Just because supply of shelter in certain locales has not kept up with demand for that specific locale, and/or is affected by numerous legalities regarding things like eviction and zoning codes and fire codes and animals, does not mean invalid the theory of higher prices incentivizing sellers to increase supply.
… why would incentivizing supply of staples be a good idea? If I make 2,000,000,000 more eggs you would expect that the vast majority of those would not be consumed, because people already consume staples at a near optimal rate. The sales of substitute goods would go down, but you’d almost certainly expect a rotating set of WICesque price fixing to combat the natural rise in price?
Not necessarily. It's straightforward to make it revenue neutral.
You make it revenue neutral for the average tacpayer. If you want UBI to be $1000/month, you increase the average tax by $1000. The average taxpayer still benefit because even though they don't get more money, they have a safety net.
People making less than average get more UBI than the tax increase, and those making more pay more.
Most people get more money because the median income us a lot lower than the average.
Right, but people with lower incomes spend, and mostly on necessities, I think the idea is that most of those necessities would become more expensive (naturally or artificially due to price-fixing) if the poorest suddenly had more financial power. In the system as it stands, it seems to me like it'd just result in a bunch of money going to grocery giants and their suppliers, landlords, medical, etc.
Most of those are commodities, where the price is set by the cost of marginal supply.
Housing prices should go down. Housing is expensive in places with jobs and cheap in places without jobs. UBI gives people the freedom to move from the former to the latter.
Yeah this is the downstream effect I had in mind. You could say we'd increase supply to meet the demand but that hasn't really worked out with housing for example
Is it straightforward to get Congress to make it revenue neutral? And to keep it revenue neutral? I don't think so. Politicians find "free money for everybody" to be too easy a way of getting votes.
If the only money is UBI money then things start to get weird. If UBI coexists with regular income in moderation then it doesn't change much. Consider that about 1/3 Americans receive some form of government assistance. There's already a kind of fallback UBI distributed across SNAP + Medicare + Medicaid + Unemployment + Social Security + etc, and no one on those programs is clamoring for them to be shut down so that lentils become cheaper. Giving money to everyone does increase inflation (though you can play with the tax rate to offset that), but the important effect is it transfers purchasing power to net recipients. Basically: the economy wide money supply would at worst go up by a modest factor, the income of the poorest goes up by an absolute amount (or a massive factor if you want to view it that way), which is a huge benefit to them.
Yes, it does cause huge inflation, but that's not even the biggest problem with it. That would be: people do not really like to share fruits of their labor with strangers, so UBI would significantly undermine the motivation to do anything other than bare minimum.
UBI is not possible until robots and AI take over most jobs (but then we risk that one day the AI decides to just get rid of "those useless humans")
I don't think we should worry about the advent of AGI deciding to get rid of us; I'm more worried about the people who own the AI current AI infrastructure, as well as the current US regime, who don't see the value in the pesky humans beyond revenue and votes, respectively.
"Solve the problem" probably not, but trigger inflation, probably not, since the amount is so low, it will have very little impact on the behavior of the richest, but it would have a massive impact on the behavior of the poorest, and their purchase habits generally don't impact inflation as much.
UBI is just a band-aid on not taxing the rich, though.
Humans have fixed calorie needs and even the very obese spend maybe 10x the norm, nothing more.
Compare that to the prospect of someone buying MULTIPLE properties, possibly multiple properties that are 10x more expensive the norm, the price disparity between a regular car and multiple supercars, the price disparity between owning a boat and/or yacht vs...not owning a boat.
Not everything, only stuff that are suddenly in higher demand that can't increase supply. If you take food as an example i don't imagine demand would increase? And if it did we could probably just produce more? And also it's not like everyone will have unlimited money, so you'll still have to prioritize and luckily we don't all have the same priorities. I'm pretty sure the idea is to fund this by taxing production and not by printing money, so inflation shouldn't be a problem.
If anything, parent comment's usage of orthogonal might've been a typo/mistake. People usually use orthogonal as a metaphorical term to imply "no correlation" [1]. My read of the OP is that anxiety powers others' ambition, that they are portraying the relationship between the two as correlated/causal rather than orthogonal.
edit: to clarify a bit further, I believe the term comes from how vectors that diverge along some dimension form a right angle, rather than a correlation (i.e., if one vector is (0, 5) and the other is (4, 0), they form a right angle )and are orthogonal, meaning "wherever you are on the (4,0) line doesn't correlate with where you are on the (0, 5) line". This might be a bad explanation but it's how I've understood it from working somewhere where coworkers use the term a lot.
To avoid delays with traditional money rails. Most usage is for DeFi (you’d prbly call it gambling) but I also know people who use it for remittances. Believe it or not, sending stablecoins internationally and off ramping at a foreign bank acc is faster / cheaper than using something like western union
There are other reasons why having stablecoins is useful.
Regular money can’t be transferred digitally. If you want to send money to someone, both your bank and their bank need to speak the same protocol. This isn’t an issue usually but try sending a large transfer (>100k) or sending money internationally.
Stablecoins have the protocol built into it. Just by using a stablecoin, you are able to receive and send the coins digitally to anyone else who uses them.
That is true, but I have used Forex services before to transfer money internationally. Using stablecoins is going to be harder.
Forex service:
1. Set up deal.
2. Country A: Transfer your Bank -> Forex Bank
3. Country B: Receive Forex Bank -> your Bank
"Large" transfers (I am not rich so someone can chime in about millions) are a bit different. There is no problem doing the above, it is the same. But you might trigger AML/KYC questions at both the banks and with the Forex service. But this might also happen when transferring from fiat to crypto (more likely, many banks are now extra careful if they think the money is going to crypto).
There are two prices, the bid price (how much someone is willing to pay) and an ask price (how much someone is willing to sell). When you submit a market order, you usually get a price close to the bid (if you’re selling) or the ask (if you’re buying).
The 20$ difference you describe is the spread - not a fee taken by the brokerage, market maker, exchange. Whoever is executing your trade isn’t pocketing the 20$.
Then just don't execute both trades... and everyone can quote on the current bid or the ask price, you should do it too if you're afraid of crossing the spread.
Is that misinformation or not? Don’t market makers make their profits by collecting some difference between bid and ask? I recall a video from Warren Buffett explaining that it was criminal that firms like Robinhood get away with calling it zero fee trading.
The consolidated bid and the ask across all exchanges make up what's called the NBBO and every one (market makers, exchanges, etc) are required to give you a price equal to or better than the NBBO. So if the bid for SHOP is say $50.00, the ask is $50.10, and you are selling SHOP, its illegal for anyone to give you a price < $50.
Market makers make money by buying low and selling high (and vice versa). They typically look for small movements not large ones. So if a market maker bought SHOP at $50, they would try to sell it at $50.10. This is what everyone means when they say a market maker makes money off the spread.
This strategy works really well when you have large random order flow, which is why market makers want to pay brokerages for order flow. They incentivize brokerages, even ones that charge commission) by giving pfof (payment for order flow) and price improvement on top of the NBBO. This price improvement is passed on directly to the customer.
IIRC, brokerages have a best execution obligation. So they are required to try and execute orders in a way that gets customers the best prices. I don't know about other brokerages but at Robinhood, pfof wouldn't go into our order routing decision at all. We would send orders to the market maker using a model which only considered the historical price improvement they gave our customers.
Because Robinhood order flow is so lucrative for marker makers in aggregate, they were willing to give us really good price improvement. So the execution for options and equity orders at Robinhood be better than other brokerages (even ones you pay commission for)
Huge fan of safety razors. At least for me, razors with multiple blades would tug on my hair too much and cause ingrown hairs often (I think those two are casual)
Plus, nothing wakes you up in morning like potentially cutting yourself
Safety razors are a much more reliable shaving experience for me then multi-blade razors too, but the big win was once I learned about them suddenly I also learned about a whole bunch of other stuff which made shaving so much easier.
The big win was using an alum block - disinfects and seals nicks quickly, and styptic pencils (same thing but stronger).
Safety razors are so sharp it’s hard to feel when you’re cutting yourself - I get little spots sometimes and see them more than feel them. Weirdly the biggest factor between getting cut shaving and not for me is how foggy the mirror is. I never get cut when the mirror is clear.
I feel like, as with a lot of tools, graphql is really useful if you’re at the scale of having 1000s of different object types. If you’re only dealing with a handful of resources, a simple rest api is way less headache.
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