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by dspillett
882 days ago
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> If you have particular questions There were four fairly direct questions in the post you replied to, to which you might like to give a response: >> [what do you] mean [by] the "printing press to furnace" analogy of the economy >> what you mean by 1971 >> or the gold bug >> or the 50 year transistor The first of those I'm pretty sure I understand what you are meaning, though if I'm right about that I don't think it is a good analogy, but the others I have no context for. |
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By “printing press” I mean the set of mechanisms in which fractional reserve deficit spending creates the money supply to notionally value future growth, and by “furnace” I mean the set of mechanisms by which we prevent arbitrary inflation as a result. You can measure the money supply in plenty of ways, but for someone who needs a glossary on my original comment, TLDR you want a number called “M2”.
A “gold bug” is someone who either does or advocates the strategy of holding “precious” metals as a uniquely good asset class (no one turns down a free pile of gold, many of us think the market is pricing gold as well as we are), in particular an asset class uniquely resistant to inflation and/or the “government”. I can assure you from painful experience that “the government” gives no fucks if you have gold in your back yard when they make a clerical error.
50 years is roughly the period of time it took for at least two separate inventions of “the transistor” by a bunch of Bell Labs people, but overwhelmingly associated to a guy called Shockley, to culminate in a useful computer that a middle class person could afford to have in their living room. I learned to code on an IBM PC my distinctly middle-class grandfather owned, and it is a substantially better computer than no computer, a harder claim to make about the Apple I for example.