Sure, but now there's a deadweight loss by allocation inefficiencies (plus the disemployment effects are strongest at the margin, so now many people are working less than they want to, because they cannot sell more of their work for less, so ie. they have part time jobs).
The "obvious" thing is to subsidize employment (by negative income tax for low-incomes to avoid discontinuities), and sectoral/collective bargaining (to avoid divide-and-conquer information asymmetry), and unemployment payments (to allow for the market to find new "healthy" equilibrium, so people don't have to take the first shitty job).
You have two underlying factors which make everything else downstream moot. Fractional reserve lending and plastic imports. FRL means a bank is depositing $5 and lending $50 then charging you interest for the $45 they never had in the first place. Now you must extract that interest from someone else, who likely finances the missing amount and compounds the problem. So that’s how we stay ‘afloat’ if you can call it that despite the problem of #2. #2. Plastic is made from oil. Whereas anyone would exchange labor for energy, energy prices money. It’s the civilizational bottleneck. It would be cheaper to empty fort knox into Boston Harbor than accept another ship of disposable plastic goods that we send to a landfill. It’s effectively taking a big wad of US wealth every day and lighting it on fire, then using the nonsense FRL to make up the difference.
Given all that, whatever labor or wage trick you do is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. I know how to remediate the plastic issue, which is an engineering question. Until that’s addressed the union sq debt clock is counting the cargo ships docking to feed our money/energy/oil->landfill pipeline.
Money supply management is important for price stability. There's no debt problem in fractional reserve banking. (Exactly because debt is slowly inflated away while real assets keep their value [as their nominal value increases].)
There's a tremendous amount of economic growth. And as long as there are places where we can put in some better technology, a more efficient process or organization, then growth will continue, and the money supply will have to grow, and it's currently done via bank-issued money, because it provides some risk management. (Which is the most important factor of money creation. This is why finance and insurance developed intertwined.)
Energy is one bottleneck, sure, but there's no serious slowdown of growth of electricity generation capacity for example. And GDP growth is decoupling from carbon intensity. (As it should as we started to invest a lot of our economic surplus to do so.)
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The important thing to remember is that there's a balance between how much money is needed now and how much is issued to be paid back later, and obviously if the growth would be almost zero the interest rate would be almost zero too.
If growth slows down (the fiscal multiplier goes down, there are no more public things to do, no more houses to insulate to get a smaller HVAC bill, no unemployed person to teach skills who would then work) then need for money also goes down, as no one will offer to pay it back with interest, so interest rate will go down, so whatever amount of money we have (as debt) we can keep rolling it over.
And of course the central bank can always exchange debt money to non-debt money. (And every time it wants to increase the interest rate it used to do something similar, it sold assets [US Treasury bonds] which removed debt money from the system. And back in the 90s there was talk about how the US central bank will adapt if the US government starts to run surpluses permanently.)
> Money supply management is important for price stability
That’s an academic answer but it’s wrong. Price stability is derived from economic equilibrium, which means energy however you want to label it in and out must be stable. It’s not a philosophical debate nash models most of it. Our landfill pipeline is the source of our debt.
The classical hypothesis is that a swamp of credit is always going to buy some magic wand where the ends justify the means and there are infinite ways for society to store debt. What you get is fraud after a phase transition which is the society we live in now. Basically all I’m pointing out is no free lunch. There’s nothing to debate. I’m mapping no free lunch to the various materializations of energy in the economy. Food fuel labor oil power whatever you want to label it you have to pay for that oil. It’s potential energy whose current payment date is hundreds of years in the future. The whole global supply chain theology is laid bare a bunch of horrible trade offs which falsely claim credit for largely unrelated gains in raw human output and hidden costs.
Of course there's no free lunch, but economic equilibrium includes future obligations too (at a discounted rate), it includes the value of current unfinished things, there's a lot of real economic value backed by demand, because otherwise there's nowhere for supply to go. (Imagine if suddenly no one wants to build houses, because let's say everyone gets a tent. Suddenly there is an oversupply of construction services, and construction materials, and architects, and inspectors, and labor in general. Which will immediately triggers a drop in wages.)
You have a hypothesis about price stability, and it's easy to see that while energy prices do impact everything so do interest rates (and in general monetary policy), therefore you need a model that's more complex than what you propose.
Prices inherently aggregate almost all concerns, so even logically it cannot be simply determined by one thing (like energy). Even if energy is cheap if we misallocate it then food, housing, or transportation gets more expensive.
You seem to be mixing up monetarism with sustainability and diminishing returns.
I really appreciate the level of discourse here on Hacker News. Thank you to threads like this and the authors of the comments.
I appreciate your argument, and you knowlwdge of economics adds weight to it. I'm wary of putting the burden on workers to remove information asymmetry and power imbalances in bargaining. Just because it's necessary now doesn't mean it needs to be. It could create a cycle of permanent extra work for those most in need of regulatory help.
I don't know if I had the full language of economic inefficiencies ready to flow like you do if that argument would be more effective. Or if there are other blocks, you know?
Seems absolutely unnecessary, forced, immeasurably trite, off-puttingly boring, overused, so brazenly cliché that there has to be some kind of counter-intuitive selection going on, like with the email scammers that target those who are not immediately noticing the fraudulent intent.
... or simply our arrogance is showing, after all average minds discuss people, right?
How many major national magazines publish good articles? The inverted pyramid is from newspapers and bears resemblance to scientific publishing while magazines bear more resemblance to the human interest crap between events when presenting the Olympics. Perfectly fine I suppose but then it's nice if they don't get confused about appropriate subjects.
Yep, all 4 charges remained in the superseding indictment (filed Aug 27 in 2024 by Smith).
One of the problem is the "the DOJ's policy of not prosecuting sitting Presidents", while it's understandable it's definitely not great for the rule of law.
And the other is it took too many years for the whole shit shower to drip down. (Garland appointed Smith in November of 2022, and it took ~10 months for the indictment.)
Jack Smith also just fucked up the prosecution. The Supreme Court was going to find some sort of official acts immunity existed. There is implied official acts immunity for judges in the U.S. And official acts immunity for executives is typical in the developed world. The EU for example has official acts immunity for “officials and servants,” though the scope is fuzzy: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-high-flyers-face-fresh-do....
Jack Smith’s indictment mixed together conduct, like the sitting President consulting with his AG about suspected voter fraud, that clearly would fall within the scope of immunity, with stuff that was clearly not an official act. I don’t know if he was dumb or arrogant, but it was an insane tactical error.
Official immunity is tough and there’s no clear answer. The old canard that “a prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” has a lot of truth to it. As between a potentially criminal, but duly elected President, and a potentially corrupt, and unelected prosecutor, which one is the bigger risk? There’s a strong argument that it’s better to have elections be the final backstop rather than the judgment of unelected prosecutors being able to override voters.
is that too much money for one person? well, apparently it depends on who do you ask. and even if the board members who approved it might thought it's too much, it still could have been cheaper than to fire the CEO and find a new one and keep Mozilla on track.
CEO compensation is usually a hedge against risks that are seen as even more costly, even if the performance of the CEO is objectively bad.
framing Mozilla/Firefox as some kind of bastion is simply silly - especially if it's supplied by the gigantic fortress kingdom of G, and makes more money on dividends and interest than on selling any actual products or services.
it's a ship at sea with a sail that's too big and a rudder that's unfortunately insignificant.
but whatever metaphor we pick it needs to transform into a sustainable ecosystem, be that donation or sales based.
Just because something bad has been normalized doesn't make it appropriate, though.
You can argue that they won't find another CEO for less money. To that I would posit that they won't find another CEO from the MBA crowd for less money, but that is a feature, not a bug.
it's a completely obvious "problem" -- more users are easier to monetize, even if they "simply" go the Wikipedia donations model
many people stated that they are happy to do targeted donations (ie. money earmarked strictly for Firefox development only, and it cannot be used for bullshit outreach programs and other fluff)
and if they figure out the funding for the browser (and other "value streams") then they can put the for-profit opt-in stuff on top
effort might mean going against the flow, so if you go where the resistance is the smallest that is likely your niche
of course this might need some tweaking, because if someone is really good at pickpocketing maybe some effort would put them on a much better long-term trajectory?
If so, what does it mean that "nature makes no effort" but humans do? Is the claim then that non-humans are literally incapable of "going against the flow"? Is it a religious argument, about us having some mental/metaphysical capacity that nothing else in nature has?
but yes, I also want the juicy details!
so this is the clock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST-F1
or this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST-F2
or there's already F4 too, but it doesn't have a Wikipedia article yet
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/04/new-atomic-fou...
but maybe they are talking about the new non-microwave clocks that use Ytterbium-based optical combs ...
or about the Aluminum ion clock
https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2025/07/nist-ion-clock...
mind blown
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