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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The challenge is, in a real org of some size, you’ll suddenly get marketing or customer success asking you for commitments that are very far out, because ad slots have to be booked or a very large customer renewal is coming up.

    And some of the normal coping mechanism (beta-branch that spins off stable feature to the general release branch) don’t work for all those requests.

    Try as you might, you are going to get far off deadlines that you have to work towards. Not for everything but for more than you’d like.


  • sunbeam60@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    1 month ago

    <giggle.gif>

    Not really. They’ve got a version of the euro, called kroners, which allows Danes to believe they have their own currency. They are locked into an exchange rate band (extremely tight) which means the Danish central bank has to follow every decision the ECB takes within minutes). And this makes complete sense, in that it’s a compromise that’s edible by voters (maintaining the illusion that Denmark didn’t adopt the euro) and edible by business (allowing businesses in Denmark to participate fully in the common market).

    And that’s one of the reasons Denmark has such small national debt and runs a government surplus - they can’t really invent new money because it would break the bond with the euro. So the Danish budget is sort of a “household budget” in that in contrast to, say, Sweden, they cannot create money (meaningfully) and the books have to balance (which they do; lots of oil, Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Vestas and a few other big international plays who still pay a majority of their tax in Denmark obviously helps a lot).


  • sunbeam60@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    1 month ago

    Yes more or less, that is indeed how the central bank creates money most of the time; the government creates a piece of paper that says “IOU 100k and I’ll pay you 5% interest on it for 20 years and then I’ll return your original 100k to you in 20 years” (that’s a bond), which they sell on the open market, at auction (where the variable element is the interest rate someone is willing to accept). When the central bank wishes to increase the money supply they buy government bonds on the open market (ie from other holders, rarely from the government directly) by materialising money out of thin air.

    When they wish to shrink the money supply they sell their government bonds and destroys the money that they receive from the sale.


  • sunbeam60@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    1 month ago

    Does your mom have debt that she pays on time? Is her “doing everything right” visible to credit scoring agencies and aligned what statistic says about good borrowing customers?

    Credit score doesn’t mean “runs a good personal economy” it means “likely to pay their loans on time, consistently, based on statistics that are observable”.


  • sunbeam60@lemmy.onetoMemes@lemmy.mlthe debt
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    1 month ago

    No, if anything it shows capitalism is working. When you can increase or tighten money supply (ie when you can print and shred money) debt isn’t what you think it is. A state with money issuance powers is not a household.

    I can thoroughly recommend “The Deficit Myth” book by Stephanie Kelton, if you wish to understand modern monetary policy better.

    Or watch the film Finding the Money: https://youtu.be/3HRgsYSLOYw?si=g_CgqMWtC7oBCkGn

    And to answer your specific question, there are countries with very low debt, but that’s usually due to either not being able to “borrow” money (again, borrowing doesn’t always mean what we would think as borrowing when you can issue your own money), being locked to another currency (Denmark is a great example - amazing economy and locked to the euro) or having a large generation of wealth (typically oil). Larger countries can issue debt more easily.





  • It must be a lot of work to see everything through this lens, all the time.

    If you look at the states surrounding Germany, and the inter connectors they have, you’ll understand better why this isn’t just a simple thing to do and why it doesn’t relate to income level differences.

    The only region that has managed to build a perfectly integrated spot market for electricity is Scandinavia. Every time you want to enable something like this, you’re in difficult negotiation territory; politics, unions, local government, NIMBYism, technical difficulties etc play a huge part.




  • You are correct that when you build one new plant every 25 years it takes a long time to spool the industry, the skills, the testing and the manufacturing capability up to build new nuclear.

    In countries that regularly build new nuclear it takes 5 years, comparable to any other power source. When France when through their mass-conversion to nuclear in the 70s (following the oil crisis), they put 2-3 new nuclear plants into operation every year.

    All new western nuclear is in “production hell”. We don’t build them often enough to retain the skill set or for industry to dare invest. So they become massive state-run enterprises.

    If we were serious on solving our climate crisis we would build nuclear power plans en masse.