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"It is better to be approximately right, than precisely wrong"

— Warren Buffett

now the challenge for nostr:npub1xy60n57p02ugl743zfag2ljftxh4s0ufpzu0wsmhdvng7hj5c0vqvx8w7v is to understand how it relates to our mini feud about precise definition of hyper inflation.

all right i am going to help him. you need to get the principles right before worrying about numbers. if you're fundamentally measuring the wrong things it doesn't matter how precisely you're measuring them.

when i came to America i noticed Americans have an unhealthy obsession with numbers. for example in America often a person's age is listed as a number next to his name - we never had that in Soviet Union.

Americans compensate for their total inability to do any kind of math ( compared to Russians ) by trying to put numbers on everything for no reason.

"United Kingdom enters recession" then 3 days later "United Kingdom exists recession" ... what changed ? NOTHING. it's just that there is some arbitrary number that shows when a country is a recession and it flips by 0.0001% within 3 days and that makes the news ... even though that number doesn't measure anything relevant at all.

I had to take Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calculus and Differential Equations for my dual major in Electrical and Computer Engineering at NYU but i rarely bother looking at numbers because they are almost always irrelevant.

it's the principles that matter. numbers are not substitute for understanding.

( as you can see nostr:npub1xy60n57p02ugl743zfag2ljftxh4s0ufpzu0wsmhdvng7hj5c0vqvx8w7v has managed to get under my skin LOL )

Prince Aleph 1y ago

Remember I'm only technically American; racially I am Eastern European like you. Also I had to pass through Calc IV (which is the same as the Differential Equations and Linear Algebra course you are talking about) for a math minor, although I realized after getting out that it is pointless for the kind of software engineering that I ended up doing, although if I had gone into AI it would not be irrelevant. But at that time AI didn't have the cachet. I haven't used calculus or looked at it since university. My uncle, who is an engineer, used it only a half-dozen times in a decades long career. How much use it is depends a lot on the specific field of engineering, though.

I don't care too much for the government's numbers on inflation myself, I just used them for general reference to know that the peak took place around 2022 and also that there's a split between how goods and services behaved. I believe you are right that goods spiked enormously from a shut down economy and also the fact that people being stuck at home bought everything out of the pipeline. We all remember the huge wait times that would come up on Amazon goods in '20-'21. But the persistent signal of increasing services prices has continued past lockdowns, I think a side effect of both the Fed pouring a lot more money into the system than had been there before, and also the politicians continuing massive budget deficits. I pay attention to those numbers because I've noticed bills for certain types of services relating to for example homeownership going up 2-3x from where they were.

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Dissident Sound 1y ago

i think what we discovered is that government will do what it can to kill the real economy ( manufacturing, farming etc. ) either by lockdowns or regulations, or "cyberattacks" or blowing up pipelines or forcing cancellations of pipelines etc ... they do this in order to reduce the "carbon footprint" which is itself a proxy for the size of real economy ...

in other words the purpose of carbon reduction is to kill real economy and to achieve carbon reduction you kill the real economy ... which seems unnecessarily complicated except you can never tell people the truth so it has to be done this way to get people to accept it ...

these hits to real economy then cause the downturn in the stocks ( the fake economy ) and because the government actually cares about the fake economy they ( or rather the FED ) will respond by printing money until the fake economy is booming again ( stonks going up ) ...

the disconnect between the real and fake economy is the inflation ...

and the timing is something like: lockdowns > shortages / stock crash > stimmies / printing money > stock rally > price inflation

price inflation lags the stocks because printed money go into stocks right away but consumer prices only increase after the shortages are resolved by switching to lower quality and more expensive materials and components and after manufacturers come to grips with the fact that they're losing money on everything they sell and are forced to finally ( after much denial ) readjust prices to new reality ...

whoever was president during stock rally wins the election

whoever was president during price inflation loses the election

as always timing is everything ...

nostr:npub1acg6thl5psv62405rljzkj8spesceyfz2c32udakc2ak0dmvfeyse9p35c nostr:npub1c856kwjk524kef97hazw5e9jlkjq4333r6yxh2rtgefpd894ddpsmq6lkc

Brunswick 1y ago

Somehow you've managed to be a magnet for Eastern Europeans. Although I'm natively American, my heritage includes Northern Slavic. With regard to the definition of inflation and the measurement of the economy and numbers that the government publishes, I think we can be safe to say that none of it has any meaning whatsoever. Below I will attempt to define new terms for this discussion.

Currency inflation is a simple equation that should be separated from the notion of deflation, where currency inflation could be defined as total defaults (including accumulating national debts) on uncollectable debt subtracted from the amount of net currency that's exported overseas through trade imbalances.

Economic deflation, on the other hand, is a sum of the increase in population, increases in the earning potential of the population, and the deflationary effect of increases of production efficiency. Currency inflation is easily measured whereas economic deflation is not as easily measured because it is measured using the unit of the inflationary currency.

What the government attempts to do is to measure economic deflation by using what they call a basket of goods to somewhat represent the actual expenses that a average person undergoes throughout the year, then represent that in units of the deflationary currency. Of course this activity of the government performing these measurements is inherently corrupt, thereby they hide the misdeeds of Congress through the generation of these numbers. It should be noted that regardless if the source of sociological statistics is public or private, they will always be skewed and falsified to benefit the originator.

Therefore, to use any number that originates from the government that could negatively reflect the performance of the government or of the economy as a whole, which is being managed by the government and the regulators, is to trust that the government can ever act in our best interest. You're far better off to do your own kitchen math on the back of a napkin than to trust any number that the government publishes.

With this information One can estimate true economic deflation through observation of the marketplace. And one can also calculate, based on numbers provided by the Fed actual economic or monetary inflation given that all this information is centralized through the central banks. With this, you can calculate actual universal theft from through money printing.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

OK it is too late in the day for me to process what you wrote so i will instead talk about simpler stuff that i can at least somewhat understand.

my controversial opinion is that theft through money printing is a good thing. the government needs to be financed somehow and of all the ways it can be done money printing affects me the least since i don't hold cash. sure prices can potentially increase but it doesn't matter unless you're on fixed income. somebody has to pay for government's expenses ( like making all the bombs they send to Israel ) and i would rather it be paid by somebody else than me, and with money printing that's exactly what we get - we get suckers who hold cash to pay for government waste, to bail out banks and so on. maybe even they don't pay anything - maybe economic growth pays everything.

my concern is how to stop government stealing from ME !

so let's say i get out of cash by buying a house ... now i have to pay property tax ... which in New Jersey is about 2% ... that is about the same as inflation ! ! !

or let's say i invest in some kind of Index Fund ... will i then have to pay capital gains tax ? ( sorry i don't know anything about this )

in other words inflation is the low hanging fruit for government - the easiest way for them to steal and the last thing any intelligent person needs to worry about because intelligent people do not hold cash ...

but even though the government will always target the weakest ( stupidest ) victims first ( target cash holders with inflation ) you can only extract so much money from them because they are all poor to begin with ...

all this really accomplishes is keeps about half the population in perpetual poverty ...

at some point they must extract wealth from the middle class that has actual assets and not just money stuffed in a mattress ... so how do they do it ? and how can we avoid it ?

i suppose we could buy bitcoin ... but aside from it being a meme asset i also wonder - how is it even legal ? i mean wouldn't have you to tell the government that you own it ? if you make profits from it - would that be something the government might expect a cut from in form of capital gains tax ? ( again, sorry, i know nothing about this )

Brunswick 1y ago

The issue with your theory, that inflation only effects holders of fiat, ignores how inflation effects prices; namely wages. The normal course of things is 1) money printer go brrr, 2) prices of everything goes up, 3) wages stay the same. Wages always lag inflation. This means price increases effect the lower classes the most. So, regardless if you hold fiat (and the poor can never hold onto any in any case) inflation still makes you poorer. This is one reason for the widening financial divide: Only the affluent have access to credit or leftover fiat to invest in things that can hedge inflation. Bitcoin reverses all of these trends.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

my other unpopular opinion is that wages need to come down if we want to stay competitive with China

there is just no reason why Americans should make 10X as much as Chinese if they aren't any more productive

but as i said my brain already went to sleep because it's my bed time and i can't get into any deep stuff right now

i hope to be back in shape tomorrow

Brunswick 1y ago

That Chinese wages are 1/10 of American's is a myth. That is information from decades ago

Dissident Sound 1y ago

The only reason American Wages should be higher than Chinese ones is because America still does things that China can't do.

China still has nothing to match Google, Microsoft or Nvidia and in general American companies like Tesla, Nike etc. are more prestigious than Chinese companies.

But china is catching up. Volvo is a Chinese company now for example. Xiaomi now has the fastest production sedan in the word ( faster than any Tesla or Porsche ). Chinese are strong in Solar, Electric Batteries, Self Driving Cars and are making progress in Aerospace.

Once China moves past making toilet seats for Walmart and starts to make things that previously only America could do there will no longer be any way to justify why American wages should be higher than Chinese.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

i don't believe in Bitcoin because i don't buy the premise that Bitcoin is money.

Bitcoin is a meme asset. Even if we ignore the meme part it is still an asset, not money.

Money is created by the powers that be for their own benefit - and we are forced to use it to pay taxes - it is how the system of wage slavery is set up. Bitcoin does NOTHING to change this.

You can invest in any number of assets like Real Estate, Stocks, Precious Metals etc. Bitcoin is just one more asset like that, except it has no use in the world whereas for example Gold is useful in dentistry and electronics, Stocks represent businesses that solve the needs of customers and so on.

So Bitcoin is just an ultra-retarded Asset. It isn't money. As such it solves nothing.

Brunswick 1y ago

This is certainly a possibility. What I read you saying is that the government, ultra rich and powerful dictate the unit of account and therefore they control the minds of the entire world with their money. Yes, this is the case today, and your viewpoint assumes nothing will change.

My issue with this is that money has always changed to whatever is the preferable economic medium for the time, and it should be painfully obvious we are suffering under an old technology that solves a problem we no longer have; that is how to mobilize an entire continent into a global war. Nuclear weapons have made this objective obsolete, and it's time to put these previously acceptable but wicked and corruptable measures behind us.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

as long as government has the authority to throw you in prison for not paying taxes, your not using their money doesn't take away their power.

it is still feudalism where you pay them in exchange for them allowing you to live. you are a still a serf.

whether you pay a knight or king or to the church or to mafia or to government - you are a slave.

in fact the money used during feudalism was hard money - it was literally basically just gold and silver shaped into coins - and people were just as enslaved as they are now.

the job of people is to produce goods and die in wars. the job of government is to rob and enslave and send people to their deaths.

money is just an accounting system. it has changed throughout history but relationship between people and government never changed even as we renamed it from democracy ( Greece ) to republic ( Rome ) to feudalism ( middle age Europe ) to republic ( Early America ) to democracy ( what we are told we have now )

the entire "bitcoin solves this" narrative is just a pump, same as how Elon's "DOGE" ( department of government efficiency ) is a pump.

i frankly do not understand why little guys choose to pump assets when it would be a much better use of their time to simply switch to a different asset that is already being pumped by somebody bigger.

i mean it takes a million bitcoiners pumping hard to pump bitcoin up in a year by the same percentage that some other meme coin can be pumped up by a single individual ( like Elon or Andrew Tate ) overnight.

no need to for reading any books by Lyn Alden - you just have to be fast - you need to both buy and then sell faster than others do it.

for example when Trump won coins went up. you didn't need to know anything about coins to play that trade - you just needed to know that Trump is seen as pro-coin. you could have leveraged that trade and made bank.

this is how smart people make money. preferably using insider information but as you can see in this case it was not necessary to have insider information.

meanwhile fools spend all of their time telling everybody about Bitcoin and in the end make exactly the same amount of money as somebody who simply holds Bitcoin and never talks about it. a waste.

Dissident Sound 1y ago

it actually seems to make sense now that i had some sleep. to summarize how i understood it:

inflation is when people ( or government ) borrow and spend and never pay back or produce anything of value - that is when money enters economy but products do not.

deflation is when money leaves the economy ( to foreign countries ) or when production of goods increases - that is when money is spread over more products.

CPI basket of commodities is constantly adjusted depending on what is going up or down in price to mask inflation because at any given time something ( like flat panel TVs ) is always going down in price, even as overall costs of living rise.

i remember some ass clown during the height of inflation saying something like " inflation is actually pretty low, except for food, energy and housing " ( in other words except for cost of living )