Are any of the Chromium-based browsers going to retain manifest v2, or are they all stuck with neutered extensions? A quick search says even Vivaldi is going to lose v2 support later this year. Brave and Edge are non-starters.
Honestly don't know. I've never cared much about extensions. Most people seem to care about ad blockers, which Vivaldi has built in. I don't see many ads because the sites I frequent most often, I pay to see.
Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused. They've since stopped being that. Even if they are still tacitly privacy-focused, that's not good enough anymore.
We assume Mozilla is now just another ad-pandering jackwagon because that is the only safe assumption when presented with the facts: a major change in management, followed by removal of "we won't sell your data" across all of their marketing.
Their userbase is arguably mostly people who put up with browser disparity for the sake of peace of mind about their data. That type of user will abandon Firefox the same way we did Chrome.
I've been seeking out and trying alternatives for years, but there's one thing that I think is essential to practicing safe Internet: a uMatrix/uBlock-style connection blocker. No alternative browser I've tried comes close to acting as my user agent, it doesn't seem to be a priority for any of them.
Mozilla being explicitly privacy focused didn't get them any effective brownie points. The only thing that saves them is that they are the only viable competitor so, Google, via Chromium has to support them financially so that they don't fail. This is literally the I support my competitor so the argument that I'm a monopoly looks weaker. (BTW, Google practices around Chrome were anti-competitive)
>Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.
I don't think I would agree that they ever actually 'survived' Chrome at all. Mozilla had market share because it was the best thing before Chrome, in largely a pre-mobile era (at least in terms of pools of users that determined who led browser market share.) The focus on privacy was sourced from an ethos that has long existed in the software development community as a kind of baked-in default that I think was broadly shared by a lot of people and depressingly now is regarded as a kind of unique personality twist that the occasional company has.
The onset of Chrome I don't think involved survival, but was instead a steady march toward Chrome gaining dominant market share.
Mozilla seems to have forgotten that they survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly privacy-focused.
Mozilla survived Chrome by being overtly, explicitly and almost totally dependent on Google --- one of (if not "the") world's biggest privacy invaders.
And I seriously doubt they have forgotten where almost all their money comes from.
This is nonsense: firefox was and remains a better browser than chrome just in terms of usability. If you ever believed that a browser maker cared about "privacy" I have a bridge to sell you.
I mean, just look at their business model. Enshittification or bankruptcy was always the future.
How so? The two are basically indistinguishable to me in terms of UI, their layouts are almost entirely identical. If anything I think Firefox has become more like Chrome over time.
What concern? You mentioned Firefox having better UI, I was asking how you think the two differ - ad blocking and containers are fair points, it wasn't quite what I was thinking of as UI, but fair enough.
I'm using both every day. Firefox has better adblocking and better integration of tree style tabs. Both provided via extensions. I also prefer Firefox Sync to whatever Google has, though given Mozilla's trajectory it'll be a toss up sooner or later.
If so, their execution of that change is terrible. They could have explicitly clarified things, replacing "sell" with more expansive language that would maintain the explicit commitment to user privacy. But instead they changed their words to sound like Microsoft and Google, two notorious privacy violators, and have since only made it worse by only giving us circular explanations.
> In order to make Firefox commercially viable, there are a number of places where we collect and share some data with our partners, including our optional ads on New Tab and providing sponsored suggestions in the search bar. We set all of this out in our Privacy Notice.
And that's what people are objecting to. The reason they need to clarify their terms "in accordance with California law" is because it is a good law, not because they have done nothing wrong.
I'm in the U.S. and doing the same. While EU laws don't protect me as well as they would someone on the correct side of the pond, I do still benefit from better integrity and transparency.
Filen is becoming pretty awesome not only as worde alternative but as best sync storage period (and its e2e). They dobt have teams/bussines yet but its comming for sure.
for plain e-mail, recommend migadu.com (swiss) . They do only that
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one thing that seems tricky though, is smartphone OS software. Apple + Google is on like 99% of everything. i went few years with Sailfish, all fine.. but they support only 5y+ old devices, for a reason or another.. and i got tired of waiting, and switched to Android. hmmm
I bought an used phone and an used tablet supported by LineageOS.
I installed e/OS (derived from LineageOS) on the phone and LineageOS on the tablet.
The hardware is like new and with "debloated" software it works very well.
The AABill hits hard against Australia being a useful jurisdiction alternative to the US. Heck this law has made it impossible to hire any Australian National into security critical positions outside AUS. And the same law made services by fastmail and Atlassian suspect.
A lot of people are so brainwashed by U.S. propaganda they cannot comprehend that American billionaires are independently evil. Add to that the fanboyism where his sycophants can't see how utterly rotten Musk is and always has been.
Their sense of world order requires there be a shadowy threat actor such as Russia or China, instead of the obvious truth that this is American capitalism operating as designed.
What makes Musk so utterly rotten? Otherwise "it's just like your opinion, man..."
"Requires a shadowy threat actor such ad Russia and..."? Trump is trying to normalize US-Russian relations.
"This is American capitalism operating as designed" - Honestly what do you mean?
Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
I'm also curious about Billionaires being independently evil - what do you mean, are virtually all billionaires evil? Are they really morally worse people than the average or do they just have access to more resources and influence?
>Trump and Musk's reforms looks different enough from anything else tried in the last 25 years that I am super curious to see where it goes. I'm not into fear porn that this is the end of the world, H*tler, or whatever.
Arbitrarily firing arbitrary amounts of federal employees on the belief that this will make the gov't function better? Are you also currently in talks to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
It is possible to be unhappy with the end result of Ukraine or Trump's views of Ukraine without psyching ourselves up that these two dudes are literally H*tler.
It's possible but the concentration camps, the removal of trans rights, the push towards a unitary executive, referring to the disabled as "parasites," the scapegoating of minorities, talk of annexations etc etc etc all add up to one thing.
They can't grasp that miscarriages, which occur for many reasons even in healthy people, have exactly the same emergent medical care needs as abortions. Laws banning abortions usually also interfere with (if not outright block) access to necessary care.
It's a textbook example of how theocracy is wholly incapable of sound public governance.
Until the mid-late 1800s, abortions were legal, and even allowed by the Catholic Church until "quickening" (when you were able to feel the fetus kicking/moving).
Abortion became illegal and started to get "theocratized" for business interests by the American Medical Association for regulatory capture of "physician services" and push out homeopaths and midwives where were the administers of abortion drugs. The AMA lobbied congress and Congress passed the Comstock Act of 1873, and finally made abortion illegal in 1880.
Prior to these, abortion was not only legal, but it was not even considered immoral. It was just a fact of life.
> Until the mid-late 1800s, abortions were legal, and even allowed by the Catholic Church until "quickening" (when you were able to feel the fetus kicking/moving).
No, the Church has never allowed abortion. When gradual ensoulment of the fetus was the dominant scientific theory, the quickening marked the difference between homicide and murder.
Medieval intellectuals, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard von Bingen, believed that the fetus only received its soul around 40 days after conception.
Forty plus years ago I took Philosophy mainly for twentieth century logic under Graham Priest and alongside a few peers that now do fancy Royal Institution physics, run their own philosophy departments, etc.
As part of that I was roped into also taking Morals and Ethics led by a talented Jesuit type whose name escapes me and who went at depth into many such questions; I had the actual original texts by the three I mentioned in front of me back in the day.
Right now, the best I can do on the fly is point at, say:
and state that Augustine made a strong case for soul–body dualism and considered at least three paths for the soul to join the body, along with the belief that that a soul must also leave a body, and (IIRC) wrote about "the quickening" (motion of a fetus) being a sign of a soul either transfering in part from the mother or arriving "from outside" via God, etc.
He also remained uncommitted to "one true notion" for the bulk of his life (according to the Stanford and other articles I skimmed).
Augustine is, I believe, the best known for writing on soul-body dualism but I have not taken a deep interest in this area of Philosophy and am by no means an expert.
If you're interested in leaning more about the thoughts that humans have had on the matter that's likely a good starting point for reading material and references, going forward it'd be best to find a diverse group of other interested parties in that part of Philosophy, there will be no absolute answers, just a wealth of conjecture and reasoned arguments for sometimes opposing opinions.
My main concern is the same as with electronic gear levers/selectors, electric parking brakes, steer by wire, and throttle by wire:
What happens when the car has a failure that kills all the electrics?
That's a much more common failure scenario than people think. Batteries go flat. Wiring gets chewed and shorts with vibration. CAN buses need only a brief short to go out entirely and not reset. Even in a modest crash the car can lose its battery and alternator, or get a system short.
Tesla owners have learned this lesson repeatedly with getting locked out, locked in, stuck in park, unable to shift to neutral for a tow, etc. Other car owners have learned this with electric parking brakes getting stuck on.
If the electrics fail and the car is moving, I need steering, brakes, and the gear lever to all work to stop safely. If they're by-wire, I'm just a passenger.
Same thing that happens if a brake line pops, steering wheel locks up, or the throttle gets jammed open. There are ways of designing redundancies into those systems. Multiple communication channels, reserve sources of power. A lot of new model vehicles already have this stuff, drive by wire for example has pretty much been the standard for twenty years now. Typically, the entire system doesn't go down because they're designed for that not to happen.
My one-off experience. Parked my car once for a long holiday (two months). Mice chew through the main wiring loom behind the dashboard and urinated over electronics (urine is slightly corrosive). 1) no mechanic has time to repair single wires 2) dashboard removal is more than day of labor 3) main can bus failures are hard to find and require pulling modules till canbus high/low get the right voltages
I’d say a hard NO towards flybywire brakes.
Also worth noting that such sites technically are piracy. I am not making any moral or ethical assertions about it, but people need to know that so they can make an informed decision before doing so. And no, it's not inherently obvious to everyone.
Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.
I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating.
Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
Also consider checking your local public library services.
You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties).
It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it.
These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas.
Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft".
Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia.
(Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal;
Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for.
"Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences.
LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory?
The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them?
I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
Critical points nailed. This current weird state of the world is missing the basic principles, which must be stressed. I find them trivial, but the social (and political) issue is, they are not to many actors.
There is a "right to learn". There is a "right to access". And there are values to pursue, and urgencies to tackle (a world collapsing on its own cognitive faults)...
We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
The real cost will play out over years after Trump's term. When funding cuts like this hit, researchers and programs decide to find homes elsewhere with better funding. Cuts like this cause current and future talent loss that is very slow to reverse.
We had nearly a century of the best scientists in the world wanting to come to the US to study, teach, and work. To view this as America loosing and the rest of the world getting a "free ride" is pretty crazy.
how else would you prefer to frame America footing a bill for a benefit to everyone? we benefited, sure, but everyone else received the same benefit for zero cost.
we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. when you amortize your R&D costs across a small population instead of your whole market, that will mean charging everyone in that small population much more.
my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others. i am pretty comfortable at a fundamental level with public support for medical research.
i am not comfortable with failing to protect the results of that research and ensuring that if anyone outside the borders of our country wants a scrap of benefit from those, we enforce payment for that benefit.
> America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone).
By what measure? Life expectancy? Happiness? Wealth? We have the highest economic stratification of almost any nation in the developed world, by a longshot. We're the only developed nation that does not provide universal healthcare, does not guarantee sick time and does not guarantee parental leave. We have the most barriers to unionization of any developed nation We have the highest number of incarcerated people, by both total number and percentage of our population, of any developed nation.
We're also among the worst countries in terms of alignment between what the populace wants for policies and what they get from their elected representatives, so we're failing pretty hard at the whole "democracy" thing, too.
> i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that
Great news! I have the cure. All you need to do is google "federal budget percent foreign aid" and you'll feel so much better. It's just one percent of the federal budget.
Since we're on the subject of "paying more than we get back" and our tax bills...what state do you live in, dear commenter who feels ripped off by his tax bill?
“just” one percent is quite a lot given how many things the feds do. i’ll take the hundreds of dollars back on my taxes over paying for transsexual operas in south america or food for people who chant “death to America”
you are, of course, correct, we urgently must also end social security and medicare, as they represent large proportions of the budget.
> we spend a lot of our GDP on healthcare. part of this is due to other countries paying much less for new developments than we do. ...
> my issue isn't especially with the funding so much as it is with ensuring the rest of the world pays what they owe. America has functioned since WWII as a large charity project for those less capable of running a great nation (namely, everyone). i am pretty sick of seeing my tax bill every year and knowing that. so too are many, many others.
Man, spoken like a true Brexit voter - absolutely sure that they're tired of how the EU is just leaching off the backs of the unappreciated UK. Placing the blame on those foreigners for all the problems at home, and cutting them off will show them how much they needed us all along.
Some storylines are just too tantalizing to looking into the details of. They must be correct because they feel correct to me.
As the UK so bluntly and drastically learned, getting suckered by those storylines sucks when reality comes calling.
the only thing this suggests that brexit was the wrong way to extract adequate value from the leech nations of europe.
it doesn’t negate the basic point that the EU consists of many countries relying on net contributions from only a few. britain’s point wasn’t wrong.
thankfully, America is a much larger and more important nation so we should be able to do a better job of it.
Have you tried calculating what your tax bill is going to be when the US can no longer run a deficit after USD is no longer the world reserve currency? Funding scientific research isn't a zero-sum "charity project", rather it's spending some of the proceeds from our demurrage currency on maintaining the leadership position that makes it still be considered a good store of value.
Whether the US can or cannot run a deficit has nothing to do with the dollar being a reserve currency. It being a reserve currency means it probably will run a deficit but that's just a reflection of foreigners wanting to save US dollars, which is true for many country's currency.
The deficit is just a reflection of the sectoral balances[1], which governments don't realistically influence through normal policy. They obviously can change them, but it generally results in significant undesirable outcomes.
Sure, "deficit" is crappy political term that mostly serves as a martingale and rallying cry for kayfabe austerity politics. Forgive me for stooping.
I'm really talking about monetary creation/inflation - the part of the budget deficit that is new "loans" from another branch of government (Federal Reserve), plus "loans" from the Federal Reserve into the financial industry to do things like grow the housing bubble.
The belief that USD will continue to be redeemable for best in class future goods (technological widgets, military hardware, trade and military alliances, etc) combined with the stickiness of transaction costs (especially at nation-state scale) is what allows that ongoing monetary inflation without commensurate price inflation.
There's certainly a reasonable concern about what happens when China stops accepting IOUs in return for piles of actual stuff. That doesn't influence though the ability of the US to create what it needs, which is just a function of what resources it can draw on. As Keynes pointed out, anything we can actually do, we can afford.
I'm not actually American, but you get the gist. I've taken the liberty of posting the full passage here since it's so good:
For some weeks at this hour you have enjoyed the day-dreams of planning. But what about the nightmare of finance? I am sure there have been many listeners who have been muttering: “That’s all very well, but how is it to be paid for?”
Let me begin by telling you how I tried to answer an eminent architect who pushed on one side all the grandiose plans to rebuild London with the phrase: “Where’s the money to come from?” “The money?” I said. “But surely, Sir John, you don’t build houses with money? Do you mean that there won’t be enough bricks and mortar and steel and cement?”
“Oh no”, he replied, “of course there will be plenty of all that”.
“Do you mean”, I went on, “that there won’t be enough labour? For what will the builders be doing if they are not building houses?”
“Oh no, that’s all right”, he agreed.
“Then there is only one conclusion. You must be meaning, Sir John, that there won’t be enough architects”. But there I was trespassing on the boundaries of politeness. So I hurried to add: “Well, if there are bricks and mortar and steel and concrete and labour and architects, why not assemble all this good material into houses?”
But he was, I fear, quite unconvinced. “What I want to know”, he repeated, “is where the money is coming from”.
To answer that would have got him and me into deeper water than I cared for, so I replied rather shabbily: “The same place it is coming from now”. He might have countered (but he didn’t): “Of course I know that money is not the slightest use whatever. But, all the same, my dear sir, you will find it a devil of a business not to have any …”
Had I given him a good and convincing answer by saying that we build houses with bricks and mortar, not with money? Or was I only teasing him?
…
For one thing, he was making the very usual confusion between the problem of finance for an individual and the problem for the community as a whole …
The first task is to make sure that there is enough demand to provide employment for everyone. The second task is to prevent a demand in excess of the physical possibilities of supply, which is the proper meaning of inflation. For the physical possibilities of supply are very far from unlimited. Our building programme must be properly proportioned to the resources which are left after we have met our daily needs and have produced enough exports to pay for what we require to import from overseas …
Where we are using up resources, do not let us submit to the vile doctrine of the nineteenth century that every enterprise must justify itself in pounds, shillings and pence of cash income, with no other denominator of values but this. I should like to see that war memorials of this tragic struggle take the shape of an enrichment of the civic life of every great centre of population …
Assuredly we can afford this and much more. Anything we can actually do we can afford. Once done, it is there. Nothing can take it from us.
> As Keynes pointed out, anything we can actually do, we can afford
And what if we're currently affording more than what we can actually do? And what of going forward when a lot of what we can do gets afforded by other countries calling in those IOUs (which won't end up being fully repudiated for a bunch of reasons) ?
What does it actually mean to "call in an IOU" in this case? It means use the dollars to buy stuff - so export. Well, that's bad if it extracts too much real value from the economy, but then the economy and the government have various tools at their disposal, from outright banning exports, through export tariffs to importing the stuff to export from another country that has a surplus. It's only a claim insofar as the claimee will deliver; there's no credible higher authority to whinge to that the US isn't playing fair, and the US government is only really answerable to its population.
Except that before we get to the opposite side of excluded-middle situation you're describing, there's a long transition period where the US government doesn't repudiate the IOUs because it wants to remain "business friendly", is dependent on some imports, wants to trade with some countries, its elites want to be able to go to other countries and spend their wealth, etc. You're basically asserting we can always resort to strict economic controls, when that's essentially the opposite of this country's foundation.
You also didn't address my first point that we're likely currently affording more than we can do, especially in the short term. So shutting down foreign trade would result in a straightforward standard of living decrease. Like yes it is important to remember that finance and money are abstractions on allocating real resources, but currently those abstractions are supremely benefiting the US.
What do you mean by "affording more than we can do"? The measure of affordability is whether something is possible or not. If anything, a non-zero unemployment/under-employment means more can be afforded. By definition, in real terms, you can never afford more than you can do.
Accepting the IOUs means more exports, which is what everyone seems desperate for at the moment. In fact, Trumpism seems to be all about shutting down imports and increasing exports, which happened jolly fast and wasn't in any way related to an inability to import.
And as I said, the simple response to export demands exceeding capacity is normal - increase capacity through efficiency, import stuff to sell. A good post on exactly this stuff: https://new-wayland.com/blog/savings-are-an-export-product/
I was using the framing of your Keynes quote, with the context that Keynes was generally for increasing the monetary supply (making it possible to afford what can be done).
It is possible to afford more than you can do yourself when you buy things from other countries. That quote is arguing for ignoring the financial abstraction when it becomes limiting, and focusing on the economic realities of what can be done. But my point is that the financial abstraction is currently benefiting the US. Eschewing the financial abstraction, balancing imports and exports, and no longer being a reserve currency means that we will be able to afford less.
That may be fine if the goal is to achieve other results (eg stable manufacturing jobs that support a middle class, supply chain security). But it's still something to be acknowledged, rather than written off. Effectively the worldwide use of USD to facilitate international trade and as a store of future value is itself an export, the use of which is paid for by ongoing monetary inflation. Reducing the desire of other countries to hold USD means ending that export.
That's not what he means by afford. I think the rest of the quote makes it clear that affordability is a statement about whether the thing can be delivered in real terms.
There's no financial abstraction happening here. Exports and imports always balance, it's just that financial assets are an export product that foreigners may wish to hold. If they do, then great, because you can swap financial assets for real stuff. This is not unique to the US; plenty of countries run like this.
Of course you should acknowledge that the situation might change, but there's nothing to indicate that's happening. It's not like there's a ready supply of customers waiting to buy all the stuff the Chinese rely on selling for their domestic employment.
Edit: it's worth noting that the decisions here are largely made by the private sector. The government runs a deficit or a surplus because it has to to balance the sectoral flows [1]. If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit.
I don't really know what point you're trying to make beyond reframing the situation into different terms where different things are assumed constant, and then not actually examining what happens when those things are not constant.
I tried to meet you there with the terminology of the Keynes quote and you argued definitions rather than address the translated point.
In the general framework you're pushing, if the government does not run a deficit by being a place to park money, then that money remains in the economy regardless - private savings is generally in terms of loans to banks which then propagate the money elsewhere, not simply holding vast quantities of Federal Reserve Notes. (And frankly FRNs should really be considered part of the debt/deficit too)
I'm a bit puzzled what you're saying about private savings. You can certainly consider deposits/savings as loans to a bank, is that what you mean?
I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population. As long as the country remains capable of producing useful stuff, everything is going to be fine, since that's what _actually_ matters.
> I'm a bit puzzled what you're saying about private savings. You can certainly consider deposits/savings as loans to a bank, is that what you mean?
Yes, in a previous comment you said this:
> If the private sector wishes to save and import, then if the government wish to not starve the economy of money, they necessarily have to run a deficit
My point is that the private sector saving does not itself starve the economy of money. Savings is generally done into banks, which then choose where to invest that money onwards. What makes it possible to starve the economy of money from this is precisely that the government takes loans from a private sector looking to save - either through banks that buy Treasuries, or even Treasuries bought directly - which forms [part of what is currently considered] the deficit.
> I think the point I trying to make to is that deficits should not be anything to worry about - they are just a balancing item that reflects normal monetary operations as desired by the population
My original argument had an even stronger implicit point - being able to run a deficit without the consequence of significant price inflation is an extremely beneficial situation. It implies an ever growing value of the ecosystem of that currency, sustaining the new money. We can certainly debate how that value should be realized and what it should be spent on. But pulling back from the world stands to destroy that value creation.
Ah, I see. The problem is that banks can't really invest their reserve holdings because they need them to balance the deposit. The best they can do is shuffle it around the vertical circuit, that is, they can buy government bonds. They could also take a deposit at another bank (indeed, the whole system can run on that basis without reserves), but that would be strictly on less beneficial terms than a deposit at the central bank (because the corresponding bank would need to balance the deposit made to _it_). The mainstream idea is that swapping a fixed price floating interest financial asset (reserves) for a floating price fixed interest financial asset (bonds) somehow locks it up, but that's just wishful thinking.
I'm not sure if in your final point your implying something about the quantity theory of money, which is something I reject (flows being the important measure). Perhaps you can clarify what you mean by destroying the value creation? Is this a statement about closed economies being less valuable than open ones?
US will have to prove that these big changes are a sogn towards more stability, for others to keep saving in USD. Gold markets are pretty insane nowadays, which makes me think of my own savings.
Our insane spending on health care is independent from funding of scientific research, and only a small amount of your tax funds it (again - different than spending on "healthcare").
Being that country that makes scientific breakthroughs is a good thing. Name one of these "free loading" countries out there is in better shape because they don't do science and just sit back reap the benefits?
