• 32 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 6th, 2024

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  • When are people going to learn that exports aren’t even good. The export market just gets a lot of play in politics because of concentrated interests. Exporters lobby. Politicans present arguments to justify what they are doing for exporters. That becomes political rhetoric. Generations later people actually believe it.

    Countries with high exports don’t have a great quality of life. Exports don’t improve the quality of life people living there. It increases work and lowers real wages as often as not. It just makes exporter’s rich. Did British people actually benefit from the opium wars? Do Chinese workers have physical prosperity matching their level of productivity?

    Exporters have convinced countries that money is more valuable than goods. Countries print money.

    This is why the tariffs don’t actually hurt Canada but are just a self-own for the US. It hurts Canadian exporters. But who cares. Now Canadians get to enjoy those products. If a few jobs are lost momentarily, they are replaced by jobs serving the domestic market.







  • Arch is one of the most vanilla of Linuxes. Everyone wanted to run an opinionated distro. But what we needed was the opinions of developers and fewer opinions from people who think creating a distro is a sensible way to distribute art.

    Arch - every package is just the software the original developer shipped, kept up to date.

    “I have art work I want to share. I know. I’ll make myself responsible for the reliability of a thousand people’s operating systems. I hope my cooky ideas never come into conflict with that.” <- Not who you want indirectly changing files on your system when you use the package manager.





  • I blame low interest rates.

    Speculating on someone who themselves are speculating that their customer’s speculation will be fruitful is exactly what low interest rates encourage. Everyone likes the extra activity that produces on the macros, but it just makes the market less accurate.

    Interest rates basically set how permissive the market is with its todo list. The problem is when you let yourself do anything, and then also let yourself get distracted doing something that might help something that you maybe shuldn’t be doing anyway. This is not a functional life. It’s a busy life, but not functional.

    If you want to kill AI, raise the interest rates. It will cause a recession, which sucks. But frankly, humanity will survive a recession and it will be temporary. A higher interest rate market solves real problems that benefit actual people within a near horizon. What we don’t need is people working 14 hour days, slaving to keep their heads above water, working for companies engaged in far-off speculative race for world dominance; we wouldn’t want them to succeed at anyway. That’s 100% what we’re all doing, and it is interest rates that modulate that.

    Raising interest rates will kill all of those jobs involved in that, and sadly a few more from the shock. But those people weren’t doing anything productive for humanity anyway. It’s better to have them lose those jobs and then later redirect their labor towards something productive. In the long term they are digging themselves out of having a job with their current path anyway.





  • Almost all politicians are. And Epstein wasn’t the only operator. Today’s politicians act like they are, and Epstine’s operation was too far in the past for most of them.

    Blackmail mills blackmail a lot people. If you had political finance money, would you finance the campaign of someone who says they are aligned with you, or someone you know will stay aligned with you? Power isn’t given to un-blackmailed people. And people who want power know this. So there is a long list of people willing to get blackmailed to get into power. They may even enjoy the part that gets them blackmailed.


  • I’m starting to be a fan of countries walling off vs the alternative. To be clear, I’m not for it. I would prefer open internet. But what’s worse is countries trying to project their jurisdiction across the globe.

    If you don’t like that I don’t comply with the laws of places where I don’t live, block my site. I don’t block you. You block me. I shouldn’t even have a responsibility to know what your laws are to know if I should block you. It’s your laws, your job.

    And if a country finds it easier to block off the whole external internet, fine. That’s still better than someone who I didn’t elect thinking they can tell me how I must do my job. Certainly better than 152 different governments and municipalities trying to do it at the same time.

    So we should make it clear. When someone in a foreign country visits your site, you are not operating in that country. The user is visiting yours.





  • Sadly, a lot of people get tripped up because they are confused about one simple thing. We are not the government.

    This really short book covers it well. https://cdn.mises.org/anatomy-of-the-state.pdf

    In fact the first chapter argues that really pretty convincingly. So it only takes about 5 minutes to properly understand that we are not the government. Backing a politician’s grab for power really doesn’t benefit you, because, really, you are just giving social support to more power going to the uniparty, which doesn’t work for you.

    It’s one of the shortest books written. It’s basically Machievilli if you freeze dried it into a two hour read. And the critical parts are up front.