james22

Some, sure. But there's enough others that seem very genuinely shocked at American suburban and rural affluence to make it seem more reflective of the whole than not. And knowing what we know of the actual disparity, that's only to be expected.

They're more than a bit poorer. Because: If they did understand, they might be less content.

https://archive.ph/j6kgr

Nice.

You shoot/hunt, Parsad?

Well, China also the First Sino-Japan War, the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Civil War, and Mao's Great Leap Forward. Lots of externalities and bad decisions by a authoritarian. Europe has none of those excuses since the end of the Cold War. Losing your best men in World Wars and War Guilt has an effect, sure. But Europe's response (over-regulating bureaucracy) has been *their* choice.

During the 17 years between 2008 and 2025?

No, no external (Opium Wars) or internal (Taiping Rebellion) excuses. No excuse at all.

GDPR & European Innovation Culture: What the Evidence Shows https://medium.com/@AdamThierer/gdrp-european-innovation-culture-what-the-economic-evidence-shows-b19d2309de07

The spice will flow.

https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/strait-of-hormuz-a-citrini-field

Iran’s mining operation was not primarily a financial experiment. It was a demonstration that a sufficiently motivated state actor can construct a parallel monetary infrastructure using physical assets, namely, energy and computing hardware, that no financial sanction can directly target. The US can freeze dollar accounts. It cannot freeze joules. It cannot embargo the mathematical relationship between electricity and cryptographic proof. Iran found the gap between those two realities and moved billions of dollars through it over the better part of a decade. . . . The deeper irony is that American sanctions policy, by severing Iran from the dollar system, may have inadvertently subsidized the development of exactly the kind of alternative monetary infrastructure that Washington most fears. If you exclude a sophisticated adversary from the dollar, that adversary will find another instrument. Iran found Bitcoin. It is worth asking which other sanctioned states are already mining, and what happens to global crypto markets the next time one of them goes dark.

Iran built a machine for converting cheap energy into hard currency under the noses of the most sophisticated financial surveillance apparatus in the world. The machine worked. It worked for years, and it likely suppressed Bitcoin prices, if modestly, for every quarter it ran. https://newsletter.amuseonx.com/p/operation-epic-fury-may-have-done

https://gcaptain.com/the-hormuz-hypothesis-what-if-the-u-s-navy-isnt-in-a-hurry-to-reopen-the-strait/