LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
5d ago
Yeah my experience whether on or off keto was that sucralose & sugar alcohols didn't disrupt my hunger/satiation. And I thought as of maybe 10+ years ago, the story was that while each of the artificial sweeteners have slightly different results with different people, they all had extremely low metabolic response compared to dietary carbs in general. The idea of your body being 'tricked' into producing a flood of insulin by the apparent encountered sweetness seems like some kind of psychological intuition that some people may find useful, but that wasn't backed by evidence.
And it's crazy to hear dentists saying 'luckily you're not a soda drinker' when looking at perfect teeth, whenever I'm drinking an impressively expensive amount of energy drinks instead of coffee.
LateMechanic
9d ago
Interesting, thanks. Yeah the wiki article on Reconstruction era referred to "the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States into the United States" and various laws & amendments being passed nationally, which sounded like what I remembered. But what stood out was looking up what marked the end, the supposed compromise of 1877, simply being when federal troops were pulled out (so it was all an 'era' characterized by gunpoint).
Union imposed governments were incompetent, corrupt, and full of radicals who didn’t particularly care how their ideas worked in practice.
That's the wild part to me, which I somehow never learned or got through osmosis. I always had the connotation of 'carpetbagger' as economic opportunist, northern capitalists coming down to make a buck, a la 'shock doctrine'. Never knew that apparently northern white & black republicans literally went south and became congressmen & governors for a decade. The people who would actually pack up and move to a southern city to try to run/organize politics and government -- that's a mindset I'd also like to see portrayed from the flipside. If it was something other than a naked power grab, I could imagine it positively portrayed as a moral SJW angle, a 'doing my part' missionary flavor, or a more general entrepreneurial spirit.
Much less is known about the first wave of the klan but vigilantism has a long history in the south
I was wondering if maybe in the initial wave they were trying to imitate the crusades with the outfits and talk of wizards & knights. Then the revival in the 20s after this movie came out seems a lot more like a fanclub secret society, either larping or wanting more agency of 'you can just do stuff'. Admittedly, the movie poster artwork does look fairly badass, and makes me want to play dark souls or something.
LateMechanic
9d ago
I just watched The Birth of a Nation (1915). Despite having a shredded attention span for movies typically, I found it pretty compelling and surprisingly watched it in just a few sittings (same thing I found with the Napoleon silent epic from the 1920s which was even longer). Just great expressive acting, scored well, with a story that flowed at a solid pace (and from a perspective that I can imagine inhabiting, but hadn't seen before). And I can guess how especially impressive some of it was for the time. Though the actors playing mulatto characters were maybe hamming it up too much as the villains, and seemed like they thought they were in a different movie (or maybe the director really wanted to sell that angle).
Given our forum members here, does anyone know of any heterodox witchy takes about the KKK? Are most people fairly accurate in seeing them as shallow dumb racist terrorists, lashing out while hiding their identities in cowardice? Or is that more like history being written by winners, where there was actually more to engage with, some higher theory of mind, like what this movie is trying to portray (revenge, fighting back, or maybe even beyond that)? Back in the day I had the basic high school AP US history, but apparently everything between the civil war and the great depression didn't make a lasting impression, because I find myself really not knowing anything about reconstruction, 'radical republicans', etc. In general I find that time period pretty interesting & appealing, with Monet impressionism, Dostoevsky & Arthur Conan Doyle books, and post-civil-war-set Westerns being most interesting. Just have no idea about the US South vs North around then I guess.
Or failing that, does anyone have any movie recommendations in any similar vein? I used to think of silent movies being mostly slapstick comedies which weren't even that funny, but these two epics I mentioned were great. Or related to this movie in other ways, I tried watching Gone With the Wind and Triumph of the Will, but got bored of both after 10-20 minutes (will give them another shot at some point). The 2012 spielberg Lincoln movie was great too, for DDL acting, and it seems like the Tommy Lee Jones character was rehabilitating the similar character in Birth.
I'd sum this up in going back to the fundamental equation he presented: [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)].
These NIPA I & S terms are probably some of the more pointlessly confusing things in macro econ. The whole thing is an identity because it starts with the basic concept: someone's spending ≡ someone's income, and then slices & dices that in various ways. The 'S' is not any colloquial version of savings, like your money in a bank account. It's "gross saving", which is a really bizarre terminology for income. Meanwhile in the usual national accounts equation, they cancel out the consumption spending & consumption income parts. So it ends up as I being non-consumption spending, and S being non-consumption income. (So even if you know this is 'spending' and 'income', the letters are literally flipped...very helpful).
In financial terms, (S-I) is the domestic private sector financial surplus. Green on this sectoral balances chart. (G-T) in red, the government deficit, is pretty clearly the 'source' of both the private sector surplus and the foreign sector financial surplus (M-X) (blue). So arranged more usefully, (G-T) ≡ (S-I) + (M-X). The foreign sector and the domestic private sector both want to earn more dollars than they spend, so the government ends up spending more dollars than they earn (aka net issuing new IOUs in the form of USD reserves/bonds/bills/notes/coins/whatever, which our households/businesses and the chinese both want to get our hands on).
I couldn't say what level of confusion Cochrane was on there, when he insinuated that the source of the government's deficit is partially the foreign sector's surplus. So in that chart, we're suggesting that if the blue goes to zero, our government won't be able to be in such a deficit? That's certainly a take. It just won't need or be forced to run such a deficit, and/or our green part of that chart will gobble up the extra dollars.
Tariffs are not likely to fix any of this. If we cut off all net trade, as the current tariffs seem to aim to do, this process will have to come to an end.
But how? The US will no longer be able to finance $1.3 trillion budget deficits from foreigners, and will have to do it from domestic savings. Or, it will have to cut $1.3 trillion of spending, or raise $1.3 trillion of durable tax revenue. Interest rates will spike, and that’s the point. Higher interest rates encourage domestic saving, and discourage budget deficits and corporate investment, to bring investment plus government spending back in line with savings.
Just more confusion from Cochrane coming from the NIPA "saving" term. It would sound pretty stupid if he got this right, and properly wrote "without foreigners having large net incomes, we'll have to finance the government deficit by our domestic private sector accepting larger net incomes". Homer Simpson indeed there.
edit a few hours later: I guess I was typical-minding and literally forgot that some people might be using a 'loanable funds' framework of how money and credit could be imagined to work (as if they're finite goods), such that deficit spending requires being 'financed' by borrowing someone else's pre-existing 'savings' that they're willing to lend. The chain of logic where current accounts deficits disappearing leads to problems is still confused in multiple ways, but I guess it wasn't necessarily a confusion just from the national accounts 'S' term.
Even after the market didn't 'plummet' and just went sideways monday & tuesday, some basic news aggregators like yahoo news (don't ask, I'm masochistic and want to see what is being pushed to normie boomers) kept that Reuters article about futures from sunday on the front page for days, just because the headline was so juicy for them as anti-trump fuel, and it seemed like it was applicable at any point in time. People have given some reasonable pushback and alternative explanations, but you're also not wrong here.
And why does this require price effects, demand elasticity, and asterisks in the formula?
I don't think it does. The substack you linked posited that trump's team are smooth-brains because they canceled out those potential elasticity terms, and are literally just setting tariffs based on the pure trade deficit.
Why must it be currency devaluation, rather than comparative advantage?
Well the currency saving aspect is what makes it not really a truly free floating exchange rate (whether their intentions are to manipulate or not). It can be a bit messier in the real world, but the pure logical premise of a floating exchange rate is that if one side is exporting more than the other, then their currency is going to appreciate (more buy-pressure on their currency in the foreign exchange market and more sell-pressure on the net-importing country's currency). And eventually that prices their exports out of competitiveness, and/or makes the import-country's exports such a value that they start to out-compete, until the imbalance disappears.
Just googling for a basic source, here's an old paper from 1982 that explains the logic & evidence pretty well:
The great advantage of floating exchange rates is that the exchange rate adjusts to equilibrate a country's balance of payments. Domestic economic policy can be used to promote full employment or to maintain stable prices.
[...]
An appreciation of the U.S. dollar puts U.S. exporters at a disadvantage in world markets and forces domestic producers to compete with cheaper imports. In 1971, for the first time since 1873, the United States had a merchandise-trade deficit. Since 1971, the merchandise-trade balance has been in surplus in only 2 years. Despite the large recent deficits, the U.S. current-account balance has tended to fluctuate around zero, because of the strong performance of the services account.
[...]
Under fixed exchange rates, reserve assets and government bonds are used to finance balance-of-payments deficits. In the case of a deficit, such financing can go on only as long as the reserve assets last or as long as foreign countries are willing to accept the IOU's of the deficit country. In the case of a surplus, such financing can go on as long as the surplus nation is willing to accumulate reserve assets and claims on foreign countries.
I would think it to be impossible to run sustained trade surpluses against another country, without simultaneously saving in their foreign currency. But I'd be interested if I'm wrong in that.
LateMechanic
21d ago
And what's the deal with "Critical Trade Theory?" Are trade deficits a good way to measure non-tariff trade barriers?
The premise must be that it's not really possible to calculate 'average' tariff levels, or the counterfactual amount of trade reduced by tariffs, as people were discussing here in a thread a few days ago. So they're just agnostically looking at the trade deficit level, and saying, if we have free floating exchange rates as the supposed global order post-bretton woods, this is supposed to (roughly) balance out naturally over time to equilibrate everyone's imports and exports. When a country sells more to the US than it buys from the US, that should push up their currency's value and push down the dollar, until the exports/imports from each are competitive with each other again.
If that trade balance doesn't (roughly) happen, it must be because the net-exporting country is devaluing their own currency against that of the net-importer country, by earning/buying the other currency and sitting on it. The positive ways of describing this are like "switzerland is fortifying their stockpile of foreign reserves as part of their monetary policy plan", or more neutrally "china is adjusting their target USD peg". The negative description would be "currency manipulation", which is what the trump team wrote in fine print on their big mathy chart that's being goofed on. Foreign holdings (may be a better chart somewhere) of USD reserves & treasuries is not the naive gut explanation "peasants lending money to the US", it's rather them buying & saving in our currency which happens to push on the exchange rate and make their exports more competitive in the US.
At the macro level, in 'real' terms of trade: your pile of goods & services that your country gets to enjoy are everything your domestic economy can create, plus everything you can import, minus anything you have to export. Exports are a real cost, where your country takes time/effort/materials to make something that someone else gets to enjoy. So we should all hope to be so lucky that anyone targets our country for their currency devaluing, allowing us to import more without paying for it with real exports. But that's at the macro national level. There are real losers on the micro level, like anyone trying to run an export business (who doesn't care at all who they sell their products to). Exporters can be very powerful & politically dominant in other countries, and maybe that's where we find Trump now, influenced by manufacturing business leaders (or trying to court/help their workers). Then there are also other potential motivations for going against the obvious economic benefit of maximizing import value, like the intangible value of maintaining a national manufacturing capability.
LateMechanic
21d ago
The US receives tons if money licensing IP that doesn’t show up in trade.
Are you sure that's not classified in the accounting as an export? There are tons of "invisible trade" services that are properly tracked as exports, like local tourism.
LateMechanic
21d ago
Yeah it's not that foreign governments / central banks buying the currency counts for imports/exports. It's just that that's the required action to counteract the natural sell-pressure on the net-importer currency and the buy-pressure on the net-exporter currency, which would otherwise cause the exchange rate to move and would eventually end up evening out the imports & exports, dynamically.
So I believe the agency is pretty much all on the side of the trade surplus nation/currency, because anyone can issue their own currency and buy foreign reserves (which will be called 'establishing/maintaining an exchange rate peg' if formally acknowledged). No one can really force themselves into the trade deficit side.
LateMechanic
22d ago
Presumably with free floating exchange rates, trade should end up roughly balanced between all currencies, right? So even if the country doesn't buy enough american goods, they would at least trade the USD back into their own currency, making theirs more valuable and therefore less competitive over time, until trade balances.
I think the only way to get persistent trade surpluses is when one country is saving in the other's currency (earning or buying their currency, and then just sitting on it). Some small amount of that will happen dynamically, particularly for desired stable currencies. But any country actually trying to pursue serious export-led growth will have to actually continually buy up foreign reserves and sit on them. That was definitely the case with Japan, and then China; I'm not sure about Switzerland/Israel/Singapore.
And thus, any kind of not letting the currency truly float (with a declared or de facto peg), is maybe what Trump had in fine print as 'or otherwise from currency manipulation', on his chart.
Meanwhile personally, I'm on the side that thinks other countries working hard to make stuff to send to us, in exchange for dollars that they can't spend, is on balance a strongly desirable position for us (as long as we can find jobs for people to do other than manufacturing). But yeah this has always been trump's ideology, that trade deficit = getting ripped off.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
They are choosing to set the interest rate above 0%, to subsidize savings by giving money to people who have money. Interest is just another type of deficit spending. On balance I agree with the view that it's probably a pretty dumb idea to do that subsidy spending. But the current macro regime still thinks that higher interest rates are anti-inflationary (even with large debt-to-gdp, which doesn't seem to have been worked into their models), and they want to have the ability in the future to drop rates (because they still think that's stimulative).
LateMechanic
1mo ago
Every citizen is ultimately on the hook for the government's debts in one way or another.
I'm pretty sure they were also saying 200 years ago "our grandchildren are going to be burdened by paying off this debt!" Somehow the bill hasn't come due yet, but maybe our grandkids will finally be the time? Seems a bit more likely that people should solve their cognitive dissonance on this stuff by realizing they don't quite understand money, accounting, banking, and government finance as much as they thought they did.
"The fiscal crisis is about to destroy this country, the government deficit is about to hit $10 million $2 billion $90 billion $1 trillion $50 quadrillion"
Particularly if anyone finds themself like Elon saying 'what, the total worldwide debt is $100 trillion...lol who do we owe it to, Jupiter??', surely there must be some sense of 'maybe I just don't understand this fully'.
If you find it desirable, why not cut the middleman and increase corporate surplus by donating your money to a corporation directly?
If I had the power of broad taxation where the only thing I accept in payment is my own IOUs back to me, then: my IOUs would be perpetually valuable, people would probably want to save some extra for a rainy day / retirement, and I would indeed (have to) satisfy their savings desires by spending & giving them out (hopefully in reasonable ways).
LateMechanic
1mo ago
Yes, in order for the private sector as a whole to be a net creditor, the government must be a net debtor, but that's meaningless. There's no reason we should care about the private sector being a net creditor.
Well I agree that it's not like a rule of the universe that the private sector must always need or want to be in perpetual surplus, accumulating monetary savings. It just happens to be how people have acted, in the US in the past few centuries at least.
In the US's history, there have been 6 periods where the government went significantly into surplus, with the private sector being significantly in deficit. Those ended in the 6 depressions in the country's history:
- 1817-21: In five years, the national debt was reduced by 29 percent, to $90 million. A depression began in 1819.
- 1823-36: In 14 years, the debt was reduced by 99.7 percent, to $38,000. A depression began in 1837.
- 1852-57: In six years, the debt was reduced by 59 percent, to $28.7 million. A depression began in 1857.
- 1867-73: In seven years, the debt was reduced by 27 percent, to $2.2 billion. A depression began in 1873.
- 1880-93: In 14 years, the debt was reduced by 57 percent, to $1 billion. A depression began in 1893.
- 1920-30: In 11 years, the debt was reduced by 36 percent, to $16.2 billion. A depression began in 1929.
And it seems pretty understandable logically, that people like accumulating net savings over time.
In more recent history, the private sector going into financial deficit (some combination of spending down savings and increasing private debt) in the late '90s and mid '00s ended with a massive recession. Your contention that non-financial physical asset wealth was fine didn't seem to stop that resulting recession.
It's true that if government doesn't run deficits private investors can't invest in government bonds, but they can buy private bonds or invest in equities.
It's not even about the actual financial savings instruments being available, because we have banks with infinitely flexible balance sheets (indeed, the current monetary policy regime is simply paying interest on reserve balances directly, so treasury securities are a pointless vestigial leftover). It's more about the flows of spending: someone's spending is someone else's income.
The government borrowing [...] adds to the burden of private borrowers by driving up interest rates
If there's enough demand for government bonds that government can borrow at rates low enough
For a government that uses their own currency and has their own central bank, the base interest rate is a simple policy tool set wherever you want -- it's not subject to market forces.
Under no circumstances should the government borrow 6% of GDP at 4% interest at the peak of the business cycle in order to subsidize middle-class consumption.
Totally agreed, as they should drop the interest rate much closer to 0-1% and leave it there. Interest income is just deficit spending in a mostly-pointless, regressive way.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
It's not our debt, it's just the government as a balance sheet entity which is issuing IOUs that we (the actual people/households/firms) get to hold as assets. As for people/firms 'buying bonds': at that point it's just an asset swap between different types of interchangeable government IOUs (reserves, notes, coins, bonds, etc).
Anyone benefiting from the government spending more money into the economy than it drains back out in taxes is taking part in the aggregate private sector surplus. The rich undoubtedly are benefiting from the government deficit, but the evidence isn't that they're holding their savings in the form of bonds at the end of the day. (The government could set the interest rate at 0% permanently, and would still use the deficit to inject savings into the private sector.)
LateMechanic
1mo ago
In a way, this realization is liberating. It puts you at peace. You understand that the problem will never be solved until a fiscal crisis occurs.
And the next step, for even more complete inner peace that lets you sleep like a baby at night: realizing that the government's deficit is the private sector's surplus, which most people find desirable and wouldn't want to cut. That's why we run government deficits for centuries, because the private sector likes accumulating net savings over time.
I think we're still in mistake theory territory with some true believers like Musk who thinks government debt is "our" collective debt, which would somehow be an existential problem soon. But unless things really ramp up dramatically with DOGE with congress's backing, it's currently still thankfully mostly beating up the ideological opponents with the current small cuts.
LateMechanic
1mo ago
I would have recommended glenn greenwald (System Update), max blumenthal & aaron mate (The Grayzone), and matt taibbi (Racket News) as leftist journalists with good video/audio backlogs. But that may not be what you're looking for here, as these are the types who feel the modern left moved away from them over the last 10 years, and don't necessarily have many takes that the motte disagrees with. So it's largely critical of israel/neocons/neoliberals, and often defenses of trump against the establishment.
The 'vibe shift' also changed the equation somewhat. Some unabashed american chauvinism from an outside 'mirer in the mid biden years feels like a breath of fresh air, leaving many people saying 'you've got better spirit than a lot of my actual neighbors, hope to see you here soon bro'. Or at least respecting the contrarian take (especially framed as an argument with a more cosmopolitan/europhile girlfriend).
But right now and for the past few months, practically every day has already felt like christmas to an american chauvinist. So there's no longer much feeling of thirsty drought of that kind of spirit -- making it exactly the wrong time to air any kind of annoyed entitlement over the changes from the shift, based on taking the previous sentiments for granted. That exposes the cracks in the 'more american than actual americans' fantasy.
LateMechanic
5mo ago
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-donald-j-trump-free-speech-policy-initiative So it's from Dec 2022, during the twitter files? Part of what seems strange is that he's aged appreciably since then, particularly after the shooting. Biden from 2-3 years ago also practically seems like AI when you're used to seeing him now.
LateMechanic
5mo ago
Remember how it felt in July, that this was basically a guaranteed lost election cycle for the democrats, and the main question was who would step up and take it? (to save the downballot races from utter landslide territory if they left Biden in) Everyone at that time was looking past Kamala, as an obvious bad choice, and speculating about Newsom or other up-and-coming talent. But then there was the specter that looking past her would be a perpetual thorn in their side, where Kamala could always be on the outside saying 'told you so', 'my turn', or playing identity cards, fracturing support with stepped-on toes and 'what if' cases.
So it seemed that for the Obamas & party leadership, letting Kamala take this (likely) loss served to clear out Biden, Kamala, and Trump, all in one fell swoop, from the next 2028 cycle. I don't think it was quite at the level of the 'Harris as Jobber' argument -- they would still try to push her to victory. But her loss isn't necessarily theirs, and helps their future prospects in some ways.
LateMechanic
5mo ago
I can't fully remember the 2016 one, but Cenk had a solid 4 minute rant ripping democrats once the NYT needle got to about 85-90% last night, maybe 10-20 minutes before he went on the PBD show to take some lumps from a hostile crowd. But definitely different vibe from 2016 -- less utter shock or tear-shedding from over-investment in a candidate.
LateMechanic
6mo ago
The point I am trying to make is that "MAGA see Puerto Ricans as outgroup" is not priced in - if Hinchcliffe had said Haiti was a trash island it would have been a dog bites man story.
I'd think it's roughly the opposite of that (at least in reality, but maybe you're making a good case for why pundits would try to make this stick). Puerto Rico works as the punchline because it's a funny surprise, exactly because they're not a serious outgroup currently, but are a decent sub-population in NYC. They can take being roasted in 2024, especially when the bit is more about the 'island of trash' setup, and the punchline just needs to be [real place].
It would have actually sounded a lot meaner and out of place if he said "yeah, I think it's called Haiti". That's where other comedians would start saying 'woah did this just turn into a klan rally?'
LateMechanic
9mo ago
The most disturbing thing isn't the joke itself, but watching and hearing the crowd go fucking wild at it.
That's what makes me think that in context of the whole show (without having heard Tenacious D in 20 years), it must be practically like an in-character comedy set, where the audience is willing to go along with near full charity, not with arms crossed and deciding how they really feel about anything said.
Mind you, this was before the shooting, and I am intensely interested in their next episode together.
Definitely, this has to be one of their most anticipated episodes. John's TDS does seem embarrassing, but I at least gave him credit before if he was trying to say out loud how he really felt, even knowing that it didn't sound good. I think now that things actually ramped up to another level, it's sobering, and people are feeling a bit sheepish to have been involved in childish gay ops or fantasies. But to the extent anyone keeps at it or doubles down, that's important to learn. I'm still not interested in going after a Home Depot worker for it, but I'd hold John to a higher bar (although it's a bit unlucky to not have been this past monday for a less filtered take).
LateMechanic
9mo ago
It does have basic comedic timing, with a big setup to say something unexpected and then blowing out candles: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-hPUM01nuis
I wouldn't know to what extent they're playing characters, but it seems pretty exaggerated. And they're americans in another country so it may have seemed less inflammatory to go for a darker joke there. But yeah it doesn't preclude that he did mean what he said, even if as a punchline.
LateMechanic
9mo ago
This was my main expectation after the assassination attempt -- that the 3 remaining cases were going to be pretty quickly abandoned or dismissed (whether on strong or dubious merit, doesn't even matter) and the 4th's sentencing would be even more minor. The supreme court had already been handing out rebukes, and the tide was beginning to turn after they got the big courtroom spectacle and it didn't change much. But it just seems like things are ratcheted up to a different level after saturday, like a splash of cold water, where trying to continue doggedly pursuing these ticky-tacky partisan trials now would just come across so badly and not at all as the behavior of "the adults in the room".
Maybe they'll go for an appeal, and get the georgia case going again with a different prosecutor or something, but I suspect a lot of people want to take any excuse to shut these all down now (can save face by just saying 'oh well, trump appointed that judge and those supreme court justices, what can we do').
I used to do that, but my mistake was thinking SlateStarCodex must have been some MMO people were playing like Eve Online or something, so I skipped past those posts, and ended up finding the motte group way later than I should have.
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