Never did play the game. Never will. Certainly Bitcoin makes it easier and has enabled a lot of projects that would otherwise have never got done, but overall the world has imo got worse in many ways in recent decades. Cannot be easy for younger people now. The neoliberal greed is good financialisation 1980s was probably when I consciously took a stand and said, No thanks. Fuck that.

That is laughable. The publicly funded British Health Service is massively more effective in providing universal healthcare than the US privatised system where many people have little or no cover. Public healthcare provision is one area where demonstrably state provision can be and is vastly more cost effective than the US privatised health system which is the least efficient most expensive least equitable in the developed world buy a large margin.

Yes, these scammers are becoming very skilled in finding and targeting their victims. When you think of how increasingly we conduct more and more of our lives and financial transactions online it is a huge problem.

Comparing me and what I have said with Stalin is as absurd and is failure to respond logically and with any convincing argument to what I have actually said. It is a crude and blatantly dishonest attempt at shooting the messenger instead of engaging in a reasoned contest of ideas. BTW Churchill and Roosevelt did! If your ability to present your ideology cannot cope with the real world and challenges to your viewpoint directly then your grasp of your ideology is not strong. When others present an alternative viewpoint this is the golden opportunity to advance your position and refute theirs in a reasoned manner. If you fail to take that opportunity then you fail in the contest of ideas. Those who are confident and secure in their beliefs are not frightened of different ideas. They welcome the opportunity to engage and compare logic. Very few Libertarians appear capable of this. It makes them look more like a cult than a philosophy.

Well said and it is telling that very few Libertarians appear capable of responding in such a calm and reasoned manner where they will defend and represent their viewpoint in a manner that welcomes alternative viewpoints - because they provide a golden opportunity to engage in a contest of ideas.

Much more often Libertarians out themselves as fragile emotional ideologically rigid 'believers' in a creed, and that they cannot convincingly respond in a calm and reasoned manner that convincingly refutes alternative viewpoints.

When a respondent seeks to shoot the messenger they concede defeat, by default, in the contest of ideas. They lose the opportunity to respond in a manner that demonstrates to a neutral observer the logic and strength of their beliefs.

If you are confident of your ideology and the reasoning behind it you will invite and welcome alternative views as an opportunity to demonstrate the advantages your position and views supposedly offer. If on the other hand you are not confident and capable to reason and present the logic and strength of your ideology, but instead it is based on a shallow set of premises, poor reasoning and desire to belong to a group of fellow believers, you will stumble and revert to reactionary silence and inability to engage in and win the contest of ideas.

There is an efficiency in a government that can plan and direct infrastructure in a manner that creates a self reinforcing virtuous cycle. A government for example that develops transport infrastructure than improves the marketability of its farmers and manufacturers improves their profitability and ability to pay taxes to fund further development. It is via this process whereby the government has the unique position, mandate and capacity to develop the productive potential of its jurisdiction and the ability to fund it in an ongoing way that determines which economies come to dominate and which come to be subjugated. You cannot give any examples of wealthy nations where the government has not performed this role, because it is just as nonsensical as Libertarian ideology itself is. Private enterprise can and does not ever have the mandate, incentive and ability to develop the productive economy and national security in the same manner, and it never does. As Adam Smith put it hundreds of years ago 'People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices' No much has changed and you still need a good government to regulate and manage the overall best functioning and development and security of the economy...while enabling free enterprise to thrive within that framework. It is a subtle expertise and balance - something lost on the crude black and white reasoning of Libertarians.

Libertarian ideology is a decadent outgrowth of the decadent western civilisation that has dominated global wealth and resources for centuries. The idea of individual 'rights' being more important than the individuals obligations to the group they belong to is something that has developed most strongly in the societies which have come to dominate others cultures and gained wealth and power via imperialism. The individuals in these privileged dominant societies come to expect more and more 'rights' from the state and to take the state and its provisions more and more for granted. This is the beginning of the end for these societies as other competing societies where such a sense of entitlement is not so developed. China is an example of where citizens understand very well the consequences of a weak nation state government- The Opium Wars left China devastated for a century. Only in recent decades has the Chinese state come to respond to the dominance of western civilisation in an effective manner by combining state led economic strategies with the natural entrepreneurship of Chinese people. In contrast decadent Libertarians moan about paying taxes as though the infrastructure and military productive power and power projection of the state is not essential to their individual wealth and security. The nation state and its effective functioning is crucial to the wealth and security of citizens- most even westerners still vaguely understand this. There has never been an enduring wealthy dominant culture develop and sustained without good government playing a crucial role in the process.

Who the fuck wants to buy British cars or steel? This will be more about aligning the UKs already sophisticated tax havens network with Trumps developing crypto safe haven network for wealthy elites who want to protect their capital wealth as China reverse engineers the global trade payments banking system via mBridge and Hong Kong.

The UK is monetarily and militarily a subservient tribute state to the USA. So are Japan, S.Korea, the EU and Australasia. However with the exception of the UK, China is now more important as a trading partner to all of these traditional US allies. The UK handed over its empire to the US in a fairly agreeable gentlemanly manner. The same is unlikely to be the character of Chinas rise. Chinas banks are not the Jewish owned ones that have financed the dominant empires of the last 5 centuries.

They did previously mostly use phone contact as I understand it but using multiple numbers which appeared to originate from multiple origins. I don't know how they do this but apparently it can be done. More recently I think the contact was mostly via them posing as others via email and facebook messaging. In the more recent events I think there was also some contact was via his phone as he mentioned the need to change his number to prevent the same happening again. Screening incoming calls is a good idea if it can be done might be one of the ways of reducing the risk, but as the facebook attack shows they have multiple vectors via which they can approach an established target.

Yes, he was retired but now faces going back to work and or selling house to downsize. Since the last scammers attack I really worry if he sells house or gets more money they will be lurking to scam it off him. How do you get rid of them? You need to completely delete all tracing data and they are clearly very cunning, persistent and skilled at what they do. They know the law is unlikely to catch them. Online scamming is a major growth industry.

Good friend (late 60s) has been scammed out of his life savings (except his house) by online scammers and he is struggling to accept it- they used bitcoin and crypto extensively to cover their tracks.The police here do not have the resources to seriously investigate. I tracked some Bitcoin transactions, part of the scam, to HTX exchange but neither HTX nor the NZ police would help trace the funds further. More recently the scammers demanded a 'final payment' of $20k, which he refused and does not have anyway and they then impersonated a friends facebook profile and extracted from him his home address. They then posed as buyers of things he was selling on facebook marketplace and asked him to arrange shipping via a fake website where they gained his current credit card details and once gain cleaned out his credit card- this time the bank was onto it and called him to check the card use was legit. The scammers are persistent. He now faces having to go offline or seriously reduce online use. They now have his home address. He is understandably concerned.

Another friends father (93) calls her from the ATM to ask her birth date as its the pin number for his bankcard. Hes been taking out large sums of cash lately but family don't know what for.

Seems to be a lot of it going on.

The first casualty of war is always the truth.

But the reality is USA is fucked without Chinese supply chains.

Yes the tariffs hurt the Chinese economy, but they hurt the US economy more.

Ah yes that sounds like something off the classic Putin menu. They were once best of buddies. So who runs Wagners operation now? Sounds like maybe its been nationalised?

There are many metrics you can look at and compare.

Across nearly all of them the USA is now in decline and China is rising.

Very rarely do citizens of empires in decline see and acknowledge the process, until it is too late.

US exceptionalism being perhaps a case in point.

The naivety of the Libertarians 'markets fix everything' dogma and their dismissal of the importance of government in determining the wealth of nations being another.

Of course its not but it is an interesting way of looking at it. No matter how you look at it - China is rising in relative power and the USA is in decline.

Fair comment, you do have a point- Russia under Putin is very active projecting its will via Wagner...and directly as in Ukraine. Although most of the nations Russia is meddling with are relatively small in economic terms- as is Russia itself. Now Russia is however Chinas mercenary, fighting the USA by proxy...N.Korea and Iran are helping too. The Axis against US hegemony is growing. Though didn't Putin have a falling out with Wagner or is that now sorted?

Russia has invaded Venequela? Syria? Sri Lanka? Madagascar? Libya? Kazakhstan? Since when? You have links to evidence of this?

Can you substantiate that assertion with some numbers on the number of invasions carries out by USSR/Russia vs USA? USA 'wins' by a large margin especially if you include the number of ongoing unlawful drone attacks and 'interventions' not to mention 'extraordinary renditions' that USA has done over the last 20 years internationally in locations where no war is even declared. Indonesia, Iraq, Iran(remember the US installed puppet Shah?), Afghanistan, Libya, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Laos etc etc