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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Banks are allowed to use fractional reserve to lend several times more than they are required to warrant themselves, governments only force banks to have an entity who will pinky swear to write down up to a certain amount in everyone’s accounts in case the banks can’t. Neither skill nor labor produce money, central banks produce money as a loan with a repayment obligation, skill and labor only shift around the fractional obligations created by banks from thin air. Crypto is actually generated as an effect of the skill and labor required to secure its own ledger. People use golf courses to claim carbon offsets they sell in get-rich-quick schemes, or stamp collections, or digital collectibles, or natural gas extraction plants, or a thousand other schemes; everything can be, and is being used to scam someone somewhere at every moment, doesn’t mean everything is a scam.


















  • At this point, they don’t have many options, since their economy is based around using the waterways as main transport routes.

    Keep in mind Russia can have a container ship delivered from China right to Moscow, and viceversa.

    Russia’s best bet (around 2000-2010), was to befriend the EU, while getting rid of all their internal corruption, and start treating ex-USSR republics as proper states instead of relying on forcing puppet governments in them. Especially in Ukraine, they shouldn’t have burned their puppet government in 2014 by making it accept a worse deal than what the EU was offering, definitely not before at least having the country split in half and Crimea+Donbass secured as separate puppet countries.

    By uniting Ukraine, then making an enemy out of the EU, while still allowing a ton of internal corruption, Putin has screwed Russia royally.

    Russia’s only options right now are to either:

    • Roll over and ask the EU, Ukraine and NATO to pretty please forgive them… which Putin would not survive (best case scenario, he’d stand before the Hague tribunal, if he got to live that long)
    • Dig an even deeper hole for themselves until they go full nuclear… which Russia as a country would not survive (but maybe Putin could, in a good bunker)
    • Have a civil war… which Putin might be able to flee, while whoever ended up on top could roll over and ask the EU, Ukraine and NATO to forgive them pretty please.

    Speculatively:

    • Spend some bucks on Iran to support Hamas going full berserk in Gaza in an attempt to shift US attention from Ukraine… (which already had Republicans ask to reduce military aid for Ukraine while increasing it for Israel)… and hope to secure some more of Donbass before those F16 make it basically impossible for Russia to do anything. Then push for an armistice with the new borders.

    But it’s kind of impossible for Ukraine to willingly agree to that, highly unlikely for the EU to lift its sanctions just because, and NATO would still rather have Russia disappear as a threat completely.

    The EU might agree if it included guaranteeing a safe tax-free railway corridor to China, which would on one hand still hurt Russia, but on the other they could also benefit from a railway connection to China, even if it isn’t that much better than having container ships go from China right to Moscow.