known white supremacist and Hitler fan

They had a problem with “known”

$400 check, and $400k in PPP loans that I will totally repay (if I have to)

I should be cynical about AI and labor displacement, but…

Does anyone actually want to wreck their bodies by walking all over a giant warehouse and lifting heavy unwieldy objects?

Now the robots will do all of that.

We’ll just need some humans to uh… follow them around the warehouse… and move them when they break down. (This is totally different, you see.)

And do the original task that glitched it out. And dodge all of the other robots while doing so. And be paid less because we have robots now.

Yall are worried about banks when a massive bet on AI makes up over 30% of the S&P 500?

And when you smash their nests, birds don’t lay eggs

It’s not all bad

I’m glad there are other people out here trying to explain how money actually works. I gave up a while ago cuz I got sick of being treated like a crazy person.

I think that, partially, people don’t like being told their folk wisdom is wrong… but more importantly, they don’t wanna believe that the people in power are either just as misinformed or deliberately lying.

Eldritch is right, but it’s kinda like Newtonian physics vs general relativity: you can think of (federal) taxes as “funding the government” and it’s not a terrible approximation. But it’s not the reality.

The reality is more like what Eldritch said: money is spent into existence, and taxed out of existence. The issuer of a currency doesn’t need to take the currency from you in order to spend it — they need to destroy it so that their newly-printed currency is actually worth chasing after.

Sounds like a distinction without a difference, right?

Except it matters when we talk about “tariffs funding the government” (cuz they don’t) or “how are we gonna pay for something like the green new deal?” (paying for it is the easy part, controlling inflation is the real constraint).

When we talk about major economic initiatives, it kinda matters for people to understand how money actually works. Musk, for example, had no clue and thought he had uncovered some massive scandal when he gained access to the federal payment system and was confused at how the funds don’t actually come from anywhere: https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/elon-musk-discovers-the-magic-of

supporting

These are people who heard “trade deficit” and thought “deficit? That’s a bad word!”

We were getting a ton of stuff from other countries for cheap, meanwhile those countries either couldn’t afford our stuff or bought it at an absurd premium.

That is not supporting the other countries, it’s exploiting them.

The funny thing is, I’m like… Yeah, we should probably stop exploiting them. And in that sense, the tariffs are a good thing. Buuut the price of doing that is being paid disproportionately by working class people.

If it was more equitably implemented, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with a more tariff-based USA.

“This is probably not a Hatch Act violation, because it’s not tied to an election,” Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the non-partisan ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), told Forbes.

Not tied to an election? What? What rock are you living under?

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”

“I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: we’ve been too naive. We’ve left children’s digital lives to platforms that never had their wellbeing in mind. We must move from digital captivity to community.”

Powerful words.

Small question: Why are you giving these horrible platforms more leverage over their digital captives instead of just banning them or outlawing the worst parts of their business models?

The real Turing test

some kind of man

The real content is the friends/enemies you make along the way

“Suddenly”

like a cunt

He lacks the depth and warmth.

Now I’m no economist, so maybe I’m just ignorant here.

But it seems to me that if there’s less stuff being shipped into a country, the people who live in that country are gonna end up having less stuff.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that one the main goals of an economy is to… checks notes uh… “have stuff”.

Is this the “winning” we were warned about?