Maybe you're not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi "driving" a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there's a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.
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Makes me wonder about the wheel's rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that's all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).
Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.
Looks cool, though, I guess.
The hubless wheel is on their current models. It's basically their signature differentiator.
There's reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:
https://thepack.news/11000-km-in-2-months-marc-travels-rides-the-verge-ts-across-europe/
The CPB exists to allocate government funding to nonprofit public stations (the individual broadcasters in each city) and networks (NPR and PBS). Without government funding, the CPB has no reason to exist.
The public stations and NPR and PBS still exist. They are the ones that actually produce and distribute content. And they've always relied some on donations.
PBS and its stations have been roughly 15% funded through the CPB. The rest relies on donations and other income.
NPR doesn't receive much money directly from the CPB (less than 1% of its budget), but its member stations do, around 13% on average.
So it's not the end of the world for these stations, but it does represent a reduction in funding that is pretty serious.
We are far beyond the GDP vs. GDP(PPP) that started this.
No, you started talking about PPP in response to a news story that described the United States and China competing over influence over the Venezuelan economy: Chinese aid and investment in response to United States sanctions. Those are essentially going to be dollar denominated, and PPP doesn't matter. I've been saying from the beginning that you were wrong to bring PPP into the discussion, because this discussion, in this thread, isn't about domestic consumption in either China or the U.S.
The US's main problem is it's lack of industrial production.
Again, when talking about the effects of sanctions and foreign aid and investment, we should be talking about transactions that occur in the currency at issue. If China wants to provide aid to Venezuela in RMB, Venezuela will either need to spend that on Chinese producers or exchange for another currency to spend elsewhere (including Venezuelan Bolivars being spent domestically). If there's going to be a currency exchange, then PPP of the aid providing nation doesn't matter. A million USD from China is worth the exact same amount as a million USD from the U.S.
On the world stage, as an economic power, the US is losing to China.
I think if we're talking about on the world stage, as an economic power, the interconnected West is best understood as a power bloc. U.S. inconsistency and unpredictability on things like Russian sanctions actually show the limits of U.S. unilateral power while still showing the power of the broader Western order. Yes, China and Russia want to provide the world with an alternative multipolar order, and fragmentation of the Western powers may open up opportunities for that vision, but that competition is playing out along alliances, not isolated nations. In any event, PPP doesn't have anything to do with that particular competition.
If we're not comparing the ability of a citizen to buy things with the fruit of their labor. What are we comparing?
In this particular case? I think we're comparing Chinese and American ability to project economic influence (from trade or aid, to outright bribes or coercion or boycotts or sanctions or everything in between) over Venezuela.
The normal person
But the normal person has nothing to do with governments dealing with other governments on the global stage. And that's what this story is about, Venezuela being caught between two competing visions of their future in the international order.
If a country wants to build an airport in their capital city using the resources of foreign governments seeking to influence them, the question isn't about how many eggs the citizens of those countries can buy in their home turf, but about how much concrete and steel and heavy machinery those other countries can provide in the country considering offers.
No serious economist uses GDP as a metric for actual economic production. Can we please at least use GDP (PPP)?
In terms of flexing on foreign countries on the international stage, though, raw GDP (or at least imports and exports) is pretty important.
The PPP calculation comparing China to the United States may tell us a lot about how much a resident of either country can expect to experience using the local currency domestically, but if we're talking about influence over a third country, in that third country's local currency, then I think each respective PPP back home doesn't matter as much.
"Everyone will just X" when X individually makes obvious sense for most people.
For some, it's a matter of cost. The cheaper option tends to get a lot of adopters. Making the better option cost less is sometimes a matter of engineering and innovation improving the cost of the better option. Or sometimes it's making the worse option cost more, sometimes directly through taxation or indirectly through regulations. Electric cars are pretty much on a self sustaining path at this point, where the economics of electric cars can be a much better financial decision for themselves personally, compared to similar ICE vehicles.
For others, it's a matter of cultural influence, where trends in adoption just make things different. Tobacco use, especially actual smoking, is way down. Drinking alcohol is down, too. In my lifetime, helmet use for bicyclists and skiers is way up. These broad societal preferential shifts can happen without necessarily having big mandates from government.
And even if nudged somewhere by temporary government policy or price, sometimes people stick with that option long term if that's what they learn to prefer. Seat belts kinda went this way, where seat belt usage rates went way up between 1980 and 2010, so that even after federal regulations were struck down by the courts and state level enforcement dwindled in the past decade, everyone still wears seat belts (including when visiting places where they're not required).
And of course, the big influential force for changing behavior is government policy. As a society, we've pretty seamlessly moved off of things that were banned (leaded fuel, CFCs), even if the transition took a few decades (lead pipes, lead paint), or quickly adopted things that were mandatory (child car seats, bike helmets).
Emissions from food production is one of those things that can shift a bit from all of these factors. We've shifted away from beef towards chicken in the last few decades, and that alone has made a difference in greenhouse emissions. We might see more shifting down that line, just culturally. Or we might see some economic nudges from the fact that beef and dairy production are so costly for reasons correlated to their environmental impact.
But ultimately, meat doesn't contribute nearly as much as driving does, for the typical American household. The real impact comes from how we design our cities, not on how we eat.
The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar.
They control the base currency by physically printing dollars and lending money directly to banks. Then, more significantly, they influence the money supply by influencing how much commercial banks are lending, through interest rate operations, and sometimes through market operations that provide liquidity for certain types of securities (especially government bonds).
Taken together, it's the power to create or destroy money in response to macroeconomic trends.
The Federal Reserve system is independant of the US federal government.
Kinda. The board of governors is chosen by the president to 14-year terms, theoretically making them independent of any specific President's specific priorities. But there's a Supreme Court case heading when the President can fire the governors, which might effectively end or limit Fed independence.
The individual federal reserve banks also operate in their regions with a lot of leeway to meet local needs, and those are public/private partnerships where nationally chartered banks also have a voice in their operations.
My "We're totally different from Enron" accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.
In my mind the concept was one of regulatory oversight.
No, the core concept is one of whether a bank has full reserves, sufficient to cover all of the deposit liability. If the bank keeps only a fraction of the total liability in reserves, then that's a fractional reserve.
Do you think that when a bank loans money to another bank they are creating money out of thin air?
Yes, that creates money.
If they can do that then why do they need to borrow money?
They need to borrow money for liquidity, to cover the payments they owe to others. An IOU isn't money, so having a bunch of IOUs in the asset column may require a bank to pledge those IOUs to borrow some money from someone else, maybe even another bank. Then, with money in hand, they can make payments to fund their own operations (pay employees, rent, vendors, taxes, etc.) and pay depositors on demand.
And as a financial institution borrows too much and pays that interest, or is overextended without enough assets to remain solvent/liquid to be able to make payments as they're due, they may find themselves with insufficient creditworthiness to be able to borrow freely (as other banks are wary of lending to someone who might not pay back). And they might fail. So that general concern always provides a limit on how much they can borrow from other private entities.
They can borrow from the central bank as a lender of last resort, but that carries a cost (and can still only borrow as much as their assets can support). If they're paying more interest to their creditors than they're collecting from their borrowers, they're gonna fail.
Do you believe that the US government must collect taxes before it can spend money? Or do you agree that government spending is self financed and money creation (in spending by the US government) is only limited by concerns of inflation?
No, the government can (and does) borrow money to finance its operations, as well. For the U.S., the sheer amount of government spending is such a high percentage of economic activity that it would be highly inflationary to combine the fiscal power of spending money with the monetary power of controlling the money supply (through creation of base currency, influencing private transactions and interest rates to control bank-created money, and buying/selling securities on the open market).
I think if we lived in a different system without an independent central bank, we'd see a lot of different things going on, including a temptation to elected officials to just create money without regard to inflationary effects. But in the current system, most of the money is created by banks.
Do you believe that Banks hold digital money in their reserves? I do.
Yes, that's what we've been talking about the whole time. When a commercial bank creates a loan, that's just a ledger that creates an asset in one column and a liability in another column. It could be paper, or it could be digitally stored. If the funds are transferred electronically to another bank, that's often an electronic record with no physical movement of anything. So yes, those are effectively digital dollars that can be withdrawn as paper money on demand at any given time.
it's true that banks can create money when they lend more than they have in reserves and assets
To be clear, the article is saying (and I'm saying) that the bank creates money every time it makes a loan, in the amount of the loan. Regardless of whatever its reserve and asset situation is. An asset and a liability are created in that moment that cancel out, and then each side can take their asset and do something with it: the borrower uses that cash to spend, and the lender uses that loan balance as an asset it can borrow against or otherwise count on income from.
IMO bank loans are credit but the bank loans are repaid with actual money.
It's repaid with actual money, but it's all actual money. When the loan is created the balance in the deposit account can be withdrawn or transferred from there and it's real money that can buy real goods and real services. The money is created, and then it's real money in the economy. Then the loan is repaid with real money, and then destroyed in the act of repayment and reducing the balance owed on the loan.
Also, you mentioned fractional reserve banking but that no longer exists. It ended around 2020 when the government changed regulations and no longer requires banks to hold any ratio of reserves to debt.
No, that had the opposite effect of what you think. The minimum reserve requirement was abolished, so banks could then do fractional reserve banking in any fraction they pleased, including even smaller ratios than what was previously allowed. The change in regulation didn't eliminate fractional reserve banking; it eliminated limits on fractional reserve banking, and every bank continued to hold a reserve that is much, much smaller than 100% of the amount of their deposit liabilities. So the fractions still exist. And can continue to exist in any number, with other practical limits on their ability to loan (creditworthiness and solvency).
VTWAX is still like 65% US equities. It hasn't diversified out of U.S. exposure (and frankly, international stocks aren't protected from U.S. economic crises). A lot of people think about full blown collapse and crisis, but wouldn't know what to do about lethargy and stagnation for decades, but still roughly the same economic and financial paradigm.
I think U.S. equities are overpriced right now, especially when looking at market cap weighted indexes (because the U.S. tech bubble seems to represent a much higher percentage of any given index). And I'm concerned that the correction will just be decades of tepid growth or even stagnation where decades of investment won't actually earn a good return. Not that I'm investing in something else, other than maybe the soft skills I've described in my earlier comment.
Your own link from the Bank of England starts off with the thesis that agrees with me:
This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans
And you might as well link to the canonical URL of the PDF or the Bank of England website landing page for that article instead of Google Drive acting as a middleman.
The money in the bank's reserves started its life by being created by the federal government.
No, you're misunderstanding how the money supply works. The creation of physical printed money might happen by the government, but those physical dollars represent such a small portion of the overall money supply.
First of all, through fractional reserve banking, one physical dollar can get multiplied many times over to represent many dollars in circulation. Especially because most transactions happen on paper, through a ledger that transfers funds from one account to another.
Everything you're saying still relates to the practical limits of money creation by commercial banks, in terms of creditworthiness (banks don't want to lend money they can't get back) and liquidity/regulation (banks don't want to be left vulnerable without sufficient reserves to satisfy account holders demanding their deposits).
Realistically, the bank takes one of their own assets, such as the balance on the loan, and uses that as collateral to borrow liquid cash as needed for its own reserves (which are only a fraction of the total deposits in its accounts). And every dollar in a circle in a closed loop that doesn't touch the Fed is a dollar that doesn't actually trace back to a governmental entity. The Fed is a lender of last resort, but they're a last resort because they generally charge higher interest than bank to bank loans.
So of the entire money supply, the vast majority of it is dollars created by banks, not dollars created by the government.
To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.
But by this telling, the billionaire isn't any less moral than the person who buys the tickets. If simply transacting with this system is unethical, then the billionaires aren't any worse than the millionaires, or even the people barely subsisting on what they have.
In my eyes, there's a huge difference between the person who actively exploits others, and one who incidentally interacts with a person who exploits others. Especially if choosing to opt out wouldn't actually reduce the exploitation happening. There are still degrees to things, so it's entirely possible for the billionaire artist to be ethically superior to the millionaire venue operator, even when they both rely on the other.
Not to mention, there's a difference in kind when talking about exploitation in terms of a team effort where not enough of the fruits of the labor get shared fairly with all team members (positive sum interactions) versus when one actively takes from another, and that victim is worse off from the transaction.
Money begins its life by being spent by the federal government.
No, in the modern system, money is created by commercial banks when they give a loan.
At the moment a loan for $1 million is created, a bank takes $0 and then turns it into two accounts: a loan with a balance of negative $1 million owed, and a deposit account with a balance of $1 million that can be withdrawn. From the bank's perspective, and the borrower's perspective, they went from having $0 to suddenly each having $1 million in assets and $1 million in liabilities, for a net value of zero. Obviously there are going to be fees and stuff paid out, and interest charged over the life of the loan, but you can think of that as fees for services rendered.
The money in that deposit account, created out of thin air, can then be spent elsewhere and enter the economy.
The limits on the ability of banks to do that indefinitely is default risk (the bank is left holding the bag if the borrower doesn't repay) and liquidity (the bank needs to be able to use the loan balances as an asset on its balance sheets to go and borrow cash for its own operations so that its accountholders always have the ability to withdraw money on demand) and government regulation (the Federal Reserve and the FDIC have various regulations requiring their balance sheets to be able to survive stress tests and other adverse economic events).
So even though the government, through Federal Reserve policy, controls how private market participants might choose to create money, the actual act of money creation happens in the banks, not in the government (except when the government is acting as a bank by lending money through its loan programs).
but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with,
Historically it has not been enough to draw down funds that are invested in a broad American stock market index like the S&P500. But that doesn't make it impossible. A 20-30 year run that looks like the Nikkei 225 between 1990 and 2020 could wipe out portfolios on a 3% withdrawal rate. Even a 2% withdrawal rate would've run out of money in 32 years.
I'm kinda bearish about the continued dominance of the "invest in publicly traded large cap American equities" strategy over the coming decades, so I'm a bit more conservative in my savings rate, and what securities/assets I'm actually invested in, including soft assets like my own earning ability if I were to bail on this country and move somewhere else (fluency in another language, job skill sets that translate outside of the US borders, relationships/network with people who don't rely on the US).
And I know that's not the central point you're making. But there are plenty of people who might not feel secure with $1.5 million or even $3 million or $6 million in investible wealth, especially if it's tied up in one particular asset or asset class, or otherwise less liquid than publicly traded securities.
I think that's right. To summarize, here's where I think we agree and disagree:
We agree: GDP is not a particularly good metric for measuring international economic influence.
We disagree: You think adjusting GDP by PPP makes it better for this context, and I think that adjustment makes it even worse.
We agree: Exports matter for discussing economic power on the international stage.
We disagree: I think imports and investment also matter. You clearly don't, by dismissing them as mere consumption and financial engineering.
We agree: United States economic power overseas is in decline, including in the hegemony of the US Dollar, and its importance/influence through organizations like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, or even things like the SWIFT banking network.
We disagree: I think the United States is still much, much stronger than China on global economic influence. The lines may cross, where China overtakes the United States, but I think that would be in the future, whereas your comment suggests you believe those lines crossed in the past.
In the end, a country like Venezuela wants to sell barrels of oil to buyers, for a good price. That means things like U.S. sanctions (especially when enforced by the entire west) will hurt more than Chinese aid helps. At least as of 2026.