Just stumbled upon this (it’s a podcast, 7 min, contains some explicit language).

I apologize for losing my shit here

I just spent 7 minutes losing my shit. I apologize, but No regrets. Because they’re doing it again. Trump & his sycophants are spreading lies, attacking our democracy and inciting violence again. On purpose. They are traitors. We must defeat them.

Yeah, I was wondering the same, but didn’t want to edit the original title. Maybe there are some details that are new, I don’t know. What the CCP has been doing for a long time now is a shame.

Yep. Why China censors banned Winnie the Pooh

And the next whataboutism! What a waste of time.

Yeah, these are the ‘tankies’ who got banned on Reddit, right? I guess it takes time until they get a minority, but it’s good that the community grows steadily.

One thing that’s obvious here on Lemmy is that whataboutism works only in one direction. If an article is critical of China, Russia, Iran, or other dictatorships, you’d read, “But about U.S./EU/the West”. But there are tons of articles here critical of Western countries, and it’s accepted. Why is this? Just wumaos?

I suppose that’s the mechanism they’re using to centrally manage the economy, by controlling fund transfers to lower levels of government.

I would agree with this view. The local governments are responsible for the majority of spendings (including pensions, health care), but they can barely raise funds themselves.

The central government has already said that the new debt will be forwarded to the local government, and that it will be ‘off-budget’, meaning the money goes to LGFVs. The future will tell us how this ends up, but the risks are high imo given the country’s debt burden is so much higher than in most other countries as you suggested.

The real change in retail pricing might be discrimination pricing (or ‘surveillance pricing’ as it is now called sometimes). Simply speaking, it uses personal data to personalize prices not just for each customer, but also for each customer depending on actual circumstances such as day time, weather, an individual’s pay day, and other data, collected through apps, loyalty cards, …

As one article says, there is One Person One Price:

"If I literally tell you, the price of a six-pack is $1.99, and then I tell someone else the price of a six-pack for them is $3.99, this would be deemed very unfair if there was too much transparency on it,” [University of Chicago economists Jean-Pierre] Dubé said. “But if instead I say, the price of a six-pack is $3.99 for everyone, and that’s fair. But then I give you a coupon for $2 off [through your app] but I don’t give the coupon to the other person, somehow that’s not as unfair as if I just targeted a different price.”

The linked article is a very long read but worth everyone’s time. Very insightful.

I am thinking the same. Must be some sort of Streisand effect :-)

Yeah, and not to forget:

One interviewee admitted to paying for access to a data set. “I bought access to an official archive and altered the data to support my hypotheses.”

After the Trump verdict, most Republicans say they’re OK with having a criminal as president

Last week, Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony charges in the hush-money case against him. Compared to before the verdict, the biggest changes we found in a post-conviction poll conducted between May 31 and June 2 are in Republicans’ positions on felony, crime in general, and the presidency. They have shifted in a way that puts the verdict in a more favorable light and keeps Trump’s candidacy viable. For example, fewer Republicans think it should be illegal to pay hush money for the purposes of influencing an election than did a year ago, and more now say felons should be allowed to become president than did a few months ago.

You can’t make such a decision based on simple financial calculations, not in the least as there is no way to make reasonable predictions in our current market environments. Ask any investment advisor, and they will tell you to buy your home if you can afford it.

This is off-topic: Why is the NYT accessing the camera when going to the linked article?

Israeli activists battle over Gaza-bound aid convoys

Months after some Israelis started to protest against aid lorries entering Gaza at the main Kerem Shalom crossing, the battle has moved to other key junctions, where rival groups of activists do their best to block or protect aid convoys […]

Right-wing activists, including Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank, have uploaded dozens of videos of crowds, including some very young children, hurling food onto the ground and stamping on boxes of aid.

You’ll find a short video embedded in the linked article.

I doesn’t seem so given Israeli officials’ statements. But it will have a long-term political impact if Israel ignores that imho. It could lead to a higher degree of ‘diplomatic isolation’ for Israel and its allies for a long time. That’s just my opinion. And there’re arrest warrants, too.

As international support for an independent Palestine grows, here’s what Israelis and Palestinians now think of the two-state solution

With the announcement by Norway and Ireland that they have recognised Palestine as an independent state, and Spain expected to follow suit by the end of May, it appears that international momentum for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is growing.

The concept has long been supported by the US and its allies, as well as most Arab states and the United Nations […] Could things be different under different leadership? To answer this, we need to know whether the Israeli and Palestinian people could be persuaded to accept such a plan. Here it’s worth taking a look at what polling tells us.

They have to stop the use of forced labour in China, the U.S. and wherever this bs happens. This “U.S. bad, China bad okay” stance is unbearable.

This is related, particularly as the discussion is to a large part around cheap cars:

China: Carmakers Implicated in Uyghur Forced Labor - (February 2024)

China’s electric vehicle battery supply chain shows signs of forced labor, report says - (June 2023)

This article is highly biased and misleading imo.

First of all, it doesn’t make sense to compare economic policy performance by a single metric, be it inflation or GDP or anything else, let alone if you compare economies in different periods.

For example, the high inflation during president Carter’s term was mainly due to the oil crisis in the 1970s. President Biden started his term in 2020 - right when the pandemic broke out and subsequent interruptions of global supply chain caused a soaring inflation. You may or may not agree with both presidents’ economic policies, but you can’t obviously blame Carter or Biden for the oil crises and the pandemic, respectively.

The articles also says:

Neither the Fed nor economists in general view housing prices as inflation. The economic illiterates do not count asset prices in general as inflation.

The ‘economic illiterates’ use inflation to measure prices of consumer goods and services but explicitly not prices of assets. This is why rent can reasonably be part of such an index, but house prices probably not (exactly because a house is an asset and not a consumer good). This is also one reason why you should always look at a dashboard of metrics and interpret them to the individual circumstances (e.g., in different epoches, cultures, etc.) rather than looking at just one measurement.

So the inflation and the way how it is measured (there are multiple ways to do so) is certainly an imperfect metric, but this is true for any metric. And comparing the economic policies over several decades by just using a single metric doesn’t make any sense.

Probably, but as the article’s authors say, hate “does not mean rage, anger or general dislike”. It appears to be a different concept.

“we have these “assets” but we aren’t going to tell you what they are because we don’t have to”

Yes, this is exactly what off-balance sheet, OBS for short, means.

Suppose a company has a line of credit at the bank of, say, 1,000,000 dollars, but the credit line comes with a financial covenant stating that the debt-equity-ratio must not exceed 0.5, meaning that the company’s total debt must not exceed half the company’s equity at any point of time.

Suppose now the company wants to buy a new machine on credit, but the costs for this new asset would violate the covenant rule. So the company founds a subsidiary. The subsidiary would then buy the machine to immediately lease it back to the parent company. As the parent company doesn’t legally own the machine, it is not on its balance sheet, meaning the debt-to-equity ratio is fine, but it can control and use the asset (the machine) as it is the company’s subsidiary’s asset.

The company now pays leasing fees (instead of interest rates, had it bought the machine directly on credit), which, of course, stresses its liquidity (very much as it would be in case of a direct credit).

So OBS assets can technically improve ratios, but they are hard to analyze and assess (but they can deceive shareholders and other stakeholders, including authorities, by conveying a higher solvency and liquidity than they actually have).

Large companies and banks have many opportunities to create such OBS. They often create so-called Special-Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) following a similar approach as in our small example. Banks can also move assets through securitization, leaseback agreements, accounts receivables, derivatives.

Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons to use this tool, but if and when you overdo it, you may not know yourself what risks your entire business actually bears. It becomes incalculable.

And if then, say, you can’t pay back a small loan because investment A went wrong, then investment B that has initially nothing to do with A may also suffer, which then effects C …

[Edit typo.]