Slashdot Mirror

Between 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 there was a rally to the dollar. When compared to other currencies in the world, it went from 72 to 88 in the dolar index. This caused everything to drop in price in dollars. Since then, the US dollar has fallen sharply, fast enough to prevent improved technology from lowering costs. It has rebounded a little this year, but not because the dollar gained anything, but because the euro fell sharply.

But lets price it in something less erratic than the US dollar, euros or anything that comes out of a printing press. Lets price it in the most stable currency known to man: gold.

pricing the same 16GB in gold we get:

Q1 2008 0.006875 oz
Q1 2009 0.002777 oz
Q1 2010 0.002363 oz

As you can see, when priced in gold, you can see that flash has never really stopped going down in price. It simply slowed down probably due to some of the reasons explained in TFA.

9. Limit maximum APR on any form of lending to 15% over inflation so credit card's are limited to around 17.5% APR / year.

While I'm as annoyed as the next guy with credit card rates, I don't think usury laws help any. Instead you get a whole mess of creative dodges, from the old contractum trinius to replacing interest with high transaction and account maintenance fees. Meanwhile, desperate people with bad credit are simply frozen out of the legitimate market and driven to illegal loan sharks.

Inflation at 2.5%? USDX has been walloped over the past year suggesting a ~12% inflation rate, rather at variance with the 2-3% CPI creep.

but it doesn't surprise me. long gone are the days when americans would earn an honest living working in a steel plant, building cares, mining or in my case producing adult video entertainment. Nowadays everybody wants to sue and get rich very quickly. Is it any wonder our currency keep losing its value in the world?

http://quotes.ino.com/chart/?s=NYBOT_DX&v=d6

And the US is acting on it more decisively than anyone. They've put lots of troops on the ground in the richest oil region in the world.

My favorite quote is "Look at the Canadian Dollar, it's worth almost 80 cents. 4 years ago it was worth 65 cents. Since Canada is our largest trading partner, and we're big importers of Canadian raw materials, this is killing us. You'd think Bush is a Canadian." (It's now worth about 82 cents, thanks to his election win, just look at the huge increase when it became clear he'd won.)

Prior to the stock market crash of October 1987, it was about US$1.20. I was travelling at the time and found that my traveller's cheques, in AUD, were suddenly worth about half in local currency than the day before. That hurt.

A good site for tracking the AUD is here, though it only goes back about two years.

Really? It's been going up pretty steadily the last year. Of course, most of that is due to the USD going down generally as you pay for the invasion by borrowing from the rest of the world.

In reference to another economy-related post above, the US Dollar is dropping in value even as Bushie-boy and Treasury Sec. Snow-job declare that they "support a strong dollar". For those who'd rather see the true picture, good charts for the dollar and other items can be found here.

Interview question: 'Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?