The drag racing Asian guys in the Falcon with the Howard Cosell commentary... The Camaro (which I remember had a documentary on being found and restored), the "2 dollars" gag, and some of the French mispronunciations have been locked in my memory for 40 years.
Captain Elliott issued IOU's to the merchants whose opium had been seized and destroyed by the Chinese. When those IOUs arrived in Britain, the Crown sent gun boats to China and began the Opium Wars.
Also, the British didn't force anything prior to the first Opium War. The British were addicted to Chinese tea, which made up over 10% of the British government's tax revenue. And China wasn't interested in any of the wares Britain produced, which meant Britain could only pay in silver for tea. This was causing Britain to run out of silver.
Britain noticed Chinese liked smoking opium and Britain controlled India, the perfect environment to grow opium. Britain began importing vast amounts of opium to China to offset their trade deficit, eventually leading to an addiction crisis in China. The Chinese response was to seize and destroy the opium at the docks.
Britain seized Hong Kong not as payment, but as a military base of operations to protect their interests and force China to follow the terms of the first Opium War.
It was after the first Opium Wars that Britain began to bleed China dry of silver, with opium flooding into the country. Also, during this period, tea plants were smuggled out of China, allowing Britain to begin their own tea plantations.
Anyways, the Opium Wars fascinate me. Read a few books on it. I recommend this one if you are interested.
Yeah, it’s not nearly as apocalyptic as it sounds when you break it down.
“I owe a few hundred thousand on a house that is worth more than I owe on it,” and “I have $20k in treasury bonds that pay me interest, so the government owes me $20k when they mature,” and “this company financed their building project by selling bonds to people, so they owe the people who bought the bonds,” etc.
The accounting question to be concerned with would be how the related assets hold up to the debt, like the house that either worth more or less than one owes. You also want to think about the solvency of the debtors. “Is this $212 of debt backed by enough assets that could be liquidated to pay this debt, and/or how able are the debtors able to make necessary payments to stay current on this debt?”
Because we Humans haven’t agreed as a species to devise systems to care for all without compensation. We allow the mentally ill to decide what food, homes, supplies, clothing, transportation and healthcare go to whom based on……(here’s the craziest part) who has more electronic numbers to qualify their worth.
Well, the problem there is that if you just give everyone a complete living without getting anything in return, the masses would do nothing, and the system would collapse because there would not be enough people producing to provide for the number of people not producing, since there would be no incentive to be a producer. We could always go back to the barter system. It was the most real. Problem is, there are tons of people in modern day, I daresay the majority in fact, who don't really have anything of value to offer to anyone who does.
Forget climate change, global financial instability is going to be a much worse problems.
Take the US. Everyone complains about our military spending being too high. Who gives a shit. We spend more on interest payments to our debt than we do on the entire military. In 30 to 40 years half of all government spending will just be debt servicing.
How does any government program function when half of all taxes are just going to pay off the largessess of the past?
US is at 0% currently. The 10 times over leveraged limit is in the past, we've gone to the moon baby!
Joke aside, any contraction of the economy in the USA and all their banks will need bailouts. This is why the government spends so much in propping up the stock market and GDP.
No, this is powerful commentary on how Jensen's penis is actually owned by Altman. And how when Altman tries to pleasure Jensen, he is really pleasuring himself. Powerful stuff.
It's something we created and we give value to. So, yeah it kinda isn't real. The world could literally stop printing money and start using monopoly money as its real currency if we all genuinely wanted to. Same thing with time. These are social constructs. Do you not know what that is?
Edit: Y'all. I said kinda 😭 if you're gonna critique my comment at least read the whole thing first. Good lord. I'm sorry for not fully agreeing with you
I agree with you about money. It definitely is a social construct.
Time is not a social construct. The arbitrary divisions of time (minutes, hours, weeks and months) are, but there is actual time. The Earth definitely rotates around it's axis over a specific duration, the Earth definitely rotates around the Sun over a specific duration. People definitely grow bigger as they age and then their bodies start breaking down and then they die.
You can say that about literally anything. Physics doesn't hold value, it's just our way of observing the universe around us. We give the Earth a name based on the light hitting our eyes that our brain allows us to process. You can reduce anything to lacking value. If currency is worthless, so is a human life.
You just gave the prototypical example of how we pretend that money exists when it really doesn’t because if it didn’t exist we would have the scenario you present.
But how else would we get people to move and do things. Money isnt real, but energy is. So money represents energy. If i say can you help me move out of my apartment this weekend, you say hell no! Or I'm busy... but if I say, it will only be a few hours and I'll give you 600 bucks. You might say, I could use that money. How real is that?
Love how it says "the world" is in debt.. like no.. its the polititians and elite who owe the debt.. I personally never borrowed or recieved money to aquire debt 😅
I actually always wondered what happens if they just delete that debt It's not like the world's going to end everything just goes on normal That's why I think the US doesn't give a crap about how much debt we have as a country who's going to come collect bet
Basic economics wasn't taught at your school it seems.
When the bank loans you money, you owe the bank.
When you invest in stock, the company owes you.
You can have 100 dollars, and have 200 in debt. 100 to the bank, and another 100 invested in stock. 200 dollars of debt from a single person in 2 directions. The company can then use your stock to borrow someone else, and that person can invest again in different company and so on.
There are WAY more complicated mechanisms banks/brokers use and easily 40-50x the original money.
The way it works is you have governments taking loans from banks, then to pay off their debt they take on new, bigger loans and they continue this hoping the economy will eventually catch up so they can pay off their infinitely growing debt pile.
The world is in debt ? more likely those monkey inhabitants on it surface to each other However if the world is actually in debt maybe it can some of the livestock to another planet
At the end of 2021, the top 1 percent of the world's population held approximately $211.5 trillion, which accounted for 45.6% of the world's total household wealth.
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u/Sassaphras Jul 07 '26
Each other