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Had an Idea on the Way Home But Probably Regurgitated Shit I Read Somewhere Else

Started by POFP, February 05, 2020, 04:59:24 AM

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tyrannosaurus vex

Quote from: chaotic neutral observer on February 05, 2020, 05:37:43 PM
Dumb question, but what does money mean when it's not moving?  The point of money is to induce people to do things and/or give you some of their stuff.  If it's not being actively used, what effect does it have?  It doesn't seem the same as piling up food while the neighbors starve, since if money leaves circulation, the money that's left in the system just becomes worth more.

If you're just stockpiling it, isn't that morally neutral?  I mean, aside from the possible deflation caused by reducing the money supply.

(I expect my viewpoint is unrealistically simplistic, I'd just like to know why.)

I think of money as a sort of distilled potential. It represents everything it could be used to buy, so as long as it isn't actually used to buy anything, it can drive a lot of economic activity whose goal is to capture it in a transaction. Beyond that, having it concentrated in as few hands as possible allows for greater risks in that activity because you can put more time and effort into creating something I'll buy for $100 than you would into something else that 100 people will buy for $1.

Of course, that assumes that I do, eventually, spend that $100 on something. And that's a fine assumption as long as my money isn't tied up in some Rube Goldberg style contraption of speculation and financial instruments, which is just meta-betting on some eventual outcome that investment bankers confound and delay for as long as they can.

So it's the nature of currency to be a repository of economic possibility, but unless it's actually trans-substantiated into economic reality at some point, its only real purpose is counterbalancing risk. Apple can fuck up a whole new line of iThings if it wants to, because it has the cash to cover its bases. So the riskier (in terms of speculative demand or the time involved in bringing something to that market) your business model is, the more cash reserves you should have.

And that's all well and good. I mean, I don't have a moral objection to anything there. The problem is when cash just sits around doing nothing (except maybe growing through investment) just because some asshole wants to make sure he's the only one in his ZIP code with a private yacht and a personal helicopter. And that's what it comes down to - not just greed for an obscene standard of living, but malignant greed that wants to make sure nobody else has what you have. For that reason, I think it's immoral to hoard cash that could be doing a lot of good without jeopardizing your own lifestyle, just because you value the gap between you and everyone else.
Evil and Unfeeling Arse-Flenser From The City of the Damned.

chaotic neutral observer

Quote from: Doktor Howl on February 05, 2020, 06:03:53 PM
Money that isn't moving is money that was creating wealth and now is not.  If that's a million or so people stashing money away for retirement, the effect is gradual and tiny and gets lost in the background noise.

However, when you have an entire class of people who are gaining money faster than they could spend it even if they chose to, the effect is large, immediate, and dangerous for the economy.  And economic failures start at the bottom and work their way up.

Lastly, the market doesn't react to shortages, but rather *perceived* shortages.  If we learned tomorrow that Mars's moons were solid gold, the value of gold would plummet, even though we can't get to all that other gold. 

Money owned by billionaires is perceived as still existing.   If the reality mattered, the dollar-prices of goods and services would drop every time another billionaire came into existence.  That has not happened.

So, the problems here are that the reduction in the "live" money supply is significant, and that the perceived value of a dollar doesn't reflect the amount of live money, but all of it.

Dollars are supposed to be worth the same, whether you're buying or selling.   But if the number of actively traded dollars drops, then you would see the emergence of a stock-market style spread, where the price is higher when you're buying than if you're selling.  The fewer dollars available, the worse the spread.

But that would mean every transaction involving dollars would lose value.

...that can't be right.
Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando.

LMNO

Money that doesn't move literally creates more money out of nothingness.


It accumulates interest, and more importantly, is used to secure loans.


You can use a large amount of non-movable money to provide an income from interest alone.  That money moves, but as noted, it's created from thin air.

That money is then passed on to heirs, who don't need to contribute to labor, or "creating" anything, other than more money.

Doktor Howl

Quote from: LMNO on February 05, 2020, 07:56:16 PM
Money that doesn't move literally creates more money out of nothingness.


It accumulates interest, and more importantly, is used to secure loans.


You can use a large amount of non-movable money to provide an income from interest alone.  That money moves, but as noted, it's created from thin air.

That money is then passed on to heirs, who don't need to contribute to labor, or "creating" anything, other than more money.

Technically, it is created by the value of the investment returns in real life.

For example, your money is invested in dildo manufacturing.  The investment is added to whatever else DongCo™ has gathered, and they build a new production line for The Crippler™.  The increased value of your investment comes from the returns from the added production of improbably large/baroque sex toys.

To you, the investor, it just appeared

None of this is weird, and it's not necessarily bad, except that the larger the stack, the less velocity the money has (ie, poor folks spend EVERY dime they make, rich people not so much, because a lot of their money goes into luxuries that do not require a large employment base and do nothing but sit there afterward.  Your Rubens painting employs nobody.)

Weird is derivatives.

Bad is a one person or group accumulating so much cash that velocity does not scale with the stack, which happens somewhere between $750 Mn and $1 Bn, as I understand it.  I am unsure why the voodoo threshold is such a narrow band, but apparently in the gilded age, the voodoo happened at about $30 Mn.
Molon Lube

The Wizard Joseph

In the course of planning what may well prove to be THE THING that I do with the rest of my life i fairly recently turned my attention to the precise meaning and origin of "profit" in part because I simply did not know the origin of the word and all legal definitions seemed barely discernable as much different from other words referring to value transfer of realized gains like "compensation ", "pay", and "dividend" which all have unique definitions legally that are QUITE consequential if you misplay them in business. The definition of profit seemed a bit nebulous so I resorted to etymology, which is where the architects of our systems hid a lot of ontological bodies so to speak.

Profit is derived from a French legal phrase "profit a pendre" meaning literally "right of taking". The definition of the phrase is a bit bland, but what it
implies is horrible. Profit a pendre is somewhat similar to a land easement in that it gives certain rights to use a part of a property you do not technically own, easements often allowing land without road access to share a driveway for example. Profit a pendre however is the authority granted right not to share common use but to outright take anything on or from the land, minerals, timber, crops, feudal rights probably including people and anything a serf could be legally said to "possess". The right is total and potentially subject to lethal enforcement. It is in essence a right to plunder and even outright rapine from another legal owner without having to pay for the right of possession from the owner.

To this day the term often used for receiving gain from "for profit" corporations, and in other markets, is called "taking profit" taking your "rights" to what is not really yours by force if necessary. In this sense one might rightly see a for profit corporation as a virtual person made to be plundered over and over and over. Just a thought. Sewing a few seeds.
You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl

The Johnny

Quote from: PoFP on February 05, 2020, 04:24:16 PM
Quote from: The Johnny on February 05, 2020, 08:27:20 AM

So i mean, you do eventually speak of the marketing and manipulation of desire, but I just think it came into play way earlier than the chronology you are basing your argument on.


That's a fair point. We can see obvious evidence of greed and market manipulation much earlier than the Industrial Era. The methods that American Corporatists use to make a profit were definitely inherited, or at least re-implemented using concepts documented by the greedy bastards of Olde.

I guess I would say that the purpose of this text had more to do with establishing contained cause and effect scenarios to explain the Why and How and its relation to addiction, and had much less to do with actual timelines. That being said, I made explicit references to timeline specifics, and should either keep the timelines accurate or express the idea in a different way to maintain consistency and avoid needless confusion or historical falsification.


Quote from: The Johnny on February 05, 2020, 08:27:20 AM

People like Ian Curtis ("The Century of the Self") have argued that rather Demand was manipulated to stay on the level of the new capacity for massive Supply and production.

Demand =/= Supply in its natural state, it has to be pushed in that direction so that people don't build up savings or investments.

Bad quality of Supply is not dictated by insatiable Demand... it's dictated by Profit and its maximization and how good they can manipulate people to buy garbage.


I would argue that poor quality Supply is tied to both Greed and insatiable Demand - They are not mutually exclusive relationships and I believe they present themselves in the real world frequently. The morally bankrupt use whatever means they can to satisfy their Greed, but the morally lazy or willfully ignorant (Usually created by the morally bankrupt out of necessity.) will simply cut corners to meet the ever-increasing requests of Production-lines in all Industries. And my main argument is that neither practice/relationship is sustainable, and that both are induced by the mentality - That Supply must meet Demand - When the overall goal should be to reduce Demand to limit consumption of Supply.

I didnt mean that far back, but ok  :lulz:

Like, regarding Curtis's discourse, marketing came into full force and became its modern incarnation around the time where "conveyor-belt production" came into existance. It's the methods of production that were created for WWII that when the conflict was over were implemented for civilian life.

These methods of production were extremely efficient, capable of what could be deemed "Infinite Supply"... within that context, one could produce good quality products that would last a lifetime, but that's suicide as a vendor, since you have an infrastructure that profits from production. ¿So what do? You ask your little venomous demon marketers to artificially create a demand for cheap and fashionable products, that need to be constantly replaced because they break down fast due to low quality, but people still want it because their value is beyond pragmatism and includes things like fashion and current trends... its applying the principles of clothes fashion to EVERYTHING.

Regarding the theme of "addiction", that's a bit of a very specific and technical analogy, which although interesting, it can't be done passingly or lightly.

And your hypothesis on the existance of an ideology of "Supply must meet Demand"... idk, i think its badly stated with a lot of assumptions and/or needs to be broken down to detail... with the methods of production its practically impossible for Supply to fail Demand, if anything, Supply being bottlenecked by the price its asking... I see in action more the inverse, of a principle of "Demand must meet Supply".
<<My image in some places, is of a monster of some kind who wants to pull a string and manipulate people. Nothing could be further from the truth. People are manipulated; I just want them to be manipulated more effectively.>>

-B.F. Skinner

Black Death

Quote from: PoFP on February 05, 2020, 04:59:24 AM
The US economy, especially during the start of Industrialization, was formatted/reformatted based on the assumption that we would need to increase efficiency of Production to meet an ever-growing domestic and foreign Demand (Supply-side economics). It's no accident that this unsustainable ideology is almost identical to the basis of the relationship between drugs and addiction.

The cycle of addiction is based on the idea that Demand is equal to Supply. In other words, you use whatever you have access to.

However, in most cases, due to the fundamental nature of our brain's Reward System, people reach a point where their Supply can't feed their Demand. So, the Suppliers use cheaper substances to make more out of less and meet the growing Demand. Sometimes, that means they use other substances as filler that are less pure because they're easier to find or cheaper to buy. Almost like how most of our food nowadays is rarely pure or untainted by cheap and/or toxic fillers. It's fairly obvious at this point, to anyone paying attention, that we've seriously over-shot our goal of allowing Supply to meet Demand, meaning we've reached, and far surpassed the point of addiction.

In hindsight, it seems like it was inevitable. But why?

Because it was intentional:

It's not that surprising that the US economy's Supply/Demand dynamics run parallel to the fundamental nature of addiction. It was designed before addiction science and treatment was invented, and during a time when drugs were traded openly without any level of regulation or constraint (And were often the most popular trade commodities). It was also during a time when the wealthy were allowed to grow their wealth unrestricted using the profit that came from being the Suppliers (Or the "Suppliers of Suppliers," and so on. I'll explain this concept more a bit later.).

So, what happens when Suppliers become dependent on their excess wealth? They become addicted to it, and so become addicted to the Demand that creates it.

The Demand becomes their Supply.

So, the Suppliers, in need of Demand, began studying and taking advantage of man's vulnerability to desire. Thus, Toxic Marketing and Advertising was born, which has now fully integrated itself into literally every single aspect of our lives. And when Supplying cheap, worthless shit became too personal and real, the wealthiest Suppliers decided to add layers of abstraction between them and their customers to avoid their discomfort. And thus Corporatism was born to integrate Beaurocracy into Supplier organizations and make Supplier markets more complex. It added processes between the Suppliers and the Consumers to blur the lines and fuel plausible deniability and willful ignorance.

How did we get to this point? We were already there. The system was designed based on:

Supply = Demand

It's really that simple. The system assumes Supply is equal to (or infinitely approaching) Demand. Mathematically, and logically, they are one in the same - Two sides of the same coin: An unsustainable system of trade in which neither side is capable of winning because the point of satisfaction for either side is an infinitely moving target. The goal of those with Demand is to be a Supplier. And the goal of the Supplier is to create (not feed, because that's more expensive) Demand and be Demanded.

But if they're the same thing, and we obviously need some things to survive, meaning someone has to Supply the basics for life to meet a basic Demand, does that mean we were doomed to become unsustainable?

Not at all. We've only ever entertained this equation in one direction: Up.

We've been ignoring the fact that the equation can be read the other way:

(-1)Demand = (-1)Supply

More to come some other time.

Feel free to rip apart and put back together again, or add to it. Part of me is very certain that someone's come up with this analogy before, but I have no idea where I would have read it other than here.

OK two points: 1)parasites make up the majority of life forms on Earth, addiction is just a label attached to a form of parasitic relationship. Example: ....humans were thus domesticated by wheat. 2)Any time you try to reduce a complex dynamic process into an abstraction you end up at fail. Your fail may be useful and serve a variety of constructive purposes but that does not alter it's essential and ultimate fail.

The Wizard Joseph

You can't get out backward.  You have to go forward to go back.. better press on! - Willie Wonka, PBUH

Life can be seen as a game with no reset button, no extra lives, and if the power goes out there is no restarting.  If that's all you see life as you are not long for this world, and never will get it.

"Ayn Rand never swung a hammer in her life and had serious dominance issues" - The Fountainhead

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimisation."
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality :lulz:

"You program the controller to do the thing, only it doesn't do the thing.  It does something else entirely, or nothing at all.  It's like voting."
- Billy, Aug 21st, 2019

"It's not even chaos anymore. It's BANAL."
- Doktor Hamish Howl