Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

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> Rice was an example that was palatable to both my lazy fingers and I hoped to those who may not have appreciated a jargon filled response. It does not detract from the clearly presented general case which you are more than encouraged to investigate

I am also using rice as a stand-in for the general case.

> I am not proposing anything, I am merely describing.

That's a meaningless distinction. Academic communists who supported Stalinism also claimed innocence when Stalinism resulted in the deaths of millions. I am not accusing you of anything on that scale, but I am saying that ideas have consequences. You are responsible for the consequences of the ideas you support and promulgate.

> This is classic market failure

Right, and I don't think markets are inherently failure-prone. If I drive my car into a light pole, is that a classic automobile failure? So I dispute the very terminology here.

Case in point: The 2008 mortgage crisis was caused by a massively distorted market for mortgages and easy credit. The first was created by Barney Frank with Freddie and Fannie, the second by the Fed. Future generations will remember this as a "market failure" and use it to justify the existence of future incarnations of Freddie, Fannie and the Fed.

> I would suggest that you are either quite the revolutionary thinker, or that you are, in fact, typically wrong.

There is a third possibility, which is that lots and lots of people think like me.

> I am also using rice as a stand-in for the general case.

The existence of futures, commoditised goods, integrated markets and all the rest have clearly not eliminated shocks of the type I describe. What's your point?

> You are responsible for the consequences of the ideas you support and promulgate.

Again, you appear to be having issues with the concept of description. What I explained is how things actually work, why they need solved, and how they are currently solved by intervention. There is no argument here. I could very easily describe your arguments, and why they're flawed, and in no way would that amount to my supporting or promulgating them.

> I dispute the very terminology here

Dispute the terminology all you like, it's just a name for the what I described, it has no bearing on the concepts which you have failed to address cogently at all.

> There is a third possibility, which is that lots and lots of people think like me.

I think you mean that lots and lots of people think like me, and I would ordinarily dispute that too.

> What I explained is how things actually work, why they need solved, and how they are currently solved by intervention.

Except that the people who disagree with your "description" would point out that they are not solved by intervention, the underlying problems are simply exacerbated until they spiral out of control and experience a black swan event and the entire edifice collapses into an orgy of post hoc problem fixing that just messes things up more and more all the time.

At best this is just delaying the inevitable, and at worst drastically increasing the magnitude of how bad it's going to be when it becomes impossible to delay it further.

In theological terms, your claims are equivalent to appeals for plenary indulgences as effective as an effective long term strategy for the mitigation of sin. ;)

> I think you mean that lots and lots of people think like me, and I would ordinarily dispute that too.

Lots and lots of people think like both of you. Bitcoin takes the question out of the political realm and into the technical realm. If you don't buy keynesian economics and want no part of it, then for the first time in modern history it is largely possible for you to circumvent systems based around those assumptions and management strategies.

There might be arguments that the very fact this is now possible eliminates the ability of keynesian systems to act in what they describe as a benevolent fashion, but it's largely irrelevant now. The cat is out of the bag and nothing is going to put it back in.

> Except that the people who disagree with your "description" would point out that they are not solved by intervention

If the problem is warding off a depression, then the solution I described is indeed a true solution. It may not be optimal, but starting to discuss optimality of the potential solutions was a little beyond the scope of the point I was making.

> At best this is just delaying the inevitable

Let me explain to you what a business cycle is. Here is an example long term growth trend: http://wolfr.am/17dwVbt and here is the same with business cycles http://wolfr.am/1iaDMSa - if there is an inevitability, it's the trend. I can't comment on your inevitability, because you didn't actually say what it was.

> at worst drastically increasing the magnitude of how bad it's going to be when it becomes impossible to delay it further

Money is nominal, it has no long run effects. Everything I've described has been the use of a nominal tool in the smoothing of short-run fluctuations. The long term trend is unaffected.

> If you don't buy keynesian economics and want no part of it, then for the first time in modern history it is largely possible for you to circumvent systems based around those assumptions and management strategies

This is not relevant to what I said. If sufficiently large your Bitcoin utopia will suffer these problems and you won't have a solution. God help you if all your eggs are in that basket when reality strikes.

> If the problem is warding off a depression, then the solution I described is indeed a true solution.

If the problem is warding off an invocation of oomkiller at the kernel level, then just setting the jvm heap size lower is indeed a true solution. We'll just ignore the fact that it doesn't actually address the problem and the memory leak still exists and has actual consequences, because we stopped oomkiller from randomly killing innocent processes which is definitely a noble goal.

Keynesian solutions have consequences, they are not magic. And they are not really solutions at all if you're not deceived by the simple sophistry of them, they're band-aids. That

> The long term trend is unaffected.

Is terribly amusing, I guess that's why we don't have financial crisis anymore or hyperinflation or sovereign debt defaults or poorly managed national economies or anything of the kind.

> If sufficiently large your Bitcoin utopia will suffer these problems and you won't have a solution.

That's because setting a shitty raft on fire so you're forced to deploy life vests instead of drowning is simply not a solution, and pretending otherwise is just stupidity masquerading as tactics.

Whatever, as long as it works for you hope you're happy with it, I'm not buying.

> Money is nominal, it has no long run effects.

Wow. Normally I wouldn't say something that appears this "snarky," but...

I think the wrongness of this speaks for itself. This is being used as an excuse for massive manipulation of people's lives and businesses. Apparently, that has "no long run effects."

Definitely reminiscent of "In the long run, we're all dead."

Are you being paid to astroturf?

He probably isn't. Are you?

Your posts mostly consists of rambling that the established economics definitions of efficiency, market failure and so forth are wrong. You call an entire profession slippery and dishonest.

You are clearly pushing your agenda, in a fashion that IS intellectually dishonest. Try having a conversation where you actually use the jargon of the subject matter. Market failure means one thing when you are discussion economics, don't try to invent your own definition. That is dishonest and poor argumentation technique.

> You call an entire profession slippery and dishonest

Academic economics isn't a profession.

> You call an entire profession slippery and dishonest.

I didn't call all economists slippery and dishonest. So, this is a bizarre and blatantly false accusation.

I don't even think all economists who accept the jargon and go with it are dishonest. It would be hard to do anything else. But I think certain jargon is inherently biased. Somebody originated that jargon.

> in a fashion that IS intellectually dishonest

How so? I think it's pretty fair to criticize my point of view, but I don't think you can support the accusation that I'm intentionally misleading people. That's a pretty high bar to reach. I'm not going around intentionally inventing confusing terminology.

Re: astroturfing, I regret bringing that up. But the guy I was talking to didn't seem to be interested in discussing the issues, he seemed to be playing language games to "win" an argument. But that is just my perception, I'm not even sure I'm right about that.

Those "language games" (I assume you're referring to my having to twice clarify the definition of description) were necessary a) because you were putting words in my mouth; and b) half of your argument centred around attacking me like I was pushing some agenda: I was describing reality.

> But the guy I was talking to didn't seem to be interested in discussing the issues

I made a clear point with a clear example and well defined boundaries. Some of what's been said here - a lot by you - has been so wrong/irrelevant/flawed that I wasn't willing to entertain it, on this point you are correct. I'm 2 weeks in to a new keyboard layout you see, and the thought of the amount I'd have to type to address them all properly was too much to bear.

> astroturfing

For the record, I had to google that.

> a) because you were putting words in my mouth

No I wasn't. Give an example.

This would have to take the form of me having claimed you said something you didn't, not the form of me claiming an implication of your statements that you don't agree with.

> (I assume you're referring to my having to twice clarify the definition of description)

Now thrice, and it's irrelevant because you are also "pushing an agenda," as you put it. You can't really do one without the other. Every fact about reality has implications for human action.

> Some of what's been said here - a lot by you - has been so wrong/irrelevant/flawed that I wasn't willing to entertain it,

I think this is an example of not pursuing intellectual discussion, like I was talking about.

Another reason I brought up astroturfing is because you have a new account.

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