metallic_z3r0
@metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
- Comment on Somehow metal with zip zap moves rocks without touching and this isn't fiction? 3 weeks ago:
You know the corollary to Arthur C Clarke’s “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which is “Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from technology”? That’s what I think the explanation and manipulation of the electromagnetic force and strong and weak nuclear forces basically are. We just figured out the rules for how magic works, and now we manipulate them to make rocks think and show us pretty colors over vast distances, and can also explode cities with glowing rocks and weird gasses. Also we can make potent potions from strange biological and chemical essences that make the body do what we tell it, mostly. And we’re getting better at it (and would be getting better at it faster if it weren’t for metaphorical dragons getting in the way).
Just because we can explain it doesn’t make it any less magic.
- Comment on The future shines like gold 4 weeks ago:
Yes.
- Comment on The future shines like gold 4 weeks ago:
“Forever” unless the knowledge is out of date, or you don’t use it and forget, or until Alzheimer’s or some other dementia happens and everything disappears (or until your death, I suppose, but gold also tends to change hands around that time).
- Comment on Of course, it's the way you tell them... 4 weeks ago:
lol. lmao, even.
- Comment on When the whole world says 'Can we use your pool?' you say, 'What? No. Get out of here.' 4 weeks ago:
I quote this at my kids sometimes.
- Comment on Continental D r i f t s 2 months ago:
Two inches per year is more than some old couples get, good on them for keeping the spark alive for so long.
- Comment on Warning 2 months ago:
The real question is if the darker purple is in front or if it’s the lighter purple.
- Comment on Ask ChatGPT to pick a number between 1 and 100 2 months ago:
37 is my favorite, because 3x7x37=777 (three sevens), and I think that’s neat.
- Comment on CD Projekt CFO does "not see a place for microtransactions in single-player games" 2 months ago:
Or if we’re talking Witcher 3, Hearts of Stone or Blood and Wine. Both of those had an amazing amount of content, well worth it.
- Comment on shit post 5 months ago:
Thanks KC Green, may the memory of your work live much longer than you do (he is very much still alive, as far as I know).
- Comment on Call an expert 5 months ago:
This is the reason I’ve taken to carrying a small magnet with me (combined with a flashlight/blacklight/laser pointer), so I can easily pick up those little bits that get lost (my wife cross stitches too, and sometimes her needles fall into the carpet, so it’s nice to find those before our feet do).
- Comment on haha :( 5 months ago:
If nothing matters, then you can choose what matters to you, and if I choose to care about something, then it matters because it matters to me, even if it doesn’t to other people.
- Comment on He thought it was a sausage on a stick.. 6 months ago:
Me want plant corn dog delight!
- Comment on he learned not to trust farts 6 months ago:
For someone not trusting their gut, that guy sure seems super trusting that their eyes are going to be ok.
- Comment on Braid, Anniversary Edition Release Date Trailer 7 months ago:
I hadn’t heard about that, what a shame.
- Comment on You need a gift, and you're loaded with cash. How about a gold and pearl purse with a memorable clasp? 7 months ago:
For anyone curious, apparently this gaudy trash went for $5557 and is now sold out:
- Comment on ‘Mind-boggling’ sea creature identified as digenean trematode 8 months ago:
Hopefully the pastries aren’t all medusa-head conglomerate organism-flavored, I’d like at least one or two to be decent with jam, or maybe cream cheese.
- Comment on Do Multivitamins actually do anything? 9 months ago:
I prefer defying whatever gods exist by living in darkness and cold. Sunlight causes skin damage, I’d prefer getting by with vitamin D supplements.
- Comment on Essence transfer ftw 10 months ago:
If you go by 3.5e, they’re hardly immobile, and are more like demi-gods than temporarily inconvenienced liches.
- Comment on The mistake was developing higher brain functions. 10 months ago:
Fortunately, our much closer mammalian cousins were brave enough to swim back, and now some of them tip over boats for fun.
- Comment on Is America Really That Bad? 10 months ago:
As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:
I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.
The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that’s true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world’s gold reserves (today it’s a little over 25%).
The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries’). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn’t sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.
This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping “New Economic Policy” on August 15, 1971, stating:
““We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.””
To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.
So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US “temporarily” suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn’t mean: it wasn’t the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn’t really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn’t the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.
It also really doesn’t have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn’t really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.
Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).
" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"
I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists’ opinions on intelligent design.
- Comment on There's a steep decline in pay compared to the value workers add to the economy, closely tracking the fall in union membership. 10 months ago:
As Kochevnik81 wrote 10 months ago:
I just wanted to speak a bit towards that website. I think that specifically what it is trying to argue (with extremely varying degrees of good arguments) is that all these social and economic changes can be traced back to the United States ending gold convertibility in 1971. I say the arguments are of extremely varying degrees because as has been pointed out here, some things like crime are trends that stretched back into the 1960s, some things like deregulation more properly start around the 1980s, and even something like inflation is complicated by the fact that it was already rising in the 1960s, and was drastically impacted by things like the 1973 and 1979 Oil Shocks.
The decision on August 15, 1971 is often referred to in this context as removing the US dollar from the gold standard, and that’s true to a certain extent, but a very specific one. It was the end of the Bretton Woods system, which had been established in 1944, with 44 countries among the Allied powers being the original participants. This system essentially created a network of fixed exchange rates between currencies, with member currencies pegged to the dollar and allowed a 1% variation from those pegs. The US dollar in turn was pegged to $35 per gold ounce. At the time the US owned something like 80% of the world’s gold reserves (today it’s a little over 25%).
The mechanics of this system meant that other countries essentially were tying their monetary policies to US monetary policy (as well as exchange rate policy obviously, which often meant that US exports were privileged over other countries’). The very long and short is that domestic US government spending plus the high costs of the Vietnam War meant that the US massively increased the supply of dollars in this fixed system, which meant that for other countries, the US dollar was overvalued compared to its fixed price in gold. Since US dollars were convertible to gold, these other countries decided to cash out, meaning that the US gold reserves decreased basically by half in the decade leading up to 1971. This just wasn’t sustainable - there were runs on the dollar as foreign exchange markets expected that eventually it would have to be devalued against gold.
This all meant that after two days of meeting with Treasury Secretary John Connally and Budget Director George Schultz (but noticeably not Secretary of State William Rogers nor Presidential Advisor Henry Kissinger), President Richard Nixon ordered a sweeping “New Economic Policy” on August 15, 1971, stating:
““We must create more and better jobs; we must stop the rise in the cost of living [note: the domestic annual inflation rate had already risen from under 2% in the early 1960s to almost 6% in the late 1960s]; we must protect the dollar from the attacks of international money speculators.””
To this effect, Nixon requested tax cuts, ordered a 90-day price and wage freeze, a 10% tariff on imports (which was to encourage US trading partners to revalue their own currencies to the favor of US exports), and a suspension on the convertibility of US dollars to gold. The impact was an international shock, but a group of G-10 countries agreed to new fixed exchange rates against a devalued dollar ($38 to the gold ounce) in the December 1971 Smithsonian Agreement. Speculators in forex markets however kept trying to push foreign currencies up to their upper limits against the dollar, and the US unilaterally devalued the dollar in February 1973 to $42 to the gold ounce. By later in the year, the major world currencies had moved to floating exchange rates, ie rates set by forex markets and not by pegs, and in October the (unrelated, but massively important) oil shock hit.
So what 1971 meant: it was the end of US dollar convertability to gold, ie the US “temporarily” suspended payments of gold to other countries that wanted to exchange their dollars for it. What it didn’t mean: it wasn’t the end of the gold standard for private US citizens, which had effectively ended in 1933 (and for good measure, the exchange of silver for US silver certificates had ended in the 1960s). It also wasn’t really the end of the pegged rates of the Bretton Woods system, which hobbled on for almost two more years. It also wasn’t the cause of inflation, which had been rising in the 1960s, and would be massively influenced by the 1970s energy crisis, which sadly needs less explaining in 2022 than it would have just a few years ago.
It also really doesn’t have much to do with social factors like rising crime rates, or female participation in the workforce. And it deceptively doesn’t really have anything to do with trends like the US trade deficit or increases in income disparity, where the changes more obviously happen around 1980.
Also, just to draw out the 1973 Oil Shock a little more - a lot of the trends around economic stagnation, price inflation, and falls in productivity really are from this, not the 1971-1973 forex devaluations, although as mentioned the strain and collapse of Bretton Woods meant that US exports were less competitive than they had been previously. But the post 1945 world economy had been predicated on being fueled by cheap oil, and this pretty much ended overnight in October 1973: even when adjusted for inflation, the price essentially immediately tripled that month, and then doubled again in 1979. The fact that the economies of the postwar industrial world had been built around this cheap oil essentially meant that without major changes, industrial economies were vastly more expensive in their output (ie, productivity massively suffered), and many of the changes to make industries competitive meant long term moves towards things like automation or relocating to countries with cheaper input costs, which hurt industrial areas in North America and Western Europe (the Eastern Bloc, with its fossil fuel subsidies to its heavy industries, avoided this until the 1990s, when it hit even faster and harder).
" I know the gold standard is not generally regarded as a good thing among mainstream economists,"
I just want to be clear here that no serious economist considers a gold standard a good thing. This is one of the few areas where there is near universal agreement among economists. The opinion of economists on the gold standard is effectively the equivalent of biologists’ opinions on intelligent design.