781–790 of 812 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anyone trying to move to china/russia/iran/india. The outflows however continue to be extensive.
A lot of people are moving to Russia China and India from non western nations that use to send their top talents to the EU/US.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. hows that going? economists have been giving advice to policymakers for decades, and we have a widening gap between the haves and the have nots, society increasingly in debt, etc. Maybe economists have it wrong.
The gap between haves and have nots is more related to politics than economics IMO. It's about how the value is (re)distributed.
If all the banks failed we would certainly have a more equal society in 2025.
It is really hard to say though if spending my 30s and 40s largely in a depression would have been worth it just from a personal standpoint.
Imagine instead of the boom of 2010s we had a depression.
Rather intellectually dishonest for a technologist to complain about this really.
Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
If you are trying to pin a currency to a standard, gold isn't great. Its value is almost entirely speculative and it lacks meaninful intrinsic value at this point. If you demand to leave fiat currency, an aluminum or steel standard might make more sense. Rare earth metals, or even just petroleum would be my proposal. Maybe someday we will have a duterium pinned currency.
Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
> This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. Isn't this a good thing? Otherwise, what incentive is there for financial discipline? > The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stick to it. Have stuck with it for over 75 years. Not too shabby. Also why is empire in quotes? > China has been quietly debt trapping a whole…
there isn't one. Banks need to lend as much cash as possible to make as much money as possible. A gold standard doesn't stop that, it just means that bailing out customers of those banks much much harder. hence why the FTC was setup. Its a rich history and well worth looking into
> I know the US and Europe has for centuries.
Not really, the last "european" style colonial system died in 1989 with the collapse of the USSR. Sure France does the whole "we'll administer your currency for a huge fee", bu that only works because they are ex colonies. Invading another country and turning it into a puppet state is much more costly than people think (see Syria, Georgia, Iraq, Afghanistan)
What china is doing is far more clever, far more effective, much less bloody and extremely profitable. just build a road, port, rail line, factory, mine. charge the host country a fee, bish bash bosh, massive growth for the host and china.
> Do you really think trump gets to decide geopolitics?
I mean he's not far away from deposing a president, and he's allowing another country to ethnically cleanse another(Biden did that too). Biden crashed russia's economy, Trump will un-crash it and let it re-arm to invade another country.
That sounds like geopolitics to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate? It’s thought provoking as a mechanism to reduce all of this zero sum (or even worse, parasitic) effort that dominates our system.
Making an inelastic resource (gold) the unit of exchange in a growing economy is a recipe for deflation. You don't want the most economically sensible decision to be holding onto capital, since that results in precisely nothing useful being done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I prefer my economic takes from economists, or people who actually study these things. I think the ideas are interesting and worthy of discussion. If you want an actual credentialed economist talking about similar issues — here’s one: https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/21/donald-trumps-econ... But you need to recognise that there is an “orthodoxy” and challenges to that. You aren’t going to hear the questioning…
I like Varoufakis; watched a short video interview he did just a few days ago. I doubt he'd agree with geohot's take.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making an inelastic resource (gold) the unit of exchange in a growing economy is a recipe for deflation. You don't want the most economically sensible decision to be holding onto capital, since that results in precisely nothing useful being done.
This seems to be an orthodox opinion I see often, and I get the intuition. But time preference is a real thing. Tech is the easiest example. People buy tech that they don’t need that will be significantly cheaper in the future. I’m not a historical expert, but this specific point didn’t seem to be an issue during the time periods we were on the gold standard.
In the 1980's and 1990's computer industry, your dollars could buy a lot more megahertz or megabytes every year.
If the "deflation = bad" people were correct, everyone should have held onto their dollars waiting for next year's tech, knowing it would be a lot better than this year's tech. No one should have wanted to buy computers, and the tech industry should have been in a gigantic depression.
Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
Going back to a gold standard will limit the money supply. This means that there will be less capital for building $thing. A gold standard means that when the economy gets overheated it pops, then contracts and you get deflation. This makes crashes last longer and harder. It requires greater fiscal discipline to overcome. The problem with the USA "empire" is that for a trading empire to work you need a plan, and stic…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we have to be careful that by adding “utility” as an indirection we don’t accidentally traffic in “cost”. Because maybe I am dumb but it seems to me that the utility of a toaster is its ability to toast bread. If I make 5x as much as someone in China and am willing to pay 5x as much for the same thing, at the end of the day we both just want toast. And if I buy a crappy toaster that only costs 2x as much and…
> at the end of the day we both just want toast but the seller doesn't care about that. The seller will attempt to extract the maximum price of a toaster. It is because americans are more productive, that their maximum price for a toaster is 5x that of china; they can afford to pay 5x. So this is a measure of their utility - not the ability to toast. An american finds that the ability to toast to be worth 5x that a c…