toasted

fellow econtalk/cumtown (well more red scare) listener here..

The latest feed refresh used to make me feel "Wow how will I have time to listen to all of these!" whereas now its "God do I really want to listen to any of these."

I guess previously we were all starved of interesting long form conversations (or socialist edgelords) but now we're reasonably satiated and like anything else it has to be good to hold our attention.

I still find a good econtalk pod is one of my greatest pleasures - russ & munger episodes particularly.

google sonostar, bargain a bit for a good price :)

Cool project :)

I just got back from shenzhen where I purchased a handheld ultrasound probe with built-in screen about the size of a really chunky smartphone for $1800 with wifi & connection to ios/android

Off-topic - but currently in India and the uber experience is absolutely amazing.

The handful of times we have used taxi drivers, none of them can find the place where we are staying even with written directions in english and in hindi or even with a hindi speaking person instructing them via the phone. There is always some niggle over pricing and whatever you pay them they claim you are shortchanging them.

With uber they go to the right place EVERY TIME, there is no haggling at all, they dont try to angle for tips but are very grateful if they get tipped. It is a complete gamechanger for travel in these areas.

This is fantastic.

Have there been tangible environmental gains from all the money being invested?

Take land - demand for it changes over time, the exact same amount is in circulation as there was 200 years ago, the value goes up as population increases and it becomes more scarce, why can't money be the same?

> Nobody really knows how this ends, good or bad.

Efficient market theory is based on the fact that when you leave people to their own devices, they tend to do a far better job and be better off than if you try to help them. Basically everyone agrees on that.

So why do we accept efficient market theory for basically everything, yet when it comes to currency someone has decided that we need elaborate schemes of variable government decreed micromanagement in order for things to work?

In terms of keeping things simple and letting the market decide, the perfect currency would be global, unable to be printed or manipulated, of a fixed amount, so that external interference is impossible, and people knew exactly what they were dealing with at all times. The closest we have is gold (and maybe bitcoin).

Unless the investments bomb and no value is created eg. the clean energy investments of the last 10 years

Wait - but quantitative easing usually involves buying back government bonds (in recent times it has also involved buying riskier instruments like collateralized debt obligations (eg. bundled mortages from freddy mac/fannie mae))

But government bonds are issued by the government as a form of govt debt to finance the federal government deficit.

So doesn't that mean that money IS being printed to finance government deficit? It's just that it goes through a slightly convoluted path to get there?

Total vaporware.. consumers vastly overestimate the value of their own attention and assume it can fund expensive things like this. If it can be ad supported why do you need to pay $10 for the "app" via kickstarter?

Has anyone considered the grameen model of peer pressure lending in P2p marketplaces?

You signup with your facebook account, it records all the details of your facebook friends, and if you go into default on your loan for more than 3 payments then it starts contacting your facebook friends automatically and stating that unfortunately you were unable to keep up with your debts and could your friends chip in some money to help cover things??

the threat of losing face would probably decrease default rates significantly, therefore allowing a decreased interest rate to be charged.

So amazon's market cap of 144b is theoretical because they don't have profits? And bezos should be paid enough salary to survive but not so much that he is no longer "hungry"?

Because regardless of whether profit is there, they should be able to extract value if they want to.