[Non-political] News that makes you Laugh/Cry/Both...

[Occluded Sun]

Ha! Superstition is ridiculously difficult to eradicate. And while any political decision can be spun as resulting in someone's death (especially if you think governments are responsible for anything and everything that happens to their citizens) those kids were killed totally pointlessly due to a factually inaccurate understanding of how the world works.

[Kaelik]

those kids were killed totally pointlessly due to a factually inaccurate understanding of how the world works.

It was weird how you changed subject so directly and quickly to talking about Flint Michigan...

[Longes]

Our brave new world is closer and closer, with negative interest rates and ban on cash.

[Koumei]

The website itself looks kind of hackish, but anyway, could someone better educated or innately smarter than me explain interest rates? As in, who typically sets them, what they cover, how adjustments are generally supposed to work and what ends up happening?

[Longes]

The website itself looks kind of hackish, but anyway, could someone better educated or innately smarter than me explain interest rates? As in, who typically sets them, what they cover, how adjustments are generally supposed to work and what ends up happening?

Interest rates show how much money you get from putting money in the bank. Negative interest rates mean you pay the bank to keep your money. They are set by the central bank of the country, so Bank of Japan in Japan, Bank of England in UK, etc. In US it's the Federal Open Market Committee. The point of manipulation is to change the amount of money in the country - the higher the interest rate is, the lower is the money supply.

However, while NIRPS encourages deflation, it has a very big sideeffect - people don't put money in the banks. I mean, it makes sense - if you have to pay the bank for taking your money, you are going to keep the cash and not use banks. So that's where the second part of the trick happens and cash gets banned, leaving you with no choice but to use banks.

[Username17]

The website itself looks kind of hackish, but anyway, could someone better educated or innately smarter than me explain interest rates? As in, who typically sets them, what they cover, how adjustments are generally supposed to work and what ends up happening?

Zero Hedge is not a credible source. About anything. Period.

As for interest rates, there are actually several different systems used in different parts of the world. But most of the OECD uses the Central Banking system where the central bank is a semi-independent agency that prints money and also loans it out to people and store reserves for banks that deal with companies and people. They charge whatever interest rate they want for the money they lend out and award whatever interest they feel like on the reserves stored with them. Whenever a bank wants to change virtual reserves to cash, the central bank prints actual dollars (or forints or pounds or bqhatevwr), and whenever a bank turns cash over to the central bank to be reserves, they set those bills on fire and create a virtual credit.

If the central bank lends money out at low interest rates, more money floods the system because the banks snatch up the cheap money and relend it out to others at a profit. If the central bank offers higher interest rates on reserves, banks suck money out of circulation to dump on the central bank's fire because it's safer than lending out to people who want to buy a home or build a factory.

Now here's the part where people call shenanigans on the world economy: you notice how all of this is defined in terms of lending at interest? So every one of those transactions that's supposed to take money out of the system is also supposed to put more money back in the system in the future. All the transactions that are supposed to put money in to the system are also supposed to take more money back out in the future. So... that's a thing.

Basically dollars aren't like gold bars in a vault. People spend them multiple times. And banks are allowed to use their credited dollars more than once - a process called "leverage." So if the central bank puts 10 dollars in and then takes 11 dollars out somewhat later, those 10 dollars will have been spent like 8 times each and the total dollars flying around will have been increased by 69 dollars. So long as the central bank is constantly sending dollars in and out (which it is), the number of dollars in circulation keeps going up even though all of the literal transactions of the central bank take more money out than they put in. This part of the economy makes Austrian types lose their shit.

The negative interest rate thing can be on reserves or loans. That corresponds to the central bank charging other banks money to hold their reserves for them or to ask back less money at the end of transactions than it gave out. There are obvious limits to how negative these rates can go. If the central bank charges more to store reserves than it would cost banks to store cash in vaults, then the service will go unused. If the bank gives too good a rate on simply holding money then the banks will ask the central bank to simply run the printing presses at full blast and then simply sit on all the cash, causing the economy to come completely unglued. But various central banks in various countries have run negative interest rates in the negative 0-1% range and nothing special has happened. What the actual limit on how negative interest rates can go before shit falls apart is unknown, but I've seen credible estimates that run between about negative 1.5% and negative 3%. Also, it's likely a different number for reserves and loans, and everyone on Earth is kind of afraid to find out exactly what the limit really is because it's not clear how you'd find out without a financial catastrophe telling you that you'd crossed the line.

-Username17

[tussock]

It was a surprise here too.

But the graph of the NZ-US exchange rate is silly, it dropped the weeks worth of speculation-based rise that he wouldn't put the rates down again. Our floating dollar is rather strongly affected by our liberal banking policies of letting anyone invest money here in banks that have never failed with very low tax rates (100% state bailouts, naturally).

We also do a little money laundering for large criminal conspiracies abroad, by refusing to declare where money that leaves the country came from in the first place, simply noting that it was all legal here and tax was already paid.

There's a bunch of political pressure here to keep our dollar low so people's $NZ farm mortgages can be paid with milk powder exports mostly valued in other people's currencies. Because our banks are ... well, you know, they own a lot of small farm businesses that aren't actually solvent and never will be, but shhh don't tell anyone that.

Not long after the dollar dropped, the local diary export monopoly (Fonterra) announced a slight increase in projected milk solid payouts for the coming year. Which are always high of the actual payouts, but have been forever and no one cares.

[fbmf]

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-gener ... happy.html

An article on why Generation Y assholes seem like such entitled shitstains. Thoughts?

Full disclosure: I meet the definition of Generation Y according to the article.

Game On,
fbmf

[Kaelik]

Well as a rule, people who arrange for their made up acronyms that describe made up categorizations of people to arrange into ethnic slurs are usually not the best people to take seriously...

But more specifically, I don't buy it, I doubt that millennials are any happier than generation y, despite having probably had appropriately lowered expectations.

[MisterDee]

I agree with the idea that the constant bombardment of "everything else is awesome" probably fucks up our expectations. For us, a successful entrepreneur makes billions in a cool tech company, he's not making a reasonable living running a five-plumbing-trucks company.

That said, the rest is pretty much bullshit. Buying a house will cost us ten times our annual salary, instead of the three times our parents paid. There aren't "good jobs" anymore: keeping the same job year-after-year means you only get a cost-of-living raise (if that.) You're chasing the career (in a much flatter pyramid than during our parents' time, by the way) or your settling for a lower-middle-class salary at most.

Speaking of salaries - they've been stagnant for basically our entire working lives, and that's using the CPI values of inflation (a.k.a. the value that only matters to investors.)

All of that is factual data. But the whiny Gen Yers is such a better narrative.

[Maj]

Well as a rule, people who arrange for their made up acronyms that describe made up categorizations of people to arrange into ethnic slurs are usually not the best people to take seriously...

But more specifically, I don't buy it, I doubt that millennials are any happier than generation y, despite having probably had appropriately lowered expectations.

Millennials are Generation Y.

[Stahlseele]

Also, everybody always forgets that OH NEW TRECHNOLOGIES! NEW POSSIBILITIES! usually means possibilities for a few that will leave many more without work because the new technology will make them redundant in some way. And also that there will always be more people competing than in the last generation as well.

[Maj]

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-gener ... happy.html

An article on why Generation Y assholes seem like such entitled shitstains. Thoughts?

Generational astrology is just as stupid and inaccurate (but sometimes fun) as the real thing.

Full disclosure: I meet the definition of Generation Y according to the article.

So do I. There's not just one definition of the generation. I mean, they're still showing pictures of high schoolers taking selfies to represent Millennials, when the cohort started long enough ago that the oldest of them are married and have kids. There's a big difference in world perspective between a married parent and a high schooler.

I think a slightly better measure of generation is by available technology. There's the never-had-it-why-do-I-need-it generation (but they grew up watching the first TVs). There's the didn't-have-it-but-now-I-love-it generation where computers and such started becoming a thing right around high school, so college reports were all done on a screen instead of with correction paper (thank god it's about damn time). And then there's the always-had-it-oh-dear-lord-how-did-you-live generation.

But that's still a bunch of bullshit that I just made up now because the generational shit just gets on my nerves.

[erik]

Millennials are Generation Y.

Hunh, I didn't think that's so, but wikipedia agrees with you.

At least I think of myself as Y because I'm too young to be an X'er and I thought Millenials are in their 20's, which I am not.

But apparently I'm just within the gen X age group (even though previously when I'd heard it enumerated I was a few years too young). Weird.

[Maj]

I don't think of myself as Gen X because my siblings are a decade younger, so my childhood memories are of the same TV shows/movies/pop culture as theirs. I don't honestly have memories of much of anything out of their range except Karma Chameleon and She-Ra. And people my age around here all seem like fuddy-duddies to me, so we hang with peeps who tend to be about my siblings' ages.

I really just feel like I don't fit anywhere. Sort of like this: http://soberbuildengineer.com/blog/2013 ... t-quite-y/

[erik]

I think my confusion stems from that it was called Generation Y for a while, and when the Millennial term caught on I just assumed that was the next batch, not mine, and they they were going in decades not scores.

My brother who is 3-4 years older than me certainly fits for Gen X. He's moved out to the coasts (first east, then west) been in at least a couple start ups.

I think of Millennials as the kids who didn't grow up having to learn how to research in libraries, who got cell phones before they were adults, and didn't get to do really dangerous or fun shit without parental supervision that wasn't drug or sex related.

[Koumei]

Yeah, I always thought Gen Y was "my generation, give or take, ish, this isn't an exact science, or a science at all" and Millennials were the "born around 2000, doesn't know the sound of a dial-up modem". Well there you go, I guess according to some arbitrary system, I am in fact the same generation as my youngest sister.

Maybe we should just stick to using "generations" to refer to consoles and pokemon.

[Darth Rabbitt]

That would be a good idea, given that every generation name is monstrously stupid.

[maglag]

That's great to hear from you people, since I never really understood what those fancy titles were about.

However people have been complaining about how their kids and the friends of their kids are so spoiled since Ancient Greece.

[Prak]

I think my confusion stems from that it was called Generation Y for a while, and when the Millennial term caught on I just assumed that was the next batch, not mine, and they they were going in decades not scores.

My brother who is 3-4 years older than me certainly fits for Gen X. He's moved out to the coasts (first east, then west) been in at least a couple start ups.

I think of Millennials as the kids who didn't grow up having to learn how to research in libraries, who got cell phones before they were adults, and didn't get to do really dangerous or fun shit without parental supervision that wasn't drug or sex related.

I'm 28, you just described me. Millennial stretches out to people who are currently in their early 30s.

[Prak]

Cops find a dozen guns, big bags of weed, some xanax and methamphetamine powder capsules in house of Chumlee from Pawn Stars

Oh, and a "Chum Chum room" with a baggy with white residue and a rolled up dollar bill.

Because of course they did.

[erik]

I think of Millennials as the kids who didn't grow up having to learn how to research in libraries, who got cell phones before they were adults, and didn't get to do really dangerous or fun shit without parental supervision that wasn't drug or sex related.

I'm 28, you just described me. Millennial stretches out to people who are currently in their early 30s.

Yah, my beef was that description does not describe me, and I thought that I was too young for Gen X. I was still in college when the internet bubble burst, so I never got in on that hype and entrepreneurial jazz.

But I did get a cell phone when I was 21. Spent untold hours researching stuff from actual dead trees (pro-tip, find an original source paper and gather their references). And during my childhood a pack of us neighborhood kids just went around doing stuff unsupervised just shy of Stand By Me antics (we never found a dead body, but that was hardly our fault).

But Koumei does bring up a good counterpoint.

Well there you go, I guess according to some arbitrary system, I am in fact the same generation as my youngest sister.

I think that's how generations are supposed to work. Which makes me suppose that since my brother makes sense as Gen X'er, I guess I should be as well.

[Prak]

You know, if you'd tried hard enough, I'm pretty sure you could have found a dead body.

lazy kids...

[erik]

We were too busy building a tree house on some farmer's property without permission, blowing things up with household chemicals, building a large half-pipe to skateboard on (I think it was ~6' tall, ~14' long), bicycling to the neighboring city, and having bottle rocket battles.

In retrospect, life became a lot more tame once some of our neighbors got Sega/Nintendo systems. We were younger when we did the more adventurous things.

[Prak]

All of those things you mention could lead to a dead body for you to find.