starspangled

> When USA do the same, the non-USA dollar holders also take on the cost

They don't. If they aren't holding USD or something pegged to it then it is not devalued.

In other words, what I said was correct.

> That is not the same thing because it's real productivity, labor is the only thing in the world that has any real value.

Note that I'm strictly discussing this topic using words in the way you'd find them defined in a reputable dictionary or a high school economics book.

I didn't say Americans aren't living beyond their means. Just that on the face of it they aren't living beyond their means due to their currency's status if that status gives them some means to buy more. OP just didn't really provide a rationale as to why it's this currency issue in particular that you can point to to say Americans are living beyond their means.

Lots of countries have a lot of debt, many are in similar boats or worse as USA when you look at various metrics like debt per capita, per gdp, etc. Politicians and their "experts" and economists etc generally insist this is perfectly fine. I also get the feeling they're probably lying about that and many other things, though I don't know enough about the subject to actually know myself.

The fact remains that the data we have says the value of US manufacturing is about 50% of that of China. You have your own perceptions of value of course, but that's not how value is actually calculated. The same as people who perceive China's manufacturing to be worthless because they produce cheap flimsy junk is also not an indication of any reality other than their own.

It's not a reserve currency because the US decided it is, it's a reserve currency because everybody else decided it is. They decided that because they decided it was in their own best interest to trade in and maintain reserves of USD.

But whatever difference it makes is still just a matter of degrees. Countries keep reserves of and trade in currencies other than USD. Some get more benefit than others from this, and they all work to benefit from what advantage they can take from their own positions within their means to do so.

Many countries control their currency and can print money to pay debts, and can control their fiscal and monetary policies to best gain advantage for themselves. And they do.

US can do some things more, bigger, longer, etc., for various reasons. Just like Australia can do more, bigger, longer, etc., than Tonga. I don't really see anything profound being said here.

USA might be in some advantageous position now, and it might not always be in such a position, which is a pretty bland observation, but it also does not support the idea that they are living beyond their means today.

No, the meaning of the phrase "living beyond one's means" doesn't go to the unavoidable fact that circumstances change over time. I will one day become infirm and unable to earn money, that does not mean I'm currently living beyond my means.

US dollars might one day cease to be the global reserve currency in which case Americans will not see such benefits associated with that. This is a true statement. That doesn't mean they are currently living beyond their means either though.

I'm not asking what it's called, I'm asking why that's claimed to be out of their means when it quite clearly is within their means to have this exorbitant privilege, as evidenced by the fact that they have exorbitant privilege.

Even if we take what you wrote as fact, that does not answer how it is living beyond their means if their means includes "providing mainly a financial service, by managing the dollar".

> No, it is more like these companies monopolized access to the high income market and exploited this inefficiency. It is similar to buying a stock for $10 then increasing the bid ask spread to sell it for $100.

Okay so we have this scenario you constructed where the Chinese company produced great value without engaging in any IP theft or unbalanced terms of trade or currency manipulation and the American company simply took that and gouged prices with anticompetitive practices. What exactly is your question? The hypothetical American company in your example did not create value, by definition. I don't see how that's particularly useful though.

> Only on a dollar value basis.

Uh, yes.

> And that's heavily skewed on how an item's value is calculated.

An item's value is calculated according to what it is bought and sold for. That's how value is determined. What would you rather it "skew" towards?

> When you use $50 of parts (all made in China) to assemble a machine that you sold at $500 , $50 of GDP value is attributed to China while $450 of GDP value is attributed to the US. But who did more "manufacturing"?

If an American company can design and develop and sell a product that requires $50 of parts and people are willing to pay $500 for it, then clearly that company created an enormous amount of value, didn't it? By definition almost. Manufacturing output or value is not a function of the number of beads of sweat or drops of blood or hours in a factory to make something. It is how much value (i.e., what others are willing to pay for) the things you create.

> It gets massive amounts of products and services enabling the US residents live well beyond their means.

What does this mean really? That is their means.

For a somewhat topical example, people of Australia get access to cheap medications (in part because they pay to subsidize the cost of them but also because) their government negotiates with pharmaceutical corporations to pay lower prices. This kind of negotiation would be completely out of reach of any private Australian person, but they are not living outside their means. Their means includes the means to elect governments to run the country for the benefit of its own people including doing things like securing lower prices for medications.

> China for example, sends huge number of electronics and all kind of other consumer goods that Chinese produce by sweating in 12 hours shifts in 6 day work weeks in exchange for imaginary numbers.

Until 1990, Kenya had a higher GDP per capia than China. It is absolutely not "imaginary". Work produces real value, just because you can represent or trade that for allegedly "imaginary" currency does not mean that the value created was imaginary.

> US is definitely not the victim here. There's the risk of this system stop working and that's when the US might have hard times due to being forced to live by its means and have no ability to kickstart its own production when that time comes.

US manufacturing output is double that of China's on a per-capita basis.

> It makes sense to be worried for such an eventuality but US is definitely not being taken advantage here.

Seems like that's the popular assertion but I don't see much solid reasoning behind it in this thread (not picking on you specifically), just handwaving about how USD's status as a global currency somehow makes trade deficits inevitable despite simple facts available that US had a surplus trade balance 50 years ago, when the USD has been considered the global / reserve currency for over 60 years.

Really? You rm -rf your working trees each evening before you finish, and git clone them from github in the morning? :)

I store my code in a completely distributed fashion, often in several places on different local devices (laptop, build server, backup, etc) not to mention on remote systems. I use github and gitlab for backup and distribution purposes, as well as alternative ways people can share code with me (other than sending patch emails), and other people use git to get and collaborate on my work.

distributed version control system doesn't mean distributed storage magically happens. You still need to store your code on storage you trust at some level. The distributed in DVCS means that collaboration and change management is distributed. All version control operations can be performed on your own copy of a tree with no other involvement. Person A can collaborate with person B, then person B can collaborate with person C without person A being in the loop, etc.

Well it does mean "no modifications" to the hypothesis, hypothesis being about performance of code A and B. Code B' would be a change.

It's just semantics, but the point is that the article wasn't saying the same thing OP was worried about. There's nothing wrong with testing B, B', B'', etc. until you find a significant performance improvement. You just wouldn't test B several times and take the last set of data when it looks good. Almost goes without saying really.