ok real talk. is this a feasible strategy. just send your (replaceable) head of state for a diplomatic summit wearing a gun or better yet a s**cide vest.
think about it. you dont make a HEAD OF STATE go through security right? no way youd pat them down.
france has an immediate replacement for macron anyway because its a republic, leaders change all the time, etc
russia by contrast convulses!
diplomatic suicide is *only possible for republics.* a competitive advantage against over our peers!!!
the guy who replaced putin would put on a show of being mad but who cares. wed privately explain that he owed his new elevated position to france. and we have plenty more expendable NATO leaders to send to him if he gets our drift
in a system of alliances one ally can handle the bomb and the remote detonation of the head of state of another. ideally he wont even know its coming. easy deniability
the US would have no problem detonating macron and i doubt france would object either
in monetary economics, greshams law states that good money drives out bad
ie: if there exist different currencies with the same _legally-mandated_ value but different market values--say, quarters made of silver vs zinc--people will pay using the shitty ones and hoard the others
this is almost trivially true, but an easy check of the law can be conducted by looking at the number of quarters in circulation from the years after 1965 and comparing them to the number of quarters from 1964 and earlier, when quarters still contained silver
oh yeah sorry baby is running amok
greshams law is "bad money drives out good"
anyway i have a related hypothesis about science that i dont quite trust but perhaps seems under-considered
ok so maybe im still not calibrated. everyone is mentioning polls here but poll threads while i try to make them fun are really usually the result of me interrogating an idea and are partly a map of a discourse space, partly a conversation with myself
a thing im coming to appreciate at a new level is my first animal behavior lab PI
his field had been arguing about a facet of animal behavior for decades, there were all sorts of inelegant models with inorganic parameterizations lifted from rational actor economics
so, this guy comes up with a neat simple model of how his favorite animal might actually act in an abstraction of their real circumstances, and goes to show that this tailored structural model can explain their behavior equally well as the boring reduced form
there were some experimental elements of this that i was involved in; we had some neat approaches to falsifying one of them that we were developing with a really impish line of argument
i want to thank everyone on the right for setting up alternative systems of schooling, payment, comms, etc
apart from their immediate utility, when your successors take power in 1-50 years and start doing the same stuff your currently trying to escape. these will be essential
im serious about gratitude, i just see a hegemonizing spirit as basically inevitable in whatever cultural power is ascendant, rather than intrinsic to a faction. tho i dont trust your future incarnation to be Different perhaps these institutions will survive to limit its power
in the meantime i appreciate your present cultural powerlessness because it makes our interactions low risk, free, equal. it is a delight to converse openly as fellow men who have no ability to sanction one another
please remember our old friendship after you ascend someday
any time you find yourself inclined to Support a Politician it can help to remember that some of the most important resources in politics are lists of email addresses of vulnerable elderly people who are milked for donations with nigerian prince tier emotional appeals
its not a matter of party this is just How Its Done
trumps campaign perhaps pioneered the now-common use of Nudge-like prechecked subscription boxes for monthly payments. you think an 80yo on social security is gonna notice that little checkbox