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ProxCoques commented on The Fannie and Freddie trade is back   bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/ioblomov
wrfrmers · 8 months ago
Modern China is an even more interesting story. Their largest state-backed real estate firm collapsed years ago. The reason why China is in a mild recessions instead of a full-blown depression is because the state took control, triaged what they could, and chose losers in such a way as to prevent the worst-case scenario. A solution similar to what the US eventually dragged itself to after the 29 Crash. In a crisis, socialism works, actually.
ProxCoques · 8 months ago
> In a crisis, state intervention works, actually.

There, fixed that for you. Stop calling literally anything that isn't 100% raw free market capitalism "socialism".

ProxCoques commented on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals   ft.com/content/1201f834-6... · Posted by u/kvee
jandrewrogers · 9 months ago
US Federal Reserve studies indicate that the percentage of US households with no excess income after necessary expenses (as distinct from "ordinary expenses" as a term of art) is on the order of 10-15%. This definition roughly matches most people's intuition of what "living paycheck-to-paycheck" means. That isn't nothing but it implies 85-90% of Americans are not actually living paycheck-to-paycheck.

There is another 25-30% of households that spend all of their income on ordinary expenses beyond necessary expenses. This includes things like car payments on a new BMW or a mortgage on a big house; "ordinary" is determined by expense category, not expense necessity, so a lot of spending on luxury goods is classified as "ordinary". By implication, there is effectively no ceiling to ordinary expenses.

By contrast, the median US household has >$12,000/year in excess income after all ordinary expenses. Technically these households could have expanded their lifestyle to consume that income, but in many cases they are spending it on things that are not classified as "ordinary" and therefore not saving it. The categories of "non-ordinary" expenses (which have a sensible objective criteria) are almost entirely obvious lifestyle flex things, so not particularly controversial.

The implications of these statistics are pretty wild. The median household can easily accumulate a million dollars in inflation-adjusted net worth, not including their house, over a 40 year career. And they can do it without being particularly thrifty, since ordinary expenses covers a lot of luxury spending.

Americans have very high incomes, both in theory and practice, they just would rather spend it than save it.

ProxCoques · 9 months ago
Also by the Fed: 4 in 10 Americans lack enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense:

https://fortune.com/2023/05/23/inflation-economy-consumer-fi...

ProxCoques commented on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals   ft.com/content/1201f834-6... · Posted by u/kvee
bluGill · 9 months ago
"capitalists" have many central planners each planning the same thing but coming up with different results. Then we reward the ones who are right. Socialism features one planner - they may have helpers, but just one. If one planner gets it wrong in capitalism you can go with a different one.
ProxCoques · 9 months ago
Capitalists as in capitalist governments centrally organising commercial legislation and regulations, subsidies, tariffs, standards, etc.
ProxCoques commented on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals   ft.com/content/1201f834-6... · Posted by u/kvee
Ferret7446 · 9 months ago
It is precisely because individuals suck so much at correctly perceiving the allocation of value that free market economies ("capitalism") completely blow centrally planned ones ("socialism") out of the water.

So the fact that you think money is divorced from reality is a very normal, mundane misconception.

ProxCoques · 9 months ago
All "capitalist" economies have very large amounts of central planning for them to function (not to mention state subsidies and other protections from failing to make money), and use taxation and the national debt for that. Socialism plans centrally to the same extent that capitalist economies do, but also has the state owning the infrastructure that the economy relies upon. So it doesn't need to tax for that purpose. Socialism in that sense has never actually been practiced historically though, in the same way as there has never been "capitalism" in the sense of no central planning or regulation. Luckily.
ProxCoques commented on .an, the TLD that ceased to exist   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.an... · Posted by u/popcalc
mardifoufs · 9 months ago
I'm going to claim dotsucks.sucks now.
ProxCoques · 9 months ago
Didn't somebody register dot.com and had an email address of dot.dot@dot.com? You could have dot.dot@dotsucks.com
ProxCoques commented on The price of shutting down coal power, and what would be gained   economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/therabbithole
Animats · 10 months ago
In the US, coal consumption is down 60% since the peak year of 2008.[1] The trend looks linear. Hits zero sometime in the 2030s. Coal is over in the US. Even the coal industry thinks coal is over.[2] Conversion of coal plants to natural gas is proceeding rapidly.

China, though, is still adding coal capacity.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/243934/coal-consumption-...

[2] https://ieefa.org/resources/nowhere-go-down-us-coal-capacity...

ProxCoques · 10 months ago
My understanding on China's coal plants is that it's not the number of them, it's whether they're running that counts. Coal-fired generation is currently cheaper than storage for backing up wind and solar generation and their plants are typically running about 50% of the time right now, expected to run less often as storage and more renewables come online. So China’s coal use could fall despite it adding more capacity.

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants

ProxCoques commented on (UK) Government crackdown on single-use vapes   gov.uk/government/news/go... · Posted by u/chris-orgmenta
ProxCoques · 10 months ago
If (and it's a big if) the human race survives to deal with the effects of climate change, the next great battle will be to prevent waste from becoming the existential problem.
ProxCoques commented on The racist AI deepfake that fooled and divided a community   bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/cmsefton
CalRobert · a year ago
"Well, even if it’s not real, it’s what I think they think."

This is the real problem, I suspect. People will tend to favour things that support their existing biases (this includes me!) and now we have a firehose of crap to help us feel better about our views instead of challenging ourselves.

ProxCoques · a year ago
I used to naively think that some kind of PKI/trust network for online media would have to rise up to thwart misinformation.

But anger is the real the reason why people want to believe obviously fake info about how Mexicans are manipulating the weather. We live in a society that tells you that you are free: freedom to work hard, treat people right and do the right thing. Then health, wealth and happiness will be yours.

But what if you do all those things and see the opposite happening to you and those around you? You want reasons. 5G brain control, Bill Gates and the Deep State all look like great explanations because long arcs of neoliberal monetarism and deregulated economics is, well, boring and quite hard to understand. So who cares about some AI fakery when that's going on?

ProxCoques commented on Please Don't Make Me Download Another App   theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/thunderbong
aaronbrethorst · a year ago
Don’t forget, you can read this article in the Atlantic’s official iOS app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-atlantic-magazine/id397599...
ProxCoques · a year ago
Not downloaded that app, but does it deliver exactly the same features as the web app but just look a bit different? If so, I wonder whether anyone working in the respective web and app departments sometimes wonders why their company maintains two separate apps that do the same thing. I know I did.

Edit: Oh, offline mode. Towering profits?

ProxCoques commented on Please Don't Make Me Download Another App   theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/thunderbong
matrix_overload · a year ago
Well, the elephant in the room is that an app these days is a packaged version of a website with one twist: notifications. Unless you explicitly disable it via settings, it will try to get a small chunk of your attention every now and then.

- Would you like to enable notifications to see when your EV finishes charging?

- Yes.

(in a couple of days when you're thinking about a completely different topic)

- SPECIAL OFFER! 20% OFF THE FATTY FRIES IF YOU GET A CAR WASH FROM US!!!

And that's everywhere. It pays off due to the scale, just like spam. It costs nothing to send an annoying notification to a horde of users, and even if 1% of the users go for it, it is still 5+ figures of revenue out of a handful of characters pushed to users' devices, and hours of human time wasted dealing with useless annoying distractions.

ProxCoques · a year ago
The weird thing is that companies will pay for entirely separate engineering, product and marketing departments for their apps which duplicate their web apps in every way (or usually a bit less), not to mention being under the thumb of the app stores - all for the sake of notifications.

I'm no bean-counter, but that seems very odd to me.

u/ProxCoques

KarmaCake day587May 9, 2016View Original