Also used to use the tram like everybody else, back in the day.

Meanwhile in the UK there are actually laws just for the Royal Family, like the one that temporary closes parts of the airspace for the Royal Family Helicopter to pass through.

Mind you, this is far from the only way in which The Netherlands has a far, FAR, FAR more egalitarian spirit at all levels of society and laws than Britain, and I say this as somebody who has lived in both countries.

The criteria of “significant achievement” is basically bollocks: for example Fred Goodwin who led RBS to pretty much bankruptcy (not quite as it was saved by the state) held a knighthood for “Services to Finance” which he got for merelly leading the bank he almost destroyed (though at least it was annuled after he almost destroyed it) and mandarins, politicians and public prosecutors get theirs for nothing more than doing their job without being brazenly incompetent, something which is only a “significant achivement” if one expects extreme incompetence for the vast majority of such people hence doing one’s job without ending up in the press for massive incompetent is a “significant achievement”.

From my point of view (as an immigrant who lived in Britain for a decade, and thus having not started with any respect or lack thereof for the Honors System), after a couple of years I concluded that whilst the folklore surrounding it was all about if being about honor (hence the supposed criteria of “significant achievement” and the very loud giving once in a while of one to a very visible public personality such as an actor for being a famous person who did their job in a competent manner), the reality of it was no such thing and de facto the criteria were highly skewed by the social class a recipient originated from and their level of contribution to “keep the boat steady and stop it from being rocked”.

Certainly when it comes to peerages the Honors System bares no relation to honor or any kind of achievement that goes beyond “having a specific job and not end up in the press for being exceptionally incompetent at it”.

I think that if one would blindly throw a stone in the middle of the Lords it would be far more likely to hit a person who is not good (i.e. with a personal moral better than “personal upside maximization”) than one who is.

More broadly for things like Peerages, outside artists it’s rich people, politicians and public-school attending scions of the upper and upper-middle class (even the Public Servants who get one are public-school educated). Notice how common people who are not in the public eye and committed enormous acts of bravery and self-sacrifice for the good of others (the above-mentioned “firemen and nurses”) never get peerages or above, and instead get at most OBEs.

You’re correct, similarly to Germany it has a President with limited powers which are far less than Parliament or the Govern, not a Presidential System (like the US or France) were the President actually has executive power.

In theory it does make sense to have someone who can veto everything on behalf of the state if the government goes weapons grade guano.

In Democratic countries which have a President but not a Presidential System (so, like Germany and Portugal, and unlike the US and France) that’s basically the entirety of the power of the President.

Personally I vastly prefer a figurehead President who has at most limited to power to dissolve parliament (for when, as you say, “the government goes weapons grade guano”) which gets actually chosen on a vote and kicked out if he or she turns out to be worse than they seemed before getting the position.

From the places I lived in, I above all detested the Constitutional Monarchy in Britain, with the Royal being filthy rich and a cornerstone of a web of patronage that was part of, if not most of, the reason why the country has massive class division and discrimination by European standards. My experience in The Netherlands was nowhere as bad, though.

Does that guy reflect the Norwegian version of having “breeding” or is it more a case of too much inbreeding?

After seeing this picture I’m actually curious how much inbreeding is there in the Norwegian Royal Family.

I lived in Britain for a decade and the impression I got was that, outside people with genuine proven merit like artists and scientists, having a titles of nobility there was a pretty good indicator of the holder of the title being a complete total sociopath, the higher the title the worse the character of the holder.

They do quite a lot of whitewashing of the system by giving things like knighhoods and damehoods to well known and loved actors and actresses, plus a renowned scientist here and there, plus some lesser honors (NEVER a knighthood or damehood) to people like firemen or nurses who went above and beyond their duty in helping others, but the vast majoriyty of types with Peerages and above are either well connected career politicians who made sure the “right” people gained from the system, very wealthy nouveau riche or those from old wealth.

That will be right after they do it to Tony Blair for the war crime of Pillage in Iraq as detailed in the Iraq War Report …

Judging from all the sociopathic shit I’ve seen from New Labour both when I lived in Britain and when I didn’t, I fully expect that Mandelson is but the tip of the iceberg.

And this is without even going into the Tories, who are at least as devoid of empathy as New Labour types, though possibly more open about how they’re superior people for whom there is no need to verify that they obbey the ethical and moral boundaries that are supposed to moderate people’s social behaviors. (IMHO they mainly differ from New Labour types in their level of hypocrisy rather than in personal character).

Consider the possibility that a nation’s “support for Israel” is highly correlated to how many of the elites there were involved in the pedophilic honeypot that Epstein ran together with Mossad.

They’ve used threats instead, as well as the power of shaming and the influence they have in many places including the Press (for example, pretty much the whole Board of the BBC has a royal title, be it a Peerage or higher, and this is similar in quite a number of other places, both in the public and the private sector).

Look up the “black spider memos” from the time the current King was still a Prince.

The buildings and overboard “state folklore” are what generate revenue, not the Royals - the probability of ever seeing a Royal in person, either as a tourist or a local, is basically zero.

Meanwhile the Royals are a cornerstone of a massive system of patronage and class segregation, not to mention being one of the wealthiest families in Britain. Oh, and the king also has the power to block laws, though he seldom uses it and apparently will instead in the background use the threat of it and of shaming governments (look up the “black spider memos”, which date back to his time as prince).

They’re pretty much the most anti-Democratic Royals in Europe by a long margin, IMHO.

You can have a President without having a Presidential system - like, for example, Germany - were that post is mainly being a figurehead/top-diplomat with mainly the power of shaming parliament when they go overboard with some laws, both not actually able to block it, possible with some limited power to dissolve parliament and call new elections.

Basically it’s the same thing as a modern day monarch in a Democratic nation, except that people actually get to chose who gets the post, if they turn out to be bad at it they get replaced after 4 years rather than being there for life and they don’t actually own a massive chunk of wealth for historical reasons (like, for example, the British Royal Family).

I’ve lived under Presidential systems (Portugal) and Constitutional Monarchies (The Netherlands, Britain) and vastly prefer the former: the latter is especially fucked up in Britain were the Royals actually have real power (to block laws) - if seldom used - and are the cornerstone of a well entrenched system of patronage and class segregation which is far beyond anything I’ve seen elsewhere in Europe, though granted in The Netherlands The Royals were a lot closer to normal people - to the point that before becoming King the current ruler used to work as a pilot for KLM - than in Britain.

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.