LateMechanic
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User ID: 1841
LateMechanic
4d ago
excessive government spending increases the price of debt
It's actually kind of surprising that the 30 year yield is only 5%.
Something has to break.
I can merely suggest that any cognitive dissonance you're experiencing with real world outcomes could also be solved a different way, with an acknowledgement that your understanding/intuitions were mistaken.
It sounds like your model is one where 'finance' is quantity-constrained with floating price. That could be a hypothetically-used system, and the gold-standard-era sort of tried to mimic that at one level of the money hierarchy. But our current system, from the top to the bottom, is one where finance is infinitely-elastic, floating quantity, based on set prices. If you're credit-worthy, you can always borrow money into existence at a rate that gives the bank a margin. If the government has their own currency and their own central bank, they choose their own interest rates to pay as a matter of policy, setting the base rate for everyone else. If anything breaks in the near-future, it would be due to a similar inept policy choice, rather than any fundamental economic gravitational pull. It would be like giving up on building a house because you ran out of inches.
LateMechanic
6d ago
Yeah the last 4 minutes definitely subverted all my expectations, based on what they had achieved already. Didn't know if those choices were from a japanese culture angle, or yeah just the allure of making a follow-up. Although I still liked it and would always recommend it, I'm maybe less interested in rewatches.
then the camera zooms into her window for a menacing shot of the same iceberg that sank the ship all those years ago!
As long as this is accompanied by the foreboding godzilla theme playing, I suppose I'd allow it.
I was definitely feeling this when attempting to listen to the gamergate summary posted below. Even though my own take has been pretty consistent now and when living through it, it just feels especially quaint and from a different head-in-sand era to offer any charity to the antics of quinn/sarkeesian and the media figures trying to circle the wagons around them. In comparison, the current popular thing is the asmongold "only accept total chud victory" / "welcome home to mcdonalds" celebrations at all the closures of 'modern' projects/studios/companies, while showing pictures of how much more their staff was now made up of women compared to the good old days, and having zero patience for even the slightest escape-hatch attempt for sympathy for lost jobs.
It definitely looks like the dominance of the "you're debating not to change the mind of your debate opponent, but those of the audience" angle. Once some people start being beyond the reach of shaming & guilting, and just let it rip, only to be met with massive growing popularity like fuentes/asmongold/etc., I think that's certainly showing the new era we're in.
There was a time when most of the popular MRAs on youtube were actually women, like karen straughan, who often had sons or at least positive relationships with their male relatives. I can't recall this ever being treated as a reason to dismiss their takes, or thought of as anything but positive. Meanwhile, we're currently at the point where any adult man who isn't at least vaguely benevolently chauvinistic/sexist is now suspected of simply being a "wifeguy"/"girldad" as an explanation.
You mentioned blaming Marvel fake-outs, but which category do you put Infinity War in? That was pretty shocking in the theater to the audience, and was probably also the franchise high-point (alternatively: final good marvel movie), although that's probably just a timing coincidence.
When I think about my reaction to various things like Godzilla Minus One, Fight Club, Rogue One, Fail-Safe, Dr Strangelove, Outer Wilds, 3:10 to Yuma, Double Indemnity, etc., I can't really pinpoint any consistent personal preference. I guess it probably is when a clear choice is made artistically, either way.
This may be my own semantic skill issue, but it does seem like your shortening of his "state of emergency"ism to just 'emergencyism' loses something (even if you were trying to keep the idea but make the term more usable). It sounded like this concept was actually about there not even really being any emergency at all -- just the existence of political opposition as a boogeyman, which means all times can be characterized as being in a generalized potential state of emergency such that we can't afford to police political allies [right now]. Hence the classic example "this is the most important election of our lifetime, not the time to be overly-principled" every cycle.
Certainly seems like everyone partakes in this to varying degrees, although the anti-Trump era is characterized by a particularly zealous version of it for whatever reason. To find anyone avoiding the brainworm, you'd be looking for the heterodox/heretical people willing to be disagreeable (or at least those willing to talk to them). Or I suppose you'd be looking for a legit emergency, which may subjectively reach the level of being worth piping down and falling in line.
I agree that they are white people from those countries, descended from other white people also from those countries, who speak white languages and are members of European-descent cultures. So what? To the extent that they are ideologically committed to my destruction or immiseration, they are my enemies. In what specific ways does their genetics or their family history or the language they speak or the culture they grew up in make them less my enemies?
Blue Tribe is pretty clearly not a "fake ethnicity". You can go to any media organization, any academic institution, any school, any court, or indeed Bluesky or Reddit and see them, live in the wild. They are a highly cohesive socio-political culture, distinct in a variety of ways, and not even slightly shy about expressing their beliefs to the world at large.
What do you make of the possibility/propensity for people to change their ideology, either with age, changing life circumstances, or in response to the changing world? I'm an example of someone who would have been your ideological enemy Blue at age 21, but already by early 30s would have been your strong ally (even if not fully 'tribally' baked Red). It seems like culture & ideology are a bit too sticky to assume almost everyone follows that track, but that stereotypical 'maximum leftwing posture in early/mid 20s that peters out' shift can't be uncommon. Or for ideological enemies, do you mainly set your sights on older people who are no longer likely to change?
I tend to mostly agree with your takes, although the way you neatly bucket 'Blues' does sometimes come across like it's a heritable ethnicity, with the die fully cast. Wouldn't a culture war victory look like a nuclear vibeshift where most blues change into reds (sheepishly or zealously, we've seen both psychologies), rather than a civil war with fighting or physical separation? (If you're amenable to the idea that mainstream normie women are largely the ones determining and enforcing social consensus, with many men then trying to follow and appeal to them, this would just look like what's politically 'correct' changing again, as it does). Maybe the argument is that your ancestrally-identical democrat neighbor who grew up reading the same bedtime stories could themselves (or certainly their children) lose their ideological difference and be your identical tribal fellow in a way that cultural immigrants just can't (at scale).
Like I said, just an offered suggestion. If you don't actually feel any cognitive dissonance with any outcomes or past predictions, then fully ignorable, my mistake. I can then instead just offer my own prediction for the next few years, of no austerity, no demand-pull inflation (could get cost-push from oil prices, certainly up in the air right now), and no loss of control of interest rates (indeed at some point the Fed will likely do their job and exercise more yield curve control instead of having the treasury attempting to do it alone).
Well the chosen interest rate isn't constrained. What's constrained by inflation is the stimulative effect of increased deficit spending, but note that raising the interest rate directly increases government deficit spending. So as an economic tool, whether you're moving the rate up or down with monetary policy, you're pressing both the gas & brake pedal at the same time, and just hoping to correctly predict which channels will have a stronger effect. Currently most central bankers still use a rough reaction function where they hope the net effect of raising rates cools the economy on balance, fighting inflation, and lowering rates stimulates the economy / causes inflation, but the evidence is just getting murkier for that hope (so they're thankfully getting away from anything close to a rigid taylor-rule style). There's no evidence that leaving the rate at 0% causes inflation, and a mountain of evidence to the contrary. So personally I do think they should set it to 0-1% and leave it alone. As for solving all problems, surely not, but maybe a lot of the problems you were bringing up.
They could, via the core accounting and economic logic, as well as having access to the reserve banking system with a permanently available lender of last resort. But indeed you noted the real restraint, government regulation, with current rules requiring those commercial bank members to stay profitable and thus well capitalized, or else face reprimand & closure. So sure, Charter can't walk up and get another $90B tomorrow. But if we accidentally just 'shiv' a super productive & profitable economy by having over-tight regulation that prevents lending to credit-worthy borrowers, that would be a failure of policy & imagination, not any kind of inevitable 'crowded out by tech' story.
Fair, I don't know enough about the appetite of retail & institutional investors for corporate bonds. I would have guessed it was effectively limitless at the right price, with the market being tens of trillions in size, where a company's finances & fundamentals would dwarf any effect from competition between issuers.
Either way, the federal government is definitely not playing in that same game as a competitor that could crowd anyone out. Their 'borrowing' consists of mopping up the exact reserves that they just injected into the system with the prior deficit spending. As for the chosen monetary policy risk-free rate being the starting point for all other interest rates, which get priced at some spread above it, I wouldn't find it very illuminating to use 'competition' terminology for that. That's just always how it works, regardless of the level of government spending. It's more aptly seen as a subsidy: the government chooses to give out money to those who have money, which obviously sets a base opportunity cost. As for long-term treasury price floating, that's still a choice of monetary policy to allow some market participation in setting the price, based on predictions about future inflation and rate-changes. I don't know how valuable they really find that information gathering from the market, and they could definitely choose to control the yield curve with any durations having any prices they want.
Looking into it briefly, it seems like a pretty interesting and extraordinary case study, rather than some joe schmoe typical avatar of the non-AI 'regular economy'. I'm paying them every month myself, but never knew about their prior bankruptcy & recent debt shenanigans with the mergers.
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