It would be nice if more brands realized there's much more to lose than to gain by being cute on twitter.
One important thing to understand is that inflation doesn't always raise prices, and rising prices isn't always caused by inflation.
Inflation is monetary, so the key to inflation is money supply.
To understand how governments and central banks inflate the money supply, you need to understand how money is created. Money is created when a loan is issued. The money didn't exist before, and comes to exist because the banks issue the money for the loan.
Under normal circumstances, there's a few ways a central bank can affect this.
One simple way is Qualitative Easing. This works by directly purchasing loans from banks and effectively replacing the loans with cash. This means that banks have the asset of a loan replaced with a liability of a deposit, so they can go out and issue more loans.
But why would banks need money if they can just create money? Well, that leads into the other way banks can change the money supply, and that's by changing the reserve requirement. The reserve requirement is how much money a bank is required to have on-hand in order to loan out money. The banking system in NZ, Hong Kong, and the US do not have reserve requirements at all at the moment, so theoretically banks can loan out unlimited money.
There's another reason banks need to have money in some form or another, and that's because of risk. Banks can loan money out all day long, but if you default, they take the hit. That's why banks in NZ and the US and HK still give out limited loans, because while they can loan out unlimited money, they can't afford to lose unlimited money. Central banks help reduce this risk because banks can borrow from the central bank as necessary, but all the loans in the world can't help if you've got a negative net worth.
So what can governments do?
Taxing and spending can increase or decrease prices by increasing or decreasing localized demand (this is exactly why you don't hand people money to help with higher prices. Overinflated housing markets around the world all have lots of government programs to "make it cheaper to buy a home", Canada being top among them), but they won't change inflation. The amount of money in the system doesn't really change. The one big thing that government does infuence is debt.
When the government takes out debt, that essentially introduces many, many new dollars to the system which in turn help produce even more dollars through new loans justified because of all the dollars in the system, increasing inflation.
When the government balanced budgets and starts paying down debts, that removes many, many dollars from the system which in turn helps to remove even more dollars from the economy because it's more difficult for banks to justify more loans, decreasing inflation.
At the beginning of this post, I said that higher prices are not inflation and inflation isn't necessarily higher prices, and once you understand that inflation is monetary and the effects of government policies on inflation, you start to see it. Prices happened to stay level for the past 15 years despite wildly inflationary policies around the world because other factors kept prices down.
One continuous impact of inflation is the creation of asset bubbles. Smart money knows it's shrinking in value, so it looks for things that grow in value to preserve itself. When this happens with lots of money at once, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, such as what we saw in tech in the 90s, houses in the 2000s, tech again in the 2010s, and crypto more recently. These things aren't blowing up because they're special, they're blowing up because they're blowing up and the smart money is getting into them to protect itself which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money rushes in so prices rise so money rushes in.
I could keep going all day long, but one last thing to think about given my last point: People are pissed off at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Guess what created these mega-rich people? It's inflation. They aren't special, they aren't smarter than people in mining or manufacturing who didn't get to become the richest people on the planet, they just got lucky and the massively inflationary policies since the late 1990s are the reason they could get lucky.
Inflation is monetary, so the key to inflation is money supply.
To understand how governments and central banks inflate the money supply, you need to understand how money is created. Money is created when a loan is issued. The money didn't exist before, and comes to exist because the banks issue the money for the loan.
Under normal circumstances, there's a few ways a central bank can affect this.
One simple way is Qualitative Easing. This works by directly purchasing loans from banks and effectively replacing the loans with cash. This means that banks have the asset of a loan replaced with a liability of a deposit, so they can go out and issue more loans.
But why would banks need money if they can just create money? Well, that leads into the other way banks can change the money supply, and that's by changing the reserve requirement. The reserve requirement is how much money a bank is required to have on-hand in order to loan out money. The banking system in NZ, Hong Kong, and the US do not have reserve requirements at all at the moment, so theoretically banks can loan out unlimited money.
There's another reason banks need to have money in some form or another, and that's because of risk. Banks can loan money out all day long, but if you default, they take the hit. That's why banks in NZ and the US and HK still give out limited loans, because while they can loan out unlimited money, they can't afford to lose unlimited money. Central banks help reduce this risk because banks can borrow from the central bank as necessary, but all the loans in the world can't help if you've got a negative net worth.
So what can governments do?
Taxing and spending can increase or decrease prices by increasing or decreasing localized demand (this is exactly why you don't hand people money to help with higher prices. Overinflated housing markets around the world all have lots of government programs to "make it cheaper to buy a home", Canada being top among them), but they won't change inflation. The amount of money in the system doesn't really change. The one big thing that government does infuence is debt.
When the government takes out debt, that essentially introduces many, many new dollars to the system which in turn help produce even more dollars through new loans justified because of all the dollars in the system, increasing inflation.
When the government balanced budgets and starts paying down debts, that removes many, many dollars from the system which in turn helps to remove even more dollars from the economy because it's more difficult for banks to justify more loans, decreasing inflation.
At the beginning of this post, I said that higher prices are not inflation and inflation isn't necessarily higher prices, and once you understand that inflation is monetary and the effects of government policies on inflation, you start to see it. Prices happened to stay level for the past 15 years despite wildly inflationary policies around the world because other factors kept prices down.
One continuous impact of inflation is the creation of asset bubbles. Smart money knows it's shrinking in value, so it looks for things that grow in value to preserve itself. When this happens with lots of money at once, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, such as what we saw in tech in the 90s, houses in the 2000s, tech again in the 2010s, and crypto more recently. These things aren't blowing up because they're special, they're blowing up because they're blowing up and the smart money is getting into them to protect itself which is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money rushes in so prices rise so money rushes in.
I could keep going all day long, but one last thing to think about given my last point: People are pissed off at Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. Guess what created these mega-rich people? It's inflation. They aren't special, they aren't smarter than people in mining or manufacturing who didn't get to become the richest people on the planet, they just got lucky and the massively inflationary policies since the late 1990s are the reason they could get lucky.
It's pretty funny watching these people turn on a dime against one of their previous messiahs.
Imagine having to agree with someone all the time in order to like them.
Imagine having to agree with someone all the time in order to like them.
The one thing that android has that Apple doesn't is the freedom to install what you want. You won't be able to install f-droid on apple, but you absolutely can on android.
It's a thin thread of liberty, but at least it's a thread.
It's a thin thread of liberty, but at least it's a thread.
Can't say much.... My instance allows posts up to 60,000 characters (and occasionally I use them)
I can kinda sorta see it.
Like, "Oh, this is for adding a post to my favorites, but I don't want to add any posts to my favorites it's not like I'll go back and look at them"
Sometimes too much experience with other stuff can make intuitive stuff less intuitive because your previous experience misleads you.
Like, "Oh, this is for adding a post to my favorites, but I don't want to add any posts to my favorites it's not like I'll go back and look at them"
Sometimes too much experience with other stuff can make intuitive stuff less intuitive because your previous experience misleads you.
I feel like it's histrionic nonsense.
For a lot of the stuff listed -- particularly the legal stuff -- the potential for problems may indeed exist, but the the way the post paints everything is like there'll be a cop car immediately dispatched the moment anything happens.
Companies end up out of compliance with rules and regulations every day. Some of the biggest companies on earth are presently out of compliance, know they're out of compliance, and the regulator knows they're out of compliance, and the world keeps turning. Even if theyre "caught", it isn't the end of the world. Facebook keeps getting hit with gdpr fines, it says "oops", pays them, and moves on with its day. Facebook has 20 times the staff twitter had at its peak.
Moderation issues are a dead issue for me, because Twitter already had terrible moderation. Remember, this is a website that was already fighting in court because it refused to take down child porn. that wasn't because Elon Musk owned the site, he didn't own the site at that time. If you looked for it, there were all kinds of terrible stuff that were fully allowed and the site didn't end. Twitter is where all the bad campaigns to end innocent people originated, because twitter allowed that sort of thing.
Technical issues could be a thing, but notice how many of the risks are "If we make a broken change". In other words, as long as nobody breaks the site, the site won't break. I've had this first-hand, where something works forever and you make a change and then have to deal with the consequences. Even if it's a bad problem, the world doesn't end. Every major website has had issues in the past 24 months. None of them have failed as a result.
From where I'm standing, I think you could probably maintain twitter with a few hundred competent people maximum. You don't have people shoveling coal into the tweet furnaces, and I think the excesses that were revealed regarding twitter staff and twitter offices reflect that. The stories of people who work a day a month and pull full paycheques are probably real.
In the twitter poster's defense, this is histrionic nonsense if you're trying to make a prediction about the next few weeks of twitter existing, but it excellent work if you're trying to manage risks and identify potential problems so you need to list all the things that could happen and the potential consequences so you can mitigate those risks. I've created documents just like this listing all the risks of a thing, looking at the chances of it happening, the thing that happens, and what the potential consequences could be for the purposes of preventing those things from happening. Thing is, when you're doing stuff like that you're intentionally ignoring "rubber meets road" things like I've written above because nobody wants to be the Ford Pinto manager measuring the number of deaths and lawsuits against the cost of the recall.
For a lot of the stuff listed -- particularly the legal stuff -- the potential for problems may indeed exist, but the the way the post paints everything is like there'll be a cop car immediately dispatched the moment anything happens.
Companies end up out of compliance with rules and regulations every day. Some of the biggest companies on earth are presently out of compliance, know they're out of compliance, and the regulator knows they're out of compliance, and the world keeps turning. Even if theyre "caught", it isn't the end of the world. Facebook keeps getting hit with gdpr fines, it says "oops", pays them, and moves on with its day. Facebook has 20 times the staff twitter had at its peak.
Moderation issues are a dead issue for me, because Twitter already had terrible moderation. Remember, this is a website that was already fighting in court because it refused to take down child porn. that wasn't because Elon Musk owned the site, he didn't own the site at that time. If you looked for it, there were all kinds of terrible stuff that were fully allowed and the site didn't end. Twitter is where all the bad campaigns to end innocent people originated, because twitter allowed that sort of thing.
Technical issues could be a thing, but notice how many of the risks are "If we make a broken change". In other words, as long as nobody breaks the site, the site won't break. I've had this first-hand, where something works forever and you make a change and then have to deal with the consequences. Even if it's a bad problem, the world doesn't end. Every major website has had issues in the past 24 months. None of them have failed as a result.
From where I'm standing, I think you could probably maintain twitter with a few hundred competent people maximum. You don't have people shoveling coal into the tweet furnaces, and I think the excesses that were revealed regarding twitter staff and twitter offices reflect that. The stories of people who work a day a month and pull full paycheques are probably real.
In the twitter poster's defense, this is histrionic nonsense if you're trying to make a prediction about the next few weeks of twitter existing, but it excellent work if you're trying to manage risks and identify potential problems so you need to list all the things that could happen and the potential consequences so you can mitigate those risks. I've created documents just like this listing all the risks of a thing, looking at the chances of it happening, the thing that happens, and what the potential consequences could be for the purposes of preventing those things from happening. Thing is, when you're doing stuff like that you're intentionally ignoring "rubber meets road" things like I've written above because nobody wants to be the Ford Pinto manager measuring the number of deaths and lawsuits against the cost of the recall.
I would absolutely argue that that time came, and the people who swore the loudest that they would never be the one holding their arm up were right there.
The problem is, they made the mistake of assuming the problem was with the specific symbol, the specific action. In reality, what really mattered was the specific principles, and so those people were tricked into supporting the same thing yet again because while the message remains the same in principle, the symbols changed and thus the gullible were tricked.
The problem is, they made the mistake of assuming the problem was with the specific symbol, the specific action. In reality, what really mattered was the specific principles, and so those people were tricked into supporting the same thing yet again because while the message remains the same in principle, the symbols changed and thus the gullible were tricked.
It's a great technocratic move: disregard reality and instead focus on finding experts who will say what you want instead.
Elitism at its best.
Elitism at its best.
"I'm going to mastodon" is the new "I'm moving to Canada"
Except US the country isn't as addictive as Twitter. Most of these people would suck dick in a dark alley for a hit of Twitter.
Except US the country isn't as addictive as Twitter. Most of these people would suck dick in a dark alley for a hit of Twitter.
I think almost every admin has seen some very weird reports in the last week.
Maybe it's time for the big Tech refugees to go back where they belong. They clearly want to have the power to report anything that makes things feel remotely weird in the pants.
Maybe it's time for the big Tech refugees to go back where they belong. They clearly want to have the power to report anything that makes things feel remotely weird in the pants.
I really really really wanted to be ready, but it's not ready.
But for whatever it's worth, when I bought my first Android phone, that wasn't ready either. I think Linux is more ready now than Android was then.
At some point in the near future I would like to pick up a pine phone pro to see if additional hardware can be thrown into the problem. I tried the Nexus 5 and pine phone, and neither one of them can really drive the software well enough.
I will say that there are some non-standard forms of Linux that are much closer. The Ubuntu phone is basically usable at this point, but it's sitting in an evolutionary dead end since it doesn't share the ecosystem with the rest of Linux. Same with sailfish which worked pretty well.
For me, so Way Forward is going to be Linux on phones running xorg or Wayland so that in addition to specialized applications designed specifically for smartphones, you also get the entire catalog of Linux applications that will run on whatever architecture the phone is.
But for whatever it's worth, when I bought my first Android phone, that wasn't ready either. I think Linux is more ready now than Android was then.
At some point in the near future I would like to pick up a pine phone pro to see if additional hardware can be thrown into the problem. I tried the Nexus 5 and pine phone, and neither one of them can really drive the software well enough.
I will say that there are some non-standard forms of Linux that are much closer. The Ubuntu phone is basically usable at this point, but it's sitting in an evolutionary dead end since it doesn't share the ecosystem with the rest of Linux. Same with sailfish which worked pretty well.
For me, so Way Forward is going to be Linux on phones running xorg or Wayland so that in addition to specialized applications designed specifically for smartphones, you also get the entire catalog of Linux applications that will run on whatever architecture the phone is.
I cannot believe that I have to tell people this: If somebody stabs you with a spear, you do not end with a vagina on your chest, you end up with sucking chest wound. They're quite dangerous, you will likely die.