nvm0n2

This supposedly famous SS slogan is a "motto applied to the blades of uniform daggers worn by the SA and National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_Nazi_Germany

For sure everyone in Germany memorizes literally everything ever printed on any physical object made by the Nazis. A totally reasonable expectation that is not at all driven by a desire to ban their political opponents. According to the Glossary, the Nazis were also fond of criticizing Das System, which is what they called the Weimar Republic. I'm sure nobody on the German left has ever railed against The System because that would be Nazi language, and certainly the Verfassungsschutz would investigate such things promptly and without bias.

This kind of thing makes Germany look ridiculous and sinister.

> The original Nazis also did not do socialism, but rather elimenated their socialist wing soon after taking power.

Hitler killed fellow Nazis for the same reasons Lenin and Stalin killed fellow Soviets. It's wrong to assume a socialist dictator would not kill fellow socialists. They always do. It's one of the things that makes them scary, even their allies aren't safe. As for the "original" Nazis, here's a quote for you:

"Socialism as the final concept of duty, the ethical duty of work, not just for oneself but also for one’s fellow man’s sake, and above all the principle: Common good before own good, a struggle against all parasitism and especially against easy and unearned income. And we were aware that in this fight we can rely on no one but our own people. We are convinced that socialism in the right sense will only be possible in nations and races that are Aryan, and there in the first place we hope for our own people and are convinced that socialism is inseparable from nationalism"

> the quotes he uses, well, I assume you understand german, so maybe read for yourself?

I spot checked a few of them but none of the sources check out. Some are 404s or paywalled. Other quotes come from writing by Landolf Ladig. From Googling it appears the German left think this was once a pseudonym for Höcke, but he denies it. The journalist who makes this claim based it on the fact that Höcke once used the term organic market economy, and that term also appears in this article. That's such a weak standard of evidence it's insufficient to make such incendiary claims.

Quote 14 says Germany isn't a real democracy because of speech controls. That he complains about being censored is then used as evidence he's a Nazi who should be censored.

In another place Höcke is quoted as saying "this Merkel system is all cartel parties that do not mean well for this country" which the page paraphrases as "Höcke wants to abolish all other parties", which is not what he said.

Another: "I am taking this party down a long and difficult path. But it is the only path that leads to a complete victory" which is paraphrased as him wanting a "Final victory" which is then presented as evidence of being a fascist.

Quote 24 says the AfD should only consider a coalition with other parties if they change their positions. This is scandalous because refusing to consider coalitions is something only his opponents are allowed to do, apparently.

This compilation comes across as untrustworthy. They have to rephrase everything he said and attribute things not written under his name, because if they didn't their thesis wouldn't hold.

So that leaves climate and immigration, but the question is very vague. "Changed the way you look at the future" doesn't imply you think there's a crisis or will vote for a party that treats the issue as a crisis. The Guardian and the organization they cite both think it does.

Well that sort of language won't help. The AfD are not Nazis. This claim makes everything worse and needs to be discarded.

The National Socialists campaigned very openly on Hitler's belief that democracy was a bad system that should be abolished. Nobody was surprised when he went ahead and did that, because that's exactly what he always said he would do. They also campaigned on a very left wing agenda, with lots of talk in their speeches about comrades and ending class divisions, and they ran regular shows of strength in the streets with mass rallies of their supporters.

The AfD in contrast:

- Disdain socialism

- Do not organize massive street rallies

- Campaign on pro-democratic positions, like wanting lots of Swiss-style referendums. They say they dislike the EU because it's got a democratic deficit and they talk sometimes about a UK style referendum on leaving it, for that reason

Their opponents:

- Are left wing

- Organize massive rallies of supporters on the streets

- Take anti-democratic positions, like wanting to ban their opponents

So it's very dangerous strategy to attack the AfD as Nazis because they can just turn this around. They will say to those who listen: who is the bigger threat to the constitution? The people who spend years engaging in peaceful political campaigning (AfD), or the ones who have already had a key policy invalidated as unconstitutional and now talk about making it illegal to vote against their other policies (Ampel)?

1. Wasn't an AfD meeting

2. Had CDU politicians there too

Reality is, the AfD's positions are popular and Scholz tries to respond to that, whilst also claiming his opponents are a threat to democracy. But that is a risky strategy. After all, if one party can make a policy that another party cannot then campaign to reverse, then who is really dismantling democracy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243

> During an interview, passenger Gayle Yamamoto told investigators that she had noticed a crack in the fuselage upon boarding, but did not notify anyone.[3]: 5

https://deft.com/dedicated-servers/

But socialists never think about this stuff. They just pretend there are no downsides to central control of prices.

The usual way it happens is that you write some code inside an async function that's straight line not suspending, and then later someone adds an await inside it. The await returns to the event loop, at which point an event arrive that you didn't expect. You now have control flow jumping to somewhere else completely, possibly changing state in a way that you didn't anticipate. When the original function resumes it sees something change concurrently.

I'm not sure what you mean in your second paragraph. Keeping the monetary base stable is eminently possible.

COVID certainly saw stimulus be used, but I didn't say that's when Keynesianism was discredited. It's really happened during the post-pandemic recovery period.

The US claims to be experiencing strong growth right now, but there are reasons to be a bit skeptical of that. Opinion polls that have historically always tracked reported economic performance have now diverged significantly, with people telling pollsters that they feel the economy is poor whilst the government announces that it's actually doing great. This leads left wing economists like Noah Smith to claim that there's suddenly a sort of ignorance crisis in which people have suddenly stopped being able to assess their own economic security. I think it's more likely that US data has gone bad, ably assisted by a very pro-Biden civil service. For example one metric they use to measure economic strength is job openings, but read any thread about the job market on HN and you'll see lots of highly skilled people struggling to find work along with many reports of what appear to be fake job openings, held open just to collect CVs.

In Europe what we see is very weak or non-existent growth when controlled for inflation despite truly vast levels of immigration, i.e. real economy is probably shrinking in the UK:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/gdp-constant-pri...

Did shrink in Germany:

https://archive.is/F2IX2

And inflation has reached very high levels.

For an Austrian "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon". The post-COVID inflation is for them entirely a function of stimulus, which you'd expect to have a delayed impact in that case because when the stimulus money landed in people's bank accounts everywhere people might spend it was closed. The economy reopens, travel becomes possible again and that money starts flowing out of the bank. Inflation appears immediately, exactly as expected.

Again it's a clearer picture in Europe. The UK started rapidly raising interest rates at the start of 2022, just as COVID was ending. Two years of lockdowns had left the economy in a terribly weakened state, nobody in the UK would claim the boom times were back, yet the BoE left Keynesianism behind and ramped up interest rates to levels last seen just before the last crisis in 2008. Back then they reacted by dropping rates to zero. This time they reacted by raising them to historical norms. A pretty clear repudiation of Keynes.

I think your description of Keynesian monetary policy in terms of addiction is interesting!

You can view 2008 as either caused by regulation or deregulation, it's a fascinating event in that way, and is why different parties were at loggerheads over it.

The view that it was caused by deregulation is as you say: banks were allowed to do risky things that leveraged up their risk until they were going to fail, and this provoked the crisis.

The view that it was caused by regulation is to observe that the only reason banks aren't allowed to collapse in the first place is the odd way in which they are regulated. A banking license is a regulatory permission to tell people they have $1000 on deposit whilst not actually being able to service such a withdrawal. In the case of a normal company like FTX, that's fraud. With the right license, it's not.

If retail banks weren't allowed to do anything with deposits except keep them safe, they could not have become endangered by bad aggregated mortgage debt, and then could have just been allowed to fail. It would have hurt investors a ton but bubbles always do - the ATMs would have kept working though and that's what politicians really respond to, the crisis of the innocent working guy. To fix this situation you don't pass a law, you repeal a law, hence, caused by regulation.

Not necessarily. AI has gone through a winter before.

Elon Musk has made this point, that progress isn't a monotonic ratchet. Progress in rocketry went backwards for years. Progress in top speed of commercial flight went backwards. Keeping current tech levels requires constant effort.

In the software industry, many argue that UI quality went backwards with the shift to web apps for an example of cases where progress isn't obviously one way.

In reality there's already a standardized unit which sums up the worth of a person's labor (money) and a standardized way to compute it (the market). Marx didn't like what that system computed and argued strongly that it all be swept away and replaced with some notion of "need" (family size) and "ability" (simple hours worked or intensity of those hours) which is drastically too simple to reflect reality. That's why his ideas led to collapse everywhere they were tried.

Original claim: they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety

What you're now saying: the claim they’re making, which is something like “DEI led to decreased safety” or something

Read again - the claim is that they have prioritized DEI hiring over safety, a claim amply backed up by Boeing's own statements which are very proud of this fact. Employees who were once told to focus on safety and quality exclusively are now told this is no longer their only priority, and now they must focus on recruiting racial minorities and women as well.

There isn't yet hard evidence this policy has led to a concrete safety problem, which is the claim you're now rejecting. But nobody said it had. Only that it's very, very likely to.

What now? Well, economics isn't really that complex.

Rule 1. Don't print money - it distorts the natural flow of information and incentives through the market, leading to misallocations.

Rule 2. Get rid of fractional reserve banking. It's an unnatural privilege that other companies would be forbidden from engaging in (it's considered fraud if you don't have a banking license). This forces all interest bearing investment to take place through funds that expose their actual risks and liquidity constraints to investors.

When it's possible to save money risk free because banks can't loan it out and there's no monetary inflation, the moral hazard evaporates and you can allow funds to collapse if they make persistently bad investments. There is no longer any need for bank bailouts.

Recessions can still happen in such a world, because mass hysteria and utopian thinking is a part of human nature. There's no law you can pass to stop people getting over-excited about dotComs or AI startups. You just have to let people work out the true value of these things themselves.

Debt and money printing are intimately linked in our system, to the extent that they're nearly the same thing, which is why I used them interchangeably.

If you go back a few hundred years, money printing was pretty simple: the King wanted more money than he could raise through tax to pay for a war, so he'd debase the currency by reducing the quantity of gold in it. We don't use gold anymore so there's no theoretical limit on how much money can be created.

The creation of central banks introduced an indirection. Nowadays governments pretend to not print money. Instead they always "borrow" it. Sometimes this is actually legitimate borrowing, because the lender is someone domestic or foreign who has some surplus currency and wishes to earn interest on it. But very often the lender is the central bank. The central bank is described as independent, but in fact is just another arm of the government. It is granted special powers by law, and in many countries (e.g. the UK) the head is appointed by the government, answers to government and their salary is paid by taxes. Specifically the Central Bank is allowed to type a higher balance into its own computers, and banks are required to respect that balance. So the Treasury issues bonds, and the CB buys those bonds with newly "typed in" money, and this is just an obfuscated way for the government to print money in the end. They literally borrow from themselves.

You may wonder what happens to the interest payments, if the government is borrowing from itself. The answer is that the Treasury pays the central bank which keeps the interest payments for a while ... and then the Treasury takes them back!

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/09/bank-of-eng...

Repayments meanwhile simply disappear, the money is wired to the central bank and then deleted. This really puts into perspective how meaningless the whole charade really is.

> The former stimulates the economy at the roots, the latter generates immediate employment and long-term wealth.

Well, spending on welfare is an economic depressant, you're paying people to not work. The second part is on firmer ground: Keynesians argue that the government should spend abstractly on "infrastructure" during recessions to stimulate employment (in the construction sectors primarily), and this will create wealth.

But this argument also has great problems. It's not yet as discredited as counter-cyclical monetary policy. You'll see governments refer to this concept routinely. However it doesn't work, conceptually:

1. With only a few exceptions if an infrastructure project was actually worth it the private sector would want to be building it already (because it'd have clearly positive ROI). The exceptions are ones where you need eminent domain to seize large quantities of contiguous land, which pretty much means railways, airports and roads (but usually not roads these days). So either the government can simply take over private sector activity, which doesn't actually improve the economy (same stuff gets built), or it can invest in things with expected negative ROI.

2. Governments have a long track record of being very bad at calculating infrastructure ROI.

The problem is that there are very limited opportunities to build heavy transport projects these days. Look at the difficulties the UK has faced with HS2, Heathrow third runway etc. You have to demolish a lot of homes and people don't like it, and environmental law offers many opportunities for delay, so in practice by the time an infrastructure project gets off the ground the recession was already years in the rear view mirror.

Combine these things and infrastructure spending by governments, counter-cyclical or not, often ends up just being a waste of resources, or very ambiguous at best. The poster child for this problem right now is Belt & Road, although in the past EU spending was also famous (Spain's airports to nowhere, etc). An airport in a place with no demand i.e. not a city, is not literally digging a hole and filling it again, but it's somewhat similar from an economic perspective. You move a lot of earth and in the end it's not useful for much.

> I understand them to say of 2008:

That's not quite what they say about 2008 no lol :)

von Mises would have done nothing in 2008. Just let the recession proceed without interference until it reaches its natural end. Fundamentally those houses just weren't worth much and the debt was bad, no way to go back in time and fix that, so you just have to take the economic hit and let things shake out. It sucks but you can't unspill milk, better to focus on what went wrong and how to avoid a repeat.

The Austrian analysis of 2008 is that it was caused by government interference in the market, specifically, governments became very keen on the idea of everyone being able to own their own home. US law and regulation was changed to strongly incentivize banks to issue mortgages, in particular, Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac started buying up pretty much any mortgage going even if it wasn't a good investment, but that didn't matter because the government was always willing to take them. Eventually it all came tumbling down. The fix would therefore be (a) stop government interference in the housing market, (b) forbid fractional reserve banking, which is why banks have to be bailed out when they fail.

> because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size

And the parts of Marx you quote say literally that exact thing: that people's needs vary only depending on whether they are married, how many children they have "and so on and so forth".

In other words Marx didn't recognize any connection between quantity or quality of work and what you get back. In a Marxist system your income is a function of family size. Indeed Marx didn't even recognize the concept of "work smarter not harder" because he believed everyone's work was exactly the same and the only difference was that big strong men could deliver more units of abstract "labor" per hour than a small weedy sick man.

Why do you think your quotes dispute what I said? Is it not perfect support for it?

That isn't what it looks like from the outside. The explanation circulating for how Claudine Gay ended up president of Harvard is that Harvard's DEI office was allowed to veto any candidate who wasn't diverse.

For example he is famous for saying "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" i.e. everyone works as hard as they can yet gets the same pay, because everyone's "need" is the same. Maybe adjusted by a few exceptions like family size and medical conditions, but the point of this is to separate how hard you work from what you get.

To recap Keynes: his core idea was countercyclical monetary policy, i.e. to issue debt (print money) when times are bad and pay down debt (recall money) when times are good.

It sounds good but the Austrians pointed out that there would be two problems in practice:

1. Give governments a nice sounding justification for money printing and they will do it to excess, creating inflation. The Austrians were right: governments cited Keynes when printing money in a recession, and then the "emergency measures" would conveniently never end. The part where you pay down the debt in good times by running a primary surplus would never be respected.

2. Keynes misunderstood the nature and cause of recessions.

Recessions occur when there has been widespread misallocation of resources, usually due to some collective delusion or state mismanagement. The groupthink breaks and people realize that their investments are duds. Credit is withdrawn, investments cease and there's a giant sucking sound as people lose their jobs whilst those who still have money try to figure out what to do next.

Keynes posited that recessions are quasi-natural disasters that just inexplicably happen, and that the fix is for the government to spend money to balance them out. But this isn't the case and so his fix just makes things worse. It may appear to end the recession if all you look at is a handful statistics, but the underlying misallocation still occurred and when governments step in desperate to create employment - any employment - they misallocate resources still further. Like someone taking stimulants to try and delay the end of the party, it works for a while but they get more and more messed up. There's lots of activity but not much is actually useful. Governments don't care though, because all they're trying to do is keep people digging proverbial holes and filling them back up again.

You can drown the signals of a recession by misallocating resources still further, but it's not a good idea.

Keynesianism has worked out in the past 15 years exactly as the Austrians always said it would, and now Austrian economics is back in vogue. The 2008 recession led to the ZIRP years of easy money that never ended, even when the economy was booming. Government debt climbed endlessly. Inflation span out of control and now interest rates have been hiked repeatedly even though the economy was trashed by lockdowns - exactly the moment Keynes said to do the opposite.

FPTP forces parties to the center, because they have to be pre-formed coalitions before going to the polls. Single issue parties and fringe parties end up with nothing in FPTP.

That's why the usual argument for PR is that it allows smaller (fringe/extreme) parties to exist and have influence, so represents minorities better.

In practice this is what we see. Countries with PR often have very powerful fringe or single issue parties (often the Greens), whereas in countries with FPTP the main parties are all big tents that just represent the centre-left or centre-right.