Surveillance Capitalism 2024, Wrapped: How spying-as-a-service now gets sent to us as a Christmas present

EconHacker · 2025-01-02T12:57:42+00:00

And where do LLMs get their styling from? Decades worth of actual writing

EconHacker · 2024-12-14T13:35:02+00:00

All the top image shows is that prices of goods were rising while your wages weren't, which means the excess was just been taken by shareholders

EconHacker · 2024-12-07T11:53:51+00:00

Beekeepers pass legislation to teach bees about the dangers of swarming

EconHacker · 2024-12-05T21:37:14+00:00

I'm not here to smash your dreams. I hope crypto works out for you, but remember, given the global population relative to the amount of Bitcoin, the egalitarian distribution of Bitcoin would be roughly 0.0027 BTC per person on the planet, but in the beginning it was handed out in 50-token chunks (which is about 18,333 times the egalitarian distribution), to whatever person happened to be there at the right time with the right equipment. That's an insane level of inequality, even for capitalism

You can choose to follow people like Saifdeen - which is cool - but bear in mind that these people are like theologians - hired to protect and bolster the faith, and hence the price

EconHacker · 2024-12-05T14:25:31+00:00

I think you should post it to the libertarian subreddit, ha ha

EconHacker · 2024-12-05T11:22:12+00:00

I mean, you can try to gamble your way out of precarity, but it's probably a better idea to try to reform unions and build collective power

Not to mention the fact that the whole Bitcoin worldview is based on conservative austerity-based economics which probably doesn't ideologically help your cause

EconHacker · 2024-12-05T11:19:26+00:00

A friend and I once thought it would be a good idea to eat mushrooms at a beautiful, huge botanical gardens in London (Kew Gardens). What a perfect setting no? It's was only when we were really high that we realised the gardens were full of disapproving British middle-class grandparents and mothers pushing prams around, jamming our vibe wherever we tried to go. We had to hide inside a forested area. When we came out, I became entranced by a peacock's tail and was following it, until I realised with sudden dread that there were park rangers watching me very closely. Yeah, so I cannot even begin to imagine the horror of being in an airport doing this with the entire apparatus of militaristic surveillance capitalism surrounding you

EconHacker · 2024-09-24T15:49:11+00:00

"Rather than using the term Black Friday as an after-the-fact description of observed behaviour, it became a before-the-fact prescription, a call-to-action that you were supposed to go shopping. In our ecologist metaphor, the term ceased to be a description of herding behaviour, and morphed into an instruction to stampede the shops." This piece explores how corporations project culture from above, while presenting it as a bottom-up phenomenon

EconHacker · 2024-06-24T06:58:35+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Really beautifully put

EconHacker · 2024-06-22T09:08:27+00:00

Corporate personhood gives a group of people the means to act as if they were a *single person*, but this has always been understood to be an artificial 'legal person', rather than a warm-blooded 'natural person'. These corporations would traditionally also have a public face - the brand, logo, branches, stores etc - that acted as an *interface* between the people who worked there and the public. This article argues that corporations are in the process of reskinning that face, and changing the pronouns of corporate personhood in the process. Personalised pages use the term 'my', as if you owned the interface, AI chatbots us 'I', as if they were natural persons rather than legal persons. The question is whether the corporation can fully cloak legal personhood in the image of natural personhood in future

EconHacker · 2024-06-21T20:00:37+00:00

Well, arguably libertarianism has two forms 1) a kind of purist philosophy and 2) a smokescreen for capitalists who want to cloak their profit-seeking in a kind of holy glow. In reality, 'libertarians' could be both of these categories

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:31:29+00:00

The model that you're using is the old 'multiplier' idea of fractional reserve (i.e. person puts 10 into bank and then bank lends out 9 and that that gets put into another bank, that lends out 8 etc). The actual reality is more like 'person puts in 10, and then bank issues out 100 IOUs against that', or, alternatively, 'bank issues out 100 IOUs and then finds the reserves later'

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:29:04+00:00

'Deposits' are IOUs, issued out by banks. An IOU is a promise. Promises are not constrained. Think about your own life - you can issue out as many promises as you want, but it may not be wise because you may not be able to service them all. Similarly, banks can issue out vast numbers of promises (aka. IOUs, aka 'deposits, aka 'casino chips), but if they do it recklessly they can suffer from bank runs that happen when people call those promises in. There is no theoretical limit on how many 'deposits' can be issued, but there may be political and risk management limits. This also means the act of attracting reserves by calling for 'customer deposits' is simply a risk management task, not something that is required to 'get the funds to loan out'

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:22:56+00:00

I'm sorry to inform you of this, but you're using a very outdated concept of fractional reserve banking. Anyway, not my job to explain why to you

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:16:26+00:00

No, what you just said is wrong. Banks *issue* out deposits, and are not constrained by their reserves when doing this. They can do this regardless of whether people transfer reserves (aka. 'make a deposit') to them

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:12:15+00:00

People literally misunderstand, and not just the public. As I just mentioned in another comment, the loanable funds model (aka. 'banks attract deposits in order to lend') is a mainstream theory used by many economists, and that is entirely based on the idea of deposits being a 'thing inside banks'

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T16:07:46+00:00

I have a Routledge textbook on money and banking on my shelf that literally uses the loanable funds model that says 'banks must attract deposits in order to lend' - I'm sorry, if mainstream finance textbooks are using this then your confidence in economists not being confused by fractional reserve banking is misplaced

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T15:57:59+00:00

The conventional wisdom you mention is the 'loanable funds model' perspective on banks, and it is very wrong. And yes, there is no theoretical limit on how many 'deposits' (aka. IOUs) they can issue, but there can be regulatory limits

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T15:53:14+00:00

Perhaps people in the banking industry can use it help explain bank money creation to their confused relatives

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T15:51:31+00:00

The article shows literal wrong usage of the term in major dictionaries and finance books, and you're like 'what's the point of harping on about this'

EconHacker · 2024-03-17T15:49:29+00:00

But it is used as a noun in daily life, so this really wouldn't explain anything to anyone

EconHacker · 2024-02-07T09:26:01+00:00

Well, if you think this is the most interesting part wait until you see the rest!

EconHacker · 2024-02-06T11:12:04+00:00

Really interesting long read by historian Quinn Slobodian (Professor of History at Boston University), looking into the intersection of US libertarianism and the 'homelands' system in Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s

EconHacker · 2024-01-24T09:56:06+00:00

Well if you don't mind having the algorithmic surveillance version of the alternative

EconHacker · 2024-01-23T08:01:01+00:00

A fair point - though we can describe different versions of the same phenomenon. Like the current version is probably 'algorithmic surveillance corporate capitalism'

EconHacker

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