but also, spending energy on prevention (the publicity) and then when the thing doesn’t occur saying “i guess we were wrong” is the wrong take i think
same thing with Y2K and plenty of engineering things: people were saying “it was no big deal! yall were saying planes were going to fall out of the sky! we wasted so much time and money!”… yeah; it was a huge and expensive effort that’s why the bad things didn’t happen
the world is larger than north america… walmart does not operate in the vast majority of the world… it doesn’t even operate in the vast majority of western countries
i take hope from the fact that since the war begun people have been saying ukraine has no chance, and yet here we are with ukraine still existing and independent… i guess when you’re defending your home you can pull some pretty impressive manoeuvres out of nowhere that people hadn’t accounted for
and now we collaborate quite nicely! we share fire fighting helicopters and fire fighters often fly over to help each other, since our seasons are offset
hopefully that remains and isn’t just seen as “giving things away” and used as a bargaining chip in a perverse game of number go up
which other one? because i’ve got kanye on my list too and there’s at least a couple more
the concept of currency is absolutely not the problem… barter systems are hugely complex and incredibly inefficient
currency is (should be) an abstraction of the value of something… to support the population as big as we have we need a system that’s able to manage that complexity
currency unlocks immense amounts of human effort and allow people to do what they want instead of just the things that are wanted in their local area. you can’t really have grants with a barter system, complex supply chains are impossible (so say goodbye to advanced scientific research and most modern technology), large scale planning is over because you can’t guarantee whether you can get the resources you need for the things that you’re able to trade in months or years time (just because your iron supplier wants toilet paper now doesn’t mean he will want it 2 years into the future when you need more iron)
it’s also a multiplier, on top of just reducing work required for every single trade. to do a lot of those large-scale things there will always be cash laying around somewhere - you get given it, and then you need to plan or get it from multiple sources until you have enough to request the resources you need… whenever currency is laying around like this, it’s wasted effort. currency works; currency gets things done when it’s moving; currency sitting around is wasted… when you put that currency in a bank, they’re able to loan it to others, who then put it to good use by being productive. you get that currency back when you’re ready, and all of a sudden there is more done that what would have otherwise been able to be done: that’s what the “made up paper system” allows (and there are many more examples of this)
it could be arguable that there’s plenty to go around and that if everyone is happy living with equality and not extravagance then we wouldn’t need to barter or trade anything… perhaps that’s true person to person (ignoring human behaviour, sociopaths, power over people in and of itself becoming the currency, doing the work that nobody wants to do - some of that can probably be tamed with societal norms and punishment, and technology) but humanity’s understanding of the universe needs to progress to improve everything for everyone, and the more we progress the more complex and large-scale the needs of the projects are that are required to do them… if you have a bundle of resources, how do you allocate them to projects without knowing how much of a dent they’ll make? how do you say which will take more to complete: ITER or the LHC? it’s already impossible for us to comprehend everything about our system of trade without removing the abstraction that simplifies it all so we can reason about it
don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to make sure currency again becomes representative of value, but currency in and of itself absolutely makes people’s lives better every single day. unrestrained capitalism is absolutely the problem with currency - currency is just its tool of choice
honestly imo luck is involved no matter what… maybe other than inherited wealth
first time you can almost forgive as an accident… second time means it wasn’t an accident and the society is built around that being viable: you never know when it’ll happen again, and that’s not a viable strategy for long-term investment of either capital or influence
BUT… governments and businesses have a short memory and bad risk evaluation where money is concerned
a future queen has far more future influence than a forever princess
every day that passes it gets harder and harder to just say “lol sorry” and the world to have the memory of a goldfish and just reply “ahhhh water under the bridge” as soon as a suitcase of money is waved under our collective noses
that’s absolutely true too! there are multiple parties who share the responsibility… as always, the world is complex and rarely are things black and white