domain:felipec.substack.com
LateMechanic
1hr ago
The core bulk of MMT is descriptive, showing how money, banking, and government finance work, from a fundamental logic & accounting level of interlocking balance sheets. When armed with these correct fundamentals, it's a lot easier to see where actual tradeoffs and choices apply, and to avoid being upset by goofy incorrect gut notions and suffering from various types of cognitive dissonance. If anyone even talks about "public borrowing", they likely still don't grasp what is even actually happening in the accounting plumbing.
The policy prescriptions which some MMT proponents tack onto that descriptive project is probably a mistake in my view. But most of them think that once you understand the real constraints, then some choices (like implementing a Job Guarantee / Employer of Last Resort program) are so obvious and moral that they should always be pitched at the same time, and ended up with a largely progressive following who wanted more of that. You can take or leave those prescriptions though, it doesn't make the descriptive project incorrect.
There is not a single MMT economist who is confused that different countries & currencies have different challenges. By the 2010s when they were starting to get traction after a decade, they probably knew more about it than almost anyone, because this was such a common early dismissal attempt 'yeah maybe they know about the US, but circumstances are special there'. The core logic still works in any situation, and understanding real constraints vs. imaginary or self-imposed constraints is the key thing to get right. There are definitely real constraints and tradeoffs in all cases.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
4hr ago
This is wildly out of touch with the actual odds of something like this occurring if you leave you home state. This is fox news 80 year old grandpa levels of living in a fear bubble. I'm really not trying to be rude here. It is just a bit boggling to me, the world is a big beautiful place and just because people have a different opinion on some issues doesn't make it dangerous to visit other states or countries. Do some traveling, step out of your comfort zone and you'll find that your fears are unwarranted.
LateMechanic
9hr ago
This is rather MMTers poking some fun at other supposed macro experts who don't actually have a correct clear grasp on how money or government funding works. He kept tripping over his words because his intuition was leading him astray, so "government prints money and then lends it" kept coming out. The correct, clear, simple answer is that government prints money in the form of bonds every day, and swaps them with central bank reserves where appropriate (like swapping between $100 bills, $1 bills, and quarters where appropriate, perhaps when trying to ride the bus or go to the arcade). The only clash is that people have pre-existing non-sensical stricter definitions of the word "money", so MMT generally prefers to sidestep a language intuition issue and just refer more broadly to what matters, financial assets.
It's already been nearly a decade since mainstream economists stopped trying to say MMT is wrong, and switched to "we knew that already", so I guarantee you MMTers aren't saying something as obviously wrong as "we can print as much money as we want without worrying about inflation". And it's MMT who has pushed better & better verbal explanations to laypeople of all those interlocking balance sheets in IGI's linked NYFed diagram.
ControlsFreak
21hr ago
Because not all slippery slopes logically entail exactly whatever anyone can just throw out there as a possible conclusion? So, perhaps, you're throwing out "death of innovation" as the end of the slope, but that's actually akin to "dog marriage". And someone else might throw out a different possibility as the end of the slope, and that's akin to trans stuff. A reasonable conversation can be had about the connection between gay marriage and those two different possible end points, just like a reasonable conversation can be had here about this regulation and different possible end points. You would simply terminate the conversation immediately and conclude that it must be dog marriage/death of innovation. This seems like a pretty obvious non sequitur, a conversation killer, a mind killer, and the enemy of rational discussion.
Skibboleth
11m ago
I mean for the politicians to only see a percentage on each line item.
This mostly seems like a way to waste staffer time preparing reports which convert percentages in actual relevant cost information. You can't actually make the legislature decide budget priorities in purely percentage terms and then decide how much revenue to raise. Whatever the nominal procedural requirements, it's going to be negotiated holistically.
LateMechanic
1hr ago
It may be the case when dealing with random commenters on the internet, but that kind of goes for everything right? I'm talking about like Paul Krugman who kept being embarrassed when going a few rounds against MMT economists over the years, and he kept exposing that he couldn't shake some fundamental incorrect starting points like a loanable funds framework.
As for different words, that's definitely a communication hurdle where people feel like they're not speaking the same language. To me it seems to be warranted to actually cut to the heart of what matters with some different terminology, to avoid some pitfalls with peoples' everyday colloquial versions of money, lending, borrowing, etc., and talk about what is actually happening with each balance sheet operation.
But it has to be said that people in finance and central banking pretty much immediately understand MMT's descriptions in a matter of minutes. After MMT started gaining popularity, there were multiple central bank research papers put out saying the same types of things, to help educate the field and wider public, and to help correct classic misconceptions still being taught in economic textbooks. The only people who really struggled with it were mainstream academic economists, who had to try to translate real world explanations into their toy model terms. 'So you're saying that in your version of my model, my drawn curve here should be basically a vertical/horizontal line pushed out over here?'
ControlsFreak
3hr ago
Not once in there did I say anything about it becoming an over-regulated morass. You can change your culture enough to do the trivial fucking basics without becoming an over-regulated morass.
Skibboleth
11hr ago
I'm being a little glib. As a pejorative it's tended to have pro-free market connotations, though when right-wingers adopt the term they tend to emphasize the globalist aspect of that rather than the anti-regulation/anti-public sector implication of left-wing usage. In either case, it tends to suffer from lumping together a wide range of people who may not be part of the same political coalition as each other or hold the views imputed to them.
drmanhattan16
12hr ago
The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".
BahRamYou
13hr ago
300m long is more than three football fields! That is an absurd amount of space for anyone in a city, where we fight over parking spaces that are about 3 meters long. The one @ToaKraka linked sounds better, but 75m is still way too much space for most people. You also need enough space in the sky for othem to fly without running into someone else, which can happen at any angle in three dimensions. It could work for a select few, but... we already have that, with private planes and helicopters.
Besides, if we're going this route, why not bring back zeppelins? The Empire State Building was designed with a spire so zeppelins could dock on top, as were several other buildings of the time.
Rov_Scam
15hr ago
I don't know that any of these are great examples. Let's approach them individually:
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act
It's a bit academic, but it should be noted that the EEOC doesn't actually have Title VII rulemaking authority. The "rules" they promulgate are merely interpretive documents that inform businesses on how to comply and inform courts on the agency's interpretation. The courts themselves are only bound to follow EEOC guidance if it's "reasonable". Now, there are decisions out there that say that courts can't just wave these away and should give the agency deference, so there's a pretty big hurdle to overcome if you want to go against this guidance, and it gets pretty complicated here, but suffice it to say that courts aren't bound by these rules the same as they would if they were promulgated by an agency that actually had rulemaking authority. It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
As far as the actual rule is concerned, it's hard to say from a Republican perspective what the EEOC should have actually done. Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related. Saying nothing about the matter isn't an option either. Since they're still bound by the APA, they have to address the comments they received, and they received plenty of comments about abortion. And even if they could have just omitted the abortion section, all that really does is kick the can down the road for when a court actually has to decide the matter, and it's unlikely that any but the staunchest anti-abortion judge would rule that abortions aren't related to pregnancy.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation. The rules pretty clearly state that the effect of this guidance is that an employer is required to give a woman leave (paid or unpaid) to receive an abortion. While this seems like raw culture war bait, the reality is that, excepting for circumstances where someone is trying to rub it in an employer's face, no one is specifically asking for time off to get an abortion. I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions. Employers generally aren't allowed to ask employees about medical conditions that aren't work-related, except to verify leave, although as long as a doctor confirms that the absence is for a medical reason they can't really inquire further. And I doubt they would, since hunting for people who are getting abortions means, practically speaking, that they'd have to investigate every employee's medical leave, which I doubt any really want to do. There may be some unlikely confluence of factors where this could become a real issue, but I doubt it. Most women seeking abortions aren't going to tell their employers that they need time off specifically to get one.
If Republicans felt that strongly of this, they would have sought to get specific language into the bill. They didn't, and complaining about this is just them getting hoisted by their own petard given the electoral consequences involved.
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point. The point is that someone has to come up with these definitions and they have to conform with the statutory language without being overbroad. But that's tricky. The problem here is that there are two basic categories that are uncontroversial. One is the people who are actually running gun stores who need FFLs for legitimate business purposes. The other is people who simply have a gun they don't want anymore and want to sell it. But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language. Now it's up to the ATF to flesh out that definition to cover the myriad circumstances in which someone might be selling guns "for profit". And that's hard! The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped. They simply aren't arguing that the law was a good idea but ATF bungled the implementation; they're arguing that the law was a bad idea to begin with and using the ATF's interpretation as proof. But those are two separate arguments.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue. At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring. It's also telling that the act also allows for private enforcement via a civil cause of action that few parties seem bothered to sue under. That being said, anti-abortion protestors necessarily do most of their work when the place is open and in full view of the public. Most of the church vandalism was done at night by people who actually disguised themselves. One type of crime is much easier to investigate than the other.
Of course, that doesn't really apply to the Nota case, because the perpetrator was caught in the act. But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline. Houck, on the other hand, was found not guilty by a jury. For all we know he could have been offered the same deal as Nota but turned it down; I'd be surprised to say the least, if there was no deal offered at all.
Dean
15hr ago
I would disagree with your conclusion, and affirm your opening question. I think the variations you see do exist, as Putin runs a personalist system and so his personal foilables show themselves (including his desire for historical reputation, his propensity for aggression when he perceives it as a safe i.e. easy win), but there is a distinction between someone who is pursuing a strategy badly (Putin is, I have asserted for many a year, strategically inept), versus not having a strategy at all.
Putin is in many respects incompetent at various strategic factors, but that's a matter of capability, not intent.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
17hr ago
I mean, I think the regime you describe for the ADA satisfies all of the 1-3 points you propose for basic things you agree on, though perhaps not in a manner you like.
There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
Of course. The ADA, and many similar pieces of legislation, contain explicit limits on what is to be covered and who must (or may not) provide accommodation under the Act.
There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
We do this with the ADA, and many similar laws, via a combination of the private market and our adversarial justice system. Businesses talk to consultants and experts to understand what they need to do to be in compliance. Sometimes people think they're wrong about whether they are and get sued. Then a jury of their peers is going to be responsible for figuring out whether they were in compliance and how much they harmed the plaintiff if they weren't.
This process may not come up with some obvious fixed-in-advance dollar amount but it seems a very common way of determining how much "we" should spend fixing a particular problem.
Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).
Of course. The Act describes who is covered and what accommodations those covered need to make. If anyone is alleged to be in violation theirs a public judicial process to determine if they are. Characterizing this as a "reverse lottery" is absurd. Lots of businesses (probably most) manage to go without being sued under the ADA or similar laws. Who wins and loses is not random either, unless you think the outcomes of jury trials are random. In which case there's this whole thing called "the criminal law" that should be much more concerning.
ControlsFreak
19hr ago
CMOS RAM
Fair enough. Hopefully the worst case is that this ends up not being covered, even though it should be.
5.4-2 (unique IDs)
I think I can agree that there may be tradeoffs here for some devices.
twenty sensors on a LIN line
I think these would almost certainly just be classified as "constrained devices", and they also give alternate mechanisms for valid trust relations, which I think will be what the automakers go for. They'll do the verification at a different step and say that the lack of physical or other access is what ensures that presence on the network is sufficient.
A presumption toward encrypting everything makes sense when it's free or nearly-free, but there are a lot of entire devices where it's just not that relevant. If your equipment does literally nothing but relay temperature and humidity values over ISM bands, you might want some amount of authentication to prevent spoofing, but it's really not that big a deal if someone can listen in. And there's a lot of IoT stuff that goes into that category.
There's some parts of the rules that motion around this -- 5.5-1's "Appropriateness of security controls and the use of best practice cryptography is dependent on many factors including the usage context" or the exceptions for ARP, DHCP, DNS, ICMP, and NTP in 5.5-5 -- but again that turns the requirement into aspirational text.
I think you're right that some portion of this is aspirational text, but I think it's along the lines of, "If you can just put some reason down on the table for why this should be considered aspirational text, then you're probably fine," and the only people who are at risk are the people who are doing the clearly and obviously boneheaded stuff. Like, I don't think it's going to be hard for the maker of a device that does nothing but relay temperature and humidity values over ISM bands to just say, "It's a constrained device; can't do any of that fancy stuff; pretty much no way in anyway," and we can all mostly go home happy. If we start having major corporate networks brought down by botnets of temperature monitors (uh, how?), then perhaps folks will have to figure out how to make it more than aspirational text.
In any event, thanks a bunch for really thinking through edge cases for a wide variety of really specialized and, for lack of a better term, really constrained devices.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21hr ago
You have opened with sneers, the relevant fragments were already quoted to you. I never said you should put forward a complete framework. Much like you are demanding of others and are refusing to give yourself, I said you should start with anything anyone can bite into. You have baited people into a low-quality pissing contest, and are acting upset that they took the bait.
I never once misrepresented my opponents' views. They still explicitly claim that I represented them appropriately.
Again: where is the part where they say they death of innovation is instantaneous and absolute? If you can't show that part, you have misrepresented their view precisely to the amount you are claiming they have misrepresented yours.
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
We're having a nice conversation here about the regulation in question. That is a good way of having a discussion about having non-zero regulation, but hopefully not too much of it. One can argue that some of the specifics are, in fact, too much of it, but that's what that conversation looks like... not the mess the other guys are doing.
One could even go after a "framework for analyzing", even in slippery slope situations. Here's a good example of how to construct such a framework, and I think rich conversations could be had. In fact, it could even be beneficial to have a top-level comment that branches off from Volokh's work to have a nice robust discussion on how to construct an appropriate framework.
But they're still refusing to have any sort of framework, discuss any sort of specifics, nothing. Just that they have declared that the slope is slippery, and nothing more need (or can) be said. That is it. That once we have passed epsilon, we are on the slope, one cannot discuss frameworks anymore, and doom is upon us. This is not a strawman. This is a repeatedly stated position, stated openly, and resistant to any attempt to bring the discussion back to the type of thing that you would like.
I would be perfectly happy not driving a steamroller over anyone's culture. But billions of trivially-hackable devices with default passwords is truly unacceptable. If you want to characterize any version of "we need to fix this problem (and by the way, we can do so trivially)" as being "my way or the highway", I think this is just a fully-general argument against fixing any problems ever, even the most trivial ones.
Uuh... I feel like I'm being uno-reversoed here. I specifically said I would be in favor of fixing the problem, particularly when it can be done trivially, and you explicitly said that my approach is reasonable. So you cannot I'm characterizing any version of "we need to fix this problem" as "my way or the highway". This cannot be down to a misunderstanding at this point, we've been through this several times. What I am characterizing as "my way or the highway" is your explicit admission that if the trivial solution does not work, you won't think twice about destroying the tinkerers' culture. If you want to make the claim that the utter destruction of it is worth it to get rid of the scourge of default passwords, but you can't claim that you just want a trivial fix, and you'll leave everyone alone.
It's just that their way is the other way. Why aren't you rejecting their position on the grounds of it being "my way or the highway"?
Because they're not trying to sell themselves as "hey, just implement this trivial fix, and we'll leave you alone". All terminal values are "my way or the highway", but everybody has terminal values of some sort. My complaint with you is that you're acting injured that anyone would portray your values as terminal, when you said you'd destroy innovation and tinkering if other solutions won't work. You sneer at people for suggesting it might go that far, and then happily admit you'd have absolutely no issue of taking it to that point, if that's what it takes.
I don't know what you mean by this.
You write in a vaguely antagonistic shit-posty style, that implicitly asks to be taken with a grain of salt, but when people respond in kind you demand that their stylized arguments be taken deadly serious.
Can you link me?
Here, you even responded to it.
If you truly believe his silence means that we can do it, fix the problem, and not destroy the culture, it may actually be mission accomplished.
My problem here is that if it doesn't work, you explicitly said you won't stop at it.
Folamh3
55m ago
Savita Halappanavar's death
Such an obvious one, don't know how I forgot it.
SSCReader
58m ago
The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost?
Doesn't this critique also apply to the whole civil suit edifice? If a company breaks a contract with me, it is the government that backs the court resolution with force if necessary. Which kind of highlights a problem with giving a budget per person. Currently a company might make efforts to not break a contract because I can sue them, and that should count as government spending by this metric? And if the solution applies then each person is given a contract enforcement budget, but, a big company could simply sign a contract for oil rights on my land worth a million dollars, then break the contract and I only get 5000 dollars towards trying to rectify it?
In other words your solution removes the advantage of government force against entities that are less powerful than a government but more powerful than a normal individual. The whole point is to leverage the scale of the government as the aggregate of its citizens. Which I understand is somewhat antithetical to a Libertarian, but I think your proposal is kind of the worst of all worlds. I can see an argument to take the government out of it entirely and I can see an argument to have the government do the whole thing. But where the government does it, but only to a very minor extent for each person just seems more inefficient than either.
Which isn't to say I think the ADA way is right either, I'd rather just have a mandate passed on what a company needs to do, set up a department, people make complaints and the government either finds in the companies favor and does nothing, or uses government power to force the company to comply. Then you could also measure the cost both to the company and to the government of enforcement without diluting the whole purpose of having a government.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Fair enough. California already sealed our fate years ago, and I guess this conversation has nowhere else to go.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
You are still effectively saying "get rid of things that annoy me, or I'll drive a steamroller over your culture", even if you don't particularly care how those things or gotten rid of, in my opinion that's still accurately described as "my way or the highway"?
I would be perfectly happy not driving a steamroller over anyone's culture. But billions of trivially-hackable devices with default passwords is truly unacceptable. If you want to characterize any version of "we need to fix this problem (and by the way, we can do so trivially)" as being "my way or the highway", I think this is just a fully-general argument against fixing any problems ever, even the most trivial ones. Literally any time someone points out any problem that could be fixed and says, "Hey, how about we fix this," it can be characterized as "my way or the highway". Even if they're open to literally any option that you can put on the table to solve the problem, they're not prescriptive at all, and are perfectly happy considering the relative merits/demerits of each approach, and even open to the possibility that all options genuinely have too many demerits to implement. Literally any form of "let's fix this problem" is "my way or the highway" because you want to "get rid of the problem (that annoys me... and also causes billions of dollars in damage every year and is a national security threat, but I guess mostly because it annoys me)".
So look, if you can come up with any other ideas. Get rid of them, don't get rid of them. Fix the massive problems some other way, still having billions of devices with default passwords, fine. I don't care. Come up with ideas. Bring them to the table. We can debate the merits/demerits. We honestly could even conclude that there are too many demerits of all the options and choose to not do anything. But right now, what I'm being told is that the One Great Demerit that is fatal to all possible options (not "my way"; all options) is that whatever is done, it will "destroy a culture". Very little is given to support what the meat of this demerit is, other than what appears to be vague threats of slowing innovation. If that's all, then I will throw in with destroying the culture. I will throw in with doing it in the most minimal way possible, with the most reasonable regulations you can come up with, or whatever alternative solution you propose, and we will just have to live with destroying the culture.
Moreover, your refusal on grounds of it being "my way or the highway" is fully symmetric, in addition to being fully general. If, as is claimed, the only two options are "billions of trivially-hackable devices with default passwords" and "destroy a culture", then the people who are demanding that we choose the former are also demanding "my way or the highway". It's just that their way is the other way. Why aren't you rejecting their position on the grounds of it being "my way or the highway"?
You're getting tit for tat
I don't know what you mean by this.
I did, and he didn't seem to say anything in response to me, so mission accomplished?
Can you link me? I'd really appreciate seeing your way. If you truly believe his silence means that we can do it, fix the problem, and not destroy the culture, it may actually be mission accomplished.
That this is the only way, that we have to change their culture. If that is required, I am willing to do it.
Ok, in that case I'm out. If it's your way or the highway
It is not "my way or the highway". Again, if you can come up with any other way to make it so that we don't have billions of trivially-hackable shit with default passwords, sign me up. But I keep getting told this is my only option! It's not even "my way"! It's the only option! That this is a fact about the universe! Nothing to do with me at all!
EDIT: Give me "your way"! Make it an option! If you can do so in a way that won't result in Nybber telling us that "your way" would break their culture, great! But he keeps telling me that you can't.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Ok, so "read the whole post" means "ignore the first two thirds and just read the last third". Got it. Violates Grice's maxims and makes you a bad communication entity, but got it.
However reasonable a given rule is of no consequence if it enables unreasonable rules to be made and if unreasonable rule makers necessarily outcompete reasonable rule makers.
Ok, so flesh out those "ifs". In your long post, you spoke about power rising up to take power. In this context, it would sound like what you're worried about is cashing out in terms of regulatory capture/crony capitalism. That powerful corporate interests will rise to impose unreasonable regulations to form barriers to entry. This is a totally plausible thing to happen, and perhaps we could consider some reasoning for when this is likely to happen/not happen, and how damaging it is likely to be in a particular domain. Plausibly, this has something to do with the regulations in question or the regulatory bodies in question, or something. Or is this truly just a long-form way of restating, "Once we've crossed epsilon, the worst conclusion in inevitable."
The great thing about printing money here in America is that we are the USA USA USA baby! Everyone takes our dollar, they take it for oil, for oranges, for tungsten, for cars, for iphones. We print it up out of thin air and they give us real goods for it every day.
The higher the trade deficit the more they are getting ripped off by exchanging real goods for dollars. Even with all the printing we are still experiencing a strong dollar and less inflation compared to other countries that don't have the backing of the US economy and 11 carrier strike groups.
Look at any currency vs the US dollar over the last 4 years. The dollar is as strong as it has ever been. MMT is a brilliant scheme for extracting real material and goods from the rest of the world in exchange for protection and promises. It is crazy that we get away with it! USA USA USA!
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