Did Saudi Arabia wait until it could manufacture oil drills before it started exploiting its oil?
Solar panels are oil drills. The oil is in the sky. If your supplier stops selling you oil drills you have several years to find another supplier or start building your own.
I thought a lot of manufactured goods come from China. Including many of the tools and equipment for drilling oil. Is oil not a secure energy supply either then?
Saying solar power is dependent on China because panels come from China is like saying fracking is dependent on China because some pumps and drilling equipment come from China.
Yeah I'd say it works. I've seen many minors doomscrolling on their phones. I haven't seen any with a beer in hand. That's not to say there aren't any, but there are fewer.
So in the USA in 2026, any interest rates or fees that are not illegal, are not exorbitant? And any loan or credit that is not illegal is not usury? That is obviously not the working definition for other commenters here.
If illegal loans have financed our cars, education, and homes, then where are all the criminal prosecutions? Where are the lawsuits to recover the exorbitant rates? Was it consumers taking these illegal loans? Or was it the established banks, negotiating illegal and exorbitant rates with criminals? Is that why banks fail, or are "too big to fail", because we are reluctant to expose their criminal activity?
We heard of people "walking away" from their home loans during the 2008 recession; it's difficult to walk with broken kneecaps! We heard that their loans were "underwater", but we didn't realize they were "sleeping with the fishes"!
> That is obviously not the working definition for other commenters here.
If you've read the other comments I don't understand why you're still confused.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882360 pointed the finger at the general practice of moneylending, known for most of history as "usury", for high housing prices. This is broadly true - lower interest rates equal high prices.
Others thought they meant modern usury, which is lending money at higher than the legal maximum interest rate.
That would require a functioning legislative branch that could pass laws. However a major political program of the past decades has been to gum up Congress and prevent its functioning. There's very limited bandwidth to accomplish legislation, and there's hundreds of good fixes that can't fit through, so I doubt the US will be able to fix this anytime soon, unless there's bigger scandal.
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