And again. Read my reply. I refuted this idiotic. take.

You allowed yourselves to be dumbed down to this point.

A bit more than fifteen years ago I was burned out in my very successful creative career, and decided to try and learn about how the world worked.

I noticed opposing headlines generated from the same studies (published in whichever academic journal) and realised I could only go to the source: the actual studies themselves. This is in the fields of climate change, global energy production, and biospheric degradation. The scientific method is much degraded but there is still some substance to it. Wikipedia no chance at all. Academic papers take a bit of getting used to but coping with them is a skill that most people can learn in fairly short order. Start with the abstract, then conclusion if the abstract is interesting. Don’t worry about the maths, plenty of people will look at that, and go from there.

I also read all of the major works on Western beliefs on economics, from the Physiocrats (Quesnay) to modern monetary theory. Read books, not websites/a website edited by who knows which government agencies and one guy who edited a third of it. It is simple: the cost of production still usually means more effort, so higher quality, provided you are somewhat discerning of the books you buy.

This should not even be up for debate. The fact it is does go some way to explain why the US is so fucked.___

Wikipedia presents the views of reliable sources on notable topics

Absolutely nowhere near. This is why America is fucked.

Yeah because 1. obviously this is what everybody does. And 2. Just because sources are provided does not mean they are in any way balanced.

The fact that you would consider this sort of response acceptable justification of wikipedia might indicate just how weak wikipedia is.

Edit - if only you could downvote reality away.

You can build homes and all sorts of stuff out of wood. It doesn’t have to be a low-tech backwards building material.

Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source of information for anything regarding contemporary politics or economics.

Edit - this is why the US is fucked.

Yes.

Who knows what other reasons various people in and around the government at that time had for invading Iraq, but what does seem to have been established is that it wasn’t WMD’s or anything to do with 9/11, which iirc, is what the Americans and us (well Tony Blair, who was paid handsomely for his service) said it was.

The US (Nixon) made an agreement with the Saudis that the world buy their oil in dollars in exchange for the US providing protection - thus extending the dollar’s period as global reserve currency beyond the time the US unpegged the dollar from gold. Known as the petrodollar agreement, this extended the period the US gained an unearned portion of global wealth beyond the 70’s.

America was, Americans were paid handsomely for its agreement with the Saudis. [Edit - this is a little bit reductive, but] Bretton Woods then this is why boomers were able to buy a house and live well on one wage.

I understand not every American benefited from this, and that from Reagan, and neo-liberalism onwards, all the wealth went to capital. In fact I think American capitalist ideology largely squandered this period of wealth enriching the likes Tump, Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg etc. I guess ‘a rising tide raises all boats’ and ‘trickle down economics’ turned out to be big lies after all, whouldathoughtit.