TV shows centered around normal people are really boring.
I can’t speak for everyone, but it’s been my personal experience that many groups of friends partake in “shit talking” or “gossiping” when no one is around.
This leads me to believe that many people can be uncaring behind closed doors (which is what I think Seinfeld was meant to show, and which is why many people could relate to the show).
I believe that the show was so popular because many people saw connections between the characters and people they actually knew in real life. Compared to Mr. Robot, I would say that the characters in Seinfeld were far more normal.
So maybe relatable doesn’t necessarily mean normal, but that’s what I was thinking.
I think it’s starting to happen with Mr. Robot already. I liked season 1 a lot, but I’m not as big of a fan of season 2. I think they’re going too far with the whole “delusional acid trip” kind of thing.
You should watch season 2. All of the above are directly addressed.
I hate this so, so much. I enjoyed Orphan Black but the biologist character was just such a babbling idiot that I kept having to fight the urge to fast-forward through her scenes (I have to say though, the actress that plays the clones has a pretty amazing range. Not all of the characters are great but sometime I had to remind myself that it was the same person playing all the roles).
This seems to have originated with the procedural crime dramas; the "geek tank" full of adult children that spout technobabble to eye-rolling detectives and are unable to communicate technical concepts to non-technical people. I have a few friends in research. None of them have lip rings or dreadlocks and they are all able to carry a conversation with people of diverse backgrounds and education.
When government is continually debasing money through forced inflation, it's not surprising that people develop a distaste for money itself. Rather than functioning as a virtuous representation of value creation, inflating money just represents political connection to the central bank. Rather than being able to build up savings to gain security and negotiating power, the common person's primary interaction with money is having to service the debt driving their wage-slavery.
If you believe in free markets, you should want to make money sound again. Writing off people's rational distaste for the role money is presently playing just allows the fundamental problem to continue growing.
In inflationary economies, there is nothing stopping individuals from saving value in the form of assets; you can store your value in pork bellies or gold or ownership of a company or whatever other asset you'd like, in order to build up savings to gain security and negotiating power. The oft-repeated idea that inflation precludes saving is silly; it does make it costly to save by stuffing your dollars into a mattress, but it would still hold true in an economy without managed inflation - such economies are still subject to inflation and deflation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Historical_Inflation_A...) so if you need to actually spend your money during one of those 20% inflation spikes, well, good luck with that.
Store your value in an asset rather than a medium of exchange and managed inflation is a tremendous boon thanks to its tendency to decrease the risk (and thus cost) of investment.
The disconnect in your analysis is that price inflation hits hardest the areas where the conjured money is injected into the wider economy. Saving in gold works to pay for food, but not to pay for housing. To keep up with the latter, you must invest in housing to cover the entirety of your consumption. Until you achieve that, you're over the barrel servicing debt. This encourages everybody into further helping to inflate that bubble, with those who've succeeded then lobbying for even more housing inflation.
Historical record is not aligned with the fantasy that eliminating fiat currency would cause price stabilization and promote savings. It would eliminate long-run inflation, but at the cost of price stability and medium-run investment.
The core of your argument seems to be that there is little economic difference between natural technological deflation and forcing a slow inflation, that the market can adjust to either condition. But if markets were perfectly efficient like this, then forcing inflation would have no effect and in fact bubbles would not occur because they would be immediately corrected
Real markets have inefficiencies and lag time, and altering the macro environment is straight endorsement of specific policy, but cloaked as science. If prices were allowed to go down and people were able to save money (actual savings, not simply leveraged between stocks and debt), then they could choose to work less and we would be able to actually see widespread gains from technology. Instead, the government is running the same tired Keynesian playbook for getting "full employment" while the need for human work is being ever reduced.
> You're presuming that 100% of price level changes are due to changes in the money supply
No, just the majority of them. Even though demand for housing is going up (population), we would expect prices to rise to stable premium over the cost of creating new housing (corresponding to the lag between demand and production). Instead, what we're observing is a continual inflation in "values" that seems to actually be constrained by the cost of interest on the value. This makes intuitive sense based on how people are actually encouraged to view houses (like various acquaintances thinking a $5k earnest money deposit is serious business, while seemingly oblivious that they're actually spending much much more).
Furthermore, shamelessly implicit in the idea of forced inflation is the viewpoint that people should be forced to "invest". This certainly keeps the financial sector in demand, but obviously hurts the average person who has their savings eroded either passively through inflation or actively through transaction fees and time spent managing relatively small investments.
> Also the part about vilifying companies and loving big government is not my cup of tea.
Watch Season 2 before you make any judgments on who the bad guys actually are.
I chose the former when it came time to design a protagonist for my totally unrealistic hacking-themed mobile game.
"Politics is for puppets."
"We voted for this, not with our rigged elections..."
"I'm talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys who play God without asking permission..."
This is probably the main reason why I love so much this series.
FYI: I think I'm kind of a introvert person. I have small problems with myself. And yes, I am programmer.
Also the part about vilifying companies and loving big government is not my cup of tea. At least in Person of Interest both were bad.
Last part, vilifying money as a medium of exchange is just absurd. Are they expecting to exchange their computer services for eggs at the supermarket?