SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The amount of $100 bills in circulation is surging. And it's leaving some economists scratching their heads.
The number of outstanding U.S. $100 bills has doubled since the financial crisis, with more than 12 billion of them across the world, according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve. C-notes have passed $1 bills in circulation, Deutsche Bank chief international economist Torsten Slok said in a note to clients this week.
[...] "By eliminating high denomination, high value notes we would make life harder for those pursuing tax evasion, financial crime, terrorist finance and corruption," [former Standard Chartered bank chief executive Peter] Sands wrote.
The global illicit money flows were "staggering" and fuel crimes from drug trafficking and human smuggling to theft and fraud, Sands said. He estimated that depending on the country, tax evasion robs the public sector of anywhere between 6 percent and 70 percent of what authorities estimate they should be collecting. And despite "huge investments in transaction surveillance systems, and intelligence, less than 1 percent of illicit financial flows are seized.
[...] "The Federal Reserve and Treasury make 99 dollars for every $100 dollar bill they print and sell offshore," Colas said. "There's a natural desire to keep printing these things — the U.S. government makes a lot of money selling them."
Superbills?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 01 2019, @09:58PM
What our utility function is isn't directly chosen by us, though it can be influenced by our choices. Rational agents will never ascribe positive expected utility to changing their utility function at the time they are considering doing so*. Therefore our utility functions will, to the extent we are rational, only drift neutrally and so we don't need to care about altering them. Therefore our morality is out of our hands to the extent we act rationally, and what appear to be people altering their morality are actually just people deciding that a given strategy leads to greater expected utility (e.g. because they feel good for having done so/because they avoid feeling bad/because it's just habit they got into due to a process with positive expected utility (e.g. obeying parents on moral matters and not bothering to reconsider)/because they avoid prison/et c.).
Therefore I, and all others, already do seek maximum utility without regard for morality, because it can't influence our behavior but is rather a description of it. Choosing to be honorable so that others will be is just a decision theory problem, not anything deeper. My prior sacrifices of utility in the name of morality were just the products of a heuristic for maximizing utility, and still good decisions because they caused others to trust me, which is more beneficial than the utility I would have obtained even if never betrayed.
I believe that maximum utility will be obtained from pseudo-rights, where they're respected up to a point and then are ignored, as almost all people currently support but mistakenly call rights.
Guess I'm a statist now. Didn't expect that. This has been coming for a while, but I didn't expect such a sharp 180 into egoism.
Please point out any mistakes, I'm tired and know fuck all about this topic. I'll think all this through properly over the coming days/weeks. I don't expect my actual behavior will change in the slightest because of this, being trustworthy is far too valuable to give up for the utterly minor gains I could have by violating other's rights.
*newcomblike problems aside, accounting for them isn't needed to communicate my point.