Debt Rattle October 5 2017

 

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  • #36319

    Juan Gris Guitar on a chair 1913   • S&P 500 Poised To Lose $10 Trillion In Value (Pal.) • The Sum of All Fears: China Shadow Banking Hits $40 Tr
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle October 5 2017]

    #36320
    Ken Barrows
    Participant

    So if federal tax revenues do not fund federal expenditures, I am thinking that Treasuries do. Am I missing some other form of magic money? I am also thinking that paying a little bit of interest is better than paying no interest whatsoever.

    The long term issue, which Professor Black doesn’t address, is whether debt can increase faster than income in perpetuity. I don’t think so, but I am just a schlub. The USA has an official deficit for FY 2017 of about 3.5% GDP. Nominal GDP barely grows that fast.

    As the reserve currency, we can exchange debt for goods and services. Amazing deal. I am sympathetic to debt to provide health care and prevent homelessness, but why is MMT such a great idea for the long run again?

    #36322

    I can see in our visitor numbers today that a bot is going through TAE from A to Z . Lots of hits. Unfortunately, that doesn’t show up in our ads revenue.

    Now, none of you would have an ad blocker on for the Automatic Earth, would you? Bad idea. I have no doubt we’re already losing out bigly because of that. Exempt TAE if you do have an ad blocker! We’re small!

    #36323
    Dr. Diablo
    Participant

    More magic thinking: we don’t grow sheep, spin wool, weave, and cut clothes, we just print them into existence on our keyboard, says Bill Black. Honest! As many as we want. There’s no work AND no downside, just like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice!

    Funny, rural beekeepers don’t have nearly the problem of the professional ones. Maybe because when you fly insects into fields of insect poisons, insects die? And if you keep insects away from world-wide environmental poisons, they die a lot less? And hey, how about the rest of us? If we didn’t poison every field, every crop, every gene, running off into every stream every kid plays in, to every water a mother drinks might we be healthier?

    Constant, smart, caring, but omg IYI-class on all things living. Let’s start back a step: TAE reports on the astonishing imbedded oil in modern food production. Well, a great deal of that is fertilizer. Would you like to remove the fertilizer and drop the dangerous, high-investment, concentrated, overseas, choke-point dependency on petroleum? Yes? Then you need animals for your fertilizer. But but but but…?

    But about a dozen things: we have no way — none — that I know of, to produce anything like the volume we need using organic non-animal methods. If you tried compost, you’d waste all your acres and tractor-diesel turning compost foothils in the volumes you need for America’s 1,000, 10,000 acre fields. Ain’t happening, not even in a 100 acre scale. Animals are your only high-speed composters. And guess what? They self-replicate, AND are a food source. Cool, huh? Also without desertifing the fields, you must MUST let them fallow at least 1 in 4. So 25% of your crop yield per year? Gone. Oh wait: unless you have animals, then you turn the fallow year to hay and feed it to them to turn into the high-value compost (manure) you MUST have. Then you eat the composters rather than let them die of old age and vet bills. Rather than paying a coalmine and steel mill to make metal composters, then a junker to repair, melt, and dispose them. Which do you prefer? And choosing a life-oriented process undercuts factory farms and presses the return to smaller farms and families. And the smaller scale means less villainy in conditions! The horror.

    And you want to make meat in a vat? Is this like the same unfathomably-bad-at-math people who thought we’d have solar panels (at 15%) and ship the electric to cities (at 20% loss) to run LEDs (at 30% efficiency) to grow hydroponic lettuce in a high-rise? How high do you have to be to think THAT’S a good idea? You create the product with most efficiency at the point of sunlight, looking for maximum energy concentration before shipping by expensive, rare petroleum. So…animals again. I swear to God these guys are trying to kill us all. Thank God we’re not on a spaceship or we’d have mutinied by now for sheer survival.

    No, lab meat is not going to be more energy efficient for multiples of the reasons that piping sunlight into lightbulbs isn’t going to be efficient. Want a few more? Okay, what were you planning to grow in western Texas and say, upper Greece or the Spanish plains? What were you planning on growing in the steep hills of Colorado or Austria? Kale and green beans? Seriously people: no. These marginal lands are not well-suited or profitable for the crops that you’d grow in the climate and good soils of the outer rim of Paris or SanFancisco. You can’t transport kale from a field below Durango and make a profit, no matter how much oil you waste. You know what you CAN grow on distant, 45deg slope, in bad soil, where the frost comes sudden? Sheep, maybe. Cattle. Buffalo, you know, meat. Unless you’d like to take that 30% of marginal land offline for human consumption altogether, and kill, you know, 2.25 billion people. ‘Cause you can with ignorance, you know. And they are. Will all their brilliant, expert ideas.

    Please for the love of God stop helping and just leave rural, food-making people alone. You’ve already stolen all their money, culture, children, and hope, can’t you just do this one thing to save your own city-Univertity expert lives? I promise it will be the smartest thing you’ve ever done.

    #36326
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    Diablo
    Soylent Green anyone?

    #36336
    Nassim
    Participant

    “Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forests Overwhelmed By Climate Change”

    Please have mercy on our brains. These trees have survived through a whole series of climate changes. What difference does 2F make?

    Here are some nice charts showing how trivial climate change has been over the past 150 years compared to what these trees have endured.

    Some Historical Perspective

    BTW, even 5000 year old trees do die from old age – and that is why they procreate.

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