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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • hydrospanner@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    25 days ago

    Ignoring, for a moment, the inherent and fundamental differences between an individual and a state…

    …in my late 20s and early 30s I bought a new car.

    At the time, that car cost more than I had in my accounts plus my other possessions at the time. In fairness, my annual income was more than the total cost of the car, buuuut I also was carrying tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt as well, meaning my overall total debt was significantly higher than my annual income, or my “personal GDP” if you will.

    Yet when I applied for my car loan, it came through with easy approval and I even qualified for the best possible interest rate.

    Why? Because I’ve always paid on my debts adequately and promptly.

    Nobody bats an eye when a couple buys a house that costs more than what they can cover with their combined income in one year. Why? Because that’s an arbitrary and unrealistic yard stick of comparison and nobody expects them to pay off a house in a year. They’re able to buy their house and live in it immediately, and pay for it incrementally, over time, as they earn over the coming years because of debt. And the bank is willing to lend the money because they’ll make money in the long run through interest.

    Similarly, it’s unreasonable to imply that the US shouldn’t carry more debt than it’s GDP because the two metrics aren’t directly linked in any way. And since the US has excellent credit worthiness, that debt is far safer than the bank’s loan to the homebuyers. And the US gains access to borrowed funds by setting it’s own interest rates through the Fed, which tells lenders exactly how much they’ll make in interest if they let the US government borrow some of their money.

    And since the US is a safer bet than homebuyers, that’s why home interest rates are higher than the rate at the Fed: if they were equal, banks would never lend to homebuyers since they could get the same return by lending to the government. So instead, they set their own, higher rates for homebuyers, to account for the higher risk of lending to a party who has a much higher likelihood of default.






  • The Autodesk forums are 40% this, 20% “just learn to program, spend a few years getting good at it, then write yourself a custom script to do what you are struggling with”, 20% “you are wrong for wanting that in the first place” or “you are wrong for having this issue”, 15% “this has been brought up once at some point in the past two decades, try searching”, 4% “OMG yes I have this issue too!”…

    …and 1% split between actual helpful answers, and confirmation that it’s a known issue.







  • While I agree with you in principle, I’m not sure the newspaper example supports your position, although it is an apt analogy.

    I would imagine that the counter argument would take the form of something like, “Yes, you don’t have to read the whole paper, but you can’t just buy the comics. You buy the whole paper, get access to the whole thing, and the ads come with it. Similarly, with our web presence, in order to access everything, whether you choose to consume it all or not, the ads must come as a part of it.”

    Personally, I don’t fully agree with either that argument or yours, can see the merits and flaws of both, and fall somewhere in the middle.

    I’d argue that while they’re within their rights to create, distribute, bundle, and price their content as they see fit, just like the current debate with social media companies, your monitor is your own personal, privately owned platform, and you shouldn’t/can’t be forced to offer a platform to any content you don’t wish to publish (to your audience of one). So you’re perfectly within your rights to want and attempt to only view the content you wish to see, while they’re also perfectly within their rights to want and attempt to package their content in such a way that links their articles with the advertisements of their sponsors.

    So at that point, it’s just an arms race between the producer doing their best to force ads onto screens and consumers doing their best to avoid same. Neither side is morally right or wrong, and while there likely is a middle ground that wild be acceptable to both parties, there’s zero good faith between the two sides which would be necessary to establish that middle ground.