@nuala If life doesn't give you enough lemons, you can always buy more.

Well that's a new draft of a script for the V0.4 film then. Called "Forum" or maybe "Data Theft".

Probably some revision to go, but that's the right shape and pace I think.

If anyone who likes #screenwriting wants to review it and give notes that'd be great. I can take it.

Lots of walking around and some fighting and jumping from moving vehicles, should stretch the animation engine nicely. Those are the things I want working better next really. Figure out how to do those things well.

Also some social commentary. Too preachy probably. I usually am. Perhaps try and tone it down a bit with future drafts.

Have most of the sets and characters as models already from just sketches of a pre-draft of the script before.

Might even get time to work on some timing audio track and basic blocking out of the scenes later in the long weekend.

#wip #writing #animation

"The average American has three friends and is lonely, but with the help of AI we can fix that! Get it down to just one or two easy." - That Creep Zuck, more or less.

@inpc What if you finger their .well-knowns?

@flatplanet Money taken out of the system doesn't reduce the amount of work that can be done though? It just increases the value of the money which *is* in circulation.

The money being saved isn't actually work, it doesn't prevent people building solar panels or water pipes. They will still do that, for the money which remains in circulation at higher price.

I would think?

I don't think this idea that savings somehow prevent work from happening holds up at all.

And savings always eventually get either spent when inherited or destroyed.

The world hasn't really had a genuinely fixed money supply, it's never had the experiment to know what would happen. Just thought experiments done by people very used to the way things already work.

Owing favors or bushels no doubt did exist before gold coins or modern national bank debt accounting, but it doesn't make either thing good.

@flatplanet Is encouraging saving really a problem?

I always thought it was good to save, and bad to borrow.

Why is it better to have a debt economy than a saving economy? I hear this a lot but it sounds wrong and certainly unproven.

Especially if we want a managed degrowth to avert climate catastrophe.

Read Lyn Alden's book "Broken Money".

The problems and issues with using bank debt as a global monetary system were a surprise to me when I first discovered them in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

"Money" is mostly not notes and coins. Banks don't hold your money, they fractionally reserve it and create 95% of all the money that exists out of nothing. All that stuff that isn't notes and coins is interest bearing debt, and there isn't enough money in the system to pay the interest.

It must mathematically, inevitably, lead to collapse.

Alden goes through some of that problem. Describing money as a ledger, either managed by book-keeping or by physical scarcity.

She goes through some history of how money evolves in society. How the limitations of physical money (mostly that it can't be transferred quickly at the speed of communication) lead to using credit and ledgers with balances at trusted traders, and eventually banks. The collapse of Breton Woods with the ending of the Gold Standard and the problems with the current Petro Dollar system.

Some of these problems are in the media spotlight at the moment: The US printing money to trade for foreign products negatively affects their balance of payments, and is bad for the American worker. Deskills their economy and makes America dependent.

Trump says he wants to fix that, but its hard to see how it could be fixed while Dollars remain the world money standard, and America therefore has to get dollars out into that system somehow. And gets to make money for nothing to swap for real world products.

Their free money also pays for the wars that America pursues and funds all over the globe.

Another problem: Constant money printing and resulting inflation causes monetization of real estate, pushing up the price of housing and making people not even *want* there to be cheap housing. They celebrate the cost of housing going up as though it enriches them.

Likewise stocks, and equities and real estate and art and jewelry. All inflated stupidly due to the constantly devaluing worth of money.

Also the problems already mentioned that I learned about in 2008. All the money in the world is owed at interest, and to pay that interest more money must be created, at more interest. The whole system doomed to collapse and enriching the worst of us till it does.

Is the solution to return to a gold standard? Presumably not, gold is too hard to transport, and already collapsed into bank credit once in the 70s.

More controversially she wonders could it be Bitcoin? Not "crypto", which is just scams and more tokens printed out of nothing to enrich those doing the printing. But Bitcoin specifically, separate from Crypto, as a token which only real-world work can create. Nobody gets to print Bitcoin for free. It has no company or country controlling it. It has deliberately limited supply. It is a bearer asset like Gold which can be transported around the world at the speed of communication.

The last 3rd of the book looks at how Bitcoin works, how it's different to Crypto, and examines some of the obvious objections.

I remain unsure that Bitcoin could really be a new global reserve currency, but I also remain convinced that *something* has to, because continuing to use the dollar is certainly doomed and causes innumerable terrible difficulties until it does.

And what else is there?

Can we finally make Keynes' Bancor?

Until we find something, money remains broken. Like in the title. And that breaks many other things too.

#reading #books #economics #money

Updated my mail-list manager for Nextcloud so it'll run with V31.

Pain in the arse this update I tell ya. Change the logger, change the attribute annotations system, change the inheritance for API calls.

Took ages.

Still. Done now. So my own nextcloud install can finally be up to date again too.

https://github.com/revpriest/listman/

@IndyRichard When Corbyn was leader of the opposition he actually, you know, opposed. Whipped and voted against government policy, defeated the odd bill.

Everyone seemed to think this was doing opposition badly, and that "sensible opposition" would mean voting with the government to show you agreed, like Starmer did when he took over.

🤔

@atomicpoet Does the drama get dialed down though, or does it just become drama arguing about whether you used AI and it's appropriate uses and mdashes? 🥴

@Klaxun Is that why so many people seem to spell it Mastadon?

Damn Tad and Tod rivalry.

@neil Only software suitable for my grandma would be some sort of headstone engraving app.

@clock I wear just one of the two. Half trust 😁

"It's not just that north western continent, the whole planet is burning. Pollution is warming their air and those with control over resources intend to continue polluting"

Watch the whole video:
https://dalliance.network/w/7HggvkDNie7pDYgFCvT8cJ

@RichardJMurphy Gary Stevenson explained why in his book. Bad news is good news because bad news brings government intervention. The fed will do quantitative easing to rescue the rich. The fed have said they are ready and willing to buy government bonds.

That wall of money will be added to by new printed money as needed.

The aliens turn off their model:
"So, that north western continent is already lost to fascism then?"

Watch the full five minute video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aKg3v9KBKo

#aliens #fascism #animation