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United States42226 Posts
On November 13 2024 06:24 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 06:06 Byo wrote:
Perhaps the stock market is where the trickle down happens, we all are vested in the stock market. Company x pays bonus of 3 billion to me, which I don't need, so I throw it into the stock market, and it trickle downs to others who already have same stocks as me. See the economy is doing great I remember explaining the mechanics of the 2008 financial crash to someone, partly in explaining technical terms in layman’s terms, partly with analogies (something I never otherwise do) The response I got was effectively that that sounds so stupid that I don’t believe you, these institutions can’t be full of idiots. You must just not understand these mechanisms. Brass tacks, the stock market is also fundamentally flawed, although not worthless either. It’s a speculative beast, sometimes very informed by numbers and data, but crucially also influenced by intuition. Crucially it’s also a value assessment based on prediction and perception. Not reality. In a crude sense if that wasn’t the case and it was an assessment of how a company is actually doing, insider trading wouldn’t be illegal. I don’t have any innate issue with betting and gambling, but that’s effectively what the stock market is. Whereas I think many have the perception that it’s some kind of infallible, neutral arbiter of company or asset values. The stock market wasn’t collectively smart enough to figure out that Theranos not actually having a functioning product maybe was a problem in their evaluation. Or that Tesla was at one valued more as a company than the next 10 automobile manufacturers combined is the insane valuation of a crazy person.
I don’t think that Theranos ever IPO’d.
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Basicly the whole stopping climate change is now felt to be too much of a burden, and voters everywhere have chosen to ignore it for the sake of "economy".
My idea would be to dicate prices per KiloWattHour and just let the market compete for the more efficient technology.
A liter of gas is about 10kWh of energy.. in an internal combustion engine.. 7kWh produce heat and 3kWh make it go.
So a normal passenger car burns 80kWh to go 100km... and an EV only burns 20kWh.
If gas at the pump costs as much as electric energy at the plug.. you can simply choose. There is no nanny telling you to not buy the V8 to commute.
Further example:
Our appartment needs 25000kWh for heating. and if we'd got a heatpump instead of a gas heating.. it would be about..9-12000kWh. But electricity costs 3 times as much as gas.. so why fucking bother?
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So I'm wondering what the people who were obsessed with Kamala's level of qualifications are thinking about Pete Hegswith, who has never run anything at all in his life, being given the entire US military to run just because he has the 'right' politics?
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The armchair generals wanted one of their own.
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On November 13 2024 18:38 KT_Elwood wrote:
The armchair generals wanted one of their own.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's more attempts on his life between now and January.
Having this 'Everyone's fired' approach to the Pentagon might not be overly smart.
There are some truly insane picks in Trump's line up. Why the fuck would he make a fundamentalist Christian 'end of days' type nutcase ambassador to Israel?
Trying to bring about the end of the world?
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Their idea is that if israel gets rid of arabs and muslims, it would be fit enough to welcome back jesus, unite jews and christianity into one . and bringing back all the dead.. to the rapture that will take all believers to god (ending the world)
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/commentary/2023/11/03/world/evangelicals-israel-hamas-war/
For example, in the Old Testament, the prophet Isaiah predicted that God "shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the Earth.”
Exegetes took this to mean that the return of Christ would take place once the Jewish diaspora returned to Palestine. Eager to put God’s plan in motion, these Christian Zionists — not an oxymoron — began to push their governments to take active steps to get Jews back to Palestine.
Or as Southpark put it:
![[image loading]](https://y.yarn.co/ff436bf9-7750-414f-8a33-58d6986237eb_text.gif)
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United States42226 Posts
On November 13 2024 12:15 Razyda wrote:
Ok. I may be off here, and would gladly got Kwark opinion here, but isnt value of things exactly the amount, people are willing to pay for it? Isn't essentially valuation of the shares/BC inherently the same as fiat currency?
This was a tough question to answer.
Not really. A thing may be worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it which means its value may rise and fall with market sentiment. A fiat currency is intangible, its value does not change because it is valueless without an external frame of reference. You don’t buy a dollar hoping to resell it for $1.10, you don’t buy a dollar at all, you sell something for a dollar hoping to buy goods with it that are by definition worth one dollar.
A currency is explicitly valueless because it is the medium by which things are measured. The value of a dollar is a dollar is a meaningless statement. If I offered you a trillion KwarKcoin for something tangible you’d not accept before attempting to quantify what you can get with a trillion KwarKcoin. If I assured you that a KwarKcoin had a value defined as 1 (KwarKcoin) then that wouldn’t reassure you any. There’s nothing tangible there.
But the ability to do business without barter provides the group with collective utility and so one of the services our government provides for us is the issuance and guarantee of currency. Let’s say that in a barter economy everyone routinely loses 10% of their stuff in every trade due to the inherent inefficiencies. Rats eat grain, milk goes bad, livestock needs to be fed, iron is heavy and needs to be moved around, whatever. If I’m selling apples and want to buy wood then while my apples may be worth 10 pigs to someone I’m probably going to demand more than 10 pigs from you because by paying in pigs you’re giving me the additional work of finding that specific guy who has a bunch of wood for sale and needs pigs. And until I find that guy I’m stuck herding pigs.
A currency provides huge amounts of practical value in the reduction of real losses. Every time someone uses it they make an additional 10% on the trade in our hypothetical example. You could theoretically have it be fully private, a financial services firm could provide it. In a way they do. A dollar in your Visa balance isn’t worth a dollar, they’ll net out fees. But it saves you a bunch of cash handling work and so you’ll rationally accept Visa dollars for card payments. The measurement system may be imaginary but the hours of work saved are real.
Given the huge amount of real value generated in collective utility from not having to barter the existence of a functional currency is extremely valuable. So valuable that it is treated as the kind of natural monopoly that government has historically reserved for itself through the mint.
A fiat currency vs a reserve backed one isn’t a hugely meaningful distinction. Even when we were using silver nobody cared about the silver. You get your value from the currency when you use it to avoid bartering, it doesn’t matter whether it’s physical silver, a piece of paper that denotes ownership of some real silver somewhere, or just paper. The value of silver was never that it was shiny, it was that in a low trust environment you can somewhat guarantee that it’s value won’t hugely change day to day by someone printing a shitload of currency. It’s more stable because it’s supply is constrained by labour and so that labour as a kind of benchmark.
Once you move into a higher trust environment people immediately move away from silver because you have to count it, test its purity, move it around, and so forth. Putting all the silver in one location and just leaving it there while people barter pieces of paper denoting ownership of the silver is way simpler. Because nobody actually wanted to physically possess the silver everything still works. The coolest example is the Yap islands where giant rocks were used as currency. Nobody could move them, everyone knew where they were, you’d just trade the idea of ownership in the giant rock. It bridges the gap between fiat and reserve backed and shows why it’s not a meaningful distinction.
In theory Yapese Stone Money isn’t fiat. Owning the rock seems like a tangible currency, you can touch it, feel it, it has a lot of substance, until you try to explain ownership of it outside of a collective agreement to all imagine the giant rock as yours. The rock itself is unchanged by your ownership of it, what matters is how people feel about the rock. And if the system relies on collective imagination then you don’t need the rock, you can all imagine a rock and trade ownership interests in it. Incidentally this actually happened. Some rocks were lost over time but continued to be tradeable.
So that’s currency, why it’s worthless, why it’s hugely valuable, why it’s made up, and why fiat vs metallic really makes no difference.
Things that aren’t currency can be bought and sold and can have their value, denominated in currency, inflate in a speculative bubble. They can be tangible like Pokémon cards, quasi tangible like shares, intangible like NFTs etc., doesn’t matter. But their value can change based on market sentiment, regardless of any kind of intrinsic value or utility. The doubling of a value of a NFT doesn’t mean the NFT’s production has also doubled, nor that the demand for whatever the NFT does has doubled, it’s just what someone paid for it. Value is a delusion.
But, to get back to your initial question, that doesn’t make them like currency. Two things may involve delusions but there can be different kinds of delusions. Currency is a very specific collective delusion and a very productive one. Value is a very personal and subjective delusion that need not be productive.
Currency is the belief in an imaginary unit that you can use to measure other things while it itself retains its oneness. 1 KwarKcoin will always be worth 1 KwarKcoin, no matter how many NFTs you can buy with it.
Value is just the wanting of something. If I won’t sell you my Pokémon card for $1000 then that means it’s worth over $1000 to me. But if I dropped it and you saw it in the street you might not pick it up because it’s value to you might be $0. Both those valuations are real and true, simultaneously. I might want a share in Tesla because I think it’s a bubble and I want the right to resell it and then buy more Pokémon cards. I might be right about the bubble, I might be right about the Pokémon cards, none of that matters, the wanting a share in Tesla part was fundamentally real, it was really valuable to me.
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United States42226 Posts
On November 13 2024 16:03 JimmyJRaynor wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 09:34 Impervious wrote:
By all reasonable metrics, the USA did extremely well under Biden over the last 4 years relative to other countries. I would have loved to have both the inflation rate and the GDP percentage growth that the US had compared to us here in Canada, for instance..... To me, it's shocking that the messaging was so awful. While the status quo sucks and the dems were pushing policy that was pretty much just the status quo, Trump's policies and the republican policies seem worse..... All I can say is that it looks like this election was more about emotion than anything else. Things suck right now for most people, and the republicans were able to channel the associated anger and fear better. I think the USA substantially outperformed Canada because Biden's team was average and Trudeau's team is really dumb. The mainstream media is so biased in favour of Justin Trudeau it is comical. One big sign of economic affluence is participation in hockey. Hockey is an extremely expensive sport. The USA now has more kids enrolled in hockey than Canada for the first time ever. The USA is now the #1 hockey power on earth ... As I predicted several years ago. Canada peaked as a country under Chretien. I'd say the USA peaked as a country under either Reagan or Clinton. Both countries are in decline, however, Canada is going down a lot faster. Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 09:34 Impervious wrote:
Similar to your partner's sister, we've got struggles affording a place here too. My girlfriend and I have been looking into finally buying a house ourselves, we're in our late 30's, we're both finally doing well financially, I'm 37 and I started working at least part of the time in the USA from the time i was 19. Canada no longer offers economic opportunities on par with the USA. Once Ontario decided to "save the world" by going green in 2007... that was the beginning of the end. I bought my first house when I was 24. May God Bless America. I live a 40 minute drive from St. Catherines, Ontario in upstate New York. The difference in hydro prices between St. Catherines, Canada and Niagara NY is staggering. No wonder there is zero manufacturing going on in Ontario. Nuclear power is far too expensive and far too dangerous. When we have another 3-mile-island, and we will, Ontario is super fucked. The environmental crazies won't want Ontario using Nuclear or Coal. What will Ontario do for power when they have to abandon Nuclear? It’s great that Trump was elected because he is not going to try to save the universe with crazy green energy policies that Justin Trudeau adopted. Ontario ending coal burning provides a great example for Americans about what not to do.
If I’m understanding you correctly it’s great that Trump will coal because hockey power got predicted several years ago and America bucked a global trend because it's average. Can’t argue with that.
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This is an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort to make the post, but I'm not sure I really agree.
I would agree that share valuation is not "inherently the same" as fiat currency. However, it seems like you're trying to argue that currency is some fundamentally different thing, and I don't think that's really correct either. To me, the blurred line from reserve currency to fiat currency continues to blur into anything else that people will accept as an intermediate barter. The axis is just the fraction of people that will accept it, and the variance on the valuation from person to person.
Obviously, on one end is cash, widely accepted and stably valued. Shares are a bit further across, most people would accept them if you offered a good rate and the variance that you'd need to offer is not a huge fraction of the paper value. Beyond that, we get to pokemon cards, and then pigs and so on - still valuable, but you start to have to offer increasingly unreasonable rates to get the person to accept them.
I don't know that anything you've said convinces me that there's a hard cutoff in that sequence. There's probably a bunch of little villages somewhere where pigs can get a rate pretty close to currency, and places where shares aren't even going to be considered.
There's even situations where cash wouldn't be considered either. If you're in the US and someone offered you a choice of an S&P ETF or an equal value of thai baht.... maybe you'd take the shares. Even though baht is currency, it might be more of a runaround to exchange it at a good rate than it is to just sell the shares. You'd probably take the pigs if they offered you lira or bolivar.
It's interesting that you left out crypto, when to me that's the clearest example of that line blurring. I honestly can't see very much difference between people's collective delusion around bitcoin versus the collective delusion around the island rocks. Neither of them has inherent value, both of them have some features that make them effective as a barter substitute, both of their values depend on what everyone agrees.
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United States42226 Posts
On November 13 2024 20:17 Belisarius wrote:
This is an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort to make the post, but I'm not sure I really agree.
I would agree that share valuation is not "inherently the same" as fiat currency. However, it seems like you're trying to argue that currency is some fundamentally different thing, and I don't think that's really correct either. To me, the blurred line from reserve currency to fiat currency continues to blur into anything else that people will accept as an intermediate barter. The axis is just the fraction of people that will accept it, and the variance on the valuation from person to person.
Obviously, on one end is cash, widely accepted and stably valued. Shares are a bit further across, most people would accept them if you offered a good rate and the variance that you'd need to offer is not a huge fraction of the paper value. Beyond that, we get to pokemon cards, and then pigs and so on - still valuable, but you start to have to offer increasingly unreasonable rates to get the person to accept them.
I don't know that anything you've said convinces me that there's a hard cutoff in that sequence. There's probably a bunch of little villages somewhere where pigs can get a rate pretty close to currency, and places where shares aren't even going to be considered.
There's even situations where cash wouldn't be considered either. If you're in the US and someone offered you a choice of an S&P EFT or an equal value of thai baht.... maybe you'd take the shares. Even though baht is currency, it might be more of a runaround to exchange it at a good rate than it is to just sell the shares. You'd probably take the pigs if they offered you lira or bolivar.
It's interesting that you left out crypto, when to me that's the clearest example of that line blurring. I honestly can't see very much difference between people's collective delusion around bitcoin versus the collective delusion around the island rocks. Neither of them has inherent value, both of them have some features that make them effective as a barter substitute, both of their values depend on what everyone agrees.
Currency is an alternative to barter. The fact that you could barter Pokemon cards do not make them a currency. You accept Pokemon cards in payment at a premium with the intent to list them on ebay and convert them into money. You do not accept them as money.
Currency is fundamentally different, even though that difference is only because of a shared belief that it's fundamentally different. The belief is what makes it function as a means of exchange and the functionality as a means of exchange is what creates the efficiency benefits and therefore the value. Anything could be money, there's nothing intrinsically special about the token used, but that does not mean that anything is money. It needs the special sauce that is the shared belief. Without that it doesn't give the efficiency benefits, you're back to bartering.
The same thing can be a currency for one person and a commodity for another like your example of a foreign currency that could be accepted as full settlement in one part of the globe and accepted as barter with the intent to subsequently convert it to local currency in another place. With the example of bitcoin there's a pretty obvious distinction between users. A commodity user taking it as barter or holding it for speculative resale purposes will tell you that a bitcoin is worth $87k. A currency user will tell you that a bitcoin is worth 1.
You described a sliding scale of liquidity based on the ease of conversion. Money market funds are pegged to cash and settle nightly, publicly traded stocks can be converted into cash at a fairly known value within a few days without much slippage whereas pokemon cards may take longer and have greater slippage. You used that sliding scale as evidence of no clear cutoff because wherever the line is you can always put something just over it and challenge the placement of the line. I disagree. It doesn't matter how easy a given thing is to convert into money, it matters that it must be converted into money. The fact that the conversion to money step exists at all by definition renders it not money. That's the cutoff. A money market fund may almost always be readily convertible to cash at a 1:1 ratio but that does not make it cash, it makes it a cash equivalent.
Edit: I came up with a test.
If two different users within the same economy disagree on the value of X then X is not money. It'd be easy to find two different people in America who disagree on the value of a pokemon card. It'd be reasonably possible to find two different people who disagree on the value of a share in a money market fund. It'd be very difficult to find anyone in America who sets the value of $1 as anything other than $1. You could maybe generate scenarios like "it's $1 but it's far away so it's really worth less than that" but the $1 is still $1, you just also place a value on the labour involved and then perform a subtraction. But in that subtraction you're still placing a $1 value on the $1.
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The missing piece is that not all money can or should be treated the same. Some money looks more like a value bearing thing, while other money looks more like an anchoring unit of value. The latter category is where there is a difficult to precisely enunciate distinguishing feature that sets money apart, and that feature is bound up in questions of sovereignty and global economic power. That’s a long way to say the analysis of what sets money apart from other value bearing things requires answers to the questions of which issuer of money is in power and what that power looks like.
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On November 13 2024 20:34 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 20:17 Belisarius wrote:
This is an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort to make the post, but I'm not sure I really agree.
I would agree that share valuation is not "inherently the same" as fiat currency. However, it seems like you're trying to argue that currency is some fundamentally different thing, and I don't think that's really correct either. To me, the blurred line from reserve currency to fiat currency continues to blur into anything else that people will accept as an intermediate barter. The axis is just the fraction of people that will accept it, and the variance on the valuation from person to person.
Obviously, on one end is cash, widely accepted and stably valued. Shares are a bit further across, most people would accept them if you offered a good rate and the variance that you'd need to offer is not a huge fraction of the paper value. Beyond that, we get to pokemon cards, and then pigs and so on - still valuable, but you start to have to offer increasingly unreasonable rates to get the person to accept them.
I don't know that anything you've said convinces me that there's a hard cutoff in that sequence. There's probably a bunch of little villages somewhere where pigs can get a rate pretty close to currency, and places where shares aren't even going to be considered.
There's even situations where cash wouldn't be considered either. If you're in the US and someone offered you a choice of an S&P EFT or an equal value of thai baht.... maybe you'd take the shares. Even though baht is currency, it might be more of a runaround to exchange it at a good rate than it is to just sell the shares. You'd probably take the pigs if they offered you lira or bolivar.
It's interesting that you left out crypto, when to me that's the clearest example of that line blurring. I honestly can't see very much difference between people's collective delusion around bitcoin versus the collective delusion around the island rocks. Neither of them has inherent value, both of them have some features that make them effective as a barter substitute, both of their values depend on what everyone agrees. Currency is an alternative to barter. The fact that you could barter Pokemon cards do not make them a currency. You accept Pokemon cards in payment at a premium with the intent to list them on ebay and convert them into money. You do not accept them as money. Currency is fundamentally different, even though that difference is only because of a shared belief that it's fundamentally different. The belief is what makes it function as a means of exchange and the functionality as a means of exchange is what creates the efficiency benefits and therefore the value. Anything could be money, there's nothing intrinsically special about it, but that does not mean that anything is money. It needs the special sauce that is the shared belief. Without that it doesn't give the efficiency benefits, you're back to bartering. The same thing can be a currency for one person and a commodity for another like your example of a foreign currency that could be accepted as full settlement in one part of the globe and accepted as barter with the intent to subsequently convert it to local currency in another place. With the example of bitcoin there's a pretty obvious distinction between users. A commodity user taking it as barter or holding it for speculative resale purposes will tell you that a bitcoin is worth $87k. A currency user will tell you that a bitcoin is worth 1. You described a sliding scale of liquidity based on the ease of conversion. Money market funds are pegged to cash and settle nightly, publicly traded stocks can be converted into cash at a fairly known value within a few days without much slippage whereas pokemon cards may take longer and have greater slippage. You used that sliding scale as evidence of no clear cutoff because wherever the line is you can always put something just over it and challenge the placement of the line. I disagree. It doesn't matter how easy a given thing is to convert into money, it matters that it must be converted into money. The fact that the conversion to money step exists at all by definition renders it not money. That's the cutoff. A money market fund may almost always be readily convertible to cash at a 1:1 ratio but that does not make it cash, it makes it a cash equivalent.
I guess my question is, which money?
If I sell shares in the US to get USD, now I have money. If I carry that USD to Germany I no longer have money, I suddenly have a commodity that I need to convert to Euros. Then I have money again, until I fly back to the US.
I'm happy to agree that for general use, the currency of the country that I'm in is the One True Money by which all things are measured. Obviously, USD in the US is currency and pokemon cards are not currency. However, bolivars are probably not currency in Venezuela, euros probably are currency in Switzerland, and gold would be currency in Moria.
I suppose I'm just trying to point out that the special sauce of shared belief is not constant, and never covers 100% of the population even for USD in the US. Sometimes there's nothing that qualifies as money in a local situation, and you have no choice but to barter.
I agree with your position, I just disagree with the universality of it. Lots of things are not money, but even money is sometimes not money.
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On November 13 2024 18:29 Jockmcplop wrote:
So I'm wondering what the people who were obsessed with Kamala's level of qualifications are thinking about Pete Hegswith, who has never run anything at all in his life, being given the entire US military to run just because he has the 'right' politics?
They are probably thinking that campaign season is over and that the United States of America has an extensive traditional and constitutional stipulation of civilian control of the military.
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On November 13 2024 18:29 Jockmcplop wrote:
So I'm wondering what the people who were obsessed with Kamala's level of qualifications are thinking about Pete Hegswith, who has never run anything at all in his life, being given the entire US military to run just because he has the 'right' politics?
There's always been a double standard. It's not like Trump chose the best people during his first term either, often going out of his way to appoint people with no expertise whatsoever (e.g., Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education). Republican leaders occasionally criticizing Democratic leaders for not being perfect candidates only works because Democrats have higher standards than Republicans. Democrats actually care about qualifications.
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United States42226 Posts
On November 13 2024 20:59 Belisarius wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 20:34 KwarK wrote:On November 13 2024 20:17 Belisarius wrote:
This is an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort to make the post, but I'm not sure I really agree.
I would agree that share valuation is not "inherently the same" as fiat currency. However, it seems like you're trying to argue that currency is some fundamentally different thing, and I don't think that's really correct either. To me, the blurred line from reserve currency to fiat currency continues to blur into anything else that people will accept as an intermediate barter. The axis is just the fraction of people that will accept it, and the variance on the valuation from person to person.
Obviously, on one end is cash, widely accepted and stably valued. Shares are a bit further across, most people would accept them if you offered a good rate and the variance that you'd need to offer is not a huge fraction of the paper value. Beyond that, we get to pokemon cards, and then pigs and so on - still valuable, but you start to have to offer increasingly unreasonable rates to get the person to accept them.
I don't know that anything you've said convinces me that there's a hard cutoff in that sequence. There's probably a bunch of little villages somewhere where pigs can get a rate pretty close to currency, and places where shares aren't even going to be considered.
There's even situations where cash wouldn't be considered either. If you're in the US and someone offered you a choice of an S&P EFT or an equal value of thai baht.... maybe you'd take the shares. Even though baht is currency, it might be more of a runaround to exchange it at a good rate than it is to just sell the shares. You'd probably take the pigs if they offered you lira or bolivar.
It's interesting that you left out crypto, when to me that's the clearest example of that line blurring. I honestly can't see very much difference between people's collective delusion around bitcoin versus the collective delusion around the island rocks. Neither of them has inherent value, both of them have some features that make them effective as a barter substitute, both of their values depend on what everyone agrees. Currency is an alternative to barter. The fact that you could barter Pokemon cards do not make them a currency. You accept Pokemon cards in payment at a premium with the intent to list them on ebay and convert them into money. You do not accept them as money. Currency is fundamentally different, even though that difference is only because of a shared belief that it's fundamentally different. The belief is what makes it function as a means of exchange and the functionality as a means of exchange is what creates the efficiency benefits and therefore the value. Anything could be money, there's nothing intrinsically special about it, but that does not mean that anything is money. It needs the special sauce that is the shared belief. Without that it doesn't give the efficiency benefits, you're back to bartering. The same thing can be a currency for one person and a commodity for another like your example of a foreign currency that could be accepted as full settlement in one part of the globe and accepted as barter with the intent to subsequently convert it to local currency in another place. With the example of bitcoin there's a pretty obvious distinction between users. A commodity user taking it as barter or holding it for speculative resale purposes will tell you that a bitcoin is worth $87k. A currency user will tell you that a bitcoin is worth 1. You described a sliding scale of liquidity based on the ease of conversion. Money market funds are pegged to cash and settle nightly, publicly traded stocks can be converted into cash at a fairly known value within a few days without much slippage whereas pokemon cards may take longer and have greater slippage. You used that sliding scale as evidence of no clear cutoff because wherever the line is you can always put something just over it and challenge the placement of the line. I disagree. It doesn't matter how easy a given thing is to convert into money, it matters that it must be converted into money. The fact that the conversion to money step exists at all by definition renders it not money. That's the cutoff. A money market fund may almost always be readily convertible to cash at a 1:1 ratio but that does not make it cash, it makes it a cash equivalent. I guess my question is, which money? If I sell shares in the US to get USD, now I have money. If I carry that USD to Germany I no longer have money, I suddenly have a commodity that I need to convert to Euros. Then I have money again, until I fly back to the US. I'm happy to agree that for general use, the currency of the country that I'm in is the One True Money by which all things are measured. Obviously, USD in the US is currency and pokemon cards are not currency. However, bolivars are probably not currency in Venezuela, euros probably are currency in Switzerland, and gold would be currency in Moria. I agree with your position, I just disagree with the universality of it. I suppose I'm just trying to point out that the special sauce of shared belief is not constant, and never covers 100% of the population even for USD in the US. Lots of things are not money, but even money is sometimes not money.
Whichever money possesses the special sauce. As you say, it doesn't carry the special sauce with it as part of the token. You could tear a USD apart atom by atom and not find a single atom of moneyium. The money status is imbued upon it by the collective belief of the participants in the economy. Change the participants by crossing a border or change the belief by replacing it with a new currency as Brazil did in 1994 and it'll lose the status.
The original question was provoked by the challenge of reconciling the value assigned to Tesla stock compared to the fundamentals. How can a company that doesn't produce and sell that many cars be worth so much more than companies that produce and sell more cars and at higher margins with fewer business threats. Make it make sense.
I didn't really answer that question because the comparison the asker used to show just how fundamentally hollow the valuation is was fiat currency and that was a much more interesting rabbit hole. There are almost infinite things imaginable with different ratios between the fundamental value and the market dictated value. Hell, I'm an atheist and in theory don't believe in souls but I probably wouldn't take $10 for mine and so in theory it has a value of at least $10 which, when divided by it's fundamental value of $0, makes it an infinitely overpriced asset. But it was more interesting to me to address the flawed comparison because fiat currency is the one thing you can't use as a comparison. Fiat currency doesn't have an intrinsic value of nothing, despite being unbacked. A fiat dollar has an intrinsic value of $1. What a dollar gets you may change, but the value of a dollar is always $1.
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Yes, I'm pretty far from the original statement at this point so I'll concede.
On your test, since I missed that:
If two different users within the same economy disagree on the value of X then X is not money. It'd be easy to find two different people in America who disagree on the value of a pokemon card. It'd be reasonably possible to find two different people who disagree on the value of a share in a money market fund. It'd be very difficult to find anyone in America who sets the value of $1 as anything other than $1. You could maybe generate scenarios like "it's $1 but it's far away so it's really worth less than that" but the $1 is still $1, you just also place a value on the labour involved and then perform a subtraction. But in that subtraction you're still placing a $1 value on the $1.
This feels a bit tautological. Yes, 1 USD is 1 USD because that's how it's defined. Nobody would say that a $1 note was actually worth $2.
I would say there's situations where someone might not accept even the local cash, which to me is an inherent disagreement on its value. They're all edge cases, but "[any] two different users within the same economy" is statement that declares itself edge-case proof. All you need is one guy who refuses to take US dollars because he's a sovcit who has printed his own currency on his inkjet, or an addict who considers cash a thing to be bartered for his true currency of cocaine, etc etc.
Really, though, tautology is the point. It's declared to be true, (nearly) everyone agrees that it's true, and so it is.
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United States42226 Posts
As you say, the tautology is the point. This was fun.
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And you didn't even insult anyone.
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On November 13 2024 21:04 oBlade wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 18:29 Jockmcplop wrote:
So I'm wondering what the people who were obsessed with Kamala's level of qualifications are thinking about Pete Hegswith, who has never run anything at all in his life, being given the entire US military to run just because he has the 'right' politics? They are probably thinking that campaign season is over and that the United States of America has an extensive traditional and constitutional stipulation of civilian control of the military.
Personally I would go for a civilian who has had experience of being in charge of important things and making extremely important and sensitive decisions, but each to their own I guess.
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On November 13 2024 21:33 Jockmcplop wrote:Show nested quote +On November 13 2024 21:04 oBlade wrote:On November 13 2024 18:29 Jockmcplop wrote:
So I'm wondering what the people who were obsessed with Kamala's level of qualifications are thinking about Pete Hegswith, who has never run anything at all in his life, being given the entire US military to run just because he has the 'right' politics? They are probably thinking that campaign season is over and that the United States of America has an extensive traditional and constitutional stipulation of civilian control of the military. Personally I would go for a civilian who has had experience of being in charge of important things and making extremely important and sensitive decisions, but each to their own I guess.
How did you conclude he doesn't have that?
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EPT
