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TheDemonBuer

@ TheDemonBuer @lemmy.world

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  • Kamala Harris Completely Fails to Read the Room on 2028

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  • Yeah, I don't think Harris is the candidate, but who is? I'm skeptical that democratic voters can reach a consensus on a candidate. I'm sure establishment/moderate Democrats can come to a consensus on their candidate, and progressives can come to a consensus on their candidate, but there's only one party nomination. Will the progressives vote for the candidate the moderates come up with? Will the moderates vote for the candidate the progressives come up with?

  • U.S. Olympic Hockey Hero Responds To Diss Of Women's Team By Trump, Men's Squad

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  • “People are so negative about things,” he continued. “I think everyone in that locker room knows how much we support them, how proud we are of them and we know the same way we feel about them, they feel about us.”

    I'm sure he believes that, but I doubt he's talked to a single member of the women's team to hear their opinions on the matter. I doubt he cares.

    It just goes to show the huge gender disconnect in this country. Trump is a white man's president, and these white men can't understand why everyone else is so mad at them. They are seriously lacking insight.

    And I'm saying this as a white man. Not all of us are on board with this, but I can't seem to explain to some of my fellow white men why they need to make some changes to how they view things. Again, they lack insight and I don't know how to get them to open their damn eyes. I've kinda just stopped trying, and I just don't talk to them about it anymore.

    Edit: idk if it's right to say Trump is a white man's president, necessarily, because it's not all white men and it's not only white men, even if it is mostly white men. But, I do think it's right to say that Trump is the president of people who have a certain attitude about manhood or masculinity. He's the president for people who think they're just inherently superior to everyone else. He's the president for people who don't care about anyone else. He's the president for selfish, narcissistic people, and in this country a lot of white men are that way, unfortunately.

  • Also, in my state, all the drivers are the worst

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  • It is a scientific fact that Tennessee has the worst drivers. Not my state, btw.

  • The Economist: Don't go after the rich to fix broken budgets.

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  • Even leaving out the exploitation, there will always be goods and services that it's more economical to import than to produce locally. Attempts at autarky always fail.

    I'm not necessarily advocating for total reshoring. I don't think it's necessary. However, as I said, globalization led to its own problems. We saw during the pandemic how fragile complex global supply chains can be. Plus, there's a certain amount of autonomy lost when a country is dependent on another country for some vital resource or product. That's a great way for an independent country to become a vassal state.

    Almost everyone wants more than they can afford. That's probably constant, and is probably a consequence of human nature. But inflation isn't constant. So I don't buy that explanation.

    You are clearly unfamiliar with Japan in the 90s. Despite falling prices, Japanese consumers didn't go out and spend mindlessly. They saved, causing prolonged deflation. It got so bad they had to make savings rates negative to try and get people to spend the money the government was printing instead of saving it.

    Insatiable consumption is a cultural thing, not necessarily "human nature." Here in the US where I am, the culture of endless consumption has been carefully, deliberately cultivated over generations. Here, if you put money in someone's hands, generally they will spend it, that's true, not save it like the Japanese did. But clearly not every country is like the US.

    And not every person is that way, either. Here in the US there are people who aren't so loose with their money. Or at least there were. My grandparents lived through the Great depression and they were quite thrifty, regardless of what the Federal Reserve's policies were at any given time.

    But it isn't just my explanation. That's just how it works. Supply and demand determines price. Prices go up when demand outpaces supply. The amount of money in the money supply can influence that, because, as we've established, under many circumstances at least, if people have money to spend they will try to spend it. But central banks rarely just print money and hand it to people. When they do, yeah, that can definitely be a recipe for runaway inflation.

  • The Economist: Don't go after the rich to fix broken budgets.

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  • Care to share your thoughts on why such high persistent inflation is everywhere if not due to the ever expanding money supply?

    There's no denying that inflation is persistent, and that's by design. Because money is created through debt, and the debt has to be paid back at interest, there's no way that would be possible without persistent inflation. Hence why the Fed has an annual inflation target of 2% (which is admittedly completely arbitrary).

    But the real driver of inflation is simply supply and demand. Prices go up when there is greater demand for products and services than there is supply of products and services to meet that demand. Disruptions to the global supply chain during the pandemic led to a supply demand imbalance and thus higher inflation. Trump's tariffs have contributed to a recent higher than target inflation, as well.

    However, there are also systemic problems that have contributed to higher inflation, and they come down to US capitalism just generally failing.

    Capitalists want to invest their capital where they think they will make the highest profit and get the highest possible return on their investment. The theory is that this should result in capital flowing to productive endeavors that generate a sufficient supply of the goods and services that are most in demand, but that doesn't necessarily happen. Capitalists aren't in the business of meeting consumer demand, they're in the business of maximizing their profits, and often those two things are incongruous. And that's why it's so hard to keep inflation under control. Domestic producers are simply not producing enough of the goods and services to meet demand, because doing so just isn't profitable enough for them, and that's creating an imbalance, where demand constantly outpaces supply, causing prices to go up too fast.

    The Fed could address this by raising rates, tightening the money supply, reducing demand and causing a recession. That's one way, but almost no one wants that. The other, better way to address higher than target inflation is to get the damn greedy capitalists to stop prioritizing their own maximum profits and start producing the quality, affordable products and services that people actually want.

    We were able to mask many of the negative impacts of greedy capitalists running everything for some decades thanks to globalization. We couldn't get our capitalist scumbags to produce enough quality, affordable products and services domestically to meet domestic consumer demand, because doing so wasn't profitable enough for them, so we let them go overseas to produce stuff, where taxes were lower, regulations were minimal, and the workers were extremely poor and thus dirt cheap. That worked for a while. It made it possible for some things to remain relatively affordable, even get much cheaper in some cases, while maximizing profits for the greedy scumbug capitalists. But, globalization was a one time deal, and it came with its own problems, so now there's a big push to reshore a lot of our production. But the greedy scumbug capitalists won't produce domestically because they can't make the profits they want making products and services people want to buy at prices people want to pay. So there just isn't enough domestic supply being produced to meet demand.

    An example would be cars. Making low margin, affordable mass market vehicles just isn't profitable enough for the greedy scumbug capitalists, even if it is what most consumers want, so instead they make higher margin, lower volume luxury vehicles. This has driven up the average cost of vehicles.

    Inflation will remain persistently high so long as the supply of affordable products and services is insufficient to meet consumer demand.

  • The Economist: Don't go after the rich to fix broken budgets.

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  • This whole debate is completely moot. We continue to have it because people still do not understand how fiat currencies work. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer. The Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. And I'm not talking about actually printing physical dollars or minting coins, I'm talking about going into a computer and typing in some numbers and, boom, money is created. The VAST majority of transactions these days do not involve any physical currency. That's why the physical currency in circulation is significantly less than the total money that's out there. Today, money is numbers on a computer, and we can create an infinite amount of it.

    But, I know, inflation. I know. People still think that modern monetary theory is unrealistic because it would cause runaway inflation. But, modern monetary theory isn't a theory, it's just how money works in the 21st century. People are creating money all.the.time. and it's not just central banks. Do you know how many crypto currencies have been created on various block chains? Millions. Millions of coins, worth trillions of dollars. But that's just crypto, and crypto is NOTHING compared to fiat currencies, like the dollar.

    I said the Federal Reserve creates its own money, and that's true, but most of the dollar creation doesn't actually happen at the Federal Reserve. Banks create money everyday. Every time a bank creates a new loan, they are creating money. Out of nothing. I know, people will swear up and down that banks aren't creating the money, they're lending out depositors money, but that's not true. It used to be kind of, sort of true, if you squinted and looked at it just right, back when we had fractional reserve banking. Banks used to be required to hold SOME depositors money in reserves, but it was a ridiculously small amount, like 5% to 10%. As of 2020, the Federal Reserve lowered the reserve requirement to 0%, and it ain't going back up. There's no need for it to. Banks don't use the money in your savings account to make loans, they just create the dang money. Banks make a loan and disperse the loan proceeds without taking the money from anywhere. Again, they don't take the money from your savings and give it to the borrower, they just create the money. The borrower has the loan proceeds and you still have the money in your savings account that you can withdraw at any time.

    That is how our monetary system works. We use debt to create money, and we use interest rates to control inflation. That works well enough for funding profit making organizations. The idea is the business will borrow the money to fund their business, with the expectation that they will generate enough revenue from their business operations to repay the money, with interest. As long as the business generates enough revenue to repay the loan, it all works ok. But this system DOES NOT WORK FOR PUBLIC SERVICES. If a public entity provides a public service, but does not charge for that service (or doesn't charge enough), that public entity cannot repay a loan. When we force public entities to borrow money to pay for public services, we doom those public entities to taking on debt that they have no means of repaying. We could tax to repay the loans, but why do that when we could just tax to pay for the public services in the first place? Why? Because people don't like paying taxes, that's why. So we force public institutions into borrowing money to pay for public services, money they can't repay WITHOUT RAISING TAXES! (or charging fees for the service, but if you have to charge a fee for a public service, it's not really a public service, it's just a service for those who can pay) It's complete nonsense.

    This whole thing is especially ridiculous at the Federal level. Because, again, the Federal Reserve LITERALLY creates its own money. Do you know how much the US Treasury Department owes the Federal Reserve? $4.5 trillion dollars. We have to tax people to get dollars to payoff debt, in dollars, that we owe to the institution that creates dollars. How fucking stupid is that?

    There is absolutely no reason why the Federal Reserve couldn't just create money and give it to the Treasury Department to use to fund all government services. I don't see any reason why this would cause significant inflation. But if it did, we could raise taxes. Not to fund public services, but to control the amount of money in the money supply to keep inflation under control. But I don't see any reason why we couldn't just continue to use interest rates to serve that purpose. Again, when a business borrows money, it has to repay that loan at interest. During periods of higher inflation, raise rates, raising the cost of borrowing, businesses borrow less, less money creation is happening at banks, inflation slows down. And because none of this would affect public services, because public services would be funded without debt or taxes, higher rates don't have to mean governments taking on expensive debt that they will have no way of repaying.

  • Trump touts bill that could make voting harder for married women

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  • Intentionally so.

    Trump wants to stay in power, by any means necessary, legal, ethical or otherwise. Usually otherwise. His main motivation for this is simply his massive ego.

    Many different groups want to help him stay in power, so he can remain a useful idiot for them. Most of these groups just want the usual corruption stuff. They just want to use Trump to try and get rich. But some have more ideological goals: White supremacy, expanding the US empire and strengthening US global hegemony, neoliberalism/right wing libertarianism/anarcho capitalism, techno feudalism, White Christian nationalism, and others. Some, like China and Russia, want Trump to stay in power because they know he will continue to weaken the US, and they want to see the US weakened, if not eventually collapse (honestly, I'm fairly sympathetic to this one).

  • Trump touts bill that could make voting harder for married women

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  • Intentionally so.

    Trump wants to stay in power, by any means necessary, legal, ethical or otherwise. Usually otherwise. His main motivation for this is simply his massive ego.

    Many different groups want to help him stay in power, so he can remain a useful idiot for them. Most of these groups just want the usual corruption stuff. They just want to use Trump to try and get rich. But some have more ideological goals: White supremacy, expanding the US empire and strengthening US global hegemony, neoliberalism/right wing libertarianism/anarcho capitalism, techno feudalism, White Christian nationalism, and others. Some, like China and Russia, want Trump to stay in power because they know he will continue to weaken the US, and they want to see the US weakened, if not eventually collapse (honestly, I'm fairly sympathetic to this one).

  • Some Democrats plan to skip Trump's State of the Union address

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  • Hey man, nice shot.

  • I'm in!

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  • It's fairly straightforward: they don't want restrictions placed on their rights to own and carry a gun, but they absolutely want restrictions placed on the rights of their political enemies.

  • Hitler’s Greenland Obsession | After creating an economic mess with ill-advised tariffs, Hitler looked north in pursuit of resources and national security.

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  • "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

    • Karl Marx

  • Do Democrats Have a Plan for the Post-Trump World Order?

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  • There’s a rough consensus that the world is transitioning to a new order, but no one really has any idea what the world is moving toward.

    I think the new world order should be international democracy and the rule of law. But, laws require enforcement and that means some kind of global government entity must be created that has the authority to enact and enforce laws.

    That's essentially the role the US has filled since the end of WWII. We have been the unofficial world police. Some people don't want that to change, but there are a couple of reasons why it should. One, the US is unelected and unaccountable. For a state to govern legitimately, it must have the consent of the governed. Outside of NATO, and perhaps a few other countries, no consent was given to the US, nor did the US care to seek consent. Two, the US has primarily pursued our own interests, and that of our allies. That's thuggery, not the rule of law.

    Of course, what should happen and will happen aren't necessarily the same thing, unfortunately.

  • Republicans, Braced for Losses, Push More Voting Restrictions in Congress

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  • Considering a LOT of conservative women change their name when getting married

    So do a lot of liberal women. Liberal women probably are more likely to keep their maiden name, but I'm sure most liberal women observe the custom of taking their husband's name.

    The point of this is to prevent WOMEN from voting, broadly. Regardless of party affiliation. Many women who are registered Republican and have conservative husbands secretly vote for the Democrats, at least some of the time. I personally know a few right-leaning women who hate Trump, even though their husbands continue to support him.

  • The Multipolar Delusion

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  • The goal shouldn't be a "multipolar" world, the goal should be international democracy and the rule of law. Yes, laws require enforcement and that means some kind of state, with a monopoly on the legal use of violence, must exist. These ding dongs want the US to continue to fill that role. But there are a couple problems with how the US has played the role of global rule enforcer: one, the US is unelected and unaccountable. For a state to govern legitimately, it must have the consent of the governed. Outside of NATO, and perhaps a few other countries, no consent was given, or for that matter even sought. Two, The US seeks to protect its own interests, and that of our allies, not to enforce laws for all countries equally and objectively. Does that sound like the rule of law or a corrupt cop?

  • Robert Duvall Dead: 'Godfather,' ''Apocalypse Now' Actor Was 95

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  • Removed

    Electricity Is Expensive

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  • Capitalists don't care about democracy. Some may tolerate some forms of national democracy, but only conditionally. Many capitalists are avidly opposed to all forms of democracy. All capitalists are opposed to democracy in the work place, that's for sure.

    Defenders of capitalism swear up and down that democracy and capitalism are not incompatible, but they clearly are. You might be able to get capitalists to, again, tolerate some form of probably very limited democracy, but only conditionally, and that means only temporarily. The death of democracy under capitalism isn't a matter of if but when.

  • US fixation on the hard-hat economy and making manufacturing great again makes little sense

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  • The decline in manufacturing, however, is less a story about policy blunders than one about the long progress of the US economy, which has to a large extent graduated out of producing stuff like phones and cars and into the delivery of services, like finance and healthcare – a process similar to that followed by other countries that moved up the ladder of success.

    I think this way of thinking is massively flawed. I really hate this idea that economic "progress" must necessarily mean making and building fewer things, and instead "delivering services."

    One, "delivering services" often means charging rents, meaning you're moving from an economy that creates real value to an economy that extracts rents. A rents and service fee economy isn't really an economy, it's just a machine that creates inflation.

    Two, no matter how far your economy moves up the "ladder of success," people are always going to need material goods. Houses can't be built of financial services and food can't be grown on spreadsheets. We need real stuff to have a real economy. So what this means is that the "graduated" economies must become net importers of real, physical stuff, and/or net importers of poor people to do the work here that can't be as easily moved to another country. We must therefore become dependent on other nations to make the stuff we need. How can a nation maintain its independence if it is completely dependent on other nations for all of its vital products? That's not an independent nation, that's a vassal state.

    Three, all of this assumes that there will always be countries in the world who never "graduate" to our economic level, otherwise who would make everything? But isn't the idea for every country to strive to reach our level of "success?" If so, who will make all the stuff when most of the world's population is rich, working white collar jobs? Martians? And doesn't this create an incentive for us to try and keep at least some countries poor so they can supply us with the cheap goods and migrant labor we need?

    Real economies make things and create real value, they don't just move money around and charge rents. People don't just stop needing material goods once they get rich enough, and someone has to make and build that stuff, it might as well be us. Otherwise, if we come to rely on other people to make our stuff, we lose our independence and our ability to be self sufficient. That's not the road to "economic success," that's the road to economic ruin.

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk

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  • Capitalism has no more solutions because it is only concerned with one thing: maximum profits for owners and investors. The capitalist theorists swear up and down that exclusively focusing on profit maximization will inevitably lead to better lives for everyone, albeit indirectly or incidentally, but that is clearly not true. Maybe it was true enough at various points in the past, but it is absolutely not true anymore. Under capitalism today, the exclusive focus on profit maximization is REDUCING access to a better life for many people, not increasing it.

  • Democrats at Munich security summit to urge Europe to stand up to Trump

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  • Everyone in here saying, "why don't you stand up to him, Dems?"

    Guys, the Democrats don't do that. I don't think they even know how to do that. The whole concept is so alien to them you might as well be asking them to surf the rings of Saturn. No, no, the Democrats don't stand up to rich and powerful people, they gargle their balls. They can get those things so deep in their donor holes that they can tickle the scrot with their uvulas.

    If you're looking for the Dems to stand up to Trump, you're barking up the wrong tree, friends.

  • If you ditched your car, could you afford to leave the suburbs for a great urban neighborhood?

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  • More dense urban areas certainly should be more affordable than suburban or rural areas, but they're often not. Or at least not as much as they could be.

    One reason is I think many suburban and rural areas are being subsidized by urban areas, by using urban tax revenue to pay for suburban infrastructure.

    But I think the biggest reason is that urban areas are often in much higher demand, because that's where most of the jobs and housing are located, but the supply of housing is simply insufficient to meet the demand, thus driving up housing prices. And other prices, too. There's a supply demand imbalance for a lot of things in many higher density urban areas. And part of that is by design. The "suppliers" of homes, that is landlords, don't want to oversupply the market with housing, relative to demand, because that will push down rents, and they want rents to be as high as possible, because rents are their source of revenue.

    Until urban areas find ways to significantly increase the supply of housing relative to the demand, housing prices in those urban areas will remain higher than they could, or should be. Non-car transportation infrastructure also needs to be significantly improved in many urban areas, but that takes money. Money that many urban residents either don't want to pay, or can't pay because so much of their income is going to housing, and other costs of living. Edit: Plus, these infrastructure projects are often poorly managed by politicians, causing cost over runs and long delays.

    Finally, there's a social/cultural element to this that almost no one talks about because it's seen as problematic or taboo. People don't necessarily want to be surrounded on all sides by people they don't consider to be a part of their cultural or ethnic group. I'm sorry, I know, reading that makes a lot of people's butt holes clinch, but it's true. I think people would be much more willing to live in more densely populated urban areas if the people in these areas were more like them (culturally, ethnically). You can choose not to believe that because it makes you uncomfortable, but, uncomfortable though it may be, I think it is nonetheless true.

    Edit: I want to add that I think there is also a class element to this, in addition to the cultural/ethnic element. Many people move out to the suburbs because they don't want to be around people they see as being of a "lower class" than them. Edit, again: also, where there are higher rates of poverty in urban areas, there are often higher crime rates. Many urban areas are often very unequal, with wealthier areas that are better maintained with better schools, very near much poorer areas that are more poorly maintained with worse schools.

    Final edit: so, for better urban areas we need: to stop using urban tax revenue to subsidize suburban infrastructure. We need to significantly increase the supply of housing relative to demand, even perhaps oversupplying housing to drive housing costs down as much as possible. We need better non-car infrastructure and better leadership to better manage the building and maintenance of that infrastructure. We need to reduce poverty and inequality in urban areas as much as possible. If we do those things across all urban areas, I think the ethnic and cultural issues will work themselves out.

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