see also: @smallpatatas@gotosocial.patatas.ca

  • 12 Posts
  • 68 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 18th, 2023

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  • Yeah out of many changes that distorted or outright altered meaning, one of the worst bits was that the second version eliminated the crucial first few words - which acknowledged the original post and therefore set a particular tone.

    Communication is way more complex than statistical relationships between words, and I sincerely doubt that any of these systems will ever be able to fully mimic that complexity





  • OK so, I’ve only read Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth and listened to some interviews with a few others, so I can’t speak for all MMT proponents, but a lot of the critique from Roberts sounds flat-out wrong to me.

    I don’t think I’ve heard anyone claim that governments can create infinite money without consequences; the idea that there is no theoretical limit to the number of dollars in existence is simply a conceptual point, and the practical limit of government spending is inflation, which, if I understand correctly, happens when you keep spending money into an economy that has reached its productive capacity (something that it sounds like Roberts claims MMT does not address)

    I’ll absolutely grant that there are aspects of MMT that bother me (often there seems to be a focus on productivity and boosting the private sector) but I have never once heard of someone proposing to create jobs that pay less than the minimum wage. The phrase “setting a wage floor” AFAIK is usually framed as a way to ensure that jobs in the private sector are treating workers decently, because bosses will know that workers aren’t risking destitution if they quit/get fired.

    The critique that MMT does not offer a theory to nations without their own currency is fair, and I agree that MMT doesn’t offer much in the way of a critique of capitalism.

    What I think it does do - I see it as a step in a dialectical process - is show us that there is no magic fiscal obstacle to us collectively determining what society’s resources should be put toward.

    Like, national budgets to not have to balance; national debts do not have to be paid off. The government always has the money to pay for something, because there is no theoretical limit to the number of dollars in existence; the real limiting factor is whether or not that thing is available to be bought with the government’s currency.

    So really, discussions about budgets should be about our collective values and the availability of resources, and not about arbitrary fiscal constraints. Imagine what we could do!




  • I have no idea what the views of the person in the article are, but the Idea of a supposedly federated platform like blusky banning people is a bit ridiculous

    This take is ridiculous, more like.

    The whole point of federation is that each provider is responsible for moderation on their own service. Bluesky is indeed running a service, not just writing the AT Protocol specification. It shouldn’t be controversial to boot people who have explicitly said they’re there to promote bigotry.

    And, because federation, then those bigots can make their own instance, right? Sure, and the Bluesky instance and everyone else should then defederate that instance due to harassment.

    That’s how federation works.


  • After having recently restored some stuff from an aging external hdd, i’m seriously considering getting a few dvdr discs and burning the important things every now and then.

    I know they don’t last forever either, but - just as a random example that has definitely never happened to me hahaha - you can drop them from a height of 3 feet and still get files off them!



  • I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will ‘cam out’ (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out

    Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they’re great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they’ve been painted over.

    Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun