Sure - florists, influencers and soccer moms don't use Org-mode. Real hackers do, because it is extremely developer-oriented. And of course it won't ever be more popular, simply because there are far more soccer moms in the world and not too many hackers.
Its true that its a small number, but when you look at the statistics as a function of "percentage of homes purchased in 2024" instead of "total percentage ownership of homes", it is a bit more substantial: My understanding is the number is closer to 2% for Institutional investors, and as high as 4% for major markets like Phoenix and Dallas.
What it will come down to is the exact wording of what Trump means by "large institutional investors" (his exact words on Truth).
I have a founders edition Clicks keyboard for the iPhone 15 Pro. Its really a fantastic piece of hardware; worked great since I got it, idk, maybe 14 months ago. Obviously this is a full device and much more complicated, but I wouldn't personally have any qualms taking a risk on it given that their track record for the other clicks devices is pretty solid IME.
I have a handful without a record player; they make fantastic, cool wall art. That is the extent of why i buy them. I have no intention of ever buying a record player.
Gold-backed currencies, and even Bitcoin, are really good if you want your economy to be only this big, and never grow bigger. Eventually, a crisis will happen, and you'll say "actually, its now 1.3 yuan to the gram, because we need to build tanks", or "actually, did we say we had 8,000 tons of gold in reserve? we meant 9,000. Yeah we just counted, no you can't look at it, we have 9,000, here take the yuan and go build vaccines", or "its now illegal for citizens to own gold, turn it in at your nearest party headquarters" (even the US participated in that one!)
If the government not sticking to a backed currency is one of the biggest concerns, then that's quite high praise of the concept in and of itself! In any case the amount of currency does not determine the size of an economy. Rather the size of the economy determines the value of the currency. As economies grow in a system with relatively finite amounts of currency, the currency simply becomes worth more - people become overall wealthier and things become overall cheaper.
This is how you get things like the elderly generation thinking people are just lazy - when they were young, you could fully fund university and have enough for a down-payment on your first home through a part time job. The dollar just went much further. They don't really understand that's not the way things are anymore, especially as most are largely detached from the broader economy.
Also the 'crisis point' you mention is similarly an issue with fiat currencies. Look we're going to print a billion dollars just this once... then 10 billion... then 100 billion.. then they're printing money by the trillions and insisting that the inflation will just be 'transitory', because it always has been, until the one time it isn't. It's akin to somebody arguing that you can always put a bit more air in the balloon - after all it hasn't popped before, so why would it now?
> the size of the economy determines the value of the currency.
Economies do not grow if their currency is deflationary. If currency gains value over time, actors in the economy are disincentivized from transferring their money to other actors. Less spending means less economic activity; fewer businesses; less investment in high-risk technology research; loans get more expensive; we get stagnation and wealth inequality as individuals with money continue to accumulate it without any incentive to spend it with those who do not have as much.
"But we're in an inflationary environment right now, and there's still extreme wealth inequality" -> That's because our glorious leaders (sarcasm) found a non-currency thing they could subject to deflationary forces: Assets, like stocks and real estate. This was the effect of post-2008 monetary policy; all that extra money had to go somewhere in such a way where it would not cause significant inflation of the monetary supply, so it flooded into assets, which caused a deflationary effect there. Sure, Jeff Bezos has a few tens/hundreds of millions of actual-dollars; but his true wealth is his tens of billions in Amazon stock, which has jumped from ~$4 to ~$250 in the past 20 years.
I don't need to be convinced that printing too much currency is a bad thing and can cause too much inflation; its a matter of degree, not direction. Some might say that we printed way too much money during COVID; but others might argue that the situation would be much, much worse if we hadn't (remember: unemployment hit almost 15% during COVID; the highest number in recorded US history). Currency inflation and asset deflation are good things; but we're experiencing too much of both right now.
The USD was metal based, in one way or another, from 1792-1971, with convertibility briefly suspended following the Great Depression. The economy grew by many orders of magnitude over that time, vastly more (relatively) than it has since 1971, which is when Bretton Woods ended and the USD finally became completely free floating.
Now, just 50 years beyond that point, think about how fragile everything already seems. It's only being held together by massive fed involvement, quantitative easing, and ever more archaic economic concepts like zero or even negative interest rates. And this all during (1) extremely stable years (relative to the World Wars and much more that we previously overcame) and (2) unprecedented growth enabled by the computing revolution. Without these factors, do you really think this experiment would've seen 50?
From 1800 to 1950 there was inflation of less than 50%. [1] From 1971 to 2007 (to go just before your cutoff date) there was inflation of 528%. That in-between era of 1950 to 1971 is when the money printer started. We were still bound by Bretton Woods and so when France made a 'gold call', on all the worthless dollars they had accumulated, we simply defaulted and withdrew. A fun quote from Nixon's treasury secretary at the time, "The dollar is our currency, but it's your problem."
"actually, did we say we had 8,000 tons of gold in reserve? we meant 9,000. Yeah we just counted, no you can't look at it, we have 9,000, here take the yuan and go build vaccines"
Lot of emotion in this comment; not a lot of substance. I think you're misunderstanding how some of these systems work.
> This change will also force the US to finally get fiscally responsible and get the bloody USD printing machine under control, something they never had to do because of the USD reserve currency status.
It is not the case that the US didn't "need" to get the USD printing machine under control because of the reserve status; it is the case that the US
"could not" get the USD printing machine under control, because of the reserve status. When there is demand for US dollars, domestic or foreign, US dollars sometimes needed to be printed to satisfy that demand. If the US decides to not print those dollars; this is literally "defaulting on the debt", and would be bad-bad.
This gets at where you're misunderstanding how these systems work, because I think you're imagining that US debt is, like, an account in your Chase app that goes up, then you pay it down. US debt are, obviously, bonds. The USG says "we've got bonds to sell, they're at N year M% interest". Buyers say "we want those bonds we'll buy them". The USG is now in debt, and is obligated to repay those bonds; and sometimes has to print money to do so. This gets at the previous paragraph; money, broadly, is printed to satisfy debt obligations, not directly to service the deficit (proceeds from the initial bond sale are what could be said to directly service the deficit, but that's pennies compared to the size of the overall market).
Extending the Chase app analogy, you have it internalized that if we just get the deficit under control, then we could start "paying down the debt". In fact, probably, even our President understands it like this. But this isn't how it works. To "pay down the debt" would require two things to happen: We stop issuing new treasury bonds, and we pay off the already issued ones over 20/30/etc years as they mature.
The general professional sentiment on what would happen if the US even communicated it wanted to, in totally good faith, begin doing this at some point in the future, is basically armageddon. You have it in your head that, because Dave Ramsey says debt bad, the US should have no debt; but the world wants our debt; it has an insatiable (though, decreasing) appetite for it. Depriving the world of this debt would leave trillions of dollar-equivalents without anywhere to park safe from inflation, which would descend global financial markets into chaos. Tens of millions of people would starve in the first three months, among other undesirable outcomes. Some actively make the argument that the USG refusing to take on new debt would be net-worse for the world than the US defaulting on their existing debt, though its an interesting space to game out; a little game of global-cataclysm worst-thing-to-ever-happen-to-humanity olympics you can play.
But, debt servicing is becoming unmanageable for the US budget; so the best case for the United States is that USG debt demand from the rest of the world drops slowly and naturally, so we can naturally slow the issuance of new debt; and over 100 or so more years let managed inflation catch us up to recover from the utter shitshows that was 2001, 2008, and 2020. Everything I've seen, and I do mean everything, suggests that this is what is happening; but we'll know for sure in 90 more years.
Your entire wall of text has conveniently and completely omitted the hard fact that the U.S. Treasury has borrowed to pay for its defense (oops, sorry, I meant "war") budget for many, many years now. The war budget (~$850B) has been larger than the deficit in many years.
No other nation except the U.S. can sustain this without running into hyperinflation and consequent national rioting.
In some ways, this effect can have a positive impact on US citizens; demand for the US dollar requires supply to satisfy the demand. Where does that supply come from? Oftentimes: Printing. The US generally does not make a habit of telling US dollar buyers "no, we don't have any US dollars to sell you", so less demand on the dollar for reserve holdings can have a deflationary impact on its value. This can be combined with lowering interest rates, which creates more domestic demand for dollars, to help balance out the inflationary impacts from that.
Many economists take the stance that being the world's reserve currency is something of a two-edged sword; a curse that does come with geopolitical advantages, but bundles those advantages with significantly more difficult global financial responsibilities.
It’s either printing or increasing taxation for constant benefits. We all know what happens when the government tries to increase taxes at all, now try doing it for zero increased benefits. This is a populace that’s had candy for dinner since WW2, and forcing them to eat their vegetables will result in a never before seen level of civil unrest from people of all political inclinations.
The Fed most commonly uses Open Market Operations to modify the money supply, with "money printing" or Quantitative Easing used in more emergency situations.
But more broadly your comment doesn't really represent reality, whatever happens in the markets and economy the Fed manages inflation (or deflation) and it's much more complicated than a single relationship like you describe.
More interesting is trade, where the US consumes so much and pays out so many dollars for goods that places like China which run huge surpluses have few choices other than lend it back to the US.
Sure; and I'm referring directly to those "emergency situations", which aren't much of an "emergency" as most people would understand the word given that they've engaged in QE for ~7 of the past twenty years.
But you seem upset by QE in general. It seems to upset a lot of people, possibly because the Fed created a lot of money, but that's what central banks do, they create and destroy money. It's really not that much of a big deal. People lose sight of the fact that money is an abstraction and not something concrete.
It's always been that way. The notion that currency is backed by something concrete like gold is an illusion, one that some people cling to these days.
Even if it were true, inflation makes the whole issue moot. Money is only worth what it will buy, so it is at the mercy of prices.
Finally money depends on people's collective acceptance of it. No point in holding gold if people lose confidence in gold, for instance if people start producing convincing fakes. How does the average person verify gold? It almost always goes back to trusting some central authority.
Holy crap. This is going to trigger a five-alarm fire at Spotify Engineering. This has got to be among the largest proprietary datasets ever unintentionally publicized by a company.
I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the 99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.
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