HailSeitan

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HailSeitan ,

Don’t post reputation-washing corporate PR. Billionaires aren’t heroes when then make undemocratic donations to charity that never should have belonged to them, and LLM companies don’t get credit for trying to stem the tide of bad publicity around data centers.

HailSeitan ,

Criti-hype

HailSeitan ,
HailSeitan ,

The numbers don’t lie: The housing crisis is not caused by a supply shortage ( www.policyalternatives.ca )

the housing crisis has been created by banking practices that have directed excessive amounts of credit into the property market, and especially residential mortgages. As a result, buyers can bid prices up to ever-higher levels, resulting in a market where people must pay more for the same type of housing. Hence financialization ...

HailSeitan ,

You are part of the problem

HailSeitan ,

Can a mirror be hosted somewhere, since it’s in the public domain?

HailSeitan ,

Haha fuck science, amirite?

HailSeitan ,

Anyone who thinks a currency-issuing country like the US would be better off by taking $3 trillion OUT OF CIRCULATION, thereby making the American public $3 trillion POORER clearly shows that they understand NOTHING about how economies work.

HailSeitan , (edited )

Exactly. The number of people on Lemmy who simp for Valve’s monopoly just because Epic (along with every game developer, big or small) stands to benefit is kind of shocking.

HailSeitan ,

The commentor was saying that skins cost Apple nothing to produce, not Epic, which is why the Apple App Store profit margin is estimated to be around 78%. I think you misread the comment.

HailSeitan ,

Being obviously self-interested doesn’t make him wrong about app store monopolies, whether Apple, Google, or Valve.

HailSeitan ,

And ecommerce sellers don’t “have to” sell on Amazon, so they don’t have any market power they can abuse to extract 40-50% fees from sellers, right?

HailSeitan ,

I would use other words, but I don’t think you are actually interested in understanding market power, coercion, or network effects. It is a little tricky, but if you’re not just shitposting in bad faith, Lina Khan has a great paper on digital platform monopolies and Matt Stoller has a good podcast on Valvle’s monopoly in particular. Or does Matt Stoller also not understand what a monopoly is, according to you?

HailSeitan ,

Appeal to expertise is not an appeal to authority. Otherwise we could never cite scientists, epidemiologists, or other experts. You might be interested in the fallacy of equivocation.

HailSeitan ,

And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms

HailSeitan ,

Anecdotes are not data!

HailSeitan ,

Nobody thinks that it’s impossible, which is incredibly rare, but rather that it’s very costly not to comply, which is the source of every monopolist’s power. Could Pepsi refuse to sell at Walmart to avoid the huge wholesale discounts they demand over smaller stores? Sure, but it would shoot themselves in the foot, and that’s the source of Walmart’s anticompetitive power, which coerces Pepsi (and lots of other suppliers) and hurts lots of smaller businesses who don’t get the same discount.

HailSeitan ,

It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.

HailSeitan ,

More like ambisexual, like in The Left Hand of Darkness

HailSeitan ,

“…a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government."

HailSeitan ,

How about you fuck off defending the mafioso vig that Apple, Google, and Valve have extorted from game developers for years, you monopoly bootlicker?

HailSeitan ,

Sounds like a long winded way to say you don’t understand network effects or monopolies

HailSeitan ,

Aw, those poor hardworking app stores with their razor-thin ::checks notes:: 78% profit margins

HailSeitan ,

Says the wanker defending billionaires’ profit margins

HailSeitan ,

I’m sorry you can’t understand the difference between a principled anti-monopolist like Lina Khan and a Tim Epic simp

HailSeitan ,

How does it feel not grasping what it means to be an antimonopolist? I imagine it’s kind of expensive.

HailSeitan ,

Who is defending Epic? You seem to be conflating legitimate criticism of Valve (which everyone should do) with defending the douchebag Tim Sweeney (which no one should do). But it’s a false choice to think you have to support one team or the other; both companies can be bad, and criticism of app store fees (whether Apple’s or Valve’s) has nothing to do with supporting Epic, that’s just a false equivalence.

HailSeitan ,

Let’s say Donald Trump says corporate landlords shouldn’t be able to own houses. If someone else makes the same argument, that doesn’t make them a Trump supporter. You get that, right?

HailSeitan ,
HailSeitan ,

What a wild timeline, when Bruce Springsteen sounds like David Rovics

HailSeitan OP ,

If you’re picking them, you’re probably paid by the gallon

HailSeitan OP ,

Why not both? We can oppose both Gemini and Pichai

HailSeitan OP ,

I don’t know, that just seems too simple. There’s a good argument to be made that technology can embody political values and power relations, apart from its designers. The “guns don’t kill people” line doesn’t hold much water when all the empirical evidence shows that the mere presence of guns makes us less safe, for example. Similarly, it’s not especially important why tech bros do what they do, or if they have good or bad motives, if the things they make hurt people or destroy the biosphere. The purpose of a thing is what it does, regardless of what its maker intended it to do.

HailSeitan ,

What a stupid headline for a 300-year-old idea

HailSeitan ,

Criti-hype

HailSeitan ,

Introducing E-Corp stablecoin!

HailSeitan ,

Minnesota goddam

HailSeitan ,

It sounds like your friend has been exposed in a rudimentary way to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), some of the tenets of which are controversial but which makes some solid conceptual points.

One of those more plausible points is that a sovereign currency issuer (like the US, which is the sole issuer of the US dollar), by definition, creates the currency it issues. The federal reserve creates dollars not by taxing or borrowing, but by entering zeroes into a spreadsheet and then spending (or lending) those dollars into the economy, which are only then available to be taxed or borrowed. This is the STAB (spend, then tax and borrow) model.

This differs fundamentally from all other users of the currency, including households (like you and me) as well as US cities and states, which even if they have the power to tax are not currency issuers, and thus have to operate on a TABS (tax and borrow, then spend) model. (They typically can’t run a deficit either and have to balance their budget, unlike the federal government.)

Now, just because conceptually the federal government doesn’t need taxes in order to spend or create money doesn’t mean it’s a good idea! In particular, it may cause inflation. But once we realize that the purpose of taxation is to control the amount of money in circulation, rather than being strictly necessary, it reveals that the limits to spending by a currency issuer are practical (such as how much we can spend before inflation creeps up) rather than conceptual.

One immediate upshot is that if there is enough slack in the real economy to allow spending that wouldn’t create inflation, there’s nothing in principle stopping a currency issuer from doing just that. Another upshot is that this conceptual model gives the lie to all those naysayers who claim that we can’t have nice things because “there’s no money.” In practice we might not do it because we don’t want hyperinflation, but that’s a very different reason from it being impossible in principle.

HailSeitan ,

Vital organ subscriptions (and the enshittification thereof) is the plot of “Common People”.

HailSeitan OP ,

Informed for sure, but pithy they are not, with a recent post clocking in at 19,000 words!

HailSeitan OP ,

The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free!