My understanding is that saying anything "grossly offensive" is illegal there, so it's not clear those police were blatantly overstepping their authority like in the case from the OP.
you pitch this and next election cycle you will out as soft on crime which is why this can only ever go (significantly) into the opposite direction unfortunately
Right, nor was that the suggestion of my comment. I just wasn't sure they were comparing how abuse of power is handled in different legal systems so much as how freedom of speech laws are handled.
Yup, I was looking up a pair of IEMS vs another pair of IEMs. It said option A is overall better, when really it was just reciting a single person's opinion. I've been aware it will summarize only a single source and present it as an aggregation of many opinions, but it stood out to me how matter-of-fact it was that the one was definitely better than the other. I simply wanted to find forum discussions on people's thought and wasn't influenced by this AI blurb, but I think seeing an answer at the very top state so matter-of-factly that one is definitely better and present it as though everyone thinks that will definitely influence a lot of people. It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
> It makes me wonder how "gameable" this will become...
You better make sure your ad spend is high enough that your product's matter-of-fact result will be positive. That's a nice product you have there. It'd be a real shame if nobody knew about it.
The iem sub has a post with some recommendations at various price points. I’d probably start there, not sure your budget and I don’t know have the most experience with the super cheap ones: https://reddit.com/r/iems/comments/1la65kr/top_5_iems_in_eve...
I also encourage finding the right tips. Tips are cheap and finding proper fitting ones is important.
Most of the ones that are over 50 can last a lot of time and have good enough sounds. But the most important stuff are the tips and the cable. Make sure the former fits (just buy a pack) and the latter is thick and braided. Some cheapo ones send every rubbing amplified to your ears.
Not gp but I really like the sound of my GK Kuntens and 7Hz Zero2s. Both have a rather V-shaped sound signature, some like it and some don't. Though unfortunately the Zero2s feel a bit uncomfortable in my ears when using them for longer
I was only intending to use the traditional search engine, the AI was incidental. If I want an AI answer, I will go to it separately. This is better in my mind as optimal queries for each are different.
The issue is, Google has mixed the two in a way that promotes the AI response as primary. This has resulted in dubious answers being presented as “official” summaries (to the lay person).
At the very least, one would expect it to be a little smarter—perhaps by automatically doing things like you suggested—instead of basing things off a single source, as it seems to enjoy doing.
MMT folks generally advocate that inflation is the way to measure if the spending is "too much" and argue that spending should generally aim to improve productivity (i.e. increase gdp) to minimize this issue (e.g. spending to build infrastructure so people can get to work is productive vs spending so people stay home is inflationary).
There is this pervasive idea that MMT promotes limitless spending and I'm not sure where it comes from, what they actually preach feels like a reasonable way to evaluate government spending to me.
I think the major argument against MMT is that no one has the stomach to actually implement the level of taxation necessary to counteract inflation when it starts to rise too quickly. Or at least no major political party in the United States.
Everything can be sound on paper about MMT but if no one is going to practice it properly then the theory isn’t really going to work out.
As much as “eating your vegetables” in terms of government budget policy makes sense, if making people do that in practice gets you immediately voted out of office (or not even elected in the first place), then we won’t be eating our vegetables.
Keynesianism has the same problem - the government is supposed to spend in the bad times (to keep the economy moving) and save in the good times. But in the good times there is an incredible pressure on the government to spend more as tax revenues increase.
The issue here is divorcing budgeting from democracy, which I believe Germany did after their travails?
Similar to how well-run companies separate their CFO duties (how much we can and can't afford) and from their CEO ones (what we choose to invest that in).
The US has that in the monetary side (for now, the Fed) but has never had that on the budgetary side with Congress being concerned with being reelected (and bringing home the bacon being a reliable way to make that happen).
Paying down US debt seriously will only happen if Congress and the President choose to cede part of their spending cap authority to an independent entity, and that's never likely to happen.
It's really hard to do that in the general case. As the aphorism goes, "Show me your budgets and I'll show you your priorities", and in a democratic society, the priorities are supposed to be decided by the voters.
You could however envision a system where the bottom-line (the overall budget surplus or deficit) is dictated algorithmically by economic conditions, with the government free to move funds between different priorities, raise taxes, or cut overall spending as long as they met the target budget surplus. Actually wouldn't be a bad idea; it mimics how private organizations and households have to adjust their spending to fit constraints. The whole idea of algorithmic central banking and algorithmic fiscal policy could be quite interesting, particularly now that you have cryptocurrency where you can build algorithms into the nature of money itself.
You can't make voters care about budgeting for the future. They have unrealistic expectations and politicians have to pander to voters.
The majority of voters can't manage their own finances that well.
When the future hits us hard, we simply all blame the past politicians for not being prudent. Or people older than us - like boomers - the blimmin idjuts.
MMT is descriptive, not prescriptive - the economy follows MMT whether you agree it does or not. Separate from MMT, are the ways you would expect would be good ways to run an economy if you believe the economy follows MMT (which it does).
I think it's worth looking at what was actually asked. From your article, they were asked these two questions:
> Countries that borrow in their own currency should not worry about government deficits because they can always create money to finance their debt
> Countries that borrow in their own currency can finance as much real government spending as they want by creating money.
MMT is quite clear about limiting factors that make those two statements false, yet the article frames them as "the basic aspects of MMT". To me, those questions feel intentionally malicious and even if not, the survey is certainly meaningless as to the opinions of economists on what MMT actually describes.
The parent comment isn't saying MMT is true or false. They are just saying MMT is a theory of how the economy operates (descriptive). _If_ you take it as true then here are things you can do (prescriptive).
It's sort of like saying something like the water-sky color theory is descriptive not prescriptive. The theory is that the sky is blue because water is blue and light reflects that color back into the sky. There is no behavioral prescription just a description of how one influences the other. If you want to change the color of the sky change the color of the oceans. That part would be prescriptive. This says nothing of whether the theory is well-founded or how many scientist agree with it.
Parent is saying MMT simply lays out a theory of how a (our) economy currently operates, not whether it's good or bad. People who adhere to the theory would then derive their policy prescriptions based on it being true and (crucially) their desired economic/political/social outcomes.
To make matters worse, when inflation spikes, that's kind of when people need the money. Good luck radically increasing taxes in a 10% inflation shock.
People not being able to afford things is the point of raising taxes to curb inflation. When people can't afford things they don't buy things and that's what lowers inflation.
But there's a time mismatch, at least at typical government action timeframes. Quarterly inflation looks high, meaning people are already out of pocket. Tax goes up at the same price levels, making people more out of pocket. Inflation reduces, hopefully, but that doesn't mean prices go down - people remain out of pocket. Then, you hope, wages catch up, but that whole cycle can easily take a year.
Elections are on average 2-3 years away. Midterms in USofA 1 year away.
The point of economics is to give people what they can have, not to give them what they want. High inflation in a MMT context means that the economy as a whole wants more than it can have. The reason for the inflation is that people are bidding against each other for scarce goods; you've injected more means to pay than exists means to produce. The way you cure it [1] is by reducing demand, which you do by decreasing the means to pay. MMT proposes doing this by increasing taxes; monetarism proposes doing it by increasing interest rates. But in both cases, the whole mechanism for solving the problem is people going without things that they want, which will almost always be unpopular.
[1] When you can't increase production capacity, which in a macro full-employment context means increasing productivity, which is outside the scope of MMT or most other schools of macroeconomics.
I get that (at least the theory, as with UBI, I'm not convinced). My point is rather that this is like treating broken bones with a hammer. Maybe it works, but the pain of it might well be unbearable.
There is this pervasive idea that MMT promotes limitless spending and I'm not sure where it comes from
Right. The theory says you can (should?) spend until you hit the "inflation ceiling," then use taxes to drain liquidity.
But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph. The "tax it away" solution proved to be a political fantasy. No politician is going to hike taxes on the middle class to cool down the price of eggs.
My understanding (I'm not an economist) is that MMT is currently viewed as a "fair-weather theory." It explained why we could spend during a liquidity trap, but offered no viable steering mechanism once the engine overheated.
In my mind, this puts it in the same box as Keynesianism. Both theories are politically convenient because they offer politicians an excuse to pander. But those politicians aren't willing to do what their pet theory would require once the emergent crisis has passed.
> But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph.
Except that 2020-2022 was not (completely) about fiscal/monetary problems that could be fixed with fiscal/monetary solutions. A good portion of the spike was because of 'outside' factor(s), e.g.:
What would extra taxation do to help that? There are various types of inflation, categorized by 'root cause', and 'too much money' is not the source of all of them:
> But what we saw in 2020-2022 was that we hit the ceiling at 100mph.
The 2020-2022 inflation spike wasn't due to following MMT based spending policies though. Slamming the brakes at 100mph may certainly have bad consequences, but driving at 100mph in low visibility conditions was the problem, not braking before you hit something.
The fact is everyone knew the combination of supply chain disruptions, remote work, and the changes in spending habits would eventually produce inflation, and yet we kept pumping money in. Every economic school would have advised against that course of action. MMT only calls for spending to keep pace with economic growth, not to run the money printers as fast as you can.
Economic theories, like scientific theories, are successful if they correctly predict what will happen if you do X. If the theory of gravity predicts that you will fall to your death if you jump off a cliff, it's not a failure of the theory of gravity that it doesn't tell you how to levitate after you've already jumped.
Economic theories, like scientific theories, are successful if they correctly predict what will happen if you do X.
In addition, an economic theory can only be useful if the actions that they dictate can actually be put into practice; if nobody's going to follow what the theory tells you to do, then it's of little use at all.
This is the big problem with both MMT and Keynesianism: they're both great figleafs for politicians to wear when they want to spend in order to pander. But when the theory tells them that the situation has changed and they need to change their actions accordingly, they don't heed the need to raise taxes (MMT) or slash spending (Keynes).
Unless we really do the thing, then pointing at a given macroeconomic theory is just an excuse.
> In addition, an economic theory can only be useful if the actions that they dictate can actually be put into practice; if nobody's going to follow what the theory tells you to do, then it's of little use at all.
That is not a requirement for a theory to be useful. The fact that not using it has a cost is proof of its utility.
Remote working itself isn't inflationary, but transitioning from office to remote is. Remote workers can get high paying jobs in low cost of living areas and can generally job hop with less friction so salaries rise, spending that would have gone to commuting expenses and daytime childcare is now disposable income, people spending more of their time at home causes them to invest in larger or nicer homes. More money getting thrown at fewer items causes prices to rise.
It's also pretty funny when you realize that the GOP loves MMT when it comes granting tax cuts but when you use the same MMT principles they use for say social welfare suddenly MMT is nonsense!
Yup, for me I can see the device but when I try to initiate a send it just doesn't show up on the other device about half the time. I've not found a reliable way to fix it either, toggling AirDrop on and off on both devices seems the best way to fix it but only works like 70% of the time.
There is a big difference between a tavern owner keeping tabs on the comings and goings of their customers and the government having 24/7 precise location monitoring on everyone in the entire country.
One does not violate the 4th and the other does (though they do it anyway).
I don't see such a clear benefit to eliminating the debt, actually I see a lot of downsides that would likely be worse for our children. The way I understand it, the primary concern is whether the debt is growing faster than the economy can support and whether we're using it for productive purposes or not. A government isn't like a household: treasury debt also functions as a safe asset, a tool of monetary policy, and a store of value for pensions, banks, and investors around the world, a majority of the debt is also a domestic asset. Trying to eliminate the debt would likely mean austerity and major tax increases, which can be more damaging the debt itself.
I don't think people realize that a large share of the government's debt is also a domestic asset. It is still something to be wary of and manage carefully but it is not something that I think is wise to eliminate either. The main concern should be making sure it is being used productively and is not exceeding what the growth of the economy can support (which happens when its used unproductively).
