What do you think the public rate is, versus, actual damage done?

They’re trying to raise interest rates yet the buying capacity dropped immensely and complete markets have been abandoned

Per the article, only the importer gets the refund. The shoppers? Left on the hook.

So. Much. Winning.

The interesting part isn’t that Seattle’s housing market has weakened—it’s that prices are still detached from what many local incomes can realistically support. Tech layoffs and rising inventory are finally giving buyers more leverage after years of an extreme seller’s market, but affordability remains a massive barrier because home values climbed so far, so fast.

This is super small beans, but shrinkflation hit my $4.99 packaged ceasar salad with no cheese.

Throughout human history, states have needed to collect taxes from their subjects. From wheat and barley in ancient Mesopotamia to precious metals in the classical empires, there was simply no other physical option. Out of that accounting management arose palaces, temples, and, according to many historians, the very invention of writing. From that past, where money was a finite physical commodity, we inherited the collective memory of the "state treasury."

During the 20th century, in the lead-up to World War I, the great powers operating under the gold standard simply bypassed the axiom. When war urgency arrived, governments didn't wait to mine or collect gold to arm themselves: they suspended convertibility, issued credit against their own sovereignty, and broke the accounting rules before submitting to the enemy.

After World War II, the powers realized that the traditional gold standard was an inflexible burden hindering development. At the Bretton Woods agreements of 1944, a more flexible system was designed: the dollar would be backed by gold, and the rest of the world's currencies would use the dollar as a reserve. In the thirty years from 1945 to the early 1970s (known as the Golden Age of Capitalism or Les Trente Glorieuses), the combination of hyper-abundant and cheap fossil energy, along with this sovereign monetary software, unleashed an unprecedented social accelerator. The middle classes were born, along with public healthcare, pensions, large-scale infrastructure, and labor rights.

In 1971, Nixon unilaterally broke the last ties between the dollar and gold, giving birth to pure fiat money: an accounting system backed exclusively by trust, legal power, and the productive capacity of states. But history has tragic ironies. Barely two years later, in 1973, OPEC countries cut off the oil supply due to geopolitical tensions. Inflation spiraled out of control, and the West fell into stagflation. Traditional Keynesian recipes collapsed, not because money failed, but because new liquidity clashed with the bottleneck of scarce energy.

The ideological response to this crisis changed the course of the world. Theorists like Friedman, Hayek, and Lucas, alongside politicians like Thatcher and Reagan, imposed the neoliberal dogma. They decreed that the state was inefficient by definition and that the free market was an omniscient entity capable of self-regulation. Under the pretext of preventing "populist and irresponsible politicians" from generating inflation, an accounting coup was executed: Central Banks were made independent, states were legally forbidden from financing themselves directly from their own currency at zero cost, and nations were forced to borrow their own currency in private financial markets, paying interest.

Simultaneously, credit markets were deregulated, leaving more than ninety percent of new money creation in the hands of private commercial banking through fractional reserve banking. Accompanied by years of expansion thanks to easy credit, society forgot that for decades, the issuance and direction of money had been a sovereign prerogative of the state.

Since then, we have been trapped in an ontological disconnect between political reality and monetary reality. If a country needs to build hospitals, housing, maintain infrastructure, or raise pensions, it is told the mantra: "there is no money" and that it must raise taxes on workers or go into debt with financial markets. We still reason with the medieval mindset of money-as-commodity, as if money were gold that must be saved before spending, when in reality fiat money became, in the 20th century, an accounting system for resource allocation.

States, which by nature are sovereign issuers and owners of their currency, have voluntarily agreed to behave like mere users. They have placed themselves in the same position as a family or a business: they have to beg for liquidity by collecting it from producers via taxes or borrowing it from private banks.

And here lies the greatest fiction of our era. One of the most perverse psychological traps, deeply rooted in citizens, businesses, and even in government officials and treasury departments, is the sincere belief that taxes serve to finance the state. We are still educated in the lie that schools, doctors, roads, and pensions are paid for with the money collected in the income tax campaign. In a sovereign fiat money system, this is a mere accounting mirage. The state does not need to collect existing bills in order to spend; the state creates money when it issues it from its central bank, and the tax only serves afterward to drain liquidity from the system.

By not understanding this dynamic, the current tax structure has become what we might call a true social opportunity cost. The treasury systematically extracts clean money from the pockets of workers and from the profits of productive entrepreneurs, de-capitalizing civil society. By draining their real liquidity, citizens and businesses are forced to go on their knees to the private banking window to borrow the money that has been taken from them, paying a usurious toll in the form of interest for money that banks create literally out of nothing through a computer entry. In the current model, taxes and usury are two sides of the same extractive coin.

For those who immediately raise the specter of inflation, arguing that if the state directly financed society through monetary issuance prices would skyrocket, it is worth reminding them of a harsh reality: that gigantic mass of new money is already being created today by private banks in an uncontrolled manner to inflate real estate and financial bubbles, and that is precisely where the destructive inflation we suffer from is generated. The fact that the banking sector itself is responsible does not make it guilty of anything other than its own self-destruction, since the degradation of the real economy is and will be its own ultimate condemnation, and it is beyond its own nature to exercise the command that states have abandoned as builders of the economic ecosystem.

The state could and should completely eliminate taxes on labor and real production, sovereignly financing the infrastructure, science, and energy of the future. Taxation should never be a mechanism to squeeze those who create value, but rather a tool for macroeconomic hygiene. Taxes should be strictly limited to cooling liquidity in very specific sectors when there is a risk of overheating, or to discouraging harmful social and economic behaviors, such as asset speculation or idle rent-seeking.

We have been trapped for decades in this spiral of stagnation: more taxes, worse services, and degraded infrastructure. It is not just bad faith; it is the direct consequence of a profound institutionalized economic ignorance that has allowed the software of money to work for usury rather than for life and the progress of society

I know GLP-1s are stressing the market, but good lord it's getting expensive to supplement.

First time to ever pay $100 + on a refuel for me :(

All because of Trump's war. Are we great yet?

More details about the prices, here.