Varoufakis on Negative Interest rates
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Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:I think you are tool who was duped by John Gault. The government of the USA Psyops division did a similar trick with the media by promting the term "conspiracy theory" and associating it with crazy people.
My favourite conspiracy theory is the one that the term "conspiracy theorist" was invented by the CIA. Of course it wasn't.. http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_always_already_wrong
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Young Master Smeet wrote:I'll just quickly add: a previous instance of this was factory tokens: ekmployers would pay with coin that could only be redeemed in their own shop. Workers movements fought tooth and nail against that trick, lets not recreate it.I agree. I haven't created a means for business to hold an account in my universal values exchange system. So far I've only considerd and made provisions for a real person to create an account for themselves. Although, I wasn't planning much in the way of proof of identty and intended anonymous account ownership, so I don't see how I could stop a business employee from opening an account and using it on behalf of a company. but if that employee did open an account for a company then it wouldn't have any more bargaining power than a real person, so I guess this just levels the playing field between business and individual. I think business is unlikely to find the universal values exchange system profitable because the business can't offer for exchange any non-tangible goods like time or hope for trade on the exchange and it would't work well if one employee acting on behalf of the company got a negative review for 5 minutes of time mis-spent in an exchange and damaged the whole company reputation. so primarily, I suspect, business would just use this like regular dollars and in the regular dollars mode it doesn't actually do much for the business since all the usefull and surplus value capturing couldn't be used by the business. Maybe not though, business is clever. I'll think on this topic a little more and see if I can figure out how to prevent problems due to unequal personal economy sizes wether it's a business negoting with a person or just a person who makes a lot of exchanges negotitatin with a person who makes very few exchanges. It seems to me in either case the negotiating advantage is pretty even regardless of the difference in size of each parties past economic exchange histories. Someone with a small short history of exchanges has roughly the same negotation power as someone with a long history of exchanges. Business accounts, if they were created would have very long transaction histories in theory compared to an individual. But a long exchange history doesn't help much with negatiation if all yoru exchange receipts have "I'm disatisfied" comments on them for the next person to consider before agreeing to an exchange. One way to solve the problem would be to just write in your exchange agreement's in the terms and conditions section "The value of this money will decrase by 50% if it's spent by a business or employer", and that would discourage business from trying to take over and use your money against you. But I don't know how you would enforce that within the system since it only records exchange agreements and doesn't know anything about if the account is owned by a business or individual. hmm… .well it is an enforceable terms and condition you could write, and someone could use 5 minutes to just ask them in a survey if they represent a business. If they lie, it might not get discovered right away, but it would allow complete reversal and cancellation of all past transaction credits to the business as a possible enforcement mechanism and that could work. in 5 minutes someone could look up and check the identity or business listings that the business replied to with their 5 minute survey question. So yes, you could write that and have it enforced, but it would probably take longer than average time and cost in minutes to enforce a judgement on a business if they are trying to be secretive. We could add another exchange agreement that takes care of that by writing in "if this is a business, then all time and dispute disagrement fees must be paid by the business regardless of the outcome of the dispute" and that could be enforce too.
DJP wrote:Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:I think you are tool who was duped by John Gault. The government of the USA Psyops division did a similar trick with the media by promting the term "conspiracy theory" and associating it with crazy people.My favourite conspiracy theory is the one that the term "conspiracy theorist" was invented by the CIA. Of course it wasn't.. http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_always_already_wrong
That's a very good article on the topic of who "invented" the term conspiracy theory. I think you missunderstood if you thought I was arguing the CIA invented the term. They merely redefined it and repurposed it and promoted in the media their preferred version of it. So I guess that makes a the article you linked to a straw man argument agains what I said. Sorry if this was confused, and in reading back my original comment I notice I mispelled "promoting" as "promting". neither of those words are have the same meaning or sound as "invented" so I'm not sure how you came to consider the word "invented" as interchangable with "promoted". but once you made that false equvalency, I can see how it would have reasonably led you to the straw man agument about how the term was "invented" long long ago. But like all good arguments the straw man argument yo linked to that replaces the concept of "redefined, popularized and promoted" with the concept of "invented" has other bits of truth thrown in to make it sound plausible. The really interesting part is it's talking about the first formulation of what we now call "the worldview backfire effect". the worldview backfire effect is a special type of confirmation bias ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias ) that was discussed for ages but never given it's own name or studied scientifically untill recently. and the best explanation for it is part of a series on denialism of global warming and research into why that happens and how. there's a video you might like if you enjoy that kind of reasoning and analysis of human motivation and cognition. . . this comes from a university in australity that has a class and a program to study climate change denialism and how it works in society and the mind and anything else needed releated to climate change denialism. But, the general concept of the worldview backfire effect applies to lots of non-climate change arguments like this one on negative interest rates. here's the video from the online course on the topic. . .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtSk03efSqQ ps. I was wondering what Noam Chomsky had to say about "conspiracy theory", since your article link did make me question my argument for a while before I realized it was just a straw man argument. Here's what I found, and I think you might find it interesting and relevant. "If something comes along that you don’t like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you’re an educated person what you use are complicated words like ‘conspiracy theory’ or 'Marxist’."Noam Chomsky— 5 years ago with 55 notes#chomsky #noam chomsky it seems to me this discussion of negative interest rates has used and discussed the worldview backfire effect arguments and the conspiracy theory arguments and the marxist arguments for interpreting the statements of the masters of mankind in an attempt to figure out if exactly what the masters of mankind want the interest rate to be. Who's to say which are accurate and trustworthy sources of information? Me I always side with noam chomsky when the topic is the intersection of linguistics and politics. I think Noam is the most authoritative source for linguistics and politics intersectional theoires and arguments because Noam has never made an argument he couldn't support in my exhaustive study and reading of him(ps. my idea of exhaustive study is surely much less than yours, admitedly in advance). I personally favor his protegee George Lakoff for more usable intersectional analysis of politics and linguistics and would be happy to discuss somewhere with other fans of Lakoff's theories of politics and morality. I know Lakoff and Chomsky much better than marx or engels. P.s. I might add to Noam Chomsky's quote and suggest the corrallary argument "If something comes along that you don’t like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you’re an educated person what you use are complicated words like ‘conspiracy theory’ or 'Marxist’. [edit, added by steve san francisco] if you're in a socialist website what you use are capitalist invented words like 'money crank'. [/ end edit]. This seems to say you and Mcolme1 are not true socialist at all since you're using capitalist invented words and capitalist favored strategies and arguments for discouraging discussion and you're arguing for the "no true scottsman" fallacy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman). My guess is you'll come back and say "naom isn't a true socialist and he's sold out". I think "not a true socialist and he's sold out' is probably onohter one of those things you can say at worldsocialism.org if you don't like an idea and want to push it out of the sphere of discussion. My conclusion is that Johana Gault, daughter of John Gault, is very please with the free work to promote his ideas and values that you and a few others on this board have done voluntarily and you should ask her for money or threaten to stop posting if she doesn't pay you enough. I guess for you it must be a dream job to get paid for doing something you'd do for free. but just because you're willing to do something for free doesn't mean you shouldn't charge a capitalist for it if you can make buck. Don't worry, Johana Gault will pay whatever reasonable price you ask. you're doing a great job for her dad and promoting his ideas to people who wouldn't ordinarily listen to his advice if it came from him directly.
Varoufakis in Zagreb, and on his love of Star Trek communism: https://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/12/13/the-hitchhikers-guide-through-a-collapsing-europe-by-diem25ers-yanis-varoufakis-srecko-horvat/
https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2017/07/05/2nd-anniversary-of-the-oxi-vote-our-parallel-payments-system-its-importance-confirmed-by-the-oligarchic-press-continuing-ritualistic-distortions/Varoufakis is out to justify himself, however, these excerpts from his book do seem to suggest a workable way that an insolvent state could refinance itself viably (and at the same time clear a lot of debts to the state as well):
Quote:Suppose that the state owes Company A €1 million but is delaying payment due to the state’s liquidity squeeze. Suppose also that Company A owes €30,000 to Jill, one of its employees, plus another €500,000 to Company B, which supplied it with raw materials. Meanwhile, Jill and Company B also owe, respectively, €10,000 and €200,000 in taxes to the state. Now imagine that the tax office creates a reserve account for each taxpayer (per tax file number, to be precise), including for Companies A and B and Jill. The state can then just ‘deposit’ €1 million into Company A’s reserve account simply by typing it in and provide each taxpayer with a PIN to be used to transfer ‘funds’ from one taxpayer’s reserve account to another. Company A could then transfer €30,000 to Jill’s reserve account and €500,000 to Company B’s reserve account, which Jill and Company B could then use to repay the €10,000 and €200,000 they respectively owe the state in tax arrears. The immediate cancellation of many arrears would have been thus effected.The infrastructure is there, and, technically, no market principle has been violated, the state would just have to be crafeul not to end up with massive inflation. Technically, this could be used to clear a lot of bad debts out of the economy, preumably just as the state could invite direct loans from citizens, firms could sell their debt to each other on a secondary market…
Quote:The infrastructure is there, and, technically, no market principle has been violated, the state would just have to be crafeul not to end up with massive inflation. Technically, this could be used to clear a lot of bad debts out of the economy, preumably just as the state could invite direct loans from citizens, firms could sell their debt to each other on a secondary market…I might have understood it wrongly, I kind of like Varoufakis's thinking out of the box,, but surely this would be open to the creation of another bad debt bubble, as unscrupulous firms or those in danger of collapse took advantage of it?
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