Deciduous Tree Rex
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deciduoustreerex.bsky.social
Deciduous Tree Rex
@deciduoustreerex.bsky.social
540 followers 1.8K following 17 posts
Collector of academic degrees and chronic illnesses. Mom. Creator of dust-gathering wonders. Cripplingly incapable of participating in capitalism.
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deciduoustreerex.bsky.social
I’m enjoying @unlearnecon.bsky.social’s new book, which I received for my birthday, opened to the first page and started reading, and have hardly stopped reading since.

I have, however, gotten to the part where I’m just writing “fuck” in the margins. (Also there’s a rare typo on this page.)
Photo of my hand holding Cahal Moran (@unlearnecon)’s new book, which has a white cover with a red border and black block font. The text reads: CREATOR OF UNLEARNING ECONOMICS CAHAL MORAN WHY WE'RE GETTING POORER A REALIST'S GUIDE TO THE ECONOMY AND HOW WE CAN FIX IT Image of p. 251 from Cahal Moran’s book WHY WE’RE GETTING POORER. The auto-extracted text is below. My copy in this image has many pencil marks and margin notes, because I’m One of Those People. At the top of the page, the margin note says “Brakhage’s Black Magic” indicating the first (full) sentence on the page. The next sentence is starred. The subsequent paragraph’s thesis merits an “oh fuck,” and the penultimate sentence in that paragraph also scores a “fuck.” That’s when I stopped reading to take the picture. The page’s text [with margin notes in brackets]: WHERE DOES MONEY COME FROM? - 251 depositor back to the bank (the deposit). When credit is granted, it is a way of giving bringing resources from the future into the present, [Brakhage’s black magic] so that somebody can buy or invest now and pay back at a later date. The entire financial system depends on the trust of participants to honour their future obligations to keep it going. Even the hard cash or reserves that underpin this whole process are essentially promises from central banks and governments to banks and citizens that they will honour their obligations. When the monetary system breaks down, it is a sign that trust has broken down. This manifests in its worst form in hyperin- [oh fuck] flation, when people completely lose faith in a currency due to economic, social and political breakdown. It can also manifest more subtly: many people reasonably feel that private banks and corporations benefit more from existing monetary policy, not to mention direct bailouts. Citizens either rebel politically - by voting or protesting - or else economically, by looking for alternatives like gold or cryptocurrency. Wherever you stand on these alter-natives, they are completely understandable when a system based [ fuck ] on trust has repeatedly violated that trust. Many people feel that the existing monetary arrangements have made them poorer. Money is the lifeblood of the market economy, so everybody who participates in the market economy needs to be able to rely on it. Our valuable IOUs that we use in increasing areas of our life need to retain their value. Yet since the pandemic, many people have experienced the exact opposite, as costs rise across the board. People need to have a better understanding of infla- tion and to participate in how to manage it, instead of leaving it to arms-length authorities. We will now turn from the abstract operations of money to the more practical problem of how the cost of living got so damn high.
March 25, 2025 at 11:10 PM
deciduoustreerex.bsky.social
https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/

The number of comments is ticking up faster than the numbers on a gas pump.
Chart from https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/ showing spikes of outages reported for x.com (Twitter) across the morning hours of Mar 10, 2025.
March 10, 2025 at 4:04 PM