Printing money does not create wealth but printing money and then spending it on public construction projects (like public transport) does create jobs and wealth for the general population.

That is not how economics work either.

Inflation is kinda irrelevant, what matters is the people’s buying power, i.e. how much they can afford to buy based on their wages.

And the wages are determined on the labor market based on supply and demand: If there’s high demand for human workers, wages are higher.

And demand for human workers largely depends on how much employment opportunities the state creates. Like, if the state just begins to randomly construct public transport and public infrastructure and more energy production sites and also clean water pipes and lots of other stuff, that creates construction jobs and drives up wages which means people can buy more stuff.

That has literally nothing to do with how much money the government prints, and it doesn’t really matter if the cost of bread is $2 or $20 as long as your wages rise just as quickly.

Money is fictional anyways. If they want to, Moscow can print literally arbitrary amounts of Rubels. There’s no way they’re gonna bankrupt.

What could be interesting, however, is see how the economic situation unfolds for everyday people.

unless most switch to electric vehicles

yeah that’s what i meant

I imagine that’s how it is/was for a lot of rulers. The feudal lord doesn’t have to be smart, he’s just a representative. The priests and diplomats and businessmen in the background tell them what to do. It’s beneficial for both sides because you can have a lot of influence without actually having to expose yourself to the public.

My guess is that they didn’t really intend to keep it secret anyways. Probably many many people knew about it (at least many thousands!) because otherwise how did Epstein get his clients? His clients would have to have known about his business, and that means that even more people (who were not clients) had to know about it too.

My guess is everybody kinda knew it but nobody bothered to tell the public, because why would you burden the public with what happens at the nobility’s castles?

tbf the cost of energy is pretty important because it’s a part of basically every product.

that’s actually precisely why i think the whole world should install more solar panels. it would make energy cheaper overall, and interestingly enough it would also make oil cheaper, since oil consumption would be lowered (because people can use electricity as a cheaper replacement) and that would mean there’s lower demand for oil while supply stays the same, so oil becomes cheaper too. solar panels help literally everyone, including the gas-guzzlers.

I think a better way might be that browsers can auto-decline all cookies.

Why would the user have to click on each cookie banner separately?

These people have abandoned humanity.

I wish they would abandon Earth too.

more like: every goddamn day the newspapers only report about the bad things that happen, because good things make no money.

well yeah in my personal environment, the people i talk to IRL, lots of people complain about the supposedly overly-strict GDPR rules and about the fact that it makes management quite a bit more challenging, because they have to be careful about what information to put/share where. Like, even if you make a public google sheets document as a calendar for a small company/school where a group of people can enter their email addresses, that’s already a GDPR violation, because personal data becomes accessible by other people. As a result, you theoretically would need very elaborate custom-forms, where only you can enter information but nobody else can see it. It’s a hell of a lot of work, IMHO. So yeah, people have semi-meaningfully complained about it.

oh yeah i’ve heard about it.

basically, people got pissed with cookie banners so much that they complained to the EU government about it.

the EU government said “well, if people don’t like the choice to allow or deny cookies, i guess we’ll un-do these regulations”.

I think this is a very good example how people are always complaining, no matter what the government does.

If the government makes a law, a group of people complain. If the government later removes that same law that people kept whining about, another group of people complains. What to do?

Btw, another nice example is worldwide free trade. When it was introduced starting in the 1970s, people were very loud about the fact that they didn’t like it because they feared competition from foreign markets, companies moving abroad (offshoring), and jobs at home being lost. That is largely exactly what happened (though free trade also had many positive sides like exchange of technology and culture). 50 years later, world governments (especially in the west) want to un-do free trade, and people complain again about it, citing a loss of free exchange of ideas as a reason. What to do.

the paradoxy of tariffs:

they’re at the same time high enough that the people suffer paying them,

but at the same time, if people got the money back they paid previously, suddenly everybody complains it’s so minisculely little that it doesn’t help anyone and nobody can buy anything with it.

It’s actually a bit more assuming wealthy people spend more on consumption than poorer people, and therefore also pay more import tariffs. If the tax credit is distributed to everyone equally, then poorer people get more than they spent.

Problem is, i really really doubt Trump is ever gonna help the people at all. He’s probably gonna say it a thousand times so his republican voters can say “he’s the good guy”, then he’s gonna deliver the thinnest of excuses for why he can’t actually do it and blame somebody else for it.

the exercise:

proud Debian user here :)

I’m thinking that the US needs to go back to A/B testing. The “christians” in the midwest think social safety nets and “free handouts” should be illegal? They can get that. The countries who want them handouts, however, get them. And in 30 years we compare how’s everyone doing.

I’m very not sure about how to evaluate the end of the shutdown.

On the one side, they didn’t pull through with playing hardball, on the other hand, I’m not sure whether people would have gotten better results if the shutdown would have gone on for longer.

thanks!