Sun 28 Jul 2019 08:58:03 AM EDT

Slept from eleven-thirty to seven-thirty.
Woke briefly around five.

High of eighty-seven and mostly sunny today.

Watched John Carpenter's The Thing, which I hadn't seen in years.
Pretty great, though I'm still fond of the original.
It works a bit like an English country house mystery, with an group of suspects trapped in an isolated location with an unidentified killer.
The weak characterizations hurt the fun of the guessing game a little.
Why did Childs stay behind when everyone else went outside to give Blair the test?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_%281982_film%29
> The film is screened annually in February to mark the beginning of winter at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen%E2%80%93Scott_South_Pole_Station
> An annual tradition is a back-to-back viewing of The Thing from Another World (1951), The Thing (1982), and The Thing (2011) after the last flight has left for the winter.
Ha.

https://theconversation.com/neoliberalism-has-tricked-us-into-believing-a-fairytale-about-where-money-comes-from-113783
> What modern money does retain is its association with debt. Unlike sovereign money, which was created and spent directly into circulation, modern money is largely borrowed into circulation through the banking system. This process shelters behind another myth, that banks merely act as a link between savers and borrowers. In fact, banks create money. And it is only in the last decade that this powerful myth has been finally put to rest by banking and monetary authorities.
>
> It is now acknowledged by monetary authorities such as the IMF, the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England, that banks are creating new money when they make loans. They don’t lend the money of other account holders to those who want to borrow.
>
> Bank loans consist of money conjured out of thin air, whereby new money is credited to the borrowers account with the agreement that the amount will eventually be repaid with interest.
>
> The policy implications of the public currency being created out of nowhere and lent to borrowers on a purely commercial basis have still not been taken on board. Nor has basing a public currency on debt as opposed to the sovereign power to create and directly circulate money free of debt.
>
> The result is that rather than using their own sovereign power over money creation, as Alexander the Great did, states have become borrowers from the private sector. Where there are public spending deficits or the need for large scale future expenditure, there is an expectation that the state will borrow the money or increase taxation, rather than create the money itself.
>
> Ecologically, there is a problem because the need to pay off debt could drive potentially damaging growth: money creation based on repaying debt with interest must imply constant growth in the money supply. If this is achieved through increasing productive capacity, there will inevitably be pressure on natural resources.
>
> Basing the money supply on debt is also socially discriminatory because not all citizens are in a position to take on debt. The pattern of the money supply will tend to favour the already rich or the most speculative risk-taker. Recent decades, for example, have seen a huge amount of borrowing by the financial sector to enhance their investments.
>
> The economic problem is that the money supply depends on the capacity of the various elements of the economy (public and private) to take on more debt. And so as countries have become more dependent upon bank-created money, debt bubbles and credit crunches have become more frequent.
>
> This is because handbag economics creates an impossible task for the private sector. It has to create all new money through bank-issued debt and repay it all with interest. It has to completely fund the public sector and generate a profit for investors.
>
> But when the privatised bank-led money supply flounders, the money creating powers of the state come back into clear focus. This was particularly plain in the 2007-8 crisis, when central banks created new money in the process known as quantitative easing. Central banks used the sovereign power to create money free of debt to spend directly into the economy (by buying up existing government debt and other financial assets, for example).

Ten-minute walk in the afternoon.
Cicadas.
Some sun, some dark clouds.

Watched some anime — Tsurune.

Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 3/4, vegetables 3/4, dairy 1/2, meat 1/3, nuts 0/0.5

Brunch: chips, pineapple, cucumber
Lunch: banana, carrots, coffee, egg and tomato sandwich
Afternoon snack: orange
Dinner: ice cream

127/78