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World capital is probably around $1 quadrillion. See Bain & Company, A World Awash in Money, and the BIS statistics on derivatives for evidence.

The idea, [Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator] said at the Commonwealth Club, tackles the question not enough people are asking: "What do we as the tech industry do to solve the problem that we're helping to create?"

The tech industry should hold a challenge for the best indexation scheme. Indexation links everyone's incomes automatically to prices so that everyone's real income purchasing power remains the same no matter how high nominal prices go.

Since indexation eliminates inflation, because you can start thinking of the price of everything in terms of units of your real income purchasing power which is guaranteed to be maintained, we can then put a basic income entirely on the Fed's balance sheet at zero cost to taxpayers.

The Fed would be creating, say, $6 trillion a year in deposit accounts, at the Fed. $6 trillion is a fraction of what the private financial sector creates each year, according to a Bain & Company report (seev A World Awash in Money).

World capital exceeds world GDP by a factor of ten. See Bain & Company, A World Awash in Money:

total global capital will expand by half again, to an estimated $900 trillion by 2020 (measured in prevailing 2010 prices and exchange rates). More than any other factor on the horizon, the self-generating momentum for capital to expand—and the sheer size the financial sector has attained—will influence the shape and tempo of global economic growth going forward.

World capital is close to $1 quadrillion; world GDP is much less than a tenth of that. Your story about 1:1 ratio of money to real goods is of by an order of magnitude. Finance relaxes your imagined economic constraints on money creation. Your idea of money is quaint and obsolete.

See Why Is Money Difficult?:

The first and largest barrier is what I call the “alchemy of banking”. Banks make loans by creating deposits, expanding their balance sheets on both sides simultaneously. This process apparently offends common sense understanding of what it means to make a loan—I can only lend you a bicycle if I already possess a bicycle. Even more, it seems to go against a fundamental principle of elementary economics that “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Against this resistance, I insist that the essence of banking is a swap of IOUs.

What we're seeing is the result of capitalism's reach getting to scientists. The focus of institutions has moved from discoveries of research to the monetary benefits of research. The reason for this is plain as day, a lack of funds. The question is, who is restricting funds and what is their motive. If you find this, you'll discover the problem.

Capitalism has it's place but using it everywhere will lead to disaster.

Because today, science and advances take an extremely remote second place to servicing the stockholders. Once upon a time, there were places like Bell labs where a lot of research was done. Then there was a shift to Universities. This helped fo ra while, but now the Universities are groaning under the weight, are in some cases employing more managers than any other field, except for possibly accountants and fundraisers. http://www.bain.com/publicatio... warning - thi sis plenty dry stuff here.

The fix? I personally have no idea. Perhaps some monies can be wrested from the football programs. Maybe they can open up research to gambling.

"the money magically appears out of thin air."

The financial sector creates $30 trillion a year out of thin air. The world capital total is approaching $1 quadrillion, over an order of magnitude greater than world GDP. Financial firms are creating tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars out of thin air, and backstopping it with public money creation by the Fed (which opens unlimited swap lines with the ECB, Bank of England, and other central banks).

Sources: A World Awash in Money, The Spread of Central Bank Currency Swaps Since the Financial Crisis.

Private sector money creation is occurring at the rate of $30 trillion per year, according to a Bain report. Total world capital is approaching $1 quadrillion, exceeding world GDP by at least an order of magnitude. Where's the devaluation? The dollar is getting stronger.

Your quantity theory of money has very serious empirical problems. Sometimes you quantity theorists like to cite "velocity of money" as the reason we haven't seen the predicted rise in inflation. However, you are not measuring velocity of money; you are calculating it after the fact to make your predictions come out right, in hindsight. Velocity of money is a fudge variable.

Private sector money turns over a lot. Banks are constantly lending and borrowing in the Fed Funds and Repo markets, putting off final settlement for another day. Money created by the private sector does not simply sit in bank accounts; it is turning over, daily. So you can't use Velocity of money as an excuse why your Quantity Theory of Money fails to predict.

"Actually, the vast majority of research - particularly in potential drug therapies - is done with public (NIH grants) and not-for-profit funds (think March of Dimes, Juvenile Diabetes, Jerry Lewis, William Gates Foundation, etc.) by universities and such."

Who starts these urban legends?

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_ files/Iglehart_Slides.pdf
http://www.phrma.org/publications/publications/17. 03.2005.1142.cfm
http://www.bain.com/bainweb/Consulting_Expertise/h ot_topics/detail.asp?id=22

1995: After various post-collegt Mcjobs, got a temp job paying GBP5 per hour converting Lotus 123 files into Excel, on Windows 3.1. These 123 files had macros, so I taught myself VBA from the manual and help files. In 96 we got web access - which made an enormous difference as I could search for software, help from othe users, etc. Got into Perl about this time (10 line sof Perl == five pages of VBA, and it's soooo much more elegant and powerful...)

1997-8: Brief spell at Logica, then joined Bain as the sole developer in teh London office. I twisted the specs and fought to do as much web-realted stuff as possible, which I could sneakily do in Perl on Apache rather than IIS/ASP, and no-one was any the wiser :) Also got into net admin stuff, learnt as much as poss about TCP/IP, DNS, routing...

About this time, installed Debian GNU/Linux on my shiny new PC. practice, practice. Save up for many O'Reilly books: read them, practice, test, experiment.

2000: On the basis of the Bain web dev and home experience, worked for a couple of dotcom startups: by the time the last one went bust in August I'd got tons of 10-hours-a-day Linux experience (get the hours in!), networking (DMZ design), lots of security experience hardening production servers, w/stations, IDS, pentesting etc. Still supposed to be spending 50% of my time developing websites...

Which brings us up to the present: I've got tons of experience and knowledge, but no MCSE / CCNA (UK employers don't seem to pay for formal training in my experience...) I really really really want a job in network security, or system/network admin, or even good old Perl web development... but the job market here (London, UK) is dead, I'm on the dole, and with my savings going fast I soon won't even be able to afford Net access.

In summary: practice, practice, practice; keep a career goal in mind when changing jobs - how will this position help me get where I want to be? Look out for any chance to get experience in your chosen field. Practice at home if you can. System admin involves knowing about a lot of different areas: networking in particular is a huge field. Look out for tasty free information on the web: there's an absolute ton of indispensible stuff out there. Don't /ONLY/ read O'Reilly's: I reckon about a 5:1 ratio of ORAs to 'other' publishers' books...

Good luck!

Since then I've used a ton of Open Source and Free software on NT. I've played around with Sendmail, BIND (as a cacheing only local nameserver), MySQL, Ruby, Python, XFree86 (with windowmaker, which confused the hell out of my local Linux zealot friend ;) even tcl... I use emacs and the cygwin bash + other apps ports (ssh, GPG, all the time. It all absolutely rocks, and best of all it's got me familiar enough with the basics of developing on and using a *nix system that I've been able to swap onto Linux, Solaris and openBSD with a minimal speedbump, allowing me to concentrate on learning the interesting bits of Unixland (system stuff, IP tables, NAT, IDS and a ton of security software that still isn't available on NT. Although (shhh!) nmap now compiles out of the box... netcat runs,too...)

In short, if you're on windows but interested in checking out Freedom, these ports make a nice comfy way to get familiar with the other universe. Most of it is also far superior (more secure, more stable, more flexible and powerful) than the point-and-click Microsoft provided tools.

The one thing I need now is the strength to have another bash at getting Mutt or Pine working. I love mozilla and use mail & news for everything now, but I'd still like the cheap geek thrills of a non-gui scriptable CLI mail client. Then I can get cron mailing me home-rolled tripwire-like security checks daily...

Ak, I haven't had my first coffee of the day, what am I posting to slashdot...

Pretty soon after I left everything was transferred to an IIS box built to the approved corporate standard. There's too much Perl to throw out overnight, but future development will be ASP with Visual InterDev. (Odd that I could replace / replicate ASP stuff quickly but not the other way round ...)

Even on NT, Apache ran without problems for nearly a year. Not a single crash. The average uptime on the NT server zoomed up to >30 days.

From what I hear, the IIS box has rolled over and died many times in the last few months. Still, at least it did so in the Approved Corporate Manner.

/a
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my