David J. Shourabi Porcel

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  • 26 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2024

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  • The price of goods going down is not contained to one country. […] Deflation would be global.

    That contradicts both present reality and future expectations as far as I understand both.

    In the past two years, China has been grappling with deflationary tendencies at the same time that much of the world has been experiencing extraordinary inflation.

    China’s current deflationary tendencies stem from a combination of relatively low domestic demand and an ongoing decrease in exports. This decrease in exports was mostly caused by US protectionism, which is set to expand in both rates and scope under Trump.

    Looking forward, the divergence I aluded to –deflation in China, inflation elsewhere– seems poised to continue. Further protectionism and the looming tariff war –not only with China, but possibly with Canada, Mexico and others– are expected to both fuel inflation in the United States and further reduce imports of Chinese goods. That would strengthen deflationary tendencies in China unless the government pulls off a stimulus package for their domestic economy more effective than the ones deployed thus far.


  • On the one hand, one Raspberry Pi would not really suffice. As @theherk@lemmy.world argued, you would need legitimate email addresses, which would require either circumventing the antibot measures of providers like Google or setting up your own network of domains and email servers. Besides that, GitHub would (hopefully) notice the barrage of API requests from the same network. To avoid that and make your API requests seem legitimate, you would need infrastructure to spread your requests in time and across networks. You would either build and maintain that infrastructure yourself –which would be expensive for a single star-boosting operation– or, well, pay for the service. That’s why these things exist.

    On the other hand, although bad programmers might use these services to star-boost their otherwise mediocre code, as you suggest, there are other –at least conceivable, if not yet proven– use cases, such as:

    • the promotion of less secure software as part of supply chain attacks, with organizations sticking to vulnerable libraries or frameworks in the erroneous belief that they are more popular and better maintained than alternatives, for example;
    • typosquatting; and
    • plain malware distribution.








  • If money should never become an asset worth holding, how can inflation be better than deflation for the working class?

    It’s deflation that turns money into an asset worth holding and thus slows down economies. Too much inflation isn’t good either, for different reasons. A slight and stable inflation is the sweet spot.

    Proportionately, the rich hold a lot more money assets than the poor, who generally don’t hold any or very little.

    Indeed, the rich do proportionately hold a lot more money than the poor, but it isn’t much. The rich mostly have shares in corporations, bonds and real estate.

    Inflation is generally worse for workers than for the rich because the latter have more pricing power. If both your living expenses and your income after taxes increased by 20%, you’d even end up with more money than before, assuming your living expenses were a fraction of your income. Unfortunately, prices haven’t risen equally; the cost of living increase has generally outpaced real wage growth. The rich have been able to set higher prices; workers haven’t been able to extract high enough wage raises.

    Neither high inflation nor deflation are good for workers. What workers need is pricing power through strong unions and political support.




  • “The economy” in this instance being a playground for the rich.

    People won’t stop paying for food or rent just because their money might be worth a little more tomorrow.

    Indeed, people won’t stop paying for everyday necessities, but the economy consists of more than just individual people: there’s the state and there are businesses too. You conflate the latter with “the rich”, which is generally true for corporations, but corporations are not the only form of business; there are cooperatives, partnerships, and others which can distribute profits more fairly. In any case, deflation affects all businesses, including fair ones, and the state itself. As another commentator suggested, money is meant to change hands and should never become an asset worth holding.


  • So what should be done to the country that blew up Germany’s oil pipes?

    Thank them, whomever they were, for forcing Germany to finally move on from an economic model that was untenable not only for her international partners, but for her own population. Had the Nord Stream pipelines not been so severely damaged, the prospect of cheap industrial inputs may once more have tempted the business establishment to sell out Germany’s partners and public interest for higher private margins; now, even if the upcoming election should yield a government friendlier towards Russia, rebuilding the Nord Stream pipelines –and with them a Trojan horse that had been looming over the European project– would be impracticable.


  • To my knowledge, Zelenskyy only expressed support for Israel after October the 7th, 2023, over a year and a half after Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine — a year and a half during which Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian Authority could have condemned Russia’s war against Ukraine. They didn’t, presumably, for the same reason Zelenskyy has expressed support for Israel: to avoid antagonizing their allies, morals be damned. Given their dire situation –both Ukraine and the Palestinians rely heavily on their respective allies for military and diplomatic support–, I think we ought to give them a pass. If you disagree, at least apply the same logic to both and condemn them equally.