Weapons can come in all forms and sizes. When wielded with the blend of censorship and propaganda, (social) media is absolutely a weapon. Is there a reason why it won’t be?
Well it’s time to rethink that then. Necessity is the mother of all invention, and at one point it’ll be a necessity to downsize if you want an affordable home.
How much space do you really need to raise a child? I’m genuinely curious because Americans act like you need a mansion to raise kids.
A 3 bed with 1K sq ft still gives you like a 10x10 room - more than enough space for a crib and a queen bed. And you have two other bedrooms to spare. As they get older and need space to run around and stuff, there’s no shortage of parks / trails / fields.
> How much space do you really need to raise a child?
It definitely depends on climate. I live in Ireland (in a relatively small house in the suburbs) and in the summer, there's absolutely no problem as we can take the kids out pretty regularly. However, in the winter when it's dark at 5pm and wet and windy, I definitely feel like we don't have enough space.
I do think the US houses seem absurdly large to me, but then lots of the more recent houses built in ireland are of a similar size.
Yeah, the cold would bother me less than the rain and darkness, tbh.
> for short stints.
This is the issue though, we have a 2.5 year old who's just super active, and it's much easier to tire him out when the weather is better and there's more light. Like, right now in Ireland it's still completely dark by 5.30 which means it's hard to tire him out in the winter.
> and we still have 3rd Places nearby, like community centers
That's cool, we have those too but they're mostly kid friendly in the mornings and afternoons and used for adult stuff in the evenings.
I’m a little shocked to see the quality of some comments here - I would expect a more grounded discussion. This is like Reddit / YouTube comment history. Someone please tell me this is a Wendy’s.
Sure the Fed isn’t perfect. But we don’t really have a better solution as of now because our financial systems are extremely powerful and anyone in office would love to abuse it if they can.
Sure, the renovations are ridiculous. But it’s not like this administration is austere in the slightest, so that’s a bit rich. Not to mention the cronyism prevalent across the cabinet.
There's also little genuine conversation to be had. The situation is bad, has been bad, and seems to only be getting worse. That's the only interpretation any rational person can hold. And, when everyone has the same opinion and that opinion is drastic, that creates a circle jerk.
Not the renovations themselves but the cost is supposedly at 2.5B. Personally I don’t really mind but I also don’t think government buildings need to be all that fancy with marble flooring.
It was budgeted at 1.9B (in 2019). Most of the cost overruns are from unexpected site issues like asbestos (more than thought) and water table problems. The buildings are historic, they already had marble. The marble was taken down and saved, this marble will be re-used. Some pieces are damaged, those will be new marble. These buildings are near 100 years old. I also don't think they have marble floors, but facades and other stonework.
I don't understand the cost either, apparently it only costs around a billion dollars to build a skyscraper? The Burj Khalifa only cost one and a half billion dollars when completed in 2010. I don't know that there's criminal activity here, but the cost of this is rather surprising to me. I knew the Federal Reserve was being renovated, but I thought it was something closer to a hundred million dollars.
Do you know anything about how data science works? The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data to optimize for an unchanging reward function. The problem isn't that complicated if you think about it.
> The algorithm is to be tuned over historical data
So you’re saying that historical data can’t have biases? Data cannot be collected and shared (or not collected a la jobs report) to manipulate the output? Seems a bit of a naïve take if you ask me.
If data is not collected, it is missing. A decent algorithm will be robust to missing data.
How on earth do you think the Fed sets the rate? Each board member probably has a simple spreadsheet, although they use their gut feeling in the end. It's markedly less objective and completely un-transparent.
People here are funny in that when I preach for transparency and objectivity, they preach for obscurity and individual board member bias. Their skepticism of data science shows how uneducated they are about defining and optimizing an objective function.
I’m not saying I’m against an algorithm. I’m saying that I’m against _only_ an algorithm. And we do want transparency and objectivity - nobody is denying this. I’ve worked with enough data to know that there are implicit biases, and just because data exists doesn’t mean it’s good. Let’s just say I’m skeptical that an algorithm alone can replace the Fed.
> although they use their gut feeling in the end.
That gut feeling check is pretty crucial, I think. Why not just work to make the Fed a more transparent org? And let’s say it is by an algorithm - will it be open sourced so it can be vetted?
Edit: also more crucially, who’s responsible when the algorithm fucks up?
That's just something they say to scare the children.
In any event, the point of a decent algorithm is that if the result isn't complying with the action, upcoming updates to the weights will fix it. Moreover, changes to the weight would be such that they optimize for maximum learning.
It is so weird seeing people preach for an obscure entity to do something so basic, and being shut down when asking for transparency. Today's AIs could write good model-development algorithms for tasks that are a hundred times more complicated.
Oops, the unaccountable algorithm eased when it should have tightened and Volcker Shocked when it should have eased. No prob, the weights will get tweaked and all will be well. Once the economic crisis blows over, anyway . . .
> That's just something they say to scare the children.
Is that really your response to “past results aren’t indicative of future performance”? Honestly at that point why not just let ChatGPT run loose and set guidance? Please, I implore you to think about the issue a bit deeper.
> I would argue that the Fed manipulating our financial system causes monetary crisis.
Well, get ready because you aint seen nothin yet if you thought the Fed was manipulating our financial system. Do you honestly think a partisan system would be better?
> I think a lot of largest tech companies feel that they'll face retribution from the current administration for not being supportive enough but would not from future admins.
The Democrats should play hardball but the geriatrics can barely take a swing.
They don’t know where the plate is, what the game is, or what day it is. They’re just hoping for ice cream when the nurse comes around with the meds. Meanwhile they are retelling stories from the 1960s for the hundredth time.
This is exactly it and parallels what happened with the end of the Wiemar Republic. There was an asymmetry in response between the Nazis and the government. You can see that in the limited prosecution and light sentences of the Beer Hall Putsch perpetrators.
The tech titans like Thiel see the Trump administration as a "big bet" a startup investment. They can "shoot for the moon" and try to realize the network state. If they fail, they figure they'll just toss the Democrats some campaign contributions and all will be good.
You can dislike a solution but admit that you can't think of a better solution, or specify that it is better than an even worse solution.
I can see why someone would have a issues with "a bunch of rich bankers appointed by politicians" controlling American monetary policy. But I can't really see a better way at least, until we can achieve a post-scarcity economy or something.
Bernanke had a strictly academic career before going into public service (and was/is probably one of the foremost experts on the Great Depression, something that was handy in 2008/9):
I think people over-estimate how many "rich bankers" are in the Fed, especially at the FOMC.
Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast with some Fed members in recent years, especially the more obscure regional ones, about their work, and how they often go out and talk to local businesses about what's happening 'on the ground'.
I’m not denying that, but that’s not how I read the comment. That comment comes across as a relief that the Fed is under attack, but is more upset that the source of attack is the executive branch.
The appears to be difficult for a lot of people to like, but the Fed still exists because the people who bitch and moan about the Fed can never voice an alternative that wouldn't immediately destroy everything if it were implemented.
The eradication of the Fed and fiat money. As others have expressed, I also think the interest rate mechanism is clumsy and that bailouts do more harm in the long term than good (see one of the most recent examples [1]).
The libertarian view is that interest rates should be decided by the free market and not a central bank. Mainly due to what we're seeing now (the executive trying to take it over) and that a small board of people can make bad decisions that have reaching effects.
Markets don't always seek equilibrium. Some aspects of the economy tend to be governed by vicious and virtuous feedback cycles. Always leaving everything to markets feels like more of a religion than a reasonable policy position.
This is actually quite correct. The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system. You "cut" rates to increase money creation, which actually pushes your long-term rates higher due to expected inflation and leads to even more money creation for a constant policy rate, and vice versa. This can all be fixed very simply by changing the instrument to a crawling exchange rate peg, which has an inherently stabilizing effect, as seen from the effectiveness of currency board systems - that system doesn't shift against you if you stick to a bad peg, whereas it very much does if you stick to a bad policy rate.
The long term policy goal (stability in the path of nominal incomes (prices + real activity) in the very short run, and prices in the medium-to-long run) would be unaffected, but the whole operational aspect would be simplified quite a bit.
> The Fed Funds policy interest rate is a clumsy instrument because it involves chasing the ever-shifting balancing point of an inherently unstable system.
I don't know about "inherently unstable system", given that as central bank independence has grown so has, generally speaking, monetary stability:
Great Moderation basically involved the adoption of price stability as a long-term policy target, as opposed to trying to keep long-term fixed exchange rates. There's no reason to change the policy target, the issue is wrt. the policy mechanism/instrument.
No it did not. I don't know why people repeat this so often but it is very frustrating. Nixon unilaterally ended the gold standard because the US was printing money to pay for Vietnam and the rest of the world called the US on its bullshit. The end of the gold standard is relatively recent in history and the verdict is still out on the impact.
I think your observation assumes that inflating the value of gold relative to the rest of economy is a problem - if you do not care about that I'm not sure it matters.
In any case gold served as a strong check on monetary policy even if it had problems. Certainly it is possible to have a "sound" monetary policy without gold. I'm just not convinced in societies ability to affect sound governance of monetary policy without some "stronger" guard rails. Especially not in today's climate.
You asked about which piece "of the dual mandate", but the OP said "operates as" which I am going to reply to.
Does the Fed can any data from labor sources or unions? I am asking in honest because the few reports from them that I have looked into(mostly around unemployment) all seem to be polls solely sourced from investor class assets like companies.
If they are only sourcing from one biased source for their data, they wouldn't have to have a bad mandate or manipulate it, to operate like it was for the benefit of the data source, right?
It prevents banks from doing their job, so does the existence of t-bills.
They hinder the economy by suppressing creativity and ingenuity . Every time a person becomes an investor instead of an inventor the economy and prosperity of a nation falthers.
You just don't see it in stats because stats can't measure against hypotheticals but that doesn't mean it isn't true
reply