The first person hedged their statement with "I heard once" so it's likely true regardless of whether the rest is accurate.
In a similar vein it has been said (by me, just now) that DeBeers is actually already out of diamonds and manufactures then de novo from the compressed ashes of orphans.
Well, I heard it was the Epstein-Trump Boating School For Children, which taught vulnerable youngsters how to get away from Epstein’s child-rape island.
I'll provide a citation since I'm in this industry and watch it closely.
De Beers currently has about 2 billion worth of diamond stock in its holds. This equates to about... 5-6 months of sales volume. It used to be worth more but lab-grown and other re-valuing initiatives have dropped the worth of their hoard.
It's yet another borrowing of the prestige of technical terms -- propagated by LLMs, but in rampant misuse by poseurs even before AI: inflection point, exponential growth, order of magnitude, evolve, viable, ...
Seems Google Trends say ~50% "interest over time" around 2004, which Ngrams at that same time has about half the occurrence in books compared to around ~1926.
As the labs adjust their models to become more human, less repetitive and more of the population starts catching up these patterns, we'll see it become less used again, starting the new loop of the repeating cycle.
If it’s easy, where’s the evidence? Nothing you wrote is evidence for anything, at most “educated guesses”.
> Countries without an extensive bureaucracies are all failed state
This is such a ridiculous statement. There’s so many different levels of bureaucracy across the developed and developing world that you can’t really put them all in a single bag.
I would like to know where that 1% retail business is located. My family has a bunch of hardware/electricity retail businesses and the margins are way more than that. Like 30%-500%.
You mean subsidized wares that is priced for loss to lure masses to cheap shopping, while selling other stuff above the price? Like buying liquors like rum and whiskey in european supermarkets is almost guaranteed to give cca 2x the price of cheapest online sellers in same country. Thats age old tactic, you need to look at overall sums spent or prices across the offer
Currency is already managed by the elected government, and every democracy in the world traces electronic transactions. Some (like Italy) forbid cash payments in large sums altogether. So what's the boogieman here?
The boogyman is just what you described, and every democracy in the world absolutely does not trace electronic transactions.
Some have a more hands off approach, including size of transactions and flagged behaviour as indicators of when payment processors must report to the government.
The Goverment should absolutely have no idea who spends what, where. Warrants and court orders, check values should be required before anyone can know. The potential to suppress political opponents, to squelch legitimate protest, to interfere with elections, is too dangerous.
Simply because some countries, like the US after 9/11, decided to give up this aspect of a free people, does not make it right.
Governments have a monopoly on violence and thus technically the ability to do whatever they want. But it matters how theoretical that ability is and how publicly apparent misuse of the ability will be. Having all transactions flow through the government makes abuse both trivial and invisible to the public.
Currency is a barriers bond that affords a degree of decentralisation-in-operation and use that isn't afforded by digital payments, even crypto for practical purposes.
Yes, and this is a bad thing, and free societies are impossible without the possibility of payments that the government doesn’t want you to be able to make.
Cryptocurrency solves that problem well, which is why governments have moved hard to effectively nerf it everywhere.
Visa and Mastercard don't, but right now cash more or less does. If the state has a monopoly on digital payments, and can thus mass surveil all digital payments without any scrutiny, the state has a huge incentive to disincentivize or bar the use of cash. Then all it takes is a bad actor to come into power and abuse the system.
> Not relevant to the point I was making at all - the state running digital payments is no more an incentive to stop cash payments than Visa/MC.
Yes, it is. The state acting as a direct intermediary for all transactions creates new mechanisms of both mass surveillance and economic control that do not exist in the status quo where the state functions merely as the issuer of cash.
When private businesses create digital transaction systems that augment the cash economy, the state itself does not have direct access to or control over the transactions that flow through those systems, and must work within legal strictures to interact with the organizations managing them.
> User data is available from either and in the case of Visa/MC it also likely leaks overseas.
Perhaps, but the legal implications between the state obtaining access to illicitly leaked data and the state itself being the originator of that data are drastically different.
The Italian government has no power over foreign cards, and will be careful to not hinder those transactions lest they want to lose their tourism income.
When it comes down to it they do have power over the use of foreign cards in their jurisdiction. But the further indirection from the government does matter and makes abuse harder.
Realistically the most they can do is exercise power over cards issued by Italian banks. They can't do anything about cards belonging to Italians, which have been issued by foreign banks, unless they ban all foreign cards. In which case they will lose all tourism and destroy their country completely.
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