#devaluation of the dollar

[poorrichardjr]

Uncharted Future

There are plenty of things going on right now that make me question exactly where we are going to end up in a few months to a few years. To start with, the stock market is unstable. That isn't new, but the reasons for it are. Every few days we get a new threat of tariffs, war, or firings of people who can actually keep the chaos from expanding.

The thing is, when stocks start to tank, which they have in the last few months (stocks have lost all the gains they had since Trump was elected), the value of US bonds go up. But that ain't happening this time. Foreign nations are not only not buying into the bond market, they are actively selling them. So, the value of bonds is also tanking while the stock market declines. Some nations, like China - which holds a LOT of our debt in the form of bonds, are threatening to not buy new bonds when we inevitably try to sell more because Trump is demanding a raise in the debt ceiling.

To top all that off, the value of the dollar is also declining. It has lost significant value in the last two months. It is now weaker than it has been in at least three years. That means we as Americans will have to spend more money just to buy the same amount of stuff we do now. Most of the reason for that is because foreign nations aren't using our currency or are investing in foreign currencies instead of our own.

These three things do not all decline at the same time, but they are for a very simple reason. We have a moron as president who wants to be a dictator and foreign nations no longer trust us or think that we are a good investment. This fact has led to a massive collapse in travel tourism. Estimates are that we will lose up to 90 billion in tourism this year.

The thing is, all of this is cumulative and will only get worse in the coming months to years. What happens because of this is uncertain. However, what I can tell you is this cannot be undone simply by electing a new president in four years. We are already seeing bills being written in state and federal government that will greatly curtail the ability of most of the population to vote, especially if they aren't fully MAGA.

The damage that is likely to occur to us as a nation will be consequential.

Good luck America. Things are about to get a lot worse, and it is because so many Americans thought that hate, racism, and stupidity was better than a black woman.

[kazifatagar]

NEW: The U.S.-China Currency Clash – A Battle for Economic Supremacy

Picture this: a high-stakes economic showdown between the world’s two largest economies, the United States and China, with the value of their currencies at the heart of the fight. The U.S., led by a vocal Donald Trump, is pushing China to revalue its currency, the yuan (or renminbi), to level the playing field for American businesses. Meanwhile, China, a master of economic chess, has a history of…

[leahthedreamer]

My country just voted in a woman that said women are only truly fulfilled when they have children and become mothers as our new prime minister, starting off the week terribly

[saltedsolenoid]

oh no... absolutely heartbreaking monologue idea...

[1st-worldsaver]

Hm. Had forgotten trump was president during 2018.

[lovezacblr]

We had an 81 Cadillac Eldorado with the same crush velvet interior. LA Heatwaves had you like 🥵🥵🥵🥵

1980 Buick Century Limited

[thatdisasterauthor]

👀 i would be interested in hearing the deviantart points rant

Alrighty, the deviantART points rant. For context, I had a dA account from the time I was 12 and used it steadily until I was about 20. I was also a volunteer moderator with them for about a year, and they even offered me a job at one point. (But there was no way in heaven or hell they could've paid me enough to move to southern California, and god forbid they offer remote work.)

dA was one of the original social media behemoths. Never quite to the level of Twitter or Facebook, but if you were an artist you were on deviantART. It was a fantastic site back in its heyday. Artists got their start on there, recruiters were on there, art directors were on there, the community building features were fantastic. Yeah, it had its share of weird shit, but point me to a website that doesn't.

Multiple famous artists got their start on deviantART. Back then, it was a place you got real, legitimate work from. A place you could use to build a real, legitimate audience. The titans of early 2000s digital art that pretty much everyone knows (in the West, anyway), the ones who still have a massive effect on art styles today, basically all got their start on deviantART. It influenced the entire western culture of what art looks like on the internet, and that bled out into what art looks like everywhere else because these people made beloved shows and comics and movies and books and everything else.

But one of the best things about deviantART was that it was created at a time before everyone decided social media had to be slimmed down to its barest bones. It was a complex site, and there was a lot to it. That made it really easy for all levels of artists (and just plain art enjoyers) to use, and easy for them to make it function in a way that worked for them. This fostered a great environment where people of all skill levels could interact, share knowledge, and just absorb skills from one another.

Now, one area deviantART didn't initially cater to people was built-in payment options. They had a print shop you could upload your work to, but it was like Redbubble or Printful; merch selling, not custom work selling. So if artists wanted to offer commissions, they'd have to take payments elsewhere. (Usually Paypal.) Which was fine! That worked great!

But, well. Corporations gonna corporate. I forget the exact year, but one day they launched a new feature called Points. Points were a site specific currency, and they were one of the first (if not the first) to have such a thing. There were also some other things launched with it, including the ability to accept commissions with points as payment. You could also use points to buy site subscriptions, badges, stuff from the print shop, etc., or you could gift them to other people. You could also cash them out for real currency, for a fee (I wanna say the fee was 10%, and less if you were a subscribed user, but I can't remember exactly).

The conversion rate for Points was 1 Point=1US cent. Which seems fine on the surface! But the problem was psychological, because what they didn't do was actually make it look like that. Points instead looked like dollars, because there was no equivalent to actual CENTS in the Points ecosystem. So, for example, lets say you want to charge one dollar for something. That would look like this:

$1

P100.

Or ten dollars for something:

$10

P1000

Or a hundred dollars for something:

$100

P10000

See the problem? They're the same VALUE, but points just look massively bigger. This was especially a problem for people who didn't know what the conversion rate was because they just didn't know, or they were from other countries and REALLY didn't know because it wasn't related to their own currencies at all. (I think there was also a max amount of points you could charge for a commission, like a couple hundred dollars worth maybe? It was low when you converted it to real currency, if I'm remembering correctly.)

It devalued the art market like a knife to the gut. People were suddenly taking commissions for literal pennies just because the numbers LOOKED bigger. And because deviantART was such a hub for the art community, it bled out elsewhere. Prices started to dip other places too, because people who DID understand the conversion rate knew they could go on deviantART and get shit for super cheap from the people who didn't know or care. Which made other people lower their prices to compete, and it just resulted in a spiral to the bottom.

Would the art market have still tanked in the same way without the introduction of Points on dA? Maybe. But Points were the first domino to fall, and they were a massive one. The art market has never recovered even though deviantART has been 90% dead for going on a decade.

So yes. There's my internet history rant on Points and art values. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

[kazifatagar]

Trump’s Plan to Devalue the Dollar: Strategy, Risks, and Global Reactions

The “Mar-a-Lago Accord” is a proposed economic strategy under President Donald Trump aimed at addressing the perceived overvaluation of the U.S. dollar to enhance American manufacturing and reduce trade deficits. The plan draws inspiration from the 1985 Plaza Accord, where major economies coordinated to weaken the dollar. Key figures like Vice-President J.D. Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott…

[digitalassetinvestment]

The Devaluation of The US Dollar

Discover The Devaluation of the US Dollar and its impact on investments. With central banks expanding monetary policies, hard assets like bitcoin become crucial to hedging against currency risks. Explore investment opportunities with DAIM for a secure financial future.

[shithowdy]

had a somewhat disheartening encounter on reddit after i suggested an artist raise her commission prices, where she told me that they are so low because in her country the value of the us dollar is much higher so $20 is more like $100 to her.

international artists, that $20 is still only worth $20 to your american customers! no one is taking currency exchange conversions into account when it comes to buying art. a piece is not suddenly worth half its value in usd because it can go twice as far for the recipient, that's called taking advantage of you. i understand the desire to keep prices low to cast a wider net but to do so devalues the labor as a whole. get those sweet american dollars and up your prices.

[apas-95]

“Civil War” is a very poor war movie. There is a “war” in its title, but the U.S. has been at peace domestically for so long, that American filmmakers simply cannot imagine how a highly developed industrial society would enter a state of war. In every scene of the urban street battle, the backdrop is a brightly lit city. Even in the suburban area where the interview team rests on the first night, you can see machine guns opening fire with some functioning streetlights in the backdrop. Nearly a century after Thomas Edison’s death, Americans can no longer understand that “a lit lightbulb is a miracle.” Details that don’t fit the war atmosphere also include clean streets, freshly mowed lawns, and well-maintained highways—the worst “destruction” being a pile of abandoned cars that jammed the road so you have to drive around for a short distance. It seems the filmmakers were unaware that these commonplace, day-to-day living conditions require tens of thousands of professionals working around the clock to maintain. A real war would first destroy the daily operations of various public sectors, especially eliminating the financial basis that pays their salaries. On the one hand, the script sets up a detail where the U.S. dollar has devalued crazily and shopping is impossible, yet on the other hand, Americans still enjoy reliable power supply and roads. I can only say that Americans have been too well-protected for the past century.

— China Academy

[evillesbianvillain]

MORE CHAOS! MORE DOLLAR DEVALUATION!

[violetasteracademic]

Generative AI Can Fuck Itself

I am one of the AO3 authors (along with all of my friends) who had their work stolen and fed into a dataset to be sold to the highest bidder for training generative AI models.

I feel angry. I feel violated. I feel devastated. I cannot express enough that if you still do not understand the damage that generative AI art and writing has on our planet, our society, and our artists, I don't know what else there is to say. How do you convince a human being to care more about another humankinds ability to create than their personal need to consume?

Generative AI, when it comes to art, has one goal and one goal only. To steal from artists and reduce the dollar value of their work to zero. To create databases of stolen work that can produce work faster and cheaper than the centuries of human creation those databases are built on. If that isn't enough for you to put away Chatgpt, Midgard, ect ect (which, dear god, please let that be enough), please consider taking time to review MIT's research on the environmental impacts of AI here. The UNEP is also gathering data and has predicted that AI infrastructure may soon outpace the water consumption of entire countries like Denmark.

This is all in the name of degrading, devaluing, and erasing artists in a society that perpetually tries to convince us that our work is worth nothing, and that making a living off of our contributions to the world is some unattainable privilege over an inalienable right.

The theft of the work of fic writers is exceptionally insidious because we have no rights. We enter into a contract while writing fic- We do not own the rights to the work. Making money, asking for money, or exchanging any kind of commercial trade with our written fanfiction is highly illegal, completely immoral, and puts the ability to even write and share fanfiction at risk. And still, we write for the community. We pour our hearts out, give up thousands of hours, and passionately dedicate time that we know we will never and can never be paid for, all for the community, the pursuit of storytelling, and human connection.

We now live in a world where the artist creating their work are aware it is illegal for it to be sold, and contribute anyway, only for bots to come in and scrape it so it can be sold to teach AI databases how to reproduce our work.

At this time, I have locked my fics to allow them only to be read by registered users. It's not a perfect solution, but it appears to be the only thing I can do to make even a feeble attempt at protecting my work. I am devastated to do this, as I know many of my readers are guests. But right now it is between that or removing my work and not continuing to post at all. If you don't have an account, you can easily request one here. Please support the writers making these difficult decisions at this time. Many of us are coping with an extreme violation, while wanting to do everything we can to prevent the theft of our work in the future and make life harder for the robots, even if only a little.

Please support human work. Please don't give up on the fight for an artists right to exist and make a living. Please try to fight against the matrix of consumerism and bring humanity, empathy, and the time required to create back into the arts.

To anyone else who had their work stolen, I am so sorry and sending you lots of love. Please show your favorite AO3 authors a little extra support today.

[dostoyevsky-official]

constant tariff threats (and the actual additional 10% levied on china last week everyone's forgotten about) warrant a Kindleberger Spiral reminder: what happened when tariffs were used at the onset of the great depression. the "weaker dollar" (competitive currency devaluation) has been a vance-thiel pet idea for years, too

[notayesmanseconomics]

Argentina is facing what is even by its standards quite a currency crisis

As I am sure many of you are aware there has just been an election in Argentina. As ever my concern is the economics rather than the politics. The events are already really quite extraordinary. I do not envy whoever at the Bank of England had to tell Governor Andrew Bailey this. The Board of Directors of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA) decided today to raise the monetary policy…

[directdogman]

Hello directdogdiaper asking for a friend (I’m the friend) what if for the next thing you make about dialtown is Roger route part 2 where the evil red gnomes go into the building Roger and Peter work at and fight the blue gnomes the blue gnomes are the good ones btw

The two varities of gnomes that you've seen are roughly as evil as each other. The main ideological difference between the red and green gnomes is that the red ones favour higher tariffs, industrialization and want the gold standard to return (while the other kind want lots of silver coins to be minted to intentionally cause rapid hyperinflation and devalue the dollar.)

Both varieties would still both do equal amounts of harm if given the opportunity.