That, and off-by-one errors
718 karma · joined February 4, 2020
I already answered why bonds are still valid to be owned by institutions with lots of money and also why big banks still buy them (happily, I should add).
> The world is a) substantially overweighted in bonds (and other financial assets, especially US bonds) at the same time that b) governments (especially the US) are producing enormous amounts more debt and bonds and other debt assets
Yes and no. Why are there so many bonds? Well, lots of countries have policies to not issue money directly to the finance ministry which then gives the money to whatever the government wants to fund, but instead for every spending of the government issue bonds that are sold to banks and put that money on the finance ministries balance sheet. It's an entirely political concept, but it's reality. As such, bonds and state debt are just the money handed out by the state. If they would not hold debt and/or issue bonds, there would be no money for anybody. Period.
>…If bond prices fall significantly that will produce significant losses for holders of them, which could encourage more selling
This leaves out the political dimensions in its entirety. Bond prices will not fall significantly UNLESS the state's resources (technology, work-force, ...) also drop significantly. If that is not the case, the state can just uphold the bond's values.
> …Imagine what would happen if, for any or all of these reasons, the holders of these debt assets wanted to sell them. There is now over $75 trillion of US debt assets of varying maturities.
This is just wrong. I already explained why, in brief, above. I won't shed anymore words on this, except that it is fear-mongering.
> …History and logic show that central banks, when faced with the supply/demand imbalance situation that would lead interest rates to rise to more than is desirable in light of economic circumstances, will print the money to buy bonds and create “yield curve controls” to put a cap on bond yields and will devalue cash. That makes cash terrible to own and great to borrow.
There are more sides to that coin. This is often used to create fear for inflation. Because history has also shown that unless there is hyper-inflation people always love to own cash, regardless of the economic circumstances. And better borrowing conditions should enable economic growth, and over-borrowing should be kept in check anyways (re: financial crisis 2008) so there is no real issue here. And as explained above, unless the resources of a state drop significantly, there is no trigger for hyper-inflation.
All in all, he is just arguing from an invester's perspective, but even then not a very holistic approach.
But to answer the original question, disregarding any logic of how state debt or bonds work, why would you own bonds? Two possible answers:
1) Because they serve as a deflation hedge. This is interesting for people with lots of money who need some more security 2) Because it is guaranteed money (at least bonds for countries like US, UK, JPN, DE).
Great approach, Kudos!
What is humor allowed to do? It's a big question of our time, and I'd say everything that is immoral, but nothing that is unethical.
Should humor be kept out of _professional setting projects_. My take: No. If we do that, we humans are just machines.
David Graeber said in Bullshit Jobs (p. 213 of the German version; sentence-by-sentence translation by me):
> You can call this mockery of justice. It exists in many forms. The right-leaning version judges those that believe the world owes them [...] equality before the law. But there also exists a version of the left-wing: It consists of telling people that they should check their privileges, if they had the impression they had the right to anything that poor or more opressed people don't have. With this benchmark even the person receiving a beating by the police and is imprisoned without reason can only then complain about injustice after naming every other category of men that is more likely to be a victim of it.
But the VoIP/audio chat is using WebRTC, so Matrix is only the signalling server and the audio is p2p between the participants. As such the strain on the hosting server should be minimal
I also really enjoy knowledge management and I think I would really love org mode once I figured it out, but I just never got around to it. I am a Sublime user and really enjoy it, so I found other tools for my use cases and so far I am happy with the results. Could org mode provide me more value? Maybe. But it's not the point.
Somebody might be taking more notes than others, because they are used to it, or because they need it, and it's totally okay and people should do what works for them. If your data was truly yours (data affiliation vs data ownership) this would be even less of a problem.
1) They teach me things I'm interested in
2) They are really well structured and start of with a hypothesis or premise
To elaborate:
1) On the spectrum you mentioned I'm more on the organized side, though not as extreme as you. A lot of my colleagues are really disorganized and they picked up some pointers from me and our collaboration has become much more efficient by them just taking a few more notes and sharing instead of me always starting at 0 (or 1) when we start a conversation. Everybody should find his own comfy spot on the spectrum, but people should try to not make others miserable by relying entirely on external knowledge.
2) Recently I read a few books which follow this structure (which is also the standards for scientific papers) and it's just so refreshing to the usual brain dump blog post. I do enjoy some of these brain dumps, especially if they are more for entertainment and less so for teaching, but sometimes it is exhausting if a blog post aims to answer a question, but it's not clear where it's going in the beginning and you just keep on reading.
The movie Yesterday is such a farce because it suggest The Beatles songs are super successful no matter who performs them, as long as they are the first to perform them. When effectively it was a mix of having skilled musicians, produce and perform good songs on the one hand, but also who they were, the marketing and their performances on the other hand.
I work in IT of a non-Tech company and it's sometimes crazy to think that just because our industry is so short-handed on IT people we get paid so much more compared to the guys in the company "doing the work". I think it's probably fine because we also play a vital role in the company's success and it's good taking pride in your work, but some of my colleagues act like they are the reason we are making any profit. They are running the tool that enables our sales, but they are not the ones doing the actual selling. Just because the company has been around longer than there has been commodity sales order software and they are still running it does not mean they are the cause for all the revenue in their tool.
We have it amazingly well and we should make sure to be nice to other people, especially since we are privileged.
I'm always looking for the super hidden unsubscribe button. I don't move to spam. But sometimes I get mails without even subscribing, and that is far worse.
Also, I just stopped buying from Amazon a couple of years back. Only purchase in my history for the past 3 years is an Apple charger since when I changed from Android to iOS they didn't deliver them with the device anymore and Amazon had the cheapest price from the actual Apple distributor (no re-distributor).
A treatment of the root cause would be tremendous.
So they compete by executing well, instead of blackboxing their ideas.
I vehemently disagree. Cash is issued by the central bank. If you put it directly into "assets", then the working class would have no money. It needs to flow through all participants of the economy. At each stage some of it is "saved" by the participant and "lost" by the state until eventually the remainder is supposed to flow back to the state via tax (The reason inequality rises so much nowadays is that most money just stops at Jeff Bezos).
> 10% growth long term with an inflation target of 2% is exactly the promise of not having to work at some point in the future.
Not sure who promises 10% growth long-term, but 4-6% is possible. First of all, let's take retirement funds out of the equation. Basically, guaranteed payments in your retired stage of life, but in most countries quite low. Now if we assume a long-term growth of ~5% hitting a retirement point is basically a break even of savings+interest versus spend. If you save 50% of the money you make (after taxes), the break even is around 17 years of working [0]. Keep in mind this is very simplified, but at the same time very doable. In fact the whole FIRE movement is behind this and they built a calculator for it [1].
So why don't more people do it? Because you'd have to save a significant amount of your after taxes money (and discipline/frugality) to do so. Most people don't have that. Here in Germany the median after taxes income is 23515€ [2]. If you live in the city, almost half of that is already eaten by rent alone. Then comes food, cloths, transportation, and so on.
Which brings me to one of the main drivers for inflation: Rent. At least in the last 20 or so years, inflation has slowed down strongly. The fed and ECB are trying to hit a 2% and 1,8% inflation goal, respectively, and although they print tons of money, they usually undershoot. The only thing really driving inflation is increased rent cost (and other luxury goods which normal consumers don't care about). Everything else pretty much stays the same or goes down nowadays. In essence inflation only occurs when you have too little goods and services for the amount of money in the economy. But since most money, although not flowing back to the state, is stuck with the rich people, the amount of money in average Joe's household doesn't change too much and the buying power stays apprx. the same. That means when investing you have to worry about inflation, but not as much if you consider it for retirement and plan on owning our own house. Especially since inflation is also one of the main drivers for market growth (in monetary value) since the market consists of companies that own infrastructure and assets, thus being valued higher.
> The economy will periodically crash and wipe out enough wealth that people have to work again.
This only becomes a problem if you need large sums of cash during your withdraw phase or if the crash is sustained over a longer period. Bear markets recover fast (historically).
> Full automation is a possibility in my lifetime, but unlikely. It certainly wasn't expected anytime before ~1950 when the advice was still "invest long term".
I totally agree with you. But as a Marxist, I feel his most important teaching was that even though we know the goal and we know it's possible, and we know the current state can't continue, we can't just declare an utopia now and tell everybody to suck it and live by it. We need to get there step-by-step.
I'm trying to find a nice note to end on, because I agree with your sentiment, I just don't think "we are ready yet", as stupid as that sounds. Let me just say this: I'm not entirely sure if I want a society that does not work at all, it would be nice to know you don't have to work. But I'd already be a million times happier if I only had to work 3 days of the week and be done with it, or have much higher wages, because I'd focus much more on what I really love. But that's just me.
[0] - https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/m... [1] - https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=70... [2] - https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Einkom...
>Honestly, if the only winning move is to invest for the long term then why even bother with capital markets at all
Because they are gamblers, that's why. Most (reasonable) people only invest long-term.
>Sounds like a waste of time when what we really want is for people to own the means of production.
Yup.
>Dump 100% of federal tax revenue into index funds and let it grow faster than the interest on T-bills issued for expenditures. Churn for ~50 years and start paying UBI from the massive profits.
Tax revenue is not 'profit' by the state. That's not how tax nor money issuing works. But to the topic at hand: There are countries that put money into investment funds that will invest into infrastructure and safe long-term assets. But usually not for UBI, but for retirements (e.g. Denmark).
>If the market can magically let everyone with enough money invested in their youth retire happily then it follows that letting the government own all the stocks and issue UBI would result in roughly the same outcome.
Generally the idea of not having to work at all is still heavily controversial within science. Some believe in UBI, some in job-guarantees and others just in relatively high minimum wage and very strong retirement plans.
It means "Don't you dare" in German