Not_mikey @ Not_mikey @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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8 mo. ago

lower interest rates go, as more imports mean more buying US debt.

More imports means currency devaluation/ inflation on the international market. This pushes interest rates up as people demand higher interest rates to counteract expected inflation. If I buy a bond at $500 and expect that $500 to be worth the equivalent of $400 in 5 years when it matures, I'll demand a higher interest rate to counteract that loss in real value. If you want to see an economy that reliant on imports look at Venezuela during its first oil booms and tell me that's a healthy economy.

you increase production because people are begging you to take there money

That doesn't increase production. If I'm a farmer in Weimar Germany and some guy is begging me to take his wheelbarrow full of cash for a potato that's not going to make me produce more potatoes. That'll just make me doubt the worth of that wheelbarrow worth of cash and think about how hard it will be for me to try and get someone to take that wheelbarrow full of cash so I can get a new plow. Im not going to put in the extra effort to make more potatoes so i can fill my shed with this money that i have to beg people to take and is probably worthless. Money is only as good as what you can buy with it and if it's hard to buy stuff with it eg. Your begging people to take it, then it's not worth anything.

If you completely reject supply side economics, what would have been the solution to stagflation? Harold Wilson's government proved you couldn't just add more money and increase wages to get out of it. It only made it worse.

Stagflation doesn't have to be a recession, it could just be stagnation. UBI would cause a recession though in the standard economic definition of high unemployment and lower productivity. Per wikipedia stagflation is caused by:

supply shocks, such as a sharp increase in oil prices, and misguided government policies that hinder industrial output while expanding the money supply too rapidly

The latter explanation matches what UBI will do very well, industrial output will go down because less people are working and the money supply will increase as people will have more money to spend on things. In general I think you should read that Wikipedia page on stagflation, it shows the pitfalls of only focusing on juicing demand without thinking about supply.

UBI will not be a jump in economic growth, again per wikipedia:

economic growth is an increase in the quantity and quality of the economic goods and services that a society produces

There is no mechanism in UBI to increase production. The numbers may go up but thats just due to inflation, real output will remain the same or drop due to the increase in unemployment

this is not how China works, private enterprises ....

Yes it is, yes China has private enterprises that are subsidized by the state but there are also a lot of state owned enterprises. The second largest EV manufacturer in the world is a state owned enterprise SAIC.

job guarantees waste people's time

Is cleaning up the environment a waste of time?, is building high speed rail a waste of time? Is building new affordable housing a waste of time? You seem to think everything productive and worth doing is already captured by the market when it's not, there are tons of things that need to be done that the market ignores. The government can be productive if we allow it to, and productivity is literally the opposite of wasting time.

a job guarantee also suggests no possible cause for firing.

Yeah it does, you can still get fired for being bad at your job, it's just the government has to give you a new job.

I'm not saying we need to optimize for lowering inflation and increasing productivity, I'm saying inflation without an increase in productivity (stagflation) doesn't help workers, and inflation with a decrease in productivity hurts workers.

I think you're underestimating specialization. You're average person is not going to be able to make an addition on there home that is safe and up to code without a couple years of schooling and apprenticing. If that's what your using to counteract wage inflation of the carpenter then that carpenter can charge the equivalent of 2 years of your wages in labor costs alone, that doesn't get into materials.

Staying on the subject of home additions let's imagine a neighborhood of say 5 people who want a new addition with 2 workers who can do it this year. Before UBI the houses will bid up the price of the addition until the two richest families win and get the addition. After UBI one of the workers quits, everyone now has an extra $1,000 though so they want to get an addition, but everyone else has it too so prices again get bid up until the one richest family gets an addition. That second richest family has lost purchasing power, they used to be able to purchase an addition, and now they can't. Sure the carpenter is making a shit ton but so is everyone else so when he goes to buy a new car he's competing for that more limited supply with other people now making $ hundreds of thousands a year.

These people are losing purchasing power because the supply is decreasing. Real wage growth (wage inflation - inflation) requires an increase in purchasing power, ie a worker can buy more stuff with there wages. The worker can not buy more stuff with there wages if the amount of stuff in general goes down.

This is why are jobs guarantee is better, the government can use the unused labor to increase the supply. Even if the government is shitty and inefficient at making cars, every car they make is one that wouldn't have been created anyway so the total supply goes up and now a person who previously couldn't buy a car can buy a shitty government car, there purchasing power has increased. And it doesn't even have to be a shitty car, Chinese state owned companies have shown that they are fully capable of making decent quality low price electric vehicles.

Sucks to be Mexican. The world cups finally coming to your country after 40 years and the tickets are too expensive for the locals to afford.

Will probably be great in Mexico and Canada, they'll probably fill the stadiums there with the people who don't want to go to the US to see it.

I can see how this may be useful. My understanding is that this is go lang and the person created a wrapper type UUID and this function takes the go standard library uuid.UUID and returns the wrapped UUID.

The wrapped UUID could be useful as you can then define methods for it like toInt() or something to make it implement some ID interface you have set up. It's a common pattern in go to create a thin wrapper around an imported type so you can implement all the methods required for some interface you defined. It does make naming those thin wrappers hard because what are you supposed to name the struct that just contains a uuid?

Yes people will work, but less people will work then they do now, that will lower productivity and therefore supply and raise prices. If you're relying on imports from low wage countries, while your own countries productivity and therefore exports go down, then that will just increase the trade deficit. So more money will be leaving the country, increasing the supply of that currency on the international market and thus decreasing its value. Another word for a decreasing value of currency is inflation.

everyone is happy to not have to work, and still get cheap products

Again where are these products coming from. Internally they will get more expensive as wages rise, externally they will get more expensive as the value of the currency falls.

You picked the one job out of that list that people will voluntarily do. Very few people are signing up to do manual labor restoring ecosystems, building housing/infrastructure. You can say this is a mindset thing that will change once people have there basic needs covered but there are a ton of rich people who don't work for a living right now and you don't see them on the highway picking up trash. A change in scarcity mindset isn't going to build a high speed rail network, labor and investment will, and UBI will make that labor and investment a lot more difficult to get.

We don't not live a slave system we live in a capitalist system, both use coercion to extract labor from the worker but they do so in very different ways. I'd recommend you read some Marx to better understand the labor relations under capitalism. Either way a UBI system doesn't challenge the capitalists control of the means of production and thus doesn't challenge there true power. If anything it reduces the workers power as they can no longer use there power to withhold there labor. What are the unemployed on UBI going to do if there conditions deteriorate? If worst comes to worst workers can always strike which is devastating to the capitalist class. That is one of the main differences between slavery and capitalism, a slave can't strike and is thus completely powerless.

but any supplier can take share and profits by increasing supply

Increasing supply in almost every industry requires more labor though. With UBI you get a labor shortage though as less people will work, and the people that do work will be demanding higher wages like you said, pushing up the price of the finished goods.

This is the problem with UBI , it focuses only on demand and consumption on the assumption that increasing them will magically make supply increase to match. But demand doesn't create supply, labor does, its the core of productivity. Someone's gotta be making the food we all get to eat, and caring for you when you're sick or old etc. If more and more of those people decide to go on UBI then there will be less of those to go around and the supply that will be available will be expensive as the people that continue working will demand a higher wage for there service.

UBI + homelessness means you can afford a shoebox and a lifestyle...

Not sure what you mean by this, by homeless do you mean unemployed and a shoebox just means a small APT, or do you mean actually homeless and a shoebox is just a PO box to have a permanent address? Assuming you mean the former, again you aren't building more shoeboxes so that shoebox that the homeless person wants to rent with there UBI is probably currently occupied by a person who will use all there UBI to bid up the rent so that they can keep there housing as theyre now competing with those homeless people with UBI to keep from being homeless. This works further up the housing ladder as each tier will bid up prices to maintain there housing in the face of rising competition from the lower tiers who now have UBI. So rents increase, but the housing situation for everyone remains the same.

As for the jobs guarantee it doesn't have to be, nor should it be for most people, digging holes and filling them in. The other benefit of it is that we as a society can decide on what work is useful and not the market. Under this a job could be caring for your dependents at home, building green infrastructure, environmental restoration, building affordable housing etc. work that the current market based system doesn't value. With UBI you keep that market system of labor and that work doesn't get done but a lot of socially destructive work like say running a casino keeps going.

UBI actually makes it harder for the government to do these projects as the government wouldn't have the money for it and labor prices would also go up. It'll be hard to build actually affordable housing if all the government budget is going to UBI and construction workers now cost twice as much in wages.

UBI works on the assumption that there's not enough work to be done and that a sizable chunk of the population can stop working and we'll be fine. That's not true, not only do we have to keep working on all the things we currently are, we need to do more to transition to net zero and figure out how to sequester millions of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, that's not going to happen by itself.

forcing supply/competition to catch up

How though? There's no mechanism in UBI to increase production to match the increased demand. If anything its could decrease production / supply as less people work and choose to just live off UBI. Increasing the amount of cash in the market doesn't increase productivity/ supply, otherwise printing money would work. Increasing aggregate demand / money without increasing aggregate supply / productivity just leads to inflation. This is what I mean by its myopic focus on consumption, production also needs to be considered. Everyone wants to focus on the "to each according to their needs" part and not the "from each according to their ability"

Yeah certain industries can scale up relatively cheaply to match this increased demand but things like housing which have a limited supply that expands relatively slowly will just see price increases. You said this could cause increased competition for landlords but it will also cause increased competition for housing.

If there are 4 houses and 5 households and before UBI 4 households made enough to afford $1,000 in rent and they got the 4 houses, after UBI of $1,000 the landlord can use the threat of renting to the homeless person to raise the rent until that homeless person is priced out again. If you increase the amount of money people have without increasing supply then the people will use that money to bid up prices until you're back to the old distribution of resources.

The alternative to UBI that the left has been pushing forever, especially the African American left, has been a universal jobs guarantee. Anyone can go into a government office and they'll give you a job with decent pay. Since you're putting people to work you can actually increase productivity and supply to match the new demand. You still get all the guarantees of income and the benefits that entails of getting out of bad situations but you also are able to pressure employers for better labor standards. If the government is offering a living wage for 3 days a week then other employers will have to match that. It's also more politically viable, trying to convince middle America that "free money" is a good thing will be a lot harder then convincing them that a jobs guarantee is good.

There are some legit criticisms from the left on UBI, it's myopic focus on consumption, the possibility of it being eaten away due to inflation it causes and becoming a gift to landlords etc. I don't think "the government will use it to control us" is a good one as that can be said about any social service the government provides. Should we not have universal Healthcare because if a fascist takes over he can kick you off the roles and you'll die from a preventable disease?

Filling everyone's basic needs will be a vast social undertaking that will require a lot of organization, just because someone might take over that organization and wield it for power doesn't mean we shouldn't make it, it just means we have to keep careful watch over it when we do.

*except class war

And just like in Italy with Giorgia Meloni she's a right winger.

Watch out Germany, Alice Weidels gonna get elected next and bring back the axis, but with girl bosses this time.

No it was a flare that they launched at there own ship because they wanted attention, the hasbara bots told me so.

Idk about the Washington part but the Oregon part would be Jefferson, so not exactly progressive, until you hit the Willamette valley which I've never been to but assume it's like the central valley here in CA and full of the most annoying conservatives constantly complaining about the big cities.

Interesting that Newsom didn't say anything when colleges were forced to send the names of any professor or student who doesn't support genocide. I guess he has very specific concerns about academic freedom.

Hamas probably won't go for this as it still requires them to demilitarize and they, along with a lot of Palestinians in gaza, view that as a path to slow ethnic cleansing like what's happening in the west bank.

You'd think the "Hillary's gonna take our guns" Republicans would understand not wanting to surrender your guns and security to a government in general, much less one that's been trying to genocide you for decades.

You can make that argument for anyone feeding there cat dry kibble then as a cat probably couldn't tell the difference between kibble with meat and the one without as it's so processed anyway.

In general the stuff we feed pets is more like chicken nuggets then chicken breast and you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a vegan chicken nugget and a real chicken nugget these days.

Seems like it could be like music production software becoming widely available. Now you don't need to get a drummer, a bass player etc. Together to make music, you can just make it at home on your computer. It enables lower level people to get off the ground as they now have the tools that the pros do, you want a saxophone but don't know anyone in town who can play or can't afford one, just use a synth that sounds like one. Once you get signed though and you have a label giving you studio time you might hire an actual saxophone player because it sounds better.

Same with movies, AI could be helpful in making small low/no budget indie movies, but I don't think it's at the same quality as real actors for big budget movies where people expect more, so maybe the wealthy studio execs won't benefit from it much right now.

I mean that's sort of the point of the article. Stopping climate change is going to require both systemic and personal change. Media likes to focus on the systemic parts:

mining, manufacturing, and energy production (55.9%); fossil fuels (47.9%); and transportation (34%)

And ignore the personal parts because people don't like to be told "this thing that brings you joy is killing the planet" and are more open to the idea that it's all just the big corporations faults and if we could just control/regulate them we can have a sustainable future without having to change our lifestyle.

We are going to have to change our lifestyle though and meat consumption is going to be a big part of that change. It's also a personal choice, it's not like cars where the system is basically forcing you to drive. You can become vegan or vegetarian tomorrow and the only cost would be to your taste. Sure there are some subsidies nudging you towards consuming meat, but rice and beans is still the cheapest diet there is and no amount of beef subsidies will make a burger the cheaper option.