Broke and depressed

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  • 12 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • SociallyIneptWeeb@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•Check mate atheists
    154·
    6 months ago

    You seriously believe in Lamarck? Like, I don’t know, I’m not a native speaker, maybe I’m missing something.

    How many fucking times do we have to repeat this: TRAITS ACQUIRED DURING LIFETIME ARE NON-INHERITABLE

    If you lose your fingers in an industrial accident, your children aren’t going to be born fingerless, are they?

    Giraffes don’t have long necks because one little giraffe long, long ago tried really, really hard to grow a longer neck, but because giraffes who had been born with longer necks could compete better than those without, and pass on their genes. And they got those necks due to mutations.

    Environmental pressure selects for benefitial mutations, while the mutations themselves are random. That’s literally the mechanism of evolution through natural selection.

  • SociallyIneptWeeb@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•How Does a Country's Debt Affect its Citizens?
    101·
    11 months ago

    Ok, so the idea that “government debt is the debt of the citizens” is not entirely true.

    In general government takes on debt if it’s planned spending is bigger than its revenue.

    There are many reasons for that phenomenon, the main being, that the government undertakes many programmes (for example social security) that it needs to pay for, as well as the cost of its operations etc. being bigger than the profits from those operations.

    There are two types of govt debt - external (owed to foreigners) and internal - owed to its own citizens (which is why saying that each individual citizen “owes” some amount of govt debt is inaccurate). The latter is mostly in the form of govt bonds and loans from national banks.

    There are two main impacts of govt debt:

    1. High debt can cause an increase in interest rates, which will lead to a fall in private investment (which is a component of GDP, and translates to future economic growth i.e. high debt --> high interest rates --> lower investment --> slower growth)

    2. And obvious one is the risk of a sovereign debt crisis like in Greece, when the government is unable to repay its debt, leading to an economic crisis, collapse of the economy, IMF loans and all that “good stuff”. That is an extreme situation, and usually means that the country is in deep shit regardless of debt.

    There are also tangentially related risks.

    1. Inflation - One might ask “Why not issue more money to pay off the debt?” Inflation is the answer why. According to theory, one of the forms of inflation is monetary inflation, when there is so much currency available, that the purchasing power of the currency unit (i.e. $1, 1€ etc.) falls, so prices rise to keep up with the fall.

    2. The decrease in purchasing power of the currency also means, that foreign currencies become “stronger” in relation to it. That’s good if you’re earning your wages in dollars, but your home currency is falling (since your wages effectively rise in value) but if you’re in the opposite situation it can be a problem.

  • SociallyIneptWeeb@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.ml•We can all agree on that, right?
    1429·
    1 year ago

    Honestly I don’t even know where to start with this, so I’ll keep it simple. Enshittification of Twitter, Reddit et al. is not necessarily a result of capitalism, and likewise Fediverse doesn’t exist because “workers took the means of production”.

    For example the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly” (that’s why swear words and gore are banned), and in part due to a need to follow existing copyright law.

    Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.