It's too early to say how I feel about it. Part of me is very much in favor of Accelerando, but goddamn, we haven't been doing well as a society with just text and video on screens.
Me: money is fake
Them: yeah it's just paper that we ascribe value to
Me: no it's faker than that. Only 3 percent of USD exists as physical currency. The rest is just bank credit.
Them: right, so money is just numbers in bank accounts that the government creates from nothing
Me: no, it's faker than that. Most money is bank credit, created by private banks. Not the government, not the Fed, banks like Chase or Bank of America. They take zero dollars and turn that into a loan and debt. They decide who gets new money. Capitalists decide where new money is created and who it goes to. If the government paid back all government debt, there would be no more treasury bonds, and then if everybody paid off all their private debt, there would be no more money.
Them: wow, so most money is just credit corresponding to debt, and there's just a small amount of money they borrow from the federal reserve that was created by the government.
Me: no, it's faker than that. Since 2020 reserve requirements were abolished. Banks don't need to legally keep any money on hand or borrow money from the federal reserve or each other at all. They can just pay interest on every dollar they create to the federal reserve without borrowing from the Fed at all.
Them: oh. So money is REALLY fake.
Me: yeah. so if the government just paid off all of our student debt it wouldn't affect the money supply at all. It would do nothing to the economy other than release a huge debt burden. So let's do that.
This happens to some degree already, when phone battery levels start to dip. But, it’s opaque, and I’m not sure if app developers are able to handle those cases in their application code.
RIP #lot2046
For the good death
🏴
I have laid myself upon a fulcrum, so that force can be applied to me and I can help move an impossible weight.
do dope, fuck hope