Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
Hello back frens
User ID: 2022
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
‘This is the moment of testing. The moment your hearts are weighed against the Phoenix’s feather. Are you not curious at the outcome?’
‘Not remotely. I know my worth, and I know my crimes. This court holds no jurisdiction over me.’ Fabius straightened, trying to slow his heart rate. His muscles strained against unknown pressures. It was as if he stood at the bottom of a vast ocean, and the weight of thousands of fathoms pressed down on him.
‘Its jurisdiction extends far beyond your ability to conceive, alchemist. You have committed crimes of such monstrous elegance that even the gods themselves grow uneasy. Look – see – they sit in judgement of you.’ A too-long finger drifted upwards, and Fabius followed the gesture. He looked up, and something looked down.
It was not a face, for a face was a thing of limits and angles, and what he saw had neither. It stretched as far as his eyes could see, as if it were one with the whole of the sky and the firmament above. Things that might have been eyes, or distant moons or vast constellations of stars, looked down at him, and a gash in the atmosphere twisted like a lover’s smile. It studied him from an impossible distance, and he felt the sharp edge of its gaze cut through him, layer by layer. There was pain, in that gaze, and pleasure as well. Agony and ecstasy, inextricable and inseparable.
With great effort, he tore his gaze away. ‘There is nothing there,’ he snarled, his teeth cracking against each other. His hearts stuttered, suddenly losing their rhythm. He pounded at his chest, as internal defibrillators sent a charge of electricity shrieking through him. The chirurgeon flooded his system with tranquillisers, and he tapped shakily at his vambrace. A secondary solution of mild stimulants joined the tranquillisers, stabilising him. He ignored the urge to look up. There was nothing there. Nothing at all. ‘There is nothing there,’ he said again, tasting blood. ‘There are no gods. Only cold stars and the void.’
The pressure increased. Something whispered, deep within him. It scratched at the walls of his mind, trying to catch his attention. He ignored it. ‘No gods,’ he repeated. ‘Random confluence of celestial phenomena. Interdimensional disasters, echoing outwards through our perceptions. I think, therefore I am. They do not, so they are not.’ He met the Quaestor’s bland gaze unflinchingly. ‘Gods are for the weak. I am not weak.’
The Quaestor nodded expectantly. ‘No.’
/u/Amadan is entirely correct and in fact doesnt go far enough. The controversy is part of the game, and so is you thinking about how You Can Save Her. There is no form of attention you can pay to this that makes things better, except possibly in minecraft.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
And the reason why anyone treats that credit as valuable is because we're also simultaneously in debt to the issuer (we owe abstract value to the government in tax payments in this case).
The problem is that the particular nature of this debt to the issuer is a free variable, so a thing defined from it is a function rather than an object. "Regular" debt is like this in the sense the the government can technically just decide to default, or print its exact obligations which is basically the same, but there is a well-defined understanding of what normally happens to debt that there isnt so much with money, and the bit that there is changes based on what monetary theory the state adopts.
That's what I think I've been saying from the start
What youve said at the start was that inflation is a reason you might stop spending more because you dont like inflation. What were discussing now is that the benefits of more spending stop when you start to increase inflation. Thats consistent with the old comments, but a significant and to me much more useful addition.
This is all an explanation of how it all already works.
How it works so far may be consistent with your theory, but also others where there is still cause to worry.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
"But currency is a liability to the central bank that issues it—a promise to stand behind the currency’s value in the future."
If thats why currency is debt, then youre including that promise into "what currency is". You would then have to, whenever you try to use the fact that "currency is debt" in your reasoning, also show that the promise wont be violated, else the argument is invalid. And you of course cant already use "currency is debt" to show that something will work out without breaking the promise, because thats a regress.
It's something you observe after the fact.
Thats fine, if you can tell at the end of each period whether you went over in the previous. It sounds like youre now suggesting something about inflation as the criterion. Is accelerating inflation the right criterion and old economists where just too worried about going over, or do you object to that criterion as well? What do you think of NGDP targeting?
I suppose it just looks more like just looking at the real world.
With private debt, the strategy of taking on more and more debt looks great right until noone is willing to lend you more. People rightly want a plausible model for "observations in the real world" before making them loadbearing. The temptation to ignore limitations based on "real world observation" is omnipresent in economics ("Most people are willing on the margin to help a bit without direct visible compensation, therefore communism"), and using theoretical problems as a setup to ignore theory is precisely what keeps critics of mainstream economics outside the mainstream.
The actual concrete accounting, logic, and plumbing seems much more useful to nail down and understand first, before starting to build more & more elaborate models on various assumptions.
Even without an end-date, economics always depends on expectations about the future. Trying to understand whats happening in the here and now before you get to those doesnt work.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1d ago
How is that uncharitable? Im not interpreting it that way so that its less defensible, but because whats even the point of the post otherwise? The turkish border is not simply a complex border, it is from a domain so explicitly political that we all know its just down to negotiating peoples preferences. There are plenty of examples of complex boundaries you could pick otherwise. The biologist arguing with king Solomon is suggesting a categorisation thats better for understanding the world, and is rejected by Solomon on the basis of prioritising economic considerations. Even the quote in my last comment is quite clear about purposes: Turkey has its exclave to honor the Ottoman ancestor, and "man" has an exclave around someone if itll save their life.
The point of the post is to change categorisation from an attempt-objective assessment to a negotiation, such that to consider someone a woman even though it causes them distress, there has to be some downside to doing so thats more important in absolute terms. A downside that occurs with regards to a specific purpose, like scientific simplicity, can still be judged as "not important enough" because its only the general purpose (in Scotts case, maximising utility) that really matters.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
2d ago
It is a bit counterintuitive, but every bike ride is one less car ride, and this means a great cycling city has less congested traffic for cars.
In my experience, a cyclist on the road causes more delay for cars than another car would. Even though the bike is smaller than a car, it effectively blocks the same amount of space: the safety distance behind is the same, and that dominates the physical length. Being thinner is balanced by 2x+ the sideways distance for passing, plus for passing it usually doesnt matter how much of you sticks in the next lane, just if at all. And then they still are slower and often less predictable.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3d ago
but that is what it is
The fact that they historically descend from IOUs and there are some conventions left over from that time does not tell us "what it is". Again, what actual reality stops the fed from listing all yuan as its liabilities?
I can't think of what borrowing in gold would mean.
Someone gives me 100 gold, and I commit to giving him back 104 gold in a year. In between, I will presumably sell the gold for money, do something with the money, and then buy gold to pay him back in the end. The difference to borrowing money is that the gold price need not be the same at the start and end.
Can depend on how strict you want to be about the term full employment.
I asked about this because before you suggested employment as an indicator for the right deficit. Do you have any suggestion for something that directly tells me when the appetite for monetary saving is satiated?
By the nature of having decent "automatic stabilizer" fiscal policies...
Things like this are why Im wary of your nominal-only analysis. I would like to know if the people doing that spending then end up worse of from your previous spending, and how that can in turn influence previous saving. As is Ill have to work it out myself sometime when Im not right about to go to bed. It propably also negates/displaces the growth benefits of that previous spending.
but where we're all plowing endlessly into the stock market like a clown car, bidding it up constantly
In theory, all stocks should have the same expected ROI. If you unselectively pour money into a market thats in equilibrium, then active traders will lower their standards for what IPOs to buy, and a corresponding supply of them will show up. The money ultimately goes to new investment.
That is part of why I suggested it: Because while just more demand will grow the economy generally, it also makes a difference what that money is spent on. Digging ditches an filling them back in is worse than building more capital. Putting money into stocks means that the active traders will direct it towards the best investments. Note that current practice is that the fed does its intentional inflating by ultimately subsidising lower interest rates - that has a similar effect. If you do government spending specifically for the sake of the economy, thats generally better than spending on specific things (again, excepting cases where a certain investment is only open to the government).
And this just may be of interest to you: The classical models dont believe that people will increase monetary savings indefinitely, for reasons that go back to the "unwinding date" that came up before. I dont know how familiar you are with economics outside of macro, but classical models use backwards induction a lot. Backwards induction requires some kind of "end of the game" with final scores to reason backward from. What is that? Well, it turns out that the backwards induction arguments you want to use in general economic models dont depend on how far away the end date is. So you bascially model the situation as if there was an end date so far in the future that only these in-principle effects are relevant.
Youre not getting any utility out of unspent money at the end, therefore youll spend it down before you get there, therefore monetary savings dont grow indefinitely. Im very curious what an economics looks like where you avoid these indefinite future end arguments generally, rather than just in this one context.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
3d ago
Having family members sell access isn't illegal assuming no quid-pro-quo, it's just an optics problem.
No, what I mean is, if Joe offered to do whatever thing the client wants to corrupt him for, in exchange for payment to Hunter, and Hunter doesn't give any money to Joe, and thats the plan. I would expect this to be illegal as well, but I dont know US law that well.
Im not entirely on board with treating a simple dollar bill as an IOU. I understand your point about it gaining value from being usable for future taxes, but the bill does not, at the point of issuing, create any obligation for the future. "I owe you tax relief, the amount and whether thats relevant at all to be decided, by me." is not a financial instrument, because thats true of everything. Nothing prevents me from demanding taxes in yuan (or kilos obsidian, or literally whatever) instead of dollar tomorrow, so how are dollars my debt, and yuan arent?
Other question: If the government borrowed in a foreign currency or gold rather than dollars, would that be inflationary?
I also notice that you never say whether somethings is in nominal or real terms, whats up with that?
In aggregate, what we find is that people like to accumulate monetary savings over time
This might be the crux. If people want monetary savings to keep increasing in real terms, that would mean theyre willing to work for more than theyll consume, indefinitely. Thats certainly a disagreement with the classical model, but its not really over something monetary. In that case, I can see how you can grow the economy by just spending the money they dont. A few remaining disagreements:
First, I dont think this leads to full employment necessarily. Firstly, because while more demand can be expected to increase employment, but there neednt be any finite amount of it where employment becomes full. Secondly, because the willingness to increase real saving per unit of time is propably limited, and drawing on that full amount might not be enough for whatever you want to do.
Second, even if savings increase over the long term, there will be fluctuations. If a lot of people suddenly want to spend money that youve already spent for them, what happens?
Last, people want savings, but why would they want dollar denominated savings over non-monetary assets? If people just buy index instead of sitting on money, does that already do what you want to do?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics.
It might actually be a good sign if they did. If even different fake online faces are only shaped by their own incentives and not each other, then your real life face is propably safe.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
I did wonder if the name derived from "face". I didnt think of a letter being alphabetical numbering without any indication its not part of the word.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
You can't, that's the main draw of it.
My point is that, as nice as it may be to have something like that, it cant be all of society. You need? women, not just biological ones but social ones too, and you need to have some space for that. Even if they are then not nerds, then nerddom would need to have some kind of interface for an intended complement, and it doesnt. Nerds just want to marry nerdettes, and want them to not do the women things except when the need for it is really in your face, and then they copy something from mainstream society or wing it.
And from the male side, the really feminine thing to do is to just be one of the girls.
Is it? Concern about your appearance really is feminine behaviour, so IMO its congruent that trans women pursue a female body.
The people who do most of that complaining are not nerds.
Yes, but a lot of people from the overlap are here, thats why I brought it up. I didnt really understand the rest of your paragraph there.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
It's not like the desire is to see how large the debt can grow.
I understand that it sounds that way, but I dont think you believe that. Its just that I have not see how there is a benefit, and theres clearly supposed to be one, and getting to fund things with debt would be a candidate. So far, youve shown that just printing the deficit gets you the same effect as cutting expenditures to balance the budget, with some inflation along the way. I dont see the advantage in doing this. Now youve suggested a candidate for an advantage - you get to achieve full employment, either where the conventional method wouldnt, or in a better way. What are the details of that?
For one, you suggest seeing unemployment as evidence of too small a deficit. But in the previous model, there is no ongoing deficit in the equilibrium youre inflating towards. Secondly, the necessary expenditures to achieve full employment would likely be relative ones. And in what way is the equilibrium of your strategy better than just spending enough for full employment, and raising taxes to balance the budget?
Not entirely related to the rest, but conventional theory is that borrowing is less inflationary than money printing. Do you disagree?
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
tomboys are not trans men, though they function like the platonic ideal of one, including attitude and general outlook on life
Ive thought this too. If self-identified trans men really are men, theyre the type of man who worrys that his canthal tilt isnt enough - ie a loser, who we would consider at least as deficient in masculinity mentally as physically. Obviously the really masculine thing to do is to just be one of the boys.
And while youre right that theres some obvious reasons why men would be interested in those women, I also think there is something particular to it for nerds. We are a culture thats mostly male and at least used to believe in gender equality, and so have accumulated a lot of masculinely inspired but genderneutrally applied ideals. Jocks might like the convenice of a more masculine mentality, but they also like acting steretypically all girly. How do you act girly in accordance with nerd culture? Dimorphism exists for a reason, and I feel sometimes that this remains a mote in our eye, who now complain about other unnatural degeneracy.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
4d ago
Those are two different things. Whats useful for dealing with whale hunting is not whats useful for understanding. As for the latter, Scott disagrees with that:
If I’m willing to accept an unexpected chunk of Turkey deep inside Syrian territory to honor some random dead guy – and I better, or else a platoon of Turkish special forces will want to have a word with me – then I ought to accept an unexpected man or two deep inside the conceptual boundaries of what would normally be considered female if it’ll save someone’s life.
Yes, this is another example of asserting that there are two kinds of words, and that the "pragmatic" ones should be optimised according to reasons provided using the "primary" ones (the axis of thingspace), without explaining how to distinguish the two. Yuds version is better in that it at least gives you a concept of a plan he might propose - like "primary properties are continuous" - but it doesnt give us a system that could be evaluated for corresponding to our epistemic situation, or even being coherent. I also dont think his version of "optimise" has considerations like "Norton really wants to be an emperor so lets include him in the category":
Suppose we mapped all the birds in the world into thingspace, using a distance metric that corresponds as well as possible to perceived similarity in humans
This helps, because you have to describe your "optimisation target" in terms of primary words to avoid circularity - I doubt the Yud primary words could actually be used for the Scott objective. For the Scott version, you need to make it so "aggregate human preferences" is a real word, but "woman" is not. For an illustrative example of this problem, see here:
Similarly, if I’m thinking about whether shrimp are conscious, I’m thinking about how shrimp are similar to and different from creatures we normally think of as ‘conscious’, and what these differences indicate about whether there’s something it’s like to be a shrimp.
where you might notice that "whether there’s something it’s like to be an X" is well established in philosophical discourse as being pretty much exactly as difficult as "consciousness", and has in many ways even started the trend of considering consciousness difficult in analytic philosophy. Thats what happens when your redefinition attempts accidentally hit on one of the terms in the optimisation objective, which happened because youre not systematic about it, because youve convinced yourself its unnecessary by intellectual descent from the exact thing in Scotts post Im objecting to.
(This isnt really relevant to the gender conversation, but one consequence of these cluster words is that all logical arguments, which require language compositionality, come with an asterisk to them. This is highly relevant when you try to use such arguments to convince people of a rather unusual conclusion, where you will not have an opportunity to see if these particular words "empirically describe the cluster well enough for these purposes" until its too late.)
it is highly practical to be able to open up a minimal number of them, for example to debate what should be included as a mammal without pre-emptively also debating what "hair", "water", "leg", "swim", and "definition" mean, exactly
You, on the other hand, seem content with there not being a real distinction, and as far as I can tell youre saying here that my complaint that "this principle requires selective application" is true of Scotts theory and also in reality, without any way to be systematic about it.
'all models are wrong, but some models are useful'
Yes, what do you think "useful" means? Of course, your evaluation of whats high-utility will have to include all sorts of knock-on effects - but it cant include things like "this is useful to say because its true". This is of course incoherent, you cant actually decide whats high-utility without knowing whats true, and Scott the human knows what truth is when its about normal topics - but thats what the argument of the post implies when taken seriously (you will notice that the section thats actually talking about how language works is very short relative to the post). Theres no conceptual role left for truth, as distinct from "the outcome of usefully structuring language".
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
Keep seeing same link. Keep making same response
If "is a fish" really were just semantic, then by the same mechanism "has tiny hairs" would be just semantic. So there would be no facts based on which you can classify things... The only thing that makes this theory remotely workable is that you already know which things you want to apply it too. Its pure Humpty-Dumpty-ism in practice.
You could look it up, it's not my argument. It's good enough for me that most people hate it, so let's avoid it. It's fun when nickels are worth picking up off the ground and can get you a coke.
I mean, thats some reasons, but when weighed against "prosperity beyond what anyone can imagine" they dont weigh especially strongly. Could you at least link it? MMT has lots of cranks that will be dismissed as not representative.
I said the government levies 'some' taxes every year
I also have 'some' income outside taking on debt. I can commit to spending part of it on buying back my own IOUs/debt service in the future. Indeed, my nominal income increases with inflation and economic growth, so this is in many ways like a relative tax. Also assume I live forever. Now can I blow up my debt to infinity? Propably not; propably there is some mechanism tieing the debt amount to the size of the tax base/income, but what?
So, I actually agree that, with fixed expenditures and relative taxes, you can just print money to make up the deficit and it will stabilise eventually. Youll have inflated down the expenditures so that they are covered by the taxes. But this will have reduced the real amount of the expenditures. What is the benefit of doing this over just cutting the expenditures to meet the income?
That doesn't imply anything about somehow taxing it all back and paying it all off or whatever, at some unspecified jubilee judgement day where we have to unwind everything.
Indeed, you never have to actually go down to zero debt. But the debt is nonetheless tied to the ability to do that. It can not grow without limits in real terms. Consider: in your view printed cash and government debt are interchangable. So lets say we only print money. Then unlimited real growth of debt would mean unlimited real growth of GDP, or an unlimited willingness of people to sit on cash and never spend it. Neither is realistic.
This question of an "end date" where you unwind everything or absence thereof is in fact very interesting and fruitful to think about more broadly, because it leads to a lot of changes in economics, and Im not sure you understand this in a "settled science" way (else you would have likely lead with that, because thats the only point where your assumptions may differ from classical). For example, imagine you have no time prefencence and an investment that will keep yielding 10%/year indefinitely. What is the optimal amount to withdraw each year? For any given percentage, half of that is better in the long term... but 0 provides no utility at all.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either
I agree thats the status quo; but success for the trans movement would be creating one. Thats what I said.
they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women".
I think this goes back to whether the definition by self-identification is circular or not. I think we all, including OP, know that progressives can answer "a woman is whoever says theyre a woman" in response to the question. He must not consider that a real answer.
neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
Actually, I dont think theyre necessarily fine with non-central people asserting to be either, either.
where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it
The difference is that with gender, progressives are accused, IMO accurately, of their criteria ultimately depending on sex stereotypes, and they deny it. The right on race, once its out that they care about it at all, doesnt really mind their categorisation judgements being understood. I dont think progressives even have a theory there, true or not, that they would want to deny.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
I assume you're not asking for the various downsides of inflation in general and why people find it annoying when it's above some small amount like 1-2%?
Im asking for some kind of real economic cost; "Its annoying when the prices are different than I remember" doesnt count, no.
As for paying interest, it's purely a policy choice to pay anything other than 0% on any of these IOUs
If you dont pay enough interest, people will stop lending you money.
When and why would they ever need to 'tax back' this amount? The IOUs just roll over indefinitely.
Well, you said that the difference between me and the state is that the state can tax. If it doesnt actually need to do that, then whats the difference? Why cant I have ever-increasing amounts of debt that I service by taking on new debt?
What youre proposing here is "The Ponzi scheme that actually works". Because Ponzi schemes do work so long as the investors dont take out their money, ie stop letting you roll over your debt.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
I dont think thats a good analogy. While people do try to police race boundaries sometimes, there is not in fact a consensus sorting everyone into white and black. I would tell our autist about definitely white and definitely black people, and the ones in between will depend on whos making the judgement and whats convenient for them at the time. I dont think progressives are happy with this a model for how transgender should work.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
5d ago
I could say that I do want to shrink the non-government surplus in hypothetical situations, if we're having obnoxious levels of inflation, maybe caused by too much government spending being indexed against the price level
Ill note that you still havent explained why too much inflation is bad, or how we would know what "too much" is.
Having some amount of taxes is what gives the currency an initial anchor value... That's what allows them to indefinitely print up IOUs that promise to pay nothing but an abstract amount of value in a unit of measurement they make up, and people will still line up to earn those IOUs
Transitioning out of just questions, I agree that the taxes give value to the IOUs, but I dont think the made up unit gives you all that much long-term. You can inflate away your debt, but expectations of inflation are built into the interest rate you are offered. Unless you can somehow inflate above expectations indefinitely, in the long term you need to tax back what you borrowed plus interest in real terms. There is no reason to borrow unless your position as the government gives you investment opportunities above market returns, youd just pay interest for no good reason.
Because I think the Aella brand reasonably analogous to a demonette. Chaos creatures are created and strengthened by human thoughts and feelings in their domain, and try to induce more of those through their actions. They are analogously weakened by refusing to notice or believe in them, which is how Fabiuss superhuman boneheadedness allowed him to survive a direct encounter with Slaanesh here.
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