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Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

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Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#101

Post by crankylinuxuser »

philipov wrote: post #35
crankylinuxuser wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I ran across some scaremongers on Twitter 6 months ago who were going on about vaccines (??) And 5G. I had and still have no clue about that. As a real aside, networking everything does definitely have upsides and downsides. Upsides: seamless monitoring, remote control via api, integration across a house/car/phone, remote presence (never worry that door was open, or coffee pot is on, or garage door up). Downside…

> Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” What a genius visionary...

Indeed.

PKD gets IoT,EULAs, and contact law in one shot.

It's similar to when that engineer was investigating his purchased Tesla, and Tesla called and threatened him to not 'tamper with their car'.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#102

Post by Jommi »

luckylion wrote: post #26
Jommi wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know man, just looked at front page of /r/ unemployment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Unemployment/comments/gofuf5/illino... The "anti-rich" topic has been going on for so long without a real conclusion, I definitely would not discredit the possibility of riots in certain US cities.

From that thread: > Can we riot on the internet? And I think that hits the core issue. There's a lot of "eat the rich" on reddit and imgur and undoubtedly other platforms, but that's like #kony2012: clicktivism and online LARPing as revolutionaries. Riots are always a possibility, a sports event can be the cause, and so may be severe economic issues, but I doubt that they will be widespread and large. If they happen,…

In my opinion, I think you are right.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#103

Post by crankylinuxuser »

luckylion wrote: post #81
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that the distributed nature of the internet is actually what hurts it in this case - you riot over sports because your team won and the energy is palpable when you go out into the streets to join the crowd. There's less physical location to share this unrest, so it's largely just spent harmlessly online.

That's my impression as well, and online excitement is a bad predictor of offline activity. It's one thing to comment "smash the system" below a picture of a guillotine, it's quite another to go out to tango with the riot police or national guard. One of can have very real consequences, and that'll filter out the large majority.

Thats already happened once in recent times.

Occupy Wall Street.

Now, what happens when that expands to 1/10 of citizens due to lack of food, people getting evicted, no work, and more? Covid-19 is only accelerating the road we're currently on, in a very quick fashion.

And there's a reason why police departments were buying military surplus. They view us citizens as the enemy. There's nary a reason why you need APCs with 50cal's mounted for the local police force, or armed with a variety of grenades, or microwave cannons, or acoustic weapons.

Whatever it is that's forming and coming to a head, it doesn't look peaceful. At. All.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#104

Post by Jommi »

djsumdog wrote: post #11

Predicting the future is inherently stupid. Trying to show what will happen in our complex world using models is the stuff of Science Fiction. Going back to the article and economics, if you follow David Graber (Debt The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs), he talks in his books about how every great civilization needs to have debt resets. Going back to the Babylonians, the Sumerians, and tons of others, there were…

>Predicting the future is inherently stupid. Trying to show what will happen in our complex world using models is the stuff of Science Fiction.

I think stupid is the wrong word to use here. "Flawed" would have worked just as well without having potential for misunderstandings. Attempts of predicting the future is _essential_ for our society to work. The reason we move forward at the pace we currently do is because we use assumptions and approximations of reality to plan ahead.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#105

Post by kube-system »

dmm wrote: post #91
kube-system wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works works out for TVs because of a few specific things: 1. The consumer wants to hook their TV up to the internet to get content 2. TVs ads have a well established market of buyers who will pay for that data 3. TVs are expensive and consumers often buy primarily on price By comparison, there is no market for the data from my coffee pot, and little to no incentive for a consumer to choose a model that collects…

> 1. The consumer wants to hook their TV up to the internet to get content As the cost of 5G iot chips fall it won't matter what the consumer wants. > 2. TVs ads have a well established market of buyers who will pay for that data The data collected from Smart TVs is much more than ads. They track and report everything you watch, including dvds and blurays, with media fingerprinting techniques. > By comparison, there…

> As the cost of 5G iot chips fall it won't matter what the consumer wants.

If the consumer doesn't want that connectivity as a feature, you'll need to find a buyer for the data who is willing to subsidize >= 100% of the price of the additional hardware and service to have a viable product. Alternative data from other sources is probably still going to be a lot cheaper for most things... because a lot of competing data sources have way less overhead, approaching zero in some cases.

> The data collected from Smart TVs is much more than ads. They track and report everything you watch, including dvds and blurays, with media fingerprinting techniques.

I was referring to the purchasers of the data, not the subject of the data.

> Soon some data scientist at your health insurer will notice that people who drink more than 3.5 cups of Folgers a day are 5% more likely to suffer heatstroke or whatever. Then they can adjust premiums and deny claims more effectively.

If they wanted to do this, they could have done it any time over the past 20+ years ago by purchasing transaction data. But insurers have already found better ways to collect even better quality data: Just ask for it directly and offer a discount.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#106

Post by NotSammyHagar »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #19
pm90 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait what? Unemployment payments are the only things that are preventing a full scale depression and hardship for millions. These people have lost their jobs, have no savings or assets, nothing. How are they going to get food? Pay rent? The quick action by Congress in boosting unemployment payments has been the only thing keeping the economy from going belly up. If that stops, we’re in for a lot of hurt.

He argues that that's going to happen in July. I just can't see the States letting that happening. Here in Canada they are continually expanding out benefits, and I think the States will have to follow that as well. I can't see the tap being just turned off.

They are having this argument in congress right now. Republicans want to shrink unemployment because its bad for people, they don't want to give money to states because (that only helps blue states, red state budget deficits are different?), they want to shrink the size of unemployment because its higher than minimum wage in some places.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#107

Post by NotSammyHagar »

ethagknight wrote: post #89
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student loan debt is interesting because it could swing an election. All it needs is a candidate offering to write it off and a large enough portion of the population that stands to gain. I'll be surprised if it doesn't happen in the next decade or two.

It could have the opposite effect too. For every person with an outstanding student debt, there may be another 3 people who absolutely do not want to "pay" someone else's student debt. Those who have gone to great lengths to successfully pay off their student debts might be particular vehement against such policy.

I'm pretty angry that young people don't vote much. It's idiotic. I've never understood this. My whole life I've voted since I turned 18, even when I was in college (mostly, oops). Then people vote more as they get older. I can't understand this, can't they see the impact?

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#108

Post by NotSammyHagar »

jeffreyrogers wrote: post #57
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Student loan debt is interesting because it could swing an election. All it needs is a candidate offering to write it off and a large enough portion of the population that stands to gain. I'll be surprised if it doesn't happen in the next decade or two.

Peter Thiel had the idea of allowing student loan debt to be dischargable in bankruptcy to the university that granted the degree. Seems like a reasonable idea to me.

We absolutely need a way to have colleges suffer repercussions for poor degree outcomes. It's at least part of the problem that colleges just want you to finish your degree (so you don't scare people way) and sign those maximal govt loan papers. They don't care what happens next much. The nicest thing you can say is they need to be incentivized for your post college success more.

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#109

Post by NotSammyHagar »

dehrmann wrote: post #64

I'd take what Roubini says with a grain of salt. Economists have predicted 10 of the last 7 recessions, and a broken clock is right twice daily. In recent history, he was a bit late to the coronavirus party, not really being on-board until late February. Preppers were all over it in January.

Preppers also predicted 10 of the last 1 world debacles too, so that's not very predictive either (year 2000 crisis, nuclear war, etc). I'm no better myself.

However, in 2008 there was a giant amount of poor mortgage debt, it was a real thing. We've had near 0% interest rates in much of the western world, more in europe, wasteful debt increases and tax cuts in the us that didn't go to long term useful infrastructure. And our economy hasn't been growing that much. China has a giant debt bomb, how will that work out?

Re: Why our economy may be headed for a decade of depression

#110

Post by mikem170 »

pm90 wrote: post #100
lumost wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not want to downplay the severity of such an outcome, but it is worth recalling that this type of event ( and worse ) has occurred to multiple developed nations within recent memory. Ultimately the economy will recover and normalize, even if the availability of certain items is limited for a period of time. The fall of the soviet union saw unemployment at 40% and widespread food rationing/limitations. I don't be…

Past recovery is not a guarantee for future. I am very surprised at how much faith people seem to have in the stability of advanced economies. What we face today is not simply an economic recession; it’s a pandemic which is actively preventing people from engaging in the system, and the reality is that we might face more such natural disasters in the future. We have seen civilizations get undone quite dramatically in…

Nobody in history is immune from disaster. The world goes on. One can remember to be humble, that us humans are but a small part of nature and subject to her whims.

There is no perfect system to avoid catastrophe. Not yours, not mine. Humanity progresses. It will continue to do so.

Sometimes the best way to fix something is to riot in the streets. I hope it doesn't come to that, but often it does.

Every couple hundred years or so a fraction of humanity dies due to disaster and/or strife, and we collectively continue to thrive and improve. This has been the pattern for all of recorded history. Why do you think it will be any different now?

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