sp3ctr4l

... But if you're bored, then you're boring.

The agony and the irony, they're killing me!

Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta

Easily triggered?

Yes, you apparently are.

Yeah, dad's point was, more to the point, "if everyone had a bunch of money"

I mean, please refer to my comment that has triggered you to see an explanation as to how a far too lopsided distribution of wealth actually affects a society.

Inflation, price level rises, don't just... happen perfectly evenly across all elements of the economy at exactly the same time, to exactly the same degree.

Broadly speaking, those closest to the recieving end of the proverbial money spigot, well they get to spend or invest that money first, and then the rising price levels slowly trickle down, spread out to other segments of the economy.

Basically, bubbles start to form in usually specific economic/market sectors or segments, and then those effects spread, complexify, compound through the whole system, if not well counteracted by very effective and hands on monetary and fiscal policy.

...

You don't seem to get the idea of variable velocities of money, and how they work in a debt based, fractional reserve monetary system.

It is actually private banks that mechanistically do the vast amount of 'inflation', ie, multiplying of money.

Roughly, ever 1 dollar that gets deposited into a bank becomes 10 dollars, through being loaned out to other people and banks, which are then loaned out again, and again, etc.

But, different sectors of the economy have different multiplying factors, different velocities at which those multiplying factors occur.

You can say, print a fuckton of money and throw it at CDO holding banks to prop them up from going bankrupt.

(Basically the 06-08 GFC)

This is a huge amount of low velocity money, its not moving anywhere, its there to shore up failing assets.

Or, you could print the same amount of money, but distribute it in small amounts directly to the broad populace, who will then basically immediately spend it or deposit it, the velocity and multiplication factor of that money will be much, much greater than the former scenario.

(Roughly, Covid Era Stimulus Checks)

Or or, you can achieve something similar in terms of stimulate the ground level economy by taxing the wealthy and giving to the poor, which in net takes slow, low velocity money, and makes it fast, high velocity, without 'printing' any new money.

...

This is all actually a lot more complicated than you seem to think it is.

I don't know that you are a 'bad guy', but I do know that you are an overconfident and misinformed guy, who is flailing when their innacurate, vague aphorism is actually fully explored.

Sorry you don't like being held to an academic level of rigor and scrutiny?

You missed the 'in my experience' part of my sentence.

Its an anecdote.

That's what 'in my experience' means.

But again, broadly speaking... statistically valid correlations can and do exist between people's sexuality and many, many other aspects of themselves, their lives.

Like you can say oh, sexuality has no impact on who someone is or what they are capable of or what their life will look like... but this just assumes society is totally materially and morally neutral, and it treats all sexualities with statistical invariance, and it also precludes the possibility that to any extent, innate, complex biological differences exist.

You're basically saying sexuality is just an arbitrary choice, that society respects totally, thats the only way you could thoroughly believe that 'sexuality has nothing to do with ... capabilities or intellect.'

(You're also confusing outcomes with capabilities in that particular line, but w/e)

LQBTQ+ people are certainly statistically more likely to:

Experience physical violent crime against them,

Become homeless,

Commit suicide.

The idea that someone's sexuality doesn't have any influence on I guess seemingly unrelated aspects of their lives, their experiences, their outcomes, is just objectively false.

But if we do want to talk about actual data and studies, irt to sexuality and human intelligence, here's a fairly recent meta analysis:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7031189/

Without going into it in too much detail, there do actually seem to be some statistically significant differences between different kinds of intelligence per homo/hetero male/females, and the paper does go into some proposed theories as to the actual biological mechanics of why these differences may exist.

I am not certain that its ... that REITs are running out of money broadly... not quite yet at least...

But I am 99% convinced that basically every private homeowner and small time flipper / 'real estate investor' who just recently took their homes off market, after them already being on market 120 days +...

Yeah I'm pretty sure basically all those people are underwater, not necessarily on the property per se, but their total personal financial outlook is now fucked, from 401ks crashing earlier this year, and just generally way too high debt / debt to income ratios, general cost of living increase from tariffs/deportations.

Hooray HELOCs!

Don't worry, date the rate, marry the house, you can always refinance at a better rate later!

(except when you can't, why did you believe the used ~~car dealer~~ home salesperson?)

These people overextended and refuse to entertain a price point where they'd have to end up getting a real job or selling half their shit.

So, a bunch of them in a few noticably fucked markets actually withdrew their for sale listings... in what I can only describe as a hilariously ineffective, delulu gambit to lower overall supply and thus try to stymie that bit of the fundamentals behind the collapse.

What they evidently do not realizs is thag the actual REITs and other mass property owners... they're just gonna keep dropping prices, they can afford to do that, they have bigger pockets...

So, when Joe Blow former AirBNB landlord tries to list again in 3ish months, oh no! Comps are down by another 5-10%! Who could have predicted this!?

Its wild to see basically the housing market now just broadly act in the dumb money vs smart money vs institutional money dynamics that the stock market does, at such a scale.

So many of these petite bougeois are gonna be having total mental breakdowns that nope, they didn't make the cut, fission mailed, generational wealth not achieved, put the fries in the bag.

I am, among other things, an econometrician.

Fucking with the money is one thing.

Fucking up the concept of what money is... is another thing.

Your Dad in particular is a moron.

Literally, definitionally, money is valuable because it is near universally exchangeable for any good or service.

Money literally is not money if basically everyone does not have at least some of it, to transact with.

Money is money because basically everyone has, uses, accepts it.

Money is generally functionally defined as money, at its most basic level, by the fact that a government requires it as some kind of tax or tithe or tribute; this definition holds for the vast majority of human history and civilization.

...

If things were valuable by their rarity alone, their difficulty to possess...

Then the world's last pristine mint condition pog or beanie baby or funkopop of some particular type... would be immensely valuable, universally.

A random fingerpainting by someone you know, the only exact one of its kind in existence, would be so valuable you could buy a house with it.

...

I say your Dad in particular is a moron because his view represents a much, much more deepseeded misunderstanding of what money even is than your friend who is simply ignorant of the concept of inflation.

That is something you can sit down and explain the basics of in like 5 to 15 minutes.

Your Dad on the other hand ... seems like he would require unlearning about 50 years worth of a horrendously malformed worldview.

...

Money and taxation are inextricably linked in modern societies... and it is very, very well known that highly wealth lopsided societies are unstable, prone to collapse, and are less efficient in terms of actual real economic productivity than societies with a more equitable distribution of wealth.

The capitalist lie is that concentrating wealth upwards results in a trickle down effect that makes everyone wealthier overall.

We are way, way, waaaay past the point of wealth inequality where that could be theoretically possible, and it just literally is objectively false for at least the past 40 years in the US.

What actually would cause the vast majority of people to be more wealthy, and would then also make billionaires more wealthy also, in real terms, would be the trickle up effect that would occur if you taxed the fuck out of the wealthy, gave that money to the poorer, and then they would increase the velocity of money and thus actual economic growth considerably.

The wealthy do not want this, becauss even if they gain in absolute terms, they would not be as well off in relative terms.

They want to be better than everyone else.

Not just 'better off'.

They want power, they want monopolies and oligopolies, to sit on their hoards of extremely low velocity wealth that generates no real material gains... because this dragon-like hoarding makes everyone else far, far worse off in relative terms.

They want the power differential.

...

Billionaires do not need their excess money.

It just sits there, does nothing, other than destabalize the whole financial system by haphazardly seeking the greatest ROI, untill too many bad bets are made for too long and it all blows up (ie, what is happening right now).

After a billion, congrats, you won capitalism, 100% effective tax rate after that, dear god do we need to repair and upgrade our failing infrastructure, and mitigate climate change, dig in for its already baked in, now unavoidable, massive, massive future losses in the tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars over the next 25-50 years.

We are at the point now where it is basically either than, or literally billions will die in the next 25 to 50 years, from statvation and climate disasters, increased crime rates as people become impoverished, increased war and genocides as mass migrations from disaster areas are gunned down or enslaved, nation states fight over the last remaining bits of non cost prohibitive resources that can be extracted.

Yeah I've never understood that (first sentence) way of thinking.

I had more platonic gal friends than guy friends growing up, because most of the guys were insecure, boisterious, idiot assholes.

Simple as.

As for the second sentence, well, if we ever meet st the same bar, I'll make sure to be coy at first and then stern, but polite, hahahaha!

IIRC, I genuinely, accidentally, first discovered internet porn on an elementary school computer, as a 5th grader.

Tried to go to the website for the whitehouse.

Turns out, the real website is whitehouse.gov, not whitehouse.com

At the time... yep, whitehouse.com was hardcore porn, this was way before school network admins... really even existed? muchless had any kind of url/ip blacklists.

So yep very old school, early days, near-miss or adjacent url hoarding... I think that would have been all the way back when expedia, yahoo, askjeeves were all still competetive search engines, and I am pretty sure I was using Netscape Navigator, hahahah!

Anyway, I was quite shocked, rofl, having grown up thus far literally going to church every weekend, being told by my parents that I couldn't participate in the school Halloween festivities, as that was a 'Satanic' holiday.

Hooray fundamentalist upbringing!

In my experience, the more straight a person is, the dumber they are about anything computer, broadly speaking.

Since about 1990ish onward, yeah its still a hetero male dominated field, but the farther away someone gets from heteronormative man, chances get higher that they're actually extremely gifted/talented at doing actual software dev / it / academic research.

Don't forget Alan Turing, essentially the inventor of modern computing, was a gay man, and if you look through the history of notables in the actual field of comp sci, not the business of it, you'll find it has a lot more woman and non straight dudes in it that many other fields.

I am... mostly straight (heh), and I have had multiple gay dude friends who were just platonic friends.

Yes, absolutely this can work, why would anyone think otherwise?

Lotta straight guys could probably get some decent fashion and grooming tips, I know I did, hahaha!

Also, entirely serious, gay dudes can make some of the best wingmen ever for their staight buds.

You can just actually do this.

The trick is not actually buying anything.

Just using it for an id verification.

On a site that actually doesn't cost anything.

It could be done, over a 56k modem, guess how I know?

...they're that desperate to not get steamrolled by Thailand, huh?