🇳🇱
## How Money is created
#### Monetary & Quantitative Easing
So I just finished creating this diagram showing what Quantitative Easing and Monetary Easing is and more generally how new money is created and put into circulation, thus increasing the money supply.
#Money #USPol #Economics #Economy #Investing #QuantitativeEasing #MonetaryEasing #TheFed
@icedquinn Well no, as you can see from the diagram the bankers need to sell the fed assets (usually government bonds) which they buy from the general public at free market prices in order to get freshly printed money. They dont get it for free.
maybe just print smaller denominations of dollars.
@icedquinn Ha well it is a bit of an elaborate play of balance sheets... but its not like anyone is getting free money out of the deal, and its all free market for the most part so everyone is on equal footing
JaJa 
@icedquinn @freemo
Fuck dollars, lets do barter 
I was actually explaining earlier how the inevitable and devastating consequence of barter is it prevents people from specializing in a skill or trade. Everyone is pressured to generalize their skills and only take up skills and trades that are needed by the vast majority of a society. This is the reverse of a money society where a highly specialized expert typically can make more money than someone who is generalized.
Its one of my three laws of money I posted earlier :)
@freemo @icedquinn
If a specialized society can't make more money then it's not devastating
I dont think the common notion of "we are rendering all human labour worthless" is at all accurate personally.
Automation in one sense or another, much of which eliminated entier classes of jobs through history, has been around since the earliest humans started building things.
Decade after decade for thousands of years new ways of automating human tasks were invented and those jobs disappeared. But there were always more and new jobs to take its place. This is no different.
IMO youa re conflating issues. There are absolutely concerns that labour needs to face, some of that is inequality when it comes to opportunity to make money. there are also concerns with automation in the sense that the new and better jobs they get involves training and if people are poor they cant afford that, so there are issues around ensuring these people have access to training at all.
But my point is the idea that automation is eliminating jobs and making human labour obsolete is a fictitious one. Its created jobs that replace older jobs, its just that too has problems.
Yes it is a topic of open research, there is no consensus that it is destroying jobs and not simply changing or replacing them. Some people hold that opinion who have studied and researched the matter, others do not.
It is not by any measure a settled fact. Though some people (like yourself) do hold strong convictions that it is undeniably true.
Sure
* the team of 20 writing the AI software.
* The team of 10 doing CI for them.
* The server administrators that host the servers that push out updates.
* The network administrators across the country that need to maintain the networks to suppose the added traffic to support those updates.
* the car salesman who sell the car.
*the mechanic who needs to maintain the systems of the the, ones that are very different than others so requires specialized skills at a higher pay.
* The electrical engineer who needs to design the circuit board that will run the drones hardware, including future revisions
* The mechanical and aeronautical engineer who needs to design the physical components of the drone.
* The artist who designs the logo and painting of the shell of the drone
* the drone operator or overseer (in the case of autonomous usually monitors many drones at once) who monitors the drones and ensures the fleet is operational.
* The chemists who are designing new battery chemistries better suited to drones since range is an issue right now and we need better battery density to make them more useful.
* The people working the mines harvesting the copper, the silicon and other raw materials for the drones
* The oil rig workers who need to provide oil to the plastics industry to produce the plastic for the drone.
*The people who produce the plastic used in making the drone
* The team that tests the drones
* Regulatory agents and inspectors who review the drones compliance to FCC regulations
* RF engineers capable of designing the communication system for the drones
* Licensed RF operators to ensure the facility remains in compliance with FCC radio regulations
This is just the tip of the iceberg, the list of jobs are in fact so long I could probably go on listing people for some time.
No, programmers exist.. programmers hired to work on autonomous ups delivery drones do not, nor has anyone specialized in that since they didnt exist before now.
All of those jobs are new people that need to be hired to support the **extra** resources needd to build and maintain those drones. While some of **types** of jobs arent new.. it does generate need for new **employees** to do those jobs since there are none to support UPS drones prior to UPS drones being invented... You cant take programs from other active projects, so you need to hire new people for the new initiative and that ripples all the way through the worker base creating additional jobs at every level.
Google has one of the most advanced server and database systems on the planet, which spans the entire planet. They only have ~100k employees.
USPS' drives trucks around a single country and moves boxes. From their website:
> The Postal Service has collective bargaining agreements with seven different unions, representing nearly 500,000 employees.
that's a pretty massive difference of people to "displace" in to .. what appears to be entirely technical jobs with qualifications those people do not posess and cannot posess as we do not even have provisions for retraining.
but i don't think there is a point to me replying further.
I personally do think this modern round of automation is very different. We now have technology to significantly reduce scarcity using automation. So the result as time passes will not be starving people with no jobs as the doomsayers say (because they have no foresight or imagination), but significantly reduced prices and therefore less need to work. Less jobs then is no longer a problem, because people can work significantly less and still sustain themselves.
I've been following these conversations btw and you've got a very interesting perspective.
@icedquinn @mur2501
> because they have no foresight or imagination
well we do, i first heard of UBI/NIT from r/singularity talking about it. transhumanists and singularity seekers kinda have been discussing this problem for decades ahead of everyone else and its basically all the same.
you either have a massacre event to bring the population down to what jobs are left, you have a support system (UBI/NIT), or a radical redefinition of economics (reputation economy, time banking.)
it is not even necessary to make a "super AI." while there are some bots that have superhuman performance in set tasks, even simple human level performance is sufficient. hell, maybe even just "almost human" performance. for reasons like they never sleep, form unions, go on strike, die in accidents, skim money off the top, etc.
every job will, eventually, be destroyed.
this has been asked in the H+ circles in general. "what is everyone going to do when there is nothing left to sell?" and sometimes people answer "sell robots" to which the reply is "the robot makers will just sell robots to one another?"
Maybe I'm a bit dismissive. I searched and searched for anyone to tell me a UBI plan that actually works, that isn't just slavery of one class or all of them. The usual answer involves something along the lines of "money is a circle", completely ignoring wealth. I did find one person who laid out a plan for a working UBI of sorts, but it is essentially nationalization of a resource (and the only resource that really can and arguably is de facto already nationalized) and paying dividends to "owners" of that government. It was written by the founder of the Pirate Party in Sweden and you can read it here https://falkvinge.net/2017/03/01/a-simplified-taxless-state-a-proposal-part-1/
I think a problem with a lot of proposals are short sightedness, engineer's propensity to ignore natural laws and believe everything can be engineered (such as "eliminating free markets" and other talk of this sort), and with regard to automation, refusing to accept that lowered costs in fact do result in lower prices in a free market.
You can automate every job and still have jobs for people. There will always be someone willing to pay a human for services, even if it is only novelty services or grey market economic activity. And as I pointed out earlier, when prices go down, costs go down, and if automation delivers on that the way it has the potential to (that is, if unions or other organizations don't force us to pay people to do things we don't need people to do) then the idea of every person working full time just to live will be as alien as everyone working 100 hours is to us now. You wouldn't need a full time job per person if everything was extremely cheap, working 10 or 20 hours a week might suffice if toothbrushes were 10 for a penny.
@freemo @mur2501
we enforce a system based on doing work (including menial labor) to assign value to a person.
we then destroyed much of the jobs people would have done through industrial revolutions (which also centralized wealth to capitalists who can afford the expenses.) this was handwaved by "oh but see they can just get better different jobs."
okay, this diffused from ex. a room full of people poking cloth with needles to a diaspora of different jobs delivering sandwiches and changing tires for sandwich delivery trucks etc.
then outsourcing destroyed the jobs that those "better" jobs were feeder jobs for.
then AI is, slowly, destroying both feeder jobs and potentially the base jobs as well. for example when you see "X jobs moving back to the US from China" the amount of jobs the CN lose is greater than the jobs US gains, meaning robotization cost 20-50% of total human labor potential.
job availability is on a hard decline. we need people the least we ever have, but we have more than we ever did.
this is a problem. one nobody wants to deal with, and just sort of hopes to kick down the road as much as they can.