<story><title>Calling All Hackers</title><url>https://phrack.org/issues/71/17.html#article</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>underdeserver</author><text>Lowering rates is fine. Lowering them to zero is bad.&lt;p&gt;Economists generally believe the baseline, target rate should be around 2-3%.&lt;p&gt;Zero interest rate is like steroids. You can take them for a while to pick you up and help fight a bug (like the 2008 crash), but if you don&amp;#x27;t stop taking them, you&amp;#x27;ll need a long, painful, 5.5% interest rate rehab.</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&amp;gt; ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy.&lt;p&gt;Yes. It makes me really nervous to see people celebrating the fed talking about lowering rates. Maybe rates should be lowered a bit, sure, I don&amp;#x27;t know. But please, please don&amp;#x27;t ever let us go back to zero-interest. As a person who works with technology, that era was so incredibly depressing. So much waste. I&amp;#x27;m on the verge of leaving the tech industry because of what happened over the past 10 years. City bus drivers don&amp;#x27;t have to share an industry with SBF and Juicero and Elon Musk, you know?</text></item><item><author>AYBABTME</author><text>I thought this would be bad. The start with security stuff isn&amp;#x27;t my vibe. But then I kept reading it and the storytelling kept me. The econ stuff, parallels, etc.&lt;p&gt;It ended up capturing perfectly a bunch of ideas I&amp;#x27;ve been having for a few months now. ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy. Identifying the phenomenons and explaining their mechanisms has been a useful exercise.&lt;p&gt;I think this post will stay in my brain for a long while. I&amp;#x27;m at this point in life and this resonates a lot. I want to build useful stuff with intrinsic value and I&amp;#x27;m sick of the BS that exulted in the last decade. In my own way I&amp;#x27;m trying to start ventures, so it&amp;#x27;s a good motivating call.&lt;p&gt;Slow start but damn solid article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akira2501</author><text>&amp;gt; and help fight a bug (like the 2008 crash)&lt;p&gt;That was not a &amp;quot;bug.&amp;quot;  That was a parasite.  If you take steroids with a parasite you might just make the parasite stronger.</text></comment>
<story><title>Calling All Hackers</title><url>https://phrack.org/issues/71/17.html#article</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>underdeserver</author><text>Lowering rates is fine. Lowering them to zero is bad.&lt;p&gt;Economists generally believe the baseline, target rate should be around 2-3%.&lt;p&gt;Zero interest rate is like steroids. You can take them for a while to pick you up and help fight a bug (like the 2008 crash), but if you don&amp;#x27;t stop taking them, you&amp;#x27;ll need a long, painful, 5.5% interest rate rehab.</text></item><item><author>coldpie</author><text>&amp;gt; ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy.&lt;p&gt;Yes. It makes me really nervous to see people celebrating the fed talking about lowering rates. Maybe rates should be lowered a bit, sure, I don&amp;#x27;t know. But please, please don&amp;#x27;t ever let us go back to zero-interest. As a person who works with technology, that era was so incredibly depressing. So much waste. I&amp;#x27;m on the verge of leaving the tech industry because of what happened over the past 10 years. City bus drivers don&amp;#x27;t have to share an industry with SBF and Juicero and Elon Musk, you know?</text></item><item><author>AYBABTME</author><text>I thought this would be bad. The start with security stuff isn&amp;#x27;t my vibe. But then I kept reading it and the storytelling kept me. The econ stuff, parallels, etc.&lt;p&gt;It ended up capturing perfectly a bunch of ideas I&amp;#x27;ve been having for a few months now. ZIRP was toxic. It made us bad and lazy. Identifying the phenomenons and explaining their mechanisms has been a useful exercise.&lt;p&gt;I think this post will stay in my brain for a long while. I&amp;#x27;m at this point in life and this resonates a lot. I want to build useful stuff with intrinsic value and I&amp;#x27;m sick of the BS that exulted in the last decade. In my own way I&amp;#x27;m trying to start ventures, so it&amp;#x27;s a good motivating call.&lt;p&gt;Slow start but damn solid article.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>schmidtleonard</author><text>&amp;gt; Zero interest rate is like steroids.&lt;p&gt;The problem with your analogy is that paying interest is an active measure. It takes effort. The higher the rate*(outstanding debt), the more effort. This isn&amp;#x27;t a choice between injecting nothing vs injecting steroids, it&amp;#x27;s a choice between injecting sedatives vs injecting nothing. Raising the interest rate is like injecting a sedative. How much sedative should we inject? How much sedative &lt;i&gt;can&lt;/i&gt; we inject?</text></comment>