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sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

>not emitting more co2 in the future than expected in growth is equal to actually reducing it (government already does this when talking about budget deficit and debt)

The "My wife said it was on sale" school of reducing costs.

Protip: She usually spends more money when it's on sale.

A big thing to keep in mind is how our markets are so badly warped, not free markets at all.

The reason that there's so many investors with so much money to throw at useless crap is that the government created stuff like central banks, bank insurance, deposit insurance, and so on that allow money to be pumped out without any regard for the risk of an investment.

All this money is trying to find a place to grow, so it all goes into index funds, and if you can get your stock on there, you're golden.

This is all a result of "make the numbers go up at all times", because if the numbers didn't always go up because the state wasn't propping everything up, then capital would only grow if it was smart and chased smart profitable works, which is a lot harder than just creating unlimited money and letting it slosh everywhere.

I suspect we're going to see this hard if central banks continue to reduce liquidity to fight inflation.

Just imagine: Trudeau imports a bunch of gang members from New York, they bring crime with them.

Then Trudeau tries to ban the illegal handguns they're using as if it's the guns that are the problem.

We always sort of knew we elected a retard, but I guess this just confirms what we knew...

C'mon, don't you want the local duke to be able to bang your wife on your wedding night before you?

(Uh oh... I think many neo-feudalists would...)

This sort of thing is exactly why I migrated to a self-hosted nextcloud.

Why is it Google's business what I store on my drive? Oh wait, it isn't. And you know what else? I don't need to pay myself a per-product monthly fee for the privilege of having access to my own server. There's an upfront hardware cost, but when you start to look at the potential monthly cost, you come out ahead quickly and you've got freedom as well, which in my view is way more important.

The other thing I love is that nextcloud has a lot of optional apps that let you host all kinds of useful services in addition to just being a drive replacement.

I'm convinced that solicitation of random women is a core piece of their business model. Before I deleted my account, facebook would routinely ask me "Do you know this person?" and show me the account of some random hot girl. I guaran-fucking-tee you that this was entirely intentional to get me harassing random women so I'd spend more time on the site.

I suspect that if the government was no longer sticking its fingers everywhere, a lot of very rich people would very quickly find themselves destitute. None of them have ever had to run a business where they weren't being chosen as a winner because of their connections to the largest and most powerful state in the history of the world.

It's so ingrained into the systems of the moment, we're both writing this on a global network built almost exclusively on government money.

"I uh found 17 trillion dollars in redundancies" - Actually increases spending by 1 trillion

God damnit elon...

Liz Truss is in trouble because she just stepped in and tried to do the conservative playbook. Cut taxes, ignore spending. The problem is that neither the progressive playbook nor the conservative playbook are going to work in this environment. You're gonna need austerity, tax increases and spending cuts.

Nobody is going to be happy, but the budget must be balanced because credit is finite again. You actually need to convince someone to buy the debt, and nobody is going to accept unlimited debt purchases at rates under inflation.

Many countries in the past have discovered this, but the UK is just one of the first and won't by far be the last.

Sort of interesting that 1lb of gold was 5 years of a legionnaires wage, but that would represent about 23,100 USD today, or less than 2 years at minimum wage (presumably a legionnaire would make more than federal minimum wage)

>tfw people complain about mods and admins on a distributed platform anyone can host
laughing dicaprio meme

Not just vaxes but lockdowns.

https://susankatzkeating.com/doug-ford-net-worth-age-height/

"Ford’s net worth in 2022 is believed to be around $50 million. What is surprising is the fact that it jumped more than 15 times from his $3 million recorded net worth in 2019. During Covid-19 pandemic his net worth increased as well."

https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-net-worth-nearly-doubled-154225312.html

"Fauci’s Net Worth Nearly Doubled during Pandemic"

https://freebeacon.com/democrats/the-stock-market-made-nancy-pelosi-rich-now-she-wants-to-ban-her-colleagues-from-trading/

"The speaker also reaped a significant return during the COVID-19 pandemic, seeing her estimated net worth jump from $106 million in 2019 to $171.4 million in 2021, an increase of 60 percent."

You don't double your money on a new prophylactic rotavirus vaccine. You double your money by shutting down the entire productive economy and holding it hostage until your demands are met.

Politicians wanted to use what appeared to be the biggest crisis ever to gain more power. The more power they have, the more they can sell favors. The more they can sell favors, the richer they get.

May politicians increased their net worth by orders of magnitude during the pandemic.

And I'll give you that they weren't rounding up the unvaccinated, but you get to a certain point where the audacious abuses of power put anything on the table. The camps did exist, they bragged about it. They were threatening to cut off unvaxxed from the economy altogether, to keep unvaxxed lockdowns in place for years. There was just a tiiiiiiiiny line they hadn't crossed yet, but they did cross all those other lines.

Ffs....

Debt is a force multiplier. Successes get blown up, and failures also get blown up. That's one reason why most booms and most busts are centered around monetary factors. During the gold standard era, many of those booms and busts centered around bank policies, using silver or gold as coinage, or people playing around in markets to limit or cause excesses of money.

Usually, some stuff will be going up and other stuff will be going down and it all sort of balances out, but with debt you can have massive booms because lots of people with lots of money rush into one slightly profitable thing making it insanely profitable, but when it becomes less profitable suddenly everyone is rushing with their borrowed money to get out and it crashes, and because there's so much borrowed money involved not only does that thing crash, but the people who lose borrowed money need to pull out of other stuff to make up the difference and so it causes other parts of the economy to choke up as well.

Of course I'm not suggesting we end debt, but it's an instrument that must be used carefully, and there's nothing careful about the past 50 years.

>Making shit up
Oh yah?

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/08/26/australia-has-begun-building-covid-concentration-camps-n2594763

>Thinking their results could have been faked to a significant degree amounts to not much less than believing in the Illuminati.

Thinking that a situation where so many people had so much to gain from the favorable results couldn't possibly result in results that were faked to a significant degree amounts to believing in santa claus and the easter bunny.

>Maybe you should learn to read more than just the headline of an article

Don't lie by structure if you don't want to be accused of deception.

>I'm too tired and agitated to deal with this level of bullshit.

Same. I'm done with this conversation.

"Durka durrrr I don't remember nothing! Nobody ever said anything! Oh, you proved what you said happened happened, often with sources that are hostile to your position? Well suddenly I'm a 300 IQ critical thinker who will do a deep dive on sources to prove you're ackshually wrong!"

yeah yeah yeah. Doesn't even matter anymore. After all, the authoritarians won. Congratulations, I hope you bake a nice state approved cake.

That goes to something I was discussing with someone else today, that they do things that make the numbers always go up, but the numbers in the aggregate don't tell the whole story. They kept the numbers going up for the past 15 years, but what that's looked like is cost of living becoming impossible, factories and the like shutting down, and the economy being people shuffling around million dollar apartments in Toronto.

Keynesian prescriptions are a failure. Debt during bad times and saving during good times does not work. Politically it turns into debt during bad times and debt during good times. If you want proof, look at the years since 2008. More debt run up than ever before, in every economy around the world, during what was called the longest economic recovery in history.

So what really needs to happen is a recession. A bad one. It'll suck, and a lot of people will get hurt for a while, but perpetual economic stimulus is very bad. It means that on paper the numbers only go up, but it also means that people who have only ever see their numbers go up, and people who have nothing end up priced out of ever having anything. Kids are living in their parents basements because they can't afford anywhere to live in the second largest country on the planet with one of the lowest population densities on the planet.

We need our capital going towards productive work, not towards bidding up 100 year old houses or other non-productive rent seeking. If changing that means our numbers go down for a while, so be it. If we don't fix this obvious problem, then political extremism is going to continue to grow because there's no opportunities for anyone who doesn't already have a foot in the door to just lead a normal life. Then the numbers will really drop, and they probably won't recover for a long time.

It used to be said that "say what you will about the fascists, at least the trains ran on time". Over the years I've come up with a corollary to that: "if you're going to be fascist, the trains better well fucking run on time"

The idea being that if you end up taking absolute power, everything that happens good or bad is on you. Most of those governments don't operate that way, they will take credit for all of the good things happening and blame someone else for all the bad things that are happening.

Sort of like engineering the worst inflation at any point that I've been alive, and then instead of blaming their own policies which anyone with basically economics could have predicted, they blame Russia.

Doesn't just apply to governments either. I've seen authoritarian bullies in positions of power at work, and as long as everything is going fine, the authoritarian can take full credit for all the good things that are happening, but the moment that things aren't going good anymore everyone turns on that leader.

I might have agreed with you 600 billion dollars ago, but the current government has spent more debt than every other government before it combined in a very short period of time. Eventually, you got to put the crack pipe away.

I get it. Especially Southern Ontario. You've already got new york, why would you want more New York?

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