Bern
Member

Just another bad apple casting shade on the good apples.

He seems to live life with his pants on fire.

Texas history is awesome.

Hyperinflation isn't possible until the velocity of money increases. I really don't think that's even possible until this Covid19 business no longer restricts economic activity. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V P.S. I didn't watch the video - sorry.

The only thing of significant import I got out of the "debate" last night, other than a compelling need to shout "The Aristocrats!" at the end, was that Trump is planning to contest mail in ballots and endanger the legitimacy of the pending election. I look around this morning at various news websites and discussion forums and all I see is extreme polarization. Folks who were pro-Trump only say Trump good, Biden bad. Folks that were anti-Trump saw Trump bad, Biden good. If you try to challenge anyone on their thoughts these days, there is no civil discourse or intellectual honesty. America is devolving. The decline is happening right before our eyes.

:(

Packing the court requires control of the House, Senate and POTUS. Neither party currently controls all three.

I haven't been posting updates to this thread, but I have been watching the Fed's balance sheet via their weekly reports. The Fed was bouncing around the $7T mark for several weeks, but it looks like the last two weeks are showing balance sheet growth again. 9/10/20 - $7.059T (6B decrease from week before) 9/17/20 - $7.113T (54B increase from week before) 9/24/20 - $7.141T (28B increase from week before) If the Fed averages $30B a week increase, the balance sheet should hit $8T in about 29 weeks - just over half a year.

I watched it a few days ago. It did a good job driving home the point about the addiction engineering that is ongoing, but the issue I found most salient was the how their AI algos that determine your interests for targeting advertising aren't just used to present you with ads tailored to your interests, they are used to identify demographics for advertisers so that interested parties (political groups, disinfo operatives, etc.) can target their messages for viral distribution. That combined with news feeds filtered according to interests (by the social media AI, not necessarily user choice) surely helps exacerbate the polarization of ideas as folks increasingly shelter themselves from any intellectual challenges.