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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • radix@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldHonest
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    24 days ago

    We can start with the opposite: deflation.

    If your money is worth less today than it will be tomorrow, you won’t spend it. Burying every extra penny in your back yard would be the optimal saving strategy. But if nobody spent money outside the absolute essentials, commerce would grind to a halt. No jobs, no entertainment, no standard of living.

    So the central bank wants a little inflation. It encourages people to spend some, powering the economy. Too much is bad, though, so they target 2-3% annually. The number of levers and dials they have to make that happen is finite, so it doesn’t always fall in that range over a given short time period, but it’s pretty accurate in the long term.

    By printing more/less money, or making borrowing easier/harder (the fed rate, in the US), they can influence the amount of cash floating around to try to keep things in that ideal range.

    Whether a currency-based economy is the best way to distribute resources is a whole different discussion, but every modern society works essentially this way.





  • radix@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldWhat number is supposed to be here?
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    25 days ago

    I still vote for 3.

    The 7 above is also missing some dots on the right, so there’s an entire vertical strip of erased ink. The numbers are up to 5 dots wide, but the existing 3 only has 4 dots on the bottom. It’s possible that a fifth is supposed to be there one spot higher, matching the missing number, but it just got clipped by the erased part.



  • It’s like the saying, “is it wrong because it’s illegal, or is it illegal because it’s wrong?” It’s a recognition that the law doesn’t perfectly overlap what’s morally correct.

    Anti-heroes live in that ‘moral-but-not-legal’ area. Contrast that with people who bend the written law to serve immoral ends. Fascists tend to be Lawful Evil.