If money is just an accounting entry, why do we spend so much time worrying about it?
After all, nobody lies awake worrying whether there are enough metres or kilograms. They are simply units we use to measure things.
If money is just the unit we use to organise economic activity, why does it dominate politics?
Metres and kilos stay the same size however many of them we have. The same is not true of money. Therefore the quantity of money is a useful thing to think about…..
Prof Potato keeps on behaving as if he has discovered the Philosopher’s Stone, when everything he says is either trivial or wrong.
I suppose he’s discovered the Philosopher’s Sand. Or perhaps Mud.
By the size of him he’s probably discovered the Philosopher’s Scone.
Since everything he says turns out to be a load of wank, I think he’s produced the Philosopher’s Sperm.
He could do with the loss of a stone..
…like me…
Lord Percy turns his hand to alchemy and succeeds in creating something green.
O/T: Spudcell – a totally synthetic cell from U Minnesota. Surely they could have picked a better name?
Examiner: “What is Avogadro’s number?”
Spud as a chemistry student: “What do you want it to be?”
“Dunno. I’ll go and ava gadro.”
602,214,076,000,000,000,000,000
and fixed as the mole was defined as this constant as an SI base constant in 2019 so it’s not changing in our lifetimes.
I have a mole in my garden. I never knew it had so many particles!
An average garden mole contains roughly 17 moles of atoms — which, delightfully, means one mole is about 17 moles.
Only one way to get rid of a mole Nick: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Jli3EQCII
Or for engineers, 6e23. Exactly. Just like light is 300,000,000 exactly.
Same for biologists… the extra decimals really don’t matter much , except in edge cases, because the number itself is so stonkingly huge..
And you *rarely* have to work with that much precision.
Except for Climate science – have to get those record temps somehow.
Firstly, those of us who live within our means don’t spend much time worrying about it.
Secondly, money is the principal means of access to real things, what we use to buy them. Normal humans do not regard money as an accounting entry, they regard accounting entries as things that *represent* (to an accountant) money (or to be precise the deemed monetary value of real items).
I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone as obsessed with money as he is.
Not going to read the original obviously but is this a set up for “spend infinity money”? I thought we’d done that one this week.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone as obsessed with money as he is.
Good way of putting it. And it’s other people’s money that really gets him going.
The hilarious thing is that as we all know, money is a token, not the goods & services it’s exchanged for. The man is obsessed with tokens rather than concrete reality. He’s a (poor) theologist.
They are inextricably linked. The total value of the tokens circulating must equal the total value of the commerce being conducted.
This is where Spudanomics fails. Spud sees a bookkeeping entry for x billion £ in assets & thinks it’s money he can spend. But those assets aren’t part of commerce. To become part of commerce they would have to be sold & the money come from the buyer. Where’s the buyer? And opportunity cost. If the buyer spends their money on the assets, something else can’t get bought. What effect will that have on the economy?
After all, nobody lies awake worrying whether there are enough metres or kilograms.
But he never stops telling us that the Earth is finite, which is why we cannot have infinite growth.
And when there are no kilograms of food in the shops he might change his mind.
In any case money is just a token. We use money and in the past precious metals to purchase goods and services, because taking timber, cows and sheep to Sainburys proved rsther impractical.
The equivalent of the metre or kilogram is the £ sign, not the pound.
He’s a complete arse
He’s unbelievably stupid.
If he had to run ten miles, or shift a big pile of stone, he’d lie awake worrying about metres and kilograms.
If he had to run ten miles he would probably lie on the ground waiting for someone to help him
He is a classic example of someone who has been educated/trained/instructed way beyond the level of his intelligence.
Especially if the length of the mile were apt to change over time.
Martin
Couldn’t very well refuse your request for the full horror:
If money is just an accounting entry, why do we spend so much time worrying about it?
After all, nobody lies awake worrying whether there are enough metres or kilograms. They are simply units we use to measure things.
If money is just the unit we use to organise economic activity, why does it dominate politics?
The answer is that money may be an accounting system, but access to it determines access to almost everything else.
If you have enough money, you can buy food, housing, healthcare, education, transport, security and leisure.
If you do not, your choices become very limited.
Straw Man number 5.435.234
Money is not wealth.
But in the society we have built, it is the key that unlocks access to wealth.
That makes it immensely important.
And your alternative to that is the New North Korea – with you in the Kim Jong un role of course?
Why are governments so obsessed with money?
This is where many people become confused.
Governments often behave as though they are households.
They talk about “running out of money”.
They tell us they must “live within their means”.
They insist they have to “balance the books”.
But governments that issue their own currency are not households.
They create the money everyone else uses.
Channelling Goebbels – Act 1,256,782 Scene 2
So why do they act as though they cannot?
There are several reasons.
First, many politicians genuinely misunderstand how modern money works. They have
absorbed the same myths as everyone else.
MMT has been proven to be false – numerous times and by numerous people. Saying Black is White does not make it so. Although Big Trans seems intent on disproving this.
Second, talking about a shortage of money is politically useful.
If politicians said, “We could afford this, but we choose not to do it,” people would ask why.
Instead, saying “There is no money” shifts the blame onto economics rather than politics.
It makes choices sound inevitable.
I think most politicians in the UK need to become acquainted with ropes, lampposts and trees however, even the most moronic recognizes there are choices
Third, money is a way of allocating power.
Who gets funding?
Who does not?
Which regions prosper?
Which services survive?
Which industries expand?
Money decides all these things.
Control over money is therefore also control over society.
Don’t forget those blood drinking lizards
But surely there must be limits?
Of course there are.
The mistake is thinking the limit is money itself.
Suppose every hospital in the country suddenly wanted twice as many surgeons
tomorrow.
Creating the money would not create the surgeons.
Training takes years.
The real constraint is the availability of skilled people.
Exactly the same applies to housing.
If there are not enough builders, bricks or timber, writing bigger numbers into bank
accounts will not solve the shortage.
The constraint is always the real world.
Money merely helps us organise it.
But that’s not what much of your output says – the Green New Deal and ‘The Taxing Wealth Report’ both are based on the premised that money spent is in of itself a good thing and that people can be taxed ad nauseam with no reaction. While anyone as prolific as you is going to create inconsistencies between one work and another, it would appear AI has amplified this in your case.
So why does government worry about deficits?
Because deficits are visible.
Unused potential is much harder to measure.
A budget deficit appears as a single number.
The fact that hundreds of thousands of people are unemployed, millions are underemployed, schools need repairing, rivers are polluted, carers are exhausted and children are going hungry does not appear in a single number.
Yet those are the things that really matter.
Things are complex – great insight
The obsession with financial balances often distracts us from asking whether we are
making the best use of the country’s real resources.
I’d argue the failure to adopt sound money policies is one of the principal reasons the country is ins such a desperate state. Something people like you bear direct responsibility for – and you should answer for those crimes
What should government worry about instead?
A government should ask very different questions.
Do we have enough people in work?
Maybe stop bringing in so many freeloaders from abroad?
Are those who want to work able to do so?
Vacancies are diminishing its true but there’s still numerous sectors reporting labour shortages
Are people adequately housed?
We have people producing Youtube videos in housing that might be consider excessive, especially in the Fens
Are children well educated?
Not by the Hard Left dominated UK education industry certainly
Is the population healthy?
Are we protecting nature?
Are we investing for the future?
Are we reducing inequality?
You missed the price of fish
These are questions about real outcomes.
Money should be judged by whether it helps us achieve them.
Is the purpose of this latest boondoogle to reduce everything to a binary outcome?
The simple summary
That’s an appropriate term at least. Bad economics for simpletons
Money is only an accounting system.
But because it determines who gets access to real resources, it has become a symbol of power.
Governments often pretend that money is scarce because that makes political choices appear unavoidable. It allows them to say, “We can’t,” instead of admitting, “We won’t.”
The real question is almost never, “Can we afford it?”
It is, “Do we have the people, skills, technology and natural resources to do it without creating inflation or damaging the future?”
Once you understand that, politics changes.
The debate is no longer about finding money.
It is about deciding what kind of society we want to create, and then using our real resources wisely to make it happen.
I have seen more substance in a piece of candyfloss – and this crap was probably generated by AI.
As far as I can decode anything coherent from this mess, it’s another “Fat Controller” application form.
“Can we afford it” means “do we have the people, skills, and natural resources to do it” full stop.
The rest of that piece of waffle involves “should we?” not “can we”
And almost every question where Murphy is asked “should we” he gets the answer wrong
Because its not just an acoounting entry. It is a representation of your time or energy.
People worry less than they should about money as a concept and how its value changes.
They generally worry about how little of it they have.
How much you have is irrelevent for meters.
People do often worry about having too many Kilograms though.
If money isn’t real, tell me how come yesterday’s Defence Investment Plan, with a supposed “extra” £15Bn of headline funding, amounted to savage cuts to the services irl:
* No more new destroyers or frigates (!)
* RN all-in on “at least 6” vapourware drone ships. Which will “save money” despite being a completely new and unproven concept What’s “at least 6” irl, maybe 4?
* By the 2030’s, the RN will be reliant on ageing hulls and foreign allies to credibly defend a British carrier at sea and do routine patrol duties
* Nothing for the Army except existing commitments to Ajax (crap) and Boxer (good, if the MoD isn’t allowed to feck it up like Ajax). No new tanks, artillery or people?
* Army helicopter fleet being culled to “save money” (you know what’s expensive? Losing a war.)
*RAF gets 12 x nuclear capable F-35As (another preexisting commitment)
* No more Storm Shadow (!) – a baffling major downgrade to UK strike capabilities, Storm Shadow is our best air launched cruise missile, there’s no available substitute. We’ve decided to let Russia have better stand-off precision attack capabilities than Britain does. Strange.
I think the Americans are going to be furious at this when someone briefs Trump. They want NATO partners who can help shoulder the burden, this “investment plan” makes us camp followers, not combatants. All the big money going to big nuclear – Trident and subs. Only useful in the event of all-out WW3. Very un-useful for every level of warfare below MAD.
The decision to cancel the immediate future of the RN is astonishing, Duncan Sandyan in its hubris. No doubt the future is drones and drone ships, but right now we have a small number of ageing hulls and existing commitments and requirements (air defence, ASW) we are struggling to credibly address. And we know how long software projects can take. By 2038 they’ll be forced to keep 30 year old hulls in service longer than anticipated, at rising expense. Or face the preposterous situation of owning two aircraft carriers which can’t leave port during wartime without a foreign escort.
How come the government can find money to give people free cars but can’t afford to defend the realm?
Why would traitors want to defend the realm?
And they’ve enough fellow travellers in this country to give them both engine oil and plausible deniability.
I kind of think we deserve this. Not me. I never voted for any of it. And probably no one here.
But plenty did. More bennies for me, and for that nice Mr Somali next door, shame about the defence of the realm and, for that matter, the dissolution of the meaning of the realm.
And plenty more turned a blind eye for fear of being called nasty names, provided they got their one or two holidays a year and the mortgage was being paid.
So, yeah. What realm? The pass has been sold and we are overrun and somewhere in the region of 50% of our countrymen are either ok with that or could not give a shit.
Not saying it cannot be turned around, but, just as I’ve always said I’d start to care about Ukraine if and when britwankgov decides first to defend our own borders, I’d want to see gunboats in the Channel before I get too worked up about whether we can deploy an aircraft carrier beyond Portsmouth harbour.
More bennies for me, and for that nice Mr Somali next door, shame about the defence of the realm and, for that matter, the dissolution of the meaning of the realm.
And plenty more turned a blind eye for fear of being called nasty names, provided they got their one or two holidays a year and the mortgage was being paid.
My experience, it’s the desk jockey middle-classes think like this. Go have breakfast in the builder’s caff & you’ll hear an entirely different point of view.
It’s weird, because very senior lanyards have told me we are “at war” with Russia. That’s the official view from Whitehall.
Yet they still think they can half-a-loaf defence? Losing Storm Shadow is a massive downgrade to the capabilities of the very expensive aircraft we’ve already committed to buying and sustaining. Makes no sense. False economy, like building carriers without steam catapults.
Also strange, because shipbuilding is popular in Labour constituencies. Survival instincts of a dodo, they have.
Unless/until a future government reverses these cuts, the Royal Navy is going to cease being a proper bluewater navy in the years ahead. Very lopsided navy of expensive doomsday submarines and rusting geriatric surface fleet with a pair of vanity carriers instead. I don’t think Jackie Fisher would approve.
It’s weird, because very senior lanyards have told me we are “at war” with Russia.
Helps distract from the possibility that some of us would like to be at war with the very senior lanyards.
I don’t know about you, but I hate those people at a molecular level. It’s actual hate.
Putin? Zhi? Contemptible, odious, but what do they owe us anyway?
It’s MICVs full of armed men in SW1 that is called for. Tanks on the lawn of College Green. Lanyards being gently shown the way out of the Home Office at the point of a bayonet. Stuff like that is what we need, so my old mathematics master told me.
Oh, and Blair impaled on the railings outside his Connaught Square House and the denizens of Kentish Town begging for scraps.
There’s a knock at the door. I think it might be GCHQ.
Amazing how well britwankgov works when it wants to.
It’s not as if we don’t spend money on personnel, but:
And yet the Ministry of Defence (MoD) employs 50,000 civil servants, far more than at any other time, and while the navy now numbers only around 20,000, once the Royal Marines are discounted
Amazing! I can think of a few improvements though.
Jobs are a cost!
Here’s what I would suggest if we’re really at war with Russia:
Do build Type 82, on a larger scale. Plan the crewed replacement of Type 26 to be lowish-cost, high-capability and modular frigate that can be built and iterated at several shipyards at scale. Phase in drones as loyal wingmen, long range sensors and attritable munitions, full automation will take time. Reduce MoD staff by 75%, reduce Admiral and equivalent ranks by 50%. Build new domestic design diesel/electric submarines to bulk out the underwater fleet / defence of British home waters for relatively cheap. Add catapults to the carriers so they can have proper AWACS and longer range capabilities.
Costs money, but so did the plan to give £40Bn away with the Chagos deal.
Why not continue to support the Ukrainians to do it for us? Way cheaper than spending money on ships that will be out of date before the CAD program winds down.
War with Russia? We invading them or vice versa? If it’s the former, we’re fucked. You could quite easily lose the British army in one of Russia’s quieter bits.
The latter seems unlikely when you consider the shitshow Russia is already embroiled in. Also, if they really hate Britain and want to see it destroyed, why not just settle back and watch our traitor class do the job for them?
Churchill is reported to have said that the greatest benefit to the UK of Russia entering WW2 was the reduction of sabotage in the shipyards
Because the goal Steve is not to defend the realm. Having had an encounter with the Free Speech police myself recently, the overwhelming impression I have is that they and other lanyards would be very happy if every ‘gammon’ was beheaded.
Treason is their raison d’etre – it’s the equivalent of crack cocaine for them. That’s why I am fast approaching the point where any non- Reform MP outside Northern Ireland will be considered automatically guilty of treason and will have to prove their innocence.
I think the phrase ‘actions have consequences’ needs to be made starkly clear.
Having had an encounter with the Free Speech police myself recently
Spill the beans!
I will do shortly!!
It’s frustrating I know x
Hope you’re all right. There is no greater punishment than to be guilty of thinking wrong things. There are aids for mobility, drugs for anxiety, and I would wish both were ameliorated but nothing can help you if your thoughts are found to be haram. Does the Free Speech Union merit a donation?
Destroyers, frigates, tanks, artillery pieces, troops, helicopters.
Okay, I know we’re not supposed to plan the next war based on the current one (especially if the current one is a bit peculiar) but nevertheless that’s basically a list of things that have been rendered useless in the Russia – Ukraine spat. The Russian Black Sea Fleet (surface) is essentially gone at the hands of a country without a navy. Russian tanks are now down to a rarity from the biggest reserve in the world. Russia has lost so much artillery they are literally using WW2 pieces. Soldiers on the front line last tens of minutes. Helicopters are shot out of the sky and blasted on the ground behind the lines.
Every time NATO wargamers using traditional techniques go up against the Ukrainians, they lose. Russia lives and dies that for real every day.
Yes, the StormShadow is good (the Ukrainians love using them) but when you’ve used cheap drones to take out nearly all the expensive air-defence, they are overkill. Way more damage is being done by propeller drones than by multi-million-quid hi-tech turbojets that are really a bit too short range.
Never mind that you think NATO should have ended in the ’90s, Trump has spoken out repeatedly against NATO and the USA’s involvement in Europe. Is NATO and US partnership something we should continue investing in? I mean, I like it, but if US foreign policy shifts every other Truth Social rant then it might not be the best plan for us.
All of which is meant to replay what I said the other week. Our useless twats may be inadvertently doing us a favour and saving us an absolute fortune by not investing in legacy systems and planning that have little to no relevance in a hostile changing world. If we ever get a sensible government they’ll have had more time to look at the new warscapes and won’t be stuck with sunk cost commitments.
Trump was echoing Eisenhower:
“One of the US officials present in the little red schoolhouse at the moment of Germany’s surrender in May 1945 was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Six years later, after he became NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander Europe, he proclaimed: ‘If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.’
Ah, well, that’s Eisenhower say vs Eisenhower do. Given that he was President for most of those next 10 years and his foreign policy was primarily focussed on stopping the spread of communism (including by bolstering NATO) then we can see that do trumped say.
Unfortunately we don’t have the benefit of hindsight to assess Trump.
Destroyers, frigates, tanks, artillery pieces, troops, helicopters.
Okay, I know we’re not supposed to plan the next war based on the current one (especially if the current one is a bit peculiar) but nevertheless that’s basically a list of things that have been rendered useless in the Russia – Ukraine spat.
No, they’re consumables we need to prosecute wars. Ukraine isn’t complaining they have too few tanks and arty…
The Russian Black Sea Fleet (surface) is essentially gone at the hands of a country without a navy. Russian tanks are now down to a rarity from the biggest reserve in the world. Russia has lost so much artillery they are literally using WW2 pieces. Soldiers on the front line last tens of minutes. Helicopters are shot out of the sky and blasted on the ground behind the lines.
The Russian navy is irrelevant to the Ukraine conflict. We, on t’other, are an island.
Losing men and vehicles in a war means you need more men and vehicles.
Never mind that you think NATO should have ended in the ’90s, Trump has spoken out repeatedly against NATO and the USA’s involvement in Europe. Is NATO and US partnership something we should continue investing in? I mean, I like it, but if US foreign policy shifts every other Truth Social rant then it might not be the best plan for us.
I think NATO should have been wound up, with champagne and medals, after winning the Cold War. Doesn’t matter what I think, the British government decided to outsource our defence to NATO instead. Doing that, while angering the only country in NATO that matters, is a bad plan.
If we can’t rely on NATO we need more ships, more sailors, etc. asap, not on the never never in some future parliament.
Our useless twats may be inadvertently doing us a favour and saving us an absolute fortune by not investing in legacy systems and planning that have little to no relevance in a hostile changing world.
Maybe. Or, we could find, having shrunk the armed forces down to a palace guard force, that it’s not so easy to rebuild muscles that have been allowed to wither.
You say in one paragraph the Rookies are using WW2 artillery pieces. But at least they have WW2 artillery pieces that still work. The enemy isn’t going to care if he’s killed by a Storm Shadow or a Korean war vintage 155mm shell recently taken out of storage in Pyongyang.
The Boxer “has an operational range of 652 miles”. What, you mean it isn’t sustainable eco-electricity from huge wind turbines on the War Office roof?
Our Army has been pretty camp for a long time. And as for the Navy, isn’t it a tradition now?
He’s not wrong, if you don’t have a government that creates fiat at the drop of a hat. Or that if you then had a parrallel private money supply based upon debt instruments that were forced upon you by government dictat.
Is he now channeling Toby Baxendale at the Cobden Centre?
https://www.cobdencentre.org/2010/05/the-emperors-new-clothes-how-to-pay-off-the-national-debt-give-a-28-5-tax-cut/
I’ve got rather too many kg. Can I swap them for a positive entry in my bank account…?
I worry about how many yards are in my . . . yard;)
I worry about how much purchasing power is in my dollars. If you gave me 10 times as many dollars but prices increased 10 times then I still have just as much purchasing power.