> good chunk of the republicans are honest to god libertarians
This is key: Colorado has far more libertarian-conservatives than social-conservatives. It comes from the Western ideal of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Libertarians are "classical liberals" and value individualism, so they do not push for government-sponsored restrictions. The conservatives in many other states are socially-conservative and legislate to preserve their social values and cozy business interests.
There's certainly a libertarian vibe, but I wouldn't say it's far more than the standard Republican party stuff.
In Boebert country you'll see plenty of less philosophical politics. "I identify as non-bidenary" stickers, yard signs about how Biden enjoys anal sex with illegal immigrants, that kind of thing.
Colorado polling suggests two thirds of Republicans and a third of "Independents" approved of the Dobbs decision restricting abortion. Half of Republicans and a third of "Independents" believe Biden didn't win the election.
I don't understand how it's fraud. Banks could not lend at all if they must retain 100% of deposits.
On the lending side, it would hurt everyday people and the economy if banks could not lend. Loans are important for homeowners (mortgages) and for businesses of all sizes (research and development).
On the savings side, your community bank provides incredible guarantees with your deposit that are difficult to find elsewhere: deposits are very liquid, principle is virtually guaranteed, and convenience in routing the money wherever you direct it.
Yes, banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it, and the way we’re making the economy work needs money to be created for those loans. So they definitely fill a need. However they are printing money and decide who can borrow and who cannot, without democratic oversight.
We tend to reduce democracy down to restrictive laws & regulations. Whether we want guns or not. Whether we want to allow abortion or not. How heavy the penalties are for murder or theft. How a given industry should be regulated. But resource allocation is arguably even more important.
How we allocate our resources determine pretty much everything in our lives. It’s the choice between more roads or new train tracks, which industry should be prioritised, basically what direction our whole economy should take. And that, instead of being subjected to democratic oversight, is currently left to private interests, with a vague hope that it will somehow be okay, because "invisible hand" or something.
Damn, I’m just asking for more democracy, and there we are, way outside the Overton window.
>>banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it
I feel there's shifty language and moving posts all the time.
Fractional reserve banking, to my limited understanding and your previous post, is lending some of the money that got deposited to. Where is this "creating money" (for non central banks) coming from? The phrase comes in and out of various conversations about banking system and it's the most slippery thing I've ever seen. Can you please elaborate on your understanding of how "banks create money" so we can have a discussion from same basic understanding and principles?
And it's not "banks couldn't lend as much money". If we didn't have fractional reserve banking, it feels banks could not lend AT ALL. This is not shades of gray, it feels like a basic principle. If a bank gets deposits, and can't do anything with deposits, and has to keep all the deposits in a vault, then it cannot do any loans. SImplified and all, but again, I want to see if our basic understanding is in line.
Also, what does "more democracy" concretely mean here, as nice as the phrase is? Aren't regulations by government the spear of the democracy, in practical sense?
More or less. Long story short, when money is lent in a bank, it’s then deposited elsewhere, and then it can be lent again, such that with a fractional reserve of 10% you can ultimately multiply the amount of money in all deposited accounts by 10. In other words, a whole bunch of money just got created. It’s not central money, but it’s still money.
You could maybe try to counter with "but but but bank runs", but if this happens the state tend to print central money to compensate, thus actualising the money creation that happened with fractional reserve banking alone.
> If we didn't have fractional reserve banking, it feels banks could not lend AT ALL.
They could lend their own money.
> Also, what does "more democracy" concretely mean here, as nice as the phrase is?
In this particular instance I’m thinking of full reserve banking (deposit banks turn back into glorified vaults), print central money for mortgages (and burn that money when it’s paid back), and democratically (with congress, referendum, whatever) define clear criteria about who can contract mortgages, and what for. Criteria which would then be enforced by mortgage clerk, on behalf of the state.
The point here is that instead of letting private interests that want to make money decide, the people decide (possibly through elected officials) of the applicable criteria.
> this particular instance I’m thinking of full reserve banking (deposit banks turn back into glorified vaults), print central money for mortgages (and burn that money when it’s paid back), and democratically (with congress, referendum, whatever) define clear criteria about who can contract mortgages, and what for.
This is an interesting idea. The problem with a single lender is that it removes incentives for good customer service and (sometimes) good products. Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated. It would be difficult to design the right incentives for the government to provide a good product.
I think the main disconnect is that deposit banks never operated as a glorified vault. Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement. I understand why it may be a surprise when you first learn about fractional reserves because it may not fit an existing mental model. Instead, it seems unfair that a bank can create money. But it's not. Money supply and money velocity is a term used by economists to describe how much and how quickly money exchanges hands. The world's accounting books, with all debits and credits, always sum to the same total: however much money the central bank has printed.
There are a lot of benefits of the current system (liquidity, virtual guarantee of withdrawal, conveniences). Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits to a system that steadily decreases the size of your deposits; I think that would be a hard sell.
> Monopolies, whether public (DMV) or private (your local cable company) are universally hated.
I believe that's mostly a US thing. Here in France we love state monopoly on tap water, energy, and trains and snail mail service… Privatising those and opening them to competition generally caused more problems than it solved.
> Lending against deposits is supposed to be understood by anyone entering that agreement.
The only agreement most people understand, at the most basic level, is that money they deposit can be retrieved at any time. The idea that a bank run could even be a thing nowadays feels outlandish (I don't know the particular, but I understand that we have put various mechanims in place to make bank runs very unlikely, if at all possible).
> Your proposal would replace a system where you receive a small income from your deposits
I don't receive any income from my regular bank account. I even pay a small fee for the privilege of having that account. The things that pay interest back are special accounts, some of which I don't have immediate access to. For those the bank is very clear that it will use that money to invest in stuff, justifying why there's a return on interest at all.
Now if we went all the way to forbidding investment accounts, sure, every bit of inflation means your money is evaporating over time. I'm actually okay with that. It's a form of tax, with a flat rate, that rich people with a ton of money will pay more than the small folks. But yeah, it sure would be a hard sell to those rich people.
> banks couldn’t lend as much money if they couldn’t create it
How could a bank lend _any_ money if it must reserve 100% of deposits as cash?
> they are printing money and decide who can borrow and who cannot, without democratic oversight
I do not understand how regulations are equivalent to democracy. Either way, banks are heavily regulated in the G7 countries. Such regulation was thought to exacerbate the mortgage crisis of 2008 because regulations created incentives to offer mortgages to people who should not have qualified.
Supply and demand of deposits and loans creates a competitive market - banks operate with razor thin margins.
I still do not know how you would improve upon the current system.
> How could a bank lend _any_ money if it must reserve 100% of deposits as cash?
That’s the thing though, they could lend out and pay interest on “savings” with the understanding that the money might not be immediately available for withdrawal as it’s “in the wild”.
And a different class of banking, we’ll call it “checking”, would allow for immediate withdrawal as it’s backed by 100% reserves and doesn’t pay interest because it doesn’t make any money for the bank. Heck, they might even charge for the convenience of warehousing your money and being able to transfer it to any other economic actor you chose through a novel intra-bank clearinghouse.
What this doesn’t allow is for banks to lend out 90% of every dollar they take in — even ones available for immediate withdrawal.
As we’ve seen from the recent SVB[0] catastrophe if people assume their money is immediately available and it isn’t there’s big problems because everyone rushes to get their money right now instead of maybe getting their money at a later date. Big problem…
This is all stuff they figured out centuries ago, the main problem is it cuts into the banks’ profits so it isn’t done this way.
[0] as an illustration of the problem, they didn’t seem to get in trouble due to fractional reserve lending but from the liquidity of their assets.
> That’s the thing though, they could lend out and pay interest on “savings” with the understanding that the money might not be immediately available for withdrawal as it’s “in the wild”.
Those are Certificates of Deposit.
> they didn’t seem to get in trouble due to fractional reserve lending but from the liquidity of their assets.
It was the opposite. SVB had over-invested in long-term US treasuries, which are extremely liquid, but were falling in price due to the rapid increase of interest rates. If not for withdrawals squeezing their reserve, SVB could hold onto those treasuries until maturity and get back 100% of their principle.
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I think the disconnect is that savings accounts are not popularly well understood. People are shocked when they understand that the money they deposited is not sitting in a big vault.
You could tweak fractional reserves to be 20% (or 80%) of deposits, but that comes at a cost too. For example, it would create scarcity of money available for lending, which in turn would make loans more expensive (e.g., higher interest rate mortgages could double the cost of home ownership.)
The current system prevents the worst of bank runs by covering a good chunk of assets with insurance (FDIC in the US). It's a system that allows banks to fail and protect customer deposits.
The collapse of SVB was not a "catastrophe" because the banking system is intended to let banks fail. The alternative is far worse.
> this would give the business undue influence over politics?
It's about power. From the article:
> Communist authorities dislike the idea of anything, let alone a large private business, outshining the party. And the country’s leaders bristled at the high profile of Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, an icon of Chinese enterprise who every now and again dared question their decisions.
> The process is free as in gandi won’t charge you to migrate but newer registar might
The new registrar will charge a fee and the expiration date of your domain will increase by one year. The transfer fee should be roughly the same as the registration and renewal fees. If anything looks fishy, compare with another registrar (starting with common registrar recommendations you see at HN)
> I've purchased domains from Gandi, pre-paying for multiple years of service such that some domains I have don't need renewing until 2027.
Just in case you did not know: if you transfer to a different registrar, you will not lose the extra years of registration. You can confirm the expected expiration date of 2027 at lookup.icann.org.
As an ex-customer, I'd avoid namecheap. They are expensive and have given me no end of trouble.
I currently use porkbun and namesilo with very few issues so far (about 3 years). You will need to unlock your domain and get an authorization code (EPP Key) from Gandi and then go to your new registrar and select Transfer Domain. Its fairly straight forward.
Recently moved to Porkbun. Can confirm positive impressions so far.
Reasonable pricing. Straight forward webforms. 2 factor. No trying to slip extra bullshit in.
For me the purpose of a registrar is to register a domain. Porkbun might have other capabilities, but for this purpose it was wonderfully singleminded for me.
1. They routinely fail to auto renew domains despite correct billing details and auto renew being on (I lost some domains to this).
2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).
3. The name (NameCheap) no longer checks out, they are not cheap anymore.
> 2. They support premium domains, so you can be struck by lightning and randomly have the price of your domains dramatically jacked up (had to drop a domain due to this).
Do you have an example of this as it is against ICANN's rules IIRC.
The only instances I have seen about this were the posts here on HN when someone didn't read the registration price being at a discount compared to the renewal price thereafter.
If there is of course a legitimate instance of reclassification into a premium domain after the fact, you have a big case on your hands.
I did not take screenshots at the time so I can not prove it.
But I remember that I specifically spent effort/time to pick a name that was not marked as premium and double/triple checked before registering. Then about 3 months after I had registered it, it all of a sudden showed as premium in my account.
From my perspective it doesn't really matter much if they made it premium after I had registered it or if it was always premium and they hid that fact and gave me an invisible discount. The end result is the same.
You might need to elaborate on what problems you experienced with Namecheap before promoting two relatively unknown registrars. Although, my only experience with Namecheap was for SSL certs back in the day.
I use NameSilo but am 50/50 on it. Their control panel does not send a "Content-Type" header, which is effectively mandatory, and the support team flat out could not understand what I was talking to them when I was trying to point it out to them. It "worked" in Chrome and Firefox without add-ons and that's as far as their concern ended.
As a long time customer, I would recommend Namecheap. I was trying out Gandi since a couple months. On the bright side, they have a lot of additional international TLDs, but that's about it. Gandi has been noticeably more expensive when comparing equivalent domains.
Strong disagree. Migrated off namecheap after their support left a bad taste in my mouth. Also they had a data breach and did NOT notify me as a customer of theirs.
That article seems to indicate that no customer data was involved... looks like their send-only email key was compromised.
Maybe I'm not paranoid enough, but I think there would be too much noise if every company blasted out emails to all customers any time there was ANY security failure, including failures that do not expose customer data... Sure, they should follow up on your who got phishing emails, but I don't see a need to email every customer.
I've had no issues with NameCheap, but I just register domains, no other fancy services.
Any registrar that receives the transfer will automatically have the extended expiration date. (The expiration date is actually tracked at the registry.)
For reputable registrars, I think you could gather a list from HN comments and then "do your own research" to whittle down the list.
Associating domains with a Google account that is subject to arbitrary automated banning seems like a bad idea to me. It would be fine until it's suddenly not.
> I've seen a real trend over the past decade of a lot of people wanting to consume content/ideas/etc. from a slide format rather than reading paragraphs of text.
I prefer long form content... but spending time in the comments section of HN may show a revealed preference.
I concur with your observation. Piling on with a couple examples:
- Axios is a news service that only delivers information in bullet points. Unlike their long-form competitors, they are expanding into local news. [0]
- Long form content, such as books, are less popular. The average number of books read each year has fallen to a 30 year low. [1]
> By leaving it to the market with such a pithy attitude, we divest collective responsibility and instead assign it to some mystical process.
I think of it the other way around. If you do not vote with your wallet/feet, then you are avoiding taking responsibility for your personal decisions. The act of purchasing something creates a very small signal, but a signal all the same. It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote is virtually meaningless but in aggregate is powerful.
> The act of purchasing something creates a very small signal, but a signal all the same.
I agree with that certainly. Change starts individually. It really does, I mean that genuinely. As persons, as actual men and women in this world, we need to internalize the values we like to see flourish in the world. We just must. It would not be honorable if we did not.
> but in aggregate is powerful
The sleight of hand though is that this individual action, in and of itself, can always bring about meaningful change in every situation. It cannot. This disconnect between individual action and aggregate outcome is the main characteristic of a tragedy of the commons. To go back to the coffee maker example, the fact that our world is, well, quite literally, trash is such a tragedy. These traps never resolve solely bottom-up, without coordination.
> It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote
Voting is a good example really. A vote is the lowest, least effective way to perform our civic duty. To see the change we like to see in the world, to do our civic duty, we must advocate, picket, canvas, stand on soapboxes, fraternize, run for office, assemble, cajole, badger, pick up arms, ... That is what it means to participate in civic society. A vote, that single small signal, means nothing, if we do not actively shape what we vote for.
fwiw - I really don't think we disagree. Just wanted to expand on that train of thought a little.
> The bottom line is that Mars is an awful backup for life.
In the near term, absolutely. But the long term goal is to colonize multiple planets/moons. Eventually, Mars will be one of many worlds on which life finds a foothold, which is perhaps the best backup for life that humanity can currently deliver. But we still need to take that first step.
> People will lose interest and it'll be about as interesting as Antarctica. And then what?
Sports! Imagine playing basketball (or football, etc.) on a dome on Mars with less than half the gravity of Earth. People back on Earth would love to watch it. People on Mars would love to play it.
I actually think this would be a great idea...for the Moon. Pro-athletes making millions of dollars per year won't want to spend their whole lives in a desolate, extremely remote desert. The Moon has a much more reasonable commute.
And I think some new sport would need to be invented.
Why would you assume it'd be a dome on the surface of mars, given there's no radiation protection? You'd need to play it in underground rooms or wearing bulky radioactive protection suits.
This is key: Colorado has far more libertarian-conservatives than social-conservatives. It comes from the Western ideal of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." Libertarians are "classical liberals" and value individualism, so they do not push for government-sponsored restrictions. The conservatives in many other states are socially-conservative and legislate to preserve their social values and cozy business interests.