You cannot expect the severely mentally ill to "voluntarily" seek medical help - this is the current prerequisite for medical intervention in SF. If a child runs into the street, you don't ask for consent before moving them out of the way of oncoming traffic. The severely ill in this city have less mental capacity than a child and yet we expect them to consent like any other adult. If you truly understand these illnesses you will recognize the futility of throwing money, housing, etc. at this problem.
Sure, if heroin required a doctor's note then addicts would hit the streets once they've exceeded their allotment. But I don't need a doctor's note to get weed from a dispensary. The author is attacking a misrepresentation of what drug legalization actually is
I have to confess that I've never seen a detailed proposal to legalize heroin in the first place, but is it really the case that people are advocating for allowing heroin to be sold in unlimited quantities on the open market? That itself seems like an obviously unreasonable proposal that must be a misrepresentation of some more nuanced position. (Would anyone argue that the opioid crisis is caused by restrictions, and Purdue Pharma mitigated it through their efforts to get opioids more easily prescribed?)
With opiate prohibition, Purdue had to convince doctors, and doctors had to convince patients, that the drugs they were using were safe and not like those nasty street drugs that ruin lives and cause addiction. That lie was deadly.
Without opiate prohibition, you can have honest educational programs that help people seeking opiates use them as responsibly as possible and you can provide available, nonjudgmental services for helping them reduce or stop their usage.
My understanding is that Purdue's claims about the time-release mechanism providing safety and anti-addiction benefits were true, except that an addict who's hoping to get high could easily defeat the mechanism by crushing the pill. So in a framework of drug legalization, I'm not sure how you could say they even did anything wrong; what's the issue with an easily defeated safety mechanism if you can just buy pure oxycodone directly from your local dispensary?
How many of the decisions that determined whether Amazon would become worth >$1T or yet another mediocre web store were made by warehouse workers? Jeff is primarily responsible for Amazon's success. For making Amazon what it is, him being worth ~10% of the whole company is a totally reasonable compensation
He's entitled to more than your average amazon employee, warehouse worker, and probably any other employee: YEAH sure. But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker. I'm merely making an argument that it's hard to objectively determine how much more one employee is entitled to the corporations stock pie than another based on merit. Amazon and it's 800,000 employee base built Amazon into the >$1T behemoth it became due simply to the fact one man can't do it alone. A lot of those employees may not have been able to make the important decisions that Jeff Bezos was able to, but they instead contributed blood and sweat. I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself. By that metric he is overcompensated and others are under.
This right here shows you don't understand what it takes to make a trillion dollar company.
They were a book seller that eventually expanded into an online Walmart, that ended up becoming the largest cloud provider in the world.
Just look at Borders/Barne's and Noble if you want to see two companies that were actually in a better position in the same industry 25 years ago. That's the difference between 'simply a decision maker' and an average CEO.
> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself.
This is actually just false. He essentially just proved you could. [0]
> But I do not agree on paying such a high premium for simply being a decision maker
> I'm willing to bet even if Jeff Bezos is a super employee, one thousand times more productive and smarter, than the next best employee he still couldn't amass 207 billion himself
Being 1000x smarter or more productive isn't why Amazon is with >$1T though, and saying "simply being the decision maker" is very dismissive of the hardest part of his job.
I think it's likely that there were a few (Maybe tens) of key decision that largely determined Amazons trajectory. If Bezos was wrong on those, no >$1T company. That's why he's worth 1000x more.
Sure, employees didn't have the chance to make those decisions themselves but why does that matter? Opportunity will never be equally distributed. Bezos happened to flip 20 heads in a row, and got to reap the rewards.
Chill your hyperbolic outrage. We should be able to talk about sensitive topics like job loss intelligently and in context to the realities of building a startup. Working at a startup is inherently risky and the people who take on the risk are adults. They don't need you to defend them as if they're children
That has nothing to do with the dollar. If bitcoin were to match the market cap of gold irrespective of any money printing, it would be $500k a coin. Which is to say that people consider Bitcoin to have properties similar but superior to that of gold.
It’s very arbitrary. Silver or palladium are more similar to gold than Bitcoin, but no one even tries to compare the er... “market caps” of the mined metals to each other.
It would be just as easy to say that Bitcoin had properties similar to Copper and try to back a valuation out of that. Either comparison borders on silly.
It's not arbitrary; gold (unlike copper) has been money for 5000 years.
And unlike copper, the United State's dollar was backed by gold for a majority of the 20th century while most other currencies were pegged to the dollar.
And finally, unlike copper, there’s $8-$10 trillion dollars worth of gold being used as a store of value globally.
Bitcoin has all of the core attributes of gold with the addition of being digital and having a fixed supply.
ZH is unmitigated garbage. It began by pushing the standard tropes of goldbug interpretations of the economy with the banker bad, armchair (amateur) realist good and an unrealized schadenfreude of global economic pandemic. Now it's realized that its early readership is just a subset of the broader misinformed armchair conspiracy theorist and has expanded its message to them as well.
Just as easily as someone in software can bullshit their way through a presentation with a couple years cursory understanding of SWE topics, same goes with "researching" and writing a ZH econ article. ZH does not do meaningful economic analysis, look elsewhere.
Bingo. Also this argument in particular is wrong because even if you want to describe the current repo operations as QE, it isn't inflationary or doing much to "prop up the economy" given that none of the other QE rounds were inflationary.
At the end of the day, fiscal policy is extremely important, and almost no amount of monetary policy can do much on its own.
Unless we decide to start actually minting money, like the trillion dollar platinum coin idea.
>> ..."none of the other QE rounds were inflationary."
Earlier QE rounds (and this "not QE" round too) are definitely inflationary, but that inflation is not evenly distributed through the economy.
QE inflates prices of financial assets and related stuff. The further you get from financial assets, and the correspondingly closer you get to the real economy, the less inflation there is. Eg. equities get inflated a ton, housing prices less, the price of a hamburger not at all. The mechanism for this non-flat inflation distribution is straightforwardly derive-able just from supply-and-demand; they increase the supply of capital, but only by bidding up the prices of financial assets, while demand for those assets is approximately constant.
That said, you're right that Zerohedge ranges from "mostly-uninformed" to "intentionally writing nonsensical clickbait lies." On the other hand, it is broadly speaking not any wronger than e.g. what you see on TV or read in major newspapers.
Shifting the definition of inflation this way is misleading and confusing for everyone involved - a better analogy may be that QE is equivalent to price controls on fixed income assets.
The effects of QE become much more clear - since the price of a bond is now fixed above its market clearing price (alternately, rates are artificially pegged low), this actually results in a shortfall of supplied liquidity and a situation that sharply favors strong borrowers.
The Federal reserve injected banks with money, not the economy. One would naturally think that these banks would then lend money to the broader economy (because that's how banks make money), but a law passed around that time allowed banks to deposit their money in the Fed itself and extract an interest rate better than they would get from normal lending. The Fed, which normally ran a surplus (money which goes to the Treasury to pay down debt), began to run a deficit from these payouts. Potential inflation just became more debt. This is why over a trillion dollars in "printed money" failed to yield much inflation over the last 10 years, but let's all just keeping reading ZH articles about the looming "inflation bomb"..
Overall consumer prices and aggregate demand were virtually unaffected by QE. All the individuals who, for ideological reasons, believed QE would be inflationary got wiped out.
Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Clarium Capital, lost huge amounts of money on such a bet.
If you use the original definition of inflation, i.e., increase of the money supply, there has been massive inflation. It hasn’t resulted in a substantial increase in the consumer price index, but you can see huge increases in certain areas such as the stock markets, housing markets in certain areas, health care and education.
Stocks did increase quite a lot, as it generally tends to do over the course of the business cycle. Although, it generally was tracking actual profits up until recently (when the Fed was drawing down their balance sheet). It was tethered to real profits during the QE periods.
As a paranoid rag goes, ZH's faults are many and varied, but come on - the critique that the Federal Reserve doesn't know what the hell it's doing is 100% valid.
The observation that the FRB consistently bats 0.000 in economic outlook and interest rate forecasts (e.g. Bernanke calling housing subprime defaults "contained", or Yellen constantly stretching out the timeline of getting off zero, or Powell cutting rates three times in 2019 after predicting four hikes less than a year prior, or claiming repo operations would be unwound completely by 15 Jan) is absolutely correct, and an absolutely appropriate critique to make, even by armchair quarterbacks.
Just look at the history of FRB dot plots to get a view for how absurd your implied position is that bankers/economists are any better at their jobs than a drunk with darts and an interest rate chart would be.
You cannot expect the severely mentally ill to "voluntarily" seek medical help - this is the current prerequisite for medical intervention in SF. If a child runs into the street, you don't ask for consent before moving them out of the way of oncoming traffic. The severely ill in this city have less mental capacity than a child and yet we expect them to consent like any other adult. If you truly understand these illnesses you will recognize the futility of throwing money, housing, etc. at this problem.