Another draft posting that I drafted a couple of years ago, that for some reason never went up... but should have. The points raised here are still important! And even if none of you humans read it... well... the AIs will! They read everything...
== More financial maunderings from the Neolithic… or early 2022 ==
I gave a webinar on the future of online payment systems a few years back, with emphasis on how the time may have come - at last - for micropayments systems to partially replace irksome advertising. Four great legal scholars weighed in, with edifying perspectives! Some of you may find it interesting.
The discussion was based upon my articles on how micropayments may be the future as advertising fades and Advertising cannot maintain the internet in Evonomics Magazine. Also how micropayments systems might save journalism and enhance user freedoms.
In fact, lately there's been perked-interest among some folks involved in current payments systems, in trying one more time to make micropayments work. Especially asking WHY did all previous attempts fail? And what's the secret sauce for success?
As it happens, I can answer both questions.
== Human societies try to develop positive sum competition - it ain't easy! ==
Unlike today's weird Putin-worshippers, I’m no commie. I believe that reciprocally competitive systems are the most creative… it’s how nature made us -- though through 4 billion years of competition that were brutal and bloody and horribly inefficient. (Nature's way.)
In human societies, we aim to reduce the side effects that make competition brutal and robbed it of any grace, ruining its outputs in much of evolution and certainly in 99% of past (mostly-feudal) societie. I refer to death (nature's way is bloody!) and its equivalent in a fair society… cheating. Most historical societies tamed a little of the bloodiness, but none of the cheating by lords and kings and priests, who almost always made a mockery of fair competition.
Till along came Adam Smith and glimmering awareness of a magic trick -- the one leading to everything we’ve attained… reciprocal accountability that applies even to the mighty!
Oh, we've done it way imperfectly, so far. Still, even partial steps along that path have empowered us to work wonders. See some of my missives in praise of Adam Smith! Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him.
So yes, we need competitive markets to create the vast wealth that could let us end poverty and save the world. And those competitive markets function best when competing individuals, partnerships, families, enterprises perceive a chance to profit and prosper!
On the other hand, all good things in the world become toxic when too heavily concentrated!
You name it… Oxygen, water, food, electricity... and wealth… And today's skyrocketing wealth disparitites have zero justification under market economics. They are monstrous betrayals of markets and creative competition.
And they lead to death.
== The future of Bitcoin? ==
All of this means that - to the delight of libertarians - it will be hard to legislate or regulate blockchain token systems. Hard, but not impossible. For example, the value of Bitcoin rises and falls depending on how many real world entities will accept it as payment. And governments have been hammering on that, lately, especially China.
There is another way to modify any given blockchain token system, and that is for the owners themselves to deliberate and decide on a change to their shared economy... to change the ledger and its support software. No single member/owner can do that. Any effort to do so would be detected by the ledger's built-in immune system and canceled.
Only dig it, all such ledger-blockchain systems are ruled by a weird kind of consensus democracy. While there is no institutional or built in provision for democratic decision making in the commons - (Satoshi himself may have back doors) - there is nothing to stop a majority of bitcoin holders from simply making their own, new version of the shared ledger and inserting all their coins into it, with new software that's tuned to less eagerly reward polluters and extortionist gangs.
Oh, sure, a large minority would refuse. Their rump or legacy Bitcoin ledger (Rumpcoin?) would continue to operate... with value plummeting as commercial and government and individual entities refuse to accept it and as large numbers of computer systems refuse to host rump-coin ledger operations. Because at that point, the holdouts will include a lot of characters who are doing unsavory things in the real world.
If you squint at this, it's really not so radical. It is just an operating system upgrade that can only occur by majority consent of the owner-members of the commune. Preceded (one assumes) by lots to discussion and argument and open-source testing of the revised OS.
In fact, this is a concept that has already been done in some blockchain systems… look up “hard and soft forks”. Still, too few are aware of this, or that eventually fed-up governments may create incentives and disincentives that make this path obviously in the self-interest of most coin holders. It offers a method to 'regulate' in ways that leave unaffected the potential benefits of blockchain - self-correction, smart contracts and the like - while letting system users deliberate and decide for themselves to revise, a trait that should be possible in any democratic or accountable system.
== Repeat two words: Money Velocity! ==
One of the strongest signs of a vibrant economy is called Money Velocity - MV- which measures how often dollars change hands. In a busy economy, with lots of employed folks spending and buying goods and services, MV is moderately high. History does give examples of MV being too high, causing sharp inflation. But you’d have to be my age to remember that. Ever since the Reagan era, Money Velocity has fallen, in lockstep with every single Supply Side Theory tax cut-gusher-gift to the rich. And across the last year (2021 when I wrote this: still, the overall notion is worth pondering) the collapse of MV became a nosedive!
This is diametrically opposite to what Supply Side fans confidently predicted, over and over again. In science, when a theory is always wrong, it gets abandoned. When it is always wrong — and the SAME magical incantations are used to support trying it yet again — then the word is “insanity.”
Adam Smith himself said this (without using the term MV, of course.) When the already rich get sudden bursts of yet-more cash, they do not hurry to invest it in bold enterprises or in factories producing more (supply) goods and services!
Oh, a few do. But a vast majority squirrel the new largesse away into capital preservation investments, rent-seeking (“rentier”) holdings, asset bubbles and cheat schemes, exactly as Smith described in Wealth of Nations. They don’t even buy all that many yachts! Any cub scout will tell you that takes dollars out of circulation and eviscerates Money Velocity.
(2024 note: this is exactly why housing prices have skyrocketed despite high interest rates. Because the super rich - especially inheritance brats - don't give a fig about interest rates, as they snap up swathes of the US housing stock with cash purchases, while the home-building companies they control limit production in order to keep prices high.)
In contrast, if you invest similar amounts in working stiffs - say hiring them to fix infrastructure - the cash gets spent almost immediately and hence MV rises. That truth is almost as pure as what the previous paragraph said about the rich opting for SLOW money.
Also note that Joe Biden’s “expensive” Infrastructure Push will put no more cash to work that way than Supply Siders since Reagan poured into the aristocracy. In fact, they are VERY similar amounts… with diametrically opposite likely outcomes, especially re MV.
And of course, that is what terrifies McConnell and those screaming against the Dems' stim bill. Because he knows it will likely work.
(2024 note: what I predicted in those three paragraphs came exactly true! The 2021-22 Pelosi bills triggered the best economy in 60 years and massive inshoring of manufacturing, re-industrializing the USA.)
What is crazier? That U.S. conservatives cling to the magical 'supply side' voodoo incantation (one of many!) that has been utterly, utterly disproved?
Or that Democratic politicians are unable to parse this contradiction - and the spectacular success of their policies - in clear terms the People can understand?
You understood what I just wrote. The People would, as well.
138 comments:
Half a century on, they won’t even admit Nixon was in the wrong, and Agnew resigned, as well.
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Those People would not understand, and things won’t change until they die off. Goes beyond sunken cost—it is also a visceral urge to destroy. To them, dictatorship is destroying people outright; democracy is destroying people economically.
...and there’re the far-leftists who tell me ‘no one is free unless everyone is free.’
You can get the same thing from a house of worship.
Alan Brooks:
‘no one is free unless everyone is free.’
It sounds good until you examine the details. Better as a bumper sticker than a philosophy, though. Taken literally, it means what Dr Brin accuses leftists of saying--that because someone, somewhere is still under coercion, there has been no progress toward liberty at all.
My college girlfriend was like that for a while. Can't have a good time because someone in El Salvador or South Africa is being oppressed. Sorry, but that's no way to live.
Dr Brin in the main post:
== The future of Bitcoin? ==
Funny, just recently, I discovered and binge-watched a series called The Goodwife. The main appeal of the series was the interpersonal relationships between the characters, but the setting was a law firm, and the legal cases played a part of most individual episodes. One, which must have been from 2012 or so, revolved around Bitcoin. The concept must have been so new at the time that the series felt the need for exposition explaining cryptocurrency. The legal case in the story depended in large part on whether the court recognized Bitcoin as a currency or as an equity.
The episode must have been from a time where the mysterious creator of Bitcoin was still a real-life topic of speculation. In this particular fictionalized story, there were three suspects, and the ending hinted that they were all actually collaborators on the development.
One of the reasons why 15 years of near-zero interest rates didn't cause hyperinflation is because the people who got those loans were either oligarchs or blue-chip firms.
These are the people who rent seek when they get extra $$$. Austrian (libertarian) economists kept predicting hyperinflation because they defined inflation as any increase in the money supply relative to demand.
Paul Krugman had great fun explaining the liquidity trap, Japan's experience with quantitative easing in the late 90s/early 00s, and equating Austrian economics with "the theory of phlogiston."
What the Austrians didn't consider is what Dr. Brin writes about here: the velocity of $$$.
Demand in an economy isn't just a function of the money supply in the system, It's how much money gets SPENT in the economy. Suppose you have consumer A with 1,000 dollars and fat cat b with $1,000.
Consumer A is lily to spend his extra $1,000 in someplace like a grocery store, which employs a whole lot of people living paycheck to paycheck. They're going to spend a huge percentage of their income on necessities. Such people often have many unmet desires and extra money will be quickly spent. Dollars spent in this "consumer" economy are likely to be spent many times over by people with numerous unmet desires for necessities.
However, fat cat B behaves much different. Say Mr. Fat Cat makes $1,000,000 per year. Give such a person an extra $1k and they're unlikely to buy things like groceries because their ample income means they have few unmet needs for creature comforts.
Such people are more likely to spend the extra $1,000 on rent-seeking investments which can earn them passive income or perhaps lead to a future capital gain. So, say Mr. Fat Cat B buys a rental home---or buys shares in a firm that buys up rental houses.
That money isn't going to circulate very fast. It takes TIME to purchase home. There's many complex steps involved, and the cash involved is more likely to go to a bank. At a bank, the capital they take in is likely to support money lent out...but the loan approval process is another slow boat to China.
Money injected into this sector of the economy circulates much more slowly. So if $$$ injected into the consumer market gets spent 10 times in a year, while $$$ put into the rental market gets spent once per year, well...the boost in overall demand in the economy is around 10 times less.
So money put into the hands of the middle or lower classes tends to boost the economy much more than a similar amount issued to the wealthy. However, the downside is that "hot" money is much more likely to cause inflation.
The reason why Biden's stimulus caused substantial inflation while a decade and a half of money printing from the Fed bank did not is who got the $$$. Biden's stimulus went into the hands of consumers, who spend far more of their income on consumer goods vs. investment.
$$$ in the hands of the middle class and lower tends to have a very high "velocity" and circulates among people highly likely to spend.
John Viril:
The reason why Biden's stimulus caused substantial inflation ...
Wasn't it supply-chain issues and pent-up demand, both results of the COVID years, that led to the recent inflation? My understanding is that the inflationary effects have been worldwide, with the US recovering quicker than most.
Larry,
Wasn't it supply-chain issues and pent-up demand...
Yes. I'm inclined to blame supply chain woes for most of the early impact. People get very foggy brained over this kinda stuff, but during the pandemic there were many stores struggling to keep their shelves stocked. We saw supply pinches in the chip markets that left auto manufacturers in the cold while $$ GPU production ran amok for the crypto-miners. We saw all sorts of ripples and waves as the economy got back underway that anyone tempted to blame Biden for it all should have their eyes checked.
We ALSO saw labor supply pinches. Given how much labor costs factor into many goods and services, this was a serious thing. Many employers literally COULDN'T hire not just because people were avoiding Covid but because they flexed their muscles for better wages, work-from-home options, and other things. For example, my son needs adult daycare services and none of the local agencies could afford to pay what labor wanted. Those agencies were reimbursed by the state at a particular rate that was below what they would have had to pay.
Sure... labor suddenly being flush with cash does as JV suggests. They spend it. In a market with supply issues, they overspend for things they REALLY want. THAT'S where they contribute to inflation. Unmet demand for goods and services outmatching demand for currency IS inflation. That's how we get $20 combo meals at McDonalds.
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Prices are struck as a sensitive balance between supply and demand. That includes supply and demand for currency. The pandemic caused massive ripples in a lot of supplies, so of course there were consequences.
Is the decline of V a problem? IIUC it's MV (more precisely \Sum_i M_i V_i where the i are different kinds of money) that matters. If it's too big we get inflation and inefficient investment, if it's too low we get deflation and resources lying idle. Can't we compensate for decreasing V by having more M? I guess there's an issue if V suddenly increases again.
John Viril,
Austrian (libertarian) economists kept predicting hyperinflation because they defined inflation as any increase in the money supply relative to demand.
Who among them defined it this way?
What I've read suggests they understood perfectly well that money spent (bid/ask) is what potentially leads to inflation. A larger money supply DOES that in the hands of those willing to spend it quickly... which includes governments trying to wipe out their war debt without defaults... like the UK. (The French just opted for default after WWII.)
Please name names. I promise to go look them up and read what they said.
For all those reasons, uring high inflation that's persistent, it CAN be argued that squirreling away $ -- into the Fed or the rich - can slow it down. But in recession or in NORMAL times, it's best to keep money moving.
What kills me is that the economy right now is terrific, because the Pelosi bills keep folks earning and spending WHILE the govt is doing what supply side promised the rich would do... but never did... investing in productive capital.
Dr Brin:
What kills me is that the economy right now is terrific,...
And yet, there's this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/23/opinion/biden-trump-vibecession.html
...
Outside the economic commentariat, however, it often feels as if I’m butting my head against a wall. The dialogue tends to go something like this:
Me: “People say that the economy is terrible, but that their personal financial situation is good. That’s strange.”
Critic: “You’re saying that people should feel good because official statistics are good, ignoring their lived experience. Good luck with that.”
Me: “No, that’s not at all what I’m saying. Never mind the official statistics. The point is that if you ask people about themselves — that is, their lived experience — they’re fairly positive. But they still say that the economy, big picture, is bad.”
Critic: “So you’re telling people that fancy statistics matter more than their lived experience.”
Sigh.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/opinion/inflation-federal-reserve-rates.html
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Another example: Target, Walmart and other big retail chains have recently announced a number of price cuts, both temporary and permanent. They are presumably doing this because they are seeing worrisome softness in demand. But many of the reports I saw managed to frame falling prices as somehow a symptom of inflation — simply assuming that inflation must be sapping consumers’ purchasing power, when the reality is that wages have consistently outpaced inflation since the summer of 2022. Maybe demand is weakening for other reasons?
In both cases, then, commentators seemed determined to frame everything — even falling prices! — as an inflation problem, while ignoring other possible concerns and risks.
...
For all those reasons, uring high inflation that's persistent, it CAN be argued that squirreling away $ -- into the Fed or the rich
Perhaps. But, there are significant problems you create. The first problem with handing near-zero interest to the elite class is it sucks wealth from the professional class and below and hands it to the rich.
The second problem is the rich don't just seek rents when the cost of capital gets cheap. Instead they value one of two things 1) slow and steady but safe returns (the classic rent) or 2) highly speculative investments with a potential for big returns (these often turn out to be what Austrian economists call "malinvestment).
We ALSO saw labor supply pinches. Given how much labor costs factor into many goods and services, this was a serious thing. Many employers literally COULDN'T hire not just because people were avoiding Covid but because they flexed their muscles for better wages
Alfred, the key point here is WHY we're people who were not working able to be picky about re-entering the workforce?
The short answer is they had a combination of savings, credit, benefits, and stimulus $$$ which allowed them to take care of immediate needs.
Biden's stimulus is NOT the source of all these "rainy day" funds, but it's responsible for a significant portion of them. Federal stimulus is at least partially responsible for creating those labor supply pinches
Dr Brin:
For all those reasons, [d]uring high inflation that's persistent, it CAN be argued that squirreling away $ -- into the Fed or the rich
Yeah, but...
I think the term "inflation" is being used in too many different ways.
You describe a situation where there are so many dollars in circulation that the dollar's value is diminished, so it takes more of them to buy stuff. In that case, it makes sense that locking a percentage of those dollars up in Scrooge McDuck's vaults will make the remaining bills more valuable again.
OTOH, if high prices are due to shortages of necessities like energy or computer chips or eggs, that's not really "inflation"*. Prices go up for the items affected by the shortages, but then people have less money to spend on other choices. Intentionally locking dollars away from circulation in that case only makes the problem worse. Even if you cause deflation and the dollars in people's pockets become more valuable, prices will still adjust to reflect the shortages.
* "...but something else of that name." :)
The Krugman excerpt above about Target and Walmart suggests that today's prices remain high because of opportunism--companies raising prices figuring that Biden will get the blame. The fact that they are now lowering those prices suggests that there is an upper limit to how much of that is tenable. They raised prices to the point that people were unwilling to buy at those prices, and so now they're correcting. That's the free market at work. Decreasing the money supply by giving those companies the money directly instead of through their price gouging would have been exactly the wrong move.
* * *
While I'm on it, I have to say that that same Krugman post demonstrates pretty clearly that the presenting of every economic concern as one of inflation is really an attack on Biden/Democrats first and a cherry-picked analysis to justify that attack second. For months now, pundits have been complaining that while inflation is subsiding, prices haven't come back down. That is not what usually happens anyway except in a depression. But lo and behold, companies are bringing some prices back down--exactly what everyone is complaining Biden could not bring about. So now, somehow the very thing they've been clammoring for is 1) itself a problem and 2) Biden's fault.
"There's no pleasing some people."
"That's just what Jesus said."
John Viril:
Alfred, the key point here is WHY we're people who were not working able to be picky about re-entering the workforce?
The short answer is they had a combination of savings, credit, benefits, and stimulus $$$ which allowed them to take care of immediate needs.
Would slavery be a better solution? Or even wage-slavery?
"If human beings are not desperate for the means of survival, they won't voluntarily do the jobs that companies need for insufficient wages and benefits." Are workers are too lazy to work or too greedy to work for what their labor is worth? Or have companies been accustomed to sucking the value out of everything, and now they can't do that as much?
Krugman's Cassandranian shtick reminds me of my own. Would be fun to have a short psychohistory chat with him sometime. I'd reminisce about his frequent debates with George Will on "This Week with David Brinkley". I'd recommend FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH to him. We could agree to avoid both macroeconomics and transistors, removing one rook each.
"...what Austrian economists call "malinvestment"..."
What Brits who know their history call "South Sea Bubble"
Pappenheimer
LH
It's called the "free market" - the idea is that the "customer" - the employer - should raise the price he is willing to pay "wages" until the supplier is willing to do the work
Funny how the "free market" is a wonderful thing until it leads to wages increasing!
John Viril,
I can accept that the stimulus $$$ had an impact. We all expected it would because it increased the money supply among people who had a legit need to spend it. Unemployment shot upward during the early days of the lockdown, so the need for rent money started early. Different people were targeted for funds in those early days, though, and some of it went unspent for a while. Some businesses simply told their landlords to wait… and got away with it.
If you want to make an argument for there being too much money printed back then, I'm inclined to agree. However, I can't see how the politicians involved could have done it any different. After all, how often do we actually get to test our fiscal policies against pandemics?
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Many people I know actually held back their spending during the pandemic. They wound up with a moderate amount of savings that mattered in later labor negotiations.
More importantly, one person's negotiations occurred alongside their peers making similar demands. It's one thing for an employee to demand an option to work from home and quite another when 70% of your employees demand it. I saw a lot of correlation of demands (I've been involved in hiring decisions with my current employer) that impacted pay, time off, and work-life balance. Labor had a strong position as we all began to return to work… and new it. I could literally see the inflationary impact that was having at work.
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My experience with economics arguments has taught me the answer that is often most correct is "All of the Above". During the election cycle we like to blame elected officials. There might even be a partial truth to be found in the effort. I find the blame game to be fruitless most of the time, though. It puts too much emphasis on people who likely had a small impact that got multiplied elsewhere by correlated actions. Hand the people a huge pile of cash and it isn't inflationary until they choose what to do with it all. See?
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The second problem is the rich don't just seek rents when the cost of capital gets cheap. Instead they value one of two things 1) slow and steady but safe returns (the classic rent) or 2) highly speculative investments with a potential for big returns (these often turn out to be what Austrian economists call "malinvestment").
This is a huge oversimplification. You can do better than this. All your really saying is people are gamblers if they have a bit of extra cash and aren't afraid to lose it. Wild gamblers if the scent is in the air. It's not just rich people who chase tulips.
duncan cairncross:
Funny how the "free market" is a wonderful thing until it leads to wages increasing!
It's the same dynamic that says democracy is a wonderful thing until it leads to electing Democrats to power.
These people start with the assumption that monetary value belongs to the oligarchs as their private property, and that only the absolute minimum necessary should be doled out to those needed to produce that wealth. If the market concentrates wealth to the top, then it's working as it should. If it enriches the lower classes at all, that's a market failure. Isomorphic to the opinion that a Democratic win is itself prima facie evidence of election fraud. In both cases, it's "not supposed to work that way."
This is a huge oversimplification. You can do better than this. All your really saying is people are gamblers if they have a bit of extra cash and aren't afraid to lose it. Wild gamblers if the scent is in the air. It's not just rich people who chase tulips.
Oversimplifying is sort of necessary in order to have a conversation instead of writing an academic treatise.
Sure I'm saying people are gamblers. However, they're also lazy. Push down the price of capital and they can get complacent about performing due diligence ((time is money, right?). Hence we see a lot of Elizabeth Holmes kind of tales.
People also resist change. Let's call it economic inertia. When u create super cheap capital, it takes very small margins to create a book profit and will mean firms will continue dying business models bc they're still "making money." Firms will still keep making buggy whips and typewriters even though the demise of these goods is clear to see.
This is a test. Did we just go back to all-italics mode?
Ok, that was weird. The responses were showing in all-italics for a bit, and now they're not. Even the same posts.
I would also like to address the point that 15 years of near-zero interest rates created a massive wealth transfer to elites at the expense of everyone else.
Dr. Brin accused me of "economic incantations" (a colorful term which I have adopted for my own use. Does q great job getting across a sort of magical belief in some philosophical view) when I made this argument after first coming to this site.
In fairness, he had tabbed me as an oligarch apologist bc i said some things that sounded like I was trying to justify wealth inequality.
When u push interest rates below inflation like the Fed did from 2008-2022, everyone isn't getting those favorable rates. Generally, only oligarchs and blue chip firms can access them.
Let's follow MLB team owner Rapacious Oligarch (RO) who owns the Kansas City Jesters to illustrate. When interest rates fall to near zero, RO leverages his $1 billion baseball team to obtain cash.
RO, however, is risk averse (he certainly doesn't want to lose his baseball team, which is the only reason anyone knows who he is). So RO takes that billion $$$ and buys a portfolio of municipal bonds that finance utilities, with a scintillating 2% yield.
Let us now suppose the Fed hits its 2% inflation target right on the nose. Well, RO's business acumen has produced exactly NOTHING with his billion dollars of capital investment in real dollar terms (which accounts for inflation). Because inflation is 2% ($$$ buys 2% less in the marketplace) his 2% nominal profit creates no new wealth for the economy.
BUT, guess what. RO now has an extra $20 Million he can spend. For most people, this is a King's ransom. Suppose RO makes an 8% operating profit on the Jesters (a team so badly managed they haven't sniffed a title in 30 years). Near zero interest has boosted his profits by 25%. What a genius!
So where does RO's $20 million come from? Well, ultimately, he's bled it from the everyday suckers who deposited their income into a bank account and got nothing for their money. They often don't notice, bc they're losing about $20 a year on an account with an average daily balance of $1,000. Who cares about losing 2 gourmet dining events at McDonald's? Do this for 15 years on an economy wide scale, and it becomes a massive wealth transfer.
Notice also you're taking "hot" money and turning it ice cold.
Another Nobel-winning economist I'd like to meet is Paul Romer, who coined one of my favourite terms: mathiness.
Consensus Democracy is just another euphemism for collectivism & communism, as this is exactly how the current PRC & the now-defunct USSR have described their top-down variants of authoritarian communism with Xi Jinping, as recently as 2019, officially describing China as a "whole-process people's democracy".
The generally accepted definition of Communism is as follows:
Communism (noun)
1) A consensus-based society wherein all properties (aka 'means of production') are collectively owned, controlled & managed by the community, rather than by private individuals;
2) A Marxist-Leninist doctrine advocating revolution to overthrow the capitalist system & private ownership in order to establish a dictatorship of 'a proletariat of equals' that will eventually evolve into a collectivist society of perfect equity.
Similarly, our fine host is frequently guilty of invoking other euphemistic descriptive modifiers with the intent to transform the term 'competition' (a word used to connote the often brutal struggle & contest for achieving dominance) into some sort of froofy communal hugfest where everybody is equal, all equals win & nobody loses except for those who may wish to be 'more equal' than the average or below average loser.
He even goes on to admit that he would eliminate 'wealth inequality' by replacing cash, bitcoin & most forms of private ownership with a 'democratic' consensus-based social credit system in the same democratic manner that a pack of wolves would use to elect the unlucky sheep that they would eat for dinner, to which he adds:
If you squint at this, it's really not so radical. It is just an operating system upgrade that can only occur by majority consent of the owner-members of the commune.
And, what does one call those self-identified EQUALISTS who wish to establish an egalitarian COMMUNE?
The indisputable answer is COMMUNIST.
Best
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To be fair, I do not actually believe that our fine host is a 'real communist', but rather a 'false communist' who uses the the language of communism in the pursuit of what he truly desires, Meritocratic Totalitarianism in which the most intelligent rule roughshod over a submissive confederacy of dunces FOR THEIR OWN GOOD in the tradition of Swift's 'Laputa', minus Laputa's subsequent defeat during the Lindalino rebellion, an event that Swift predicted & could have witnessed in actuality if he had but lived for another 31 years.
“Sure I'm saying people are gamblers.”
Sure some of the rich will sometimes hurl extra cash at something speculative. Adam Smith observed… and history shows… that wealth PRESERVATION is a high priority to aristocrats. And using the state to enhance rents and reduce taxes and warp markets advantageously.
What 40+ years of ‘supply side’ show is that reducing thei taxation in a blanket way does not send much of that extra $$ into capital for increased ‘supply.’ Prices of rent properties go us, as is happening now, as inheritance brats awash in cash snap up swathes of US housing stock with cash purchases that are immune to interest rate hikes.
What I hear no one ask: With house prices high, where is the flood of investment in BUILDING new homes? How I’d love to see some of the oligarch owners of major homebuilders nailed for collusion to keep production down.
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Not even skimming, anymore. But as I was pasting in the above, my eye caught our fecal twerp yammering something about "communists'? Jeepers, the marching moron stooges for Putin's 5000 "ex" commissars in the Kremlin and relabeled KGB are everything the commies could ever want.
This country is dedicated to the Proposition that all are created equal—not the reality.
marching moron stooges for Putin's 5000 "ex" commissars in the Kremlin and relabeled KGB
The KGB term is "useful idiots".
wealth PRESERVATION is a high priority to aristocrats
If the money is in the hands of the grandson of the founder of a great enterprise, someone delighted to have money and intending to spend it on fast women, slow horses, drugs, a mansion, a collection of Meissen dolls and/or owning a sporting team then sure, it might be invested to preserve. Best case it's Wedgewood money used to write On the Origin of Species.
But if it's in the hands of a self-made billionaire like Gates, or even someone born to wealth who's built companies with it, like Musk, then preservation probably isn't the first thought. Such people have experienced success, and because of it believe they are brilliant and that they will succeed again.
David - Musk was NOT "born to wealth" - his father was at most upper middle class - about the same as Bill Gates
Cheap Capital
Capital used to be a "limiting factor" - until the invention of the Stock Market - since then there has always been lots of available - cheap capital -
Today the cheap capital is thundering about looking for any outlet - Trumps Truth Social being an example
Sorry, no edit function. "Whether it is a currency or an equity" - it is neither, if you want a category for it, it is virtual commodity.
...you know how Hippocrates’ Oath is also a proposition; a standard.
‘All men are created equal, endowed with inalienable...’
is also merely a standard.
Only part of the story, I'm afraid. The Corona stimulus, was not carefully targeted but to some extent it was either saved or just replaced lost income. But it did rebuild household balance sheets and reduced household debt. But supply chain disruptions resulted in a negative supply shock - which was the main driver of WORLDWIDE inflation. The main driver of land price inflation (often called housing inflation) is the policy of using increasing private debt rather than moderate fiscal deficits (often called the Washington Consensus) to expand the money supply - driving yields and interest rates to zero, and as a side effect driving massively increased inequality, not just between classes but between generations and between homeowners and renters. Ling story.
Yes.
Which is a good thing! It also had to other, effects, 1. Long Covid making some people unable to work, or only to work less; 2. Gave people time to reevaluate their live goals.
Shorter way to say that, there have been. changes in the terms of trade. There will be adjustments to compensate that, but they take time and investment. I'm of the view that (real) investment follows demand, not the other way around. People will only invest if the demand is there first.
Life goals!
I think some of the words used in economics lead people astray. Particularly "savings" and "investment". It is very important to distinguish between "investment" that is just buying an asset, and investment that is an increase in the stock of investment goods. Similarly it is important to distinguish "savings" that is just spending less than your income, and "savings" that are increase in total economy-wide) household financial assets. It causes so much confusion. Macro and micro are quite different. Some things only have distributional effects, and some things affect the economy as a whole.
To make it clearer, all other things being equal (they never are in reality) real investment ENABLES savings in a quite direct way, (it supplies income with consumption), but savings (not spending - reducing the income of suppliers) does not enable investment. There may be indirect processes to counteract this, but they will take time. Many people do not understand this. I think a lot the problem is money illusion (people thinking of money transactions but ignoring the underlying real economy).
Oops ... It supplies income withOUT consumption ...
While I am highly skeptical of the aether theory, I do find it wonderful that these miraculous devices from the 1970s are serving us so well... and that we are making such ingenious use of them.
https://youtu.be/s6qemkJzTpw
We are making an incredible civilization and so many troglodyte forces were desperate to prevent that.
Dr. Brin: "these miraculous devices from the 1970s"
Just a tiny, tiny amount of computational power, together with other 1970s tech achieved this. Monstrous GPU farms costing gazillions of dollars and entire countries worth of power give us generative mimicry. The production of 99.99% of humanity amounts to checking their phone 100 times a day and amusing themselves to death. I can't help but think we're once again taking the 'sifting eye candy' wrong turn. Huxley got it right with BNW.
scidata,
Don't fret too much. Each generation has been able to say something similar about the next. Chasing the wrong goals is pretty typical of generation N+1 from N's perspective.
Yet here we are.
------
reason,
I have no clue what you're saying.
Context has gone AWOL.
Alfred Differ: Don't fret too much
I was watching a bit of the Fauci show trial. My doctor would scold me (BP issues).
Heh. He's one of those people I'm glad I'm not. That sounds negative, but he was in a very tough position and had a job to do. With 10 or 20 years behind us, we might have calmed down enough to have the POV necessary for deciding whether he did it well.
I'm inclined to think he DID do it well... given the circumstances.
------
My doctor would scold me (BP issues).
Yah. Step away from it all. Go outside and watch a leaf blow around. Watch a flower grow or a bug crawl around. Less side effects than most BP medication that way. 8)
Monstrous GPU farms...
We shall find another use for them, but I don't have to tell YOU that.
Adam Smith observed… and history shows… that wealth PRESERVATION is a high priority to aristocrats.
This is one of the funniest examples of false circular reasoning that I have seen in a while as:
1) History shows a near infinite list of aristocrats who have repetitively squandered their generational wealth;
2) Aristocracy is more or less a synonym for wealth and those aristocrats who fail to engage in 'wealth preservation' simply cease to be considered aristocrats;
3) Whereas all those who succeed in the creation & preservation of familial generational wealth, whether they be common rent-seekers, middle class merchants or bourgeois gentihommes, these are frequently reclassified as a greedy rich oligarchic Putinist aristocrats when they are not.
And, for the record, neither the US Constitution nor the Hippocratic Oath is 'propositional' & neither says what you falsely think it says, but I suspect those who mistake circular arguments like 'Wealth makes one wealthy' for high logic must necessarily learn these distinctions the hard way.
Best
New Wealth people (Nouveau Riche) may think of themselves as aristocrats and the Petite Bourgeoisie might agree, but real Aristocrats usually don't. That's why we have the Haute Bourgeoisie as a clade of wanna-bee's.
Arguing that money is enough to define one's social class is a very American thing to do. It isn't, but we like to believe it is for many reasons.
------
What makes for True Aristocrats varies a bit between nations, but the core concept is they are legally privileged whether they have a lot of money or not. They often do have wealth, though, because... privilege.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations book was aimed at the richest and tried to point out their imprudence. It was a persuasion attempt less about opposing aristocrats as suggesting that everyone was being at least moderately imprudent about wealth decisions. Sure... he went to town on some of the foolishness and the people involved, but his primary aim can be paraphrased as "You are leaving money on the table. How imprudent."
Alfred Differ:
I'm inclined to think he [Fauci] DID do it well... given the circumstances.
There can be legitimate (though Monday morning) disagreement about whether mask mandates or school lockdowns did good or harm. But the kinds of things the Republicans are accusing Fauci of, like starting COVID in a lab himself, are insane. It's no longer sufficient to tell me that just because a Republican says something doesn't mean it is false. It is no longer worth the time or brain function used in determining if there's anything other than nonsense in what they say.
What makes for True Aristocrats varies a bit between nations, but the core concept is they are legally privileged whether they have a lot of money or not. They often do have wealth, though, because... privilege.
I may be confusing concepts, but don't classic Aristocrats have ownership of a particular piece of land, including the right to tax the residents?
Arguing that money is enough to define one's social class is a very American thing to do. It isn't, but we like to believe it is for many reasons.
It seems uniquely American to believe that social mobility includes the possibility of becoming an aristocrat. That it isn't necessarily on account of your lineage. A perverse kind of leveling, if "leveling" can mean equal opportunity to climb above the rest.
Smith faced the situation described by the Mamas & the Papas. "But if I really say it, the radio won't play it (the King will behead me) - so I must say it between the lines!"
Across the water, the American revolutionaries were VASTLY more radical than we nowadays perceive, seizing 1/3 of the lands in the colonies from absentee lords and redistricuing it. And banning primogeniture so large families would dissipate great wealth.
One of the most obscene political travesties was the so-called "Tea Party" - every whose member woulda been slapped, hard, by Paul Revere or Thomas Paine.
Re: Paul Revere
In 2024, the cry might be, "The Red Ties are coming!"
Heh. Mamas and the Papas.
Yah. I can see that.
Maybe someone could translate parts of the book into something modern and musical to make the relevant today. Smith's 18th century English is a challenge.
As for our revolutionaries, I think many of us have forgotten that a lot of time passed during which various out-groups came over. Everyone ranging from Puritans to Royalists to Levelers and all the religious flavors that contributed to the English Civil War. Of course they were radical.
… and many of them had their own colonies.
It's a wonder they agreed to team up at all… and not all of them did… hence Canada.
Larry,
…don't classic Aristocrats have…
Depends heavily on where they were. In eastern Europe they could actually own the serfs too.
In England (post Magna Carta) the Parliament has some of the power instead of the sovereign, but it wasn't until recent history that Parliament wasn't completely run by aristocrats.
Ownership of land was enough to ensure a flow of rents whether they had the power to tax or not.
…A perverse kind of leveling…
There is more than one kind, but they do tend to share a common belief that we aren't born with saddles or spurs. How we acquire them later is another matter.
Dr Brin:
Smith faced the situation described by the Mamas & the Papas. "But if I really say it, the radio won't play it (the King will behead me) - so I must say it between the lines!"
Heh. Good point about the conundrum. But that was Peter Paul and Mary being derisive about rock and roll music. They specifically made fun of the Mamas and the Papas:
And when they're really whalin'
Michelle and Cass are salin'
Hey, they really nail me to the wall.
Alfred Differ:
Ownership of land was enough to ensure a flow of rents whether they had the power to tax or not.
Yes, I was conflating rent with taxes. Kind of a distinction without a difference in the social system we were discussing.
Dr Brin:
"But if I really say it, the radio won't play it (the King will behead me) ..."
It seems that in all oppressive governments, people find ways to use snarky humor to communicate ideas that would be suppressed if asserted too openly?
Do the autocrats allow such expression to exist as a safety valve? Or are they all really too stupid to understand what's really being said about them?
Larry Hart: .. safety valve? Or are they all really too stupid to understand what's really being said about them?
Satire was Shakespeare's entire shtick. And he lived in those 'choppy' times.
>Larry Hart: .. safety valve? Or are they all really too stupid to understand what's really being said about them?"
Vastly too stoopid to recall the French Revolution and where such disparities lead... or ever to ponder the last 5 minutes of CABARET.
===
RIGHT! It was Peter, Paul & Mary! Oy!
Franklin and Jefferson included “all men are created equal” as a philosophical-legal clause.
All men are created equal under the law, and possess inalienable rights...
However there are no methods to require consistent compliance to such— nor to the Hippocratic Oath.
—
Not like the Ten Commandments, wherein the penalty is Damnation.
.
Dr Brin:
RIGHT! It was Peter, Paul & Mary! Oy!
Well, I see where you got Mamas and Papas, since they were mentioned in the song.
I don't know how many here are familiar with the "Dead Milkmen" album my brother used to have. There was a song called "Punk Rock Girl" with this bit in it:
Then somebody played a Beach Boys song
On the jukebox,
And it was "California Dreamin'",
And so we started screamin',
"On such a winter's day!
I don't know how many times I heard that before I went, "Waitaminute..."
"California Dreaming" isn't a Beach Boys song. It's the Mamas and the Papas.
"Satire was Shakespeare's entire shtick..."
Um...not quite. Even Macbeth vilified the reigning queen's ancestral enemies and lauded her forebears, if IIRC. Will baited the right bears to stay out of the reigning government's way, or he would have found himself shut down either directly or by a word to his sponsors. No surprise: England was rife with real and imagined plots at the time.
Dr. Brin,
I have trouble imagining an egalitarian revolution in the US unless as a counter to the much more likely christofascist coup or autogolpe you alluded to, a la Heinlein's 'Revolt in 2100'. If that sounds like I approve of the whole 'heighten the contradictions' concept of pushing for the thing you hate to get thing you want, I don't! You're more likely to see a dissolution of the US into a horror it'll take generations to pull out of, and we are running out of time. Although, sure, a limited intramural nuclear exchange might raise enough dust for some local cooling - a little like tying a tourniquet around your neck to stop your nosebleed, to borrow from Niven.
Pappenheimer
P.S. I HATE that I know what 'autogolpe' means. I didn't use to, pre-rumpt.
The Bard also did a number on the the last of the untudorly white roses, Richard III.
He didn't dare have a crack at Henry VIII until the all of the Tudors were safely off stage, and James Stuart took over.
I'm saying that fiscal policy works directly and immediately, and can be directed to halp those most needed or to attain other goals, but that tight fiscal policy and loose monetary policy always will increase inequality, inflate asset prices and leave important things ( like combating climate change, basic science, building infrastructure) undone. How can anybody believe that encouraging more private debt will be good for everyone. It is like believing that encouraging gambling will result in everybody winning. The way to build an egalitarian society is to maximise the median NET wealth. Debt won't do that.
I'm also saying that a lot of confused economics arises from economists using the words investment and savings in two different ways and getting mixed up between them, and also many don't understand the significance of modern money being debt - so it can increase only in three ways - government borrowing from government sectors, government borrowing from the central bank (aka printing money) or borrowing by government sectors and it has been disastrous to consider only the last of these as good. Our policy mix is totally unbalanced.
Pappenheimer:
Even Macbeth vilified the reigning queen's ancestral enemies and lauded her forebears,
If I'm remembering high school correctly, Macbeth was performed when King James of Scotland was already also king of England, and the real life Banquo had been an ancestor of James.
A herald of justice:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-supporters-bus-crash-new-york-8e988570e4d0568b4f1830d1b0125534
Larry, Tony,
Thanks for the Bardic additions and corrections. Been a long time since my high school, too.
Pappenheimer
Re: Shakespeare
I wasn't arguing that he bravely and loudly denounced reigning or even recent monarchs. Rather, that he crossed the class chasm using satire, irony, and perhaps even an early form of humanism. "Hamlet" takes direct aim at the royal caste.
I saw "Love's Labour's Lost" at Stratford (Justin Bieber's hometown) in the 1970s, and I scrupled naught for noble rank thereafter. Vermeer was doing a similar thing a few decades later, softly revealing the grace inherent in servants and even dropping hints of the dawning scientific Enlightenment (using the camera obscura).
It's what makes the naked groveling and sycophancy of the present day so embarrassing. No Shakespearean clod or jester could ever act so basely. Forget lofty satire, just whither nuance and subtlety?
And all limits on hypocrisy were blown past long ago. When MTG held up that beagles pic (officially abandoning any fact finding effort) in Congress yesterday and accused Fauci of animal cruelty, my only thought was "Where's Cricket?"
Time to go outside and admire bugs and flowers - thanks for the wise advice Alfred.
scidata:
I saw "Love's Labour's Lost" at Stratford (Justin Bieber's hometown) in the 1970s,
I saw "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in Vancouver in 1999, played on the grass outdoors in front of an audience which included a busload of snickering middle-schoolers. Apparently, prurient humor spans generations and centuries.
It's what makes the naked groveling and sycophancy of the present day so embarrassing.
Even having an idea of what Donald Trump was like, I literally could not believe it when he held that first cabinet meeting in which every department head crawled over each other to talk about how wonderful Trump is. My cat has more dignity, and he licks his butt.
Speaking of "literally", someone literally does not know what "literally" means:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/live-blog/trump-guilty-verdict-live-updates-rcna154814
"You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side," he said. "They were literally crucified by this man who looks like an angel but he’s really a devil. ..."
The last production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream' I saw cast 3 slinky women in filmy red garments as Puck. Not sure what that was about, but a decent outdoor performance over all.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer:
3 slinky women in filmy red garments as Puck. Not sure what that was about,
Neil Gaiman and (sorry, Dr Brin) Dave Sim each took pains to point out the preponderance of imagery of Three Women (especially maiden, mother, and crone) in fantasy literature. From the three Fates, the three gorgons, or even the three "wives" of Adam. Gaiman's Sandman made use of such imagery throughout the series.
Not sure if that has anything to do with your Puck, but it might.
Better Fates than Furies, I always say*.
Pappenheimer
*I actually have never said this before. It's too close to a dumb movie title.
To realize that satire is not a recent Jewish invention, but a time-honored tradition that predates the Socratic poop joke, must come as a great shock to most of you, so I'd be happy to discuss this topic with you in some detail if time permits.
I'm sad to report, however, that time may not permit since the comedic hits just keep on coming, as I look forward to a 'Contempt of Congress' charge to be leveled against AG Merrick Garland, followed by a formal US congressional directive to AG Merrick Garland to prefer felony criminal charges against himself in ethnically stereotypical self-contempt.
Ba dum tss!! These are the jokes, ffolkes, even though there are some here who will insist that these absurdly self-evident contradictions may represent healthy peak enlightenment rather than degenerate farce.
Either way, be of good cheer & know that I intend to limit my contributions here over the coming months, so you may enjoy even more recycled idealistic content without either challenge or mockery.
Please plan & prepare if you are able.
And, as always --
Best
Huh! You folks might have a look at this site used by teachers that helps you to reframe a paragraph to be more concise, or professional or passionate or sarcastic, etc. https://goblin.tools/Formalizer
Here's one that I autopaste pretty often (as you well know!)
"Your cult is waging all-out war vs ALL fact using professions, from science and teaching, medicine and law and civil service to the heroes of the FBI/Intel/Military officer corps who won the Cold War and the War on terror."
It 'professionalizes' to:
"Your organization is currently engaged in a comprehensive campaign against various professions that rely on factual information, including those in the fields of science, education, medicine, law, civil service, and the FBI/Intelligence/Military sectors. These individuals have played crucial roles in important historical events such as the Cold War and the War on Terror."
Using 'passionate'... wow!:
"Your cult is viciously attacking and decimating every profession that relies on facts and truth. From the dedicated scientists and educators, to the compassionate medical professionals and honorable legal experts, and even the courageous civil servants who work tirelessly to protect our communities. They are even targeting the brave men and women of the FBI, intelligence agencies, and military who risked their lives to win the Cold War and fight against terrorism. This is not just a war of words, but a war on everything that represents integrity, honesty, and justice. It is a disgrace and a betrayal to those who have sacrificed so much for the greater good. We must stand up and fight against this vile attack on truth and integrity."
...and informal:
"Your cult is like going crazy and picking fights with all kinds of professionals, like scientists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and even the FBI and military heroes who have fought hard to keep us safe. Like, seriously, what are you even thinking?"
Ay, carumba!
I've posted the famous Frank Wilhoit quote before, here's more of it:
So this tells us what anti-conservatism must be: the proposition that the law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone, and cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Then the appearance arises that the task is to map “liberalism”, or “progressivism”, or “socialism”, or whateverthefuckkindofstupidnoise-ism, onto the core proposition of anti-conservatism.
No, it a’n’t. The task is to throw all those things on the exact same burn pile as the collected works of all the apologists for conservatism, and start fresh. The core proposition of anti-conservatism requires no supplementation and no exegesis. It is as sufficient as it is necessary. What you see is what you get:
The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.
Hmmm... the 'informal' mode gets marks for punchy brevity.
Wonder what happens if you have the paragraph 'reviewed' a few times through various mode combinations.
(Someone a couple of years ago had great fun sending the lyrics of popular songs on a voyage through google translate. The results were... entertaining.)
I think this story sums up the current phase of 'craze of the moment'.
Text auto-generation tools are sweeping the planet. That Formalizer is a simple example, and they run all the way up to ChatGPT and its siblings and even full-blown book writers such as Designerr.io and a growing ecosystem of others.
YouTube is flooded with hype about instant wealth through auto-generation of content (text, audio, and video). Just let an A.I. tool generate something then sell it.
As a contrarian and skeptic, I'm going the other way - brevity. Also, since most of what I write or intend to write revolves around 'computation from first principles' subject matter, I'm working at combining English with FORTH. I won't go into the details, but the goal is something akin to a toki pona for people and machines. Wish me luck.
Bosh, the guess is you won’t be able to resist continuing to comment once a day.
—
If someone wishes to be insulted, they shall be. This is not directed at you, Loc, let’s take Trump as an example. He is the sort of person we meet once in awhile, who says in effect:
You don’t like me? See if I care! Go ahead, hurt me—see what happens...
The female version is MTG.
If someone wants a fight, they’ll eventually get it, probably sooner than later. If they sense that things are too peaceful (the unbearable lightness of peace), they will someday get to stir things up.
They’ll make a dent in the world.
Alan it's simpler. He enrages the people whom the MAGA/confederate/tories hate. And as Robert Heinlein pointed out, that's enough. Any other trait is secondary. And while there IS racism... and the poor do suffer... any simple compilation of hours spent in rage shows that the most-hated are nerds in all fact professions.
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2017/03/looking-back-at-heinleins-future.html
What, Fox rails more at woke brats than nerds? That's NOT hate! It is pure joy. They love the woke-ist imbeciles!
Whereas their masters in the oligarchy desperately fear the nerds
We know MTG craves attention, yet her comments on George Floyd are surprising. She says there’s a quote, worship of Floyd. And that, as Trump is today, Floyd was a convicted felon.
Their logic on Floyd’s death has one flaw that anyone can see: they say Floyd was so ill, his illness contributed to his death. Such is almost tantamount to a hit-and-run driver testifying the victim was so sick to begin with, it didn’t matter.
Reason
Money in the economy is like blood in a body - as a body grows it needs more blood to transfer nutrients around the body
Increases in the blood/money supply are essential and are not an increase in debt
A government should be able to increase the money supply
Scidata, "Combining English and FORTH", that sounds like you might be investigating whether the niche BASIC used to occupy might still exist. That might be fun.
Re: Combining English and FORTH
It's part of the SELDON I project. I need a better interface between the psychohistory model cells, their neighbours, and the real world (myself). Specifically, something faster and less tedious than traditional programming, which is half-duplex at best. I won't live forever, and massive parallelism and automation only hide/disguise/impair communication (as Object Oriented Programming does) - they don't enhance it. Although this may sound a bit abstract, it's quite the opposite. I don't want a Tower of Babel, but rather a full-duplex dialectic. It's also not entirely original. These ideas spring from things like TNG's Barclay interface, Asimov's "My Son, the Physicist" ("Just keep talking"), and even SpaceX's full-flow Raptor (IFT-4 launch imminent, and Musk is talking more about Bitcoin than Starship?!?).
Alan Brooks:
If someone wants a fight, they’ll eventually get it, probably sooner than later. If they sense that things are too peaceful (the unbearable lightness of peace), they will someday get to stir things up.
That's why "The long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over" is really what Al Franken refers to as "kidding on the square." To a substantial percentage of people, that really is a nightmare.
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4701626-anthony-fauci-marjorie-taylor-greenerefusal-to-call-him-doctor/
While questioning Fauci, Greene pointedly refused to recognize Fauci as a doctor and instead referred to him as “Mr. Fauci.”
“Do you think that’s appropriate? Do the American people deserve to be abused like that, Mr. Fauci? Because you’re not ‘Dr.,’ you’re ‘Mr. Fauci’ in my few minutes,” Greene said before adding, “No, I don’t need your answer.”
Greene’s remarks were slammed by some Democrats. She was later reprimanded by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), the chair of the subcommittee, who said, “The gentlelady will suspend” and instructed the Georgia Republican to recognize Fauci as a doctor.
The Democrats should have refused to refer to MTG as "the gentlelady". ("Sorry, neither.")
I've only had one interaction with any of these new LLMs. Earlier this morning I asked Chat GTP a technical question which I thought would be easy for it and save me some time, since LLM's are designed to search enormous piles of data.
I asked it if there was any Class A polyisocyanurate that had a smoke developed index of 185. It answered that most had an SDI between 25 and 50, and that 185 was unusually high. I informed that it was mistaken and that it was confusing SDI with the flame spread index. It then apologized for the mistake, told me I was correct, and that it didn't know the answer.
Not impressed.
Darrell E:
"I don't know" is an intelligent answer. I'm surprised that it could give it. I conjecture that a true artificial intelligence would answer most questions with "I don't know".
Paradoctor,
That was my characterization of a multi-sentence response. More accurately, it told me that I should carefully read product labels.
duncan,
A government should be able to increase the money supply.
Well... since you went with a body analogy...
I agree as long as there is something performing kidney functions. Too much blood volume is an issue and we have to piss away excess water. Bad stuff in the money supply has to be filtered out too. The challenge will be found in designing the policies for these kidneys. 8)
scidata,
...and I scrupled naught for noble rank thereafter.
Heh. I know you've spoken about a stroke a few times, but when I read that my eyes popped wide. Looks like a significant piece of memory/personality survived that event. Very cool.
Also regarding Vermeer, he unintentionally painted data useful to economists. All those things in the background hint at the real experiences of the people he painted. Stuff costs money, so scenes with lots of trinkets, tools, and 'stuff' hint at the real incomes of those involved. Very useful for constraining guesses regarding differences in impacts of economic systems.
Alfred Differ,
I wouldn't wish a stroke on my very worst enemy, yet I wouldn't reverse mine even if I could. Can't explain that, but it's true of many in my position.
I once stood transfixed by Vermeer's "The Love Letter" for over an hour in a gallery. A worried guard politely asked me to move on. I'm not even sure why, and no, I'm not on the spectrum.
Alfred - "Bad stuff in the money supply has to be filtered out too. " - what does that mean exactly. The money supply is all the same - a dollar is a dollar - that is a fundamental feature of the money supply. But yes, the money supply can be too large.
Duncan - I wasn't being proscriptive describing money supply as debt, I was being descriptive. That is the way it works. And if you accept option two (printing money == borrowing from the Central Bank), yes the government can create money - especially needed if money has been destroyed by repayments of debts and/or bankruptcies.
Only way we'll track AI lies is with AI cops. Better yet, vigorously incentivized AI competitors.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/top-news-app-us-has-chinese-origins-writes-fiction-with-help-ai-2024-06-05/
scidata,
I once stood transfixed by...
I get it. I think "They Might Be Giants" had a song about that. Not paintings exactly. Sculpture... but the effect is the same.
reason,
The money supply is all the same - a dollar is a dollar...
I respectfully disagree. Dollars are debt notes (you remarked on it earlier) and are often created relative to something that looks vaguely like collateral even if that is just stuff available in the markets. Back when we lived on a silver standard, there was supposed to be actual silver in the coins and silver at the US Treasury to back it all. Today we rely more on trust (thankfully as there isn't enough silver), but there is still supposed to be 'something' to back newly printed cash. There is supposed to be stuff that can fill the obligation that debt notes represent.
When there is nothing to back new cash, people adjust how many dollars they want for a 'thing' and we get inflation that matches (roughly) the influx of non-backed cash.
When there is something rotten to back it (think of those bonds that packaged a lot of subprime loans 20 years ago) then we get surprise shocks and adjustments when the rot is revealed. Those bonds were supposed to eliminate most of the default risk... but they failed to do so. Smell the rot?
Money is treated as an exchange medium, but it has a measure of supply that can get out of whack with demand for it. That's what FOREX markets are all about. Those folks flee when they detect the rot and hope they get out before anyone beats them to it.
Something here about money velocity, though not about the incalculable volatility and trend direction of this. he monetary policy makers cannot reliably calibrate the consequences of their interventions.
It's not just me. From an e-mailed newsletter by former Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn:
News: “The Sunrise Movement, a national organization of young progressives that helped President Biden shape his 2020 climate agenda, is withholding its endorsement of him in 2024” because its members are not fully satisfied with his environmental record or his role in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
View: I sigh in despair at the insufferable stupidity of the purity police on the left. One of two elderly men is going to be elected president in November. Biden will not and has not perfectly served your agenda. Trump will be an unmitigated fucking disaster for it. Sitting on the sidelines and pouting should not be an option. Wake up. Understand the stakes on these and other issues.
Alfred - this is also not quite right - nobody lost any dollars because of the subprime prime fraud directly - that is why we have deposit insurance and a central bank, but people with paper assets less secure than money lost a lot. And actual printed cash is a (very) small part of the money supply. Not all loans that create money are secured loans, and that also applies to regulated banks. And yes, for various reasons (including a poor central bank) currencies can lose relative to each other. But as I see it, there are a lot of poorly valued assets all the time that stay that way for a long time, partly because of a lack of transparency, and partly because of an unwillingness to spend the effort to look at underlying facts, but as Keynes said - the market can irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
I for one, knew that a crash was coming in the "subprime" scandal (partly because of red light flashing macro statistics and partly because me being offered loans for US real estate when I didn't even live there no questions asked was a sure sign something was wrong). But trust is engendered mainly by regulation - the "great recession" was a failure of regulation caused by Wall Street political manipulation, basically. Everybody should have listened to Elizabeth Warren who had been warning about this for some time.
Lost an engine, a fin, some tiles, and a camera lens.
Still two successful returns (landing burns on both stages).
I'm beginning to suspect there's some A.I. in the software.
scidata,
The toughness of Starship / Super Heavy continues to impress me. On IFT-1 the full stack lost control authority and tumbled for over a minute and never broke up, then the self destruct charges were activated, and it still didn't come apart for about another minute. And that was an explosion. It never failed structurally even though it was tumbling and had 2 big holes blown in it from the self destruct charges.
And here, IFT-4, a significant portion of that flap on Starship burned away, right near a hinge, and yet Starship continued on through another 15,000 km/hour of decel through the most stressful part of reentry, reoriented into the belly flop, reoriented again for the landing burn, relit the engines and decelled to 0, and then softly dropped into the water. Tough machine.
And the booster, Super Heavy, successfully completed the boost phase though down one engine, and then its virtual landing, even though down again one engine. Not sure but I think at least one engine may have come apart during the latter stages of its virtual landing. Lots of debris. But it still successfully decelled to zero.
STill can't believe that flap kept functioning with all that shreddingalong the bottom and at the hinges.Have to wonder if there's drone footage of the booster coming down and what'll be recovered... and whether the landing was precise enough to try for the catch platform, next time.
Heh. A bit decadent to make yur smores. https://shop.spacex.com/collections/trending/products/starship-torchjavascript:void(0)
Apparently they've got those flaps hinged at a few places and only the part near the bottom burned through. Makes me wonder if the same thing happened on the other top flap out of camera view. If not, then they've got something local to fix for next time.
Loved the Blue Danube Waltz played while we waited for cameras to return.
Especially loved the view through the re-entry plasma. It was obviously there before the announcers spoke of it and we could see the vehicle was still increasing speed as it dropped. Being able to see the shock fronts was amazing.
Just truncate that smores URL after 'starship-torch'
One of the announcers at SpaceX was toasting a marshmallow after splashdown.
These young people will save us.
Jim Wright's essay from 2018 is still relevant. https://www.stonekettle.com/2018/05/hunting-unicorn-to-extinction.html
They obviously had a non scripted plan for that. The guy had a marshmallow on a toasting fork too but his microphone wasn’t active. 😏
One more fix... a series of camera lense shields that can be jettisoned in sequence.
EU parliamentary election this weekend.
One thing I'd like to share with you is a campaign ad for a small nerdy party, the Party for Biomedical Rejuvenation Research (link goes to the English Wikipedia site). It is quite the weirdest thing I have seen this side of the pond when it comes to campaign ads.
Enjoy.
The good news: The top two AfD candidates for the EU parliament have been exposed (finally) as Russian and Chinese agents of influence, and are currently under investigation. Their party has effectively forbidden them further campaigning; Polls have them down by 9% from January (due to the aforementioned story, public protests, and some criminal trials).
Alfred,
To go back to an earlier post, you summarily dismissed the idea that the great depression had anything to do with causing WW2. I disagree and would argue that, even under a conventional historical view, Hitler doesn't take power without the depression.
In 1933, the Nazi's only won a plurality in the polls. The "German Economic Miracle" due too rearmament was a big part of what solidified his public support when Germany ran against the world economic tide.
Looking through a broader lens (which I am prone to do since I was initially trained as a biologist), I would say that a nearly worldwide economic crash is likely to cause a big war. Putting that many countries under economic pressure puts governments under severe stress, tempting them to scapegoat outside forces for their problems. Deciding to "take their stuff" becomes attractive.
I'm not saying the Versailles Treaty didn't contribute. Certainly, that treaty left Germany with a weak, vulnerable government that collapsed. Most people like to talk about the bitterness caused by oppressive reparations. I would point out that Germany was making those payments under the Dawes plan before the Depression after recovering from crazy hyperinflation.
So, yeah, the Versailles Treaty left the German government to revolt. One factor I'd mention is the 100k restriction on the German Army. That's why Hitler attempted a "putsch" with limited actual supporters in 1923.
However, the Great Depression is what put Hilter in power after he was in prison.
I couldn't really make out what the Starship camera was showing during reentry, but did think 'uh-oh!' when I saw a glow start where I didn't think one should be. Anyway, any landing where the vessel stays in one piece is a good landing at this stage.
It should be noted that Boeing's vessel successfully made its first crewed launch a day or so previously. Should be at the ISS around now.
Final bit of space news: astonishing new images of Io... from an earth-based instrument!
The funniest/angriest part about the inflation discussion is the dichotomy between ways to decrease inflation and what are considered possible options.
To reduce inflation you need to take money out of the economy, somehow. The most obvious way to do that is to raise taxes. Which provides an added benefit of extra funds for the government to spend on infrastructure, education or whatever. The less obvious way is to increase the cost of borrowing by raising interest rates.
It is the tragedy of the times that politicians won't touch the third rail of raising taxes, so they defer to the 'arms length' bankers as to how to proceed. Completely unsurprisingly, the bankers tell us to 'Give More Money to the Banks'. And we do that, and the bankers are happy, and the regular folks get screwed.
To reduce inflation you need to take money out of the economy, somehow. The most obvious way to do that is to raise taxes. Which provides an added benefit of extra funds for the government to spend on infrastructure, education or whatever. The less obvious way is to increase the cost of borrowing by raising interest rates.
Uhhh...tax money doesn't go into a lockbox. Government spending goes right back into the economy.
In overall economic terms, you've done nothing to reduce demand. 75% of the money those projects you mention will hire contractors, or teachers, or whoever provides the "whatever."
The other 25$ goes to government bureaucrats.
In theory, I suppose you could use taxes to remove money from the economy if you then didn't increase spending (or paying down debt). In practice, multiple federal agencies are screaming for funds and they'll spend far more than they take in.
arborman:
To reduce inflation you need to take money out of the economy, somehow
That's for true inflation--too many dollars chasing too few goods and services. It's not the case for supply shocks in which high prices are the result of supply shortages.
Take oil prices. When OPEC+ cuts production, there's less oil in the pipeline than had previously been expected, so competition to buy what remains leads essentially to a bidding war. The result is that oil costs more, and therefore every commodity that relies on fossil fuels for delivery costs more. Consumers perceive this as inflation. But what good would it do to confiscate dollars out of circulation? Eventually, deflation (depression) would bring the dollar price of oil back down, but so what? The shortage would still exist, and the cost of oil in "real dollars" would still be high.
The same applies to housing costs. The high cost of housing isn't due to too many dollars, but to too few units available relative to buyers looking for them. Same with things like bottled water in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane.
JV, if memory serves, the reparations demanded of Germany in the Versailles itreaty were no worse than what was asked of France* after the disastrous, for France, Frano-Prussian war.
*Actually, less than what was asked of France, inflation from war spending.
The sycophancy continues...
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Jun07-4.html
At the moment, Trump sycophants are falling all over themselves to demonstrate fealty to the Dear Leader, and [Representative Paul] Gosar has come up with a... distinctive angle. He has just filed a bill where it's hard to decide what is more ridiculous: The name of the legislation, or its content. It's called the "Treasury Reserve Unveiling Memorable Portrait Act" (in other words, the TRUMP Act), and it calls for the federal reserve to begin printing $500 bills with Trump's portrait on them.
LH,, If they simultaneously release a Harriet Tubman $20, my complaints will be minimal.
The NAZIS - 25 points broken down into the following categories: extreme nationalism, racial antisemitism, socialist concepts, with German outrage over the Versailles peace settlement. The program called for German rejection of the Versailles Treaty and for the inclusion of all Germans (especially those living in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) into a Greater German state. K.D. Bracher, PhD
JRiese
They are moving the forward flaps leeward a bit. Fans of classic rocket art symmetry are howling. 😏
Upper stage was 6km off target. LOTS of people thought it wouldn’t get down except as tiny pieces. Stainless steel was a good choice.
I wouldn’t mind him on the $500 if he bowed out of the race now.
@Alfred Differ,
I'd send him $500 if he'd bow out of the race.
I would rather he did NOT bow out of the race as that would allow for another GOP ratfucker to take his place with a greater chance of winning AND greater competence in being evil
The inimitable Berit Anderson converses with me on the Future in Review (FiRe) podcast, focusing on the near and mid-future of human spaceflight, especially Artemis and other planned missions to the Moon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3d_e_Efy0I
Getting back to the SpqceX flight, Elon Musk is the closest thing imaginable to Robert Heinlein's D.D. Harriman.
Heinlein has been downright prescient in so many things. Space getting opened up by commercialization is spot on.
Of course, yesterday's wild card entrepreneur becomes tomorrow's corporatist government ally when the state becomes their no. 1 customer.
Back in the early days of the mainstream internet, government agencies lagged behind early adopters of the new tech. Hence you had the net becoming the vehicle of "citizen journalists" to directly communicate with the public without building the massive infrastructure that traditional media needed to reach a mass audience.
Hence we saw massive disruption of traditional media such as Matt Drudge breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal. This got around the typical government control mechanisms of media and blindsided the Clinton administration, which nearly brought it down.
A big reason Donald Trump was able to win in 2016 was his ability to communicate directly to voters without having to get media allies to transmit his messages. He used populist tactics to entertain rw voters by trolling lw cultural icons.
However, by 2020, the big tech players largely squelched a lot of Trump's social media trolling combined with WWE marketing techniques. By allying with a lot of tech companies and workers, the Dems got these big players to filter what they considered misinformation. (and what rw types would call marketing).
By this time, tech companies (who are more likely to be ideologically dem due to their training at colleges) and Dems had a deeper understanding of Trump's techniques and allied to circumvent them.
However, the groundwork for this alliance between big tech and government had been building for years as government became a massive customer for new media. The data generated by big tech gave government unprecedented levers to influence the personal lives of citizens. This built bonds between government bureaucrats and big tech.
However, with Trump declaring war on government bureaucrats well, it's not surprising they persuaded their friends in big tech to undermine Trump's messaging---which they could do as private parties without tripping 1st amendment censorship provisions.
Now that government has become the biggest customers of big tech's information products, we can see a rather scary potential for unprecedented control over citizens.
"I'd send him $500 if he'd bow out of the race."
How about offering ME that as wager stakes - with odds - whether he makes it to November?
Duncan is right on
Dr Brin:
"I'd send him $500 if he'd bow out of the race."
How about offering ME that as wager stakes - with odds - whether he makes it to November?
Hmmm, I'm actually considering it. What would we be betting on? Whether DJT is still alive on November 5? Or whether he wins the election?
Duncan is right on
I'm not sure I agree. Yes, another Republican winner would be more competent, but I'm not convinced that another Republican is more likely to win. So much of Trump's support is for him personally, not for the Republican Party.
If DT were a Howard Beale arranged martyr, the MAGAs would flock to anyone promising revenge.
Dr Brin:
If DT were a Howard Beale arranged martyr, the MAGAs would flock to anyone promising revenge.
No disagreement*. But my summer daydream isn't that he's assassinated. There are all kinds of ways that natural causes should already have done the job. The only question is whether the inevitable occurs before it's too late or after.
Duncan's caution above was that DJT's bowing out of the race would just open the door to a Republican with a greater chance of winning. It was that premise I was questioning.
* I'll also point out that, were there to be obvious foul play, "anyone promising revenge" would be absolutely every single MAGA Republican politician plus a few jumping late onto the bandwagon. Who would they rally behind?
Fascists inevitably eat their own. I didn't want to excerpt a wall of text, but if you care to click through (not paywalled), there are a few more such anecdotes.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Jun07-5.html
...
How about another person you probably haven't heard of (unless you're a loyal reader of The New York Times): Cindy Elgan. She has been the clerk of Esmeralda County, NV, for the last two decades. This is a tiny, rural county with only 620 voters. As such, Elgan knows virtually every voter in the country by name. And she has successfully administered dozens of elections over the years.
In 2020, Trump got 82% of the votes in the county, including Elgan's (in fact, she has flown a Trump flag outside of her house). However, some residents thought that total was fishy, and it should have been... even higher. And so, they started demanding answers. Elgan has bent over backwards, sideways, forwards and upside-down to take the complainers through the process, and to assure them that the tally was legitimate. And her reward, as with Courtney Gore in Texas, is that she's now being shunned by people whom she regarded as friends for decades (including her next door neighbor). Oh, and Elgan is also being subjected to a recall election.
Stories like these help explain why so few Republicans break ranks these days, no matter how outlandish Trump's statements are, or no matter how bad his behavior is. Witness, for example, the extent to which nearly every Republican, even the supposed moderates, instantly adopted the "the Trump trial was a politically motivated sham" line. That was literally the only response available that excused Trump for being a convicted felon.
That said, these stories also illustrate a truism about extremist movements: They eventually turn inward, as members accuse each other of not being extreme enough, or being extreme in the wrong way. The useful thing about having a party line is that it helps to main[tain] extreme loyalty. The bad thing is that you eventually end up purging enough people that your movement ceases to be viable.
An interesting thing:
https://www.theinertia.com/environment/sperm-whale-asks-divers-for-help-removing-trash-tangled-in-its-mouth/
Resembles a story in a way.
Re: reparations
Prussia imposed what they considered crippling reparations on France after the Franco-Prussian war. France quickly paid them off.
When post WWI Germany had reparations imposed on it, iirc they trashed their own economy rather than pay any reparations worth anything. That's where the hyperinflation that is my dad's bugbear comes from - it requires a conscious government decision or, I suppose, hyperincompetence.
Interestingly, Rome imposed similar reparations on Carthage after the Second Punic War, and became alarmed when Carthage - then one of the world's main trading centers - paid them off ahead of time in hard coin. This led to the Third (and final) Punic War.
Pappenheimer
Recommend an upside down rumpt, or one behind bars, on a $3 bill
Pappenheimer
According to Hal Sparks, Biden made the treasury $10 Billion on sales and re-buying of oil in the strategic reserve.
"Joe Biden is the greatest oil trader of all time."
Around the 25 minute mark on this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzAEmCMVG2c
@Pappenheimer,
The $3 bill should have Lindsey Graham on it.
Re: Carthage vs Rome
Civilization VII has been announced, probably early 2025 with trailers coming in August of this year. Hopefully they've taken some of my suggestions & advice; I'm hopeful because they're still actively soliciting suggestions from everyone. History curricula really should involve some game play.
I'm stoked for Civ VII. I've played every edition since the boardgame was introduced.
Anyone that thinks tech oligarchs are anti-GOP is smoking crack.
Musk is angling for a position in Trump's next administration and bought Twitter (with Saudi money) to end democracies around the world.
Jeff Bezos just put the people that were authorizing the phone hacking scandals at the Telegraph in charge of the Washington Post.
The NYT will not give Joe Biden good press because the publisher (another nepo baby) has a personal dislike toward POTUS.
Right-wing oligarchs are lining up to buy TiKTok after the forced sale - another Democratic Party own-goal.
There are no good billionaires and anyone that says otherwise has been duped or is complicit in the theft of the world.
matthew:
The NYT will not give Joe Biden good press because the publisher (another nepo baby) has a personal dislike toward POTUS.
From what I've heard on progressive radio (there is such thing in Chicago), it's because Biden has refused a sit-down interview, which the White House expects would be used to portray him as a doddering incompetent.
It does seem a bit like J Jonah Jameson and his editorial crusades against Spider-Man ("Threat or Menace?")
@Dr Brin,
I'm serious as a heart attack, but I need to work out exactly what we'd be betting on. And I don't know if you want to air that laundry here on the blog (though I'd be ok with it for the humor value).
I haven't e-mailed you offline for a long time. I have two gmail addresses associated with you, one with just your name and one with the word "storming" as part of it. Are either of those currently good for arranging a bet if you don't want to do that publicly?
I have lost track of what you are talking about LH. Perhaps it's senility.
onward
onward
Since we're discussing topias, here's my contribution:
Pantopia, the All-Place.
In Pantopia, everything that always happens, always happens. In Pantopia, the weather is chaotic, bread falls buttered-side down, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, work expands to fill the time allotted, employees rise to their level of incompetence, expenditures rise to meet income, there is no free lunch, satisfaction is not guaranteed, bad money drives out good, communication cannot cross a power gap, power corrupts, freedom creates, everything now proven was once only imagined, and any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Pantopia's political system is the circulation of aristocracies, its economic system is the exchange of mostly useless goods by exchanging entirely imaginary money, its religion is blind faith in blind faith, and its science is mostly fiction.
Pantopia is a mixture of Utopia and Dystopia, intertwined, interdependent. Its high ideals are firmly founded upon low hypocrisy.
In short, Pantopia is reportage disguised as fiction. Its main difference from it merely being the universe is that, being fictitious, the speed of its karma is exaggerated for comic effect.
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