Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh man I'm trying to resist the urge to join in the rant about traffic behavior.

So whatever Israel is doing, is what they're doing, whatever you call it. And I'm going to even go out on a limb and say that even if you give it one name versus another, the international community isn't going to do anything different than what they are doing now.

It depends on the context. If you're in a biology class, fruit and vegetable have a different meaning than if you're an FDA inspector or a cook.

There is no "one true definition" here, I don't know why this is a difficult concept? Or are we just being intentionally obstinate here?

This 30-minute Veritasium video on the prisoner's dilemma - or its content anyway - should almost be codified in law. I wish our politicians would follow it.

1. Be nice.
2. Be forgiving.
3. Don't be a pushover.
4. Be clear.

Basically it highlights some of the good and bad that our current policy-makers exhibit. One is I think in international politics we're a bit too much of a pushover, we need a little more tit-for-tat.  But at the same time, we are also not forgiving enough - once someone strikes back, we keep attacking instead of forgiving after a time.  We're also too slow to ensure clarity: we have both too much assumptions of the other side being hostile or too much lenience in assuming it's not as bad as we think.

Ah see I'm not talking about the colloquial use, I'm talking about what it would really mean to borrow from yourself. That's why it was a "random question."

Similarly, using the phrase "stealing from yourself" implies that your future self owns the thing but your present self doesn't; I don't think "stealing from yourself" makes much sense either for that reason.

In both cases I'm referring to things you absolutely do tangibly have today, like money in the bank, or food in the cabinet, or whatever.  That is - you can't borrow a pair of shoes from yourself if you don't have a pair of shoes (borrowing from someone else is a different concept, and I'm not thinking about that right now).  You can't even "borrow" (or "steal") a pair of shoes from your future self if you don't have that pair of shoes today.

That was sort of my general train of thought on this... you can't "borrow" or "steal" something that doesn't actually exist.

NOTE: I acknowledge there is a sense of how "steal from your future self" may be reasonable, because if you take some action today, you may prevent your future self from having access to something you otherwise would presumably have if you didn't "use" it today. But it's a bit statistical, because there's no guarantees about material future...  In this case, though, it still has to be something that "exists" today to be able to use it.

Does "borrowing from yourself" have any real meaning, or is it just semantic gymnastics?

Consider, if you "borrow from yourself" how would you pay yourself back? What would this even mean?

Instead of phrasing it "borrowing from yourself", would it be better described as "making an investment", since the idea is more like you are "spending" some resources you have now, in the hope that you end up with more resources in the future than if you didn't spend them now?

Heh no that’s just the dirty secret: all money is fiat, in that you need faith that you can exchange the currency for what you really want.

The difference between gold standard and “true” fiat is that at least with a gold standard you need some gold versus just numbers in a ledger.

Monetary systems could be orthogonal to politics, but they are very easily made political tools. A way (the only way?) to avoid this is to take the power of regulating money away from the government. Bitcoin tried this and failed because eventually all users of bitcoin need to exchange for government-issued funds, which turned it into a virtual commodity instead of an independent monetary system.  Bitcoin also didn’t do itself any favors by making itself inherently deflationary and by making token creation independent from creation of goods and services.

A difficult-to-abuse system would be one where money creation is more directly tied to actual production of goods and services instead of the indirect link in all modern monetary systems where changes in money supply are based on changes in demand for money, which is only correlated with production of goods and services rather than being proportional to creation of goods and services.

It’s like a harmonic oscillator: money supply changes in response to supply and demand but with a gain and phase lag and a feedback term. But instead of treating it like an engineering control system where you don’t want oscillations and catastrophic resonance, politics ends up contributing to an unstable system instead of a stable one.

Also the goals of the Fed are likely outdated; inflation and unemployment rate are “too aggregate.” Instead the mandate could be some measure of standard of living, things like “95% or more of the population spends 35% or less of their income on housing” or “95% of the population has enough savings to cover being out of work for 6 months.”  Those metrics are less subjective and, while related to inflation, automatically scale with inflation.

That said though: the Fed cannot address housing or health care or energy costs, because the Fed cannot change production.