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9 hours agoOn a related note, FOSS suffers from massive positive externality market failure. As a result we underinvest in it.
Avid Amoeba
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Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2023
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Not exactly what you’re asking for, but I’ll share what I do. I’m using SaltStack to do config management and one of my salt states brings all packages up to date. This is done every 24 hours. I’m not suggesting you install SaltStack just for that but rather pointing out for people who use config management tools that those might be able to handle unattended upgrades.
Aren’t we a net beneficiary of it? I imagine the US and UK do most of the illegal shit.
0·17 hours agoInteresting. I’m curious to hear critique on the author’s arguments if anyone’s got the time for it. Most of what they say sounds somewhat substantiated but I don’t know enough to judge whether there are any glaring omissions. One thing that’s obvious is that the share of state-owned enterprises has steadily decreased over time even if it’s still a quarter of the economy.
0·23 hours agoIt might not be. If your fingerprints are physically changing, then an accurate scanner should not recognize a fingerprint that’s changed after the fact. If anything you’re looking for a less accurate scanner to help with this issue. But a less accurate scanner could let others in your phone too.
1·1 day agoNice. Real nice.
Oof, got the receipts and all. Nice job 👍
64·1 day agoIgnore the noise and use Ubuntu LTS. Subscribe for the free Ubuntu Pro service. This is something you do not get on Debian. Enjoy boring, trouble-free operation.
If you’re hell bent on not using Ubuntu, use Debian. Enjoy boring, trouble-free operation.
In either case, use Docker. I don’t know what the version of Docker is in Debian but in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, it’s recent enough so you don’t have to f around with third party repos.
We repeat that every time this chart looks like this. Which is almost every election. We even elected a guy on the promise to change it. 🥹
Not sure why this is down voted. This is exactly what happened. Trudeau ran on electoral reform in 2015. That was gonna be the last FPTP election, he said. Then they did some consultations with the public and said that not enough people wanted it. Shortly after, they threw the whole thing down the garbage chute.
Yeah propping up the organ isn’t ideal. At least paying Hungarian workers benefits the EU economy.
I find Windows significantly less convenient than Linux. It took a few years for my mindset to flip but there’s just no going back. Whenever something requires me to use Windows, I reach for a Windows virtual machine. Whenever I’ve been forced to use a Windows or a Mac machine for work, I’ve reached for a Linux virtual machine.
Recall, to VAG’s major shareholders, it doesn’t matter where a VW is made since they would always collect and distribute the profit from its sale. To auto workers and their local communities on the other hand, it makes dramatic difference whether the VWs on their streets were made close by, or a continent away.
0·3 days agoAnd between every dollar being backed by a bushel of potatoes or a dentist appointment and hyperinflation, lies a vast gap of other possibilities. For example future productivity that people believe will materialise which doesn’t exist today. If you factor in debt and look at fiat as a form of debt it should become more obvious why you can create money today that enables people to do work which they otherwise wouldn’t without inflation, let alone hyperinflation, under the assumption of available real resources (labor, tools, metal, land, knowledge, etc)
1·3 days agoSucks because you know they don’t cost nearly that much to make but it is what it is. 😅
In fiat economies financial capital isn’t a limiting factor since it can be and is created out of thin air as needed. The need for private citizens’ money to grow the economy is often repeated idea but it doesn’t hold water when you consider how their money was created in the first place. Specifically, currency issuing governments spend money into existence before being able to tax it. Therefore they don’t need to tax in order to spend. If there are the real resources needed for certain economic activity to occur but the limiting factor is the lack of money, a competent government will spend the required money into that sector and the activity will materialize. There’s no need to wait for private individuals to accumulate it over time in order to spend it to enable this economic activity. Crucially, even if you wait, the money is still going to come from a government’s “printing press.”
Other types of capital such as human, intellectual, can limit growth since they’re not as easily replaceable. That’s why I think your second point about who those people are is important. It is possible that they’re knowledgeable workers in different domains. It is also possible that they’re people skilled in exploiting others. If we assume the former, losing them isn’t ideal. If we assume the latter, then it’s a social value judgement of whether you want to have more or fewer of these types in your society, but they’re not essential for economic growth.
Even if they exfiltrate the money, China as every other fiat economy can replace it using a keyboard.
If these folks are indeed knowledgeable and experienced workers, then having them leave isn’t ideal. But whether they’re such people or not is an open question. They might also be people who are good at exploiting others’ labor for profit, just like their western many-multi-mil counterparts.
China saw the world’s biggest outflow of high-net-worth individuals last year and is expected to see a record exodus of 15,200 in 2024, dealing a further blow to its economy, a new report says.
It’s interesting how through the neoliberal lens this looks like “a blow” to their economy. But from a Keynesian or MMT lens, China doesn’t need high net worth individuals to drive the economy. Public investment can and has done this in China as well as many other parts of the world.
From another angle, letting high net worth individuals flee, could reduce apparent wealth inequality in China.
In the free market economic model it’s generally assumed that prices of things, including wages, investment, accurately represent the value of what’s being produced. An ideal free market has everything about a product expressed in its price. In reality markets often misprice things. That is the price determined by the market for a product is lower or higher than it should be. There are many reasons for that and they’re considered market failure, because the market fails to price things correctly which then means it fails to allocate resources efficiently - one of its primary features. This means for example that something is too expensive and we produce too little of it as a result of the other way around. Externalities are a type of mispricing where there’s negative or positive effects, or value, of a product which isn’t reflected at all in its price. For example, until recently the CO2 emitted by manufacturing of most things wasn’t factored in the prices of anything. As a result, say the price of shipping is lower than what it should be. As a result we ship more than what we would have otherwise. As a result there’s more wildfires. As a result populations near wildfires lose their homes and their insurance skyrockets. They’re paying costs that should have been part of the shipping prices which would have reduced the amount of shipping we do, or made shipping invest in low carbon technology, etc. The market however failed to allocate this externality into the price of shipping. Since the externality had additional cost compared to the price, it’s a negative externality. A positive externality is one where there’s additional benefit that’s not reflected into the price of a product. In the case of free open source software, a lot of it is priced at 0. At the same time there’s vast numbers of businesses built upon FOSS. Since the market prices FOSS at 0, most of them pay 0 and we end up with unmaintained OpenSSL libraries. Perhaps more importantly, we end up having less FOSS produced than what would be optimal for the economy. For example we end up having most firms pay Microsoft significant profit margins for their products instead of paying significantly lower prices for FOSS which would have generated the investment needed to develop better alternatives to MS’es products. And that’s the market failure that leads to underinvestment in FOSS.
Now I’m not in any way saying that the free market is a tool that is actually capable of allocating these resources efficiently and that “something is done to it” which causes it to fail. If anything, FOSS is a great example of the inherent inability for the free market to efficiently allocate resources in all cases. You know, in case the climate crisis wasn’t good enough. 😅