dtcwee: The Value of Nothing

Why you should want to work. People who don't want to work are often presented with 'The Ant and the Grasshopper' to prime them for shame and deprivation.

Don't hate on spenders. "What, like those folks who brag about taking the entire family to Disney World?" Yeah. Them. Those status-signalling conspicuous-consuming early-adopting aspirational arrivistes. They wanna flex buying SUVs on credit rather than a used station wagon with cash? Let 'em.

The space between us is smaller but the gap between our experiences is wider. How can science fiction help?

You miss 100% of the stupid decisions you don't make. Negative self-talk goes like this: I missed out on that opportunity because I'm too pushy/meek/vain/stupid/whatever. Astronaut, doctor, parent. There's no end to what could have been, but for some personal flaw.  The infinite number of missed opportunities far outweighs the finite number of wins attributable to your better characteristics.

The future of Japan's national pension (国民年金/Kokumin Nenkin), and that of Japan. Japan is at the vanguard of indebted aging societies, so there's a lot of debate about whether it's going to be OK, seeing as more than a few developed nations will also Japan-ify. Team "Prep for Armageddon" points to the huge national debt. Team "Shrug" points to that debt being overwhelmingly yen-denominated and domestically held. If indeed  each Japanese citizen is owed 9 million yen  (about USD90,000) what realistic claim do they have to it? Because how they might access it has ramifications not just for citizens, but the future of the country. That's what we're here to tease out.

You are probably selling your time for less than it is worth. The personal value of your time gets scarcer as you age and therefore more valuable. However employers and everyone else values what you output with your time, so unless you (spend time to) increase your effectiveness, the value of your time to them stays the same. Let's dive into this.

Education plus work equals money. Spend time (and cash) studying at a good school, spend skills on a good job, spend workdays boosting your reputation, and you will be rewarded with a nice middle-class life and retirement account. Well okay, that makes sense, but it may be the least efficient way to get rich.

How closely Inflation tracks Unemployment, Wages, Immigration, Interest Rates (and Debt), Trade, Currency, and Industrial Action, in Australia. Inflation scares a lot of people who remember the 1960s and 1970s with its  double-digit price rises eroding savings, investments, and wage gains. Since then, however, inflation and wages growth in the developed world has been low. Younger cohorts who haven't experienced rocketing prices (except in housing, education, and health) clamour for greater social assistance, particularly as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on, horrifying their elders who understandably fear that government largesse will re-awaken the inflation monster. Putting aside whether and how much inflation is desirable, many causes have been suggested, including unemployment, wages, immigration, central bank interest rates, the availability of debt, trade, currency strength, and the bargaining power of labour. All are compelling theories,

Problem: Samba shares do not appear in Windows File/Network Explorer. Cause: Because of 2017 ransomware, Windows stopped supporting the SMB1 protocol - the primary way Samba hosts are discovered on the network. Samba developers are not going fix  it. If, like me, you've found your Raspberry Pi (Raspbian) file server suddenly invisible, solutions follow.

Superannuation and housing are Australians' biggest assets. How do they compare in scale?

Industrialist Indigenous Australians?  In Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe portrays pre-contact Australian Aboriginals as agriculturalists rather than hunter-gatherers. 👨‍🌾 Why is this controversial? Because it challenges the persistent founding myth that Australia was inhabited by literal nobodies ; no one who could be considered civilised, and was therefore fair game for seizure. It's never cool to kill people and take their stuff, regardless of their governmental system. However, the easier they are to dehumanise, the easier it is to claim we were saving them from themselves, or honestly mistaken. There's a couple of ways to elevate the status of Indigenous Australians in the modern Australian mindset. Pascoe is one of the first to propose that First Australians were closer to British invaders than previously thought. Intending that Indigenous Australians would be respected more as farmers, he does little to challenge the notion of a civilizational hierarchy, implicitly still placi

Australian net migration and labour market to scale. 

Skilled migrants to Australia are apparently not doing what they were meant to : get jobs. 🦘👷 [MacroBusiness (MB)]: The notion that Australia’s migration program was ever ‘skilled’ is debunked by the empirical data from the Department of Home Affairs’ Continuous Survey of Australia’s Migrants. This survey shows that recent permanent migrants experienced higher rates of unemployment and are paid less than the general population: And the government has been sitting on this. Tsk. Tsk. Before borders reopen, let's use the opportunity to re-introduce a little conspiratorial thinking: [MB]: Thus, this ‘skilled’ migration program is actually undercutting local workers and adding to Australia’s unemployment queue. As such, it helped drive Australian wage growth to record lows : How, exactly? Migrant unemployment higher than the general population's implies that employers are preferring to employ local Australians (at presumably higher wages). If migrants are offering to work at sca

What if what you want just falls into your lap? ⚔ General Yue Fei was a Song dynasty patriot who fended off Jin incursions from the north, perhaps too efficiently. His devotion to killing invaders led to accusations of undermining peace efforts by traitorous bureaucrats. Left undefended by the decadent royalty he routinely rescued, he was executed for treason alongside his son. I was going to make a film about him, set in modern day. The central conceit was, "Would things have been different if Yue Fei had lived during the Nationalist period?" (Spoiler alert: given China's penchant for framing and executing effective commanders , no.) All I had after years of daydreaming were a few pitch elements, like targeting Father's Day, and swooping long takes to classical music. Then this happened: 

Whenever white people kill people of colour, as in 2021's anti-Asian shootings in Atlanta Georgia , this sort of counter-commentary appears: "Since the killing of six Asian women who worked in massage parlors in Atlanta, the media has amplified the false narrative that “white supremacy” is to blame.  ... official crime stats show that white people are significantly underrepresented in terms of the violent crime threat they pose to Asians."  ... citing FBI statistics , whereas whites comprise 62% of the population, they committed 24% of crimes against Asians in 2018.  In comparison, blacks, who comprise 13% of the population, committed 27.5% of all violent crimes against Asian Americans in 2018.  So clearly, white people do not represent the biggest crime threat to Asian Americans." Not only is this an attack on the media and its imagined agenda, it also implies that Asians can't tell who's assaulting them.

In 1940, 8.6 percent of women with children 18 and under were in the U.S. labor force.  Then America joined World War 2, and around six million women joined the civilian workforce.  Women may have saved the day during WWII, but when the war ended, things quickly changed. Soldiers were returning home and they needed jobs to help them get back on their feet and reacclimatize to civilian life. The managers who had previously begged women to help out were now forcing them back into their kitchens to free up jobs for men. By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over.  Why? 

It is tempting to assume that a weaker dollar💵 is to blame for inflation. All of this speaks to the problem with inflation today. Few know what it is. It’s currency devaluation , which means there’s no inflation fight to speak of. Just don’t devalue, but if you’re devaluing, stop. Reverse course. Inflation will cease.  After all, the causal narrative is very compelling: weaker dollar, imports get dearer, bam, inflation. It's also attractive because having currency in our arsenal means we can fear inflation less. Reality is more complex, with more actors. 

Beware of buying houses based on loan rate movements. 🏡🌏 Australian policymakers use lending rates to stabilise house prices. House prices are expected to move opposite to the interest rates charged by banks, which are set in line with the RBA's rates. When rates fall, borrowers can afford higher repayments, higher principal amounts, more expensive properties, and vice versa. However, this has not historically been uniform.