Because strong companies don’t worry much about short sellers. You’ll never see Apple complain about them (and if they do you know Apple is having cash flow problems).
Companies complain about short sellers when they’re having cash flow problems and are dependent on the public markets to raise $ (by issuing new shares or in a bond offering), dto fund their operations. Short sellers can increase the cost of the company to raise money (eg if the company has a bond offering they may have to pay a higher interest rate if tons of shorts effectively lower the share price of the company).
One of the most profitable companies in the world definitely needs to have more of their wealth extracted by the least profitable organization in the world — USG.
They charge 30% for app store transactions for the paltry amount of services they provide. Governments provide far more services from which the corporations benefit, so if apple can charge that much so can any govt.
Governments aren't intended to be profitable, they're provided in the public good, not their own. You should look at governments as massive non-profits.
“In Beijing alone, roughly 10,000 bunkers were promptly constructed...Now when night falls, more than a million people—mostly migrant workers and students from rural areas—vanish from Beijing’s bustling streets into the underground universe, little known to the world above...Local laws require a minimal living space of 4 square meters (43 square feet) per tenant, which, in many cases, go ignored.”
Something about this story doesn’t add up — many bunkers are less than 43 sq ft per tenant, but somehow the average number of people living in a bunker is ~100 (1,000,000 people / 10,000 bunkers)??
These bunkers has multiple rooms. It is not uncommon to have 8 people living in one room, and a large bunker site can have 20+ rooms. A bunker site can have living area similar to a 20 room motel, underneath a much bigger building on top (at least when they are inside the city).
Since these bunkers were built, they were build for war, some of them have very thick gas tight door to complete seal the environment from outside.
Think about how many apartment buildings are in Beijing. All of these have basements, each basement level has multiple rooms, and most apartment buildings have multiple levels of basement. A million people easily could be sheltered under that context.
>>Local laws require a minimal living space of 4 square meters (43 square feet) per tenant, which, in many cases, go ignored.”
60m2 is a really small apt, considering the place that the kitchen, hall and bathroom take. But according to code, 15 people can live there all fine and dandy. Wow!
I've lived in accomodation with less than 4 m^2 per person.
I lived almost a year in a ~3.5x3.5m hostel room with 3 bunk beds (so 6 people total). Basically enough space to fit beds and nothing else, that's about 2 m^2 per person.
It's actually not as bad as you'd think. You basically use the room as a place to sleep, the rest of the time you were in the hostel you'd just hang around the common areas.
It's definitely not for everyone. If you're more introverted and need your alone time it would be horrible.
This. I've lived in a 3.3 meters square "goshiwon" in Seoul, Korea, for about a year. After escaping the coprorate air-conditioned cubicle world back home, these were really the best days of my life!
If you're just using it as a place to sleep the window really doesn't matter.
If you're on a normal rhythm, it's night when you go to sleep and the window doesn't add much. If you do night shifts, having no windows in the day is down right merciful.
I spent a night in a climbers shelter in the Andes, in very bad weather. It was maybe 50sqm with about 50 in it. No windows, one door, which hapless arrivals tended to close during the night. Bunks up to inches from the ceiling (in my case), which was slimy and dripped. Concrete walls wet from breath. Hard to move without whispered negotiations. It was one of the most unpleasant nights I have spent. Difficult to avoid panic whenever the door closed. There is a lot to be said for windows in close quarters.
I'm sure they would choose something better in a heartbeat if it were a viable option for them.
Quite a lot of people are stuck with "Accept this crap situation, go to some other worse option or kill myself."
Plenty of cultures believe in an afterlife and/or that your actions impact on the reputation of your family or both. Suicide is often deemed shameful, it is a black mark on the family and you won't get into heaven or similar.
Thus, many people feel suicide is not really an option, leaving them with this crap or some worse option.
They are “migrant workers and students from rural areas”. They are willing to live in such abysmal conditions for a few years because it holds the promise of a strong quality of life improvement after that.
They are fucked, as they will graduate to the world of "996" and still live a dismal life. Such are the ways in cultures with a steep "power gradient." If all persons are not created equal, then someone deserves steak eggs while another deserves beans and shit. All one have left is connections, and no measure of hard work will make the graduate from a farm family the peer of the graduate from a family of Party princelings.
You should see the cages people are willing to occupy in Hong Kong. Once you cross the border into the PRC, some people are willing to live in even harsher conditions.
I don't think there is a hard limit as to what humans will endure to survive or to make money to send home. Oddly, the question falls to "how low can I go to keep my life" instead of "how high can rise above my current situation."
Where the fuck are people who stand up and say, "we are humans, not rats, and we refuse to live like rats."
The picture in the original article is an exaggeration of the real condition. There are bunkers with much better condition than what the picture shows and still very cheap to live in. I have lived in those bunkers for short time about 15 years ago. It wasn't worse than than a typical university dormitory except no windows.
It isn’t that much of an exaggeration. I’ve seen where the ant tribe lived in my own apartment building near Sanyuanxiqiao, it was very similar to the article.
No-one ever counts the dead that "wealth" and its pursuits created like this. Why is that? Are all of the slaves, and people who died in crap working conditions, and victims of colonialism and profit-driven wars and on and on and on just "necessary sacrifices" for progress, or something?
Um, WAY more people have died and been assaulted in former colonies than died or were assaulted during colonial rule (see Egypt and South Africa).
The ethics of colonization can be debated, I’m certainly not an advocate of it, but the safety of the citizens living then vs now can’t be, it’s at least an order of magnitude more dangerous to live in Egypt and South Africa now than during colonial rule.
The power struggles of post colonial time frames don't have nothing to do with the colonial rule. In a lot of places the goal of the colonial power was to leave the former colony in as shitty of a position as possible. For instance the French had orders to remove every bit of copper, iron, and steel on their way out of Guinea, going so far as to pull wires out of walls. When you wreak entire countries economies like that and leave a power vacuum, what do you expect to happen?
And BTW, the whole "the savages are better with a little civilization forced on them" was one of the primary arguments in favor of slavery.
My claim was in response to rosser's claim about "victims of colonialism" -- no doubt there were plenty, but there have been many, many more victims of poor government (and counting) in those countries (again, see Egypt and South Africa) since the fall of colonialism.
I'm also not aware that the goal of colonialism was to "leave the former colony in as shitty of a position as possible" (seems like a pretty shitty way to treat an investment, which is what colonies were -- expansions of empires) -- care to provide some sources?
Colonialism primarily fell as a result of internal political struggles within developed nations, not as a result of any legitimate physical threat by the colonized country.
I'm inclined to quibble mildly with 'monocasa's phrasing, but the ultimate point still obtains that the post-colonial conditions in those countries are, in no small part, rather direct consequences of the rapacity of their colonizers.
If the Dutch had left Rhodesia even marginally less resource-stripped, can you really assert that Zimbabwe would have played out like it did?
If the French hadn't treated the Cambodian and Vietnamese peoples like it did, would Pol Pot even have happened?
If we (the US) hadn't propped up puppet assholes around the world, would those countries and their regions have fallen into the states they did after?
The entirety of the current mess in Middle East can, in a very real way, be traced back to dividing up Kurdish territory into multiple countries, because the colonial powers recognized that the Kurds were the greatest real threat to the oil flowing. Literally drawing lines on maps right through the heart of their historical lands fixed that — temporarily. Now, though, we've got the House of Saud and Iran (another great example; the Shah much?) and Iraq (another!) and Syria, and, net, a death and misery toll we will never be able to fully reckon.
Consequences are a thing. Our system has a cost in other people's lives. Is that supposed to be better than having a cost in our own? I repudiate that notion. The GPS coordinates of your birth do not alter the intrinsic value of your life.
No, my claim is that, if they hadn't been stripped bare as the colonizers were leaving, what followed would have had a better chance at being those things.
Burning someone's house to the ground, and then bailing leaves them in a rather more precarious state than simply sneaking out in the middle of the night. That's on the person with the match, not the folks who had to clean up after.
EDIT: To torture the metaphor further: Of course, if the people who are cleaning up the fire decide to go full-on Lord of the Flies with their cleanup and post-cleanup organization, that's on them.
My point is: It is beyond specious to suggest they would have done the same if the house hadn't been burnt down.
Sounds like an argument that the colonies should’ve been left intact rather than destroyed as a result of interna politics in the colonizing country.
In any case, why are they still dangerous places now? It’s been quite awhile, and places like Singapore prove that backwaters can be turned into empires rather quickly.
The "internal politics in the colonizing country" were premised on the notion that the colony was their (the colonizer's) economic resource, not the indigenes they took it from.
The existence of multiple-axis exceptional cases like Singapore doesn't obviate the general pattern. The notion of "the exception that proves the rule," might apply here.
All of these things ultimately, directly or indirectly, fall into the bucket "consequences of markets". Whether we're are trying to own a market, or own a resource, or whatever, we have demonstrated a set-your-watch-by-it reliable pattern of considering the people in the way of the thing we're trying to own expendable, but we somehow very pointedly ignore counting those people and consequences when we talk about how "bad" Communism is.
It's a double standard, and it's boringly predictable, and boringly disappointing, especially in a crowd that purports to be as smart and capable of understanding all of the things as this one does.
I don't know. I wish I had the resources or otherwise were meaningfully able to hang out with that question, because it fascinates me endlessly.
I do, however, find it a curiously "happy" (for someone, anyway) outcome of the current model that the lack of opportunity to contemplate "better alternatives" is kinda structurally baked in.
People who do have the opportunity to ponder that kind of thing are, on the whole, the people who benefit most from the system, and so are thusly disinclined. And the people who suffer most under the system are in a position of, generally, having none of the time, inclination, or education to do so.
I won't go so far as to suggest that's by design but it is rather, "Well, isn't that curious?" to me.
Gotcha, I suggest checking this out, it’s rather long and mind-bending (but what good political treatise isn’t?) and I think will change your perspective on the matter.
Edit: And my point is that making a hard separation between colonial and post colonial circumstances is a mistake, as many of the post colonial issues trace their reasons to colonial decisions.
EDIT: If you’re going to downvote, at least have the respect to state why. My post is a serious one, I’m not trolling — people have freed themselves of Crohns with carnivore diets.
Hello, I downvoted and will tell you why. I don't have crohn's or UC, but I do have ankylosing spondylitis which is a related autoimmune issue which is very correlated with crohn's/uc especially in the genetic incidence (HLA-b27 positive).
I am entirely sympathetic to the idea that certain diets do really help symptoms at times. Examples that have been studied include Specific Carbohydrate Diet, Low FODMAPS, etc. These diets do NOT work for everyone and thus are highly variable.
I've spoken to many rheumatologists who openly say that they are open to patients experimenting. HOWEVER, that broken instagram link you posted is likely one of the few success stories that filters to the top. All the people who try these diets and fail you do not hear about.
The role of the gut and diet in autoimmune is being researched and further elucidated. Patients should safely experiment with the role of diet.
But for you to say "Fix your diet"?! As if you KNOW that other diets are simply BROKEN and that an all carnivore diet is fixing it?? It is not supported by the data at all. It runs contrary to most of the research done on dieting. I'll agree that plenty of research in dieting is flawed (often centered around mediterranean diet), but your tone of "Fix" is why you earned my downvote as a person who has an autoimmune but I don't think you are guilty of trolling. No hard feelings but be a bit more humble around these things when there's so much unknown and ANYONE telling you that they have a perfect FIX is not telling the truth.
Fair point on the tone, I added an updated edit to reflect this.
Most people’s diets ARE broken though, even 50 years ago we didn’t have hardly the level of autoimmune disease that we have today. The standard medical approach to chronic/autoimmune disease is to tell people the best that can do is manage it, not heal it.
There are plenty of people who have in fact healed themselves from autoimmune diseases and there’s a very common theme — avoid all processed foods, avoid most grains, avoid most sugar, etc. Focusing primarily on animal products (which is where the nasty majority of people got the majority of their calories over until just a few thousand years ago has been shown to ameliorate autoimmune — you have to test it out for yourself, if you wait until the medical establishment comes around you’re going to be waiting your whole life, it is completely against their incentive to find a dietary method of healing Crohn’s or any other autoimmune disease).
I completely agree with you about the rising levels of autoimmune diseases. Lots of ideas are swirling around such as the Hygiene Hypothesis. You may in fact be right about your diet choice.
However, look up "mcdougall starch diet autoimmune". Here's a doctor who runs a starch based clinic (Starch heavy, avoid ALL animal products). He has client testimonies, a legit clinic, and patients who cured their autoimmune disease.
I personally find that the diet you recommend (albeit with more vegetables) is best for me, but the paleo vs vegan argument has proponents on both sides claiming they've cured autoimmune diseases. I cannot find strong clinical trial data favoring one side over the other. With that said, look up "Dine-CD research study" that is trying to be the first clinical trial of specific carbohydrate diet for crohns.
EDIT 2: Let me re-phrase my comment as follows — I highly recommend you explore a therapeutic diet such as carnivore which has helped many people heal issues such as Crohn’s.
Eating to avoid symptoms is very common and very much recommended.
Thing is, it doesn't stop the illness itself. You are confusing eating things (like meats, also no fibers etc) that are known to not cause bowel issues in people with crohn's disease, with curing the illness. Being on that diet does little to reverse the illness and it's effect on the digestive tract other than the proccessing in the intestine and down. And what's the point of calling it a treatment if you can never revert to normal?
I asked how much insurance was. If I wanted woo-science shoved down my throat I would return home to my parents.
I highly recommend you try out a therapeutic diet such as carnivore which has helped many people heal issues such as Crohn’s.
Please don't make medical "recommendations" of any kind at all on the internet -- even if you are a doctor. It is a really, really bad practice that doesn't work at all and actively interferes with reasoned and serious discussion by people who are directly impacted by such conditions and in dire need of the ability to have meaty discussions about life, the universe and everything as it relates to their condition.
Do you feel it’s a scientific approach to NOT test out something before concluding it doesn’t work?
I’m not a doctor and don’t play one on the Internet but everyone can think and test out things for themselves. A mostly carnivore diet is low risk to say the least considering that’s how almost all humans ate for thousands of years, the modern food supply and diet is what’s radical.
I think we’re splitting hairs here, but words matters, so I went ahead and changed the wording to make it clear what I’m saying.
My whole point is that modern diets are broken, lots of people are healing autoimmune conditions with therapeutic diets such as carnivory (or if you want a less strict but IMO less therapeutic autoimmune diet you can check out the autoimmune protocol — see Sarah Ballantyne’s The Paleo Approach).
You are still saying you "highly recommend." This is the thing I am objecting to.
The OP in no way asked for alternative remedies. They asked for info on how one might adequately access conventional treatment if they moved to the US, without breaking the bank.
It is inappropriate in that context to "recommend" alternative remedies at all for any reason.
A better approach -- if you absolutely feel compelled to butt into someone else's life and just cannot restrain yourself -- is to ask if they would be interested in alternative treatments and any hard data or good info you might have about such approaches. And if they don't say "yes," drop it rather than arguing endlessly with all comers about your right to promote a carnivore diet as some kind of cure-all for autoimmune disorders.
As stated previously: I have a serious condition. I happen to manage it with diet and lifestyle, which gets me called a nutter and given all kinds of headaches. Remarks and behavior of the sort your comments are engaging in are a huge headache for me because it is part of why I am treated so shittily when I want to try to have a reasoned discussion about such topics.
I would never pursue a carnivore diet. I generally eat less meat than the typical American. My current dietary approach is basically working miracles.
Wow, I find it interesting that you choose to stop debating the moment I ask a simple question about why you wouldn't consider carnivory. Your blog name really is appropriate, you are quite salty!
You believe that nutrition is an "ideology"? Jesus. It's a science, and I make no claim that it's 100% clear what the science shows (in fact most of it is corrupt), but I do believe people should treat themselves as n=1 experiments (your blog clearly shows that you treat yourself as such, much to your benefit it seems) -- and there is plenty of evidence that carnivore or at the very least an AIP diet greatly reduces or completely eliminates autoimmune conditions.
If you want to claim that the way people, lived largely disease free, for hundreds of thousands of years doesn't constitute any form of evidence, then I'm not really sure what to say.
> I would gladly trade all my gains for a world where governments have no control over the creation and regulation of money.
In that world, there would also be nothing to stop anyone else from just taking your money by force and without any consequences.
The loudest voices against government regulation of finance usually belong to those with the least understanding of it. Most of the regulation is just there to protect market participants.
Why do governments have to simultaneously be in the business of (1) securing people’s property and (2) creating money and regulating the monetary supply?
Because regulating it is an important part of securing it. They're not separate things.
If I am a victim of fraud and lose my money, I have the concept of the rule of law to help me get my money back. In a decentralized world there is no way to get my money back.
Besides, it is the government's job to help society function well, in part by making the economy successful. Money is just a tool to do that.
They have to supply the money so that they can have something which can be collected with reliable value for taxes. If your government allows you to pay taxes with monopoly money, then Hasbro becomes King. If the government supplies the money, there is no external organization which can inflate the supply to gain control.
A predetermined monetary policy would be great when a financial crisis or credit crunch hit, causing a collapse in the velocity of money /s
While I have invested in crypto and believe it has great potential, one of its touted benefits by its supporters is also one of its biggest pitfalls, namely that its money supply is predetermined. The inability to actively manage a money supply given exogenous shocks to the economy is a big problem.
I 100% disagree, the central planning of money is (1) what causes inflation, and (2) greatly exacerbates (and in many cases creates) financial crises.
Any supply of money will do, the idea that money should increase in supply along with population growth (or some other arbitrary metric) otherwise we’ll permanently live in a deflationary disaster is an imagined monster — we live in the here and now, therefore people have to spend some amount of money to live (food, housing, entertainment, etc) regardless of whether they perceive the purchasing power of money to increase in the future. By centrally planning (and thus inflating) the amount of money in circulation during financial crises the only thing that is accomplished is a re-inflation of the bubble — essentially they’re sowing the seeds of destruction again, causing the next bubble in an attempt to cure the last one.
Please read this explanation of the financial crisis, I’d be happy to comment further if you have specific critiques on this article (and no I didn’t write it):
A low, but positive, inflation rate is of critical importance.
> Any supply of money will do.
That is just nonsense. If you have a fixed money supply, given that economic growth is happening, would result in a naturally deflationary currency. That is a terrible place to be for the system as a whole as no one has any incentives to spend or invest in anything as money itself will simply gain value over time just sitting as cash. Thus, that money isn't being used / circulated. Having a ideal velocity of money has significant multiplier effects and deflationary currencies are fundamentally flawed.
The problem then is: if you want a low rate of inflation but there is a natural variation in the growth rate due to the cyclic nature of the economy, then how to create a system that could do that without a monetary authority.
>That is a terrible place to be for the system as a whole as no one has any incentives to spend or invest in anything as money itself will simply gain value over time just sitting as cash. Thus, that money isn't being used / circulated. Having a ideal velocity of money has significant multiplier effects and deflationary currencies are fundamentally flawed.
In what world is this true? Time preference is a real thing, and it is unrealistic to assume that 100% of the population will put off non-essential consumption and investment because the price of a Ferrari will decrease by 2.353% next year. Time is a very important factor in the consumption/investment decisions that people take, and modern mainstream economics neglect this fact both on the micro-level and on the macro-level, which is why crazy theories about the neccessity of inflation-rate targeting are able to arise. Most people put their savings in a bank account which the bank lends out to businesses to invest in projects - if anything more savings will lead to more investment than otherwise, which is more important to the bedrock of an economy than spending on consumption.
Also worth pointing out that the period during which the United States experienced its most significant economic growth (mid to late 1800s) was during a period of severe deflation of the dollar.
Keynesian economics (and more generally monetary policy) and inflation-targeting (i.e. the neccessity of having a positive inflation rate) is both theoretically disproven by the existence of time preference (a time preference of zero is literally impossible, it means starving to death) and its heterogenous distribution in a population, as well as empirically by looking at the periods of deflation in the U.S. dollar during the 1800s and the associated economic growth.
Prove it, show me the world where we had a stable monetary supply that resulted in people having no incentive to invest in anything — where’s the experiment?
Again, you HAVE to spend money to live (otherwise you die). It’s impossible to live without food and water, most people want to live in a house, most people want entertainment, etc. None of those things can be had without spending money.
Also, if your argument is correct, why don’t people put 100% of their money into the stock market (which reliably goes up over long periods of time) and instead choose to spend it?
I think it makes sense. You have an economy built on an economic model rather than an economic model based on an economy.
With the latter you're constantly guessing and tweaking the model and roughly every 10 years there's a crash and the economists say okay, NOW we have it perfect and we'll never get it wrong again.
Why do you need an unlimited money supply? The only thing causing these shocks is that the economy is doing whatever it wants and then the economic model collapses.
Economic growth is very heavily tied to increases in the money supply less inflation for developed countries. Without this debt, the cost of doing anything in our economy would be way too large and it would be very difficult for our society to operate. Additionally the need for economic solvency to protect the current social structure is what necessitates government involvement.
Exactly, any supply of money will do, no need to permanently increase the amount in circulation — this is why the market settled on gold (which has an inherently low inflation rate due to the difficulties of mining) and impossible to pass off counterfeit gold at scald.
You need inflation for proper incentives. It's like a tax on the entire network to keep it supported. Without proper incentives, the game theory collapses.
The difference here is that inflation is predetermined and set instead of printing money on demand like we do in the traditional financial system.
“You need inflation for proper incentives. It's like a tax on the entire network to keep it supported. Without proper incentives, the game theory collapses.”
What, specifically, do you think the consequences of a stable money supply are?
Deflation, which given a growing population would always be a given. In turn deflation makes the entire debt system collapse , which is the backbone of economic growth especially in the developed world.
Why should debt support an economy? Without such massive inflation people wouldn’t need to take on much debt to make large purchases such as cars/houses because the prices of cars/houses would be much, much lower.
It only makes sense to take on debt if you have a productive way to put that money to use (Eg a business) that has a higher rate of return than the interest rate.
Debt is the backbone of US GDP growth, money enters the economy as debt, is used to purchase something like a car or a house, subsequently it then reenters the banking system as the person who is being paid deposits their check, and then gets re-loaned out only to often immediately end back up in another domestic bank account that then loans out even more money.
This cycle can continue forever, and the faster this cycle occurs the higher our GDP.
No incentive to support the network if there's no block rewards. The transaction fees are not sufficient and just meant to prevent spam. It's also better to tax the network as a whole (through this set inflation) than to tax for each usage.
That’s an interesting speculation, but it remains to be seen what will happen when inflation is near zero.
If people value transacting on the network, then they will pay the necessary fees to keep it running. If they don’t then it will go down.
I suspect this isn’t the big issue people think it is, regardless there’s no way to “prove” that transaction fees won’t be enough — everyone from miners to speculators by owning mining equipment and Bitcoin are specifically betting that transaction fees will be enough.
There's an assumption here that the network will be used and valuable.
If the network is used more it will be more valuable, which means the reward value will increase as the inflation decreases. If nobody uses the network then it'll be worthless, which at that point it doesn't matter since nobody is using it.
This is categorically false. The gold standard (albeit a reduced version of it established under the Bretton-Woods monetary regime) was abolished in the United States as recently as 1971. In Switzerland this link was abolished in the early 2000's AFAIK.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature — if it were easy to extract (like aluminum), it would have been much more inflationary and thus not a “good” choice for money.
I didn't claim it was a bug. I was trying to make the point that all the tree huggers that scream bloody murder because of Bitcoin mining costs never look at the actual environmental cost of existing systems.
Gold is a fringe commodity valued by a similar small subset of the population that values bitcion. And yeah, I'd say that those people are also causing similar problems to bitcoin because they incentivize significant environmental destruction. Even worse than bitcoin, they also increase the costs of real commercial use cases for gold.
> I would gladly trade all my gains for a world where governments have no control over the creation and regulation of money.
Indeed. And not just because they're absolutely terrible at it: giving control over money creation to a government is like giving a drug addict the keys to the heroin factory.
If you do live in a country where there are compulsory contribution to a retirement system, then you are forced to contribute to a ponzi scheme. You may just not realize it.
When it costs miners (who lack the economies of scale and access to cheap electricity that major miners have) more to produce Bitcoin than the block rewards and transactions fees they receive from doing so, they simply shut off their miners until the price gets high enough to operate profitably again (of course they could also just continue to operate at a loss in the short-term, but financial resources are always limited so they would have to stop operating at some point if the price doesn’t increase).
There will always be SOME miners who have access to cheap enough electricity and economies of scale for whom it continues to be profitable to mine.
Companies complain about short sellers when they’re having cash flow problems and are dependent on the public markets to raise $ (by issuing new shares or in a bond offering), dto fund their operations. Short sellers can increase the cost of the company to raise money (eg if the company has a bond offering they may have to pay a higher interest rate if tons of shorts effectively lower the share price of the company).