Remember that one way to think about money is as fungible favours. When I work for someone he gives me a token which I can then use to get others to work for me. I do someone a favour and instead of that specific guy owing me a fovour I can now ask a favour of anyone who uses that particular kind of token as money. Money printing then is kind of like stealing favours, and successfully pretending like you did people a whole bunch of favours for which other people now owe you favours. It seems like a bad thing to allow people who didn't provide any value for others to go around bossing people around (literally lol) compared to the people who provided the value for others getting to steer the economy.

I guess there's a technocratic argument for why we shouldn't allow the people who did the favour to be the ones allowed to ask favours back and that instead a wise philosopher king should be able to direct the favours But that's awfully convenient Maybe it will be true for one in a million And that person probably will not ever be the one who seeks it So that's a hard pass for me. I say he who gains the money through mutually voluntary interaction gets to spend the money

Wanted to change the phrasing of one of the point a little bit. I'll reprint the whole paragraph here.

The coordination function / information exchange function of money will be enhanced. The direction of development of the economy will be decided by the people earning money in proportion to how much money they earn, not how much money they print. The people who worked for the money will decide to what ends it will be used. I'd expect better results that way. Generally people take more care making decisions when spending their own money, not to mention they're the only ones with a moral right to regardless of who would spend it "better" (better according to whom? But again: stealing isn't right. Not even if use the money to buy things for the victim. Definitely not if you use it for yourself like a regular thief, or use it attack the victim further as often is the case with the biggest thieving mafia thugs AKA governments today) Spending decisions will more closely track true preference hierarchies. People will invest and spend when they truly want to, and not because they have to in order not to be stolen from.

Because of its deflationary qualities the economy will grind to a halt. Only inflationary money, which transfers purchasing power out of your money into newly created money, allows spending and investment to occur to a sufficient degree to keep an economy functioning and producing. You see if banks didn't suck purchasing power out of your money constantly, effectively stealing from you, you would not spend your money. You'd just keep your money knowing it would buy more in the future. So goes the argument.

After all as we all know people don't ever cash out of investments in cases where those will likely be worth more later. That's why nobody has ever sold S&P500 indexes. Because stocks tend to increase in value, and not decrease, nobody ever sells any stocks. That's reality, right? Oh wait.

And that's why nobody has ever sold gold ever in the history of mankind, right? And never ever sold gold in exchange for stock in a company, right? Every economy ever that functioned under a money that appreciated in value over time ground to a halt and no inventive and innovative companies ever came out such gold-backed economies, right? Oh wait the industrial revolutionS did.

It's such a ridiculous argument. Of-mf*k'n-course people would spend the money. The spending patterns would surely change, and yes many would hold on to money longer, save it, if they knew it would hold its value. But it's like thinking that people who have a water bottle that doesn't leak would never drink from it. Just so g damn retarded. Yes the guy with a leaking bottle will drink it faster because the water will be gone if he doesn't. The guy with a working water bottle will drink when he's thirsty. And that's the preferable scenario.

Similary the guy with money that isn't broken will spend it when the trade-off between having the money and having the thing the money can buy seems worth it to him. He'll probably make wiser spending and investment decisions isntead of rushing into things knowing he'll lose what he's got otherwise, like drinking when he's not even thirsty. He'll keep his money and only when the investment looks really good, or the product seems very attractive will he part with his money in exchange for the thing.

The coordination function / information exchange function of money will be enhanced. The direction of development of the economy will be decided by the people earning money in proportion to how much money they earn, not how much money they print. Spending decisions will more closely track true preference hierarchies. People will invest and spend when they truly want to, and not because they have to in order not to be stolen from.

Any other thoughts on this delfationary death spiral argument?

One can also think about how micropayment streaming and orange checks could add another dynamic and new fodder for statistics. In addition to thinking in terms of how many followers someone has we could also think in terms of how many incoming payment streams the person has, the volume etc. Would the latter be more informative for gauging true popularity / real engagement? I am reminded of the distinction from economics between professed/stated/imagined preference and demonstrated preference.

I'd add John Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs. Dave is a well-spoken intelligent and curious guy with a good bullshit detector. He may not be an expert himself, depending on how you wanna define that, but he has a knack for finding, and then reading extensively, the most accurate most consistent most reasonable experts.

It's kind of like how a mediocre physics or mathematics undergraduate is "smarter" than Archimedes or Da Vinci in that the undergraduate can solve problems these guys couldn't. The undergraduate student will get the right answer to problems, might be able to win in an intellectual competition, because they read other experts like Newton which were more knowledegeable or insightful in some areas and are using their techniques.

Dave is the guy who finds and reads the experts among the experts and that allows him to destroy the more mediocre experts.

If you start the carnivore diet you'll shred through those like a young Shrodinger.

Just kidding of course but I did get some improvement in mental power since I started ditching carbs many years a go and a little more on top of that when trying carnivore.

Shrodinger was on my mind since I started reading the classic by him "What is Life". Great little book so far.

I remember listening to Kevin Kelly on the Tim Ferriss Show it's got to have been around 10 years ago. Interesting dude with lots of interesting toughts.

Went looking and found it: https://tim.blog/2014/08/29/kevin-kelly/ Great stuff.

I'd recommend checking out some long form source material where you hear the people being described (smeared or slandered maybe?) talk about their policy ideas and the viewpoints inspiring them in their own words.

Alice Weidel, the party leader, has been on many a podcast speaking English I believe. There's the conversation with Elon Musk but there's more interviews in english out there in teh podcast world. Also there's some speeches that she gave in the bundestag available on to view on X with subtitles. Perhaps other places as well.

Haven't spent a ton of time looking into it but I did listen to the Elon interview as well as one other appearance on a podcast IIRC. I also listened to one or two complete speechs of hers at the bundestag. I think one of them was about 20 minutes long.

Based on that it seems to me AFD is a center right common sense party. Stop illegal immigration, deal with crime problems, focus on reliable energy, roll back censorship laws, cut back on government spending, try diplomacy with Russia etc.

Really not that extreme at all.

Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics". Don't think you can go wrong with that one.

A short piece by Mises, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth", helped me better understand the following ideas and how they relate to eachother: free markets, economic calculation and price formation.

I also remember reading "Bureaucracy" by Mises and it helping me understand free markets, how they work, what incentives are present, what kinds of results they tend to produce etc by contrasting it to a very different way of allocating resources namely bureaucracy. That piece is not quite as short as the first I mentioned but still not that long.

Increased regulation makes it more difficult, expensive and in some cases impossible to build new houses. Of course the money printing causes assets like land and buildings to increase in price in terms of the devalued money.

Between these two I'd say you've covered most of the reason for this graph.

Another graph which would be relevant to show here would be median income / median house price.

I happened to come across some info recently about house prices in the past in my region.

In the 1920s house was bought for 27k of the monetary units of the country I'm in today. At the turn of the millenium when the euro was introduced the exchange rate between the euro and that monetary unit was 1:40. So 27k of these monetary units, had they been saved, would have been exchangeable for about 700 euros at the turn of the millenium 70 to 80 years later.

Luckily the median wage at the time was also mentioned. That was about 5000 of the monetary units per year. So at that time the cost of a house for most people was between 5 and 6 times yearly wages.

Now let's compare to current day situation where I'm at. If the median net income is about 30k (that may be a little high actually) euros per year, houses would have to cost around 180k euros to have the same ratio. These prices can be found in some regions of the country but not near where that house was sold in the 1920s. Today you wouldn't find anything for much lower than 600k. So that's about 20 years worth of pay.

The factors I mentioned in the beginning would be most responsible in my view. Inflation taking away the purchasing power of your money Regulation increasing the cost of housing and reducing the supply of houses

Interesting stats.

What bothers me when this topic comes up sometimes is the double standards some people use.

Some people bend over backward to exclude any possibility of any of this being done for any other reason than the public welfare. Even in that best case where we're dealing with the noblest of intentions every step of the chain of command / decision-making about policy there's still the "road to hell is paved with good intentions" problem where ideas can arise from good intentions while at the same time being deeply misguided and counterproductive to stated goals.

Then anyone criticizing the slide into dystopian pseudo-technocratic tyranny (e.g. Alex Jones) or offering some resistance is often assumed to have malicious or cynically self-interested ulterior motives or dismissed as a dumb person / "deplorable" in need of re-education.

Somewhat related in that double standards are also in prominent display there: talk about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I see many people apply double standards there.

Anything the "western" "leaders" say when it's about noble intentions they take at face value (even when it's in contradiciton with what they've said at another time) while anything Russian leaders say that may sound reasonable must be pretext and lies.

False flags are a possibility when Russia or some other opponent did it but never when it's "our" "leaders".

When one sees this kind of double-standarding one know one isn't dealing with a rational discussion partner but instead with some kind of cultist or weird religious dogmatist.

You consider the act of voting to entail an implicit consent to the system? I'm not sure if I do.

The argument I'd bring up would be about risk, What he is doing is a fundamentally more risky strategy. If you keep the bitcoin you know you'll have that amount of bitcoin as long as you don't lose the keys , get hacked etc. What you're not exposed to is price risk. What he is doing may get him more bitcoin in the end, or less. We don't know. He does not know. If he is okay with that, fine. But that's the argument: the lack of certainty.

If you don't trade your bitcoin and just hodl it you know you'll have it. There's always the risk if you're not holding any bitcoin that the price will spike and not come down again. If he's willing to take that risk then fine but I'd advise him to keep at least a portion of his capital in assets like bitcoin and gold. That way he can be sure he will always have that portion. How big that part is depends on risk tolerance and one's confidence in one's ability to predict price movements.

edited to add: Another factor would be how much you mind actively managing your portfolio and keeping up with trends, news etc. Some people enjoy doing that. He seems like he might fit in that category. It may not feel like a chore to him.

I'd rather keep open the option to be able to use that time and attention for other things. Sure I may miss out on some gains (then again I may miss out on some losses too...) but I gain free time and attention. I also gain certainty and with that a sense of tranquility. I don't have to worry about my speculation bets checking out. To each his own.

Here's another comment of mine which may be relevant to this comment. #692683 Also the one 2 steps above that one. I give some thoughts of mine about conspiracies in general and what I see as misguided reactions to "conspiracy theorists". I often see an attitude of dismissal, ridicule and straw-manning rather than an inquiring attitude expressing curiosity and good-will.

One can pauze audiobooks but I would guess that audiobook listeners do not pauze the book as often as readers pauze to ponder a point, think about how it relates to the rest of their knowledge and experience, try and find an example or a counter-example etc. I often pauze when reading when something I read does not sit right with me. I try to think about why I'm having this reaction. Similarly when something resonates much in a positive sense. I probably interrupt the process of reading a little too much with this kind of meta analysis, and getting side-tracked or going off on tangents (i write these up sometimes. can take a while to finish a book if there's many of these) but a little of this seems to me to be a good thing. And it seems to me that with audiobooks this kind of thing perhaps does not happen as much as would be desirable because the default is for it to keep playing. It seems to me that listening to books is a more passive process that conditions the consumer more towards being in the passenger seat. Could be off on this.

There's probably benefits as well as downsides when comparing listening to books versus reading them. I'm unclear as to the "net effects" And now that I think about it one could listen to books in a way that one could easily pauze and have a similar process of following up on occurring thoughts and feelings

One podcast I've discovered in the past few years: Geopolitics and Empire. Some very high profile and extremely credentialed guests but also more obscure people. Many of the episodes offer dissident points of view very critical of "the globalists" / NWO / emerging (pseudo-)technocracy

I used to not pay much attention to this kind of talk but since covid I've been looking into it a little bit Seems like some of these conspiracy guys were on to something after all Or at least there is a legitimate discussion to be had about potentially non-democratic influences on national governments. (E.g. what's the role of organizations like Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, WEF, CFR, bohemian grove, Skull and Bones etc? What have organizations like UN, WHO, IMF, World Bank, BIS etc been up to? What's their history? Who makes the decisions in these organizations and how are they selected? Who funds them? What's the relationship with our democratic institutions and tax systems?)

The podcast I mentioned features these kinds of people who actually know what they're talking about. People who've read a couple dozen books, a few hundred papers etc on the topics they're speaking on and in some cases been part of the actual organizations and bureaucracies involved.

I've found that I'd underestimated the amount of conspiracy going on. It's also not that clear if it should be called a conspiracy or not since much of the stuff appeared in publications available to the public such as articles, papers, books etc. It's just that nobody was reading these things except guys like Alex Jones.

And when guys like Alex Jones told people what they read "from the horses's mouth" they were called conspiracy theorists for decades or completely ignored / blacked out from coverage.

Then a weird shift happened where instead of continuing to say "it's not happening, that's a conspiracy theory and therefore somehow untrue by definition" to "yes it's happening, of course, nobody said it wasn't. Besides, it's benign or if anything it is good or even necessary"

Any examples that come to mind where this peculiar switch in PR occurred from "it's not happening you crazy conspiracy theorist" to "it's happening and here's why that's a good thing"?

I've got some candidates myself but I'd like to hear from others first.

Any good pieces of journalism on why this mass immigration has been happening?

Is it an organic process? Or Are there various NGO's or government programs or UN programs trying to suck in immigrants / encourage and enable people to move to "the west"? (who would not have considered emigrating without the intervention of these organizations)

Basically is the bulk of this immigration happening out of the own free will and self-determined decision-making of the immigrants or are there third parties doing their best and succeeding in making the immigration to happen?

I used to not really think about it and I guess I assumed it was a natural / organic / not-artificially-induced phenomenon but now I'm not so sure.

Would it make a difference in your view which of these scenarios, or in what proportions, were reality?

Also is it known what percentage of the immigration that Europe is dealing with is a result from USA's ( or NATO's) war activities and USA's efforts of "spreading democracy" (and the ripple effects of these / effects downstream of these)?