I used IAU for the few instances I banked gold as a hedge. But I’ve never held longer than a year and it’s never outperformed by overall portfolio returns.

It’s just not a good long term investment.

But in smaller, more local races

They still routinely get blown out 80/20 on a good year because they have no media presence and nobody with a chance at winning wants to run under their brand.

If you can win as a Green, you’d just run as a Democrat in the same way that Libertarians who want to win just run as Republicans.

Just like the DSA does.

The D in DSA stands for Democrats.

They’re a caucus, not a party. And when they do win, they’ll often struggle to keep their elected officials loyal to the platform.

I’ve heard this argument before.

I’ve already heard the argument that national campaigns are how you gain national media publicity. So it’s the most cost effective way to raise the Green Party profile.

However you want to slice it, the current political system is very deliberately designed to keep people like Jill Stein quarantined and silenced. Insisting she’s the problem seems to miss the forest of disinformation and corporate propaganda for a very small pro-environmentalist tree.

Authoritarian governments do not like the anonymity the internet affords it’s citizens.

The internet has never properly afforded anonymity. Advertisers are constantly trying to tag and track people inside and between websites, apps, and platforms. What we’re seeing isn’t a new iteration of the surveillance state, but a weaponization of existing tracking tools.

won’t someone think of the children?

I mean, this cuts both ways. Because there is really, legitimately, and seriously a crisis of predation by commercial vendors and individual exploiters alike that’s laser-targeted to the most vulnerable end-users of the internet. That’s not exclusively children. Plenty of these scammers and creepers target the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the gullible. And the fact that our federal and state institutions seem cavalier to the degree of fraud and malicious practices on the internet, when they claim to be so obsessed with protecting us from migrants, terrorists, evil drug dealers, and domestic radicals really speaks to their uselessness relative to their stated purpose.

But on the other hand, yeah. All of this paranoia around kids using the internet does seem to be a backdoor to harass minority groups and dissidents. I might be more concerned about this except - per the above - they’ve clearly demonstrated vanishingly little technical savvy or procedural competency to date.

Seems like we’re going to continue to get the same Big Punishments For Minor Infractions fear-inducing policing we’ve come to expect from the War on Drugs/Crime/Terrorism of the last sixty years.

I hear he doesn’t poop but he’s also sunk a turd into a Par 6 in one swing.

She’s mid.

Better than 90% of politicians from Massachusetts, but its a low bar.

the head of a country that s litteraly worse in any metric

Oh absolutely. Have you seen his insane tweets? The man is unhinged.

I can think of a few notable differences.

I think the best way to destroy authoritanism, is to help people become so independent of other’s resources, that they can just decide to opt out of work for good.

Would you posit that one can prosper once they have become self-reliant by achieving political, economic, and military independence?

They would still have small vulnerabilities, but it would be quite quite hard to force them and keep them in a toxic workplace, if they can just chill for months or even YEARS, without being forced to work.

I mean, in theory, sure. But in practice, you’d need a large labor surplus that was unassailable by settler-colonialist looters. How do you marshal these reserves and defend them adequately?

So are we closer to that revolution that 10 days ago ? 10 year ago ?

Some would say we’ve made progress by leaps and bounds.

“We should have One Big Revolution!”

“Noooo! We should have a bunch of itty bitty revolutions!”

“Okay, fine. Let’s do Trotskyism as a compromise.”

“Sure thing brow, just turn around real quick”

Enough complaining about how reactionaries talk about Castro.

This is now a Ubre Blanca appreciation thread. Post your support for our glorious comrade cow and her commitment to providing ice cream for the revolution.

Lyrics that would fit neatly into a thrash metal band song.

Get the fuck off Twitter, get the fuck off Reddit, get the fuck off Facebook.

I mean, way ahead of you. But we’re just jerking each other off if we think saying this downthread of a Lemmy post is changing anyone’s mind. This is the most Preaching To The Choir ass post you can make outside of an actual church.

We weren’t ready for the internet and it’s time to turn it off.

eye-roll

Listen, if you want to walk around downtown with a big sandwich board that says “Log The Fuck Off And Touch Grass”, I’ll cheer for you when I see you. But there’s a reason people flock to an easily accessible portal for social engagement. And its naive to keep shouting “Log the fuck off!” from within the medium you can’t seem to quit yourself.

Idk, man, but its a statement that gets you upvotes.

New Zealand will go where its billionaire expat refugee community tells it to go.

Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they always send the poor?

please don’t say gold is almost guaranteed to go up…

I mean, in so far as inflation is almost guaranteed to occur in a productive economy, gold is almost guaranteed to go up over the long term.

A better question might be “Is an investment in gold going to outperform another asset class?”

I looked into it as well but in the end went with a Gov Bond ETF instead.

That’s been the gambit with gold for a while. Point to a short term up-cycle in price and insist that’s a long term ROI you can count on.

But when you look at the actual price history

there are long periods when the price is either flat or negative. Risk of holding gold relative to, say, the S&P or even basic Treasuries can get pretty high, unless you’re very confident we’re in one of those rare '04-'11 sustained price rises.

Even as a hedge against short term downturns, it kinda sucks. If you look at the big historical recessions - '81, '90, '01, '08, '20 - the price of gold had typically already jumped ('01 being a notable exception) and subsequent years were fairly flat. Spikes in gold prices aren’t a bad prediction of future recessions, but they rarely make for good shelter on the eve of the crash.