It’s working properly in the sense that the Apple-provided file picker UI is designed to give permanent file permission access to an app. But the user thinks that access is temporary. It’s a mismatch between the user’s mental model and what’s actually happening.
> It’s working properly in the sense that the Apple-provided file picker UI is designed to give permanent file permission access to an app.
In the case of sandboxed apps, this is not true. The open panel provides temporary access, and a sandboxed app needs to create a security-scoped bookmark to retain persistent access across launches.
For non-sandboxed apps, it's usually not an issue, because non-sandboxed apps have access to most of the file system by default. The weirdness occurs only for certain files and folders that are restricted by TCC, such as Desktop and Documents. But for non-restricted folders, nothing needs to be done. Observe that if you use the Open from folder... command from Insent on a non-restricted folder, then no com.apple.macl is set on the folder. No special permanent access is granted, because none is required. The only time the system automatically grants permanent access is with TCC-restricted files and folders, so we can't pretend that this is a "normal" thing.
In general, non-sandboxed apps don't even need the open panel for file access. They can just read whatever file they want... except for the TCC-restricted files. The purpose of the open panel in a non-sandboxed app is just to provide a file picker UI to the user.
The security-scoped bookmark is exactly why a user should treat all macOS file access permission prompts as permanent. There is also no UI to show to a user whether an app has created a security-scoped bookmark.
And this is for sandboxed apps. You correctly point out that non-sandboxed apps have even more access. So a user’s mental model should be that all open dialogs grant permanent access.
It is poorly written. I have suspicion that the author is talking about the persistent file permission mechanism known as Security-Scoped Bookmarks, but the article makes it hard to understand what exactly is being discussed. It reads like a raw bug report without any analysis done.
And specifically they could show some code snippet to reveal what exactly the Insent app was doing. Was it calling startAccessingSecurityScopedResource of the NSURL class?
The Apple backup strategy is purposefully broken. I’m already paying for 50GB of iCloud and it often claims that it cannot backup my iPhone despite having multiple gigabytes free. It turns that that during the backup process it operates on a file level, so if you happen to have a large file it will require both copies of the file to fit within your storage limit before the backup can complete. And guess what, several third party apps I use store all their data in a single multi-gigabyte SQLite database that’s written to every day.
As for cached and downloadable data, I have long ago turned off backups for many apps where the data is stored on a server anyways. Backing up these apps never makes any sense.
As a pedestrian I slapped a panel of a slow car that failed to yield to me at a crossing. The driver glared at me and looked ready to reverse into me. I never slapped any panel any more.
Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.
We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).
Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.
According to what?
We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.
> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.
The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.
I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.
They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.
Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.
> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.
We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.
And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.
chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.
Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?
When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.
Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.
> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?
You can avoid building adjacent to cities.
> would you live in Chernobyl city now?
Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?
Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.
> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.
Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!
> So it's not the standards that are the problem.
There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.
I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?
Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent.
Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.
Even if your authorization is so sophisticated that nginx cannot do it, a common pattern I’ve seen is to support a special HTTP response header for the reverse proxy to read directly from disk after your custom authorization code completes. This trick dates back to at least 2010. The nginx version of this seemed to be called X-Accel-Redirect from a quick search.
Well btrfs supports compression so that’s understandable. However I personally prefer to control compression manually so it only compresses files marked by me for compression using chattr(1).
But do you actually treat LLMs as glorified autocomplete or treat them as puzzle solvers where you give them difficult tasks beyond your own intellect?
Recently I wrote a data transformation pipeline and I added a note that the whole pipeline should be idempotent. I asked Claude to prove it or find a counterexample. It found one after 25 minutes of thinking; I reasonably estimate that it would take me far longer, perhaps one whole day. I couldn’t care less about using Claude to type code I already knew.
I've been working on a luks+btrfs+systemd tool (for managing an encrypted raid1 pool). While I have worked with each individually, it's not obvious what kind of cases you have to handle when composing them together. A lot of it is simply emergent, and the status quo has been to do your best and then see what actually happens at runtime.
Documentation is helpful to describe high-level intentions, but the beauty is when you have access to source code. Now a good model can derive behavior from implementation instead of docs which are inherently limited.
I implemented the luks+btrfs part by hand a few years ago, and I resurrected the project a couple months ago. Using source code for local reference, Claude discovered so many major cases I missed, especially in the unhappy-path scenarios. Even in my own hand-written tests. And it helped me set up an amazing NixOS VM test system include reproduction tests on the libraries to see what they do in weird undocumented cases.
So I think "tasks beyond our intellect (and/or time and energy)" can be fitting. Otherwise I'd only be capable of polishing this project if luks+btfs+systemd were specifically my day job. I just can't fit so much in my head and working memory.
And it can fail in great ways. Last example: I asked claude for a non-trivial backup and recovery script using restic. I gave it the whole restic repo and it still made up parameters that don't exist in the code (but exist in a pull request that's been sitting not merged for 10+ months).
Interesting. I don't think I've seen hallucinations at that level when it's referencing source code.
Though my workflow always starts in plan mode where Claude is clearly more thorough (which is the reason it takes 10x as long as going straight to impl). I rarely skip it.
You can just look at examples like Knuth Claude’s cycles that solved the problem. I have no doubt that if Claude didn’t exist perhaps Knuth would come up with a solution anyways, but given a limited amount of time/patience Claude came up with a solution while Knuth did not. That’s what I meant here.
Similarly the problems I give to Claude are also in that category where I myself did not come up with a solution within a set amount of time, and instead of keep working on it manually I decided to give them to Claude.
> how you're able to determine if the solution was correct
I had hundreds of unit tests that did not trigger an assertion I added for idempotency. Claude wrote one that triggered an assertion failure. Simple as that. A counterexample suffices.
You seem to imply that Charles de Gaulle and his policy of converting dollars to gold caused the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. That was a myopic view. The whole Bretton Woods system was doomed from the beginning due to design defects.
The system was conceived with the primary goal of maintaining balance of payments equilibrium for all countries at the expense of economic growth and liquidity. It had become clear that if a country wanted its currency to be the world reserve currency it had to run a balance of payment deficit. And the United States clearly wanted its dollar to be the reserve currency unbridled by any balance of payment constraints.
If the United States had balance of payment surpluses as it had in the early years, the system lost liquidity (other countries wanted to buy U.S. exports but had neither gold nor dollars to do so), reducing the surplus. And if the United States had balance of payment deficits, well, gold would flow out of the United States, and the United States could not meaningfully increase public debt or spending.
Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars? Then your argument of "gold would flow out" would not hold - so the only reason for it to flow out was that the gold standard was fake - the lax money policy of the US was the issue, not the gold standard itself.
> what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?
The problem here is, what if the demand for dollars increases?
In principle the US would get more gold and mint more currency, but gold is a finite resource. "All the gold ever mined" is around 200,000 metric tons, ~32k troy ounces per metric ton is ~6.4B troy ounces.
In 2022 (just before the recent gold rally) the price was ~$2000 per troy ounce, i.e. "all the gold" was worth ~$13T. Meanwhile the M3 money supply in the same year was ~$20T. What happens if you try to buy $20T worth of gold to mint currency when only $13T worth has ever been mined, and not all of that is even on the market? The answer is that you can't, so instead the result is deflation, which is bad.
Or to put it a different way, what do you think the economic effect of the recent gold rally would be for a country whose currency was still pegged to gold? It just got way cheaper to import foreign products than buy domestic ones, and way more expensive for foreign countries to buy your exports, so how's the unemployment rate looking? The amount everyone owes on their mortgage hasn't changed but the nominal value of their houses just got cut in half so now they've lost their jobs and are underwater. What happens when they start to default and foreclosures don't allow the banks to recover the principal?
The primary function of money is its trade value, to "lubricate" the real economy to let goods and services flow. When the value is unstable, people are inclined to not spend or not accept that currency, which contradicts the free flow of it and in severe cases harms the economy.
Crypto'currencies' have the same problem. By nature, they are no currency but investment for which instability is required. No crypto bro would hype their 'currency' because there would be no pumping. Arbitrage trades are considered being for fools or insiders.
Bitcoin has the same problem. There is no inherent reason you can't have a cryptocurrency where there is no maximum number of coins to ever be mined and instead the limit is that mining them requires a fixed amount of computation.
That would give you the characteristics you want from a medium of exchange, because there is a rate limit on how much can be created (doing so requires e.g. electricity). Then the value is relatively stable, if you accept it as payment on Monday it would still be worth around the same amount on Friday, but the long-term result is a slow reduction in value on multi-year timescales as compute gets cheaper, so you don't get the speculation that results in high volatility and it doesn't strongly compete with real economic activity for investment resources.
The argument you'll get from goldbugs and whatever is that nobody would want a currency which is inherently inflationary like that, but that's clearly contrary to evidence. Most government currencies are inflationary, even on purpose, and it doesn't matter as long as the rate of inflation isn't so high that people holding it transiently for use as a medium of exchange are losing a significant amount in that short period of time. Especially when the rate of inflation is predictable (the rate at which computers get faster is reasonably consistent) so that anyone entering into a long-term contract denominated in that currency can reasonably predict its future value on the delivery date. Or people could just use it as a medium of exchange and denominate their contracts in something else.
You are right, the harm of unstable currencies is a matter of public perception but boiling the frogs slowly still does harm. Inflation is a significant, longterm, bottom-up wealth pump and simply pointing to empirical evidence is a point against unstable currencies, not for them.
How cryptocurrencies are mined is secondary in that regard too because their values is also purely based on perception, since there is no large authoriry backing that currency by eg. demanding , spending and regulating it.
Gold is silly as a measure of value. It's just a piece of shiny metal. The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it else you're pulling breaks on the actual economy.
Just because a social construct is silly when you think about it doesn't make it any less real or useful.
A national border is silly as a physical reality; it is just a cartographic whim. These invisible lines, drawn by long-dead men, pretend that the lithosphere is fundamentally different on one side of a coordinate than the other.
Fiat currency is silly as a store of value; it is just a digital ledger or a piece of cotton-linen blend. Its "worth" is derived entirely from the collective hallucination that a central bank’s promise is more substantial than the paper it is printed on.
Yes. And we should never forget that these ideas are just that: useful ideas. They may seem without alternative to most people, but that doesn't mean they necessarily are.
In effect, some of them are. Look how many decry the death Breton Woods. They don't want to necessarily have good coins on them, but they want them to be tethered as a proxy. Why?
No, not in effect, no one is talking about physically exchanging gold coins, so it doesn't make sense to say "there isn't enough".
but they want them to be tethered as a proxy. Why?
That's a completely separate issue. People want to not have to deal with inflation where they are on a treadmill of needing to get paid more to support the fact that companies can raise their prices easily.
> No, not in effect, no one is talking about physically exchanging gold coins, so it doesn't make sense to say "there isn't enough".
I think my point still stands. If you can't create more gold [1] and you say - I am pegging 35 dollars to an ounce of gold. Then you are limiting the amount of dollars to the mass of gold[2]. The money works as an IOU for gold. You aren't exchanging pieces of gold, but the idea that you have 35$ is as if you have 1 ounce of gold, _that is what people pine for_. It's effectively, an IOU for 1 ounce of gold that you keep in a safe. Yes. I think the point still stands that in effect, that's what people are asking for.
[1] - You can, but it's a much slower process, deff rate limited, it's actually what people really seem to like about gold.
[2] - Yes, I am aware about the concept of fractional reserve, but that's exactly the part that goldbugs want to avoid.
I think my point still stands.I think the point still stands
I'm not sure what point you are making, it seems like you're just describing a gold backed currency and repeating the same things multiple times.
If you aren't using gold directly how would there ever be "not enough" unless a penny became worth too much? People did this for hundreds of years, this isn't some theory or experiment, it's basically how the world worked for most of human history.
Mild inflation is a good thing, at least according to modern economists. In a deflationary environment, money is worth more when you don’t spend them. And when people don’t spend them, there’s no economic growth. It’s just like having very high interest rates but the central bank cannot act to lower them.
This thread was someone saying you can't peg a currency to something else because "there isn't enough of it" which is nonsense.
there’s no economic growth
Printing money doesn't create economic growth, it just inflates assets and depresses nominal wages.
money is worth more when you don’t spend them
People say this stuff like it's gospel, but if someone understands currency dynamics in the first place they would have their money in investments, which already should appreciate and act like a deflationary currency. People can already buy stocks and leave money there to get more valuable, so why does anyone spend money now?
You also have to figure out why it already worked for hundreds of years. People act like it would be an experiment. Floating currency is the experiment and it has lasted 50 years so far. Currency has lost almost all of it's value from before the 70s and minimum wage is a fraction of what it was nominally while asset prices are sky high, then people wonder why people can't afford a house or beef or gas or just to live alone.
Economic growth comes from spending. Households must be incentivized to spend either through inflation or low interest rates.
Buying stocks hoping that it would appreciate doesn’t work when there is no economic growth. So we are back to square one.
And for hundreds of years we didn’t have the same kind of international trade, or the same financial markets. One must wonder whether a new kind of currency must accompany a new era of economy and trade.
Currency losing almost all its value is by design. Modern economists target a 2% inflation rate. This means currency is supposed to lose value. It’s another mechanism to encourage spending to increase economic growth.
> Buying stocks hoping that it would appreciate doesn’t work when there is no economic growth
Why? If you and I earn $100 per year, every year, that means there is no economic growth. We spend half of it on food, clothes, and other necessities and buy stocks with the other half, stocks will go up in value.
An non-growing economy has aspects of a zero-sum game. Speculation can still occur, and can continue unbounded. Stocks, gold, bitcoin, have historically all been deflationary.
Says who? What about governments and companies? People are already incentivized to spend because they need things.
Buying stocks hoping that it would appreciate doesn’t work when there is no economic growth.
You're contradicting yourself and going around in circles. If there is "economic growth" according to you, then stocks will go up, which means they end up being a deflationary currency, which means people will put there money there and not spend it.
They already go up due to inflation, people do buy stocks and other liquid assets, people still spend money anyway.
Also, gold still exists. By your own logic, because anyone can still buy gold or gold futures they should park their money there and never spend it.
Currency losing almost all its value is by design.
It is by design by governments and for governments. No person wants an inflationary currency, governments want it because they can they can borrow and print money they don't have and hand it out to people who in turn help with political power.
People don't want their currency to inflate away unless they own a business that can raise prices while their employees make less nominally.
Gold is actually really good at transferring and measuring value. Think about what a "good" measure of value would be have. It needs to last over time, not corrode or dissolve to the forces. It needs to be distributable, Divisible.. to be ubiquitous. Hard to create/refine, hard to find, so supply can't easily be inflated.
It doesn't matter what the object that is being used for exchange of value or holding value, that's why you can trade and barter random objects. But if you condensate down the properties that make a GOOD money, then gold is more than just a shiny metal.
"The amount of value in the world is increasing so you want to exchange medium to grow with it.." we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally. And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome taught by the FED.
Hold on - you say "we find more gold every day" and then go on to suggest that the money supply doesn't actually need to keep up with economic growth?
If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation we instead target low positive inflation. This is because deflation leads to nightmare spirals where people start stuffing money into their mattresses instead of investing in useful things because holding has risk-free guaranteed returns that the unpredictable real world can't match.
The amount of gold being mined is not sufficient to keep up with economic growth and gold is therefore inherently deflationary. It's not a good way to store value, because a coin that's going to double in value over two years or whatever is obviously not a stable store of value.
You can argue about corrosion resistance or whatever other physical properties gold might have, but unless the civilization collapses you will find just as much luck storing your wealth in the database of a major bank. Needless to say, designing a civilization around the idea that it could collapse at any moment is unnecessary and expensive.
> If we had the technology to maintain 0% inflation, we would do that. We can't, and rather than risk deflation we instead target low positive inflation.
I don't think this is quite right. My understanding is that a low positive inflation would be targeted anyway, because it stimulates the velocity of money; i.e. there's a downside to hoarding, since you need to beat inflation to come out on top. So people will be willing to invest to at least some extent in risk assets, or to buy things now rather than later.
Which, yes, makes inflationary spirals possible, but they've proven less damaging. The inflation numbers seen in regimes that actually collapsed as a result are absolutely dizzying; whereas the deflation seen in the Great Depression was... significant, but not nearly comparable.
The main advantage to keeping inflation as low as possible but positive is also that it makes interest rates cheaper. Individuals are incentivized to spend when there's inflation, but banks have a harder time writing loans because the interest rate on the loan is the product of inflation and the bank's desired ROI.
Low interest rates are a good thing because they allow people to explore new ideas and new businesses - the entire modern tech industry would not exist without ZIRP because the scale of investments has only gone up as technology has advanced.
> Individuals are incentivized to spend when there's inflation
That's not what's happening currently. Inflation has driven up prices to the point where people can't afford to spend. They're forced to cut back on spending just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table. Inflation promises that things are cheaper now than they ever will be, but that just means that anything you can't afford you either have to go without or take an even bigger hit to your wallet after trying to save money at a rate faster than prices are increasing. That sort of thing leads to less spending.
Credit cards were the solution for many Americans for a very long time, but that was never sustainable and now the US has record amounts of household debt and homelessness.
Deflation makes things more affordable and so people buy more. Yes, they could horde all their wealth, but you can't eat money and it isn't much fun. When times are good why would anyone bother going without when they can easily get what they want today. Consumerism is strong enough to keep people buying things. Decreasing prices gives consumers confidence that they can make risky purchases and investments.
> the entire modern tech industry would not exist without ZIRP
The problem with zero interest rate is that it doesn't incentivize better ideas. Why would you work to increase productivity if capital has no cost?
The period 2016-2021 was one where interest rates were the lowest, sometimes even negative, and you saw companies hiring endlessly, and acquiring competitors with no intention of doing anything their their products.
It is very hard to compete on talent and good ideas in such an environment when your all competitors are burning through loaned and venture capital (which itself is also largely loaned at some point).
> And even if there wasn't, imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD.
I fundamentally disagree. Value comes from building stuff not from hoarding. I maintain my intense dislike for gold. And I grant that it had the property of having most people on this earth consider it the peak of value. Sure common belief is a useful property. But I disagree that it's a positive outcome or that there couldn't be many many other variations except gold.
> that's why you can trade and barter random objects...imagine having an exchange currency that literally never inflated... that's GOOD. We have been hoodwinked into thinking that we need inflation to keep up with goods and services, literal stockholm syndrome
Gahhh. Stop taking your economics advice from bitcoin bros and goldbug weirdos. They don't know how anything works and don't want to learn. It's like taking legal advice from sovereign citizens. It's not even that difficult to understand why it's a terrible idea!
High inflation is bad, sure. Deflation is an economic nuke. You know those people who spent like a whole bitcoin buying pizza way back when? "If I'd just held onto it, I'd have $HUGE_NUMBER now".
Yeah. If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza. It's not just Dominos that loses out. All of the people and suppliers that go into pizza do, too. You need people to spend and lend to have liquidity and money flow.
> we find more gold every day, so there is an easing already happening naturally
That's not how that works. You're tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry. Gold is not distributed evenly across the globe, either.
And yeah, we did all that in the past, and it caused deflation, which caused numerous financial panics [0], broke the British economy [1] and after two world wars, the US ended up with like 70% of the world's gold [2].
TL;DR: Tying your entire country's economic growth to the production output of a single mining industry is stupid and we don't do it for very good reasons. Everything is a conspiracy if you don't know how anything works.
> If your money goes up in value, you have a huge incentive to stockpile it and not buy pizza
A lot hinges on this being true, but being deflationary is not unique to gold. It is also true for a lot of other things, including stocks. Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong. So much so that other countries seek to mimic it.
The argument should cut both ways: A strong stock market which is deflationary should lead to economic stagnation. Why buy a pizza today when you can buy S&P500 and buy two pizzas tomorrow?
Reality seems to disagree here. People buy what they need and want, today, and whether the rest is stored in fiat currency, stocks, or gold seems to matter very little for economic productivity.
> Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong
I...don't think you know what stocks actually are. Your argument doesn't make sense because stocks are the literal exact opposite of a deflationary good lol.
Companies issue stock to raise money. If you buy stock from a company, you're giving them that money in exchange for a small stake in ownership.
It gets more complicated with stock markets and all the other stuff, but the heart of it is taking money that would normally sit for decades doing nothing and giving it to those who can use it right now.
> Reality seems to disagree here.
It only does if you don't know how things work and don't want to learn lol
There is certainly some misunderstanding here, and I am unsure about where it is. Perhaps another example could have been more clear.
When you "buy the S&P500" you do not buy stock from companies. No S&P ETF takes part in private placements or IPOs. They buy "used" shares on the open market, with the single intention of selling it on the open market to someone else.
When you buy the S&P, at no point do you give money to any of the S&P companies (except perhaps a small fee to the ETF issuer, most of which are public companies, but let's not split hairs about that).
There are of course other methods of buying the S&P500, such as tracker certificates, but they only add layers of indirection to the above, they do not change the fundamental facts about it.
> you don't know how things work and don't want to learn
I do find it rather ironic that economists can pretty much universally agree on this concept. And yet when you point out the very existence of the billionaire class inherently causes the exact same issue you're suddenly a communits.
How is it good for an economy to have a small subset of individuals hoarding wealth through property, artwork, and offshore bank accounts - not spending it in the economy from which they extracted it? "Job creators" is a farse, the subset who you can point to who ACTUALLY create(d) jobs a-la Page and Brin have long since stepped away from that job creation and have joined the ranks of: number go up.
Yes, it's just a shiny piece of metal. However, it is a pure element and there is a limited amount of it, unlike pretty much anything else except maybe silver.
This is the origin of the entire white collar world and all of its odd bedfellows, and it will die in our lifetime. All of our jobs will go with it, unfortunately.
So as trade increases, and the need for dollars increases, gold and the dollar increase in value together.
That sounds benign until you realize that is: deflation. It incentivizes everyone to hold their dollars instead of spending them, and parasitically gain from gold's increasing utility use as currency by others.
This further decreases dollars available on the market to use in trade, further increasing their value. Which ... yes this can be an economic death spiral. Or at least, a strongly growth conflicted world.
A world in which you can make 5-10% a year by avoiding economic activity or investment is not a healthy world.
(And you can't increase gold supply to counteract this, because gold supply is also always balanced against the cost of extracting gold. Unless everyone else on the planet except the US government is prohibited from mining gold, there is no play there.)
Can you make the same arguments for holding land and activity that requires land? Or holding any other valuable, limited commodity vs activity that requires that commodity, copper for example?
Investors in those things haven't caused an economic death spiral. It's considered shrewd and good business to buy and hold things that are seeing increasing demand.
> This further decreases dollars available on the market to use in trade, further increasing their value.
... thereby reducing the amount of dollars required to trade a given amount of other things. Where does the spiral come from?
Holding land isn't as straightforward as you describe it. Every parcel of land is different. It takes a lot of knowledge of many kinds to be the one who makes money from real estate, instead of losing outright for overpaying, underselling, or simply being whittled down by taxes and other expense. And its lack of liquidity creates high situation risk, for anyone who doesn't have a large enough csh buffer to weather life's turns, unscathed by any immediate needs.
But yes, sophisticated investors do make money on under utilized land. Parasitically.
And it is an economy damper. Under utilized land is poor economic optimization by definition. Not to mention the undertow it creates, in terms of unproductive scarcity, for people who actually need to utilize land - whether that is for homes or businesses.
The solution, as economist Henry George pointed out, is to tax land, but not the property on it. Tax the exlcusionalry holding of a limited resource, don't tax productive value created by people.
Taxing land and not property isn't as simple as taxing both, but it isn't rocket science either. There are lots of standards and practices, because distinguishing between the two is important for many reasons.
The irony of taxing property, the stuff that makes land productive, is that it is a wealth tax that hurts rich and poor alike. A poor person, unemployed, who spends their time bereft of reliable income improving their own home will now be taxed on the value added - every year for the rest of their lives or until they sell or lose their home. That is a very perverse situation.
So yes, the taxation situation that subsidizes under utilized property, which is also parasitically rewarded by gains in value far exceeding the lower taxes they pay (for having no development to tax), is continually damaging the economy.
I didn't describe anything as straightforward, the fact remains that there are limited goods/properties/commodities that are in demand, not just money. It's not up to me to show why it's exactly like money because that was the only property of money used to describe this detrimental problem, it's up to the person who says that is a problem with deflationary money. Money can also be taxed too, so that also is insufficient to make the case for why it is different than land. Or alternatively you could take a limited non-renewable commodity (say, copper) that is in demand but not taxed. Also you have still not addressed that increasing value of money naturally reduces the required amount of it necessary for making a particular trade. A fairly striking omission when claiming there are feedback spirals in such a system.
That doesn't make any sense to me. Under Bretton Woods, a "dollar" was a contractual equivalent to a fixed amount of gold. There's no difference. When people are talking about "flow out" they're not talking about literally motion of currency[1], just who owns it.
[1] Which is backwards in your reasoning anyway. If you're a foreign power wanting to hold dollars, and dollars are physical gold coins, then you quite literally need to move them physically out of the country, right?
> Ok, bear with me for a moment - what if the US would use actual physical gold coins instead of dollars?
You'll get a bear economy, leading to the eventual deflation and collapse.
Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
Fake economics to "stable money causes hitler" in two sentences.
Countries used gold or metals either directly as currency or to back paper currency for hundreds of years. If their governments overspent they collapsed.
Saying you need inflation or you get hitler is pretty wild.
Your proof that the economic system that worked for hundreds of years doesn't actually work is a small town that issued their own currency, which allowed them to nominally pay people less and there were more jobs?
That's what inflation does, everyone gets paid less, but they don't realize it because they just see the same number coming in and more going out.
And then because of that, somehow noninflationary currency results in hitler in 8 years (even though it was used for hundreds of years).
I think you should look at the other end, which is governments going broke and not being able to inflate their way out of it.
> Your proof that the economic system that worked for hundreds of years
It did not. The economic system that was in place for hundreds of years kept the population in a permanent state of depression. Most people had barely enough money to buy necessities.
The economic growth exploded, surpassing _millenia_ of innovation within mere _decades_ once we got rid of the golden chains.
But I guess that you fancy yourself being landed gentry and not a landless serf?
kept the population in a permanent state of depression.
Says who?
people had barely enough money to buy necessities.
Where are you getting that? I think you're confusing and conflating all sorts of things like human advancements with inflationary money. I'm sure what you're saying makes sense if you think every invention, discovery and gain of knowledge was from people having their money inflated, but there isn't any evidence of this, it's just you restating it.
The economic growth exploded, surpassing _millenia_ of innovation within mere _decades_ once we got rid of the golden chains.
That really only happened in the 70s, it wasn't exactly the dark ages before that.
From learning the basics of history? Before 1900-s famines were common, and most people were illiterate.
> That really only happened in the 70s, it wasn't exactly the dark ages before that.
Got it. You live in an imaginary world.
In reality, the first inflation happened when the European civilization established contact with South America. It rapidly expanded the monetary base and provided an impetus to economic development.
Then paper money (and equivalent debt-based mechanisms) were invented and became popular, and this turbocharged everything.
I just explained history to you, you realize being patronizing and repeating yourself isn't evidence right?
From learning the basics of history? Before 1900-s famines were common, and most people were illiterate.
Do you think the printing press, the engine and large scale agriculture might have more to do with food and literacy than inflation?
All those problems were solved before the US went off the gold standard anyway.
In reality, the first inflation happened when the European civilization established contact with South America. It rapidly expanded the monetary base and provided an impetus to economic development.
You realize this doesn't make sense right? This idea that printing money somehow leads to all human advancement is bizarre, even for someone who is ignoring all the things I said before. If two cultures crossed oceans do you think the advancement might come from international trade or do you think some tribe in the jungle could make up a currency, start printing it off, then go straight on to skyscrapers and video games?
All this is just a gish gallop anyway, you never bothered to explain how not having inflation "causes hitler in 8 years" even though it's only been the last 50 years that we have been off of backed currency.
You also didn't confront the fact that anyone can put their money in stocks, bond or gold and essentially have a deflationary currency but they still spend money anyway.
> Fun fact: it was not hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that led Hitler to power but _deflation_ because of its insistence on sticking to the gold standard.
"Hyperinflation caused Hitler" is one of the common narratives that "everyone knows". But German economy was actually growing during the hyperinflation era and by the time of Hitler's ascension, the hyperinflation had long been in the past.
I personally edited this very Wikipedia article several times, but my changes got reverted by goldbugs who want to memory-hole it.
Thanks for sharing. I can corroborate some of the unemployment numbers in Lords of Finance and have no doubt there was some deflation. I do think the seeds of the Third Reich were sown well before this period mostly due to the insistence of France wanting full reparations and Germany borrowing in foreign currencies.
Hyperinflation undoubtedly left a huge psychological scar, especially because it happened right after the loss in WWI. But it did not cause a long protracted unemployment period that directly resulted in mass disgruntlement.
And most importantly, the deflation was directly caused by Germany's insistence on staying on the gold standard. And this has been an almost ironclad law: large countries that insist on gold standard end up with stagnating economy.
I always thought it was the musical energy of Bertold Brechts "Die Dreigroschenoper" that lead Hitler to power. /s
Just because two things are correlated in time, doesn't mean they are necessarily causally linked. Surely there are multiple factors at the same time behind the rise of a demagogue. In the case of Hitler the grievances of WWI played probably a much bigger role than economic problems.
Fair, but at the very least "hyperinflation caused Hitler" is a significantly weaker statement than "deflation caused Hitler", given that the former was replaced by the latter like 8+ years before Hitler's takeover.
Economic problems was a big part though, the 1929-33 great depression. It features heavily in political literature pushed by the Nazi party leading up to takeover. You know, like "Arbeit und Brot", etc.
All the facts are true here, but "design defect" is silly. The entire purpose was to keep a country like the US from exploiting its position, and becoming the "world's reserve currency" which is just a euphemism for running up massive debts to poorer states.
Bretton Woods was sabotaged by the US and the USSR through the single vehicle of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Dexter_White. Without a Bancor, the entire system simply became a mechanism to exploit the poor.
I agree with you that Bretton Woods was doomed from the beginning, both Keynes and Friedman said so, and this should be a better known POV. Economists are not historians though, and historians write human-driven stories (i.e., it was Nixon who ended Bretton Woods, it's not that it was going to inevitably collapse as an econometric question).
All that said, Bretton Woods matters because people look at the gold standard as a time when wages in the United States rose. Like that's why Bernie Bros on HN care. It's the same reason they oppose globalization: me me me. So it's worth knowing why it was flawed. They don't comprehend that before and after Bretton Woods, hourly wage charts measured a fundamentally different thing.
I think it's better to attack the charts - I mean, you're responding to a Charts Guy, a guy who's like, look at this Gold Denominated Chart guy - because that's what their brains work on. Don't worry about economics. These guys are not economists. They are Charts. The real attack on their worldview is that, well, just because the year in the X axis is an increasing, doesn't mean that you can compare a bigger year to a smaller year. They would really like the world to be ordered that way, but it's not, and taking leadership on convincing them of that is very hard.
> The gold bugs are almost entirely on the right. The left are far more likely to be MMTers.
see, i don't want to generalize about left and right. it's much simpler than that. look at what this thread is actually about: "chart for $/GLD is going up and to the right, therefore, gold good." okay? it's not complicated. it's not left vs right as much as it is, for every 1 person who's like, "things are complicated, economics are interesting, let's talk about it" there are 19 who live day to day in a relentless grind, and get-rich-quick is literally their only apparent salvation. they want the world to be ordered where they are a Green Wojack, where some random bet or gamble makes them a ton of money. that's why we're talking about it, not to figure out economic policy. same reason we talk about cryptocurrencies and startups. to most regular people - and programmers are regular people - it's about, $$$.
it is a totally valid complaint to say, "floating exchange rates do not produce charts that go up and to the right." I mean, that's their problem! They made the wages per hour chart stop going up and to the right! It's not that they are bad policy!
Do people on HN care about joe schmoe hourly worker? No. You can certainly make tons of money trading currencies, but look, these people are not trading. They're gambling. This class of get-rich-quick person likes: real estate, cryptocurrency, gold, startup stock... are you getting it?
You are making it about, "neoliberal dogmas" and "gold bugs" or whatever. Trust me, those people are not the morons. The gamblers are 10x as stupid. They are the antagonists.
government policy definitely has the greatest power to create (or destroy) wealth, there are a lot of things wrong with economic policy in this country, but floating currency exchange is not one of those problems.
And you'd be wrong. It's not even difficult to understand why. Uncontrolled inflation is bad. Deflation is much, much worse. You do not want deflation. It rots your economy and nukes lend and spend. We trade a small amount of inflation to avoid the nuke that is deflation.
This is, like, one of the few things economists -- even most of the crazy ones -- agree on.
That's an oversimplification. Demand-side deflation can be bad for the economy, but it's also because our modern economies are basically reliant on inflation to manage our insane debts. Typically, critique of inflationary principles is coupled with a broader critique of MMT and how our economies are run. Deflation is fine or even beneficial when it comes from increased productivity (supply-side). Heck, we have deflation in some sectors of our economy (eg. technology) and consumers greatly benefit from it. Unfortunately the good type of deflation we see in our economies is overshadowed by the money printer going brrrrrrr.
Deflation is bad for the elites and politicians, and good for consumers. When the former are running the show, of course they will claim that deflation is the worst thing ever, despite the immense harm inflation inflicts on the average person. And if you spend like 5 minutes pondering the justification for why that is, you'll see it's mostly BS.
> Deflation is bad for the elites and politicians, and good for consumers.
Hahahaha no. Other way around. I assume you meant "consumers" as a short hand for "normal people" and not its actual meaning of "people who need to buy things on a regular basis" because you do not want to be a consumer in a deflationary market. You're constantly having to piddle your wealth away because you're forced to exchange money for goods and services. Like food and shelter.
Deflation means no access to modern lending because there's no incentive to do anything with money except hold it. That's fine if you're already wealthy, because either you have it on hand, have assets for collateral, or can call in a favor. If you're not wealthy, you're just fucked.
Having easy access to debt is, overall, a phenomenal thing for the non-wealthy. Can you abuse it? Yup. Can it be predatory? Sure. Does it mean the average person gets access to capital without access to generational wealth or decades of saving? Absolutely. The middle class kind of doesn't exist without it. See also: The Ability to File For Bankruptcy is Good, Actually.
> And if you spend like 5 minutes pondering the justification for why that is, you'll see it's mostly BS.
I'm always a fan of examining things, but there's a prerequisite. You need enough education, critical thinking skills, and maturity to understand why you start at the null hypothesis: any "Secret Knowledge They Don't Want You To Know" theory is conspiracy bullshit.
And enough cynicism to know when people start talking about "elites and politicians" like they're one homogenous lump of evil agenda, it's usually a shibboleth for other, ah, less socially acceptable beliefs.
the best way to expand your worldview is to consider that time series charts do not tell a whole, or even accurate, story, a lot of the time. for example, looking at a chart of a line going up and to the right for money supply isn't as meaningful as you think it is.
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