The issue is that folks are substituting judgment and critical thinking for “vibe coding”, and having it spit out 10x more code than you could in the same amount of time is addictive and feels easy. The long term impacts and the issues of trusting the non-deterministic algorithms seem to be ignored by the folks addicted to the easy production of code. That is problematic and over time will come back to bite all of us.
The comments on this HN post nicely color the problem Tim points out, from the comments that assume the exceptionalism of the USA, to comments that say “stay in Canada”, to comments that call the post “moral preening”.
I grew up in a very conservative household, and until the tea party/Trumpian alliance would have called myself a small-l libertarian.
Now? I won’t vote republican for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that it rhymes with the worst parts of the political parties we destroyed in world wars.
There’s something new almost every day that should, in a sane culture, cause folks to abandon the Republican Party en masse. Today’s example? The 1.776 Billion “anti-weaponization” fund that is a slush fund for Trump and his allies, including folks that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The grift of this administration is shocking, but the fact that rank-and-file conservatives aren’t abandoning it by the millions gives away the game. It isn’t about principles, it’s about one party winning, no matter what.
We used to fight for what’s right, but we have become the villain. Tim is right about the declination of America (realizing his title is a double-entendre), and I can’t help but wonder if there is even a line that Trump could cross to the modern “Republican” party.
> I won’t vote republican for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that it rhymes with the worst parts of the political parties we destroyed in world wars.
As a former right winger, now recovering conservative, I'm inclined to agree. The greater issue for me is the right became every single thing they accused the left of (being easily hurt, mandated viewpoints, group think).
I said in another response, Trump has shown the cards to world that there is a sizable portion of the country that can not be trusted. Other nations have realised this is an embedded problem and cannot be fixed with another election. At least not on a long scale.
Yeah, setting policies and even cultural differences aside, the level of blatant corruption in this administration is simply beyond the pale. In any other western country, this admin would have been gone by now.
And there's so much of it that it's almost become the norm. It's shocking that anyone -- no matter their political views -- can continue to support that.
We literally went from "drain the swamp" to "fill the swamp"
I honestly do not want my kids to grow up in this country. Which is too bad because it has a lot going for it otherwise. I'm actively looking for an exit strategy.
The one truly astonishing aspect in US politics for my european mind is the degree to which many US voters appear to have given up their agency in favour of party loyalty.
Some may think supporting their own party no matter what is a smart move that will let them win, but the only thing it achieves is that the party can now stop representing your interest. One of the few levers you have as a voter is the threat of not voting for a party or even voting against them. By swearing blind loyalty no matter what, you're giving up that single lever you had. The power of a voter isn't to vote people into office, it is to vote them out of it.
Trump has seen time and time again that he can promise X and then get away with doing the polar opposite of X, just because Republican representatives and voters think towing the line is more important than everything else.
In an actual democracy the politicians are afraid of the voters, not the other way around.
As a Canadian / American who now lives in Europe: IMHO the two-party system and current constitutional structure in the US is an unfortunate local maximum.
It was very definitely better than the centuries of militaristic monarchic feudalism Europe waded through from medieval times until the mid-1900s. It is very definitely worse than modern pluralistic coalition-based democracies with proportional representation, which offer a wider range of choices to voters, and make it possible to launch competing parties / movements to counter institutional stagnation.
Until recently, the one counterargument I would hear to this second assertion is "but coalition governments have a hard time getting anything done". Now that we see a prime example of a government that alternates between a) not getting anything done and b) getting things done that belong somewhere in a timeframe from the 1890s to the 1940s, I no longer hear people making that counterargument.
Re: constitutional structure, one Irish friend I have made an interesting point: in his lifetime, there have been many changes and amendments to the Irish constitution. This is next to impossible in the US system, both because of the party loyalty dynamic mentioned above _and_ because of the incredibly high procedural bar to doing so. (And not least because of the current predominance of originalist thinking in the judicial branch, as though the constitution were an infallible document handed down from gods among men, eternally to be interpreted as the Founding Fathers intended back over 200 years ago in a completely different social, political, and technological context.)
From an American perspective, it's because we have no choice. What you have to realize is that, in the US, third parties do not have a foothold.
Yes, we can vote third parties, but this point always comes up at the presidential election and by then it's too late. If I just vote third party, that's how people like Trump make it to office. What we need is third parties to rise up naturally through local and state politics. Then, and only then, can we humor it at a federal level.
The main issue is that Americans are just not involved enough in local politics. Most Americans only vote during the federal elections.
If this wasn’t so last-stage capitalist dystopian, it would be funny.
“Let’s slap AI on it and see if we can make money” is…. Depressing as a world view. Besides the sheer amount of computational power it uses to produce a worse result than dedicated humans, the fact that if this wins out our future is promise to be replete with humans farming out any part of humanity they can to a dataset that promises to deliver a median outcome at the price the market is willing to bear to those that don’t care, from those that don’t care.
Isn't the same true of the wallet on iPhone? I drag and drop reorder my cards as necessary. There's a fixed number of positions that fit above the "fold" (in the scrolling sense).
No. I have only a vertical ordering available in Apple wallet. A card can be above another card or below another card. I have 3d physicality in a wallet that Apple wallet does not replicate.
I can fully control the location of cards in my physical wallet.
The sorting of the Apple Wallet column is a mystery to me. I can probably control it. But I couldn’t tell you how. It also lacks tactile feel. So it’s just not the same. It’s a sloppy mess.
I don’t know about you but I can’t possibly remember what’s in every fold and pocket because most of the stuff is used infrequently but is still necessary to have on me (health insurance card, for instance).
I basically only know what’s in one or two places. I just end up rifling through everything until I find it
We don’t have any serious leaders on this issue. We don’t have scholarship divorced from politics about this issue. Maybe we never will. The Austrian school basically thinks this is the end of the world. The MMT folks think this is business as usual. The Keynesians are somewhere in the middle, but being in the middle of the road politically is not the same as an apolitical view on this.
As a lay person who hasn’t studied economics enough to understand if this is an actual issue or a theoretical issue, I really need some politics-free scholarship on this.
It doesn’t help that our political leaders say it’s an issue, unless it’s their party that wants that spending, then it’s fine. The right says it’s fine as long as it goes to endless wars, and the left says it’s fine when we spend the money on social programs. Both say it’s bad when the other side spends it, but not when their own spends it.
This is exhausting and demonstrably not helping us resolve the fundamental issue of how do you manage a large society without it imploding.
The practical framing would be as two follow-up questions: what do the lenders care about? And what happens empirically when debt spirals?
If lenders do nothing, then nothing really matters - keep borrowing and let your debt grow exponentially.
In practice though, lenders, in their wisdom or folly, get spooked when debt goes up. In the Greek debt crisis, it all started with debt in the region of 130% of GDP. Rolling the debt with more debt spiralled away as lenders wanted an ever higher interest.
So US would either need to start really inflating its debt and test the investors patience, print the cash and let inflation run away, or tax and cut spending.
In the first scenario it kind of doesn't matter where the limit is - people sometimes argue about magic levels. The issue is that eventually the debt grows exponentially, so once it's out of control, it will exceed any reasonable level pretty quickly.
Can the US convince the world that their debt is special? I'm not sure. My reading is that investors are already twitchy about US debt, for other reasons for now, but higher debt levels surely won't calm them down.
So really I think the US has no better choice than to keep its debt down.
> If lenders do nothing, then nothing really matters - keep borrowing and let your debt grow exponentially.
Lenders are currently doing nothing: that does not necessarily mean they will do nothing forever.
Because should the lender actually do something eventually, the lendee may be in a world of hurt. The borrower probably does not get to the point when lenders start doing something.
100% of GDP is a level of debt that seems unlikely to be paid back, so presumably most lenders aren't considering whether they'll eventually get their money back, but instead are focussed on getting their interest payments. I suppose the crunch is when alternatives become a better mix of risk/return.
I don't think paying whole thing back has been on table for decent while. The question really comes down to is the return from interest sufficient compared to other options, will the price of underlying asset keeps it value at par. Meaning can you offload it before maturation and not lose. And finally will at maturation refinance be possible.
With money printing or some FED operations I doubt there will be default on principals. It might happen if sufficient political pressure is in place though unlikely. So in the end risk is spiking rates and inflation being foreseen. No point investing on losing bet.
Yeah, there's a constant stream of new investments and paying back of some debts, so as long as some investors are interested, the full repayment never needs to happen.
Of course, as the risk increases, investors will want higher returns to consider it a good bet as otherwise the debt repayments will start to overshadow the new investments.
MMT folks generally advocate that inflation is the way to measure if the spending is "too much" and argue that spending should generally aim to improve productivity (i.e. increase gdp) to minimize this issue (e.g. spending to build infrastructure so people can get to work is productive vs spending so people stay home is inflationary).
There is this pervasive idea that MMT promotes limitless spending and I'm not sure where it comes from, what they actually preach feels like a reasonable way to evaluate government spending to me.
I think the major argument against MMT is that no one has the stomach to actually implement the level of taxation necessary to counteract inflation when it starts to rise too quickly. Or at least no major political party in the United States.
Everything can be sound on paper about MMT but if no one is going to practice it properly then the theory isn’t really going to work out.
As much as “eating your vegetables” in terms of government budget policy makes sense, if making people do that in practice gets you immediately voted out of office (or not even elected in the first place), then we won’t be eating our vegetables.
Keynesianism has the same problem - the government is supposed to spend in the bad times (to keep the economy moving) and save in the good times. But in the good times there is an incredible pressure on the government to spend more as tax revenues increase.
The issue here is divorcing budgeting from democracy, which I believe Germany did after their travails?
Similar to how well-run companies separate their CFO duties (how much we can and can't afford) and from their CEO ones (what we choose to invest that in).
The US has that in the monetary side (for now, the Fed) but has never had that on the budgetary side with Congress being concerned with being reelected (and bringing home the bacon being a reliable way to make that happen).
Paying down US debt seriously will only happen if Congress and the President choose to cede part of their spending cap authority to an independent entity, and that's never likely to happen.
It's really hard to do that in the general case. As the aphorism goes, "Show me your budgets and I'll show you your priorities", and in a democratic society, the priorities are supposed to be decided by the voters.
You could however envision a system where the bottom-line (the overall budget surplus or deficit) is dictated algorithmically by economic conditions, with the government free to move funds between different priorities, raise taxes, or cut overall spending as long as they met the target budget surplus. Actually wouldn't be a bad idea; it mimics how private organizations and households have to adjust their spending to fit constraints. The whole idea of algorithmic central banking and algorithmic fiscal policy could be quite interesting, particularly now that you have cryptocurrency where you can build algorithms into the nature of money itself.
You can't make voters care about budgeting for the future. They have unrealistic expectations and politicians have to pander to voters.
The majority of voters can't manage their own finances that well.
When the future hits us hard, we simply all blame the past politicians for not being prudent. Or people older than us - like boomers - the blimmin idjuts.
MMT is descriptive, not prescriptive - the economy follows MMT whether you agree it does or not. Separate from MMT, are the ways you would expect would be good ways to run an economy if you believe the economy follows MMT (which it does).
I think it's worth looking at what was actually asked. From your article, they were asked these two questions:
> Countries that borrow in their own currency should not worry about government deficits because they can always create money to finance their debt
> Countries that borrow in their own currency can finance as much real government spending as they want by creating money.
MMT is quite clear about limiting factors that make those two statements false, yet the article frames them as "the basic aspects of MMT". To me, those questions feel intentionally malicious and even if not, the survey is certainly meaningless as to the opinions of economists on what MMT actually describes.
The parent comment isn't saying MMT is true or false. They are just saying MMT is a theory of how the economy operates (descriptive). _If_ you take it as true then here are things you can do (prescriptive).
It's sort of like saying something like the water-sky color theory is descriptive not prescriptive. The theory is that the sky is blue because water is blue and light reflects that color back into the sky. There is no behavioral prescription just a description of how one influences the other. If you want to change the color of the sky change the color of the oceans. That part would be prescriptive. This says nothing of whether the theory is well-founded or how many scientist agree with it.
Parent is saying MMT simply lays out a theory of how a (our) economy currently operates, not whether it's good or bad. People who adhere to the theory would then derive their policy prescriptions based on it being true and (crucially) their desired economic/political/social outcomes.
To make matters worse, when inflation spikes, that's kind of when people need the money. Good luck radically increasing taxes in a 10% inflation shock.
People not being able to afford things is the point of raising taxes to curb inflation. When people can't afford things they don't buy things and that's what lowers inflation.
But there's a time mismatch, at least at typical government action timeframes. Quarterly inflation looks high, meaning people are already out of pocket. Tax goes up at the same price levels, making people more out of pocket. Inflation reduces, hopefully, but that doesn't mean prices go down - people remain out of pocket. Then, you hope, wages catch up, but that whole cycle can easily take a year.
Elections are on average 2-3 years away. Midterms in USofA 1 year away.
The point of economics is to give people what they can have, not to give them what they want. High inflation in a MMT context means that the economy as a whole wants more than it can have. The reason for the inflation is that people are bidding against each other for scarce goods; you've injected more means to pay than exists means to produce. The way you cure it [1] is by reducing demand, which you do by decreasing the means to pay. MMT proposes doing this by increasing taxes; monetarism proposes doing it by increasing interest rates. But in both cases, the whole mechanism for solving the problem is people going without things that they want, which will almost always be unpopular.
[1] When you can't increase production capacity, which in a macro full-employment context means increasing productivity, which is outside the scope of MMT or most other schools of macroeconomics.
I get that (at least the theory, as with UBI, I'm not convinced). My point is rather that this is like treating broken bones with a hammer. Maybe it works, but the pain of it might well be unbearable.
There is this pervasive idea that MMT promotes limitless spending and I'm not sure where it comes from
Right. The theory says you can (should?) spend until you hit the "inflation ceiling," then use taxes to drain liquidity.
But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph. The "tax it away" solution proved to be a political fantasy. No politician is going to hike taxes on the middle class to cool down the price of eggs.
My understanding (I'm not an economist) is that MMT is currently viewed as a "fair-weather theory." It explained why we could spend during a liquidity trap, but offered no viable steering mechanism once the engine overheated.
In my mind, this puts it in the same box as Keynesianism. Both theories are politically convenient because they offer politicians an excuse to pander. But those politicians aren't willing to do what their pet theory would require once the emergent crisis has passed.
> But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph.
Except that 2020-2022 was not (completely) about fiscal/monetary problems that could be fixed with fiscal/monetary solutions. A good portion of the spike was because of 'outside' factor(s), e.g.:
What would extra taxation do to help that? There are various types of inflation, categorized by 'root cause', and 'too much money' is not the source of all of them:
> But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph.
The 2020-2022 inflation spike wasn't due to following MMT based spending policies though. Slamming the brakes at 100mph may certainly have bad consequences, but driving at 100mph in low visibility conditions was the problem, not braking before you hit something.
The fact is everyone knew the combination of supply chain disruptions, remote work, and the changes in spending habits would eventually produce inflation, and yet we kept pumping money in. Every economic school would have advised against that course of action. MMT only calls for spending to keep pace with economic growth, not to run the money printers as fast as you can.
Economic theories, like scientific theories, are successful if they correctly predict what will happen if you do X. If the theory of gravity predicts that you will fall to your death if you jump off a cliff, it's not a failure of the theory of gravity that it doesn't tell you how to levitate after you've already jumped.
Economic theories, like scientific theories, are successful if they correctly predict what will happen if you do X.
In addition, an economic theory can only be useful if the actions that they dictate can actually be put into practice; if nobody's going to follow what the theory tells you to do, then it's of little use at all.
This is the big problem with both MMT and Keynesianism: they're both great figleafs for politicians to wear when they want to spend in order to pander. But when the theory tells them that the situation has changed and they need to change their actions accordingly, they don't heed the need to raise taxes (MMT) or slash spending (Keynes).
Unless we really do the thing, then pointing at a given macroeconomic theory is just an excuse.
> In addition, an economic theory can only be useful if the actions that they dictate can actually be put into practice; if nobody's going to follow what the theory tells you to do, then it's of little use at all.
That is not a requirement for a theory to be useful. The fact that not using it has a cost is proof of its utility.
Remote working itself isn't inflationary, but transitioning from office to remote is. Remote workers can get high paying jobs in low cost of living areas and can generally job hop with less friction so salaries rise, spending that would have gone to commuting expenses and daytime childcare is now disposable income, people spending more of their time at home causes them to invest in larger or nicer homes. More money getting thrown at fewer items causes prices to rise.
It's also pretty funny when you realize that the GOP loves MMT when it comes granting tax cuts but when you use the same MMT principles they use for say social welfare suddenly MMT is nonsense!
> The right says it’s fine as long as it goes to endless wars, and the left says it’s fine when we spend the money on social programs. Both say it’s bad when the other side spends it, but not when their own spends it.
Spending is only one part. The part that almost nobody wants to touch is raising taxes to support the spending.
Obama also cut the deficit by more than half. It didn't get all the way to a balanced budget because of how bad of a mess Bush left to clean up, but it was moving in the right direction.
And as a sibling post noted, Bush senior also both raised taxes and lowered spending on a relative basis. So the original assertion is decisively disproven -- half of our modern era presidents (along with the Congress they presided over) did not behave the way they said "only happens".
Incentives are key. If Congress does not present a balanced budget then there has to be consequences. Many other countries work this way. No balanced budget forthcoming? Then there is an immediate collapse of the current government or ruling party and run-off elections to replace them.
The issue with requiring balanced budgets at the federal level is there are a number of situations where, by any economic theory, you want to run deficits.
So what you really need is an impartial Fed-budgetary-counterpart arbiter that declares when balanced budget rules are and aren't in effect.
And probably toss in what target percent of debt needs to be paid down too.
Contract with America convinced enough rubes in America that Republicans actually had a plan (which netted them Congress!) It was a giant failure in terms of actually accomplishing a fraction of the goals it set out, though.
Does Clinton deserve a. Ok the credit, for signing off on it? No, of course not. He deserves some of the credit. The rest goes to the Republican congress, which did the budgeting.
This ignores history. We did raise taxes in the 90s and were paying off our debt. Bush senior made the big boy decision and it left us in amazing shape. Clinton handed over a government to W that was paying off debts and had surplus from 1998-2001.
Absolutely. One note though - it wasn’t just the raised tax, it was that he very explicitly promised to not raise taxes. Maybe doesn’t get elected without that promise but I really don’t know enough about politics before Clinton/Newt Gingrich.
The US had a balanced budget in 2001, after decades of most people claiming that was impossible. The problem with a balanced budget is we all have to live in the real world. The actual real world that you can measure, not each individual's theoretical world of choice.
But stories are much more fun than data, and we put everything on the credit card, and here we are.
All sibling comments are untrue, because it is the legislative branch that has the "power of the purse", including the ability to raise/lower taxes and pass budgets for spending.
So whether an executive makes campaign promises, takes credit for signing the bills into law, or championing the bills and advocating that Congress pass them, it is ultimately Congress--the House with the Senate--that has done these things with taxes and the budget.
The part that almost nobody wants to touch is raising taxes to support the spending.
NYC passed their pied a terre tax. Even federally, at least some in congress are trying to push for new taxes. Taxing the wealthy is the most popular way to lower the debt.
> Taxing the wealthy is the most popular way to lower the debt.
Let me clarify: Few in the mainstream of current politics and media want to discuss higher taxes on the uber wealthy (1B and up) - much less the very wealthy (100M and up).
It's only happening in a few places at the state and local level, but that's challenging because of the ability of the wealthy to move residence between states (something the pied a terre tax cleverly works around).
It also seems to have a lot more purchase these days in forums like this. My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.
> My comment above about raising taxes would likely have received much more opposition 10 years ago. It seems like the consciousness here has shifted, probably because many here have a front row seat to the emergence of the tech oligarchy.
I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.
Very few here probably believe Ellison, Gates, Bezos, Page/Brin, Elon, or Zuckerberg don't deserve to be very rich.
But that reasonable "very" is 2-3 orders of magnitude less than their current net worth.
That's what many people feel is the broken part of end stage capitalism.
> I think HN specifically, and the country more generally, has become disgusted with the magnitude of wealth concentration.
I'd like to believe this, but the proof is in the pudding, the pudding being how they vote. Apart from a few well known politicians, most of them aren't running on a platform of countering oligarchs.
A HNer might ask themselves: do I vote for the future where preserve low taxes in case I become massively wealthy, or do I vote for the future where I work for my income?
Yeah, this. The one issue that unites left and right (and pretty much everyone else): We do not want to pay for this much government.
One step past there, of course, there is no more unity. Can we just run a deficit forever with no consequences? I have a profound distrust of free lunches, but I can't prove that MMT is false. I'm almost certain that it is, but I can't prove it to the satisfaction of anyone who believes it.
But even if you don't believe MMT, then what? Can we keep going a while longer without too much damage? Should we?
And if not, then we have to cut some things or raise some taxes or both, and that's where the political trench warfare starts.
I want to raise taxes to get rid of billionaires and the historically high inequality resulting in many (most?) of today's problems. More money for the government makes it a win-win. Not American, so I don't have a horse in this particular race.
Thanks for sharing your opinion. The first difficulty in real world (even idealized) politics is voicing a consistent independent stance and thinking through the implications. Many cannot even make it that far.
The second and greater difficulty is that realizing that a solution that is politically untenable is not a solution, it's a campaign slogan. I don't know how we get people to move past this difficulty.
I assume you are suggesting that a tax on the rich is not politically viable.
When the structural violence that permeates our society finally manifests in the only violence the lower class can execute - this non-viability might change.
It will be a harrowing time- and I hope we avoid this.
The billionaires will cease to exist one way or another.
I'm an American with a few horses in this race, and I also want to raise taxes to get rid of billionaires and provide more money to the government.
I'd prefer to use that money for "progressive" things like schools and libraries and parks (voted in 2024 to increase my own taxes on those things specifically, but my neighbors voted against them), but I'd even settle for spending it on the military if it came out of the pockets of the oligarchs to reduce inequality.
Money is make believe if it’s not backed by something. Ever since 1970s, money has been a figment of imaginations. We only have a semblance of balancing (or attempting to) the budget but reality is they just print the paper or update a sql row. Done. More money.
right, something we have assigned a value to. We disagree on. We find the common denominator and have a deal or we don't. could be a sticky note, could be a rock, but we decided it's 2.5"x6" paper with ink on it.
There was no deal, except maybe initially the promise to exchange for gold that the government defaulted on.
The government said pay taxes in USD or go to jail. They pay their contractors and employees USD (some of which can essentially be "eased" out of thin air). After those people get it, they can say "jump bitch" and you or someone you want to trade with will do what they say, because without those USD you won't be able to settle your tax debts.
> There was no deal, except maybe initially the promise to exchange for gold that the government defaulted on.
Gold came into the "money" game quite late. The earliest forms of money we have are with credit, on tablets dating back to Ur III (>3000 BC); gold came later (Lydians in 700 BC).
Credit has been part of many societies, even that had gold/silver floating around (because for most of the folks who were near the bottom, they didn't have enough to lay claim to any precious metal):
We've gotten sidetracked somewhere. I replied to this:
>but we decided it's 2.5"x6" paper with ink on it.
It was clearly referring to USD, not whatever the David Graeber of the IWW was saying happened 5000 years ago while talking about "everyday communism."
Since ~1792 up until, depending on when you want to argue, some time in the 20th century USD was backed by or defined by gold or silver.
As for gold standard an 50 years or some such (IDK about those numbers, but lets take in on face for a moment), sure but it was a direct drop in for silver standard which lasted "from the Sumerians c. 3000 BC until 1873." [0] The idea there was a precious metals backing, not that the PM has to necessarily be gold.
That's where "or someone you want to trade with" comes into play. It turns out it's highly useful to have the currency that ~300M people with the largest tax debts in the world need. There's no other currency backed by that much violence.
You can always be assured there is some American who desperately wants to stay out of jail, and someone will want to buy their stuff.
> it's highly useful to have the currency that ~300M people with the largest tax debts in the world need
The drivers are consumption and investment. Not taxation.
If you want to sell to the richest consumers in the world, you get dollars. If you want to finance something from the deepest financial market in the world, you accept (and repay with) dollars. (Both of which drive demand for, and thus deepen liquidity around, dollar-denominated financial assets.)
Demand for currencies and the level of taxation are barely correlated.
I'm not sure why you would expect linear correlation with taxation. Sitting in a jail cell is just as bad whether it's because you owe $1M in tax evasion or $1B. You're conflating backing of violence (which isn't well correlated with actual tax rate, so long as it's above zero so that people have to pay taxes in USD) with backing of nominal taxation.
USA provides more goods and services in nominal value than any other country. The people providing those goods and services have the threat of jail for not paying taxes. Even if you pay them in something like gold they have to account for the USD value and then pay taxes plus taxes on any appreciation vs USD, so there's too much friction for them whether taxation is 10% or 30% not to just accept dollars. Many would probably like to be paid in gold or something but they still have to get USD to settle the debt so you end up with "other thing" + "USD" no matter what, forcing USD as a lingua franca when all those "investments" and "financial markets" settle.
Taxation is the underlying "backing of violence" that helps makes USD so attractive. It's not the level of non-zero taxation but the level of mass potential violence against a large body of relatively productive people for not paying taxes. The IRS will raid someone just as easily no matter the tax rate, so I wouldn't expect raising taxes to do much to raise global demand for USD because the level of violence backing it doesn't change much.
> Taxation is the underlying "backing of violence" that helps makes USD so attractive
It really isn’t. If the U.S. shifted to a system of tariff-only taxes, the dollar would still be in demand. If the U.S. let income taxes be paid in the currency of the payer’s choice, most Americans would pay in dollars and irrespectively the dollar would be globally demanded.
There simply isn’t much empirical proof for the taxation hypothesis of the value of money.
Every single taxable US transaction having a non-zero component that must be settled in USD seems like a pretty strong empirical piece of evidence as to why the transaction would settle in USD. You can point to back when US funded itself mostly on tariffs, but I don't know what that would prove, because at that time USD was backed by gold (or silver).
I dunno it seems to me that whenever the Democrats are in office the deficits start to go down; and whenever there is a Republican in office they tend to go up. That's been the pattern my whole life so far.
Like, you say the two sides are the same because one wants to spend endless money on wars and the other wants to spend endless money on social programs, but we only ever spend endless money on wars. There's no spending comparable to war on poverty / illiteracy / sickness / homelessness.
Same observation. I’m beginning to think that it’s not about “spending” like if money was a finite resource. It’s really about the outcome of the policy: more power for elites and more access to energy and resources; vs more power and independence for regular people (and thus less for elites relatively speaking). From a “spending” perspective you could really do both and in the real economy they don’t even compete for the same resources.
Having an economic science without politics at all isn't really possible - you have to define a goal for economic development to evaluate different approaches. And defining that goal introduces politics into economics. "Development for what or whom or whether at all" simply can't answered in a neutral way, it will always be in the interests of some and against the interests of others.
Isn’t the whole point of a ‘scientific approach’ to reduce biases and to study the problem independently of how the problem affects us? Why do we call things sciences but we’re unwilling/unable to divorce our biases from the process of studying a thing?
My background is in educational science where we face similar dilemmas. In both fields I'd say there is no conflict between scientific rigor and political goals as long as you make your goals transparent.
The fact that you want to study economic processes because you want to e.g. better the live of the poor half of society does not mean you can't apply scientific principles. But the results will not necessarily be applicable for those who think a rising tide lifts all boats and therefore want to develop the economy in the interest of the upper class.
In fact I'd be suspicious if people claim to be unbiased in any field that even remotely has something to do with humans or society - it usually just means they either hide their interests, or aren't aware of their biases.
the left says it’s fine when we spend the money on social programs.
FWIW, for every dollar given to people for social programs like the child tax credit, they spend $1.50-$2 locally. This seems fine to me & it was popular country-wide. Meanwhile, we've gained nothing from the Iran war. We've obviously lost money and probably weakened our global standing and strengthened some of our enemies. It is also unpopular with the people. You don't have to "both sides" every issue. You can assume republican leadership is generally bad and don't have to give them the benefit of the doubt on issues you're not studied on.
If we look at the worst case, the French Revolution, it started with a deeply indebted Louis XVI.
Jacques Necker tried to restore investor confidence by publishing the Compte rendu au roi in 1781, which hid key expenses. This allowed the king to continue borrowing but did not fix the fiscal crisis.
Attempts at tax reform failed due to resistance from the nobility and the clergy who paid nothing, leading Louis XVI to convene the Estates-General of 1789. Which triggered a series of events leading to the revolution.
Revolutionary leaders seized Church lands and issued assignats to fund the state, but overissuance caused inflation. More durable financial stabilization came later under Napoleon Bonaparte through institutional reforms and, in part, revenues from military campaigns. He looted much of the wealth of the Italians who he “freed” from the Austrians.
The insight I get is that the debt is similar to NIMBY. Local interests benefit from an ever increasing debt, but collectively we are all hurt by it.
If it’s impossible to discuss GDP without politics, then it’s impossible in our current political climate to discuss whether or not debt as a function of GDP is a valid measure of an issue, and the practical effects of that issue.
It would seem that functionally the only real world impact would be spending more money to service that debt.
Ok, what about just cancelling that debt? Some economists have said “it’s money we owe ourselves”, so why not just forgive ourselves of our own debt? What would be the real world impact? What would happen?
We keep attaching political value judgments to this without reasonably discussing the practical implications free of our own political dogmas.
>Ok, what about just cancelling that debt? Some economists have said “it’s money we owe ourselves”, so why not just forgive ourselves of our own debt? What would be the real world impact? What would happen?
It's tied to Treasury Bonds that people hold so they would become worthless.
> Ok, what about just cancelling that debt? Some economists have said “it’s money we owe ourselves”, so why not just forgive ourselves of our own debt? What would be the real world impact? What would happen?
It's not money we owe "ourselves", it's money we owe each other. When you buy government bonds you're lending money to the government. Cancelling the debt is just stealing the money everyday people and investment institutions have lent to the government. What would happen is people would lose a huge portion of their investments and pensions and it would be catastrophic.
Honestly it's wild to spout an opinion in this thread if you don't understand this.
You keep using words like “us” and “ourselves” but I don’t think you understand that you’re not in the same class as the people who lend the money or the people who lobby for how any public resources are going to be spent at all.
I view it as a rational play of prisoners dilemma in a nation with central bank and fiat currency. You will ~always lose (well until things get hyperinflationary) to someone promising OPM without more taxes. The system since the 70s ensures that.
As somebody already pointed, you should always ignore the Austrians.
Now, keep in mind that "business as usual" is different from "not an issue". The MMT folks will be able to tell you exactly what the consequences are (a hint, they are not very different from when it was 95% of the GDP), while the Keynesians will rush to tell you that the stuff the MMT people are talking about isn't as important as other stuff the government could be doing. Notice that both can be correct at the same time.
Empirically, at some level of inflation the Keynesians become just wrong. Most people usually stop being Keynesian at that level.
What's the difference between MMT & Keynes? Keynes is the one who gave the "what you can do you can afford" speech. IMO (some) MMT folks are more Keynesian than many modern "Keynesians".
"Keynesians" are not people that talk about the ideas Keynes had. It's quite common for most "ians" or "ists" to not push the ideas their name implies.
Yes, MMT is largely based on Keynes ideas, so they will say a lot of the same that Keynes actually said.
At the same time, "Keynesianism" is more of a political movement than a scientific school (although, it's a well informed one). That's why they can be right or wrong independently from MMT. "Monetarism" is also a political movement, that people often confuse or try to claim to be the same as MMT.
MMT seems to be 'always "print"' and then tax. Keynes is more about induce demand by government when it's needed:
> I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:
> 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.
> 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.
> 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.
> 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.
Now most governments run deficits in the modern world, and that is "fine" as long as borrowing costs/rates are lower than inflation and/or economic growth. And that you should generally be spending on things that helps raise productivity or induce economic growth.
Kelton is a leading proponent of MMT and while I wouldn’t call her a dummy, she and other MMT proponents work themselves into pretzels trying to pretend inflation isn’t a serious problem that needs to be addressed by policymakers.
The problem is that our political leaders don’t really understand economics, and they think you can pick and choose the parts of an economic system that you like while leaving the “bad parts” (the parts that don’t benefit our benevolent rulers) on the table. So we get MMT inflationary printing with military Keynesianism and Austrian austerity.
None of these systems work if you only take a part of the system! Any of them would probably be viable, implemented properly with a good understanding and fine adjustments to account for reality, but you can’t mix and match!
MMT - it was a flash in the pan pre-COVID during the "capital is infinite / ZIRP" era. It was used as a political tool to justify increasing deficits/debt.
The challenge with this problem set is the timeline is tricky. At some point the bridge can only handle so much weight before it buckles and collapses but we don't know how strong the bridge is and we have no way of measuring it.
MMT is the equivalent of saying the bridge doesn't have to worry about physics because (a) we said so and that the (b) bridge hasn't broken yet so its fine. It is a bad economic philosophy.
I’m not economist but my impression when I learned about MMT is that it’s predicated on the idea that money isn’t like bridges at all. And is actually at this point of history a purely abstract model where “we said so” works. Meanwhile lots of people really believe a country can “run out of money” or whatever. You run out of trees, teachers and nurses, not money. Anyway what’s clear to me is that the metrics we picked like gdp or debt ratio or whatever aren’t helping us make good choices.
It is the epitome of hand wavy economic philosophy. If you think about the uber simplistic version of a credit card payment - now extrapolate to nation states where you have a myriad of debt types, debtors, swaps, much larger payments, longer timelines you can keep running your debt/deficit for a long time. However if you grossly outstrip your ability to pay at some point those incredibly complicated structures do buckle and trip the system. That the timeline is further than we thought doesn't mean it won't happen. MMT essentially says don't worry about it because it hasn't happened yet. We can spend our way out while trying to say our obligations are of little weight.
It's a garbage economic theory - strictly to justify greater spending from our politicians. In time it will be proven out to be a failure of human thinking - it is a siren call.
The math that underpins a credit card, mortgage, bond, etc, etc, is all the same. The values are different. The terms are different. Some of them have complex add on functions, etc.
But at the end of the day it's all compounding interest. And there's so much of it in both volume and diversity and inter-connected requirements that nobody can accurately predict the behavior of the system in response to large changes or over large timelines. And then of course the government controls the currency (but what it can do is limited to some degree) so that adds even further complexity.
A credit card or any other "normal" debt is a fine starting point for understanding.
I greatly look forward to your explanation of how it's "just plain wrong"
Other individual already nailed the response in this thread - so it's not worth repeating. They made the astute observation that the credit card was a grossly simplified example pointing that debt compounds even if the system is opaque, messy and main varied timelines.
I will add to your comment that printing more money by the government makes the people less wealthy in terms of true wealth. It is not a solution to get you out of the woes of heavy debt load as you pitched.
That said it sounds like you are a proponent of MMT - instead of one off pithy remarks, can you put forward a defensible position?
I don't think there are any MMT'ers in any position of influence on either side of the aisle (I mean, obviously, they'd be on the Democratic side of the aisle, but you get what I mean). Among serious actors there's a universal agreement that the Democratic party's fiscal policy was mismanaged --- it's not fair to blame the whole situation on them, the GOP did their part and so did the universe, but they had the controls when it mattered.
Nobody's going to make the mistake of blowing off inflation as an abstract concern again.
Every political system forgets its lessons (inflation, war, disease, food, housing, wealth inequality) until reality eventually slaps it in its face again.
Sure, but time scales matter. Both sides (there will always be 2 under our structure) will inevitably forget how much voters absolutely hate inflation; that's how we get inflation. But it won't happen within the lifespan of the "MMT" fad; I think that lifespan may have already elapsed.
Here's the real issue. Economic innovation only really happens when the government is spending big on some issue. That's at least half the reason war advances technology so fast. It's not like Ukrainians weren't able to figure out drones 5 years ago.
Stopping spending kills the economy. Which kills tax income. Which puts far more stringent limits on spending. Which reinforces the need to stop even more spending.
The parties were not symmetric on this issue. They were not symmetric in terms of actual behavior (as in how much debt each added when in government) nor in terms of rhetorics. For a start, Democratic party was acting mostly in centrist technocratic manner and rather then radical leftist manner you are implying.
It is really not necessary to knee jerk bothside everything.
The MMT folks think that, when inflation gets high, you need to raise taxes to take money out of the economy. The fatal flaw in that is raising taxes is politically impossible.
Cutting welfare spending will get us no where. The majority components of the federal budget are Defense, SS/Medicare/Medicaid, and debt payments. Not the forestry service or what we commonly know as welfare. At this point, even cutting everything else to zero still lands us in deficit. (Unless taxes are raised.)
To be serious, we need to talk about what cuts are to be made to SS/Medicare/Medicaid and the military. But no one wants to have that discussion. So we throw out meaningless issues like welfare and the forestry service. We quibble around at the extreme edges, never addressing the central problems. That's the essence of the politics being discussed. Those politics make the issue impossible to fix.
I honestly don't know why it's so hard? I'd be totally willing to countenance the necessary cuts to the sacred cow programs at this point. Why is everyone so opposed to it?
Yes "If" spending is cut or "If" taxes are not cut then you might have a balance.
But just implement balanced budget goals. Accept at most a deficit of 1% in the budget or whatever. Allow for a deviation from this to do QE but require a more qualified majority and limit to 1 year only.
Want to cut taxes? Fine - but don't do it with deficit spending. Want to increase welfare spending? Fine - but remember to then cut somewhere else OR increase taxes.
The fact that one side can implement large tax cuts funded by borrowing over and over (and still be elected again) is absolutely _crazy_ on a scale that is perhaps only rivaled by the healthcare system.
ICE is now larger and more expensive than the entire United States Marine Corps.
Let that sink in.
Not only that, we also seem to start a new war every 6 months. Demanding money for each one of them. SS/Pensions/Medicare seem to trend nowhere but up. And like Santa Claus the party in power keeps handing out tax cuts.
We have to make a change guys. The old ways aren't working. We can't be distracting from the central problems by yelling "welfare!". That doesn't work anymore.
And if I didn't quit my job, I'd still be able to pay rent. Oh no, whatever is there to do in this situation?
You can play the twisty game but the fact is simple - if he didn't have the political capital to cut spending, then cutting taxes is irresponsible governance.
Some of this is political, but Trump especially wildly makes a mockery of Republican supposed deficit hawkishness, not based on ideology, but by lack of a competent cabinet.
curious question as a canadian. when our prime minister makes a budget, it really is his fault. He runs parliament and executive functions. The budget in the USA is supposed to be a congressional matter so why does the president get any blame?
The Executive is the most visible branch of the US government and it lends itself to celebrity worship and cult of personality, being embodied in a single person. Most Americans can't name their representatives at any level but everyone knows who the President is.
And like a CEO, the President tends to get credit for everything.
That is an issue, I agree. I think a larger issue is that the people in Congress are for the most part spoiled children. They're "cliquey" the way schoolkids are. Their politics is essentially "yelling across the playground at each other". Their entire existence is simply begging people for money on social media or "winning points" on ... you guessed it ... social media.
These aren't serious people. The institution itself is damaged beyond all belief by this nonsense. We capped the number of seats in the house because ... we ran out of room for seats? Again, not serious people, not leaders. Spoiled children who sit on top of a hill deciding the outcome of our lives like they're toys.
With the exception of Social Security, we (the US) has a balanced budget. No politician will get re-elected if they cut social security. (Thus) the politicians are working on the problem very quietly.
The general problem with Social Security is that it pays out way more then it takes in. Part of the issue is that everybody of retirement age collects social security, including multi-millionaires.
I’ll read that article later, but that doesn’t sound right — there can’t be so many multi-millionaires that them getting free money is stressing out the system.
Quick random googling, I’m seeing the number 3.2% of retirees have more than $1m
Social security is self funded and is actually a buyer of US debt. So there is no direct connection between social security shortfalls and US gross federal debt.
To be slightly fair to the parent comment, it seems at least a bit valid to choose whether to consider the social security tax to be revenue to the government and social security payments an expense or to treat them as an entirely separate account. And the social security tax structure at least appears to be quite regressive.
As an analogy: do you think that Costco generates most of its profits from sales of goods or from membership fees? Both answers seem valid.
social security revenues / payments are not included in this metric (US Debt). Social Security is its own huge problem which is different than the US Debt problem.
Austrian school is less an academic discipline or study of economics and more a post-hoc justification for libertarian philosophy. So you can freely ignore them.
Maybe decide if the right or left has better priorities. Do you think spending money on guns and war like the right is good? Do you think spending money on social programs to be good? Seems like an easy decision to me, but hey, i have empathy and don't like killing.
The problem isn't politics, its been made to look that way but the issue is that the people who would know have been silenced in a way that the general public hasn't recognized. Its not in the benefit of the corporate overlords that you be properly educated on this.
I'll give you a brief TL;DR on the issues.
The wealth of a nation is based in its ability to produce primarily goods, and sometimes services. Pricing is a signaling mechanism that allows efficient resource allocation of both goods, and factor market labor.
When misallocation results, you get things like busts and booms where the benefits are front-loaded and a resource exhaustion cycle takes place. There are constraints which cannot be breached for any length of time, such as wages being lower than the cost of living enough to support a wife and three children to 18, and other things. Legitimate business can't operate if it can't make a profit.
There is silently nationalized industry that is unconstrained via a cycle of money-printing that has sieved assets into few hands, and risk concentrated in few hands. This is part of the danger of the ECP, and other fundamental failures related to centralized systems.
The Austrian school lives in the future. The future under a breakdown of organized society is one of death and potentially extinction. We depend on food production in ecological overshoot which depends on technology and farming. The 1970s represented ecological overshoot. When that fails you get shortage, that then sustains, famine, slavery, death, and then extinction.
Under socio-economic collapse everything fails. Currency is abandoned. Exchange cannot happen. The store of value and exchange of value fails. This happened during the Bronze Age (of which we have very little records that remain).
If these happen for extended periods of time, capital dries up and you get something like the great depression, Nintendo, and other places where logistics refuses to deliver goods at any potential profit because they were burned too many times.
There exist systems that will fail eventually and predictably (in general), but which you cannot predict specifically when those failures will happen, its unknowable, and the effects one would use to justify any decision lag behind the objective indicators of the actions that needed to be avoided.
Money-printing extracts value from those that hold the currency through the cantillion effect. Its an extraction of unpaid slave labor. Eventually it exceeds the store of value, and the businesses that normally produce stop producing. Exchange stops, etc. AI presents a unique spin on this as well because it accelerates the corruption of signalling presenting false signals chaotically in both labor and good markets.
In positive feedback systems, these type of systems commonly run-away and converge at a point of calamity. When they do the dynamics are unstoppable.
The MMT folks are delusional, having rested quite a lot of their false justifications on unsound practice to justify extraction of value.
The Keynesian's aren't so different from the MMT folks because they improperly look at certain things only in isolation with a seeming mental block to all other things, which is a form of false justification.
The bankers (if you can call them that) have corrupted leadership, and enabled sieving through non-reserve debt issuance. The mechanism over the years is leveraged buyout. The business cycle today largely runs on the ponzi cycle with debt issued upfront providing benefits upfront, followed by enshittification as the resource exhaustion cycle runs its course.
Chaos is fundamentally destructive. Large societies don't implode when they have stable stores of value, a rule of law (not by law), and manufacture goods their populace needs.
Market dynamics fundamentally fail to operate as a market under slave labor as a function of the cost function for the majority of participants. It doesn't matter if that labor is provided by a foreign power with costs socialized, or stolen through the currency through deficit spending. When you cannot know correct prices, everything falls apart at fundamental levels but you don't see it until its too late after which point the only thing you can do is start over; but existing structures under such systems seek control to the point of extinction.
No one gives power up willingly, and those that have it seek to destroy the ability for others to take it.
You can't ever make a consensus when a good portion of the people part of that consensus have become delusional, often without them even realizing it.
It’s been less than 3 years since AI agents were able to take action on their own. Heck, it feels like it’s been less than a year but that’s another story for another time.
In less than three years, we’ve gone from strict checks and entire sets of engineering procedure to keep this sort of thing from happening, to “yea, let’s embrace the agentic future.”
Not only that, the OP blames the Cursor team and the team that provided the API the AI used. Notice who is missing from the blame, and where the blame is actually due: the team that wholly embraced agentic AI to run their business. That’s where the fault lies.
8% of the male population has some form of colorblindness (for women it’s around 0.5%). I have deuteranomaly colorblindness. If you search for images on the internet related to that type of colorblindness you’ll find representations of how we see color and how we see the world.
It is not a fun condition to have, and leads to lots of problems in my everyday life. This blog post accidentally accentuated that issue, since the colors are (to what I can understand) very similar looking to me as a colorblind person.
1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences, and it’s worth it, if you aren’t color deficient, to try out some of the colorblindness sites and see the world as we do.
> 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women go through the same sorts of experiences,
Almost everyone to an extent loses some colour definition in their vision as we age, even those lucky enough to have excellent colour vision to start with, some lose a lot more than others and it is gradual so mostly not noticed at first. The is one of the reasons many grandparents have the saturation oddly high on their TVs (the other main reason, of course, being they've just never changed it from the default that is picked to make the display “pop” under bright show-room lighting conditions).
Had one of those happen in high school — science teacher talking about colour blindness and shows students the colour blindness tests, one student assumes he’s being trolled and that one of the test images was a solid colour.
Thank you both for sharing your lived experience as well as concrete examples for understanding. I, like I am sure many others, live a richer life knowing what others are going through and how I can make tiny adjustments, even if it's just awareness, to account for how others different from in one way or another go through life.
Having listened to the book on Audible, I'm both shocked at the behavior of the executive team, and not surprised all at the same time. What bothers me about all of this is what it says about us. It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Here's just one example, there are plenty more:
Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Everyone in the orbit of the executive team knew about this behavior, and everyone gave it a pass, even going so far as to defend it and to protect Cheryl. This behavior should be universally deplored, and yet is not.
What it would be terrific is that people that have access to Sheryl Sandberg in public repeteadly ask her: "Do you still invite your employees to sleep on your private jet's bed?" as reminder about how fucked up her mind and demands are.
Same should be applied to the other nasty members of Zuck's inner past/present circle.
My inner guts tell me that all these freaks just try out these out of place demands to see if people without their money and power would actually knee and say "yes" to every request that comes out of their mouth.
This right here, this is it. You've nailed the reason I stopped caring about what Trump is destroying. Yes, yes he's destroying gestures wildly at everything -- but god dammit we need to destroy a lot of this stuff. We need to rebuild institutions that have failed us, from your local DMV and/or public school all the way up to Congress, the Supreme Court, the Executive.
All of it has been so thoroughly corrupted that it needs to be destroyed and recreated.
Yes, once the orderly destroying is done, the sensible people can step in and recreate these institutions from scratch while everyone else waits patiently.
Or, everything just gets way worse, for almost everyone.
Well absolutely. Half the times we're tough on kids is in hopes they don't permanently turn into adults their behavior reminds of
And as kids learning from adults (although the subject matter is different) is exemplified in To Kill a Mockingbird.
As of today I am periodically embarrassed to be an American. Periodic in the sense that every once in a while the shameless behavior of elites feels like I ok'd in the presence of foreigners. Today's climate reminds that in our society i guess as always the suck-ups, butt kisserers, and hustle at all costs is alive and well in the top 10% of society.
Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.
I seriously dislike this current environment. And I can report not everybody is that way. They're still a few classy lads and ladies out there... but gosh the players are no longer afraid of sunlight at the same time
> Relatedly, this is ultimately why European courts went they way of the dodo. Moody kings, palace intrigue, the maneuvering for kinship to power, the gossip, the scandals whilst spending stupid money so aggravated people we quit.
European courts went the way of the dodo because the insane material affluence unlocked by industrialization definitely swayed the balance in favor of the merchant class over nobility. The average person under monarchy had absolutely no exposure to palace intrigue & gossip.
The job of execs/middle managers seems to often be dual parenting: 1) coordinate the capable well-parented employees below them, and 2) pander to the usefully myopic spoiled brats above.
What really happens there, if you ignore the author’s spin on it and concentrate on the facts is Sheryl is repeatedly asking her pregnant employee to please come stay in the big bed in the private jet and rest.
Then author has good points, such as Sheryl not taking into account she’s expecting ready deliverables. But she also spins it as if something sexual might happen there, or that Sheryl saying “you should have slept in the bed” in the end of the flight is a mafioso threat - and literally suggesting that Sheryl stopped trusting her because she didn’t take that offer.
(Worked at Meta for many years, not directly with Sheryl, and I am generally a fan of her, I think the book distorts at multiple times the messages she said)
I agree the basic offer was probably sincerely from kindness. What seems creepy is her continued insistence, her inability to relate to the human in front of her.
I suspect she is just not used to anyone acting genuine towards her, let alone contradicting her. She always gets what she wants, even when it’s a whim.
Yes, it's possible that it came from a place of wanting to help.
And, after the offer was spurned, the kindness was immediately replaced with wrath, at "how dare she turn me down?"
So, both can be true: she can be kind and helpful, but also petty and vindictive, and unable to see other people's perspective. Being permanently surrounded by sycophants and yes-men/women will probably distort most people like that.
Go on, which culture is that? Most "cultures" in Europe I know of it would be a breach of many stated and unstated rules and norms (Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Poland, and Belgium).
Example of a very different behavior than the claim above?
> Which law would be broken?
What is that supposed to mean? e.g. eating dogs or cats would be an even more significant taboo and its not even explicitly illegal in quite a few countries
I think the overtures about things we care about more just provide plausible deniability and that when you dig down, people are more concerned about the risks of challenging the wealthy than they are about such window dressing.
I'm in your boat, but I've been thinking more lately around how we create competitors to the sorts of things that people claim "lock them in" to using Facebook (events and messenger are the ones I hear the most anecdotally).
Make these things reasonably self-sustaining monetarily (no ads) and just let it run.
1. Being able to discover people by name / surname, no phone number necessary. This is the most important privacy feature people care about, it's ironic that Meta had it from the get-go, while other platforms have barely caught up.
2. Used to have frictionless message sync, including in the event of a catastrophic loss of all devices, which put it far ahead of most apps (sadly nerfed by E2E).
3. A much better group implementation than Whatsapp / iMessage (no need to maintain a contacts list, no need to share phone numbers with everybody, you know who everybody is by name and surname). This is perfect for semi-professional groups where people are acquainted but not close with each other, especially when some members hold positions of power and don't wish to receive calls from irate people). Parents / teachers or blue-collar coworkers are perfect examples.
It's sad that all these apps are converging on the same set of features and mis-features, with nobody (except Telegram) really exploring the tradeoff space any more.
Seriously, why? (Not you, I'm asking rhetorically to Facebook) This broke Messenger. People don't have each others' email addresses (FB has seen to that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433), it's Messenger. It was completely unforced and don't give me that malarky of "protecting messages"
The base tech of a "friend discovery network" isn't "hard" in the grand scheme of things. But getting those who don't put much thought into their tech to care enough to move out takes a gargantuan effort. Musk had to go full nazi to start seeing the bluesky adoption, and it still isn't the level of catastropic effect you'd think would happen if you heard about this 20 years prior.
I haven't logged onto Facebook in some 6 years now, so I can't really do much more to boycott them.
That's the big issue of the post truth era. I imagine the number of people "using these platforms despite what we know" is minuscule. Most will never hear of this, and many who do know have probably left long before this for the other dozens of crimes against humanity Meta's performed.
Of the rest of this list. Youtube Premium is the only thing I'm still subscribed too. I actively unsubbed from Prime and am setting up to unsub from Google One.
On the other side of every "useless war" is the what if question. Killing Hitler before WWII would have been seen as a cruel interference with German sovereignty.
Anyway it would be wise not to tie social network corporate affairs to the war. The two are not linked in a more significant way than a social network in general being linked to such affairs as a media.
Are we going to ignore how Zuckerberg dines with the president, donated a $1M to his inauguration fund, put Trump allies in high positions at Meta, loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favour, and got appointed to the president's Science and Tech Council only a few days ago?
If you are that deeply intertwined you can't claim ignorance and innocense on the inconvenient stuff - like the Iran War.
If you want to stay with WWII metaphors: if you contributed to putting Hitler in power and benefited from Hitler's favors, you were complicit to the Holocaust.
Before Zuckerberg loosened the moderation rules in Trump's favor he tightened them in favor of anti-Trump forces (and even using the terms "loosened" and "tightened" is assuming a frame that online speech that politically-benefits Trump in some way is inherently more worthy of moderation than speech that politically-harms Trump, which is itself an object-level political stance).
It's probably a mistake to characterize that as "Zuckerberg" himself making a decision - the sorts of people who worked at Facebook in the mid-2010s were overwhelmingly Democrats or Democrat-aligned people who found the sorts of things that Trump was saying, and that Trump's supporters were saying, immoral and horrifying; and often felt they had a moral duty to censor this speech on their platform in the name of protecting people they considered marginalized. This didn't necessarily need Zuckerberg's involvement himself, and I think he may have personally changed his mind about Meta's moderation policy during the Biden administration, although of course it's hard to be sure what is actually going on in the head of any specific public figure.
Trump is making a point of putting allies in high positions at Meta because in general it's now clear to everyone in American politics that being able to control the moderation policy of major social media platforms is politically important; because those platforms are where people who vote or otherwise make policy in your country do it. Every future administration in the US will attempt to do the same thing - the details might differ as the landscape of social media changes - and every single one will claim to be acting in the name of authentic free speech and safe, reasonable discourse.
I wish that practical free-software alternatives to every proprietary social media network were available, that by construction had no central organization that could be targeted by any branch of government to censor political speech. This is unfortunately a difficult technological and social problem to solve; we have a bunch of half-solutions that very few people actually use, and the bulk of the population continues to communicate on proprietary social media platforms.
I want to know who was responsible for the "it's ok to call gay people etc mentally ill" policy. Kaplan? Zuck?
Not that it matters. FB's moderation and policies are so inconsistent it's unlikely they banned it before or would ban something now that supposedly goes against their TOS
> Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate’s rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service’s hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.
This is exactly what I'm talking about - Facebook in the late 2010s had a huge number of employees who thought it was morally important to censor speech that they thought harmed groups they considered marginalized (here, Muslims in general), using anti-hate-speech standards as a tool; and eventually higher-ups at the company felt they needed to come up with some reasonably politically-neutral public rhetoric, which amounted to "we won't censor things polticians say directly in the news". This stated policy still made a lot of pro-censorship people mad, hence this 2019 Ars Technica article attacking Facebook for it. Obviously Facebook (and various other social media companies) changed their stated and de-facto policies several times over the next several years in response to the changing political landscape in the US, which is a process still going on now.
Any attempt at all to define community standards for moderation that have some definition of what hate speech even is, is tantamount to making an object level poltical statement. I am opposed to the existence of any private social media platform that even attempts to do content-based moderation at anything approaching society-wide scale.
That's not at all what it says. No one is "willing" to have this. The fact that this outcome exists is not a demonstration of this fact.
What it demonstrates is that the administrative enforcement system is broken. It simply does not work when capital exceeds an uncertain threshold or when the utility to the intelligence agencies is deemed to be of national importance.
It also demonstrates that our legislative system is entirely captured. It could fix this with a pen stroke. The people would loudly and eagerly support this. Yet no one has put pen to paper? Something deeper is clearly wrong here.
Blaming the public for being victims of this regime is insane.
> We wouldn't give our children a pass like this, nor would we teach our children to act this way, but we're perfectly willing to allow fully grown adults to act like this.
Speak to a group of K-12 teachers.
We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
> We (as a society/culture) are absolutely giving our children passes and teaching them to act this way.
That depends upon where you teach. I've worked in schools where families who would put up with that type of behaviour were an anomaly. The school sends the same message.
Of course, one can argue that society is sending conflicting messages. Yet then my question would be: are those messages coming from people who are truly reflective of society? Those messages are certainly coming from the loudest voices, voices that are (more often than not) controlled by a few organizations that seem to have a moral compass that points towards the profit of the organization rather than social welfare. Even then I have to wonder whether the views of the organization reflect the views of the people it is composed of.
Yes, it does. I was speaking generally. I think if you selected teachers at random from the entire set of K-12 teachers in America, you'd find more who do have to deal with that behavior than don't.
That's the impression I have as well, but I am also cautious about accepting it. People tend to discuss the bad schools and ignore the good ones. They tend to focus upon the families who don't care for their kids (may they be poor or rich), and ignore the families who do care for their kids. It's easy to understand why. The kids who do act out need a disproportionate amount of attention to keep the system on track.
I wonder if it isn't so much the absolute number of kids who act out (at least initially) so much as it is the change in the way we've handled consequences? My understanding is in a lot of school systems, it's nearly impossible to hold a child back or to fail them, and that it's much harder to mete out discipline. Even if the number is holding steady, the rest of the class/families are still seeing that there are no consequences for not meeting standards and exhibiting problematic behavior, which is sort of the start of a slow moving poison.
> It says we're willing to give rich and powerful people a pass just because they make overtures towards something we care about.
This encapsulates the entire moral bankruptcy of "the Epstein class" so perfectly. I highly recommend reading the series about the Epstein class by Anand Giridharadas (Giridharadas didn't actually coin the term "Epstein class", apparently that was Ro Khanna, but he really was the first to popularize and clearly define it).
> Cheryl Sandberg inviting the author of the book to sleep in her bed next to her on the company jet, and the petulent and vindictive behavior when the author said 'no'.
Considering the timing... does that mean MeToo doesn't apply if the predator is also a woman?
Sexual advances from a position of power are simply not okay. (Weirdly as a society we appear to have accepted that an older woman predating younger men is somehow a cool thing: we call them cougars.)
Age gaps in relationships is not inherently negative. Being a cougar is not a bad thing. The issue here was that Sandberg was the author's manager. Age isn't an issue when all parties are adults.
I wouldn’t fully agree. All parties being adults doesn’t inherently remove the advantage very large age and experience gaps can give to one party over the other, especially when one is barely adult. 18 or 21 is just an arbitrary number, and one doesn’t suddenly become smart about these things just because the law says they are now legally full citizens, responsible for their acts and for themselves.
But I also agree it doesn’t make age gaps between adults inherently negative. It’s just… complicated.
Not without impacting other political aspects. Remember we only lowered the voting age to 18 some 50 years ago to justify the ability to send more kids to a war we started. And that's only the tip of the iceberg.
It still strikes me that some places consider someone fully able to freely consent to enrol in the army, to the risk of getting permanently maimed or mentally scarred, and consider them fit to make life or death split-second decisions for both themselves and everyone around them under terror In highly stressful situations.
But can’t be allowed to have a beer or a whisky, and isn’t able to freely consent to sleep with someone five or ten years older.
I wonder what the official legal justification for this dichotomy is, if there is any.
Edit: after looking it up, there doesn’t seem to be one.
You're not understanding my argument. Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people. Just picking a higher age doesn't work.
If anything, based on the median in the US right now, we should be introducing more self-determination earlier.
> Within the current way we do things, whatever age you pick is the age the transition period starts for a big fraction of people.
My point precisely. Many people only start experiencing life as adults once they’ve been declared adults. Which kind of makes sense.
Maybe something more progressive than a random date would be better. Some countries already do it for some things (both in rights, responsibilities, and legal consequences), many also have specific framework for people who simply can’t be held responsible for themselves (with, often, abuses).
I’m probably stating the obvious, but some things are complex and don’t have good universal solutions. Which is part of why we have judges and lawyers, not just laws.
There's some issues with someone that has very little experience being an adult. Once they have a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink (if relevant), it's basically all the same.
With how fast the world is moving (especially in non-US, recently-ish westernized countries that had a lot of catching up to do over the last twenty-forty years, think former eastern bloc), things aren't so clear-cut.
There's a difference between a person who grew up watching video cassettes on their neighbor's VCR, and a person who (barely) watched recaps over 1MB/s DSL. Two completely different childhoods, two completely different cultural experiences, less than 15 years of age difference, both people have had "a couple years out of school and a couple years of being able to drink."
It's not unworkable, but it's quite like a relationship with somebody from a far-away foreign country, maybe without the language barrier.
Sure there's a difference in the kind of things they're used to, but it's not giving anyone an advantage which is what the earlier posts were about. Maybe a small advantage to the younger one which is the opposite of the worry above.
there's exceptions to every rule but as a general statement that's about as false as it gets. With increasing age gap between partners divorce and breakup rates go up significantly. Cultures with strong aversion to age gaps, East Asia for example, have both low divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.
The reason isn't extremely difficult to see, where someone is in life, what priorities they have and how responsible they are is significantly influenced by age, the rom-com industrial complex might have convinced people that relationships are about butterflies in the stomach, but in reality compatibility matters.
It's a cool thing if you're the younger man getting sexual attention from a hot older woman. Declaring by fiat that this is not okay doesn't change what peoples' desires actually are, or what behavior done by other people they feel compelled to punish.
I think that was more about trying, in a dumb way, to make the pregnant woman not work all night than sexual harassment.
The author was 8 months pregnant and was going to stay up for 12 hours doing stuff. This seemed more like a commanding boss trying to stop a workaholic from working.
This is a distinction without a difference, according to the text of that enable/disable dialog,
> Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training: Allow GitHub to collect and use my Inputs, Outputs, and associated context to train and improve AI models. Read more in the Privacy Statement.
“Associated Context” is the repo. If I use copilot, I’m giving it access to my repo.
I don’t know in all the ways copilot can be triggered, and I’m not certain that I could stop it from being triggered, given Microsoft’s past behaviors in slapping Copilot on everything that exists.
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