risk000

What if we don't want to be told by you where we can and can't have a discussion?

Anti-vaxxer is a pejorative word, it lumps people together in ways that aren't fair. Many were just skeptical and wanted to discuss and debate the evidence, and that was ridiculed, as evident everywhere in this thread.

I think you're kicking the can of personal responsibility down, or in this case up, the road.

There are groupmind tendencies and competing groupthinks, as well as industrial corruption, in all of our scientific enterprises that I'm aware of. For me this is a serious issue, since I saw first-hand how pusillanimous scientists can become when their livelihoods or grants are endangered.

There is a war on for our minds. I think we each have to decide who we trust and don't trust. For many of us there is also a crisis of trust in our scientific institutions now.

Using the most extreme possible examples to justify a policy.

Yeah, 30-40% of the population needs psychologists and propagandists to evaluate or re-educate them. I think this viewpoint you're espousing might be part of the problem.

This is retold in musical form in quite a lovely way by Hedwig and the Angry Inch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJUNH-Fs4EA

The fundamental failure of this logic of trying to go somewhere and built a new city to escape the policy failures of the old city, is that those conflicts are intrinsic problems of large scale human organization. If you bring people, you bring the politics.

That seems like a really jaded view. To my mind there are millions of ways to organize human societies. The more experimentation the better. You're acting like nothing new can ever happen in this area, and I just don't buy that.

Governments are not households. Using this metaphor only causes more misunderstandings.

There are better and deeper ways of understanding money. You think fiscally sovereign nations need to borrow their own currency, and that isn't correct. You think government spending necessarily precipitates a currency crisis, and this is not only incorrect but goes against the demonstrated history of the United States from the 40s until today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg

It seems like you are conflating the role of private and public debt, which is a very common mistake. Private debt does cause economic crises, public debt is a misnomer - it's generally speaking not even correctly referred to as debt. It's referred to as a debt for historical reasons, its not owed to anyone, for example.

A paper by the CATO institute showed that world hyperinflations have not historically arisen from monetary policy changes. They have more to do with... eh, its complicated. Collapses of industry in wartime, famines, militarily-imposed foreign debts and single-resource economies living beyond their means. The understanding you are demonstrating is called the Quantity Theory of Money and its being more and more called into question. The Theory of Ricardian Equivalence is toast. Not sure if you know that those are the high-falutin names of the theories you are describing as being patent fact.

This is beautifully put and very true!

A lot of this boils down to emotions, which are not being fully processed in your system.

When you recognize a strong feeling within yourself, you can work with it to find a balance in the following way.

Find the 'negative' emotion. Now enter a meditative state. Call up the emotion into your awareness - use imagery, imagination, sensing, whatever helps. Once you have a hold on the emotion, amplify it - seek to feel it in your entire being. Whether its sadness, fear, not being appreciated - amplify the feeling until it fills every cell of your body. Do this for a few seconds only, until it feels like the feeling begins to change or subside. (It can take as few as 3 or 5 seconds, or much longer, depending). The goal is to feel the feeling as intensely as you can (without hurting yourself!). Doing this will shift it!

Then, seek to find the opposite feeling. Ask yourself, what is the opposite feeling? Feeling grateful for your job? What does that feel like? Imagine yourself feeling this feeling. Imagine a world-scenario that would trigger this feeling. Visualize yourself in a situation which triggers this opposite feeling. Then, amplify that feeling, and feel it in every cell of your body, for a few seconds.

This will completely shift your experience of the emotion and your viewpoint on the relevant issue/topic/area/domain in which the emotion is being triggered. It's a very effective technique.

Wishing you good things.

If $20k was just given to everyone, it’d have a massive inflationary effect.

Forgive me if I ask - on what basis do you know this?

The quantity theory of money and the theory of Ricardian equivalence are most likely wrong[0]. What else remains to be said?

https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_money-and-banking-v2.0/s...

This may be true, but I'd take a slap in the face if it meant another person had a place to sleep at night.

I can deal with slaps in the face. It's mostly an emotional feeling of being wronged. That's different than homelessness.

Money doesn't come from taxes and debt.

It is created de novo within a computer system.

It is conceptualized, according to intellectual paradigms, as originating as a 'debt' and being "paid back" by taxes. But this accounting is fallacious. There is a movement in economics called MMT which is going to challenge these paradigms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyT9zftNrE

Publicly created money does not come from taxes. It's generated de novo within a computer system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyT9zftNrE

They're not being 'rewarded'. They're being saved.

In this case we're pitting this theoretical family's feeling of being wronged, against the actual needs for shelter and economic solvency of another block of the population.

This is one of the reasons why the brilliant and unconventional economics professor Steve Keen recommends a debt jubilee for all citizens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBbXwQTvl_g

It circumvents the moral hazard you mention while alleviating the problems that are impacting all of us.

You make a really beautiful point here, thanks for that.

The real loser here is the future of the US dollar.

This presumes that the quantity theory of money (and/or the theory of Ricardian equivalence) is correct, which it most likely is not[0]. Money printing does not cause hyper-inflation, as demonstrated in this CATO paper[1]. Governments are not households[2], because they hold monopolies on currency creation[3]. Also, currency creation is not 'debt'.[4]

It follows from this that there is a vast and largely unexplored space on the graph of currency creation over time, where the line can rise before it triggers negative systemic effects. A fiscally sovereign nation can never run out of its own currency.

This policy space is where the future lies, awaiting us. The worldview-assumptions implicit in your question would discourage us from exploring this space. That, in my view, would be the heart of folly.

Many thinking people in the economic and policy professions are realizing this, and not a moment too soon.

0. https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_money-and-banking-v2.0/s... 1. https://www.cato.org/working-paper/world-hyperinflations 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba8XdDqZ-Jg 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AyT9zftNrE 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIe_BiRIlgU

How are the most responsible people being hurt by this though?

They continue to live in the same world they did prior to the rent being paid for the others. It's simply, in my view, that someone else received an advantage and they did not.

My brother's gain is also my gain. Is the viewpoint I'm choosing to take on it.

Dear Tech Blog Writer

I hope that your career flourishes and you write many attention grabbing pieces which predict, Cassandra-like, the future of our beloved industry.

But whenever that future arrives, I will be there, slinging Python code, because I love this language. These colors don't run. Nobody puts baby in a corner. I love Python and I'm taking this love to the grave... and beyond. I will be programming in Python when I am a soul living in outer space.

Nothing can stop this love, my friend. It is too good, too deep - I've done too many things with it, to be bothered by runtime efficiencies or however it fails in comparison with Haskell or Rust. I respect everyone's right to disengage and learn Rust or whatever but like I said, this is the bus I'm riding out on.

The liminal nature of the phenomenon is the calling card of a higher intelligence, seeking to fulfill/manifest it's understanding of metaphysical principles.

The primary metaphysical principle which, in my understanding, is seeking to be respected by these intelligences is this: Free will, even on the level of deciding what is allowed to be considered as real. A UFO that "proves its existence" to you has made concrete decisions about how it wants to alter your worldview. I believe that is a no-no.

The evidence that you will find in favor of UFOs, matches precisely or semi-precisely what the deeper nature of your belief system and mind want to believe about them. The Twining Memo alone, if meditated on and considered for its implications, proves beyond a doubt the reality of the phenomenon. I could rattle off a list of a half-dozen books that go into the topic in great detail. The amount of deathbed confessions and former insider testimony will astonish anyone, truly. The freedom to disbelieve in these things is protected. But even the Pentagon just came out saying that "UAPs" harass them regularly (with the implication known to those of us who research the matter, that this has happened ongoingly now for 70 years).

Basically just choose to open yourself to the possibility and I think you will find the evidence.

People who want to tell the old Austrian story about money will always find supporting evidence to do this. If you are seeking to view everything as a nascent currency crisis, because thats the only economic narrative that appeals, then there will be things that tie into that.

A modern iPhone, price converted into 1970s equivalent technology, has many millions of dollars of 1970s technology on it [see YT link below]. Now available for 600 dollars. An older gentleman I was speaking with yesterday told me about how nickels and dimes had become worthless.. indicating a decrease in value of the American currency. On his lap he was holding, what would have been for the era he had in mind (60s), a sleek, miniaturized supercomputer. These are now available for less than 1000 dollars with a monthly operating cost less than 100 dollars, including power. The same 10 dollar bill that in the past might have bought more food, now buys an unending amount of technical gadgets and do-dads mass-produced from the Chinese market, which can be shipped to one's doorstep for either free or an additional 5 dollars. Those products and markets didn't exist or were not open in this golden age of nickels and dimes he was referring to.

I may have misread your comment, but if you are leading me down a primrose path to speculate on the relative worthlessness of the dollar, because some asset prices have increased - I'm not going there. I've seen people parroting these arguments for 20 years now online. Stocks and housing are special cases. Cars are actually also weirdly price-fixed to support the auto industry. Everything else is getting relatively cheaper. This guy has some worthwhile thoughts on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSw41MqPFoM

You are referring to a very specific asset market in which essentially millions of people participate in legal, open, price-fixing conspiracies. There are potentially whole armies of people whose job is to keep those prices high, and to raise them higher. Year-over-year price increases in these asset classes (housing and stocks) may be baked into our whole economic model at this point. If the graph ever flatlines, it would trigger our slumbering debt crisis to go nuclear again, because of the way things are structured.

There is an entire segment of our economy (the FIRE sector) which is based on running these operations as ponzi schemes, and they are both funded and then bailed out by massive acts of private debt-as-money creation - it is like a recurring Marshall Plan, which guarantees the major players can always outrun the ever-looming debt crisis which is engulfing we, the little people.

The point is that we never have to actually fix the debt crisis or solve the problem of stagnant wages and decreasing demand, if balance sheets can always be corrected with fresh currency injections at the highest levels. Maybe you saw the gent on here who posted the Atlantic article about private firms owning 1 in every 5 American houses.

Yet your analysis would seek to use these (home) prices as an innocent, quasi scientific marker of the purchasing power of the dollar. I get the motivation there - housing is a key basis of human experience. But there is so much market manipulation going on in these asset classes that using them as a measurement of the value of the dollar is IMO not correct. The most powerful corporations around have chosen to backstop some of these assets, and that has supported a speculative boom on the part of anyone who can get bank money to 'invest' in bidding up property prices. Price discovery does not happen in that scenario, because everyone is buying things with the Bank's money, not their own. And if they don't buy it - guess what? The Bank will. Through a shell company, basically. These are some reasons not to measure the dollar's purchasing power by looking at the price of housing in America.

https://www.reddit.com/r/mmt_economics/comments/mi2jl0/thoug...

A major boom takes more than just stimulus from the government, otherwise, they'd just constantly be printing money.

I disagree. Massive, massive investment in beneficial projects is what causes booms. The last great booms we saw in the States were both the result of massive public investment during and after World War II. This gave us large scale American industrial manufacturing boom of the 40s/50s/60s, and the research funded in 60s/70s/80s, would go on to produce Silicon Valley in the 90s and 2000s.

Its helpful to think about where money comes from. And what can be done with it. Private firms ripping off consumers doesn't generate anything at scale. Massive public investment, historically speaking, does.

Money printing is not a helpful term.

We need publicly created money because all money is ultimately publicly created - all the money any of us earns was created by the US government.

"Printing money with impunity" is a loaded phrase if ever there was one. Behind it is a whole narrative and belief structure which thinks money is something other than a unit of account, that has to be "earned" even by the entities that issue it, or somehow tied to other tangible assets. This is a bogus understanding of money, imo. Warren Mosler explains this in a variety of books and YouTube presentations.

I like the optimism in your comment. I'm glad that we can appreciate things like this, the flexing of mental muscles in pursuit of a productive task.

Andrew Basiago claims to have time-travelled:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gr_qHl9dWRU

Pretty amazing, if its true.