Homeless Friend posted:

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

Disneyworld has a bunch of themed resorts based on real world attractions and every time I've checked the prices they are more expensive than going to the real things they're based on. It costs more to go to the Disneyworld Venetian Resort than it costs to actually go to Venice.

Homeless Friend posted:

Homeless Friend posted:

Homeless Friend posted:

quote:

MANILA, Philippines — The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas justified its latest rate hike and said taming inflation would not take a backseat despite risks of financial contagion from recent US bank failures.

BSP Governor Felipe Medalla elaborated on this on Friday, after an interview with CNBC. On Thursday, the central bank lifted its key rate by 25 basis points to 6.25%, as persistent supply-demand imbalance continued to stoke inflation.

“While some have raised concerns that price stability may take a backseat to financial stability in light of the recent global banking turmoil, the situation is quite different here in the Philippines,” Medalla said in a series of tweets.

The BSP boss already mentioned some of these points on Thursday, considering that the BSP matched the US Federal Reserve’s rate action.

The BSP’s 25 bps rate hike came at the heels of financial contagion fears enveloping the US economy. Experts blamed hefty interest rate hikes as one of the culprits which caused a series of bank runs in the world’s largest economy in March. The collapse of US-based Silicon Valley Bank in past weeks, followed by other mid-sized lenders, rocked the global economy as banking stocks plummeted everywhere.

“We can afford to focus on our first pillar, price stability, and bringing inflation to a target-consistent path because our second pillar, financial stability, remains exactly that: a pillar of strength,” Medalla said.

Authorities quickly assured that Philippine banks, and by extension the country’s financial system, were not exposed to the contagion from the US.

That Medalla reiterated this reflected the country’s inflation woes. Consumer price growth currently hovered at 8.6% year-on-year in February, accelerating to highs unseen in 14 years. Supply bottlenecks and expensive fuel prices have sapped the public’s purchasing power.

Despite this, the BSP already revised its inflation forecast for this year and the next, on the basis of a gloomy global outlook and the cooling impact of the interest rate hikes on the economy. For 2023, the central bank expects inflation to average 6% from the previous 6.1%, breaching its 2-4% while in 2024, they forecast inflation to move at a pace of 2.9%.

Central banks, like the BSP, use rate hikes to rein in demand pressures that are stoking price growth. The higher interest rates work by prompting consumers and businesses to think twice about borrowing money. This, in turn, lessens the money that’s circulating in the economy and chasing a limited supply of consumer items.

These rate hikes take 12 to 18 months before it seeps into the economy.

“We believe we have done almost enough and are confident that non-monetary interventions by the national government will complement our efforts and help bring inflation under control,” Medalla said.

Homeless Friend posted:

quote:

“As property owners, my clients hold a water right,” Gammage said. “This is the same as all the farmers along the river, who hold land that has been irrigated, in most cases for over 100 years. That water right is valuable property, which can be transferred. It’s like buying and selling land, except that, Colorado River water can only be transferred if it goes through an extensive review process at both the State and Federal Levels. Any proposed transfer is independently analyzed.”

In neighboring Mohave County, Supervisor Travis Lingenfelter describes what he sees as a battle for the future of Colorado River communities, adding that a number of East Coast investment firms have been trying to get in on the action.

“These companies are actually pretty savvy in that they come out West, purchase and pick up cheap rural agricultural land, they sit on it for a little while and then they’re trying to sell the water,” Lingenfelter said. “I don’t think that they should be allowed to profiteer off of Arizona’s finite resources … If they’re coming after a portion of our only water supply on the river for many of our communities, we have to fight it.”

It’s not just Arizona. East Coast firms have bought up thousands of acres of irrigated land across the Southwest, local officials told CNN. Water Asset Management, a New York-based investment firm, has become one of the biggest players in the field, with purchases in Arizona, California, Colorado and Nevada as well as pending deals in New Mexico and Texas.

Water Asset Management president Matt Diserio has called water in the United States “a trillion-dollar market opportunity,” and said he started the company “on the core belief that scarce clean water is the resource defining this century, much like plentiful, cheap dirty oil defined the last century.”

Relentlessboredomm posted:

Was wondering if this had already started, Wall Street firms buying rural land in the Southwest for the water rights and then selling the water off.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/22/business/southwest-water-colorado-river-wall-street-climate/index.html

Rectal Death Adept posted:

quit gettin mad at the economy

DancingShade posted:

Brics is going to build its own treehouse and the USA & vassals will be outside complaining they weren't invited even though they keep throwing eggs at everyone else's houses.

Then it's going to rain.

Homeless Friend posted:

StratGoatCom posted:

The rain being climate catastrophe?

Relentlessboredomm posted:

Lmao this country is so loving stupid. They’re gonna pretend they care about the children while ignoring climate change, mass shootings, and rampant homelessness to attack social media. And not to address real social media issues, just the fact that the Chinese have a popular social media site, that’s it.

I hope they ban it and the zoomers finally decide it’s time to purge the olds. I’d be honored to be sacrificed during the zoomers holy war against the olds.

Homeless Friend posted:

Beached Whale posted:

I mostly just feel bad for the true believers. My partner has a friend who divorced their husband for various reasons, mostly financial mismanagement. He had a brilliant plan, where if you don't pay your mortgage, the banks will actually just bluff on foreclosure and you can live in your house for free (few know this). He's been reduced to selling his furniture on facebook marketplace, while also holding down his side hustle of constantly shilling for meme stonks on twitter. He calls himself a "divorce ape" and has managed to burn through his marriage, his house, and pretty much all of his possessions so he can go to disney world multiple times a year and buy AMC.

kazmeyer posted:

The poo poo with Credit Suisse and UBS and all that apparently involves some of these GameStop short bags being passed around like a really explosive hot potato, and every time somebody new gets on the hook and takes one look at the balance sheet they immediately try to bail.

webcams for christ posted:

the fun kind of doom:

https://twitter.com/soberlook/status/1639209087786270720

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1639105248810737664

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1639105248810737664

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1639105248810737664

webcams for christ posted:

the fun kind of doom:

https://twitter.com/soberlook/status/1639209087786270720

Homeless Friend posted:

Nothus posted:

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1639061954282110979?t=94_SiTIUf4KFbXQNg5p2Sg&s=19

Good but lol at individual states thinking they can do enforce something like this

Nothus posted:

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1639061954282110979?t=94_SiTIUf4KFbXQNg5p2Sg&s=19

Good but lol at individual states thinking they can do enforce something like this

Homeless Friend posted:

Homeless Friend posted:

Horseshoe theory posted:

Inshallah Vornado will be destroyed.

DancingShade posted:

I mean. Yeah. But saying your competitor is a security threat is way sexier than admitting you no longer have the talent to even make an app for children.

Iron Crowned posted:

Here's the thing about baking: It's chemistry. If you're bad at chemistry, you're bad at baking.

This is what happened when I tried to make buttermilk biscuits a while back:


(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/wideofthepost/status/1639105248810737664

webcams for christ posted:

concise argument:

https://twitter.com/somali_ics/status/1638696574787244032

agreed

gradenko_2000 posted:

it's essentially the same scam they've been running with Huawei: China beat Qualcomm / Samsung to 5G technology, so just raise "security concerns" to have the US and as many other allies as possible refuse to use their hardware, because competing on an even field is unacceptable when you're losing

and part of those sanctions against Huawei included preventing their phones from being able to access the Google Store and Google services. Huawei has since found ways around this, but the idea was that this would be such a big blow to convenience and usability that people would stop using Huawei phones because they'd be crippled

but you only get the ability to cripple a company in that way because Google represents such a gigantic part of the smartphone and internet ecosystem

and that takes us back to China: the "Great Firewall" of the PRC is often touted as some kind of domestic social control measure - prevent Chinese citizens from reaching out into the wider world and realize how rotten their country and their government is.

what it really is, is internet protectionism. By preventing the likes of Google and Facebook from entering and operating in the country, China has created the conditions by which their own, locally-developed internet firms can take hold, in much the same way that you'd prevent, say, Nike shoes from entering your country so that local shoe factories can continue to exist, because otherwise they'd be outcompeted by globalized Western firms with rock-bottom prices

and you want your own domestic internet firms to have room to grow, because otherwise Facebook takes over, and not only does that mean any profits from social media get expropriated by the likes of Zuckerberg (at the expense of your own citizens) but the way that these social networks are run is at the behest of Western interests, whether it means Facebook gets to influence your elections, or as we've said with Huawei, they abide by American decrees to lock your phones out of their ecosystem in an attempt to maintain monopoly conditions

or to draw yet another comparison: Joko Widodo of Indonesia recently said that he doesn't want his country's government to continue to work with Visa/Mastercard, because he understands that these are Western countries, and they could pull the plug at any time as a means of punishing or blackmailing any country or organization that leans too heavily on them. And we know this to be true because they tried to do it with Russia!

finally, this brings us all the way back to TikTok: the US is losing social media share to ByteDance, in the same way that WeChat or Weibo would have lost out to Western social media if China had simply let the latter run unregulated a decade-and-a-half ago, and they want to tug on that leash... but they're doing so in such a cack-handed manner that it's not going to work