domain:aporiamagazine.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17hr ago
Nah. The singling out of "main legislative building" is nothing more than special pleading aimed at pretending one is different from the other, when they are very clearly not.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
17hr ago
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
LateMechanic
17hr ago
Sure, they set a price but how is that implemented? It is implemented by changes in the quantities. Yes, the rule says adjust the quantity as much as needed to get to the price. But to do that quantity adjustment sometimes you need to reduce the quantity in the market (OMOs sometimes require 'buying back' money) and for that you need assets that the market values.
This was the old rate maintenance regime, but unfortunately you're almost 20 years out of date here. The way they implement the policy rate is by simply paying that chosen rate of interest on reserves directly. They absolutely flooded the banking system with excess reserves, in order for the interbank lending rates to get pinned to that same 'floor' rate. For those entities holding reserves which aren't legally allowed to be paid interest directly, the Fed pays them interest anyway, using overnight reverse-repos that you mentioned before.
I believe basically all central banks switched to this approach rather than OMOs with 0 excess reserves (it's way easier this way).
And with this regime, there's basically no difference to the banks whether they're holding reserves or short-term securities, so the Fed's balance sheet composition and size can be changed at will.
The amount of money in real terms that a central bank can supply is limited by the assets that they hold because otherwise the bank cannot maintain the real value of money in the face of demand shocks.
I can't exactly tell, but it kind of sounds like you're describing some kind of conception of banking like they're storing real objects. Like you 'deposit' some gold bars and your jewelry, and they issue you an account balance and/or a paper money receipt for it? In that kind of idea, I can see how you would be talking about the bank's assets and how they 'back' the value of the credit money. And that kind of story is like where the 'fractional reserve -> money multiplier' ideas came from.
That just has nothing to do with how modern banking actually works (nor even really past banking apparently, the goldsmith idea was basically always a misconception or story for convenience). The Fed's balance sheet assets are almost entirely just treasury securities, which they 'bought' by creating their own liabilities (reserves). It was just a pure balance sheet expansion, which is how modern banks work. Maybe the terminology here is that banks in the real world use 'finance' model of banking while some dated textbooks discuss hypothetical 'intermediation' models.
Backing need not be about redemption. Think of stock buybacks, stocks are backed by the companies cash flows. You can't show up with one share and demand a payment from the company, but there is an implicit expected future value of the stock and the buybacks help maintain it.
You're basically just referring to things having value for various reasons. 'Backing' means there's a subject behind it, guaranteeing a value (or trying to). It's just going to serve to confuse thinking to bring out 'backed by' when it's not an actual strong case. Does a government want their currency to be more valuable than less, like a company wants their stock price to be higher rather than lower (because look at our great cash flow this quarter)? Yeah, but those are categorically different than an IOU that promises some redemption value like gold or PS5s. Now if a company has a standing offer to buy back any existing stock at some price, that is more of a real backing.
Your argument proves too much: if it were true, there would be no issues with the monetary crises in the late 20th century. Taxes are set in nominal terms, but they are set with a delay so the government will lose in real terms with inflation (after we are all bumped up to higher brackets).
I didn't follow this part, can you mention the crises you're referring to?
HereAndGone
17hr ago
I wouldn't put him at zero because right now who do the Democrats have? Tim Walz? Kamala again (if she doesn't decide to run for Governor of California instead)? The others - Pete, Gretchen, etc. who have already been rejected in previous primaries? Josh Shapiro, who they couldn't even decide to pick as Kamala's running mate?
I agree that Newsom does not have national appeal, but the Democratic party is stuck for a choice of "does not appear totally crazy progressive, can be painted as a moderate" candidates, and Newsom has been making some recent moves (or speeches) in that direction.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
Rock and a hard place. Newsom has ambitions to run for the presidency in 2028 but he needs the California vote to get anywhere, and if he loses that then he loses the primary (most likely) because the party is not going to pick the guy who lost the support of the safe state or if he makes it to be selected as candidate, he loses the national election (because no way he has enough support nationally).
TIRM
18hr ago
how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people
I like Brazil's solution: a committee looks at you and then states your race. They don't accept one-drop "my grandmother was a quarter [something]" stories and don't need DNA tests. They look and state the obvious truth. If Elizabeth Warren stood before them, they'd yell "she's white" and be done with it. Because it is perfectly clear that she is white. "I share a common ancestor with some modern Guatemalans around 10 generations ago." Yes, yes. That's called being white.
Categories are fuzzy and sometimes you get a perfect wobbler: someone who is mixed race and self-identifies as some Brazilian racial category, but the committee disagrees. Categories being fuzzy doesn't mean they don't exist. This is an acceptable outcome.
HereAndGone
18hr ago
You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave
I see you've missed the recent "the new pope is actually black" discourse elsewhere, you lucky person you! And yes, they're invoking the one drop rule: hey, if under slavery/Jim Crow laws he'd be considered black due to the discriminatory one drop rule, then yeah he counts as black now.
I don't know about Trump, but I think it would be hilarious. Especially in light of the John Oliver "Drumpf" stuff - he's not just descended from a recent immigrant, he is the Second (Just As) Black (As Obama or Kamala) president! 😁
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.
There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!
Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
18hr ago
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
This did short-circuit my brain for quite a while. Arguably the whole trans thing is a massive conspiracy to genocide and/or cause misery to the autists - even if they don't get you to sterilize yourself, navigating sex differences without ever being able to acknowledge their existence will be quite a minefield.
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
On one hand, not wrong, on the other we've all been subjected to psyop upon psyop, and it's not like the male counterpart - "Tits and beer liberalism" - has nothing to answer for here. As long as they're willing to move on and work with men in a constructive capacity (and I've seen some indication of that happening, the Men's Sheds drama in the UK got quite a pushback from TERFs), I'm for cutting them some slack.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
18hr ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either, though of course there the disputed set is much smaller (consider the case of that Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. I do not believe in transitioning or self-id and do not consider any transwoman I am aware of an instance of the class "woman", but I would genuinely struggle to assign them to one of the categories based on what I have heard).
Either way, this should not be relevant - transwomen are in general not saying something that amounts to "there is a fuzzy boundary between men and women, I understand I am somewhere near it, but I contend that on the balance of evidence I should fall on the 'woman' side", but rather "whatever the boundary between men and women is, I am a reasonably central example of the category 'woman'". OP essentially has to contend that the latter is something that is transparently false to his camp and ambiguous to progressives, i.e. whatever notion of women they have is so weak a separator that it can't even refute what to conservatives is a claim that a central example of a man is actually a central example of a woman. OP proposes that the test that evidences this is that they cannot provide a verbal definition of "woman". However, I would argue that the reason people fail to do this is the real or imagined fuzzy boundary of the category - progressives would also have no trouble identifying what 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". The same situation holds for the category "black" for either side, where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it, and yet neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
LateMechanic
18hr ago
So you're just going to repeat back MMT to me as if I haven't read Tcherneva and never heard of chartalism?
On the other side of the dunning-kruger scale, this is loudly announcing 'I looked up the wikipedia page'. And I'm not just repeating MMT back to you. I answered your precise first question by showing you how the actual government finance operations work in the US, with a link to an official testimony people find a bit shocking and interesting if they know anything about what's being discussed, and you thought that sounded like monopoly money that 'nobody gives a shit about'. You can't really be helped if you don't know the first thing about any of this.
Come on, at least engage with the idea of a debt crisis.
all I see from MMT proponents is a total faith in the impossibility of default or hyperinflation.
Involuntary default in your own currency that you issue? Definitely impossible. Inflation? I already started with that covered as the real constraint.
What if I start paying your military men in the new harder currency to loot your country?
Getting your state looted by foreign creditors is a real thing that really happens to people.
Ok, we're nearly up to countries can go to war with each other. Can you try to tie this back in to the fiscal responsibility of US republicans & democrats? Do you have any prediction about the timeline of the US becoming Russia?
Tanista
18hr ago
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy.
One additional factor: it's when transness began to be seen as contagious. I don't know if that makes the eventually-anti-trans position look better or worse but there it is.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
18hr ago
God-willing these lawless men who roam our streets, threatening innocent people will be identified and brought to justice.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
18hr ago
Why is that the bars with the oldest clientele are by far the most boisterous in the UK? I'm surrounded by pensioners playing weird card games, and they're bringing the house down haha.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
19hr 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.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
19hr ago
Compare to a hypothetical progressive definition of women:
-
if they look unambiguously female
-
if they look ambiguously progressive, claim to be a woman and at least one woman agrees they are a woman (recursively)
Of course you might be tempted to argue that parentage is somehow more solid as an axis of identity conveyance than being part of the same society, but this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
Tanista
19hr ago
I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity?
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
Yes.
LateMechanic
19hr ago
It surely depends on the government debt to gdp ratio. But yeah interest spending is government spending like any other, so turning on the fire hose and blasting people with free money is probably more stimulative than high borrowing costs are constrictive. You would have to think the propensity to spend interest income is near 0 to think otherwise. I don't know if that's the same reasoning as neo-fisherians use, or what erdogan is working from.
I'm not up to date with milei either, though I like his chainsaw schtick. If it was his policy to cut rates, the 10-year charts are pretty striking: interest rate, inflation rate. The last I had heard was years ago, that argentina was probably accidentally making their inflation worse by following the orthodox advice of raising rates. It wasn't until yesterday that I looked this up and saw the cut rates preceding the inflation drop.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
19hr ago
Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain.
Many trans activists and progressives now explicitly reject all of those premises.
None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition.
There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition. You are an adult who wants to have surgery and hormones and live your life as the opposite sex? Okay. Probably most conservatives would even be willing to go along and use your preferred pronouns out of politeness. They might think you're mentally ill and should reconsider your life choices, but only assholes go out of their way to "misgender" someone just to make sure you know what they think of you.
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy. It's not meaningless semantics when we're talking about puberty blockers for children, or men competing in sports and being housed in women's prisons and taking over women's spaces, or people being shunned or professionally harmed for saying there are four lights.
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
19hr ago
That does not follow. We have tons of sub-categories that are labelled {adjective}-{super category}. As an example "green-apples". They're still apples, but the category of green apples is useful for certain reasons.
This, of course, doesn't mean you're wrong (or right either), but you argument isn't good and it isn't helpful.
The ultimate argument is that the categories of human gender gets weird near the edges, are the parts near the edges part of the super category, part of the other super category, or something else entirely.
Jiro
19hr ago
If Argentina can cause inflation by mistake, and Japan wants inflation, why can't they copy Argentina?
No_one
19hr ago
Today he tweeted this at Gavin Newsom.
We are all waiting anxiously to watch the 4K footage of marines doing deranged things to you
They should send a strike team directly to your house
1.4K likes.
how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people?
-
if they look unambiguously black
-
if they look ambiguously black and at least one parent is black (recursively)
If the autist is not able to tell if someone looks unambiguously black, there is nothing you can do.
This fails if someone is wearing a good disguise. But that's a general problem with determining anything by sight. This problem also applies in obvious ways to the trans issue.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
19hr 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.
I agree thats the status quo; but success for the trans movement would be creating one. Thats what I said.
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.
Actually, I dont think theyre necessarily fine with non-central people asserting to be either, either.
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.
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