TapWaterBandit (u/TapWaterBandit)

TapWaterBandit commented on The U.S. economy is not crashing noahpinion.blog/p/the-us-... · Posted by u/paulpauper

486sx33 · a year ago

The huge amount of stimulus money is slowly unwinding, also people panic. Let’s say I’m invested with $50,000 in Walmart and I’m up 8.9% . In ordinary times I’d stay invested to see maybe 15%-20% When I see in the media the market is dropping and my 8.9 is already down to 7.9 I’m selling to keep what I can.

This is how the panic happens

But now I’m sitting on this cash, and like Matthew McConaughey says in wolf of Wall Street , they’re fucking addicted , so the next day I put some or all back into a new idea a new brainwave.. out of tech and into food production. Out of Walmart and into real estate.. who knows

But slowly the stimulus will unwind in equities, bonds, real estate …

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

This is too real haha. I do this exact thing.

> But now I’m sitting on this cash, and like Matthew McConaughey says in wolf of Wall Street , they’re fucking addicted

Only point of contention is that when you have a currency experiencing sustained inflation over any medium/long term time horizon, it makes sense people would want to hold anything over than cash. Anyone who saved in cash (even using Term Deposits) from basically the 70s to today in any currency has had their purchasing power destroyed.

TapWaterBandit commented on 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023 miamiherald.com/news/nati... · Posted by u/apsec112

Galanwe · a year ago

> You really think countries will willing choose to trade with the USA over the rest of the world when it isn't the biggest destination for their exports nor their major source of imports? Why would they do that exactly?

Yes, any day. Because US embargos prevent you from trading in USD, which is pretty much the de facto currency for any trade due to its stability and backing.

Also, even if you manage to settle your trade in say EUR, you now have to trade without using any US intermediary. Nothing related to this trade can involve a US bank, payment system, legal firm, etc.

A US embargo is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a country. Only if your country has already strong ties to the middle east, Russia or China can you hope to do any sort of export.

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

Dream on, dude. Look into how the sanctions against Russia are going, not very well.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/66dfc09e-c94a-4846-a4e2-60d...

I swear some Americans seem to think the world they live in is from 1955 or 1975 or something. The US is just one player amongst many, a very important one but by no means the paramount one for every country in the world. The idea it is simply isn't backed by facts on the ground.

So yea, if forced to choose between USA vs Rest of World virtually every country will choose RoW. Americans are delusional if they think they can just snap their fingers and everybody else will jump to attention.

TapWaterBandit commented on 10% of Cubans left Cuba between 2022 and 2023 miamiherald.com/news/nati... · Posted by u/apsec112

linearrust · a year ago

> Note that it's only the US that has an embargo against Cuba.

And that's the only embargo that matters. Given a choice between an embargo by the US or embargo by the rest of the world, cuba and every country in the world would choose 'the rest of the world'. Especially so for cuba since it's just right off the coast of florida.

> The rest of the world trades pretty freely with them.

No they do not.

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

> Given a choice between an embargo by the US or embargo by the rest of the world, cuba and every country in the world would choose 'the rest of the world'.

No way is this true. Look at this list of countries by biggest trade partners (import & export) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_leading_t....

You really think countries will willing choose to trade with the USA over the rest of the world when it isn't the biggest destination for their exports nor their major source of imports? Why would they do that exactly?

TapWaterBandit commented on Why has U.S. manufacturing productivity stagnated for over a decade? noahpinion.blog/p/why-has... · Posted by u/jseliger

panick21_ · a year ago

USD has been the defacto reverse currency since basically WW1 and even more so after WW2.

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

And this has been a major problem for them since then. Look up the "Triffin Dilemma". If a nation's currency is the reserve currency it pretty much must run a trade deficit and one of the major impacts will be loss of manufacturing prowess. Happened to Great Britain when the Pound was the reserve currency too.

TapWaterBandit commented on Why has U.S. manufacturing productivity stagnated for over a decade? noahpinion.blog/p/why-has... · Posted by u/jseliger

simonblack · a year ago

If you want to know the answer to 90% of questions, that answer is 'Follow the Money".

US manufacturing stagnated because US companies offshored their production. Great for the company bosses and their huge bonuses, but .... that led to two main failures: the loss of skilled workers, and the loss of company manufacturing knowledge. NOTE: Company money that gets wasted on huge bonuses is money that is not available to improve the company's future profits.

Take the example of Boeing: The replacing of aviation engineers by accountants means that decisions are made on the basis of cashflows, not on the basis of how to make better planes.

Or take the example of the US space industries: the men who were the skilled workers who knew how to make large and powerful rockets have retired and/or died off. Nobody in the US has the day-to-day working knowledge of those men of the 1960s and 1970s who produced the Apollo systems that put a dozen or so men on the Moon. Today we have men stranded in space because their spacecraft is a piece of garbage, and it's not so long since Americans had to cadge lifts to the ISS from the Russians for more than ten years.

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

I think "follow the money" is the correct call but not like this. I think having the reserve currency be the USD means there is more demand for the currency than is needed to trade with the USA (because USD is used for all sorts of other international trade as well including things like buying oil). This makes the USD relatively too strong which makes their exports relatively too expensive.

This then has all sorts of flow on impacts throughout the manufacturing process and incentives inside the country.

TapWaterBandit commented on Why has U.S. manufacturing productivity stagnated for over a decade? noahpinion.blog/p/why-has... · Posted by u/jseliger

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

My base case is still that the USD being the reserve currency is the problem. There will persistently by more demand for USD than is justified by the need to purchase American exports, so the currency is artificially high. This makes their exports more expensive than they should be relative to others, which hurts manufacturers.

Having a currency that is too strong for your economy always does this, look at the situation in European nations under the Euro.

TapWaterBandit commented on What Happens When a Fifteen Year Old Pumps and Dumps with a Net Profit of $800k? (2002) kentlaw.edu/faculty/rwarn... · Posted by u/melenaboija

midnight2 · a year ago

Crypto is basically this writ large. So many kids being taught that scamming is how to succeed

TapWaterBandit · a year ago

Not really, way more kids are getting caught in the crypto scams than are making money doing them.

TapWaterBandit commented on Money bubble tbray.org/ongoing/When/20... · Posted by u/headalgorithm

PheonixPharts · 2 years ago

> Things have been too good for too long in InvestorWorld

That's not by accident and it's been at the expense of non-investor world for a long time.

What we're seeing is finance capitalism suck surplus value from every piece of the Earth it can. We're still burning more fossil fuels than ever before [0] despite the now visible risk of climate catastrophe. I believe we're likely to see investors continue to become irrationally wealthy while increasing larger and larger pools of people a driven into ever increasing situations of hardship.

I see no signs of the madness stopping until both human and planetary resources start to buckle under the pressure and refuse to give yields they once did. The article repeatedly mentions crypto as though it were an obvious bubble, but bitcoin is near record highs and even Sam Altman's bizarre world coin is at extreme record highs, COIN is up 200% in the past year.

The bubble won't "burst", it's just that increasingly less people will be invited in.

0. https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels

TapWaterBandit · 2 years ago

At this point crypto clearly isn't a bubble. And why would it be? Cryptographically secured money has some advantages over fiat money. This doesn't mean fiat will disappear and all crypto will succeed. But most fiat currencies haven't really "succeeded" either.

Money is a very "efficient" market in this sense because each individual can decide do you want to hold currency X or currency Y or currency Z? And there are pros and cons to each that lead to price discovery between currencies. And I think as time goes on it is becoming more and more apparent that many central banks do not take the management of their countries currency seriously and so people choose alternatives. This is what well-functioning markets look like. Consumer choice and incentives.

TapWaterBandit commented on How much electricity does AI consume? theverge.com/24066646/ai-... · Posted by u/doener

krunck · 2 years ago

I'm still amazed how Bitcoin can damage the environment by just existing yet AI, air conditioning, aluminum smelting, and cat videos have subtle effects that are hard to determine.

TapWaterBandit · 2 years ago

Yep.

And, of course, let's not discuss:

- tourism + air travel

- increasingly large cars far bigger than required from a utilitarian perspective

- luxury good production

- theme parks/fireworks displays

- cruise ships

Etc.

Bitcoin/crypto opposition is 95% pushed by embedded financial interests that will use any lever to protect their control over money and the power it gives them.

TapWaterBandit commented on Man who shoveled new channel into Lake Michigan convicted msn.com/en-us/news/us/man... · Posted by u/ww520

rkagerer · 2 years ago

If he owned the property where this was done (or at least as close as you can own to the water mark) would it have made a difference?

TapWaterBandit · 2 years ago

Legally, probably. I don't know the laws around environmental protection in that area so there may still have been a violation but it appears he was convicted here for violation of property rights as this is public land. But this whole situation is more about the property rights and how the lake here will be used for recreation rather than ecological concerns if I'm reading correctly.