Or as some 'uknown' VP would say: We will protect freedom of speech until the last journalist is behind the bars. That is the price we are willing to pay.
As the Democrats reminded us regularly back when they had total control of social media, freedom of speech as a legal principle only applies to government actions.
Yeah, it looks like when everything is now hyper effective and all unnecessary spending was already cut, thanks to DOGE and BBB, there is no problem spending few millions on Shuttle moves, Ball rooms etc... /s
btw. Where is DOGE now ? Was it self-optimized to 0 employees now - like when there is no cost cutting needed anymore - than cost cutting agency is the most ineffective part of the government ;-)
> YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump and other plaintiffs after he was suspended from the platform in 2021, according to a court filing.
> According to the filing, $22 million will be used to support Trump’s construction of a White House State Ballroom and will be held in a tax-exempt entity called the Trust for the National Mall.
> According to the filing, the settlement “shall not constitute an admission of liability or fault on the part of the Defendants or their agents, servants, or employees, and is entered into by all Parties for the sole purpose of compromising disputed claims and avoiding the expenses and risks of further litigation.” Google/YouTube also did not agree to any product or policy changes.
There are many concurrents? How do you figure? There has never been as little choice and alternatives, let alone actual competition than today.
A few corporations control most of the food you eat, even less control the food you eat in restaurants. Very few media companies control the "content" you can consume and you cannot even own it, let alone sell or even trade it, and it seems everyone just pays more whether they keep raising their prices.
That is measurably untrue and it took me about ten seconds of searching to find it. https://www.billmeridian.com/articles-files/inflation.htm and many others. Historically I know you tend to argue pretty dishonestly but this was pretty easy to find and so either you're lying or didn't bother doing any research past reading Ayn Rand.
Also, prices spiking up from incompetent threats of tariffs and not coming down are categorically different than regular inflation. This is obvious and shouldn't need to be explained to you.
I think you might have been a little harsh on Walter. Perhaps the answer is more of a "yes and no" depending on your point of view. It does seem like inflation/deflation kind of canceled each other out before moving off the gold standard.
> It is probable that in 1913, while financial panics were not uncommon, high inflation was still largely seen by the founders of the Fed as a relatively rare phenomenon associated with wars and their immediate aftermath. Figure 1 plots the US price level from 1775 (set equal to one) until 2012. In 1913 prices were only about 20 percent higher than in 1775 and around 40 percent lower than in 1813, during the War of 1812. Whatever the mandates of the Federal Reserve, it is clear that the evolution of the price level in the United States is dominated by the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933 and the adoption of fiat money subsequently. One hundred years after its creation, consumer prices are about 30 times higher than what they were in 1913. This pattern, in varying orders of magnitudes, repeats itself across nearly all countries.
Not my area of expertise and no skin in the game, just wanted to point this out.
I am harsh on Walter because he tends to argue in bad faith in order to support some weird pro-business libertarian world view. He's super active on HN (as am I) so I have argued with him and there are multiple times he has said things that are outright dishonest (like once claiming that incompetent workers immediately get fired from corporations, a post I can't find quickly but is in my history somewhere, or trying to paint me as some alien-believing UFO fanboy which I am not).
So when he makes absolutist statements like "there was no inflation in the US before 1914", which is a typical springboard for libertarians to start complaining about the federal reserve and propose some idiotic Ayn Rand nonsense, I have trouble not being literal here.
There is nothing wrong with being a UFO fanboy - anyone that is not these days is psychotic. There have been so many leaks at this point, if you don't believe that's dangerous.
You're all waiting for Trump to claim it or something? It's already been announced.
Kind of off course for this convo, but no I do not think that recent "evidence" of UFOs is very compelling. Feel free to believe what you'd like but I do not think it's extra-terrestrials.
Even if we do some phenomena that we cannot explain as of right now, that does not imply aliens, it only implies that there's something we can't (yet) explain. A lot of the videos that were being hailed as smoking guns seemed to be a combination of camera artifacts and just optical parallax and stuff like that. It doesn't pass my metric for aliens yet.
The thing is, I would absolutely love to be wrong on this. It would be insanely cool to be part of the first humans who found extra-terrestrial life, so if anything I'm biased in favor of these things being aliens, but as of right now I am not convinced.
Can you quote where Friedman says “inflation [in America] started the year after the Fed was created”?
What you may be trying to say is until about 1900 there was little secular (i.e. fundamental long-term) inflation, given price levels oscillated more than they moved [1]. But the change to steady inflation pre-dates the Fed. And the secular shift to constant inflation starts in WWII, not 1914 or 1976.
The chart I showed did not show "steady inflation" before the Fed. The Depression is a bit of a special case, the deflation there was also caused by the Fed and their misunderstanding of how to adapt to changing conditions.
"The Federal Reserve System therefore began operations with no
effectiye legislative criterion for determining the total stock of money.
The discretionary judgment of a group of men was inevitably substituted
for the quasi-automatic discipline of the gold Standard." pg 193
"The stock of money, which had been rising at a moderaterate through-out 1914, started to rise at an increasing rate in early 1915, rose
most rapidly, as prices did, from late 1915 to mid-1917, and then resumed
its rapid rise before the end of 1918, rather sooner than prices did.
At its peak, in June 1920, the stock of money was roughly double its
September 1915 level and more than double the level of November 1914,
when the Federal Reserve Banks opened for business." pg 198
"The Reserve System was thus in an asymmetrical position. It had the
power to create high-powered money and to put it in the hands of the
public or the banks by rediscounting paper or by purchasing bonds or
other financial assets. It could therefore exert an expansionary influence
on the money stock." pg 213
"The large federal government deficits, totaling in all some $23 billion,
or nearly three-quarters of total expenditures of $32 billion from April
1917 to June 1919, were financed by explicit borrowing and by money
creation.30 The Federal Reserve became to all intents and purposes the
bond-selling window of the Treasury, using its monetary powers almost
exclusively to that end. Although no "greenbacks" were printed, the
same result was achieved by more indirect methods using Federal Re
serve notes and Federal Reserve deposits. At the beginning of U.S.
participation in the war, Federal Reserve notes accounted for 7 per cent
of high-powered money and bank deposits at Federal Reserve Banks for 14
per cent" pg 217
"The Reserve Board was aware that Bank discount rates were below
current market rates throughout 1919, that this was contributing to
monetary expansion, and that monetary expansion was contributing to
the inflation." pg 222
> Friedman quotes attributed inflation to the actions of the Fed
Then this is a lie:
“Inflation started the year after the Fed was created.
See ‘Monetary History of the United States’ by Milton Friedman” [1].
> for inflation through the history of the US, see
I’ve already pointed out how that source lies about the data it cites [2].
I will assume you’re misunderstanding what you’re reading. But it’s too close to willful dishonesty for me to continue to engage if you’re just going to double down.
Sorry, didn’t mean to convey that. Just perhaps mild frustration.
I don’t believe you meant to speak inaccurately. But the chart clearly misquotes its source data. That was pointed out and yet we couldn’t get past it across multiple threads.
I pulled the source data and recompiled the true rates; they partly support your hypothesis (but not the chart’s). There was inflation before the Fed but, if those data are to be believed, very little of it was secular. The balance of inter- versus intragenerational stability (and how that may have changed with industrialization and computers) is a genuinely interesting question, and not one I’d have stumbled across in this context were it not for you.
Visualizing Economics cites this source [1]. VE seem to lie about what it says.
Measuring Worth shows 1774 CPI at 7.8; by 1912 it is 9.4 [2]. That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year, 20% over 138 years. But it’s not zero and it’s certainly not negative.
If we take 1790 (8.86) to 1914 (9.69), MW shows 0.07% annual inflation. That is the statistic you should be pointing to.
But! Within the 1790 to 1914 era we see inflation from 1790 to 1814 (2.75% annually; prices doubled over 20 years). During the Civil War, prices doubled in just five years; inflation 1860 to 1865 was over 14% annually. (CPI inflation goes to 2% annually between 1914 and 1944, 3.7% ‘44 to ‘76, 4.2% ‘76 to ‘08 and 2.4% from ‘08 to ‘24.)
We had inflation in America before the Federal Reserve. It was lower, long term, than it has been post Fed. But the common factor to our inflation is war. To the extent there is a link in these data, and I’m saying this having not noticed this before, it’s between inflation and war.
> That’s a low, low inflation rate of 0.1% per year,
See where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
BTW, inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912? Not only are records poor, but the goods being compared are wildly different.
I.e. I don't know what the error bars are on the aggregate statistics, and neither do you. 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars. In fact, even today, 0.1% is likely within the error bars, as measuring inflation is fairly difficult, and there's always going to be noise as market prices are a chaotic system.
> where I quoted: "-0.2% Average Annual Inflation 1774-1912"
You quoted VE. They misquoted MW. If VE is adding error bars to MW’s data, they—one—should not. But if they do, they should show how they manipulated the data.
There is no legitimate source showing negative annual inflation between 1774 and 1912; your source’s own sole citation disagrees with its claim.
> 0.1% and -0.2% are realistically well within the error bars
What error bars?! They’re the same data!
Your chart on VE says it is showing data from MW. I took those same data and calculated the same number your chart claims to calculate with the same data they link to. The answer is different. And this isn’t, like, I used CAGR and they did simple growth because the sign flipped!
> inflation measurements before 1900 are a bit difficult, as how does one compare prices from 1774 with 1912?
You really can’t. Not meaningfully. You’re integrating data covering the pound sterling, Continental Congress, eras with no federal currency, eras with state and wildcat currency, and a civil war to boot. You’re also trying to compare a basket of wooden teeth and suet with one holding smartphones, gasoline and antibiotics.
But you brought the data and made the claim, and while VE is lying about what their source says, the actual data at MW is actually a legitimate attempt at the problem.
I think they will. If they don't see this as gross breakage of the Constitution, then we're cooked no matter what. Clearly there is no "national emergency" like a war or economic depression, so he's breaking the law, either that or the law doesn't mean anything in a legal or common sense interpretation, just the imaginings of a tinpot orange dictator.
I think this won't be the last thing up Krasnov's (well the Project 2025 lawyers anyway) sleeve, I do think the SCOTUS will shoot down the tariffs though.
USA, the land of unlimited possibilities...of how to get detained without a process...for expressing opinions...by the government repating that we have finally free speach and the dark ages are gone...while revisiting history to avoid dangerous words such as a 'women'...
And I've thought our wana-be-authorian politicians are greates idiots of all, but there seems to be running some kind of global world competion to find them and let them ruin their countries.
I suspect this refers to the list of words that are used to filter out and likely cancel or block various grants. Those words are about what the current US government considers DEI, but they are ridiculously broad and include words like "woman".
I know people who have had to defend their grant-funded research using terms like “inclusion” (geology) or “diversity” (of samples).
Growing up at the end of the Cold War with basically every major political figure decrying the USSR’s political apparatchiks monitoring everything, I never expected that to happen here but having watched the right’s embrace of Orban it wasn’t a surprise by the time it happened. The guys who brought us “freedom fries” crowded everyone else out of the party.
Projects are being killed across the government for exactly this reason. If anything it's even dumber than it sounds. If any word in a project or department title string matches a list of common terms it can get killed with zero investigation or recourse. Billions of dollars worth of research and work have already been destroyed in this way and it's only getting worse.
Well they have completely redefined what Christianity is, so in a way it doesn't surprise me that they need/use this redefined religion to provide "spiritual" comfort while performing these acts.
Yes the cynicism is there, but the "praying" is the means by which the subject performing the acts is able to feel authentic while performing them.
I find it very believable that he became legitimately convinced of whatever odd sect Peter Thiel created that justifies extreme wealth hording, because it brought him into Peter Thiel's orbit which has clearly served him well.
People are really, really good at believing things that benefit themselves.
The "balling out Europe" stuff again. Their goal is to ultimately normalise the idea that the EU is an enemy in advance of the Greenland invasion. The leaking of clarified information doesn't matter because A) US service personal are expendable and B) the involvement in Yemen is now only to keep up appearances of being allied to Saudi Arabia who will in the long term also get the same treatment as the EU because their fuel output competes with US/Russia.
Maybe publicity? The group in charge knows they can do no wrong, and I would bet their voters liked the rhetoric in the chat. Maybe they use controversy as a tool to keep people distracted (or even lead them to check out).
Agreed, absolutely everything done needs to be viewed through the lens of what will the ratings/viewership be. Everything makes more sense. Just think of the public spectacle, interviewing world leaders in the pulpit at the Whitehouse for example. It's a live TV show.
The question is what consequences will it have. I have only seen good outcomes for the administration from the chat debacle. It is worrying, this could have led to a VP resigning.
Some of them are. Have you ever heard anything said by the current US president? It's just incoherent rambling.
Then we also have the Signal chat, and even biographies and books by some of the others that makes it clear done of these people are genuinely dumb as fuck.
This was true 8 years ago. Now I wouldn't be so sure about it anymore. I wouldn't make a bet that there isn't a single Republican out there who truly believes in some of the crazy stuff they are saying.
But of course the survival of crazy policies hinges on people willing to elect politicians who will implement them. And that in turn hinges on how well you disinform them.
whether you pretend to be an idiot and do idiotic things or are an idiot and do idiotic things doesn’t matter, the outcome is the same.
Matter of fact pretending to be an idiot and doing idiotic things might be worse cause you know better, an idiot’s excuse would be that that’s all they know to do.
While there is legitimate debate over how authoritarian some policies in Australia or the UK might be in the past few years, these measures operate within established legal frameworks, with judicial oversight and public scrutiny. Even if you view them as overly restrictive, they don't stem from a single "contrarian" movement with a coordinated political agenda. Moreover, neither government is rewriting history to erase specific groups. The fact that hate-speech or migration laws exist doesn’t equate to people being arrested or deported without due process, nor does it imply some monolithic campaign to censor or remove entire populations from the record.
It's complicated. Most traditional Brits don't want that but a lot of the asians are UK citizens and bring in brides / grooms from asia to marry so the numbers double roughly each generation.
Maybe as India gets richer and the UK economy flatlines they'll stop doing that.
Indians are definitely are issue, but so are the influx of people from Africa. It is worth looking at videos of these cities and how much they have changed over the course of years because of immigration. The city is trashed, quite literally. Trash everywhere you go.
They are, and I am entitled to not associate with them in any way, and tell others to do the same, for this specific comment alone. It says a lot about his views. Like seriously, because the UK a long time tried to conquer parts of the world, mass migration to the UK today is somehow OK? Slavery should be OK, too, according to him, then, since all races have been enslaved at some point in time of history. It is extremely poor reasoning, in poor taste. You should know better.
My comment made zero moral judgements. History has consequences. Spreading the English language to over a billion people while enriching Britain means a lot of people will want to live in a rich place where they can speak the language, for generations to come. Whether immigration is good or bad is kind of irrelevant to the argument.
You appealed to what "UK" did in the past, though.
Same thing applies to slavery, then, since every race has been enslaved before. Would you say slavery is OK, too, considering it has been common practice by then by race or nationality X?
People are getting arrested and deported with no due process for expressing opinions? The UK government is rewriting history to remove women and gays?
No, you're just confusing the existence of hate crimes in UK law, and maybe the dumb migrant detention in Rwanda scheme (which has since been cancelled), both of which have due process, are public, and ridiculous to compare.
Additionally, yeah there have been "social media offenses" in the recent years. Individuals have been arrested for comments made on social media platforms. Try it out. Communications Act 2003 come to mind.
Are people not entitled to lawyers in the US?
In any case, there is authority overreach in both countries (and more).
Well, when I see the disaster of the 'We are going to run this country like a bussiness', one has to think, what kind of disasters should one await from the bussiness that he is running like bussiness...cyber..cough..track..cough...
It seems to me like when a young IT engineer comes on project running for 100 years, and starts to rewrite the core service in nodejs, because it will cost less to run it, or whatever - and you end up with half working production, because someone didint't understood, why the system is and was built how it was built, and what are the implications of changing it...
It might work on greenfield project, but anything else will probably not survive such a 'expert' in charge.
US will be Great like all Giants are - terrifying and alone ;-)
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