atweiden

> Once the marginal productivity of physical capital is below the real interest rate people will abandon production even if there is a shortage of products and people are starving on the street.

Given the profit margin on farming is something like 10%, and assuming the average annual purchasing power appreciation of our hypothetical global currency of fixed supply equals the Fed’s inflation target of 2% plus 0.25% GDP growth, how do we arrive at people “starving on the street”?

> If you want to discourage consumption you should introduce consumption taxes for natural resources, co2 and other forms of pollution

Surely the level of taxation necessary to curb industrial and retail usage of fossil fuels to the same extent of global deflationary economics would make the taxation measures politically infeasible. The tax policy would need to result in unthinkably high prices to create the drastic changes necessary. Deflation OTOH would lead to a decline in capital investment, employment, and spending without requiring any level of forcible compulsion.

A global currency of fixed supply would realistically deliver a sufficiently powerful financial incentive to galvanize widespread, voluntary adoption of ecologically sustainable consumer behaviour and business practices.

> by maintaining full employment

Particularly with the rise of automation and AI, is maintaining full employment really an achievable goal? We desperately need a way for the majority of humans to subsist without working bullshit jobs [1].

> hence the need to force ever greater quantities of money into the economy to keep it alive

We’re facing ecological collapse precisely because humanity has chased infinite growth.

> “As the lockdown to stop the spread of coronavirus in India continues, pollution levels across much of the country have dropped sharply. Now some residents in northern India say they can see the snow-capped Himalayas 200 kilometres away for the first time in 30 years.” [1]

If we had a global deflationary economic system, the incentive to invest in capital and engage in consumerism would dissipate. People would work less, because there would be less reason to work. Without work, people would have less reason to travel. Pollution would drop accordingly.

Under a deflationary economic system, a touch over $480,000 in savings would yield an effective “UBI” of $1000/mo [2].

Once adopted by the entire world, a global currency of fixed supply controlled by computer algorithms could achieve this. Humans would voluntarily work less and pollute less.

It also myopically focuses on household debt. But household debt is significantly lower than either corporate debt or government debt [1].

The biggest debtors benefit the most from inflation — quantitatively speaking, the debts of ordinary people aren’t very big.

Raku’s built-in grammars make parsers trivial to write. I effortlessly created two [2] — one for reordering fstab entries, and the other for converting human-readable LUKS offsets into cryptsetup sectors — on a lazy afternoon. Grammars in Raku make this second nature.

Then you have Raku’s multi-dispatch. It is more capable than Erlang/Elixir pattern matching:

    # a list with at least one element, extracting the head and tail
    multi sub tail(*@list ($head, *@tail)) { @tail }
    multi sub tail(*@list) { @list }

    [3]
    ==> tail()
    ==> say(); # []

    [3, 4]
    ==> tail()
    ==> say(); # [4]

    # pattern matching with arbitrary guards
    multi sub user($name where { is-valid-user($_) }) { $name.say }
    multi sub user($name) { "invalid name: $name".say }

    sub is-valid-user($name)
    {
        # notice the additive character class in this regex: “letters plus digits”
        # fail the match if $name is root
        try with $name ~~ /(<+:Letter +digit>+)/ { $0 ne 'root' or fail }; $!.not
    }

    user('name'); # name
    user('1234'); # 1234
    user('root'); # invalid name: root

    class Coordinates
    {
        has $.latitude is required;
        has $.longitude is required;
    }

    class City
    {
        has Str:D $.name is required;
        has Str:D $.state is required;
        has Str:D $.country is required;
        has Coordinates:D $.coordinates is required;
    }

    my $latitude = -37.840935;
    my $longitude = 144.946457;
    my Coordinates $coordinates .= new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
    my Str:D $name = 'Melbourne';
    my Str:D $state = 'Victoria';
    my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
    my City $melbourne .= new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);

    my City:D $sydney = do {
        my Coordinates:D $coordinates = do {
            my $latitude = -33.86514;
            my $longitude = 151.209900;
            Coordinates.new(:$latitude, :$longitude);
        };
        my Str:D $name = 'Sydney';
        my Str:D $state = 'New South Wales';
        my Str:D $country = 'Australia';
        City.new(:$name, :$state, :$country, :$coordinates);
    };

    # deeply nested argument deconstruction
    multi sub melbourne-or-bust(
        City:D $city (
            Str:D :$name where 'Melbourne',
            Str:D :$state,
            Str:D :$country,
            :$coordinates (
                :$latitude,
                :$longitude
            )
        )
    )
    {
        my $gist = qq:to/EOF/.trim;
        Welcome to the city of $name. It’s located in $state, $country.

        GPS coordinates: $latitude, $longitude
        EOF
        $gist.say;
    }

    multi sub melbourne-or-bust(City:D $city)
    {
        'This isn’t Melbourne.'.say;
    }

    melbourne-or-bust($melbourne); # Welcome to the city of Melbourne ...
    melbourne-or-bust($sydney); # This isn’t Melbourne

Perl 6 took a long time to make, but how much did that matter? What was Perl going to do about Rails, Clojure, Go, Rust, JS/TS, and more? The world of programming languages used to be a lot smaller than it is today.

> Perl 6 had a new different syntax.

Inline::Perl5 [3] allows running legacy Perl 5 code in Perl 6 codebases.

That’s a great question, and one Jude C. Nelson — who has a PhD in distributed systems from Princeton — is better equipped to answer [1] than me (or you, probably):

“PoW requires less proactive trust and coordination between community members than PoS -- and thus is better able to recover from both liveness and safety failures -- precisely because it both (1) provides a computational method for ranking fork quality, and (2) allows anyone to participate in producing a fork at any time. If the canonical chain is 51%-attacked, and the attack eventually subsides, then the canonical chain can eventually be re-established in-band by honest miners simply continuing to work on the non-attacker chain. In PoS, block-producers have no such protocol -- such a protocol cannot exist because to the rest of the network, it looks like the honest nodes have been slashed for being dishonest. Any recovery procedure necessarily includes block-producers having to go around and convince people out-of-band that they were totally not dishonest, and were slashed due to a "hack" (and, since there's lots of money on the line, who knows if they're being honest about this?).”