They’re out of money and this is their cover story.

From a business point of view, sure. But that was never my point.

I didn’t say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.

My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord’s failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord’s peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.

So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there’s an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there’s a chance. But Concord’s failure is in a whole different league. It didn’t just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.

Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.

Everything you’ve said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.

To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.

Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.

But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag… That’s what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.

You’re giving them too much credit.

Trump is genuinely this stupid, and he’s also very insecure, which means he surrounds himself with people just as stupid as he is. Even when those people don’t agree with him, they keep it to themselves because Trump’s cult leader status allows him to completely destroy the standing of critics within his party with just a few words.

The result is monarchy; a leader deeply unfit for the role surrounded by sycophants who will nod in agreement to everything he says.

It’s a pleasant fantasy to think that there’s a plan. It would be nice if this was all by design. If America wasn’t being lead by some of the most stupid and incompetent people to have ever lived. Because what does that say about Americans, when their leadership are this pathetic?

But this is real and it’s happening. Trump is actually this moronic, and the people around him are stupid enough and craven enough to enable him. Those who aren’t, like half of the top generals at the Pentagon, get pushed out. The weak willed and the idiotic remain.

Well… Not exactly.

Inflation is not ontologically evil. The problem is that we have this Bizarro world version of inflation where everything keeps getting more expensive, unless it’s an hour of our labor.

In a world where wages rise in line with costs, inflation actually benefits workers, because generally speaking our debt to savings ratio is much higher. Inflation reduces the comparative size of your debts. If you buy a house for $500,000 today, and then over the next ten years your income doubles, in effect the price of your house has halved. Ditto cars, student loans, medical debt, etc.

The problem is not the inflation itself, but the suppression of wages. That’s what’s actually killing us.

NB: This does not imply that inflation is ontologically good either. Just that, under the right conditions, it can be beneficial.

I have no disagreement with anything that you’ve said here, and it honestly reads to me that you have actually come around to agreeing with what I’m saying.

My point is not, and never ever will be, that there is nothing to be concerned about. Trump is a fascist, and he is doing everything he can to turn the US into a dictatorship.

I push back on the oft repeated assertion that (heavily paraphrasing the many different versions of this that I’ve seen) “Trump can do whatever he wants because of his magic crime powers” because it’s defeatist thinking. If you assume that everything and anything is completely within his power and ignore the actual realities at play then you’re just conceding ground that is still in contention. It’s not actually helpful or useful. You can’t fight a war if you’re always in retreat. You have to know where the battle lines actually are. That doesn’t mean that those lines aren’t under attack. But recognizing where those lines are means you can actually fight to defend them.

Love the Enzoni. Probably one of my favorite lesser known cocktails.

Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about?

Trump also can’t just tear down the White House and build whatever for billions without Congress approval

The difference being that there’s nothing, physically, to stop him from just having contractors turn up and start building, regardless of what the rules say. That’s not the same thing as ordering currency issuance, something that he has literally no means of doing short of sending armed goons into the offices. You can’t just put an apple next to an orange and say “These are the same.”

he also can’t invent huge tariff wars and he can’t control the handling of midterm elections.

He can, depending on how you interpret the law. That’s why both of those things are subject to legal challenges. Notice that his last round of tariffs had to be called off, because he lost in court.

If Trump simply does whatever he wants, all of the time, and no law or institution can ever stop him, the original “liberation day” tariffs would still be in place. But that’s just not how this actually works. Reality exists, and Trump has to operate within it.

But if I’m wrong, you can prove it very easily; just tell me where Kilmar Abrego Garcia is right now.

You can’t steal from an empty vault. As tempting as it is to imagine that Trump can just crime his way out of anything, objective reality still exists. Short of sending his ICE goons to hold the fed at gunpoint, printing money is not actually something he can do.

Wild to assume that he’d ever actually pay out.

1. He won’t. None of his other promised payouts have manifested, and they were all much smaller.
2. He can’t. There isn’t enough discretionary spending for him to move around - even illegally - to cover this. It would be over a trillion dollars. Congress would have to approve it, and they fucking won’t. Not a chance in hell.

A chunk of your argument here basically rests on the idea that a total confidence collapse in the US bond market - something I depicted as an in extremis example of the costs of unchecked issuance - literally cannot happen. First of all, that’s an assumption, not a fact, and I think we just established that it’s better to avoid making too many of those.

Second, regardless of whether that extreme possibility can occur, along the road to getting there you can still end up with a lack of confidence pushing yields higher and higher, which in turn requires ever increasing amounts of currency printing to service those yields, which further pushes yields higher and so on. Even if you’re somehow right that the US bond market can never ever seize up like it has in Russia, you can still end up in a money printing spiral.

Which brings us back to the core question of what possible downsides there are to printing infinite money. Here you have, apparently and bizarrely, presumed that my acknowledgement that the connection between currency issuance and inflation is not simple or direct as an agreement that no connection exists at all. I’m not aware of any theory of economics which supports this assertion.

Under MMT - which appears to be what you’re relying on - taxation is necessary as a deflationary measure, because it is the act of removing currency from circulation. In order for that to be true, it must follow that putting currency into circulation is, to a greater or lesser degree depending on circumstance, an inflationary measure. Otherwise you have a scale that can only ever tip one way.

You’re correct that you cannot default, but that doesn’t remove the problem, it just changes its shape. There are still plenty of bad things that can happen if you’re spending far more than you’re taxing.

And yes, you’re absolutely right to say that national debt isn’t the bogeyman that conservatives and neoliberals make it out to be. Austerity is a plague and we shouldn’t ever embrace that kind of idiotic thinking. I’m the first guy to shove Mark Blyth down the throat of every moronic con and neolib who acts like government debt is a credit card.

But that doesn’t mean that you should reflexively apply that defense of debt and spending in every circumstance without exception. The rate at which the US is accumulating debt, without anything to show for it, is a very real problem that shouldn’t simply be handwaved away. These things are not black and white. Details matter.

You need to continue to think this through.

If taxes are a deflationary mechanism because they remove money from circulation, then that would imply that the opposite is also true; that putting too much money into circulation is, broadly, an inflationary mechanism.

There’s a lot of nuance I’m skipping over there, but that’s exactly my point. You’re taking a very basic, very one dimensional view of MMT and treating it as a license to spend infinite money, when that’s not actually what the theory says at all.

I can’t stress this enough but most money is created by banks when they loan to the private sector, not by the government.

Yes, I literally said this in the comment you replied to.

Nope. The government has a list of primary purchasers (In Europe it’s banks, I assume it’s the same in the US).

You might want to try doing a little less assuming there bud. In the US, treasury auctions are open to anyone.

Regarding your points about inflation, again, you’re broadly correct, and while you’re bringing up important nuance that I didn’t include in my previous comment, it just doesn’t change the overall picture. Yes, inflation is complicated. Yes, there is not a direct correlation between money printing and inflation. It does depend heavily on how that money is spent and where. These are all excellent points and I’m glad you’re raising them. But it’s not “spreading disinformation” to discuss a subject in broad terms. What you’re describing as “monetarism” is just acknowledging the basic fact that MMT is not a license to spend infinite money. As you yourself noted, it very much matters how and where that money is spent. If the US government was accruing it’s current level of debt through careful, thoughtful spending on programs that would serve to build individual wealth, the concerns would be very different. But the reality is that they’re not.

I’m a huge defender of government spending. Austerity is a cancer that needs to be rooted out wherever it arises. I have no compunctions about that. Governments should spend more on behalf of the public. But that doesn’t mean that we simply wave off any concerns whatsoever about budget deficits. Even MMT maintains that taxation is required in order to control the amount of money in circulation. If unlimited spending with no downside were possible under MMT, then why would there be any need for taxes at all?

Government spending is good, but it has to be done right. What’s happening in the US right now is not any form of sane fiscal policy, and it is going to lead to disaster if it continues.

I want to caution against dismissing the entire field of economics as if there’s simply nothing of value there at all.

It’s absolutely true that mainstream economics has a lot of problems right now. There’s a serious and endemic issue with “frictionless cows on an infinite plane”; that is, economists building models that have not been tested against reality and then acting as if those models can predict reality.

But economics is a genuinely important field of study that offers invaluable insights about how the world really works. If we want to make evidence based changes to address the most fundamental injustices in our society, we need the kind of insights that economics can provide. We just need those insights to come in forms that are useful.

If you want to a really good intro to what economics should be, by someone who has a great understanding of all of the problems with what economics too often is, I’d highly recommend the channel Unlearning Economics: https://www.youtube.com/@unlearningeconomics9021. He does a great job of demystifying the field while also criticizing it and applying it.

There’s important work out there being done by economists who are working to challenge traditional assumptions and push the field into being something genuinely valuable and useful. Don’t throw their contributions out with the bathwater.

Nope. Just need to know an official language. English only is fine.

Most Canadians know fuck all French, just for the record. It’s only really spoken in two provinces.