It doesn’t have to do anything to monetary policy when monetary policy isn’t the problem. It can do nothing.

It’s not the Fed’s job to try to fix terrible fiscal & trade policy, but that’s now what it’s basically trying to do. So, it’s become a political function by virtue of the political apparatus offloading the consequences of its idiocy onto the Fed to clean up after it with a set of tools that can’t even actually do the job.

We saw this during COVID, the prices of things shot through the roof because of a combination of supply-chain shocks as well as the already well capitalized seizing the opportunity to spend their war chests locking down as much of the available supply as possible, which resulted in consolidation, which resulted in less available supply.

The random trade wars directly cause goods to cost more for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, it’s just a tax masquerading as a price increase, but the Fed deals in stabilizing prices, not taxes. So, it changing the money supply parameters does nothing.

The weakening of the international trade position of the USD writ large also causes prices to go up for no good reason, and nothing about that is going to be resolved by the Fed fiddling with the money supply parameters because it has to do with the stability and reliability of the U.S. as a trustworthy geopolitical operator, which the Fed can do next to nothing about.

The inflation being experienced as price instability/increases is being induced acutely by terrible fiscal & trade policy, but the Fed is acting to try to “fix it” using monetary policy, which won’t work at all. So, what’s the point? Just to look like it’s doing something?

The Fed tightening the money supply isn’t going to materially bring prices down, because the money supply isn’t driving the price increases.

The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.

Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.

First, there have been huge numbers of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. that Americans simply didn’t want to do, so adding more manufacturing jobs they also don’t want to do isn’t going to help the economy. It’s the proverbial, “Americans don’t want to screw tiny screws into iPhones.” situation.

Second, for there to be any prayer of the tariffs working to boost local production (whether staffed or automated), they both cannot be capricious nor can they be applied to the goods and services necessary to acquire and deploy in service of increasing that productive capacity. If the tariffs can be waved around randomly like a threat of grounding a child, then they work only as an instrument of short-term extortion, not as a mechanism to expand an economic base. If the goods and services required for expansion are tariffed, then there’s a giant margin and time-to-ROI disincentive to make the investment as well.

Third, there is absolutely no good reason to apply tariffs to goods and services for which you have no plausible domestic substitute. There’s no point in putting tariffs on bananas and coffee in the U.S. unless what you want is to basically put the equivalent of a “sin tax” on bananas and coffee because you’re weirdly morally opposed to people eating bananas and drinking coffee or something.

Fourth, tariffs don’t ever make domestic equivalents cheaper or more affordable for consumers relative to comparable foreign imports. They just drive the price of all available options up to or near the baseline cost of goods plus the tariff. In the absolute best case scenario where everything about tariffs works out as perfectly as possible, you’re just adding margin for producers.

Trying to be globally competitive economically by using tariffs makes no sense. Trying to improve domestic economic conditions by using tariffs makes no sense. It’s a ridiculously shallow, nonsensical approach to attempting to do either of those things even when they’re used carefully and responsibly, but they were never going to be used carefully and responsibly.

The point of them was always going to be to use them as a means of paying for indulgences and dispensations.

Though perhaps that’s a preferable policy than to re-shore sweatshops and child labor to the U.S. as you’re implicitly suggesting should be done?

However, in writing this I’ve realized that this is really only a problem for me when playing Destiny and only when I’m playing PvP. As the player population continues to die and I move on to other games or mostly PvE content in Destiny, then I’m not going to care anymore and I can switch entirely over to PC.

On the one hand, that’s going to be pretty convenient. On the other, it’s kind of a sad realization as it marks the end of a very long era of console gaming for me stretching all the way back to the NES.

My son has a Switch, but other than that my kids have only ever known using a PC as a “console”. Their play room has a relatively compact PC (13th Gen. Intel CPU & ARC A770 dGPU) connected to a TV that just runs Steam and Batocera with 4x USB 8BitDo controllers attached.

By all appearances, until about the last year or so, I would look like an ideal customer demographic for Microsoft. I’ve purchased every single gaming platform they’ve ever produced, but I’m thiiiiiiiiis close to having migrated entirely away, and it wasn’t really a conscious decision. It just sort of happened a little bit at a time. :-/

That said, if I didn’t have to re-buy a bunch of content I already own and if I could avoid playing against MnK players while I’m on controller, I’d have already switched over entirely to using my workstation to play all my games. New purchases for myself and my kids are 100% on Steam.

That sounds like a lot of people I’ve known, except they weren’t students. More like “senior engineers”.

After all these years, I assume it must measure in the tens to hundreds of thousands?

It’s in those moments of consideration that I understand humanity hasn’t done a very good job grappling with its frailty and mortality. If we had, then we’d have a crowned a winner that didn’t subjugate us endlessly to the most vapid and Sisyphean aspects of programming. Python is a lesson in managing existential angst, which I now assume was the point of it from the very beginning.

I had an MRI denied for a partial pectoral rupture. Which was a routine diagnostic as a precursor to open shoulder surgery to determine the extent and location of the rupture to figure out if surgery was absolutely necessary and to prep a viable surgical plan.

I had to fight the insurance company with the assistance of both my surgical and non-surgical sports medicine doctors.

The good news though appears to be that I imagined the entire thing, because denials for routine things never happen.

You can pay a lot of money in premiums, have a $0 deductible, and now OoP maximum, and still end up having claims denied.

I'm making a statement about a person experiencing the consequences of their stated position.

If he'd staked out a position on the necessity of compelling everyone to engage in autoerotic asphyxiation to achieve maximum satisfaction and then subsequently died from it in a suffocation incident himself, then it wouldn't really be much of a tragedy compared to a bunch of children being randomly strangled to death in their classrooms.

Insofar as I can tell it looks like Charlie Kirk died doing what he loved and in a way that aligned existentially with his zealously professed ideology.

Did he not?

The infernal suspension forks on 3 out of 4 of the bikes in my garage would beg to differ, both in upfront cost and ongoing maintenance.