Comment by sillystuff
11 hours ago
The US just finished divesting itself from its strategic helium reserve in 2024 due to the "Helium Stewardship Act of 2013"[1]
But, now we have a strategic bitcoin reserve.
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527
You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.
Pay of the credit card bill?
You mean pay the interests on it.
Financialization of everything is so funny to me, because even I, who is extremely stupid when it comes to big money stuff, can see not having state capacity on important stuff is insane. By that, I mean hard resources, materials, THINGS.
They started selling in 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve
Big self own here
It’s almost shocking that people in an era of unlimited resources could see this was not renewable and important to hold, and that later in the era of limited resources, we decided to privatize this. It’s so shortsighted, willfully ignorant.
We’re about to get a preview of the world after fossil fuel extraction and some of the knock on effects. Semi is one thing, wait till you can’t get an MRI.