fiasco

The supreme court is such a degenerate institution, and I don't mean that in terms of its current makeup. It's the only branch of government that considers itself immune to checks and balances from the other branches, and the legislature and executive are too chickenshit to do anything about it.

Except for Roosevelt, the last actually good president this country has had.

The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that "caring about customers" actually means "leaving money on the table." The relentless search for "business efficiency," evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.

Good lord no. Markets absolutely do not regulate or balance themselves, they get caught in feast-or-famine cycles based on where they are in the current credit binge. The Fed shouldn't be raising rates because the current inflationary episode is not driven by excess demand, and there are no data suggesting a wage-price spiral is coming.

She's thinking about how she missed her chance in "Naked Now."

They know that there's no wage-price spiral, and they know that this inflationary episode is not about excessive demand, which means they know that raising interest rates will not curb inflation. You can even see this in the data they don't talk about: Japan has maintained low interest rates through this whole saga, and its inflation has tracked that of countries that raised them. Because that's how supply-driven inflation works.

This has nothing to do with inflation; it's just an excuse to attack labor activism.

You have to enjoy a hobby in itself, if you're too focused on results then you'll have problems with the gulf between your ability and your aspiration. Is there anything you've tried doing that you just enjoy doing? Like do you just enjoy banging on a piano or drawing or writing, regardless of the output?

I think the counterargument is, if you continue to be a huge dick, have you really accepted Jesus into your heart? It's the actual reason Pascal's Wager is such a shit argument: one of the unstated premises is that you can pull a fast one on God.

This phenomenon is as old as history.

Socrates was killed because he made fun of powerful people. Anaxagoras was exiled from Athens for arguing that the sun and moon are just fire and rock, rather than gods. Galileo was persecuted because he got into a pissing match with the Jesuits over the nature of comets, then when the Pope's support for Galileo's (geocentric) views wavered (...they wavered for political reasons), Galileo wrote a treatise ridiculing the Pope. Hearst and Pulitzer propagandized the US into the Spanish-American War. Mondale lost the election because the media decided he looked ridiculous.

Yeah the internet is terrible for discourse, but the more basic fact is that almost all humans suck at discourse. Even, or maybe especially, Galileo.

Given how unstable and user unfriendly computers are now, just imagine a future where programmers know even less about what they're doing.

YouTube is already awful, so whatever.

Probably the biggest issue is getting all the "find a community" stuff together: the communities for new communities, and the crawlers that list communities and let you search them.

And it isn't actually clear if rate hikes affect inflation anyway. Since the interbank rate also benchmarks the Treasury yield, for example, higher interest rates will cause the government to spend more on debt service. If inflation is supposed to be related to the amount of money, then why is increasing public spending the preferred way of decreasing the availability of money?

Interest rates for inflation targeting are in fact pure class war. The fear is something called a wage-price spiral. Basically, inflation erodes real incomes, and the question is, whose income should be eroded? Workers or owners? In the presence of strong labor unions, inflation becomes an intense battlefield, of whose income gets eroded. Labor negotiation raises wages, which maintains higher demand, which raises inflation, so unions demand yet higher wages. But this is also because the companies aren't willing to take the hit to prices, so they ratchet prices up in tandem with wage increases. The result is a feedback loop: unions score higher wages, businesses raise prices to compensate, unions need to push for higher wages to compensate, and so on.

This is what the interest rates are about. The goal is to create a recession, by making both investment and debt-financed consumption more expensive, to kill off workers' ability to negotiate higher wages.

This form of class war gets masked behind economic terms like the Phillips Curve and the Nonaccelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, since after all, that sounds a lot better than Get Fucked, Workers.