sj_zero

Canada spends 7B in foreign aid by itself, and the US spends about 42B, not including the additional aid packages for Ukraine and Israel so we can help countries at war blow each other to bits.

So since the G7 is already paying more than that for foreign aid, global hunger must be over, right?

Glad I'm not the only one thinking that...

If you think about it, there have been poorly thought out inflationary policies for a long time. Between bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden, theyve increased the money supply massively and also massively increased the federal debt that was only 4 trillion around 1999. Anyone who is alive and uses money knows that things have gotten massively more expensive, but the calculation for consumer prices has been fiddled with enough to make the claim that inflation has barely broken 2%. It's marking your own homework at that point, but they could find enough half marks to pass. The result of all this monetary policy for 20 years it's been two make the economy and the aggregate look better by creating some of the richest people in the history of the world. Elon Musk wouldn't be the richest man on earth in a sane world -- his car company isn't that good and people are finally starting to realize that, but people bought it because it went up, and it went up because people bought it, and all the extra money sloshing around helped.

Covid lockdowns did 3 things:

1. Shut down a lot of productive capacity by fiat. Inflation is often a self-limiting process because higher prices cause companies to spin up new productive capacity, but where the capacity is not allowed due to government, prices can go up an unlimited amount.

2. Hand out money to everyone. People who get money often spend it, leading to that product being accounted for. The rich invest, driving up assets, but the poor consume, driving up goods prices.

3. They funded the money that they gave to everyone with monetized debt. QE works by the central bank going to banks and buying their government debt from them for printed money. It replaces bonds on A bank's balance sheet with cash, which can then be used to buy more bonds (because the banks need a certain amount of debt which is an asset for them since they lend the money). This means that of the trillions of dollars spent, many of them are effectively new dollars that were magiced into existence by the central bank. Compared to typical bond buying where somebody with money has to spend that money to lend the money to the government, meaning that the net amount of money in the system hasn't really changed, here the money just comes to exist.

So while the inflationary policies before covid didn't help, and I definitely would agree they helped set up a pile of wood to burn, and policies after covid haven't helped, trying to make people's lives more expensive when they need the opposite, it was the policies during covid that led to the inflation we are in right now.

Ironically, I've also come around to the idea that the worst predictions about the vax turned out to be wrong too.

We know it was by definition an untested experimental vaccine (since that was the point of project warp speed) and while there's strong circumstantial evidence that some fatalities and injuries occurred due to the vaccine, it isn't the apocalyptic worst case scenario many people feared, much in the same way covid turned out not to be the apocalyptic worst case scenario most people feared either.

Now that doesn't mean that there were no measurable consequences to anything -- for example the stagflation I warned about in early 2020 ended up coming exactly as I said and everyone can see that -- it actually is a "bring out yer dead" scenario with tent cities popping up around the world in cities that typically never had them. We also saw many apocalypse scenarios with respect to childhood development and education.

I live by nextcloud news, but I don't like the new interface.

The other nice thing is it syncs with apps on every platform.

They use two ways to measure inflation, neither of which are accurate.

"How can you say that?!?!?" Well, I'm a human who uses money for goods and services and I wasn't born yesterday.

The rule of 72 is something investors and economists use to estimate how long it should take for something to double given a certain start price and a certain growth rate, you divide 72 by the percent rate of growth. For example, if the growth rate is 7.2% it should double every 10 years, and if the growth rate is 2% then it should double every 36 years.

Now the keen sighted among you might notice that if prices of a thing double in 36 years if it rises at 2% then many millennials and all of gen Z should have never seen a full doubling of prices.

That hasn't been the experience of most people on a lot of things. Housing is quadruple what it was 20 years ago where I live, and rents similarly went up (but who needs a place to live?) gasoline has tripled since I pumped gas saving for college. Electricity has doubled. Bread (a simple staple food) has doubled. Forget about steak and chicken and pork chops! Internet has quadrupled easily. Used cars went into the stratosphere.

All while the state goes "don't worry everyone! 2%! In fact we might not even hit 2% this year we better monetize more debt!"

It's sad seeing the redditors pretending reality matches with their models.

But I guess they need to keep thinking that or the way they've treated people who disagree with them will have turned out to be absolutely terrible and they might have to apologize for how they acted instead of just apologizing for what other people did.

I think you're flattening a multidimensional analysis of a problem, and it's not helpful or interesting.

In response to a criticism of male aggression, I explained female aggression and how it is modified in a postmodern social media driven world, and potential impacts of that, which shows exactly the dangers of just going with the flow.

The correct answer isn't that women ruin everything or that men ruin everything. The correct answer is that both male aggression and female aggression have negative effects on dating and the human race as a whole, and a nuanced multifaceted approach is required. Men who are more agreeable need to step out of that comfort zone and figure out how to approach and engage and eventually escalate in a respectful manner because history is written by those who show up, but you can't automatically put women on a pedestal either because they're flawed and fallible human beings too.

Most of the chapter I wrote for the graysonian ethic on attraction is warnings about various ways things can go bad, but ultimately both men and women will need to take some risks because dating is dangerous all around but the outcome is the meaning of life -- lifelong partnerships, building families, raising kids, and giving the future a little piece of yourself and your partner.

Your landline is a dominos pizza?

Cool!

I don't think it was 1999, but St. Anger....

Bastards whined about Napster, then put out that piece of crap.

I made like 5 bucks an hour to earn that money, so that was hours of my life I was never going to get back.

Imo the future is federated and self-hosted. Maybe not for everyone, but for me.