Those who claim that the dollar is in decline often argue that for the last 600 years, reserve currencies have risen and fallen in tandem with their home economies. As the United States’ share of the global economy diminishes, they claim, the dollar’s role will also diminish. But the truth is that there were no dominant global reserve currencies before the U.S. dollar. It is the only currency ever to have played such a pivotal role in international commerce.
Even in a precious metals-backed era China and (proto-)Germany used silver rather than gold
(This is why the Nevada Silver Rush and the Opium Wars were contemporary – the China trade was draining European silver, so a new source was a major prize AND the British cultivated [Company-sourced] opium as a counterbalancing export to China AND they turned to force to turn terms of trade in their favor )
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I cannot emphasize enough that this was the historical way markets operated and it was a failure, that governments required that staples like flour be sold at “customary prices”, stable over time and matched to the economic capacity of customers.
But to the extent the product had any relation to a larger market (which in fairness, bulky or quickly perishable goods might largely not) affected by actual supply and demand (from say annually variable harvests and military campaigns) and yielding actual market prices, the market price rising above this regulated price would not lead to customers receiving goods below cost (opportunity cost is cost too), instead they would find shortages, shortchanging, and adulterated goods.
Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream
Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.
(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)
California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!
In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”
Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.
Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”
And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.
You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.
And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.
(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)
Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.
The idea that the Spanish Reconquista was “driving away the Muslim Invaders” is kind of funny when you consider the timescales involved.
Most of Iberia fell to the Umayyads between 710 and 780 AD. Iberia had been Christianized in the early 4th century, so that is about 400-450 years as Christian territories (a lot of that with the Visigoths’ Aryan Christianity). The majority of the Reconquista happened between about 1100 and 1300, so that is about 400-600 years as Muslim territories.
Granada was finally captured in 1492, approximately 780 years after it had first been captured by the Umayyads. Not only is that almost twice as long as it had been nominally Christian, it is approximately 80 years longer than Granada had been Roman (c 220 BC to c480 AD)!
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
The US and South America had big expatriate populations from all the Axis countries – remember Japanese internment? Remember when Peru was led by a guy named “Fujimori”? – for the same reason they were all doing imperial expansion, which was that they had pulled themselves together as modern countries too late to claim colonies of their own and so they were experiencing huge population outflows as citizens sought opportunity elsewhere
Well, also the Nazi thing because the only European governments with the capacity to even notice what was going on in South America – Spain and Portugal – were fascist-friendly at the time, Israel spinning up the capacity to go after them from scratch was a real testament to the strength of their intelligence community, which drew on tradition and experience dating back to the spymasters of imperial Central and Eastern Europe.
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
The US and South America had big expatriate populations from all the Axis countries – remember Japanese internment? Remember when Peru was led by a guy named “Fujimori”? – for the same reason they were all doing imperial expansion, which was that they had pulled themselves together as modern countries too late to claim colonies of their own and so they were experiencing huge population outflows as citizens sought opportunity elsewhere
please god above can someone explain to me why we’re still working on self driving cars when trains exist
“we’re training them to interpret road signs!” Train goes same place every day. No road signs.
“when forced to choose between old lady and child, which is more ethical for the car to hit?” Fence around train track. Nobody on the road.
“people with disabilities preventing them from driving themselves can be independent” Yes but also. Train.
“reduces the dangers of fatigue with long distance trucking” Train.
“the technology is not yet price effective for the average driver” Train.
Seriously come on choo choo bitches let’s goooooooooo
The minute you can have a train deliver things to a dozen buildings in a single neighborhood, then you might start to have something resembling a point.
The last mile is the hard part. Trains will never, ever solve it. Short of wild plans to use abundant energy from nuclear to dig massive underground tunnel networks, at which point ‘automatic underground small train’ and ‘automatic underground self-driving cars’ become the same thing - that would probably work if we could get there from here, but we can’t because people are stupid about both tunneling and nuclear power.
From historical experience of the decline of the LA streetcar system in the automotive age, “I can switch to the next lane when someone’s blocking this one”, “I can take an 82-block route along arterial streets but then at the end a 7-block final leg somewhat uphill” and “if this street is too crowded and slow I can use the next parallel major street over” were all critically important things cars but not rail transit can do
Cargo service further requires either space-consuming dedicated sidings or a willingness to have a train just sit in the street unloading for a while (streetcar-era cities sometimes resupplied outlying stores from central-city or dockside warehouses with overnight trams)
