There are definitely other factors at play, but have no illusions about it: if the United States didn't mind killing and maiming a large number of innocent civilians, it could just knock down entire cities and wipe out entire populations if it wanted to. The main reason that those conflicts are tough is because the US tries to make a show that they care about human rights instead of just shelling the crap out of insurgents.
And the current struggles of the American military only result in hundreds or maybe thousands of American deaths, which historically, would be a mere rounding error. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, et. al. are a mess, but they don't come to a significant human cost to America.
The United States and its voting populace doesn't really care about whether or not developing countries are wartorn, and quality of life is decimated—America and other states have completely destroyed the backbone of several societies in the Middle East and caused the deaths and relocation of hundreds of thousands of innocents, but you don't feel the pain of that when you live states-side. So the country has little incentive to quickly resolve these conflicts besides the bad PR; ongoing conflicts mostly buy time for protracted, proxy diplomacy with other major powers to lay claim to natural resources, and aren't viewed as conflict with a tangible human cost.
Yeah, that’s me - I basically use email as a task queue that other people can append to as well as myself, for low time urgency types of tasks, and have separate ways of dealing with the stuff I need to do more urgently.
I want to reiterate that bundling is absolutely essential to me. Specifically I make newsletters come once a week and burn through them batch so that I don’t get distracted; I bundle activism emails together so that I can be engaged but don’t feel spammed all the time; etc. without that I also would feel no strong reason to use Monolist - hope you make something powerful!
Maybe Alipay/WeChat can use their vast amount of money and deep connections to Chinese manufacturing to make simple devices that literally only act as a wallet (hopefully simply enough such that even the elderly and technically/actually illiterate can use them), and then partner with banks (or become ones themselves) to provision bank accounts for people who they sell those devices to.
If enough vendors stop accepting cash, then that alone ought to be reason enough for people in rural areas to make the effort to get/purchase these devices, assuming Wechat/Alipay makes the effort to distribute them.
Though it seems that there is limited market value to doing such a potentially expensive and politically tricky maneuver. Classic scenario in a capitalist world—the market doesn't see profit in protecting a helpless class like the poor and elderly, so the market proceeds to ignore them and screw them over.
What I wonder is: Even if it is totally a ponzi scheme/scam, it seems like the price holds even if people have little faith on whether or not it's properly backed.
So, has it _psychologically_ managed to create price stability? So long as there isn't a giant run on the currency where they actually did run out of the necessary US Dollars (as well as insufficient people stepping in willing to pay $1 for 1 USDT), does it actually matter whether or not they have fully collateralized the currency?
And the current struggles of the American military only result in hundreds or maybe thousands of American deaths, which historically, would be a mere rounding error. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, et. al. are a mess, but they don't come to a significant human cost to America.
The United States and its voting populace doesn't really care about whether or not developing countries are wartorn, and quality of life is decimated—America and other states have completely destroyed the backbone of several societies in the Middle East and caused the deaths and relocation of hundreds of thousands of innocents, but you don't feel the pain of that when you live states-side. So the country has little incentive to quickly resolve these conflicts besides the bad PR; ongoing conflicts mostly buy time for protracted, proxy diplomacy with other major powers to lay claim to natural resources, and aren't viewed as conflict with a tangible human cost.