You’ve been able to buy gulf oil in non-us currency all along. You can buy it in yuan, pounds, euros etc.
Dollar hegemony isn’t because of the petrodollar. It’s the other way around. The oil states throw off huge amounts of profit and oil is such a big market you need the dollars reach to service it.
You can't buy them off the bat from a petrostate. Heck, even China had to enter multi-year special negotiations with Saudi Arabia to even get a batch of oil sold in yuan terms. Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were the two proponents of selling oil in euros, and look where that led them.
The spot market is different but that's not where most of the world's oil is sold.
> The oil states throw off huge amounts of profit and oil is such a big market you need the dollars reach to service it.
The oil states prefer dollars (and have pegged their currency to the dollar) solely because of a number of historical decisions that enabled dollar hegemony, which made the oil states peg their currency to the dollar and prefer the USD. That's changing now, but only very recently and at a snail's pace.
You can’t trade oil in any currency off the bat. It’s a complex market involving globe spanning logistics and geopolitics.
But I’ve personally traded oil in euros and know people that trade it in pounds daily. The yuan negotiations were complex because China wanted to get the currency controls set right so that it didn’t destabilize their peg while the saudis didn’t want get stuck with the worlds most illiberal currency.
This week India went back to trading for oil in rupees with an American global adversary at the behest of the US president.
The gulf states bargain on security was a boon for them and the states, but again the correlation was reversed. The Americans provided security, a willing and ravenous market for the goods and a stable liberal currency when few others could.
There is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. The very idea is an economic theory popularized by Friedman and his students.
It gained popularity in corporate governance since then but it’s not a legal requirement it’s a shareholder preference. But that preference is violated all the time.
People often cite a 1919 era case from Henry ford because it has a pithy statement but the court in that case explicitly upheld many of the decisions Ford made that violated the principle.
That is, there is no law or precedent that requires corporate officers to only consider shareholders.
I was under the impression the application was more akin to 'fiduciary duty provides an executive shield for morally reprehensible corporate choices' rather than 'it provides an ability to sue someone for not following it.'
Legal defense instead of offense. IANAL, correct me please.
I don’t think “morally reprehensible” is a legal standard (but i’m not a lawyer either).
But to the point of this thread, there is no legal requirement that makes it so a boards fiduciary duty is in conflict with broader moral decisions, nor one that requires them to forget about their humanity when applying their duties as corporate officers.
If they are assholes, its because they are assholes, not because they are required to do so by their obligations to the corporation.
I mean in the sense that if there's a morally distasteful business choice, but corporate officers pursue it, then are sued, a solid defense is claiming fiduciary duty. To wit, they thought it would make the company money.
There is not going to be any shortage of plastics in the medium term.
Shale oil and gas production in the US produces vast quantities of ethane as a byproduct. This ethane is cracked into ethylene, a feedstock for making plastic. There is an oversupply of the stuff.
The overabundance is a big part of why it's just not commercially viable to do much with recycled plastic. Places will practically give away the virgin material because they have to find someplace for it to go to keep producing other things.
The amount of oil used for plastics or lubricants is insignificant compared to the use of oil as energy. In the United States, lubricants use ~0.5% of all oil, and all industrial feedstock about 1%.
It means the oil is being used for its heat content when combusted. Such heat may be used directly or be converted to mechanical work in a heat engine.
We burn 80% of the oil we take out of the ground. Oil production could drop 80% and we would not have to change anything other than demand for burning it.
That’s not true. 2 different courts ruled them illegal months ago. The administration decided to fight it abnd each time they lost.
It certainly would have been prudent for cbp to contemplate this very scenario given their own lawyers predicted it. But let’s be honest, that would have gotten them fired.
That doesn't show up as unemployment, though. It might mean the economy is getting worse faster than that graph, but boomers retiring is dampening the increase.
Boomers leaving (and being replaced) shows up in the jobs number, but not the unemployment number.
So job “growth” is overstated because much of that growth is macro demographic replacement.
But them being out of the workforce entirely shows up in the looking for work numbers decreasing. Therefore their leaving is accentuating 1 and dampening the other.
So more non-producers, who require non-productive health care means that lower unemployment doesn’t feel like a good economy. Thus their leaving healthy post covid number but other measures seeming bad.
Not sure what number you are referring to here? 92K losses does _not_ show the full picture but no number that I know of is saying the half a million jobs are being added to the workforce every month.
Is Hezbollah hiding in the elementary school that got bombed? Perhaps that’s where the Iranian nuclear research was done?
We attacked them. Full stop. And as far as I can tell we haven’t given them any conditions for when we will stop bombing them. In what moral framework do you have to just accept another sovereign, a vastly more powerful one, invading your country without fighting back?
Thank you for the link. AlJazeera is blocked in my country, but I was able to read it. Why is the school called Shajareh Tayyebeh, Arabic for Good Tree? Don't the Iranians speak Persian? Why an Arabic name?
I can't guess what the USA wants other than a distraction from the raping-of- children saga, but I bet Israel would settle for "we acknowledge your right to exist and won't fund or encourage organisations that plan to harm you."
Who in your opinion sets the moral framework for defending oneself against an enemy which has sworn genocide and proven capable of destroying entire peaceful villages along their borders?
Let's re-frame this: what behaviour do you think is beyond the pale for any military?
Then, in you heart of hearts, if Israel's IDF ever did that, would you condemn them and demand sanctions, arrest, and imprisonment?
If not, then this is a non-falsifiable situation: you are for Israel not matter what, because it's your parent's tribe.
So when you are making the list of no-nos above, note that the IDF is already past starving child civilians of food aid and bombing entire residential buildings in Iran.
So I'm not sure that behaviour you could find that's beyond the pale.
The rest of us have lines we will not cross, regardless of what our enemies do to us; it's the slow march of civilisation.
The IDF did not starve civilians - that lie has already been disproven. I know that you'd love to repeat it until history records it, but by no objective measure was there famine nor starvation in Gaza. Other than the starvation of Hamas' hostages.
The images of "starving children" were images of children with other medical conditions. The UN reports used a metric that considered starvation at HALF the threshold used in every other conflict zone, and even with that metric only found "evidence" in a single location once.
I accept the bombing of buildings which house those who have declared "Death to America, Death to Israel", and then have proceeded to bomb apartment buildings in Beit Shemesh.
@dang: you've banned members from this forum before for messy threads merely discussing apartheid. Surely advocating for war crimes — that the US itself considers crimes — is beyond the pale?
Why should Israel have a right to exist? And under what parameters? Within which borders? Who gets citizenship?
Surely there's no moral case to be made for Israel having a right to exist in its current religious ethnostate form? People who presumably should have citizenship due to their ties to the land area are excluded because they believe in the wrong ancient delusions.
There are at least three basic answers to that question, depending upon one's worldview.
1. Israel does not have a right to exist, in fact no state has "a right to exist".
2. Israel has a right to exist because her citizens successfully defend her from those who wish her not to exist.
3. Israel has a right to exist because the UN declared it.
>>> random.randrange(1,4)
3
That's the tough one, but I'll answer under that worldview for the remainder of the reply...
> And under what parameters?
Under the parameters established by her founders, and the UN, and those established by her neighbouring states.
From the Israeli declaration of independence:
"WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness"
- https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Independence_(Israel)
From the neighbouring states:
"No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Arab_League_summit
Need I remind you that seven nations attacked Israel on the day of her independence? That attack caused a million and a half people to become refugees - both Arabs in the holy land and Jews in the rest of the middle east. It also moved the lines of control from the UN partition plan lines to the 1948 cease fire lines - which far favoured the Jewish state and extended in some places to the internationally recognised borders of Mandatory Palestine.
> Within which borders?
Within the borders of the predecessor state, Mandatory Palestine, just like all other newly-established states (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uti_possidetis_juris). Had the Arabs founded an Arab state on the remaining lands of Mandatory Palestine then I would argue that Israel should be established only on the land allocated by the UN and the land lost by the Arabs in their failed war. But the Arabs never established a state there.
> Who gets citizenship?
The people who live within the borders of the new state, and those whom the state determines are eligible for immigration. Just like every other state.
In other words, there is no reason to treat Israel any differently than any other state on the planet.
Negotiations during which the Iranians continuously stalled and continued their nuclear work. The threat of attack was part of the US negotiation strategy, and the Iranians thought they would call the "bluff". They were wrong.
They have been chanting "down with America" - that does not mean "murder every single person in America with their missiles (which can't reach America)"
"Death to" is a mistranslation of "marg bar", a phrase that is also applied to traffic, and inflation.
Do the Iranians want to kill all traffic and all... inflation?
I'm grant you that I do not speak Persian, but I do speak Arabic and Hebrew. In Arabic the phrase موت لامريكا is common enough. And this Hebrew sign in Tehran says "prepare your coffins":
So I do appreciate you educating me on the literal meaning of the Persian phrase, yet I dispute your interpretation that they state no intention of murdering us. Quite the opposite, the more I research it the more Hebrew banners in Tehran I see and I can conclude not only are they capable of murdering myself and my children, they have intent as well.
Israel funded terrorist organisations in Syria, and in Palestine itself - most famously the group Hamas.
Many of the terrorist groups Iran funds operates in areas illegally occupied by the Israeli military, making them legitimate resistance fighters.
And Israel itself is a terrorist state - they achieved independence via the actions of Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine like Igrun, Lehi - which included several future Israeli Prime Ministers as members.
So no, I do not trust Israel with nukes - they should be disarmed immediately.
Israel supports Hamas financially several times, a.) so they can justify a crackdown on Palestinians b.) to weaken the other political groups in Palestine that wanted to negotiate with Israel so only the most radical group is left to represent Palestinians, right wing Israeli assassinated the prime minister who negotiated a peace deal with PLO and the right wing is now in represented at top o government in Israel.
Well the central post that the commenter made about the army’s iq requirement is trivially fact checked to be untrue. The army doesn’t administer iq tests as part of screening. They do asvab which tests _knowledge_ which you can study for. They have correlated outcomes in that a high IQ usually means a high asvab but they aren’t identical (you can for instance top out an asvab test and practice shows meaningful improvement whereas there is no top iq and if you can practice for it the test is flawed.)
The vast majority of public shareholders don't vote their shares. A VC is much more likely to apply unwanted pressure to the board/management than the general public is.
IMO, the best reason to avoid an IPO is to stay out of the media.
The VC likely already has ownership, and a board seat - public companies are susceptible to activist-investors and hostile bids: outsiders who hold little/no stake, but an outsized influence.
Neither of which would be relevant in the Stripe case, because if Stripe IPO's they'll release a negligible number of shares. It'd be impossible for either group to amass a substantial number of shares.
A low liquidity IPO would likely result in a massive share price increase: the number of interested buyers would vastly outnumber the number of shares available.
Harder for activist investors to get into a private company than a public one imho. Keeps out those who would squeeze the business and bail, and potentially kick out the founders. With sufficient cashflow (which Stripe most certainly has), you can buy out existing investors without going public.
(not ex-Stripe, but own startup equity and have no problem with them never going public if that is the choice; optimize for the enterprise and existing stakeholders, not the public market mechanics broadly speaking)
You'd need to amass 50% of the shares to kick out the founders. That'd be impossible for a hostile party to do if Stripe IPO's because they wouldn't release anywhere close to that number of shares.
The only way to kick out the Collison's would be for the VC's to do it. They currently own 80%. It's easier for the VC's to do that if Stripe stays private than if Stripe IPO's.
Dollar hegemony isn’t because of the petrodollar. It’s the other way around. The oil states throw off huge amounts of profit and oil is such a big market you need the dollars reach to service it.
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