oscillator gain

There is no blockade. Cuba can trade with the entire rest of the world. They just have nothing to trade.

Pity. Cuban rum was great. I could buy Havana Club rum when I was in the USSR.

Cubans are now scrounging in garbage dumps for food, in the dark. Their economy is in exponential decay. Thanks, Fidel.

I've been in several giant hurricanes and one tornado and one big earthquake, and a rescue mission to Louisiana just after Katrina. All that was orderly, organized, and the regions recovered quickly. Some people evacuated the coastal cities and had to sleep in tents or cars, or the houses of strangers, for a few days when all the motels filled up.

After Hurricane Katrina, people were driving to local gas stations, tanking up and stuffing their cars with free MREs. They soon learned to select the tastiest.

When power failed in the biggish 1989 earthquake, we had neighborhood ice cream parties before it all melted. As it turns out, power was off for less than two days.

Traffic lights were out for a couple of days. You can't imagine how polite and helpful all the drivers were.

Sorry to disappoint, but the USA is not in decline. And we still invent a lot of electronics.

And the Communists have only been in government for around 2 months. It doesn't take long for them to wreck everything!

The destruction time constant is a lot shorter than the construction one.

The UK Labour party isn't remotely communist, and the problems they are coping with are the ones that the Conservative Party spent nearly a decade creating, though most of them can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher's aversion to manufacturing industry.

They aren't. They are a lot more complicated than that.

Breitbart is a peddler of right-wing nonsense

But they still manage to control the countries they rule.

Cuba was a banana republic, and Batista was a US catspaw until Castro kicked him out.

The US resented the loss of an exploitable asset, and has done it's best to wreck the Cuban economy ever since. Gloating about how successful that wrecking effort has been is unedifying, even for a right-wing creep like you.

Could Breitbart be biassed in some way ?

Timely. Many countries have been quietly divesting themselves of dollar- denominated securities owing to what happened to those held by Russia. When you weaponise a currency and your foreign debt, as the US has recently done, you better expect some blowback. Consequently, we have the BRICS conference this coming week (ends on Thursday IIRC) and it is rumoured they're on the point of announcing a new reserve currency to compete with the dollar for the settlement of international trade. This is also what is believed to be behind the current bull market in gold, since that commodity is expected to form at least part of the backing for the new currency. That could pose a threat to the dollar's monopoly, since the greenback is underpinned by nothing beyond the faith people have in it. Expect fireworks....

No doubt. But I can't think of a single news source that isn't!

Breitbart, ZeroHedge and Fox News are predictably heavily biased to appeal to right-wing lunatics, of which Cursitor Doom is a depressingly rabid example.

He's so far gone that he thinks that main stream media is biased in favour of his imaginary Globalists.

Any currency is ultimately underpinned by the productivity of its country and people. That's a simple conservation principle.

No conference of bureaucrats ever does much but reduce productivity.

Russia is falling apart. The real talent is leaving. I think Putin wants them out, so he can have a loyal, patriotic, poor, stupid population to rule over.

Both Russia and China face a demographic disaster: people, especially the smartest people, aren't having babies.

The US is doing pretty well, given the ways the world is changing. It's still the technology center of the world. Farm output is fantastic and still increasing. We have huge energy resources. The most talented people in the world emigrate here and get Nobel prizes or start industries.

It could be that the USA is actually the pioneer case for how the world will be: super multicultural and super productive and lots of outdoor recreation.

I read an essay by a half-asian half-anglo guy who moved to San Francisco. He loves it here because it's the only place he's lived where people didn't stare at him for looking different.

Ultimately, the world will homogenize and everybody will speak a sort of English. Without racial and language-based tribalism, and everybody moving around, we won't need wars.

It usually takes a generation to really wreck things, although it has been done a lot faster.

Most news sources are horribly biased, essentially propaganda.

Real Clear at least links to both sides.

The New York Times seems to be getting a little bit more journalistic lately. I hope that trend continues.

Real Clear Politics has alternate crazy-left and crazy-right links. That's pretty much all that's available.

Any *fiat* currency is ultimately underpinned by the productivity of its country and people. That's a simple conservation principle.

There, FIFY.

Especially if they've never had to live in the *real* world of hard-nosed business dealings.

Same applies in just about all Western countries.

If you say so, John.

I'm not surprised. You'd have to be uber *ultra-wacky* to stand out in SF!

You're sounding like some dreamy, Liberal idealist. Your vision might have come true in time, but sadly we have an evil cohort who want conflict and perpetual war just for the sake of it. The future ain't bright.

Regulating an economy through monetary policy (interest rates - the usual method) is far more problematic than most folks would ever imagine. It's been likened to pulling a brick with an elastic band - and that's not a bad analogy. It's incredibly difficult to get the rate set right in order to produce long-term stability and the optimally desired 'goldilocks economy'. That's why there's normally a panel of economic advisers involved. It's too complex a decision for just one man.

The big alternative to the NYT is the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which has been directly criticizing the NYT for their unbalanced coverage, and is quite useful for pointing out what has been omitted. In the old days, the NYT would be the check on the WSJ, and so on.

Joe Gwinn

The WSJ has been owned by Rupert Murdoch for a while now IIRC, so it's not surprising they're calling out the disgraceful NYT for its biased coverage.