Also to add to this, the life-cycle of a TV display is mismatched from the live-cycle of media playing hardware or just hardware for general computing: one needs to update the latter more often in order to keep up with things like new video codecs (as for performance those things are actually implemented in hardware) as well as more in general to be capable of running newer software with decent performance.

I’ve actually had a separate media box for my TV for over a decade and in my experience you go through 3 or 4 media boxes for every time you change TVs, partly because of new video codes coming out and partly because the computing hardware for those things is usually on the low-end so newer software won’t run as well. In fact I eventually settled down on having a generic Mini-PC with Linux and Kodi as my media box (which is pretty much the same to use in your living room as a dedicated media box since you can get a wireless remote for it, so no need for a keyboard or mouse to use it as media player) and it doubles down as a server on the background (remotely managed via ssh), something which wouldn’t at all be possible with computing hardware integrated in the TV.

In summary, having the computing stuff separate from the TV is cheaper and less frustrating (you don’t need to endure slow software after a few years because the hardware is part of an expensive TV that you don’t want to throw out), as well as giving you far more options to do whatever you want (lets just say that if your network connected media box is enshittified, it’s pretty cheap to replace it or even go the way I went and replace it with a system you fully control)

Well, it depends really: companies whose operations are mostly outside the US whilst being listed in USD in US stockmarkets will see their stockprice go up in dollars is there’s a run on the dollar, not because their value went up but because each dollar is worth less.

So such stocks will actually hold a lot more of their value than it would if that money was held directly in dollars.

PS: I actually have a “funny” Brexit story around this - back when the Leave Referendum won Brexiters (the British MAGA, and as equally well informed as the American version) were celebrating how the UK stockmarket indices went up in value with the Leave Referendum result of Leave. However those indices were only up in pounds and down if quoted in any other currency than the British Pound, because what had happened was that the pound tanked about 20% following the Referendum result so naturaly values for companies with extensive international operations translated to more money in british pounds.

The size of $500 worth of gold - about 3.5g - is a small coin or a thin gold ring.

(Thinking of it, it’s actually funny that we’re back to the times of being able to buy a house with a bag of gold coins)

Regular people definitelly buy gold in physical form because it’s such a concentrated form of storing wealth, though in the West this was a lot more common in the old days and currently is a lot more common in countries like China and India.

Oh, and if you buy gold certificates and the certificate issuer goes bankrupt (like so many companies go during Economic Crashes and Depressions), then in the eyes of the law that gold is not yours and you’re just another creditor of the assets of that company, so forget all about getting most of the value of that gold back: you might want to reconsider gold certificates for value safe-keeping outside of the dollar in case of a major economic crash in the US since if the gold isn’t actually in a legal structure were you own it (i.e. you legally have direct ownership of a chunk of gold and pay somebody to store it or store it yourself), you remain totally exposed to whatever economic upheavals happen where that company is based.

Yeah, a sudden artificial scarcity of gold because the US government is witholding other people’s gold isn’t going to make the price fall, quite the contrary.

That said, best not to invest in Gold that’s physically stored in the US be it directly (you own it and it’s in a US location) or indirectly (such as Gold ETFs whose physical Gold is stored in the US).

Silver spent most of the last 15 years going nowhere, whilst gold has been steadily creeping up (though accelerating in the last 3 or 4 years).

If you look at historical prices, in 20 years gold went up around 9x in dollar terms whilst silver went up 11x, which is not that much of a difference, but if you look at the silver price in the beginning of 2025 it was only about 4x from the beginning of that 20 year range, so most of the growth has happened just in this one year to the point that the peak from 2011 was only surpassed in September 2025 whilst gold passed its 2011 peak in 2020.

All this to say that IMHO Silver price growth just seems to be much more concentrated in time than Gold’s, but in a longer timeframe it doesn’t really add to a much bigger price increase.

Gold is for all effects and purposes the oldest currency around, mainly because it has been exactly that for millenia and still today, has very little industrial use and instead is mainly used for safekeep of value and decorative purposes (such as jewelery).

Comparied to common currencies of the present age (called fiat currencies because they’re issued by states and their value is not inherent to the currency - i.e. not based on the value of the material of the cash - but rather it’s backed by trust on the issuing government) gold and its value is not under control of any one government hence doesn’t really suffer much from the policies in any one country and has a natural inflation rate of around 2% due to mining (i.e. the amount of mined gold increases by around 2% of the total per year).

So when trust in governments and the economies they manage falls, gold is a natural safe haven asset just like the currency of a different country would be, only gold’s safe haven properties also work when the mistrust is more generalized globally (multiple governments or of governments whose policies have a significant global impact) whilst that doesn’t apply for other fiat currencies. A simple example: if you move from the dollar to the euro and the dollar crashes, the euro will also be somewhat impacted by the consequence of that crash whilst gold would not and if, worse, the societal and political problems causing said crash of the dollar were alse present in the eurozone (which they are, by the way, just less so) there might also be an euro crash for similar reasons and gold would still remain unnafected*

(* actually that’s not quite so because as seen during the 2008 Crash there are price pressures on gold due to on one side people more desperatelly trying to move into it to save their wealth from the crash hence pushing prices up and on the other hand people selling gold to pay for financial commitments they have that cannot be served by other assets that have crashed in value - for example somebody who has stocks and gold and has to pay a loan, during a crash/depression might have to pull money out of gold to pay the loan because the value of the stocks has crashed).

On the other hand, the value of all the gold ever mined in the world is “only” around $28 trillion whilst the US debt alone is $38 trillion, so there’s not enough gold for even just holders of US treasuries to take refuge in it, at least not at the current gold price.

Then again, the more people who take refuse in gold, the more its price goes up - a mere year ago the value of all the gold ever mined in the World would only be around $17.5 trillion - which adds further to the expectation that a dollar crash would push gold prices up massivelly, in multiple currencies rather than just dollars.

Yeah, the malaise vastly predates Brexit and goes all the way back to Thatcher’s policies, such as the selling of public housing and policies to make it harder for councils to build more, privatisation of a lot of public services especially natural monopolies such as water supply and rail, deregulating Finance and betting on it for growth in Britain, Press deregulation and concentration, and so on.

Then neoliberal governments of both the Tory and New Labor persuasion just kept and even doubled down on such policies (who can forget Thatcher’s “greatest achievement”, Tony Blair).

Then the 2008 Crash hit the UK hard thanks to the deregulation of Finance and excessive size of it as part of the British Economy (17% of it at the time of the Crash, if I remember it correctly) with some extra fueling from a housing bubble that had been inflated since Thatcher’s days (which now is even worse).

Then the way that was handled was to save Asset Owners and make workers pay for it, exploding inequality (if I remember it correctly even already in 2015 real incomes for the bottom 90% if the population were falling at around 1% per year, whilst for the top 10% of the population they went up 23%) and hence poverty.

Meawhile paid up politicians, Press (remember Thatcher’s deregulation of the Press) and Think Tanks spread far-right ideas such as ultra-nationalism and blaming foreigners (especially immigrants, but also “the EU”) for the pain people were feeling as consequences of the post-Crash policies of their very own, 100% local, politicians.

Then that cristalized in the knee-jerk reaction against foreigners called Brexit (which, mind you, was still a less damaging far-right ultra-nationalist knee-jerk than the historically more comon one of “starting a war against some random foreign country”).

And now here we are with Britain pretty much morphed in to a posh version of a Fascist country.

Well, yeah, it was pretty obvious that Trump did not control Venezuela since he has no troops on the ground.

He’s just been threathening the current Venezuelan leadership with personally getting the same fate as Maduro, but that’s not at all the same as controlling the actual country.

No amount of struting like some prized rooster by Trump on this (like he does for just about everything just before he TACOes) alters the reality that a special ops kidnapping isn’t anywhere near the same level of military commitment as an invasion and at most will deliver chaos rather than control.

Well, it probably requires quite a lot of speed for the more elongated shape of a bicycle helmet to has enough impact on making the head rotate to actually cause damage and from what I read bicycle helmets are designed for collisions up to 15 km/h.

This would also explain why motorcycle helmets tend more towards a spherical shape as the average speed of a collision on a motorcycle is much higher.

Then I guess we were feeding each other’s misunderstanding.

Those numbers from Denmark stuck in my mind for all these years exactly because I though they were counter-intuitive, and I thought they were counter-intuitive exactly because “helmets reduce the risk of head injury” is pretty much indisputable.

“Helmet shapes that transform linear shocks into rotational shocks are more dangerous” was literally just one thing I threw in as maybe, part, of the cause of those numbers I had read about in Denmark, which was a single line in a much broader discussion.

(I never actually said that it totally offsets other effects, by the way, I just thought it was a contributing factor for the counter-intuitive results I had read in that study)

You just then grabbed that one “maybe this part of it” line of mine and ran with it as if I was claiming that wearing a helmet doesn’t reduce the risk of head injuries, something I did not and even though I actually wrote three times (including in the post immediately after your first reply) that wearing a helmet does reduce the risk of head injuries.

As for the rest, as I basically said in the last paragraph of the last post, yeah, based on the recent study you linked that shows there is no clear evidence for a risk compensation effect, so as per all evidence wearing helmet when cycling is safer than not because the helmet does protect the head and if there is no risk compensation effect then there is no indirect increase in risk (due to riskier behaviors) from wearing a helmet. What I remember from what I read as per my original post was a tiny effect (something like 2%) so maybe that was within the error margin. I mean, I’m pretty sure I read about it over a decade ago and you linked to a study which is more recent than that.

Common bicycle helmet

Common motorcycle helmet

Are you really telling me that in the horizontal axis the first doesn’t have a far bigger ratio of major-axis to minor-axis than the second?

Statistics show that wearing a helmet reduces chances to severe head and brain injuries.

Never disputed. After all a hat too will “reduce chances to severe head and brain injuries”, though by a tiny amount.

The point was always about how much and if in the typical conditions of city cycling it is enough to offset possible negative effects such as increase risk taking and less careful behavior from drivers around cyclists who are better protected.

It’s about aggregated effects rather than this one specific thing you focused on to the exclusion of everything else. If you focus on one thing alone then “always wear a hat when you cycle” would count as a safety recommendation for cyclists.

Mind you from our discussions I did shift my position to think it’s a good idea in overall to recommend people to wear a helmet when cycling (mainly because of the study you linked that reviewed various papers and found too little indication of a risk compensation effect), though not on mandatory helmet wearing because there the broader implications - as shown by the experience of Australia - are that all in all it causes more deaths because of the indirect effect of people cycling less hence dying in greater numbers because of the higher mortality for people who don’t regularly exercise. There’s also the point I quoted from the Dutch that in terms of policy aiming for second prevention (such as cyclist protection equipment) negatively impacts the investment in primary prevention (i.e. a safer cycling environment).

Ovoid shapes will cause rotational forces on perpendicular impacts, whilst spherical shapes do not. This is just Maths.

Notice how motorcycle helmets are actually spherical.

In my experience the traditional bicycle helmets are half ovoids.

That said I drilled down to the comparative analisys linked from the study you indicated and it basically concludes that people who are more fearful tend to wear helmets when cycling, so the reverse causality relationship of the risk compensation theory (which would be that a person that starts wearing a helmet when cycling becomes more risk taking).

So you make a good point that advising people to wear helmets is not a bad idea.

IMHO, as long as it doesn’t turn people away from a more compreensive risk reduction form of cycling (which is how I personally tackled changing from cycling in The Netherlands to cycling in London, which at the time had much worse cycling infrastructure and were motorists weren’t used to cyclists when I started doing it - by having quite a lot of tricks to keep me safe from the innatention and error of not just motorists but also pedestrians, most of which were not at all needed in The Netherlands were other road users always expect cyclists to be around), it’s fine.

As for mandatory cycling helmets, I’m against it because it severely lowers the uptake of cycling which ultimatelly is worse for people because of worse health outcomes. Also my experience cycling in London during the period were it went from quite atypical to more normalized, is that more cyclists around results in more motorists and pedestrians being naturally aware of and careful towards cyclists (an effect I also noticed from the other side in myself as both a motorist and a pedestrian when I moved from a country with no cycling culture to The Netherlands and got used to lots of cyclists around) which in turn makes cycling safer for everybody - in other words, more cycling adoption makes cycling safer. This seems to be aligned with the most common position in The Netherlands as per my last link:

The Dutch government, private safety organizations and cyclists’ groups all tend to agree on the following propositions: Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure.

Helmet studies typically have a bias for or against from the start.

The reality is wearing a helmet is always safer

You writting one after the other just makes clear you’re hugely biased in this as you basically put forward an absolute statement of yours “wearing a helmet is always safe” as objective truth whilst studies “typically are biased” or in other words, you know better than studies.

Definitelly agree that using numbers from injuries of cyclists with helmets in The Netherlands without any further considerations yields biased results for the reasons you described. It’s not by chance that I did not quote such figures at all and in fact explicitly said from the start that people doing things like speed cycling and mountain biking should wear a helmet.

No idea were you pulled that specific argument you decided to counter in a response to my posts.

Specifically for The Netherlands and from the last link in my previous post, the only thing about them is the general belief there that “Promoting the use of bicycle helmets runs counter to present government policies that are aimed at the primary prevention of crashes (as opposed to secondary prevention) and at stimulating the use of the bicycle as a general health measure” which is really about not having mandatory helmet laws because it reduces cycling in general and how it’s more important to push for safe cycling conditions (such as good cycle paths) than for cyclists wearing protection, all of which makes sense.

Personally I think that wearing a helmet or not should be down to each cyclist and should take in account the conditions they are cycling under, always remembering that wearing a helmet is not a silver bullet. My own experience of cycling in different countries (The Netherlands, England, Germany, Portugal) and different conditions is that the level of risk can be very different sometimes even from city to city, making helmet use more or less important relative to other things.

Again and above all, always keep in mind that wearing a helmet is not going to make you totally or even mostly safe, if only to avoid the increase risk taking due to a sense of increase safety exceeding the actual amount of increased safety from a helmet - as per risk compensation theory - which ultimatelly can make you less safe.

In my view your whole “wearing a helmet is always safer” absolutist posture is a needlessly dangerous mindset to have - it’s far better to have a far more general approach to cycling safety in city traffic (which is basically what I went with when I moved from cycling in the far safer Dutch conditions to cycling in London, meaning that I ran around with all sorts of risk mitigation practices not just towards motorists on the road but even towards pedestrians in the sidewalk that were even adjusted depending in the area of London I was in) that thinking that just a helmet will make you safe.

Sadly I read about this over a decade ago and don’t have a link for it anymore.

I looked around and all I could find were studies pointing out that helmets protect against head injury, which was never in dispute and you yourself linked studies for that - my the point was not about helmets reducing head injuries (though the whole rotational vs linear collisions thing means good helmet design is important) but about how as per risk compensation theory if there is an overal increase in risk due to increased perception of safety it might offset the increased in protection from helmets since helmets only protect the head.

Also found lots of things about how mandatory helmet use for cyclists in overall causes more deaths (for example and another example) because it reduces the number of people who take up cycling and the overall negative health outcomes of fewer people cycling add up to to higher mortality that the increased risk of head injury from cycling without a helmet given the low baseline risk of cycling in general.

Here’s a pretty good summary from the views in the EU.

I’ve actually lived in the place for almost a decade, and the problem there - especially in places like Amsterdam - is much more the tourists stepping into bicycle paths without looking than the actual cyclists.

It actually takes a while to get used to, for example, when crossing a street look twice to each side (and to look properly rather than just slight head turn and rely on sound and peripheral vision to notice approaching vehicles) when crossing a street and also on the other side consider that a car that stopped to let you pass might be hiding a bicycle from your angle.

We used to joke that the proof for us immigrants that one had become a proper Amsterdammer was passing the tourists on the cycle path and just naturally swear at them with “God verdomme” (God damn it).

I vaguelly remember a study in Denmark (which has roughly 50/50 of people cycling with and without helmets) that showed that cyclists who wear helmets were more likely to have serious accidents than those who did not, though by a small percentage.

There are several factors that are believed to be behind such an unexpected statistic:

• Drivers actually act more dangerously around cyclists who seem better protected than around those who do not and the cyclists themselves are more reckless when they feel they’re better protected (the latter being a much broader and well known phenomenon)
• The weight of the helmet, even though it’s quite low, will on a high speed collision pull the head more towards colliding with something than otherwise - in other words, if you fall the helmet actually unbalances your head and makes it more likely your head will hit the ground.
• The human brain is much more resilient to linear shock than rotational shock - basically when something makes your head rotate the brain inside will also rotate though not instantly since it not part of the bone of your cranium, so it will instead get pulled to rotate and similarly when the head stops be pulled to stop rotating, all of which can cause tearing which can kill a person. Cycling helmets tend to make the head rotate on a collision.
• Cycling helmets are only rated to protect from collisions up to (if I remember it correctly) 15km/h
• Cycling helmets do not protect anything else than the head (which links back to the first point)

Anyways, the point being that at the kind of speed and the environment that people cycle in when just commuting in a city, bicyle helmets can actually make it slightly more dangerous.

Mind you, this doesn’t at all mean that in different situations - such as mountain biking or speed cycling - helmets aren’t a must.

In places like The Netherlands pretty much nobody uses a helmet when just cycling in the city.

Fascism is very much the natural end state of ultra-nationalism.

A lot of those “victims” in America were fine with the culture of flag shagging leading to this.

(All it takes is to look at American interventions abroad to see that pretty much the entirety of the American political class and broader elites were absolutelly fine with Fascism as long as its effects stayed abroad, and those people were definitelly supported by most Americans, at last as long as there weren’t many coffins with Americans returning home - the other poster is totally correct in being angry at this).

And don’t get me started on how a huge slice of the American middle-class was alright with the total crash of social mobility since the 70s and explosion of inequality as long as they “got theirs” - the bottom of the country was falling but, hey, “I’m alright Jack”.

Mind you, this is the Progressive Politics forum so hopefully there are actually more people here who have long been aware and cared about “the greatest good for the greatest number” than elsewhere (so, leftwingers in the true sense) who are the only ones IMHO that haven’t been part of at least tilling and fertilizing the political field were American Fascism grew and who are the only real vitims.

The rest were more like colaborators, or at least the kind of people the “First they came” poem talks about.

If it wasn’t Trump, it would be somebody else similar.

Some guy like him accelerating the speed of collapse is pretty standard at this stage of the Rise & Fall cycle of Empire (of which the US is most definitely in the Fall stage and has been since maybe all the way back in the late 70s).

The whole “elite pillaging” stage of the last couple of decades in an extremelly nationalist nation with a massive myth of national greatness was bound to deliver a populist strongman that promised to “restore the greatness of the nation”.

Maybe you’ll be lucky and avoid the whole “overextending itself in a war against multiple enemies / a peer level enemy” kind of thing that also often happens at this stage.

I lived in the UK as an EU immigrant before Brexit and I can tell you that they were already well on their way before that.

Just go have a look at the Stasi-like civil society done in the UK as shown by the Snowden Revelations: it was actually worse than the US and, unlike in the US, none of it was rolled-back in the UK and instead new laws were passed to make the whole thing retroactivelly legal.

This is far from the only way in which Britain hasn’t really been a proper Democratic nation for quite a while (for example, did you know they have a Press Censorship system called “D-Notices” or that there is not right to legal counsel when interrogated at a border crossing?).

Brexit was not the cause of Britain’s increased authoritarianism, it was a consequence of it (though indirectly, due to things like Press ownership concentration, the BBC to quite an extend a Propaganda outlet for the party in government and the pain of the Austerity that was chosen in the aftermath of of the 2008 Crash as a way to pay for the costs of saving the wealth of the rich and the bonuses of bankers).

It’s just that unlike in places like the US or Hungary, the culture of the elites gives a huge importance to “keeping appearences” (hence the “English gentleman” stereotype, which at least nowadays is all about how one presents oneself and not at all about morals, ethics or honor) so you get a posh kind of Fascist rather than the raging strongman populist style of fascist you get in other countries. Also Britain is far more likely to hide the use of force for oppression with “It’s the Law” and “Proper procedure” than the others - again a form of managing appearances.