MrZee

Not the person you replied too, but I think this is still considered money laundering. If a person is selling illegal drugs (or whatever illegal product) and wants to receive the money “cleanly”, this would be a way to do so. Instead of selling the illegal item, they sell (or pretending to sell) a legal item but provide the illegal item. The seller now has clean money. I think this is still called money laundering.

If the item does sell for that much, money laundering seems like the most likely reason. The article says “selling” but it’s only “selling” in the sense that someone is trying to sell it for that price. There’s all kinds of shit listed for crazy prices.

This article is mostly talking about an economics concept of “r vs g”, which the author describes as follows:

As long as a country’s economic growth rate (g) is higher than the interest rate (r) it pays on its national debt, then the cost of servicing that debt will remain stable, allowing the government to roll it over indefinitely without much worry.

I’m not an economist, but this seemed odd to me. I suspected the author might not understand economics and the concept might more complicated than they were making it out to be.

A quick search on “r vs g economics” seems to indicate that this author has no business writing about economics. Here is the first result I clicked on, which near the start of the article states:

One approach to assess the sustainability of federal debt was popularized by Olivier Blanchard, in his speech as outgoing American Economic Association president, in 2019. That paper was written during a period of low interest rates and noted the relationship between the interest rate on government debt (R) and the growth rate of the economy (G): R less than G could imply a stable debt trajectory. However, Blanchard, as well as other economists and fiscal policy experts, recognized that the framework only holds true when the deficit excluding interest payments is small, which unfortunately is not the current case in the United States.

That makes a lot more sense to me. The economics concept applies when the deficit is small. The US deficit is not small. Regardless of R vs G, a large deficit means that debt is becoming more of a burden, even if R is less than G. Yes, R getting closer to G or exceeding G increases the burden of US debt, but R vs G isn’t all that matters like the writer of this piece in the Atlantic claims.

…At least as far as I can tell… But it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m not an economist. I’d love to hear what one has to say about this article, even if they tell me I’m totally wrong.

Interesting! When I first read your comment, I looked at the chart and thought “it looks to me like the drop starts at the end of 2022. Isn’t that before LLMs started being used broadly?”

Nope. Looks like ChatGPT was released in November 2022. It doesnt feel like it’s been around that long, but I guess it has.

What’s “flat chat”? I don’t/haven’t ever done AA. I know a lot of bits and pieces - my mom kicked the habit through AA 25ish years ago.

I had close to two years once in the past. And a year or so another time. Complacency and “forgetting” what it was like are the insidious things that led to me relapsing. “I can drink responsibly” was such an easy lie I told myself because things were feeling easy. Thankfully I’ve learned that lesson and plan to not forget it.

44 days, I take it?

The first few days and weeks were the hardest, of course, but around two months in it would also get a lot easier for me. That’s when it stopped becoming such a frequent thought and I’d even have days where drinking wouldn’t come to mind. Stay strong. Keep it up!

Thanks! You can do it!

I don’t know how many times I had quit drinking before it stuck. Never quit quitting.

I lost track of when I had quit drinking a year or two ago. I was pretty sure it was during the first quarter but couldn’t remember if I quit in 2021 or 2022. I’d tried searching through old messages and stuff but didn’t have any luck.

I just figured out that bank statements would tell me. Looking back, my last liquor store purchase was late March 2021… so I just hit 4 years sober a week or two ago.

I haven’t felt a desire to drink in a long time and it’s really really nice. I went through the worst 6 months of my life last year and worried at the start of it that I would find myself “needing” to drink. But somehow, I never even felt tempted. It kinda blows my mind. 1,465 days without alcohol. That’s a lot of days.

There’s no way in hell I’m drinking today. No question.

Per the article itself, the town voted 47% Trump, 51% Harris in the election. The article title calling that a “Trump-loving” town seems disingenuous.

I suspect the problem there revolves around “how fast can you produce hydrogen?” Generally, oversupply events (and resulting negative prices) are brief. To take advantage of oversupply / negative prices, hydrogen production (or other energy storage) needs to be able to convert energy to storage very quickly.

I don’t know much about hydrogen plants, but I would guess that they aren’t super “peaky” — meaning they don’t have the capacity to ramp up and generate a lot of hydrogen quickly like they would need to really take advantage of the situation. If that is the case, hydrogen plants can still take advantage (simultaneously helping the grid and helping to stabilize prices) but not to the extent we would like.

“Worker owned and non profit companies should have a free pass to be anti-consumer,” sounds like the less popular opinion to me.

I feel you. I find the best satire usually makes me a bit uneasy and unsure. It took me a second on your post until I looked back at the title.

I wonder if the reaction would have been different if you had put the title in the comic itself instead of just having it as the post title. It’s a small change, but I think it might have been enough. It would be an interesting psychology experiment if you could randomly serve both versions and see how the reaction plays out.