That's not why they are called extrernalities. They are called externalities because they are the external consequences of actions. They are very much in our control, and if you are going to price any commodity fairly, to make it reflect true market and societal costs, then you have to price those in. Otherwise what you're really doing is subsidizing an industry.

Yeah, I figured that. My point was just that "fixed" is just an accurate description of my income/budget (and probably yours) as it is of hers. I knew what you meant, I was just pointing out that the terminology we use doesn't make sense.

The price of a cryptocurrency reflects those things. It's value is zero. Period. There is nothing behind it.

No, fiat currencies are backed by debt, meaning that real people and companies have made enforceable legal commitments to do real work to generate the value backing the dollars or whatever. Without getting into the details, every time a dollar is created, that creation is balanced by the creation of a dollar of debt, the commitment of some productive entity to produce value to repay that debt (and thereby destroy that dollar). As a common example, when you borrow money to buy a house, the bank doesn't lend you money [*] that other people deposited, it creates that money out of thin air at the same instant you sign an enforceable contract to repay it, meaning you commit to do some sort of value-producing work to generate the value of those dollars.

Derivatives represent specific legal contracts to perform some action, e.g. buy a fixed amount of stock from the derivative seller on or by a specific date for a specific price, and those contracts get their value from the underlying security. That underlying security can also be some sort of contractual obligation rather than a hard asset, but if you keep digging down the layers you always get to something real. It's always possible, of course, that the layers of repackaging make the actual value hard enough to see that its price becomes divorced from that value (and stock pricing also gets divorced from underlying value to various degrees), but at bottom there must be something of actual substance. Further, if markets were perfectly efficient, it would not be possible for the price to move away from the value.

None of this is true with cryptoassets. Their true value is zero (arguably, negative, since proof of work is a pure sink that generates no utility), so any price above zero represents market inefficiency/insanity.

[*] It used to be that the bank created most of the money under the fractional reserve system, but for quite a while now most of the developed world has abandoned the reserve lending requirements, enabling banks to effectively create all of the money they lend. This might seem like a crazy system, but it's actually pure genius because it allows the money supply to expand and contract with the economy, which along with Keynsian fiscal policy massively reduces the boom and bust cycles we regularly experienced before we switched from metallic to fiat currency.

Aside: That phrase "fixed budget" and its twin "fixed income" always strike me as curious. I mean, short of changing jobs, most of us have a fixed income and therefore a fixed budget... and changing jobs isn't necessarily an option.

I guess maybe it's just a euphemism for "small income" or "small budget".

The argument only makes sense if you completely discount externalities. Once you factor them in, the costs of fossil fuels are absolutely monumental.

I mean, a bullet to the head cures cancer, but I'm not exactly seeing this being proposed as a medical solution.

Ah yes, reductio ad absurdum.

Twelve Angry Men must have driven you insane

You know, I don't have a panic attack if Macbeth is set in 1920, or if they recast Hamlet as a woman. I'll complain if the acting is shitty, but if the actors, whatever their gender or skin color, can pull off a good King Lear, then that's the only thing that counts.

Comics aren't even sacred to themselves. Probably the most parodied aspect of superhero comics is just how frequently "canon" is thrown into a blender, thrown out, and how new writers will just ignore established canon. Every decade or two, the publishers will make a big deal of reuniting timelines, and act as if it was part of some grand plan. The complexity of the textual history of Green Lantern, as an example, rivals the New Testament.

That would be very risky. It's more likely the court would order the administration to enforce it immediately. The administration would appeal that up to SCOTUS, but SCOTUS has already made its opinion very clear and would almost certainly uphold the order. At most they might slow walk it. Trump might simply refuse to obey the court order, but that's a very big step with a lot of risk for him, and while he might well take that step in some context he cares enough about, this isn't it. Not without a really big payoff, anyway.

No, the status quo is the best outcome for ByteDance. AFAICT, no one other than ByteDance and Congress has standing to sue over enforcement, and Congress isn't going to, so if ByteDance doesn't the courts can't intervene. ByteDance can just keep slipping cash to Trump and he can just keep extending. That's a win for ByteDance and a win for Trump. If you believe TikTok's influence over young Americans and the data it can collect is a national security risk, then it's a loss for the American people, but no one cares about that. Even if you don't believe that, it's a loss for Congress, whose authority is being flouted -- but the current Congress seems fine with that in a hundred other situations, so why not this one? ByteDance has no motive to rock this boat.

Claude Rains and Peter Lorrie both played obviously homosexual men (Raines playing Renault in Casablanca and Lorrie playing Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon), telegraphed in such a way that it would make it past the Hayes Code. Heck, look at Johnny Guitar, with Joan Crawford playing as butch a character as you will find in the films.

But yeah, Some Like It Hot has so much straight and queer visual and dialogue innuendo running around it that it's absolutely nuts. When Tony Curtis's character blurts out in frustration "You’re a guy, and, why would a guy wanna marry a guy?”, Jack Lemmon's response is one of the great bits of movie dialogue "For the security!" Even the closing line, where Lemmon finally confesses he's a man, the response is "Nobody's perfect", which some regard as one of the great closing lines in cinema history.

Hollywood had to handle things carefully back in the day, and Wilder just as much as Hitchcock was a director who had a bag of tricks to foil the Hayes Code, so sometimes I actually wonder how Some Like It Hot ever got made. But this is the guy that directed The Apartment, so Wilder had a talent for getting blatantly sexual content past the censors.

Very well put.

Crypto bros think what they'll get from regulation is respect and trust, and they're right. But that respect and trust will arise from transparency, and that transparency will also show that the emperor has no clothes. Proper regulation of cryptocurrencies will spell the eventual end of cryptocurrencies, at least as they exist today. It'll take a while, but it will happen.

Perhaps along the way someone will come up with a cryptocurrency design that actually works as a currency, providing convenient, fast, low-cost transactions that somehow manage to be cheaper than moving numbers in an audited bank database. But unless that happens, real scrutiny and regulation of cryptocurrencies will just end them.

With very critical difference that the stuff sold by the Wall St. bros is repackaged ownership of real stuff. Real enterprises that make real products for real people, real commodities that people need, real debts that people have made legal commitments to repay, etc. The Wall Street bros.' stuff has actual value behind it, even if that value is obscured through many layers of packaging.

What the crypto bros have to sell is nothing. Nothing at all. The early promise of cryptocurrencies was that they would make transactions more flexible and cheaper, but cryptocurrency transaction fees are sky high and transactions are super slow. Then came the idea of tying them to smart contracts, but that idea is foolish for reasons that I'm happy to explain if anyone wants to know.

This is completely, totally wrong.

When you buy a share of stock, you're buying part of a real enterprise that produces and sells some sort of good or service, and has some sort of real-world assets (offices, factories, equipment, etc.), structured and managed to (hopefully) generate real profits by delivering real value to real people who want to buy it.

Cryptocurrencies are nothing at all like that. With them, you're buying some bits that have value only because people think they have value.

Some people might think that "has value only because people think it has value" is also a description of fiat currency, but that's just as wrong as equating stocks with cryptocurrencies, though that's a more complicated topic for another post.

Transaction fees, paid by the merchant.

Of course, like any cost of doing business for the merchant, the cost is passed onto the customer. In the case of credit card transaction fees and the rewards they fund, what happens is that people who don't use cards with expensive transaction fees subsidize the rewards for those who do. In most cases that means poor people and people who manage money poorly actually pay for the perks of rich people and people who manage money well.

Personally, I shamelessly maximize the benefit I get from rewards cards. I never pay any credit card interest because I pay my bills every month, so I happily free-ride on the people who use cash and debit cards, who fund the very nice perks I get. The system is what it is, so I exploit it. But I think it actually sucks and would support legislation that eliminates rewards cards or -- even better -- allows merchants to explicitly pass along the card transaction fees, called out as a line item on the receipt. Merchants should also estimate a cost-of-cash fee and add that to cash transactions (accepting cash is not free for merchants; it's actually rather expensive).

I think explicitly charging consumers for the cost of the transaction is the best option. It would enable markets to push transaction costs down, benefiting consumers and merchants alike. Banks wouldn't like it because they love taking a cut of every purchase. My guess is that we would still end up primarily using credit and debit cards because bank-based purely electronic payment will be the cheapest, but the transaction fees would drop dramatically and rewards cards would obviously disappear.