Zompist Bboard Again

mèþru wrote: ↑Wed Jan 15, 2020 9:33 am It's been a few months since I've been here. What's new? I am not reading all 50+ notifications.

Pabappa wrote: ↑Fri Jan 24, 2020 8:34 pm https://www.instagram.com/ronnaldong/ does the kind of "transition" art where 2 images share one part in common, e.g. a girl holding a balloon in a cloud where that balloon is also the yolk of an egg. I found someone else whose name I dont remember who did much the same thing but all his paintings are paywalled (understandably, becaus etheyre really good) and therefore i only ever had ~600px versions of them . searching for flying whales turned up thousands of hits ... guess its more popular than i thought.

ah i found him: Rob Gonsalves . e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/ea/58 ... b525a0.jpg , https://marcusashley.com/artwork/the-un ... ea-and-sky
in fact i think i ve posted his art here before too

https://lrdpdwhome.files.wordpress.com/ ... re_out.jpg <--- someone figured out how to extract a full size image for this one, but for most of the others the full size image isnt even available

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2019 12:41 pm
My nightmare scenarios, to the extent to which I have them, tend to be different depending on the topic, but on the specific topic of economic policy, one of my worst nightmares is basically that the Keynesians and the austerians might both be right about why the other side's approach won't work. I mean, both sides seem to be much better at criticizing the other side's approach than at refuting the other side's criticisms of their own approach.

The statements "If everyone keeps cutting expenses, everyone ends up with less income, forcing everyone to cut expenses even more, leading to everyone having even less income, etc." and "If you keep going deeper and deeper into debt, eventually you'll run out of people willing to lend you anything" can well be both true at the same time.

Imagine an economy that isn’t perfect. (What economy is?) Maybe the government is running a budget deficit that, while not really threatening its solvency, is coming down more slowly than it should, or maybe banks with political connections have made too many loans to questionable borrowers. But, as far as anyone can tell from the numbers, there are no problems that cannot be dealt with given goodwill and a few years of stability.

Then, for some reason—perhaps an economic crisis on the other side of the world—investors become jittery and start pulling their money out en masse. Suddenly the country is in trouble— its stock market is plunging, its interest rates are soaring. You might think that savvy investors would see this as an opportunity to buy. After all, if the fundamentals haven’t changed, doesn’t this mean that assets are now undervalued? But, as we saw in Chapter 4, the answer is “not necessarily.” The crash in asset values may cause previously sound banks to collapse. Economic slump, high interest rates, and a devalued exchange rate may cause sound companies to go bankrupt. At worst, economic distress may cause political instability. Maybe buying when everyone else is rushing for the exits isn’t such a good idea after all; maybe it’s better to run for the exit yourself.

Thus it is possible in principle that a loss of confidence in a country can produce an economic crisis that justifies that loss of confidence— that countries may be vulnerable to what economists call “self-fulfilling speculative attacks.” And while many economists used to be skeptical about the importance of such self-fulfilling crises, the experience of the 1990s in Latin America and Asia settled those doubts, at least as a practical matter.

The funny thing is that once you take the possibility of self-fulfilling crises seriously, market psychology becomes crucial— so crucial that within limits, the expectations, even the prejudices of investors, become economic fundamentals— because believing makes it so.

Suppose, for example, that everyone is convinced that despite its remarkably high dependence on foreign capital (it has run large current account deficits of more than 4 percent of GDP for decades), Australia is basically a sound country— it can be counted on to be politically and economically stable. Then the market response to a decline in the Australian dollar is in effect to say, “Good, that’s over, let’s buy Australian,” and the economy actually benefits. The market’s good opinion is therefore confirmed.

On the other hand, suppose that despite twenty years of remarkable progress people are not quite convinced that Indonesia is no longer the country of The Year of Living Dangerously. Then when the rupiah falls they may say, “Oh, my God, they’re reverting to the bad old days”; the resulting capital flight leads to financial, economic, and political crisis, and the market’s bad opinion is similarly confirmed.

It seems, in other words, that the Keynesian compact is a sometime thing. The common view among economists that floating rates are the best, if imperfect, solution to the international monetary trilemma was based on the experience of countries like Canada, Britain, and the United States. But during the 1990s a series of countries— Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea— discovered that they were subject to different rules. Again and again, attempts to engage in moderate devaluations led to a drastic collapse in confidence. It is this problem of confidence that ultimately explains why the Keynesian compact has been broken.

In other words, Keynesianism can work for countries that don't have to face serious prejudices among the people who work on "the markets", but countries that do have to deal with such prejudices will pretty quickly run out of people willing to lend them money. (I find it interesting how he comes pretty close to saying that countries perceived as "white" usually get petter treatment from "the markets" than countries perceived as darker-skinned, but never quite gets there.)

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Mon Feb 03, 2020 1:41 amKeynesian economics has always rested on the premise of everything always working exactly right forever, operated by infinitely rational actors with perfect information.

Raphael wrote: ↑Sat Feb 15, 2020 8:11 am I just got a new external hard drive - a WD Elements 4 TB. I'm generally happy with it, but I have a question, and I wonder if some of the tech-savvier people among you might be able to answer it. You see, in addition to the sockets for the USB plug and the power plug, it has a mysterious third opening. You can see it here between the number "10" and the symbol that looks a bit like a padlock:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bN80Qi ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IgtqPH ... sp=sharing

Any ideas what this opening might be for? The manual wasn't any help.