thanks! yeah, rereading it is a bit of a tautology, and approximately fixed number of units is the basic point. the reason for emphasizing it a bit is just to make clear that demand is diverted, for a given aggregate housing budget, sudden interest in some units doesn’t change the average cost. 1/

so it’s invisible to price level measures. that’s also a tautology, basically the definition of average. but i think people’s intuition is that price spirals in high-demand automatically lead to aggregate inflation. 2/

in practice they might, probably do! but only via the channel of sucking in new purchasing power. you can decompose an an inequality of quality, redirection of demand effect from aggregate purchasing power changes, and the former have welfare effects invisible to price level measures. 3/

(this all should have been stated more clearly.) /fin

It's a very nice distillation of the MMT account of money creation, which is descriptively accurate. 1/

One can argue the description is chosen to emphasize lack of constraint, but one can't really argue with the core point, that as issuer the US can spend US dollars in arbitrary quantities into existence, the whole bond apparatus is a way of extra providing services and/or managing consequences. 2/

He does make claims toward about the uniqueness of the dollar in the global system, suggesting continuing resilience of demand for dollars as a trade and reserve currency. 3/

Those have always been contestable, and I think are more contestable now than before due to the US "weaponizing" dollar dominance with sanctions and freezes, and more recently Trump's erratic attitude toward the dollar, access to the dollar system, and trade. 4/

But the account is clear and correct that if there were a crisis because the dollar lost its near universal acceptability in global trade, at a high value in terms of tradable goods + services, we'd experience that in prices, an inflation crisis rather than an inability to come up with dollars. 5/

(A sufficiently bad inflation crisis wouldn't necessarily be a gentler crisis that the sovereign defaults that countries that borrow in foreign countries are sometimes forced into, however. Russia once chose to default on its own debt, preferring that to the consequences of printing.) /fin

Apple Silicon is market leading. But it cost me $4K to buy a decently DRAM + storage equipped laptop, which is absurd. My view of Apple as ethical (even relative to a low industry baseline) has taken a huge dive. I will try, but I may not succeed, to part ways, unless some of these things change. 1/

Apple is the king of ecosystem lock-in. The phone and laptop interoperate much more seamlessly than any third party thing could do. The wife has a watch. The whole extended fam uses iMessage. It will be costly to switch. I don't think I'll persuade them to Signal. /fin