31–40 of 79 posts
Today's feudal lords plaster you with advertising and enshittification. Paying a ransom fee doesn't help any more.
(Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)
"democracies have not resorted to modern version of debasement as a revenue source due to the unpopularity of rising prices." The USA got rid of silver in its coins in 1964 and I believe copper in its pennies recently. The modern version of debasement is in the feds balance sheet, they've gotten so efficient there's no need to affect the physical substance.
I’d argue the fed funds rate is also a minor debasement mechanism since they pay interest out of think air on deposits they hold.
It's an interesting hack where the value of a coin and the cost of a coin (the amount of silver in it) were decoupled, and they pretended that the amount of silver in it is what mattered (hence they kept the same total amount of silver) but actually the value of the coin mattered (because they created value out of thin air by giving you 20 extra coins that were each still worth one pound (or whatever) each).
I don't understand why they didn't just mint a bunch of silver coins of the lower content and spent them themselves, effectively buying coins for 20% less than they were worth. Maybe they didn't have enough silver, or didn't want to create two kinds of the same coin with different silver content each.
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"democracies have not resorted to modern version of debasement as a revenue source due to the unpopularity of rising prices." The USA got rid of silver in its coins in 1964 and I believe copper in its pennies recently. The modern version of debasement is in the feds balance sheet, they've gotten so efficient there's no need to affect the physical substance.
Some democracies in the 20th century have tried a form of cash debasement to fight inflation. The example I’m familiar with is from Finland in 1946, when the most popular and largest circulating bills were required to be physically cut in half and lost 50% of their upfront value. The Wikipedia article seems to be only in Finnish: https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setelinvaihto The idea was that the left half of the bill…
Today's feudal lords plaster you with advertising and enshittification. Paying a ransom fee doesn't help any more.
The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too? (Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)
But yes, I hated adverts with passion as a child too. I didn't complain about the industry as a whole, I just hated their existence.
Today's feudal lords plaster you with advertising and enshittification. Paying a ransom fee doesn't help any more.
The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too? (Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)
This means that ad companies also had to be wildly creative to make people WANT to watch them.
Today's feudal lords plaster you with advertising and enshittification. Paying a ransom fee doesn't help any more.
The internet is today's TV. Did you complain so much about TV ads back in the day too? (Surveillance is a different thing, and no, advertising isn't the main driver for surveillance. State actors are, and ad tech is just piggybacking on what state actors want to do anyways.)
Bitcoin fixes this for the first time in human history. I’m excited about a future without monetary debasement. How many wars have been started by the “print more money until it is worthless, oops I have to start a war to fix it” spiral? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debasement
It doesn't in any way fix things. The underlying point of debasement and other schemes outlined in the article was to generate revenue for the government. Now governments use taxes to generate revenue and inflation to encourage circulation. While taxes and inflation are generally unpopular they are also vital to the functioning of society and the economy. BTC and many other token schemes implicitly or explicitly stan…
There is a reason war bonds aren't sold any more to fund them.
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How would a wealth tax solve a problem caused government management of interest rates and active management of money supply?
So starting with MMT - money is a token granting allocation of a portion of future productivity. Over COVID the UK printed 1 trillion dollars of extra furlough-like cash, the USA something like 10 trillion, the western world as a whole something like 25 trillion.
This was necessary and a Good Thing, but when the nurse or the waitress took the cash, stayed home and paid her rent the landlord got the cash, then his bank got the cash then their shareholders got the dividend and the trillions worked their way up to the richest wealthiest 0.1%
So now while productivity is still the same as it was 4 years ago, the amount of tokens representing that productivity is up by 25 trillion.
This has lead to enormous inflation pressure especially In assets.
So ignoring any other fairness / redistribution issues, MMT says take those tokens out of circulation - the tokens represent the future production of factories and farms - unless those factories got more productive, the amount of money in circulation should not chnage.
So tax the wealth to remove about 25 trillion dollars globally.
Weirdly a stock market crash or a world war would have a similar effect.
But wealth tax seems a much better solution
And then We talk about annual wealth taxes, taxing loans as income, CGT chnages or whatever - the goal is to stop money accumulating in one place for too long - blood circulates around the body - having it stop and gather in the kidneys is bad for the body, and eventually bad for the kidneys