Diamonds are cool. Not as engagement rings, but as ultra-dense carbon.

They’re arguably the hardest known substance in the universe. The only things that might be harder are so rare that their hardness can only be tested in simulations. That makes diamond unequaled for cutting. They also have amazing thermal conductivity. All that from a transparent rock is awesome.

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.

Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?

Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.

You shared a picture of a computer mounted on a wall.

It took me a while to get the idea that money could be debt / IOUs. But, when I thought of government employees doing things for the government and getting given IOUs it clicked.

That all makes it much easier to understand the flow of IOUs through the economy, and much easier to understand how taxing destroys money. It’s the government ripping up IOUs that it itself issued to its own workers (or suppliers or contractors or whatever).

Yeah, this is the common MMT definition of money, I think.

Another way to think of it is that all money is IOUs. This one’s a bit hard to wrap your head around, but it works.

Start with government spending. A mail carrier walks through sleet and hail to deliver mail, a service they’re doing on behalf of the government. The government says “thanks for all that work, I owe you” and gives them a pile of IOUs in the form of dollars. Whenever the government receives a good or a service from a person or a company, it gives them an IOU in exchange.

Going back to the mail carrier, their work day is done, so they stop off at a supermarket. They grab some milk and some sausages and go to the cash. Now, maybe it would be possible for the mail carrier to do some kind of work in exchange for the groceries. Maybe advise them on how to ship things efficiently, or maybe just help stock shelves. But, it’s much easier just to hand over some IOUs. So, they hand over some of the IOUs (dollars) they got from the government. Now, the government owes the supermarket, rather than the mail carrier.

So, the store keeps doing business. It collects a bunch of IOUs from various customers, and issues a bunch of IOUs to its suppliers. When tax time rolls around, the store has a whole bunch of IOUs (originally from the government, but given in by various customers). Since the store owes the government for things like providing police to keep things secure, the FDA for keeping the food safe, and so-on, it effectively “cancels” that debt by almost ripping up the IOUs. Well, really, it hands the IOUs back to the government and allows the government to rip them up.

So, you can see the whole economy as the government issuing IOUs as spending. Those IOUs enter the economy and flow around, and people want to hang onto them because they know that in April the governments going to come around to settle things. Tax time is basically a point where people who didn’t do any work directly for the government can say “Yeah, I didn’t do any work for you, but I did give that mail carrier some milk and sausages, and he handed over your IOUs, so I’m giving those to you now”. And the government says “Yep, fair enough”. It collects the IOUs and rips them up, and the whole thing starts over.

In the past, this actually used to be a lot more explicit. When you could exchange your US dollars for gold, the idea that it was an IOU for the gold was a bit more explicit. These days we don’t need the gold. It’s an IOU not for gold, but for work done.

Money is fancy IOUs, that people mostly believe will be repaid.

Yeah, exactly what I was thinking. Like, it isn’t quite as simple as “print $1m for everyone and they can all go out and buy Ferraris.” But, there are plenty of situations where the government can just print the money and it won’t cause inflation or any other harmful effects.

A rack takes up as much space as a fridge though, and mounting things to the wall is risky. You better make sure you really got it into the stud in the wall. Also, don’t do that if you live in an earthquake zone.

They take up so much space though.

The only problem I’ve had with Raspberry Pi is that some apps want to write a lot of stuff to “disk”, and the default “disk” on a Pi is a MicroSD card which dies if you keep writing things to it. Sure, you can always plug something into a USB slot, but that adds a bit of friction to the whole process.

Oh, also, I wish it were easy to power a whole bunch of Pi units. Each one needing its own wall wart is a bit annoying, and I’ve had iffy results using weaker, less steady power supplies with multiple ports intended for things like phones.

Just remove the “and health insurance” and this works.

I love it when people play with the “Bruce Wayne is an evil oligarch” trope. Just look at Gotham, it’s massively run down, and yet there are billionaires like Wayne at society events. Sure, he spends nights fighting crime (or at least criminals) as Batman, but does he pay his taxes? Does he employ lobbyists who lobby for tax breaks on billionaires, justifying it by thinking that without those tax breaks he couldn’t afford to have Wayne Enterprises come up with such cool toys for Batman, and he wouldn’t be as effective at fighting crime criminals? Surely, one of the best ways to reduce crime in Gotham wouldn’t be to punch bad guys at night, but to ensure that there’s a robust social safety net, and that there isn’t such a vast wealth disparity between the haves and the have-nots. But, we don’t see either Batman or Bruce Wayne arguing for more taxes on the rich, more social programs for the poor, etc. It’s more about having adventures and going to gala events.

As for this comic, the only way health insurance companies benefit if someone requires life-long medical care is if they’re not the ones footing the medical bill, and are just a proxy for government money. So, instead of “It’s a good thing you have health insurance”, “It’s a good thing you’re on Gothamcare Advantage by Wayne Enterprises”. Similar to the scam that is Medicare Advantage.

Edit: Now I want to see someone do a Batman spoof where he’s “fighting crime” in his Batsuit but with one of those green eye shades, sitting at a desk, going line by line through financial data on his fellow oligarchs, trying to find the ways they cheated on their taxes.