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This isn't really political.

If the UK exits, they are no longer paying their EU club dues, which means the EU will no longer fund UK people/project in return; and it is easier to preemptively block further UK funding that hasn't already been funded and then (re-)fund it in the near-future if Brexit doesn't happen (no reason currently to think it won't, the UK just needs to get their shit together and actually do it), than it is for the reverse, semi-funding UK people/projects until Article 50 is signed by the UK.

This is the path of least bullshit, as far as I can tell. Given that the UK has to leave the EU to survive, wants to leave the EU, and the EU has given them significant reason to go ahead and leave the EU and not go down with the ship. I'm trying not to judge anyone, but France/German bailout of Greece, and the failure to save Spain in any respectable manner; all the while Iceland did the correct thing (and from the viewpoint as an American, our founding fathers would be applauding Iceland), the EU's economy is going to have their own Japan-style Lost Decade over this.

Side note: The point of investments is that they are not guaranteed. This is why investments have return, and there is an entire industry around calculated risk and the mathematics that go into it. As in, a low risk investment pays little (but most likely will pay it), a high risk investment must, in turn, have the chance of paying out a lot (but also has a high risk of paying nothing).

Given that (something everyone on HN should know, given HN was started as YC's news outlet, and grew into a rather nice community later on), if an investment fails, it must fail if that is the only way out. Continually bailing out bad investments is almost literally theft from everyone else who didn't fund that investment.

FDIC in the US exists for a reason: disconnect people's non-investment money from banks being commercial enterprises, and let people rationally choose to invest (or not invest) using a safe and well understood system. Telling Wall Street (or the European equivalents) that it's okay to just aim for the stars and pretend to get there every single time, teaches them that hyperinflation is okay and the little people don't matter.

The little people matter, because there's several thousand of us for every one of them, and the only "us vs them" mentality going on isn't some white collar vs blue collar shit, and it never will be, no matter how much CNN, Fox, and MSNBC bang that drum; instead, the only "us vs them" mentality I see going on is really is the 99% vs the 0.1%.

When push comes to shove, we shove back with several times more force. I'm already seeing an unprecedented push for locally grown/raised/manufactured/built/whatevered food/products/services. As in, city first, metro/county/whatever area second, state third, region of the US fourth, the US fifth, and first world countries that don't treat their citizens like shit sixth, with India/China/etc being firmly rejected as they are vehicles for legalized slavery, and only serve to enrich the already enriched.

There has always been this movement, but now I'm seeing poor people, people who simply can't afford to do this... doing it. And it's working. Hell, I'm not rich, I'm not even middle class (I'm probably the poorest regular on HN), and I'm buying $3 a dozen eggs because the money stays local, and the guy raising the chickens buys Blue Seal seed, which they themselves are largely anti-anti-nutritional (ie, not using garbage protein and fat sources, and not loading it full of corn and soy), are medium businessy (13 mills across the US, maybe only employing a thousand people across all of them), and only small local businesses are dealers for it. Their chicken feed is higher quality (== healthier chickens that live longer and produce more, and == better eggs with more nutrition, AND == more eggs), and less expensive than the garbage Purina/Cargill produces and sells to small time farmers.

So, yeah. There is my rant for the day. Good morning, everyone.




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