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- Not Having Nice Things
We had more company last night so I’m getting a late start. Let’s begin with the 3 hour Hunter Biden interview. I watched about half of it, and thought it was interesting than expected. The part I’m highlighting below is his discussion of immigration, ICE, etc.
Here’s a guy with no fucks left to give, saying what I think a lot of us believe about immigration — immigrants are great people, the lifeblood and strength of the nation, not criminals. He also names people like Rahm Emanuel and Carville as giving bad advice to Democrats on immigration. He’s right.
The media reports I’ve seen highlight the stuff he says about Biden’s disastrous debate, his drug addiction, etc. I googled around this morning and Fox called his interview “unhinged” which is typical of how they treat this guy. I have no brief for Hunter Biden but he came off as a damaged, intelligent, honest human being, not the caricature we see in the media.
Switching gears completely, Krugman has an interesting post on Brazil’s
As I understand it, Pix is sort of like a publicly run version of Zelle, the payment system operated by a consortium of U.S. private banks. But Pix is much easier to use. And while Zelle is big, Pix has become simply huge, used by a reported 93 percent of Brazilian adults. It appears to be rapidly displacing both cash and cards […]
Pix transactions take place almost instantaneously. A Pix payment settles in 3 seconds on average versus 2 days for debit cards and 28 days for credit cards.
and
Transaction costs are low. The authorities have set a requirement on Pix to be free for individuals, and the cost of a payment transaction for firms/merchants is only 0.33 percent of the transaction amount, versus 1.13 percent for debit cards and 2.34 percent for credit cards.
Of course Republicans have legislated that the Treasury can’t even study this kind of payment system, called a Central Bank Digital Currency. Instead we have crypto bros in charge around here.
Part of the decline and decay in this country is from our inability to even consider what should be obvious good things, such as a reasonable immigration system and a cheap, reliable digital payment system instead of shitty crypto. Our choices are a slightly less horrible immigration system and maybe no crypto. That’s the “radical left” in our extremely constrained political sphere.
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