There's a Terminator tv-show from 2008 that was pretty good. It's about John as teenager, going to high school and dealing with that while fleeing a Terminator that's been sent back. But I agree with your overall premise, if it isnt about John or Sarah in "the present", then it's pretty boring.
Yeah on the opposite I'd say it's pretty clear that the insomnia and poor sleep during night contributes heavily to why we are so spent and sleepy during the day. Aside from general insomnia I also had so much night terrors. Terrible nightmare, then waking up, then resuming the terrible nightmare again. Sometimes I'd try to stay awake just not to experience the night terrors. I inadvertently learned lucid dreaming to handle them.
I got it after pandemrix vaccine as well. Sodium oxybate absolutely helps with wakefulness, turns out you feel more awake and are less prone to fall asleep if you get good sleep at night (although induced by medicine).
I'm not a regular poster here, so sorry if I don't follow the rules or etiquette correctly, but I gotta go to bat for Xyrem.
I have Narcolepsy, so our situations aren't exactly identical, but it seems to me IH and Narcolepsy have a big overlap.
First of all, the benefit of taking Xyrem is so, so big. It doesn't compare to any other medication or stimulant. You can get quality sleep at night. No more insomnia, lying awake, or constant night terrors and waking up 30 times a night. You feel refreshed when you wake up, like a weight has been lifted from your shoulders. Like a veil has been revealed.
The risks aren't that great, if you take it as prescribed it shouldn't cause you any trouble, at least not anything major. Nausea usually only happens when you titrate up the doses too quickly. It happened to me, maybe 5 nights, or 10 at the most. Hasnt happened now in 10 years I've been on it.
You should look it up more. You can check in the narcolepsy reddit, there's always questions and discussions around Xyrem/sodium oxybate every day.
I do sympathize with the high cost and insurance problem. It certainly isn't a medication most people can afford on their own.
There are no reason, except greed, that explains why Xyrem is so expensive! It cost almost nothing to produce. It's an old simple molecule, GHB was know for it's restful sleep since at least the 90's and so was it's safety profile.
In a fair world the patent would be voided and it would not cost more than 20 dollars a month.
I have narcolepsy as well. What really helps a lot is a type of medication called sodium oxybate. Different kinds of stimulants never did anything to me, they might (might) keep me awake more, but I never felt rested, and always had constant brain fog. Xyrem changed that for me. Now I get many hours of good sleep at night, making me feel rested waking up. I'm still more prone to fall asleep during the day than the average person, but it's mostly after I've eaten a big meal.
Do yourself a service and look it up.
Adam Back certainly fits the profile the best. Invented Hashcash, has a Ph.D. in Distributed Systems, and is English. He's also still deeply involved with Bitcoin and has a lot of influence, which best can be seen when he successfully proposed the "speedy-trial" activation method for Taproot.
The general idea is to use something like UHF RFID to scan the whole shopping cart at once (there are even UHF RFID tags that can interoperate with EAS systems). The technology exists and is suprisingly cheap and is used by some some clothing retailers. And that points to the main issue: you have to somehow apply the tags to the items, that is easy to do if you work closely with the manufacturers and only sell your own brands, but somehow non-trivial for something like grocery store.
In theory there is an standardized mapping of the whole GS1 labeling system onto UHF RFID and the only thing that prevents universal deployment is some kind of critical mass. Somewhat surprisingly the standards even take into account the privacy issues inherent in that and the tags do not have fixed physical address (unlike HF RFID/NFC with 1wire-style deconflicting UIDs) and the contents can be progressively masked out, with command to completely disable the tag being mandatory.
On the other hand, first demonstration of that I can remember was by Siemens in 1991, so there is probably another 30 years to go for that to become widespread :)
Explain how Bitcoin, which for the next 100 years will continue to print new coins, is attempting to replicate deflation. Maybe inadvertently, by people losing access to their Bitcoins for various reasons, but the design itself certainly isn't deflationary. Not even in its final form, the supply will merely be constant.
Also I find it humorus when people complain about deflation, which pretty much is the natural condition of the world. New techniques and improvements will unenviably lead to products costing less. The problematic factor has always been the current ruling money being controlled by a central authority who will debase it.
Constant supply creates deflation because population/usage increases. You're right that products will cost less - which is exactly what deflation is.
The reason it's because taboo in modern times is ostensibly because it creates a disincentive to investment. Why invest in something that might return 5% with some risk, if your money will be worth an almost guaranteed 5% more in a year anyhow? IMO the "real" reason is because it's a proxy for politics. Governments spending trillions of dollars sends inflation skyrocketing - the US is only slightly guarded against this because of our unique ability to 'export our inflation' - a web search can elaborate more on the term if one is unfamiliar with it. So opposing inflation is largely a proxy for opposing excessive spending which is one of the main political divides, which is odd because both parties spend like maniacs - but one pretends to not want to.
If by creating a "disincentive to investment" you mean a disincentive to gamble their hard earned money on the stock market, then yes. The current situation where (at least before interest rate was somewhat high) the average man had to spend time and effort by going to the stock market with their money is not healthy. You shouldn't have to gamble your money just so it doesn't lose value by merely holding it. Investments will of course still exist, it will just be of a higher quality/yield. Because now there's actually an alternative to "investing" on stocks.
Commodity currency does have a "disincentive to investment" which has a measurable negative effect on the economic climate. This was first identified and studied by Silvio Gesell in the early 20th century, then John Maynard Keynes a few decades later. Removing this disincentive is what ushered in the post-WW2 period of prosperity and growth that we're still living in today.
The part your analysis is missing is that for a commodity currency there is a whole segment of productive, non-risky investments which cannot raise capital in a deflationary environment. If deflation is 5% and a civic works project with an effectively guaranteed 3% return is fundraising, who in their right mind would put money into that? Better to hodl than to invest in your community. There is, btw, a deep tie between this result and Henry George's analysis of the impact of rents, if you're familiar with that.
This basic phenomenon of the risk-free interest rate being non-zero, and its ramifications for the economy, is one of the most confirmed results of 20th century economic research. If you could get the risk-free interest rate to zero, it would boost the economy and lower unemployment with absolutely no ill effects whatsoever.
The USD was a 'commodity currency' up until 1971 thanks to Bretton Woods. It was convertible to gold at a fixed rate, and other currencies were, in turn, pegged to the USD. The idea was to have the stability/security of a backed currency, with the convenience of a fiat one. The security was intended to come from the fact that if the US printed too many dollars, devaluing the USD, then other countries would buy up those dollars and convert them to gold - both making profit, and punishing poor fiscal behavior.
It was a self-protecting system. The problem is it assumed the US would keep to its word. Instead we got everybody hooked on the USD, started printing a bunch of money anyhow, and then just defaulted on our obligations when other countries tried to convert it to gold, and withdrew from Bretton Woods. This led to the famous quote from Nixon's Treasury Secretary: "The dollar is our currency, but your problem."
So you're only looking from 1971 onward. This not only doesn't look especially pretty [1] in countless sociopolitical aspects, but the tremendous economic gains we have seen can also be largely attributed to a complete tech explosion that reshaped the entire world's economy, which we ended up being the natural epicenter of owing to a relatively large population, English being the defacto global language of science, and the fact that we were left entirely untouched by WW2.
The current completely free floating global fiat experiment may end up being the shortest lived economic experiment in our entire history should it turn out that we're just blowing up the mother of all bubbles. And it sure does feel that way!
Hahah, I can see you now furiously searching for 'wtfhappenedin1971 debunked.' Of course there is no debunking it as the site's just a collection of data, primarily from the US government. The data just happens to be quite inconvenient for pro inflation economic arguments.
I actually used to be of the same mindset as yourself, but it increasingly seems to me that the general preference for inflation based economics is much more of a status quo bias than something as strongly supported by data as one would think. There's also a simple logical problem you run into. When you give government the power to freely print infinite money, who do you think they're going to disproportionately direct that money towards?
Recent times actually provide one of the clear illustrations of the problem. Mega corporations take on multi billion dollar contracts from the government at way beyond market rate markups, then the moment the economic weather shifts even slightly they start large layoffs. The reason is not because the integrity of the company is threatened or anything of the sort, but simply to continue maximizing value for shareholders. It's not hard to see how with monopoly money economics you start an exponential increase in many things, like income inequality.
> Explain how Bitcoin, which for the next 100 years will continue to print new coins, is attempting to replicate deflation.
The supply of bitcoins is limited. It's harder and harder to print new coins. It means that 100 years from now the new generations will have to make do with 0.0000000000000001 of a bitcoin while people who hoarded just 1 bitcoin 100 years prior would be infinitely rich.
The only incentive in bitcoin is to hold on to it as long as possible. And we've literally seen this already.
The question was not if Bitcoin overall is deflationary. The comment said it was by design, which it arguably isn't because by design it's actually inflationary.
Once all bitcoin is issued, there will never be any more. That is intrinsically deflationary.
I really don't see how you can argue that bitcoin is inflationary by design when the period of inflation is a temporary necessity for the initial issuance, and then never repeats[1].
Folding for pressure and group think is different things imo. You can be very aware you are folding for pressure, but doing it because it's the right/easy thing to do. While group think is more a phenomenon you are not aware of at all.
