lsiq

"Theres only a handful of real theorems with proofs"

Philosophy is not mathematics. Philosophy asks you the question of what is a theorem in the context of philosophical thought, why should the fractal of reality be reduced to a reductionist theorem in the first place, and what consists as sufficient proof for said theorems.

The book Capital Returns: Investing Through the Capital Cycle details this phenomenon, including historical cases.

If anything, it shows it's possible for you to arbitrage this and in doing so help "smooth out the cycle."

I would love to use Adafruit boards in my production, but I have to resort to custom Chinese PCB stuff to be competitive. I don't want anything, but taxes and CoL is basic business logic.

SparkFun is in Colorado, which isn't a low tax state but their cost of living is still lower. So all else equals, they are going to earn maybe 5-10% more profit on the sale of a commodity item like a Teensy. You have better products than they do, all else equals you could earn 25%+ more than them, by simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL.

Adafruit is basically the best but their whole reside-in-NYC philosophy makes zero sense. The contention that they can hire better people in NYC holds no water because over 50% of what they pay their employees goes to 3 layers of governments with no meaningful benefit AND their people pay NYC rents.

They could literally halve their prices or double their pay if they moved to Jacksonville or similar. And their employees would get daily sunshine and own a house, instead of inhaling 100 year old dust in the subway everyday, commuting from their tiny 1BR apartment. It boggles the mind.

Agreed. I will say that Renesas does have one thing going for them, being Japanese it has the lowest supply chain/geopolitical risk right now of anybody other than TI. And the Microchip/Atmel low end stuff is so overpriced/outdated, that you're be better off stockpiling reels of the 8 cent Puya chips or going with the the TI MSPM0.

The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.

You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.

"the control the US is able to exert over their companies"

You have that relationship inverted. The US gov't is a mere shell at this point, having outsourced all its core functions to private companies. There is no "medicare" budget or "defense" budget, there is only the capital allocated to and embezzled by the medical & military industrial complex.

And rest assured they do their own set of overt disappearances, notably the Boeing whistleblower and Epstein. There is an obvious playbook they follow in such cases, first they bribe, blackmail, or discredit - before being indiscreet.

Buffett knows the S&P always wins because seignorage ends up in the S&P....

Every monopoly that exists (and has ever existed) does so because of some combination of government granted monopoly rights. Mineral rights, patents, intellectual property, and all other regulatory barriers to entry.

There is no "natural" culmination into monopoly, monopoly is THE ANTITHETICAL END of the market. Where monopoly exists there is no longer a competitive market floating prices. The state itself in then in control of all production or in affiliation with a stagnant racket that controls all production. There is no market anymore, because the state (a monopoly of its own) has ceased to enforce a market. It is a choice for the state to make. The contrast between the choice between a market and monopoly is as stark as the contrast between South Korea vs North Korea, or Norway vs Venezuela.

This isn't it, he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview.

He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.

Didn't you see Marc Andreesen's tweet that " 'Conspiracy theory" is code for "will be obvious in a year.' "

You only need a few first principles to see absolutely everything, like seeing the matrix code: 1) The world society is entirely made up of individual people, 8B pairs of feet on the ground. Abstractions like 'the government' or "China" are red herrings. 2) Power is relational. Vito tells Tom what to do, and it behooves Tom to carefully follow orders. 3) There are no regulations and human laws in the state of nature, only in the social reality. You alone on Mars would be free to do whatever you wanted, but here on Earth you must file with the IRS, or else.

So you're telling me that a few stuffy bureaucrats earning a salary of few hundred thousand a year are the ones who decide what happens to the money of billions? Think again.

I'll give you a big hint, both the first and second presidents of the ECB previously were part of the same small and obscure NGO concerned with the history of banking.

What's unconvincing is the vagueness of that statement. Lets' get more specific then.

Explain, for example, how both the Fed and ECB implemented Basel III. Why do these two "independent" organizations adhere so closely to the policy recommendations of some unelected NGO?

Don't you find it strange that nearly every country in the world is pursuing the same currency objective at the same time. You know the one, I just don't want to spell it out to trigger the filter.

How can every supposedly independent CB pursue the exact same goal if they are not under the direction of one nexus?

Elections indeed swing, but do the outcomes matter if the key national politicians are operating under duress? Food for thought.

Today's story is just another day of, "Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania."

"They" are in a dilemma, they either go total global control or they lose control. And it's clear they are going with the former.

This is just one more law that makes no practical sense even if the intentions were noble. The WHO treaty, CBDCs, and digital IDs are all in the pipeline doing much the same.

With the real-time, global, instant communication network that is the internet, "their" ONLY hope to retain control at scale is to use AI/Software and essentially force everyone to obey a computer.

They will fail, that's the good news. Mostly because of entropy - that is to say, it is far cheaper and easier to disable a structure than build it up. A $2B data center can be disabled by a fire or a virus. A "too-big-to-fail-bank" can disappear overnight when customers close their accounts.

The reason those don't happen normally is because people are mostly good, happy, and trusting. Once the trust is gone, there is anger, and self-interest trumps good-intentions - that's when the entropy and "Black Swan" events really kick in. I recommend Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies for how such processes have repeatedly taken place throughout history.

The bad news is that they are going to try and force total control through anyways, so get ready. Nobody can predict how its going to unfold.

Read this it will change your life for the better: https://professorwerner.org/shifting-from-central-planning-t...

Productivity is indeed a second order thing in the way the banking system works now. But you still have not understood my point.

As long as IT IS LEGAL for banks to create credit for non-productive existing-asset purchases, there is a limit to infinity function applied to the economy that leads to consolidation of all assets with ex nihilo money. The banking system as it exists now leads to a future where one hypothetical private equity firm will have purchased all assets in the economy with bank created money (in practice, it will simply be government/central bank ownership).

"When someone buys a building to lease out flats, is that not productive?"

That is simply Joe's $10M building leasing out flats has now become Sally's $12M building leasing out flats. Unless Sally makes productive investments in renovations and so on, there is a net zero gain to GDP but there is asset price inflation as a result of the bank's credit creation. If the bank instead loaned $12M to Sally to build a new identical building, there would be twice as many flats available for renters, the local builders would have work for several months, and the building materials manufacturers would make sales. Joe may have to sell his old building for $9.5M instead, but he may have slightly better rents as the local economy added jobs. And the bank, in the end, should even earn a higher rate of interest from Sally.

"it's the fault of those speculators for the speculating, not the banks." Both the speculators and banks respond to financial incentives and must work within the laws.

"This idea you have about what is a 'productive investment' or not is fairy interventionist." Is it any any more interventionist than regulating the bank so that they can't make loans to borrowers who can't pay? Or that they cannot finance new coal plants? Or that they must report all transactions over $600?

It is inevitable that banks will eventually only loan for productive purposes. If we still have a working banking system in 50 years, that is how it will work.

Banks create the money supply (~97% of it). A bank "loan" is not a legally a loan at all but a new security that is created and purchased by the bank. Furthermore, the money for that purchase does not come from any other account or "fed reserves" it is literally instantiated in the account. This "credit creation" theory of the money supply is what the article is about and was empirically proven by the work of Richard Werner.

This is a very important level of understanding, and one that is obfuscated by the central banks.

Once understood, it is self-evident that banks are wholly responsible for asset bubbles. Banks, especially large banks, create loans mostly for existing asset purchases, and not for new productive investment. Of course, they do this in part because those assets work as collateral.

What happens when this behavior is aggregated in the whole system is essentially wealthy people jumping over each other to secure an amount of loans approaching infinity to acquire FINITE real estate and SEMI-FINITE stock. You can see how that ratio will repeatedly create asset price inflation which inevitably implodes along with the banks who issued the loans.

The only solution is for the regulator, in this case the central banks, to issue guidance for the banks to create credit for only new productive investments, whether that be new housing, factories, machinery, or firms, because those are not inflationary and increase the size of the GDP pie. If done, the economy would grow at a high clip with low inflation. The current system of credit creation for leveraged buyouts ad infinitum of a slow growing economic pie, has only one logical outcome....

Everything is going as planned.

One store credit to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

Thank you, was hoping for someone to point this out.

Banks don't take deposits and they don't lend money. Banks create money.

When they "lend," what they are legally doing is purchasing a newly issued security for your home. And they are doing so with created money, that money is not transferred from some other account.

Similarly when you "deposit," the money is legally now the bank's. The bank now has a liability to you, but it is not a custodial intermediary "holding" your money for you.

It is poorly understood that banks are in fact creating credit. Most people believe in either the fractional reserve model of banking or in the financial intermediary model.

This is a real problem, because as they create credit to finance existing asset purchases (as opposed to financing new investment) they create asset price inflation & bubbles and foster inequality.

Read anything by the brilliant Richard Werner who writes about this extensively, this interview has a short summary of how banks actually work in law: https://youtu.be/EC0G7pY4wRE https://professorwerner.org/shifting-from-central-planning-t...

Foucault implied the same. Or at least, suggested that as the scientific definitions are created so too does the phenomena emerge. Ian Hacking expanded upon this and named this concept, dynamic nominalism.

That's why we had "madmen" in 19th century and that no longer exists, only to be subsumed by supposedly more specific new descriptions that psychologists have come up with.

The idea of dynamic nominalism is not that such a label as "Multiple Personality" is contrived but that the described phenomena becomes real. The two simultaneously and unconsciously converge, in a sense, to exist.

My own thought is that you can this expand concept for a lot of current & former social categories that are even broader - and not restricted to psychology, such as being a hippie. And also the social category that is currently in vogue.

Yeah when Alan Dershowitz says on TV that he was introduced to Epstein by Lynn R*thschild we shouldn't read too much into it right? Or when Cindy McCain says that everyone knew what Epstein was doing but no legal entity would go after him. Its fantastical really.

That may increase the velocity of money, but it also will drive up prices of liquid assets like index funds as those assets replace the store of value function money.

Although my post was more about cleaning up corruption via transparent and verifiable government bookeeping, etc.

I will take the risk and give an explanation.

The are two first principles that few fully understand: The first is that we are creatures of commerce - that is how we sustain ourselves. The economy is the total FLOW of all concurrent commercial transactions, and this is conducted via cash & money. For an artistic, but accurate image of the world we live in see this scene from Network (1976): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35DSdw7dHjs&t=89s.

The second first principle is that you are a sovereign spirit in this universe, and so is everybody else. There are no behavioral rules in the natural reality, only in the social reality. The rules, symbols, ideologies, religions, and institutions exist to manipulate other people's behavior and concentrate cash flows in the great system that is the economy. But in the pure state of nature, it really is only you.

The cash flows concentrate as the more capital you start with the more you can acquire. The precious few people who reach the "Center of Cash Flows" ultimately do so with force; they kill people over money, embezzle public funds, and so on because they are sovereign in their selfish minds. They are not "above the law," the law is simply for other people, not them. That is and has always been the true nature of "government."

But we have governments now that are sophisticated enough that we don't even know their true nature. It's like a laundromat owned by the Triads. You don't ever see the Triads, you don't know who owns the place, you simply go in and put your quarters into the machines.

The logical outcome of our combined individual sovereign states is that there is and has always been a human or some humans who are truly sovereign, who can break and make the rules and are not subject to the rules themselves because there is no higher power above them. They are the power and they derive that power from their control of the cash flows.

Unfortunately, if we are to form a peaceful society, only they can be sovereign; if everyone behaved in sovereign fashion we'd all be killing and stealing from each other all the time and that's not good for anyone. The sovereign sets the rules of the game that everyone underneath plays.[1]

The problem, as we know from history, is that the sovereigns themselves are a point of failure and we occasionally get a Stalin or Pol Pot there who have no vestigial empathy, and we have a "monopoly government" of total extortion, subjugation, and death.

The own nothing was only a joking reference to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBBxWtKKQiA which has become a bit of meme.

So can you now see how this proposed "database money" is some unknown sovereign person(s) wanting to take all your money?

[1] Maybe centuries from now can reach a state where everyone understands their sovereign states but chooses cooperation. We could solve the prisoner's dilemma with transparency, as cooperation would win out and we'd all have better outcomes.

That's funny you say that, because Visa founder Dee Hock is now retired and on twitter and thoughtfully warning about the massive centralization of power that is unfolding behind the scenes.

People need to wake up and see that CBDCs are literal serfdom. It is the imposition of micro-level, algorithmic economic sanctions on YOU.

Once they are fully implemented and a network effect has taken hold, we will truly own nothing.

When I read posts like this I just think, life teaches only some learn.

Let's not forget Zuckerberg called his users "dumb f*cks."

But, we're supposed to believe his contempt is gone and he cares now.

If anything his arrogance is probably far higher nowadays than it was before because he has so much power.

I was surprised to see the author's name, because I actually took History of Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy with her at uChicago a decade ago.

Her personality really shows through the article - it's highly amusing. She's an energetic philosophy wonk.

To me, this is just a classic case of a husband who doesn't realize that he can never let boredom creep in and isn't keeping things fresh and having enough sex.