BlueTie

In David Graeber's book on money, one detail that I always remember when I read a comment like this is how coinage was created so many times throughout history as a way to support an Army.

King makes money -> gives it to the army -> collects money as a tax from all citizens.

It creates a system where all the people in the kingdom have to contribute to the army in some way.

Now The Fed creates money -> gives it to bankers -> gov't collects taxes in that coin.

So we've created a system where your ability to buy things is a derivative of how much you support banking. It's no wonder why everyone is overleveraged and fragile and needs bailouts all the time.

...or it's the co-opting of OWS. Michael Burry, Ryan Cohen, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett are glorified in wsb as much as the handful of hedgefunds shorting GME are hated.

I have a feeling that in a few generations people will look back and wonder how we were so concerned about an iceberg melting when we were eating a credit card per week of plastic and wiping out most of life on earth.

(For the record I do think global warming is a big deal - I just think the latter issues will hurt humanity far more far sooner)

It's possible they would, possible they wouldn't. The point is that if you project things about human intelligence i.e. "but humans like ants so why wouldn't the reverse be true? "or "most humans don't pay attention to ants so why would aliens care?"on to other types of intelligence, you're making a big assumption.

A superintelligent ant colony with an "of ant" intellect is going to be so alien to our kind of intellect that the goals are just impossible to compare. Probably same for aliens unless there are many humanoid ones for some reason.

A better version of that argument might be: "if ants evolved to have higher than human intellect and technology - would they be interested in studying us humans?"

I think the answer is far less clear in that scenario.

Kings used to coin money, hand it out to the army and then collect taxes from the entire population that was paid in the same coin.

The Fed creates dollars, hands it out to bankers and then the US gov't collects taxes from the entire population in the same dollars.

Same strategy, different masters.

For many people their smartphone is their only access to internet (and thus bills, emails, and everything else that is more or less essential). The difference between the group of people buying an iphone because they need access to that stuff and the group of people where an iphone is only a distraction machine is a pretty solid proxy for the two groups I'm talking about between those who buy as a luxury vs essential purchase.

Isn't this entire article missing the difference between a luxury item and an essential item? A smartphone 10 years ago was a luxury for just about everyone who owned one (that is, bought with extra money) now it's a requirement.

The luxury purchase folks are certainly getting a better deal as apples:apples prices go down; but if you're paycheck to paycheck and used to be able to not buy a smartphone but now have to - you're just running on tighter margins.

I would imagine measuring economic well being directly through something like a "economic desperation index" makes more sense than doing a bunch of calculus on comparing the price and quality of items in two different years since the latter would only apply to people who own the item in both domains. Especially in the context of this article which is discussing if people have it better now or then.