Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg

How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?

I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?

You’re right. The problem is not so much the concept as what happens when residential property can be turned into Hotels by installing an app.

I think going after short-term rentals is exactly what they should be doing. If they take bribes not to then that’s a huge problem though.

The problem here is that you’re competing with tourists sleeping four to a room and you just can’t outbid them for apartments, even with high wages. The solution here is to set aside properties for resident locals so that they aren’t forced to.

It’s the same impulse that made medieval people believe they could defend themselves from fairies and demons by saying the right things the right way. Some part of the insanity demands that a person who sees through the illusion can somehow win against the evil conspirators

Also bureaucracy and public ownership

and hyper-socialist policies

The Nordic Model isn’t really all that Socialist. It’s based on strong welfare and labor rights, but also very much on the free market. The most Socialist country in Europe is probably France

The effect of the 2 party system on how people understand politics and society is incredibly interesting

Maybe? We’re currently trying to implement a different economic transition, from pollution to green. I don’t think popular resistance to those changes imply that we should try for a happy medium instead. Similarly, the difficulty in achieving Socialism democratically doesn’t necessarily imply anything about how desirable the end state would be.

The big issue with “trying” communism is that it historically has only really occurred through violent revolution. The political instability in these situations gives a perfect opportunity for the seizing of power by exactly those kinds of people.

Gradualist Socialism was the political project for Social Democrats in post-war Europe. They had 30-odd years to achieve it in several countries. The issue becomes that once they started notching up victories, radicalism decreased, and that when they’re not starving and oppressed people categorically will not vote to let someone collectivize their farms and expropriate their homes. It seems clear to me that in real-world conditions, a Socialist state can only come about through revolution, because the path in a democracy is far too long and leaves far too many angles of attack from a liberal opposition.

The TB one for instance found that TB gets worse whenever there is an IMF loan but not in the same circumstances when there is a loan from somewhere else.

Yes, because the countries taking those loans aren’t distressed.

There is a reason China’s loans are so popular.

They are popular because they come with very little oversight. Countries with higher transparency do not find them very appealing, as Italy’s recent withdrawal from the program attests.

You don’t seem to realize that IMF loan conditions have very specific governance requirements which directly impact governmental decisions around health spending.

They come with very specific governance requirements which impact governmental decisions about a whole host of things, because those governments have proven incapable of sound fiscal management.

Again, the IMF is in no way perfect and I’m sure there is a myriad ways the conditions of their loans can be tailored to minimize negative outcomes. But that does not mean they cause these problems any more than every cancer death being a failure of medicine means doctors cause cancer.

I’ve looked at all of the sources you provide, and they all point out the fact that countries experience bad outsomes after an IMF intervention, which nobody’s disputed. My argument is that countries in similar dire straights will experience even worse outcomes if there is no such intervention. As an example, I could name Venezuela, which experienced an extreme increase in child mortality, your favored metric, after leaving the IMF. The root cause is economic distress, not the IMF intervention.

Minimizing the negative effects of government failure is absolutely worth examining. Identifying the mistakes made by the IMF in past interventions is a noble goal. But we should not blame international organizations when poor governance causes countries to fail.

You will see a lot of bad outcomes following an IMF intervention for the same reason you will see a lot of bad outcomes following oncology visits. Once you’ve gotten to the point the IMF get involved, things are already going to hell. What do you believe the effect on infant mortality of bankruptcy to be?

Which Arab nations are Joe Biden currently exterminating, then?

China is way way worse than the IMF. The IMF restructures the debts of distressed countries to help them avoid bankruptcy. China sabotages this sort of help by refusing to negotiate on the same terms as other creditors, preventing the IMF from doing it’s job.

Asserting that Joe Biden hasn’t committed any genocides is not denying the holocaust. You know this very well, I think.

Which Arab nations have Joe Biden exterminated, exactly?

Genocide Joe? 🙄

People are really working to rob that word of all meaning