not consider economic cycles that even only happen once per 100 years because of how likely it is to happen once is your life and be absolutely devastating.

I stand by my statement, this is 100% on SVBs amateur hour monkey level thinking.

> 4. The old treasuries decline 30-40% in present value. Oops, they're not so safe after all if you need your money back before maturity, which is often decades away.

This is because they fucked up their duration risk handling, no one held a gun to SVBs head and forced them to invest so heavily in long duration bonds. If they bought more short duration bonds none of this would be a problem. Other banks didn’t make this mistake. So why did they do it? Greed, or who knows, maybe it was plain old ignorance/hubris. Still, it was 100% avoidable. SVB fucked up bad and pointing blame at the fed is just not making them accountable.

Like fuck, who are these dumb chimps running this place. When I help my parents plan their retirement I looked at 100 years of history of what normal fluctuations are in the bond or stock market. Looking up data like that takes an hour and should make anyone with basic math skills realize rate and the bond fluctuations that follow at 100% bound to happen given enough time. It was just absolute amateur hour at SVB.

Okay, name one?

Being back 1:1 is different from being redeemable.

> As little as a birth certificate?

I get what you’re getting at, but in Canada birth certificates from the 80s had a wallet sized version that had no more information than a drivers license, but it didn’t even have a photo on it. It was just a little pice of paper. I remember that’s very different from modern birth certificates.

I also crossed into the U.S. with my health card that only had my name on it and a number that is meaningless to the US boarder agency, also no photo.

Exactly this. As late as the 2001 I could cross into the US from Canada with as little as my birth certificate, which I often did. That was just a cotton blended paper with tattered edges with some writing, and the crest of my province printed on it. There wasn’t even a photo on it! It was closer to writing, ‘I’m daniel plz let me in’ on a napkin, than it is to my passport of today with its photo, barcode, and RFID chip that they can cross reference their data base with.

Come on, I 100% realize that jetpacks will probably always be impractical/unsafe. Although, I think there’s a lot of allure in the same way that there is for motorcycles. I imagine you would get this sense of free flying, like a bird — it just seems fun. And if we somehow magically engineered past the energy and safety problems, you’d have mobility like a helicopter, but without needing the helicopter pad in cities. Like how scooters and motorcycles can be more convenient in cities because they’re easier to park. Dream a little, it’s fun.

Funny you say that, I just opened Safari, no ads.