That’s hilarious.

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Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.

Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.

Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.

Keeping consumers alive as a class is indirectly encouraged in capitalism.

All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.

Fact checking is censorship apparently.

Dude read the room

Yes, because it would make the Mac worse. Nvidia GPUs are comically inefficient.

EDIT: tech illiterate shit-for-brains downvoted this comment.

We are so lucky Nintendo sells shitty video games instead of health insurance. It could always be worse, folks.

OpenAI has entered the chat^

FOREX is explicitly the market that compares the strength of competing currencies.

I’m aware of how the bond market works. What is your problem with the bond market?

Since we are discussing dollars and not houses, that would be the FOREX market. The dollar is very strong at the moment.

The thing is… the market disagrees with you. For now. But hey, put your money where your mouth is! I’ll give you a hundred rubles for a hundred dollars. If you really think the US government is impotent and on the verge of collapse…

That’s not the point. The US has the power to extract rents; it doesn’t have to use it.

Absolutely. Speculation on the stock market used to be illegal until the 80’s, meaning that investments had to be based on a company’s tangible performance. No options (until 1973), no stock buybacks (until 1982), even the rules for short selling were different.

Investments put your money to work by recirculating it through the economy in a productive fashion (theoretically anyway — I share your skepticism about the usefulness of the modern stock market). Investing in a company provides for the operating cost of that business. Putting cash under the mattress is not an investment. It’s just your savings.

The disappearance of crypto would have no downsides is what I meant. People could then invest their savings into something other than a pyramid scheme. Such investments would be good for the economy.

Exactly. Now they’ve metastasized into our government. Fucking orcs.

You’re absolutely right, and I have no idea. Maybe wait another 100,000 years for the 30% of humanity that lacks abstract moral reasoning to exit the gene pool.

Nah, it didn’t, but I had written it elsewhere. I didn’t think going on and on about how bitcoin represents nothing was helpful.

Again, this is incorrect. The reason dollars are not “backed by gold” (an arbitrary metric since gold is kind of useless — guns or bread or even puppies would make more sense) is that the US dollar is a currency, an IOU, not some sort of finite resource.

Dollars represent public trust in the power of the US government to extract taxes from its citizens. That’s tangible.

Bitcoin represents nothing; or if I’m being generous, I could say that bitcoin’s value represents people’s faith that the game of musical chairs won’t end tomorrow.