booly
@booly@sh.itjust.works
- Comment on Electric motorcycles with solid-state batteries seem to be coming soon. 1 week ago:
Maybe you’re not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi “driving” a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there’s a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.
- Comment on Electric motorcycles with solid-state batteries seem to be coming soon. 1 week ago:
Makes me wonder about the wheel’s rotational inertia, too. In theory, a hubless wheel could be lower mass overall without the need for a center axle/hub and spokes connecting the outside to the center. But that’s all weight saved in the center of the wheel with lower effect on overall rotational inertia. Visually, the picture that makes the thumbnail in this post shows that the brake disc has to be further from the center of the wheel, which I imagine adds a lot more weight (more material necessary for the overall brake disc being a larger circle) and a lot more rotational inertia (further from the center).
Maybe the whole design itself can save weight in certain places that make up for the weight added in other places. But I just have a ton of questions, and am overall pretty skeptical of the long term potential of this design.
Looks cool, though, I guess.
- Comment on Electric motorcycles with solid-state batteries seem to be coming soon. 1 week ago:
The hubless wheel is on their current models. It’s basically their signature differentiator.
There’s reason to be skeptical of the company and its claims as a whole, but at least that particular feature has shipped and has been test driven by reviewers:
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
The Federal Reserve is the entity that can creates dollars out of thin air, bevause they control the interest rate of the dollar.
They control the base currency by physically printing dollars and lending money directly to banks. Then, more significantly, they influence the money supply by influencing how much commercial banks are lending, through interest rate operations, and sometimes through market operations that provide liquidity for certain types of securities (especially government bonds).
Taken together, it’s the power to create or destroy money in response to macroeconomic trends.
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
The Federal Reserve system is independant of the US federal government.
Kinda. The board of governors is chosen by the president to 14-year terms, theoretically making them independent of any specific President’s specific priorities. But there’s a Supreme Court case heading when the President can fire the governors, which might effectively end or limit Fed independence.
The individual federal reserve banks also operate in their regions with a lot of leeway to meet local needs, and those are public/private partnerships where nationally chartered banks also have a voice in their operations.
- Comment on Nvidia insists it isn’t Enron, but its AI deals are testing investor faith 2 weeks ago:
My “We’re totally different from Enron” accounting report has a lot of investors asking questions answered by the report.
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
In my mind the concept was one of regulatory oversight.
No, the core concept is one of whether a bank has full reserves, sufficient to cover all of the deposit liability. If the bank keeps only a fraction of the total liability in reserves, then that’s a fractional reserve.
Do you think that when a bank loans money to another bank they are creating money out of thin air?
Yes, that creates money.
If they can do that then why do they need to borrow money?
They need to borrow money for liquidity, to cover the payments they owe to others. An IOU isn’t money, so having a bunch of IOUs in the asset column may require a bank to pledge those IOUs to borrow some money from someone else, maybe even another bank. Then, with money in hand, they can make payments to fund their own operations (pay employees, rent, vendors, taxes, etc.) and pay depositors on demand.
And as a financial institution borrows too much and pays that interest, or is overextended without enough assets to remain solvent/liquid to be able to make payments as they’re due, they may find themselves with insufficient creditworthiness to be able to borrow freely (as other banks are wary of lending to someone who might not pay back). And they might fail. So that general concern always provides a limit on how much they can borrow from other private entities.
They can borrow from the central bank as a lender of last resort, but that carries a cost (and can still only borrow as much as their assets can support). If they’re paying more interest to their creditors than they’re collecting from their borrowers, they’re gonna fail.
Do you believe that the US government must collect taxes before it can spend money? Or do you agree that government spending is self financed and money creation (in spending by the US government) is only limited by concerns of inflation?
No, the government can (and does) borrow money to finance its operations, as well. For the U.S., the sheer amount of government spending is such a high percentage of economic activity that it would be highly inflationary to combine the fiscal power of spending money with the monetary power of controlling the money supply (through creation of base currency, influencing private transactions and interest rates to control bank-created money, and buying/selling securities on the open market).
I think if we lived in a different system without an independent central bank, we’d see a lot of different things going on, including a temptation to elected officials to just create money without regard to inflationary effects. But in the current system, most of the money is created by banks.
Do you believe that Banks hold digital money in their reserves? I do.
Yes, that’s what we’ve been talking about the whole time. When a commercial bank creates a loan, that’s just a ledger that creates an asset in one column and a liability in another column. It could be paper, or it could be digitally stored. If the funds are transferred electronically to another bank, that’s often an electronic record with no physical movement of anything. So yes, those are effectively digital dollars that can be withdrawn as paper money on demand at any given time.
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
it’s true that banks can create money when they lend more than they have in reserves and assets
To be clear, the article is saying (and I’m saying) that the bank creates money every time it makes a loan, in the amount of the loan. Regardless of whatever its reserve and asset situation is. An asset and a liability are created in that moment that cancel out, and then each side can take their asset and do something with it: the borrower uses that cash to spend, and the lender uses that loan balance as an asset it can borrow against or otherwise count on income from.
IMO bank loans are credit but the bank loans are repaid with actual money.
It’s repaid with actual money, but it’s all actual money. When the loan is created the balance in the deposit account can be withdrawn or transferred from there and it’s real money that can buy real goods and real services. The money is created, and then it’s real money in the economy. Then the loan is repaid with real money, and then destroyed in the act of repayment and reducing the balance owed on the loan.
Also, you mentioned fractional reserve banking but that no longer exists. It ended around 2020 when the government changed regulations and no longer requires banks to hold any ratio of reserves to debt.
No, that had the opposite effect of what you think. The minimum reserve requirement was abolished, so banks could then do fractional reserve banking in any fraction they pleased, including even smaller ratios than what was previously allowed. The change in regulation didn’t eliminate fractional reserve banking; it eliminated limits on fractional reserve banking, and every bank continued to hold a reserve that is much, much smaller than 100% of the amount of their deposit liabilities. So the fractions still exist. And can continue to exist in any number, with other practical limits on their ability to loan (creditworthiness and solvency).
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
VTWAX is still like 65% US equities. It hasn’t diversified out of U.S. exposure (and frankly, international stocks aren’t protected from U.S. economic crises). A lot of people think about full blown collapse and crisis, but wouldn’t know what to do about lethargy and stagnation for decades, but still roughly the same economic and financial paradigm.
I think U.S. equities are overpriced right now, especially when looking at market cap weighted indexes (because the U.S. tech bubble seems to represent a much higher percentage of any given index). And I’m concerned that the correction will just be decades of tepid growth or even stagnation where decades of investment won’t actually earn a good return. Not that I’m investing in something else, other than maybe the soft skills I’ve described in my earlier comment.
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
Your own link from the Bank of England starts off with the thesis that agrees with me:
This article explains how the majority of money in the modern economy is created by commercial banks making loans
And you might as well link to the canonical URL of the PDF or the Bank of England website landing page for that article instead of Google Drive acting as a middleman.
The money in the bank’s reserves started its life by being created by the federal government.
No, you’re misunderstanding how the money supply works. The creation of physical printed money might happen by the government, but those physical dollars represent such a small portion of the overall money supply.
First of all, through fractional reserve banking, one physical dollar can get multiplied many times over to represent many dollars in circulation. Especially because most transactions happen on paper, through a ledger that transfers funds from one account to another.
Everything you’re saying still relates to the practical limits of money creation by commercial banks, in terms of creditworthiness (banks don’t want to lend money they can’t get back) and liquidity/regulation (banks don’t want to be left vulnerable without sufficient reserves to satisfy account holders demanding their deposits).
Realistically, the bank takes one of their own assets, such as the balance on the loan, and uses that as collateral to borrow liquid cash as needed for its own reserves (which are only a fraction of the total deposits in its accounts). And every dollar in a circle in a closed loop that doesn’t touch the Fed is a dollar that doesn’t actually trace back to a governmental entity. The Fed is a lender of last resort, but they’re a last resort because they generally charge higher interest than bank to bank loans.
So of the entire money supply, the vast majority of it is dollars created by banks, not dollars created by the government.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
To me, exploitation by association is still exploitation.
But by this telling, the billionaire isn’t any less moral than the person who buys the tickets. If simply transacting with this system is unethical, then the billionaires aren’t any worse than the millionaires, or even the people barely subsisting on what they have.
In my eyes, there’s a huge difference between the person who actively exploits others, and one who incidentally interacts with a person who exploits others. Especially if choosing to opt out wouldn’t actually reduce the exploitation happening. There are still degrees to things, so it’s entirely possible for the billionaire artist to be ethically superior to the millionaire venue operator, even when they both rely on the other.
Not to mention, there’s a difference in kind when talking about exploitation in terms of a team effort where not enough of the fruits of the labor get shared fairly with all team members (positive sum interactions) versus when one actively takes from another, and that victim is worse off from the transaction.
- Comment on Where does the revenue gathered from taxes go and what is national debt? 2 weeks ago:
Money begins its life by being spent by the federal government.
No, in the modern system, money is created by commercial banks when they give a loan.
At the moment a loan for $1 million is created, a bank takes $0 and then turns it into two accounts: a loan with a balance of negative $1 million owed, and a deposit account with a balance of $1 million that can be withdrawn. From the bank’s perspective, and the borrower’s perspective, they went from having $0 to suddenly each having $1 million in assets and $1 million in liabilities, for a net value of zero. Obviously there are going to be fees and stuff paid out, and interest charged over the life of the loan, but you can think of that as fees for services rendered.
The money in that deposit account, created out of thin air, can then be spent elsewhere and enter the economy.
The limits on the ability of banks to do that indefinitely is default risk (the bank is left holding the bag if the borrower doesn’t repay) and liquidity (the bank needs to be able to use the loan balances as an asset on its balance sheets to go and borrow cash for its own operations so that its accountholders always have the ability to withdraw money on demand) and government regulation (the Federal Reserve and the FDIC have various regulations requiring their balance sheets to be able to survive stress tests and other adverse economic events).
So even though the government, through Federal Reserve policy, controls how private market participants might choose to create money, the actual act of money creation happens in the banks, not in the government (except when the government is acting as a bank by lending money through its loan programs).
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
but 3.25-3.5% is basically impossible to go broke with,
Historically it has not been enough to draw down funds that are invested in a broad American stock market index like the S&P500. But that doesn’t make it impossible. A 20-30 year run that looks like the Nikkei 225 between 1990 and 2020 could wipe out portfolios on a 3% withdrawal rate. Even a 2% withdrawal rate would’ve run out of money in 32 years.
I’m kinda bearish about the continued dominance of the “invest in publicly traded large cap American equities” strategy over the coming decades, so I’m a bit more conservative in my savings rate, and what securities/assets I’m actually invested in, including soft assets like my own earning ability if I were to bail on this country and move somewhere else (fluency in another language, job skill sets that translate outside of the US borders, relationships/network with people who don’t rely on the US).
And I know that’s not the central point you’re making. But there are plenty of people who might not feel secure with $1.5 million or even $3 million or $6 million in investible wealth, especially if it’s tied up in one particular asset or asset class, or otherwise less liquid than publicly traded securities.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
I’ve also heard salaries over $£€70,000 no longer increase happiness.
No, that study was debunked. Turns out that some subset of unhappy people will remain unhappy even if you give them all the money in the world, so looking purely at the least happy people in America, you’ll notice that their happiness stops going up at $75,000 in 2010 dollars. But if you focus on people who are already on the happier side of the spectrum, more money keeps buying them more happiness, even if the slope of that relationship tapers a bit.
Side note, the way the two sides reconciled their methodologies, that produced different results, was a really interesting way to perform science, and should be followed in the future whenever there are well respected studies that contradict each other.
- Comment on How much money should one person realistically make or have? 2 weeks ago:
It’s impossible to become a billionaire after that without exploiting others, whether that is workers, employees, investors…whoever.
People say this, but I don’t think it’s true.
If I simply ask for people to give me money if they like me, and I get 1 million people to give me a dollar each, then I become a millionaire. Nobody’s being taken advantage of, everyone is voluntarily doing this.
Getting to a billion is a lot harder but not impossible. If I ask and 10 million people give me $100 each over the course of 10 years, I might make a billion dollars that way.
So who can do this kind of “ask people for money” at these scales? Anyone who provides a service where the marginal cost of each additional recipient of that service doesn’t cost anything. A musician playing music in a subway station performs basically the same amount of work whether 10 people walk by or 1000 people walk by in the time that he performs. And if you’re a recording artist, you might release a song that literally over a billion people enjoy.
Yes, sports leagues and movie studios and record labels and Ticketmaster and book publishers and live venues and broadcasters and tech platforms are often exploitative in many ways, but authors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, comedians, and other creators can and do sometimes do things that make the world better by billions of dollars worth of happiness, while taking a cut worth hundreds of millions, or even billions.
Ultimately, we do things that produce value in some way or another. Sometimes we get to keep the fruits of our labor, and sometimes we get to profit from that value created. Often, as in the world of intellectual property, the value is very far removed from the actual cost to produce, including the cost in terms of human labor. When that happens, sometimes the excess value is worth billions. Even without a big team creating that value.
- Comment on Google Deploying Huge CO2 Battery Facilities with Company Energy Dome 3 weeks ago:
Or maybe use excess power to electrolyze water for fuel cell use later?
Hydrogen storage presents a lot of challenges, because it tends to leak at normal temperatures found on Earth. So we either tolerate a lot of loss during storage, or we use lots of energy chilling it to a temperature where it won’t easily escape.
- Comment on Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else? 3 weeks ago:
There are about 500 NBA roster spots. Total basketball related income across the league is $10.25 billion, and the CBA requires that player income make up half of that. So there’s $5.13 billion to split between 500 players, an average/mean of $10.25 million per full time player (some players get called up or put on reserve when injuries or something like that happen).
There are about 3.8 million public school teachers in K-12. If you took literally every dollar paid to NBA players and gave it to public school teachers, that’d be about $1350 per teacher.
There are other sports, of course, but we’re also talking about nurses and doctors and EMTs and public librarians and other important underpaid jobs. Taking all money from sports isn’t going to make much of a dent in those other jobs’ pay.
- Comment on Is there a point we can track down when we stopped caring about doctors, nurses, teacher, etc? And thought it was a great idea to pay atheletes millions and screw everyone else? 3 weeks ago:
Ridiculous pay for star athletes and celebrities is at least fair
Put another way, we as a society actually do spend wayyy more money on doctors, nurses, and teachers. It’s just that there are many millions of people who have to split that pot of money, whereas for pro athletes there are only a few dozen or a few hundred to split that comparably smaller pot of money with.
I might have the same favorite NBA player as literally millions of people in this country. I for sure don’t have the same favorite doctor or favorite teacher, though.
So if a genie showed up and said “give $1 to your favorite celebrity and give $100 to your favorite teacher,” we as a society would give way more money to the teachers, but each individual teacher would receive less than each individual celebrity who gets paid under this system.
- Comment on U.S. consumers are so fucked up, that they put more than $1 billion on buy-now, pay later services during Cyber Monday 5 weeks ago:
Yeah but it’s pretty nice to be able to take advantage of a promo deal as long as it’s not a sticky long term relationship. Some people in this thread are talking about a reward system of 20% cash back on what you put on BNPL, and 0% interest, as some kind of Paypal promo going on during Black Friday.
If you take the deal as a one time thing, it’s a great deal. They hope that you might get used to using the service next time it’s not such a great deal, but if they don’t have a way to lock you in, then just take the money and run.
See, for example, the glorious year of MoviePass setting its own money on fire. People got great deals on movie tickets, and then the company went bankrupt and didn’t keep their customers.
- Comment on happy buy nothing day to those who celebrate 1 month ago:
The base price of TVs have gotten so cheap that in terms of absolute savings, even a true 50% discount wouldn’t seem like a big deal.
30 years ago, when a big screen TV might cost the same as 3 months rent in a 3 bedroom apartment, getting 50% off was like getting 1.5 months rent. Now, when a big TV costs less than a quarter of a month’s rent for a studio apartment, getting 50% off a TV is like getting 3 days rent.
Modern life is expensive because of housing, not because of stuff. Giving us better prices on stuff doesn’t even help make this life more affordable.
- Comment on ICE tries to kidnap random food delivery driver off the street. He jukes them on a foldable bike. 3 months ago:
He was circling on the bike taunting them, saying stuff like “I’m not an American citizen,” and the ICE dudes just tolerated it until the bike rider dropped his phone, and detected weakness and pounced, before the guy snatched up his phone and managed to ride away.
Tragicomedy is the best description.
- Comment on Shamelessly stolen from Reddit 5 months ago:
Why are you forgiving student loans?
That’s the federal government’s administration of a federal government program, so no, that’s not the same at all.
Why do you tip servers in America?
That’s the basic deal. If a restaurant implements a no tipping policy, they’re allowed to do that. I don’t see how that’s the same or different from a restaurant implementing a “discount for veterans” or “no discounts for veterans” policy. It sounds like we’re in favor of a system where the restaurant chooses what they want to be about, whether it’s a tip-based system or not, or a discounts for vets place or not.
So in a sense, it sounds like you agree with me that we should let the restaurants choose. Neither choice is a “punishment” of anyone.
- Comment on Shamelessly stolen from Reddit 5 months ago:
But really you’re just punishing veterans with PTSD
Failing to give special treatment to someone is not punishing them. Especially when we’re talking about special treatment for an entire category of people, most of whom don’t have PTSD (estimates range from 6-27% of those deployed to a war zone, and not all veterans served in a war zone), many of whom are financially well off.
Maybe the VA and the federal government should do more for vets. Maybe the military itself should take care of the troops a bit better. But asking private businesses to prop up veterans at their own expense seems like a misguided approach.
- Comment on YSK that Gerrymandering allows politicians to choose their own voters. In many countries, it's illegal. Gerrymandering is common in the United States 5 months ago:
The American political system was designed for weak parties, and geographical representation above all, in a political climate where there were significant cultural differences between regions.
The last time we updated the core rules around districting (435 seats divided as closely to proportionally as possible among the states, with all states being guaranteed at least one seat, in single member districts) was in 1929, when we had a relatively weak federal government, very weak political parties, before the rise of broadcasting (much less national broadcasting, or national television, or cable TV networks, or universal phone service, or internet, or social media). We had 48 states. The population was about 120 million, and a substantial number of citizens didn’t actually speak English at home.
And so it was the vote for the person that was the norm. Plenty of people could and did “switch parties” to vote for the candidate they liked most. Parties couldn’t expel politicians they didn’t like, so most political issues weren’t actually staked out by party line.
But now, we have national parties where even local school governance issues look to the national parties for guidance. And now the parties are strong, where an elected representative is basically powerless to resist even their own party’s agenda. And a bunch of subjects that weren’t partisan have become partisan. All while affiliations with other categories have weakened: fewer ethnic or religious enclaves, less self identity with place of birth, more cultural homogenization between regions, etc.
So it makes sense to switch to a party-based system, with multi member districts and multiple parties. But that isn’t what we have now, and neither side wants to give up the resources and infrastructure they’ve set up to give themselves an advantage in the current system.
- Comment on When will we have reached enough productivity? 5 months ago:
Increasing productivity of workers is met with demand for more production-intensive products. It’s like how every time hardware improves, software becomes more complex to take advantage of that increased capability. It’s like Jevon’s Paradox, but applied to productivity of workers.
One prominent example: our farmers are more productive than ever. So we move up the value chain, and have farmers growing more luxury crops that aren’t actually necessary for sustenance. We overproduce grains and legumes, and then feed them to animals to raise meat. We were so productive with different types of produce that we decided to go on hard mode and create just-in-time supply chains for multiple cultivars so that supermarkets sell dozens of types of fresh apples, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, etc., and end up eating much more fresh produce of diverse varieties compared to our parents and grandparents, who may have relied more heavily on frozen or canned produce, with limited variety.
- Comment on Realized 99% of all my chargers are USB-C. This can only mean one thing. New USB bout to drop! 5 months ago:
Mandatory until the European Commission updates the standard. The law mandating the use of USB-C explicitly has a procedure for how to propose a new standard to supersede the current one.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 6 months ago:
I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.
It may end much of the progress towards people voluntarily sacrificing for the environment, but I think certain technologies are already on a runaway self sustaining cycle:
- Heat pumps and electrification of residential heat is starting to make financial sense, even without subsidies and tax breaks.
- Electrification of cars makes transportation cheaper. In some countries, much, much cheaper.
- Solar power, during times of day that it is plentiful, is basically the cheapest energy source known to mankind. There is plenty of financial incentive to try to shift supply (through grid scale storage tech) and demand (time shifting things like heating/cooling and car charging) to meet this super cheap source of energy.
Trump can rant about carbon-free replacements for fossil fuels, but he can’t make them more expensive, especially not outside of the U.S.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 6 months ago:
That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.
Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:
- Switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (easy for North America, more difficult for Europe)
- Switching from fossil fuels entirely to carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal (depends heavily on geography and access to nuclear materials and engineering).
- Switching from fossil fuels to cleaner electrified drivetrains
- Improving energy efficiency in residential, commercial, industrial applications.
This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 6 months ago:
The big assumption is that the child you have will likely consume carbon-emitting goods and services at the same rate as whatever average they’re assuming.
Breaking down by country shows that people’s emissions vary widely by year and by country:
ourworldindata.org/…/co-emissions-per-capita
So if the UK spent most of the 20th century, and into the beginning of this century, emitting about 10 tonnes per person per year. Now it’s down to less than 5. Since your linked article was written in 2017 to the latest stats for 2023, the UK has dropped per capita emissions from 5.8 to 4.4, nearly a 25% reduction.
During that same 125 years, the US skyrocketed from about 7 tonnes to above 20, then back down to 14.
The European Union peaked in around 2001 at 10, and have since come down to 5.6.
Meanwhile, China’s population has peaked but their CO2 emissions show no signs of slowing down: ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
So it takes quite a few leaps and assumptions to say that your own children will statically consume the global or national average at the moment of their birth. And another set of assumptions that a shrinking population will actually reduce consumption (I personally don’t buy it, I think that childless people in the West tend to consume more with their increased disposable income). And a shrinking population might end up emitting more per capita with some sources of fixed emissions amounts and a smaller population to spread that around for.
If the US and Canada dropped their emissions to EU levels we’d basically be on target for major reductions in global emissions. If we can cap China’s and India’s future emissions to current EU per capita levels that would go a long way towards averting future disaster, too.
It can be done, and it is being done, despite everything around us, and population size/growth is not directly relevant to the much more important issue of reducing overall emissions.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 6 months ago:
Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).
Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.