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The Demoralization is just Beginning

geohot.github.io

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#51

Post by zzzeek »

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

seemed like a good article until he went into "back the dollar on gold" and revealed he was a total crackpot, sad

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#52

Post by roenxi »

lxgr wrote: post #32
roenxi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Gold standard" is an idea every sane economist rejected decades ago. I don't think any sane economists have ever "rejected" the gold standard, it is known to work. Pretty much any empire ever founded was built on a gold standard. The US jumped away from it because they were going to go bankrupt and picked a system that put the pain off until a later date. Now, 50 years later, they appear to have lost the title of…

> Now, 50 years later, they appear to have lost the title of the world's major superpower. And how is that causally related to the abandonment of the gold standard? Is the CNY somehow backed by gold, or the RUR?

The part I don't like is it confuses the situation to make it harder to tell if goods and services are getting cheaper or more expensive in real terms. But I don't know if I'd say it was causal. I'm more just pointing out that there isn't much evidence that the gold standard failed and there isn't a reason to think that all the economists reject it. They're more probably neutral to it.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#53

Post by nextworddev »

He is pretty clueless about a few things, namely 1) China inflated an even bigger asset bubble in the form of real estate and they are using dumping and aggressive trade to keep afloat, and 2)the regime can be ended in a few months without importing food since it’s not self sufficient in terms of food supply

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#55

Post by jazzyjackson »

janalsncm wrote: post #31
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run That’s a pretty good analogy for what GDP is counting, actually. But I think the larger point is that manufacturing is grounded in something real. It’s a measure of how many tanks and fighter jets you can make, no matter how much they cost to make.

Right, velocity of money! I think this is the meatier part of the essay and I wish geohot would have skipped the bit about the gold standard - our main measure of growth is how quickly we hand money back and forth (is there another measure that allows expenditures to cancel out ? Net Domestic Product ?)

The graph that shocked me tho was the electricity production, I didn't realize US was so flat but it rings true, I know there's a 2 year wait-list to even have your energy production considered to be hooked up to the grid, but I assumed there was some at least some throughput, now we're taking about onsite mini nukes while China is building.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#56

Post by lxgr »

tomrod wrote: post #45
lxgr wrote: post #28

> Back the dollar by gold [...] The second will prevent a lot of the scams. Oh boy... Bitcoin in many ways is idealized gold (unlike the real one, its supply is actually limited), yet there is no shortage of scams around it. On the contrary, a gold standard would remove one of the most essential tools modern governments have: That of monetary policy. That sounds like a good idea if and only if there's an extreme shor…

Well, bitcoin does have an upper limit, but rug pull coins don't. The exact number is ₿20,999,999.9769

Well, if you believe that that somehow makes Bitcoin immune to scams, I have a wallet address where you can send me some right now and I "promise to return you twice the amount to give back to the community"...

Note that Bitcoin might have a monetary cap built in, but source code is not actually capable of preventing people from denominating IOUs in it.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#57

Post by toast0 »

nextos wrote: post #12
ViktorRay wrote: post #4

Steve Jobs told Obama something similar once. The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities. Basically give those workers a visa along with their diploma. Obama thought the idea was intriguing and mentioned it multiple times to his advisors. It never went anywhere though. Brain draining the rest of the world is one of the main reasons for America’s succes…

> The idea was to provide worker visas to engineers who did well and graduated from good American universities Some EU countries offer scholarships to attract good foreign undergrads and grad students to their universities. The whole point is that they stay afterwards, and they try really hard to keep them. It's been proven to be quite economically profitable, see e.g. [1]. I've never understood what's the point of a…

> I've never understood what's the point of attracting good students if you don't want to keep them later on

US schools attract international students because most will pay full tuition, subsidizing costs for local students.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#58

Post by jazzyjackson »

_heimdall wrote: post #36
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> or people who actually study these things How do you define "actually study" here, and what makes you think the author didn't study the topic at all? Its totally fine if you disagree with the author's view or have additional information that they missed or didn't consider. Writing it off as coming from someone who didn't "actually study" the topic is unnecessarily dismissive.

Well, it's deferring to experts, but whether economists are experts at anything is a hot debate.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#59

Post by systemf_omega »

ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

The US is already the brain drain destination #1. Nowhere else can highly skilled people generate comparable levels of income.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#60

Post by mjevans »

Spartan-S63 wrote: post #25
ryandamm wrote: post #11

I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. -there is more to an economy than manufacturing. Using manufacturing metrics to rate an economy is like scoring a soccer game based on how far your players run: in some contexts correlated with “winning” but in others it’s not. -gold is not a good currency or basis for monetary policy. -these ideas only sound self consistent withou…

> But solution point 1 — brain drain the rest of the world — is an absolutely first rate policy. The fact that the US requires newly-minted PhDs educated here to get a different visa or leave is absolutely self-defeating. We should be welcoming skilled immigration from everywhere. Even better, let them keep their visa and if they revoke their citizenship, we'll relocate their entire family if they come from a repress…

Also great about an easy pathway to CITIZENSHIP, rather than a 'work visa' is suddenly they aren't a serf to be abused by the employer (any more than any other citizen at least), and thus grow the market rather than undercut employment.
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