A couple of intriguing quotes from Reddit’s Men’s Rights subreddit.
The topic at hand: A Redditor claims an ex falsely accused him of rape and caused him various other problems and basically acted like a shit. No one, of course, can possibly know if the guy is telling the truth, but the r/mr regulars all assume the alleged false accuser is guilty until proven innocent. (And maybe not even then.)
Naturally, some of the regulars use this as an opportunity to discuss how completely understandable it is when guys kill their exes.
Really, in this misandrist world, dudes murdering their exes is totally like slaves murdering their masters. Illegal, sure, but who can blame them? At least that’s how texaswildfires sees it:
Yep, in his mind, dudes today are totally in the exact same situation as slaves in the antebellum south — so when a guy murders his ex, the person you should feel empathy with is the murderer.
Naturally, both of these comments got upvotes, because that’s just how r/mr rolls these days.
Brandon:
She’d be leaving with the clothes on her back and without the kids, then. Eventually she might want to buy something, like food. And the same people who say “why didn’t she just walk out” will say “how irresponsible of her to leave the kids with someone she knew was violent” when the inevitable happens.
I realize you don’t have kids and live off money you find on the sidewalk (because any other way of making a living involves the other people of whom you profess to be independent), but do you at least recognize intellectually that there are people about whom this is not true?
@Pecunium: My feelings towards floating money is neutral: It can be good and bad depending on what policies the government enacts and how many times they increase or decrease the money supply.
The point that I think is bad is fiat money. Paper money that gets it’s value based on peoples perception on the countries economy.
It’s like short selling a stock. The stock starts to go down, people start noticing it, people start short selling it more, stock price goes down, more people sell short, cycle continues because each time the price does down it reaffirms the current short sellers and more people take notice and the number of short sellers increases furthering the steep decline in price.
And this can happen all while the company behind the stock is doing well.
I believe in a currency system that is NOT based on the “full faith and credit” of a nation because “full faith…” is a meaningless term and is based solely on people’s perceptions (which are fickle) instead of something more tangible.
He’s basically trying to say he believes in gold without admitting it. I mean really, “Instead of something more tangible.”?
Earth to Brandon: ALL ECONOMIC VALUE IS DRIVEN BY PERCEPTION. YOU ARE NOT PLAYING THE CORRECT GAME IF YOU WANT TO AVERT THIS.
@Rutee: Economic value is more than just perception. It is also based off of wants and needs both perceived and actual. While perception is an important factor…it isn’t the only factor.
Brandon: Define “floating currency”
But, until electronics, gold was useless outside of the “oooh, shiny” factor. Its worth, like diamonds, is largely because people associate it with wealth. You can’t make anything except for decorations (and electronic components, I guess?) out of it, you can’t eat it, it won’t keep you warm.
@Brandon
Did you know that the price of gold changes over time, according to how much people want it and how rare it is, or how valuable people think it is? Here is a helpful little chart. Currency is always going to be relative, be it printed or found. The market crash you’re talking about? Can happen with gold as well (and it looks like it already has in the past).
Because floating currencies can be, de facto, fiats. That’s the point I was making with my referent of the USSR. They had a “Hard” currency, for all the time they were in business. But, when they needed more money, they just printed it.
Monetary policy is the controlling factor, not the theoretical underpinning of the currency.
Take Mexico, ca. 1960. The Dollar was worth 5 pesos. But the 1 Peso coin, was a little heavier than the 1 dollar coin. So anyone who lived on the border could (and lots did) go across, trade dollars for pesos and come home, with a four dollar surplus in specie.
This, as you may imagine, further damaged the Mexican economy, because there was less money in it, because it wasn’t worth what it was said to be worth, in practical terms.
Specie isn’t magic. People didn’t want the £ because it was a pound of .90 silver, they wanted it because the British economy was stable. Nothing to do with the Gold/Silver reserves.
And your idea the economy is able to be larger than the gold reserves… How do you do that. If you have a billion dollars in currency (that is, equal to a 1bn valuation of the gold in reserve), how does that money move about? If you have a 10bn economy how do the bills get paid? There is 90 percent of your stuff being bought/paid for with what?
What happens if people claim their money in gold?
That’s one of Ron Paul’s big things… he says that FDR, ‘Defaulted” on the US when his administration stopped redeeming dollars for gold. What happens if you have more need for means of transfer than you have means to transfer?
Money isn’t a “thing” it’s an idea. It says that, in exchange for this abstraction, I’ll give you a thing. We agree that this abstraction is worth the thing. Inflation is a change in what the accepted value of the abstraction is. It can’t be avoided.
But all money is fiat. There was no reason for an oz of gold to be worth 20USD. The Gov’t just said it was. Which is valuation by fiat.
random 6×7: But, until electronics, gold was useless outside of the “oooh, shiny” factor. Its worth, like diamonds, is largely because people associate it with wealth. You can’t make anything except for decorations (and electronic components, I guess?) out of it, you can’t eat it, it won’t keep you warm.
It makes superb pans, esp. skillets.
But it’s damned expensive. Only ever been done as an experiment to see how well it worked. The people who can afford it (if they knew about it; it takes a serious fan of both cooking, and physics to find even references to the paper) don’t care enough about cooking to spend that kind of money to make the lives of the people who cook for them that much more fun.
The people who would like it, can’t afford it (imagine an 10″ skillet, say by Mauviel, made not in copper, but of an 18kt gold… the cost would be… prohibitive).
The same thing that Pecunium was talking about happens with banks as well. If a bunch of people want to withdraw money from their account, the banks may not have enough physical currency to perform all those withdrawals.
If money were more physical, would this problem go away? Nope. Not only to banks lend out money, depleting their store beyond what people put in, but they spend the money via investments which may not pay back immediately. No matter what form the money takes, you get this problem of having less money in the bank then people put in.
Kirby: “Fractional Reserve Banking”. One of the reforms the big banks were opposed to was increasing the percentage of actual cash in reserve, as opposed to assets on the books they were required to keep.
The problem, of course, was with the repeal of Glass-Steagal, the nature of the assets became much more volatile than simple mortgages. Making “securitised mortgages” illegal might help with that, since the banks were unwilling to actually scrutinise the paper they were buying, and then engaged in fraudulent practises to deal with the problems their greed created.
Hey Brandon, I know you’re really excited that there’s gold in them thar hills and all, but you still haven’t told us what the abused lady with no car or money and a tiny screaming child should do yet.
Lauralot, you silly goose, she should still leave. She could just sit in the street crying along with tiny child, and people will give her things!
Lauralot: The general consensus of the, “get out” school of thought is that she needs to leave, or accept the consequences.
Attempting to defend herself, if he’s not actively trying to kill her, at that moment, would be wrong and immoral.
Brandon
Did you read the internet novel now available in full length:sensation with conspiracy theorists : “Light’s Out!”? I’m guessing if you’ve read anything in the past decade that would be it.
I cannot recommend that sane people with over a sixth grade level of reading comprehension read it, but it seems it’s a cult book amongst those that believe what Brandon believes. Maybe he never bothered to read the book and just gets tips from others who have? Either way I read it, meaning Light’s out!.
I have to say that I really got a lot out of The Fountainhead when I was 15. I had told my parents I didn’t want to go to university, my dad gave it to me and said “if you can get through this and justify your reasons we’ll talk.”. For anyone that has read that book (actually) you could imagine the discussions that would go on (or did in my case and should) after a 15 year old has read it.
After reading it I was on top of the world so to speak, after talking/arguing with my dad I realized I was just a peg.
But you Brandon you’ve read it or not are highly influenced by “Light’s Out!”. Golf cart batteries, the women not being able to handle not having a shower, the supermarket employees showing up for work, everything just falling into place for the “moral man”.
The reality is Brandon if things hit the fan you’re sitting on your computer all day, you are going to be dead. It’s not a bad thing, I live right downtown on a high floor and if it was the end of the world frankly I’d want to be amongst the first to die not the last.
get over it little man. Life always ends in death.