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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • It’s hard to buy candy for yourself as an adult because you know it’s nothing but love handles and tooth decay in shiny wrappers. But if it comes into your orbit once a year without buying it, it’s tempting.

    Of course, when my kid was small he basically didn’t bother eating it at all. He’d get like 100 pieces of candy and they’d linger around until Christmas. When I was a kid we’d get pillowcases full and it’d be gone in days. Not sure if that’s a generational thing or if my son was just not very motivated by sweets.


  • There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

    The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.


  • Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.

    Economists don’t know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

    Oh shit, it’s religion again.