#prompt: market

[polyamships]

[ID: “Polyam Shipping Day / 14th of every month”. Next to the text is a red infinity sign that finishes in a heart on top. Above the text are rows of stylized hearts in the colors of both versions of the polyam pride flag (black, red, bright blue, light green, dark green, light blue, navy). /end ID]

May 14th 2024 is our 38th Polyam Shipping Day.

The optional theme for it is: 🏪 Market 💹

This could be markets that sell something - everyday going to the supermarket, a leisurely day out at the farmer's market, getting up early to go to fish markets and so on, visiting a market on holiday, or characters working on a market. There's also the stock market, bear and bull markets for it, and other financial markets like for housing. Or the consideration of how much something is worth, its market value, or how you might market either people's talents, places or products in advertising terms. Someone could be on the job market or putting themself out there again being 'on the market' for dating. Maybe even polycule board game night featuring markets in the games!

…

We’ll be tracking #PolyamShippingDay, and keeping an eye out for any @polyamships mentions too. We will reblog any polyam-positive fanworks featuring polyamorous ships of any configuration/type from any fandom. All ratings are welcome but anything nsfw/triggery should be warned for and behind a read more, as should very long tumblr fic.

You can also submit works directly to the blog or send us asks to let us know to check your blog for a post. If you’re posting on AO3, our collection name is ‘PolyamShippingDay‘ and you can post to the collection here. Only fanworks submitted/@ us on tumblr or in the official AO3 collection, or fanworks posted to our Dreamwidth community, are guaranteed to be included in our roundup. Please also let us know what prompt you created for, if any - people are always welcome to create for past prompts instead.

We have a Discord - invite here - if you want a place to chat about your ships or what you’re creating for them.

We look forward to seeing what people create for it. If you’re enthused about the day, we’d be especially appreciative of any reblogs to help spread the word about the event.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI “art” and uncanniness

TOMORROW (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on TOMORROW (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

When it comes to AI art (or "art"), it's hard to find a nuanced position that respects creative workers' labor rights, free expression, copyright law's vital exceptions and limitations, and aesthetics.

I am, on balance, opposed to AI art, but there are some important caveats to that position. For starters, I think it's unequivocally wrong – as a matter of law – to say that scraping works and training a model with them infringes copyright. This isn't a moral position (I'll get to that in a second), but rather a technical one.

Break down the steps of training a model and it quickly becomes apparent why it's technically wrong to call this a copyright infringement. First, the act of making transient copies of works – even billions of works – is unequivocally fair use. Unless you think search engines and the Internet Archive shouldn't exist, then you should support scraping at scale:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And unless you think that Facebook should be allowed to use the law to block projects like Ad Observer, which gathers samples of paid political disinformation, then you should support scraping at scale, even when the site being scraped objects (at least sometimes):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program

After making transient copies of lots of works, the next step in AI training is to subject them to mathematical analysis. Again, this isn't a copyright violation.

Making quantitative observations about works is a longstanding, respected and important tool for criticism, analysis, archiving and new acts of creation. Measuring the steady contraction of the vocabulary in successive Agatha Christie novels turns out to offer a fascinating window into her dementia:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agatha-christie-alzheimers-research

Programmatic analysis of scraped online speech is also critical to the burgeoning formal analyses of the language spoken by minorities, producing a vibrant account of the rigorous grammar of dialects that have long been dismissed as "slang":

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373950278_Lexicogrammatical_Analysis_on_African-American_Vernacular_English_Spoken_by_African-Amecian_You-Tubers

Since 1988, UCL Survey of English Language has maintained its "International Corpus of English," and scholars have plumbed its depth to draw important conclusions about the wide variety of Englishes spoken around the world, especially in postcolonial English-speaking countries:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice.htm

The final step in training a model is publishing the conclusions of the quantitative analysis of the temporarily copied documents as software code. Code itself is a form of expressive speech – and that expressivity is key to the fight for privacy, because the fact that code is speech limits how governments can censor software:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-established-code-speech/

Are models infringing? Well, they certainly can be. In some cases, it's clear that models "memorized" some of the data in their training set, making the fair use, transient copy into an infringing, permanent one. That's generally considered to be the result of a programming error, and it could certainly be prevented (say, by comparing the model to the training data and removing any memorizations that appear).

Not every seeming act of memorization is a memorization, though. While specific models vary widely, the amount of data from each training item retained by the model is very small. For example, Midjourney retains about one byte of information from each image in its training data. If we're talking about a typical low-resolution web image of say, 300kb, that would be one three-hundred-thousandth (0.0000033%) of the original image.

Typically in copyright discussions, when one work contains 0.0000033% of another work, we don't even raise the question of fair use. Rather, we dismiss the use as de minimis (short for de minimis non curat lex or "The law does not concern itself with trifles"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_minimis

Busting someone who takes 0.0000033% of your work for copyright infringement is like swearing out a trespassing complaint against someone because the edge of their shoe touched one blade of grass on your lawn.

But some works or elements of work appear many times online. For example, the Getty Images watermark appears on millions of similar images of people standing on red carpets and runways, so a model that takes even in infinitesimal sample of each one of those works might still end up being able to produce a whole, recognizable Getty Images watermark.

The same is true for wire-service articles or other widely syndicated texts: there might be dozens or even hundreds of copies of these works in training data, resulting in the memorization of long passages from them.

This might be infringing (we're getting into some gnarly, unprecedented territory here), but again, even if it is, it wouldn't be a big hardship for model makers to post-process their models by comparing them to the training set, deleting any inadvertent memorizations. Even if the resulting model had zero memorizations, this would do nothing to alleviate the (legitimate) concerns of creative workers about the creation and use of these models.

So here's the first nuance in the AI art debate: as a technical matter, training a model isn't a copyright infringement. Creative workers who hope that they can use copyright law to prevent AI from changing the creative labor market are likely to be very disappointed in court:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sarah-silverman-lawsuit-ai-meta-1235669403/

But copyright law isn't a fixed, eternal entity. We write new copyright laws all the time. If current copyright law doesn't prevent the creation of models, what about a future copyright law?

Well, sure, that's a possibility. The first thing to consider is the possible collateral damage of such a law. The legal space for scraping enables a wide range of scholarly, archival, organizational and critical purposes. We'd have to be very careful not to inadvertently ban, say, the scraping of a politician's campaign website, lest we enable liars to run for office and renege on their promises, while they insist that they never made those promises in the first place. We wouldn't want to abolish search engines, or stop creators from scraping their own work off sites that are going away or changing their terms of service.

Now, onto quantitative analysis: counting words and measuring pixels are not activities that you should need permission to perform, with or without a computer, even if the person whose words or pixels you're counting doesn't want you to. You should be able to look as hard as you want at the pixels in Kate Middleton's family photos, or track the rise and fall of the Oxford comma, and you shouldn't need anyone's permission to do so.

Finally, there's publishing the model. There are plenty of published mathematical analyses of large corpuses that are useful and unobjectionable. I love me a good Google n-gram:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fantods%2C+heebie-jeebies&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3

And large language models fill all kinds of important niches, like the Human Rights Data Analysis Group's LLM-based work helping the Innocence Project New Orleans' extract data from wrongful conviction case files:

https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html

So that's nuance number two: if we decide to make a new copyright law, we'll need to be very sure that we don't accidentally crush these beneficial activities that don't undermine artistic labor markets.

This brings me to the most important point: passing a new copyright law that requires permission to train an AI won't help creative workers get paid or protect our jobs.

Getty Images pays photographers the least it can get away with. Publishers contracts have transformed by inches into miles-long, ghastly rights grabs that take everything from writers, but still shifts legal risks onto them:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/19/reasonable-agreement/

Publishers like the New York Times bitterly oppose their writers' unions:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/new-york-times-stop-union-busting

These large corporations already control the copyrights to gigantic amounts of training data, and they have means, motive and opportunity to license these works for training a model in order to pay us less, and they are engaged in this activity right now:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

Big games studios are already acting as though there was a copyright in training data, and requiring their voice actors to begin every recording session with words to the effect of, "I hereby grant permission to train an AI with my voice" and if you don't like it, you can hit the bricks:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

If you're a creative worker hoping to pay your bills, it doesn't matter whether your wages are eroded by a model produced without paying your employer for the right to do so, or whether your employer got to double dip by selling your work to an AI company to train a model, and then used that model to fire you or erode your wages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

Individual creative workers rarely have any bargaining leverage over the corporations that license our copyrights. That's why copyright's 40-year expansion (in duration, scope, statutory damages) has resulted in larger, more profitable entertainment companies, and lower payments – in real terms and as a share of the income generated by their work – for creative workers.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, giving creative workers more rights to bargain with against giant corporations that control access to our audiences is like giving your bullied schoolkid extra lunch money – it's just a roundabout way of transferring that money to the bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/what-is-chokepoint-capitalism/

There's an historical precedent for this struggle – the fight over music sampling. 40 years ago, it wasn't clear whether sampling required a copyright license, and early hip-hop artists took samples without permission, the way a horn player might drop a couple bars of a well-known song into a solo.

Many artists were rightfully furious over this. The "heritage acts" (the music industry's euphemism for "Black people") who were most sampled had been given very bad deals and had seen very little of the fortunes generated by their creative labor. Many of them were desperately poor, despite having made millions for their labels. When other musicians started making money off that work, they got mad.

In the decades that followed, the system for sampling changed, partly through court cases and partly through the commercial terms set by the Big Three labels: Sony, Warner and Universal, who control 70% of all music recordings. Today, you generally can't sample without signing up to one of the Big Three (they are reluctant to deal with indies), and that means taking their standard deal, which is very bad, and also signs away your right to control your samples.

So a musician who wants to sample has to sign the bad terms offered by a Big Three label, and then hand $500 out of their advance to one of those Big Three labels for the sample license. That $500 typically doesn't go to another artist – it goes to the label, who share it around their executives and investors. This is a system that makes every artist poorer.

But it gets worse. Putting a price on samples changes the kind of music that can be economically viable. If you wanted to clear all the samples on an album like Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back," or the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique," you'd have to sell every CD for $150, just to break even:

https://memex.craphound.com/2011/07/08/creative-license-how-the-hell-did-sampling-get-so-screwed-up-and-what-the-hell-do-we-do-about-it/

Sampling licenses don't just make every artist financially worse off, they also prevent the creation of music of the sort that millions of people enjoy. But it gets even worse. Some older, sample-heavy music can't be cleared. Most of De La Soul's catalog wasn't available for 15 years, and even though some of their seminal music came back in March 2022, the band's frontman Trugoy the Dove didn't live to see it – he died in February 2022:

https://www.vulture.com/2023/02/de-la-soul-trugoy-the-dove-dead-at-54.html

This is the third nuance: even if we can craft a model-banning copyright system that doesn't catch a lot of dolphins in its tuna net, it could still make artists poorer off.

Back when sampling started, it wasn't clear whether it would ever be considered artistically important. Early sampling was crude and experimental. Musicians who trained for years to master an instrument were dismissive of the idea that clicking a mouse was "making music." Today, most of us don't question the idea that sampling can produce meaningful art – even musicians who believe in licensing samples.

Having lived through that era, I'm prepared to believe that maybe I'll look back on AI "art" and say, "damn, I can't believe I never thought that could be real art."

But I wouldn't give odds on it.

I don't like AI art. I find it anodyne, boring. As Henry Farrell writes, it's uncanny, and not in a good way:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/large-language-models-are-uncanny

Farrell likens the work produced by AIs to the movement of a Ouija board's planchette, something that "seems to have a life of its own, even though its motion is a collective side-effect of the motions of the people whose fingers lightly rest on top of it." This is "spooky-action-at-a-close-up," transforming "collective inputs … into apparently quite specific outputs that are not the intended creation of any conscious mind."

Look, art is irrational in the sense that it speaks to us at some non-rational, or sub-rational level. Caring about the tribulations of imaginary people or being fascinated by pictures of things that don't exist (or that aren't even recognizable) doesn't make any sense. There's a way in which all art is like an optical illusion for our cognition, an imaginary thing that captures us the way a real thing might.

But art is amazing. Making art and experiencing art makes us feel big, numinous, irreducible emotions. Making art keeps me sane. Experiencing art is a precondition for all the joy in my life. Having spent most of my life as a working artist, I've come to the conclusion that the reason for this is that art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own. That's it: that's why art is amazing.

AI doesn't have a mind. It doesn't have an intention. The aesthetic choices made by AI aren't choices, they're averages. As Farrell writes, "LLM art sometimes seems to communicate a message, as art does, but it is unclear where that message comes from, or what it means. If it has any meaning at all, it is a meaning that does not stem from organizing intention" (emphasis mine).

Farrell cites Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie, which defines "weird" in easy to understand terms ("that which does not belong") but really grapples with "eerie."

For Fisher, eeriness is "when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something." AI art produces the seeming of intention without intending anything. It appears to be an agent, but it has no agency. It's eerie.

Fisher talks about capitalism as eerie. Capital is "conjured out of nothing" but "exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity." The "invisible hand" shapes our lives more than any person. The invisible hand is fucking eerie. Capitalism is a system in which insubstantial non-things – corporations – appear to act with intention, often at odds with the intentions of the human beings carrying out those actions.

So will AI art ever be art? I don't know. There's a long tradition of using random or irrational or impersonal inputs as the starting point for human acts of artistic creativity. Think of divination:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/31/divination/

Or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies:

http://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html

I love making my little collages for this blog, though I wouldn't call them important art. Nevertheless, piecing together bits of other peoples' work can make fantastic, important work of historical note:

https://www.johnheartfield.com/John-Heartfield-Exhibition/john-heartfield-art/famous-anti-fascist-art/heartfield-posters-aiz

Even though painstakingly cutting out tiny elements from others' images can be a meditative and educational experience, I don't think that using tiny scissors or the lasso tool is what defines the "art" in collage. If you can automate some of this process, it could still be art.

Here's what I do know. Creating an individual bargainable copyright over training will not improve the material conditions of artists' lives – all it will do is change the relative shares of the value we create, shifting some of that value from tech companies that hate us and want us to starve to entertainment companies that hate us and want us to starve.

As an artist, I'm foursquare against anything that stands in the way of making art. As an artistic worker, I'm entirely committed to things that help workers get a fair share of the money their work creates, feed their families and pay their rent.

I think today's AI art is bad, and I think tomorrow's AI art will probably be bad, but even if you disagree (with either proposition), I hope you'll agree that we should be focused on making sure art is legal to make and that artists get paid for it.

Just because copyright won't fix the creative labor market, it doesn't follow that nothing will. If we're worried about labor issues, we can look to labor law to improve our conditions. That's what the Hollywood writers did, in their groundbreaking 2023 strike:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Now, the writers had an advantage: they are able to engage in "sectoral bargaining," where a union bargains with all the major employers at once. That's illegal in nearly every other kind of labor market. But if we're willing to entertain the possibility of getting a new copyright law passed (that won't make artists better off), why not the possibility of passing a new labor law (that will)? Sure, our bosses won't lobby alongside of us for more labor protection, the way they would for more copyright (think for a moment about what that says about who benefits from copyright versus labor law expansion).

But all workers benefit from expanded labor protection. Rather than going to Congress alongside our bosses from the studios and labels and publishers to demand more copyright, we could go to Congress alongside every kind of worker, from fast-food cashiers to publishing assistants to truck drivers to demand the right to sectoral bargaining. That's a hell of a coalition.

And if we do want to tinker with copyright to change the way training works, let's look at collective licensing, which can't be bargained away, rather than individual rights that can be confiscated at the entrance to our publisher, label or studio's offices. These collective licenses have been a huge success in protecting creative workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Then there's copyright's wildest wild card: The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that works made by AIs aren't eligible for copyright, which is the exclusive purview of works of human authorship. This has been affirmed by courts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Neither AI companies nor entertainment companies will pay creative workers if they don't have to. But for any company contemplating selling an AI-generated work, the fact that it is born in the public domain presents a substantial hurdle, because anyone else is free to take that work and sell it or give it away.

Whether or not AI "art" will ever be good art isn't what our bosses are thinking about when they pay for AI licenses: rather, they are calculating that they have so much market power that they can sell whatever slop the AI makes, and pay less for the AI license than they would make for a human artist's work. As is the case in every industry, AI can't do an artist's job, but an AI salesman can convince an artist's boss to fire the creative worker and replace them with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

They don't care if it's slop – they just care about their bottom line. A studio executive who cancels a widely anticipated film prior to its release to get a tax-credit isn't thinking about artistic integrity. They care about one thing: money. The fact that AI works can be freely copied, sold or given away may not mean much to a creative worker who actually makes their own art, but I assure you, it's the only thing that matters to our bosses.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

[stealingyourbones]

Short DPXDC Prompts #757

Vlad and Lex fake being married to cover up a scheme. This means they have to publicly keep up that appearance… It works a little too well.

[nelkcats]

Beans 🐾

As soon as Danny arrived in Gotham he noticed something very curious about it vigilantes: Although they were called "bats" and their leader seemed to be "Batman" they used toe beans on their costumes!

From what Danny could make out, they were used to reduce the impact when they fell from ceilings or high places. But it was still quite shocking to watch! Even though they all had different types of suits and sizes, they still seemed to include the beans!!

Honestly, Danny couldn't take Red Hood very seriously when he asked him who he was and pointed his adorable gloves at him (he looked like a kitten!!!), the halfa couldn't help but say aww to the bat-cat.

For their part, the bats had added toe beans under Selina's influence. They found them useful, although they seemed to be distracting the meta that recently settled in Gotham! How were they going to ask him questions if he was always imitating kittens and getting distracted when talking to them!?

[goldengirlgalaxy]

Munch, Munch, Munch

So a lot of people like to say that Kryptonite is Ghost Rock Candy.

And a lot of people like to say that Jason Todd (AKA Red Hood) has at least some level of liminal nature, if not full on half ghost.

Therefore, Jason eats Kryptonite.

The first time it happened, Jason was feeling Hangry while in the Batcave and, in his anger, mistook some crystals sitting out as rock candy. It's only when Tim finds him right as he's finishing off the last piece that he learn that it was, in fact, not rock candy. However, Jason keeps craving it, to the point that the Bats have to keep any Kryptonite under lock and key or else Jason will instantly consume it.

Batman eventually has to figure out why his son is craving Kryptonite and if there's anything he can do to replace it because he can't keep having his son eat his contingency plans.

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Text: It’s blood I need, and everything else too. Blood to live, to feel warm. Eyes to see, a tongue to taste, the brain to put it all together. And even then, the effects are temporary.

[fistfuloflightning]

Art prompt from the lovely @pr0cyon-lotor, and a new au to go with it 😉

When his mother dies, Luo Binghe doesn’t go to Cang Qiong Mountain. He doesn’t get the chance. Instead, he gets sold off to pay his mother’s medical fees and eventually winds up on the black market as a cultivation cauldron. Over the subsequent years he gains the notoriety of being the most sought-after cauldron, his auction bids growing more and more outrageous.

Until rumors start spreading of a group of cultivators targeting the trafficking rings that supply human cauldrons to the black market. Some say they’re connected to the Beggars Sect, others that they’re unacknowledged members of an orthodox sect. But all agree that cauldrons are vanishing as if into thin air.

And then it’s Luo Binghe’s turn.

His supposed rescuer just so happens to look like the disgraced second son of the Ming family…

[geraskierfanficprompts]

Prompt 138

Geralt has a garden in his backyard, of which he's very proud of and very attentive to. He grows vegetables and roots and such, unlike his nextdoor neighbor, of whom grows flowers. Geralt prefers something practical. Something he can eat or give his brothers to eat, rather than just something that "looks pretty". He does like how many bees his neighbor's flowers draw in, though. Geralt has reluctantly grown somewhat of a friendship with the strange man he lives next to. For about five years now, his neighbor, Jaskier, has forced himself into Geralt's house and life. He drops by with unplanned brunches, and brings Geralt tea and soup when Geralt gets too sick to garden, and he and Geralt occasionally meet in one of their houses to drink wine until they both can't think. Geralt does appreciate all of this. He's grown to quite like Jaskier. Which is why he's been dealing with Jaskier's recent oddities.

"Oh darling, your veggies are so big!" "It's for a contest." "Contest or not, I'd love to see your melons~" "Come over, then, they're in the left patch." "Oh- Okay!" "I've just picked the last of my cucumbers." "Isn't there one last cucumber you could show me?~" "No, I just said I picked them all?" "Do you grow any corn, Geralt?" "No." "A shame! I'd love a cob in my mouth right about now~" "I'm sure there's some cheap at the farmer's market." It's the night before the contest. Geralt is laying in his bed staring at the ceiling as it rains heavily outside. Geralt thinks back on his recent interactions with his neighbor, and suddenly sits up with a jolt. WAIT. BANG BANG BANG! Jaskier yawns and saunters to the door in his best robe, still holding a cup of tea. He opens the door and is met with a soaking wet Geralt. "Geralt? What are you doing over so late?" "Were you flirting with me?" "What?" "Were you flirting with me? With the comments about the vegetables?" "I've been flirting with you for five years now." "...Can I kiss you?"

[makenna-made-this]

BAWKtober Day 4 - Canning

Hen House Preserves

If you'd like to support my BAWKtobering by buying a commission or a treat for my spoiled, spoiled chickens, all my links are in my pinned- *i am immediately mobbed by a flock of chickens and dragged off stage in a cloud of feathers*

[notsodaily-mother]

in honor of mother 1 plushies having been basically just announced, i humbly request your Ninten drawn as a marketable plushie

-denpa

day 46: HAPPY PLUSHIE ANNOUNCEMENT DAY and happy mother 1 anniversary too i guess

[phoenixyfriend]

Ko-Fi prompt from Isabelo:

Hi! I'm new to the workforce and now that I have some money I'm worried it's losing its value to inflation just sitting in my bank. I wanted to ask if you have ideas on how to counteract inflation, maybe through investing?

I've been putting this off for a long time because...

I am not a finance person. I am not an investments person. I actually kinda turned and ran from that whole sector of the business world, at first because I didn't understand it, and then once I did understand it, because I disagreed with much of it on a fundamental level.

But... I can describe some factors and options, and hope to get you started.

I AM NOT LEGALLY QUALIFIED TO GIVE FINANCIAL ADVICE. THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE.

What is inflation, and what impacts it?

Inflation is the rate at which money loses value over time. It's the reason something that cost 50 cents in the 1840s costs $50 now.

A lot of things do impact inflation, like housing costs and wage increases and supply chains, but the big one that is relevant here is federal interest rates. The short version: if you borrow money from the government, you have to pay it back. The higher the interest rates on those loans, the lower inflation is. This is for... a lot of reasons that are complicated. The reason I bring it up is less so:

The government offers investments:

So yeah, the feds can impact inflation, but they also offer investment opportunities. There are three common types available to the average person: Bonds, Bills, and Notes. I'll link to an article on Investopedia again, but the summary is as follows: You buy a bill, bond, or note from the government. You have loaned them money, as if you are the bank. Then, they give it back, with interest.

Treasury Bills: shortest timeframe (four weeks to a year), and lowest return on investment. You buy it at a discount (let's say $475), and then the government returns the "full value" that the bond is, nominally (let's say $500). You don't earn twice-yearly interest, but you did earn $25 on the basis of Loaning The Government Some Cash.

Treasury Notes: 2-10 year timeframe. Very popular, very stable. Banks watch it to see how they should plan the interest rates for mortgages and other large loans. Also pretty high liquidity, which means you can sell it to someone else if you suddenly need the cash before your ten-year waiting period is up. You get interest payments twice a year.

Treasury Bonds: 20-30 years. This is like... the inverse of a house mortgage. It takes forever, but it does have the highest yield. You get interest payments twice a year.

Why invest money into the US Treasury department, whether through the above or a different government paper? (Savings bonds aren't on sold the set schedule that treasury bonds are, but they only come in 30-year terms.)

It is very, very low risk. It is pretty much the lowest risk investment a person can make, at least in the US. (I'm afraid I don't know if you're American, but if you're not, your country probably has something similar.)

Interest rates do change, often in reaction or in relation to inflation. If your primary concern is inflation, not getting a high return on investment, I would look into government papers as a way to ensure your money is not losing value on you.

This is the website that tells you the government's own data for current yield and sales, etc. You can find a schedule for upcoming auctions, as well.

High-yield bank accounts:

Savings accounts can come with a pretty unremarkable but steady return on investment; you just need to make sure you find one that suits you. Some of the higher-yield accounts require a minimum balance or a yearly fee... but if you've got a good enough chunk of cash to start with, that might be worth it for you.

They are almost as reliable as government bonds, and are insured by the government up to $250,000. Right now, they come with a lower ROI than most bonds/bills/notes (federal interest rates are pretty high at the moment, to combat inflation). Unlike government papers, though, you can deposit and withdraw money from a savings account pretty much any time.

Certificates of Deposit:

Okay, imagine you are loaning money to your bank, with the fixed term of "I will get this money back with interest, but only in ten years when the contract is up" like the Treasury Notes.

That's what this is.

Also, Investopedia updates near-daily with the highest rates of the moment, which is pretty cool.

Property:

Honestly, if you're coming to me for advice, you almost definitely cannot afford to treat real estate as an investment thing. You would be going to an actual financial professional. As such... IDK, people definitely do it, and it's a standby for a reason, but it's not... you don't want to be a victim of the housing bubble, you know? And me giving advice would probably make you one. So. Talk to a professional if this is the route you want to take.

Retirement accounts:

Pension accounts are a kind of savings account. You've heard of a 401(k)? It's that. Basically, you put your money in a savings account with a company that specializes in pensions, and they invest it in a variety of different fields and markets (you can generally choose some of this) in order to ensure that the money grows enough that you can hopefully retire on it in fifty years. The ROI is usually higher than inflation.

These kinds of accounts have a higher potential for returns than bonds or treasury notes, buuuuut they're less reliable and more sensitive to market fluctuations.

However, your employer may pay into it, matching your contribution. If they agree to match up to 4%, and you pay 4% of your paycheck into an pension fund, then they will pay that same amount and you are functionally getting 8% of your paycheck put into retirement while only paying for half of it yourself.

Mutual Funds:

I've definitely linked this article before, but the short version is:

An investment company buys 100 shares of stock: 10 shares each in 10 different "general" companies. You, who cannot afford a share of each of these companies, buy 1 singular share of that investment company. That share is then treated as one-tenth of a share of each of those 10 "general" companies. You are one of 100 people who has each bought "one stock" that is actually one tenth of ten different stocks.

Most retirement funds are actually a form of mutual fund that includes employer contributions.

Pros: It's more stable than investing directly in the stock market, because you can diversify without having to pay the full price of a share in each company you invest in.

Cons: The investment company does get a cut, and they are... often not great influences on the economy at large. Mutual funds are technically supposed to be more regulated than hedge funds (which are, you know, often venture capital/private equity), but a lot of mutual funds like insurance companies and pension funds will invest a portion of their own money into hedge funds, which is... technically their job. But, you know, capitalism.

Directly investing in the stock market:

Follow people who actually know what they're doing and are not Evil Finance Bros who only care about the bottom line. I haven't watched more than a few videos yet, but The Financial Diet has had good energy on this topic from what I've seen so far, and I enjoy the very general trends I hear about on Morning Brew.

That said, we are not talking about speculative capital gains. We are talking about making sure inflation doesn't screw with you.

DIVIDENDS are profit that the company shares to investors every quarter. Did the company make $2 billion after paying its mortgages, employees, energy bill, etc? Great, that $2 billion will be shared out among the hundreds of thousands of stocks. You'll probably only get a few cents back per stock (e.g. Walmart has been trading at $50-$60 for the past six months, and their dividends have been 57 cents and then 20.75 cents), but it adds up... sort of. The Walmart example is listed as having dividends that are lower than inflation, so you're actually losing money. It's part of why people rely on capital gains so much, rather than dividends, when it comes to building wealth.

Blue Chip Stocks: These are old, stable companies that you can expect to return on your investment at a steady rate. You probably aren't going to see your share jump from $5 to $50 in a year, but you also probably won't see it do the reverse. You will most likely get reliable, if not amazing, dividends.

Preferred Stocks: These are stock shares that have more reliable dividends, but no voting rights. Since you are, presumably, not a billionaire that can theoretically gain a controlling share, I can't imagine the voting rights in a given company are all that important anyway.

Anyway, hope this much-delayed Intro To Investing was, if not worth the wait, at least, a bit longer than you expected.

Hey! You got interest on the word count! It's topical! Ish.

[stealingyourbones]

Short DPXDC Prompts #755

Danny is brought to a Gala by Vlad so he could be introduced to Vlad’s new boyfriend; Lex.

[nelkcats]

Double Trouble

During a convention in Gotham, the Fentons brought the rebuilt Fenton Ghost Catcher, they were extremely proud of their invention and were going to catch as many ghosts as possible at their paranormal convention.

But as is normal in Gotham, a rogue attacked. Croc personally wasn't too interested in what was going on there but he was paid by some others to cause a distraction while some villains robbed the place and extra money was always great.

From the looks of it, the news that the Fentons were coming to Gotham were public. The Fentons were known as very reclusive weapon makers with peculiar interests. Their inventions sold very well, and were extremely dangerous so Peguin assumed that even if they were destined for "ghosts" they would work perfectly fine with bats.

Jason already knew that the two weapon inventors were in the city, the Bat was too paranoid not to know, but the Fentons never showed that they wanted to cause harm so when Croc attacked Red Hood was guarding the place.

The problem was that during the battle he was pushed into the Ghost Catcher and separated into two halves. One looked like the normal him but more ghostly? while the other was more lively and energetic. The second one looked like a bigger version of what Robin would have been without his death. Of course, the invention blew up right after that, and the Fentons looked sad.

Danny scrambled to hide both Jason before his parents noticed, motioning for him to be quiet as he watched the villains make off with the anti-ghost weapons. He knew the convention would turned into a mess since the beginning.

[painsandconfusion]

A human body, properly harvested and sold in pieces, is worth about $550,000 on the black market.

I wanna see characters taking full advantage of that. You'd probably get more if selling the flesh to to niche cannibals and the organs and such as medical. Hmmmmm-

Someone write it I'm too lazy and don't like medical whump but it should be done.

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Text: The teahouse has ten entrances and eleven exits. If you press your ear to the extra, locked door, you can hear what sounds like a bustling market.

[night-market-if]

The Night Market - After Dark

The Night Market, After Dark. Join us over on Patreon for the NSFW content where I take a prompt each month and write a little spicy blurb for each of the RO's. This month is on the them of "Dirty little secret" :)

Join at the Courtesan tier for this and so much more bonus content.

🪷✨🪷✨ If you want to support me 🪷 ✨🪷✨ 

🌿Book 2 WIP🌿 Book 1 Free Demo 🌿Book 1 Steam🌿Book 1 Itch.io🌿🌿Patreon 🌿Discord🌿FAQS🌿