Real clear science is an American media outfit. It's part of the same media group as Real Clear Politics and was founded in Chicago. There's nothing fringe about skepticism of the Havana syndrome story. Despite Congress dumping loads of money to support agents' health issues claimed to have been due to mysterious and unverified sonic weapons, every medical investigation of these reports has failed to offer any support for it. We lack physical evidence, we lack any sensical motive; all we have is foreign paranoia and hearsay.
this is a funny question. Avoiding tangents, for all intents and purposes, I'm secular. Though I've only had two children with no intention of having more, I was raised Southern Baptist, the oldest of six. I love our big family. My mother was one of seven, and all her siblings have many children as well. I look back fondly on our holiday gatherings and miss them dearly. my aunts were guardian angels through so many difficult times. But as much as I want those big family gatherings and the overall dynamic, I couldn't imagine going back to Southern Baptism as a means to see them perpetuated. It would be nice if there were a natalist "movement" (for lack of better word) that was more or less secular (without being self-aggrandizing and delusional ala effective altruism).
Yeah, wanting a secular natalist movement is where I was for a while. But then the truth of it hits you at some point: it will never exist. The secular way of life exalts the individual, but raising a large family is about subduing your own desires and devoting yourself to something more important than yourself. Well, guess who already does that: religious people.
Wow, that is not my experience at all. I think in some ways that's perhaps a very US-centric view, even though I'd still consider that a flawed way at looking at secularism in the US. Most of the developed world is fairly secular (even among those with religious beliefs), and extreme individualism is not as common as you seem to think.
I do wonder how common your attitude is among religious people, though. If it's common, that would explain a few things...
I was raised in a very religious household, but I left the fairly young. I spent the next couple decades around a large amount of both religious and secular people. It’s been my anecdotal experience that religious people are exponentially more likely to volunteer and donate to help others. I’ve seen yards cleaned, homes rebuilt, soup kitchens hosted, mobile laundry services and free shoes/clothes for the homeless, church closet giveaways (basically a free yard sale for the community), hundreds of doctors filling a convention center volunteering their time and money to treat people for free,… I don’t doubt non-religious people are doing these things, but I don’t think it’s at the same scale, and the secular nonprofits that are offering this kind of help often skim a lot off the top to pay beefy corporate salaries.
The secular way of life is an individual way of life, in the sense that it’s different for everyone. Some choose rugged individualism, some choose to devote themselves to their community.
I can find a small army of secular leftists who subdue their own desires and have devoted themselves to something more important than themselves - namely, overthrowing the capitalist system.
They don't make many babies though, because they've subdued their desires to reproduce and devoted themselves to the good of the planet ;)
It's good to know there are worse places than mine. some things are reminiscent of what I've seen, but nothing so extreme as even half of what's described.
Say you have $100. You pay $30 for gas, and have $70 left for other expenses. Let's say the oil cartel raises the price of gas to $40. You now have $60 left to pay for other things.
Because you now have less money, demand for other goods and services is lowered, and because of the Law of Supply & Demand, those other prices are forced down.
Now, suppose the government prints an extra $10, and gives it to you. Now you have $80 for other expenses. Your demand for other goods and services goes up, and so because of the Law of Supply & Demand, those other prices go up.
---
Another way to think about it. Money is affected by the Law of Supply & Demand just like everything else. Printing more money means there is more money (!), and more money chasing the same value of goods and services means the individual dollar are worth correspondingly less.
> So the government has boosted demand for groceries, thus causing them to be more expensive?
Increased demand results in price increases. The Law of Supply & Demand. Crazy, I know, but it is The Law.
> How did more money get into the hands of consumers aside from that one-time $1500 paycheck?
The deficit money got spent into the economy. It first flows into the hands of the voters being bought with it. Then, those people spend it, and it flows into the rest of the economy. It's like dumping a barrel of paint into a pond. It takes a while for it to spread out evenly.
Imagine you took out a loan for $1000 in 1980. In today’s dollars, the $1000 to repay is much less in relative terms than it was in 1980, because of inflation.
I'm aware of the implications of inflation and the passing of time. Let me be more direct. The "correspondence" between federal deficits and inflation Walter implied existed was almost certainly pulled from his cushions. A deficit that _purchases_ an increase in the money supply certainly _can_ lead to inflation, among other deficit sources in varying degrees. But the implication that we pay for deficits specifically with inflation is a gross oversimplification, all in service of being pithy.
Seems self-evident to me that increasing the supply of dollars does not automatically increase the supply of goods and services that people actually consume.
> Is running a federal deficit and an increase in the money supply the same thing?
No. The money supply will naturally increase as the value of goods and services in the economy grows. (This creation is done by the banks loaning money against collateral, it's a rather complex subject.) If the money supply increases faster than that, we have inflation.
The way it increases faster than that is via the fiat money printing press.
Here's another way to look at it. The US had a net zero inflation from 1800-1914. Everything the current government blames as a cause of inflation happened all over that time period, but no net inflation. From 1914 on, we've had endemic inflation.
Any explanation of inflation has to account for that.
The creation of the Fed accounts for it. It was given the power to arbitrarily create money, and so they did, to fund the deficits. Every other country saw the magic of this, and switched to fiat money and inflation.
Correct.
I don't see it mentioned much in this thread.
Everyone wants to blame the government for over supply of dollars.
Not much mention that on the production supply side, we have record corporate profits.
On earnings calls CEO's just come right out and say 'because of covid, we are able to raise prices, and man it's great'.
A lot of inflation is in the supply side just raising prices and making more profit.
If there really was a supply chain issue, then the suppliers should also be squeezed, then themselves have lower profit because their source prices were higher.
But it is really just the consumer facing prices that go up. A lot of inflation is profit taking on the corporate side.
> But it is really just the consumer facing prices that go up. A lot of inflation is profit taking on the corporate side.
The US CPI went up 21.9% over the past 5 years[0]. The PPI went up 27.3% over the same timeframe[1]. So it's untrue that it's just the consumer-facing prices that have gone up; the producer-facing prices went up even more.
Corporate profit margins are high compared to historical averages, and total corporate profits went up by 40.7% over the past 5 years[2]; but the money supply went up by even more, by 47.1%[3]. So perhaps it's fair to say that businesses have been good at capturing the bulk of the additional money supply. Real (as in inflation-adjusted) personal incomes went up 9.4% over the same timeframe[4].
Consumer behavior was in turbocharged spending mode, fueled by rock-bottom interest rates and fiscal largesse. When supply remains constrained and demand goes through the roof, prices rise. Nothing too mysterious there.
Exactly. I was more focused on visualizing accurate physics about the object. In that sense it was "vivid". Color simply didn't factor in since it wasn't in the prompt. I can, at this moment visualize complex scenes with color without much issue. Especially after looking up aphantasia more closely, I'm highly skeptical of this test. With that said, I do think I tend to think _without_ color for practical purposes--most of the time I'm just interested in the kinetics of things I'm working through. Otherwise I'm very apt to feel like things have colors about them (my daughter, for instance, has a burnt orange personality; "cosmic" is a yellow word; serene is blue; 118 is red)--so it's not simply having a propensity for not thinking or, more importantly, _feeling_ in color.
For locking to a particular domain I had always added `site: example.com` to the query, rather than adding domain to a double quote statement.
I have used double quotes to limit to a particular _phrase_ as recently as last week. I'm not privy to the improvements you mention, do you have a link?
The site:domain.tld syntax should not have a space between the colon (:) and the (sub)domain.
Incorrect:
site: domain.tld
Correct:
site:domain.tld
The - modifier to exclude a word does not have a trailing space.
Incorrect:
- site:domain.tld
- query
Correct:
-site:domain.tld
-query
I’m less certain about excluding a verbatim phrase, but I believe you can do as follows.
-“exclude this query string”
While this space rule still applies, so don’t insert a space, although this needs more testing by me to know for sure that this exclusion works properly.
if you're a worker, then mostly yes. Ideally, self-fulfilling goals that require those extra 40-60 hours you're giving to a company then can be diverted. Not everyone can work at ChangeTheWorld corp for their day job.
Part of it is that, in general, there aren't great options to spend 10 or 20 hours/week--or, really, 700 or so hours a year doing interesting work for someone else on your schedule getting paid at full-time professional salary levels. You're not available when needed. You're not keeping current probably. Even if I could do some part-time consulting on what I currently work on, I'd become much less interesting to hire pretty quickly.
