BraveSirZaphod @ BraveSirZaphod @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I take it you'd be less in favor of also rolling back all wage growth to 2019 levels, no?

It's very funny how effectively you can turn "a statistically average person" into some ominous sounding elite other by just dressing it up in class language.

Because nothing helps with the rising cost of living more than deliberately pissing away any chance of promotion and likely eventually being laid off and jobless.

You do realize how much privilege one has to have in order to casually jeopardize your income without sweating over it, right?

Inflation is the devaluation of currency due to increased supply of it

This is simply not correct. Increased supply of currency relative to the actual amount of goods and services in an economy is probably the most prominent cause of inflation, but it's not the only cause. Inflation itself is the actual generalized rise in prices, which can be caused by a variety of factors. Find a basic econ textbook, or just read the Wikipedia article on inflation.

Record profits (and expenses) are exactly what you'd expect given inflation.

Say you make widgets as a side gig. You spend $500 a month on supplies and manage to get $750 in revenue, yielding $250 in profit each month. Then, the ghost of Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe is somehow elected to chair the Federal Reserve, and after a year passes, we see 100% inflation, causing your expenses to blow up to $1000 a month. You raise your prices to match, giving you $1500 a month in revenue. You now have record profit of $500 a month! Of course, each dollar is worth half as much as was a year ago, so despite these literal record profits, you're in the exact same financial situation as before. My general understanding is that supply-side costs have increased quite a lot, which accounts for a lot, but probably not all, of the higher costs for consumer goods. I know people in my family talked about how wood and other home supplies got a lot more expensive, and the owner of a local cafe told me about how he was seeing significantly higher costs for basic things like cups and lids.

This is not to say that things like greed don't apply as well, but record profits during inflation aren't an indicator of this (and it's not as if greed is a particularly new discovery). To put it another way, record employee wages during inflation also don't mean very much if the cost of everything else rises to match those gains.

Given that parking minimums (and cars in general) are a very recent development in the context of all urban history and that, last I checked, we did, in fact, have cities before the 1940s, I think it's a pretty safe bet that this isn't a recipe for some new corporate hellscape.

Funnily enough, parking minimums were only developed in the first place so that businesses could attract wealthy white suburbanites as they fled cities, so if you really want a social justice framing, this is essentially undoing one of the core relics of white flight.

A lot of local urbanist groups have been pushing for this for a long time. Parking minimums were largely made up by pulling numbers out of hats in the 50s and have essentially no basis in empirical fact. Countless small businesses all across the countries exist in buildings that could not legally be built today because of parking minimums. I remember a story from a small Arkansas town about some local entrepreneurs that wanted to open a cafe in a vacant downtown building, but couldn't because they'd need to buy the adjacent building and bulldoze it to make a parking lot in order to meet parking minimums.

These also apply to residential buildings as well. If someone is wanting to build a medium sized apartment building in an older pre-war walkable area near a train station, but modern parking minimums require buying 3x the land in order to build a parking lot, that building isn't going to happen, meaning that new housing units aren't being built and thus there'll be more price pressure on existing housing.

Not to mention, denser housing allows for fewer cars and more transit, which in an absolute boon for the environment. There's a reason why suburbs emit way way more CO2 per capita that downtown areas.

I could have admittedly been less crass about it, but my point is that it's more than a little disheartening to see people engage with a basic principle that's as foundational and indisputable to economics as evolution is to biology and still feel the need to label it as tinfoil hat conspiracy.

Yes, oil companies lower prices in response to decreased oil demand, because they think that that will make them more money. This is not meaningfully different than old VHS tapes being cheap, or on the opposite end, someone leaving for a higher paying job after gaining more experience or more specialized skills. Prices are not randomly pulled out of hat; there's a reason that you can't sell an avocado for $10,000, nor can (most) workers charge $10,000 an hour for their time, and that if you instead sell avocados for $0.10 each, you'll have a line of people around the block (and soon be either out of stock or bankrupt).

That aside, if some dry sarcasm is your bar for "being an absolute dick", you must be surrounded by literal angels.

Congratulations on discovering the radical fact that, in the face of declining demand, businesses generally drop prices.

You're never gonna guess what happens when demand increases or if supply drops!

YouTube, as of late

Yeah, she should be spending her time doing much more productive things like shutting on other people's wives on niche nerd forums.

You then have to play a bit of a cat and mouse game with certain sites that put a lot of effort into detecting ad blockers, and that can be a bit actively annoying.

Personally, I get actually relevant Instagram ads pretty frequently, particularly for various events that I'm interested in. I've seen more than a few shows specifically because I saw an Instagram ad.

I'd naturally prefer no ads, but when they are necessary - and someone does have to pay the costs of running large platforms - I would prefer them to be actually relevant. It's still ultimately my decision as to whether I buy something or not.

I'm not saying that the terms can't be more transparent, because they absolutely can be.

But if you have become aware of this practice and you continue to participate, you have de facto agreed to it. You can of course agree to the terms and continue to criticize them, but you don't get to sign up for a soccer game and then claim that the rules against using your hands don't actually apply to you. If you don't want to face the consequences of how distributed services like this fundamentally work, don't use them.

I mean, yes?

If you do not agree to the terms of a service, do not use the service. This is the case for essentially every system ever. You can go complain about it on Reddit or something if you like.

Yes, of course it has Neo-Nazis, because it has hundreds of millions of people and essentially every niche community has representation there. The doesn't mean it's remotely accurate to say that Instagram is "only Nazis and pedos".

The most followed user is Kim Kardashian, if I remember right, and she's targeting the most normie women possible. Nazis and pedos aren't exactly good for advertising.

This isn't to say that Instagram doesn't have moderation issues, but that isn't contradictory to the fact that Instagram is not solely composed of those kinds of users.

Have you gone on Instagram ever?

It's normies and wine moms.

Instead of respecting the international money market exchange rates for USD to the Peso

You're completely ignoring the black market Peso : USD conversion rate, which is even lower than what Millei has shifted things to at about 1000 pesos per dollar. The aim is to try to get the rate to actually reflect reality.

I think in his bigbrain libertarian mind, the money market pricing of the peso to usd is what defined the value previously and he decided that the market’s pricing is not correct for that of the Argentinian currency.

You're half right here. The idea is that the black market Peso:USD price represents the actual real value of the Peso, while the government's official rate was miles away from this and completely divorced from reality and only remotely sustainable by endless amounts of borrowing, price controls, and money printing, which just contributes to worsening the problem. The hope is that a necessary but painful adjustment to the actual economic reality will eventually provide the stability necessary for real growth.

A smart government will know that, if you want to actually pull this kind of thing off, you need to do everything possible to make the transition as minimally painful as possible and do what you can to help protect the most vulnerable. We'll see how Millei does, but I can't say I'm exactly confident.

There's a meaningful difference between a government arbitrarily mandating a price and buyers and sellers reaching an equilibrium, whatever you want to label it.

You can say that price controls are worth it in some cases, and plenty of economists would agree with that, but they do come with consequences compared to raw market prices, and we shouldn't ignore that, whatever label we want to use.