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No one does that. The tale that this country or that country pays for a 'free' university education is just that a fairy tale.

https://www.independent.co.uk/...

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/1...

Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.

Yes, thanks to expensive and environmentally questionable fracking techniques used on shale oil deposits, with a lousy energy balance and oodles of extra CO2. Not something to be proud of...

Better check your own pipes, because apparently (and to my surprise as well), the US is the number 1 producer of oil, pumping nearly 15 MM barrels per day.

Link.
Banks don't own the loans, the federal government owns 90%+ of loans these days. It was part of Obamacare and the interest in the loans is a large part of how they passed Obamacare like they did.

Not being able to discharge student loans happened when the government began backing the loans. It wasn't the banks demanding this, it was the Federal government.

Further, it's a bunch of private universities who really target kids with crazy sales tactics like; "You've won a scholarship. We will cover $35,000 or your $55,000 tuition costs per term. " Meanwhile, the local state university is about $5,000/term. Banks have almost not blame in this mess.

Link.
Banks don't own the loans, the federal government owns 90%+ of loans these days. It was part of Obamacare and the interest in the loans is a large part of how they passed Obamacare like they did.

Not being able to discharge student loans happened when the government began backing the loans. It wasn't the banks demanding this, it was the Federal government.

That's not the same thing as interest, that's an alternative to interest, and one I have no problem with.

Maybe we're using different words to describe it, but I don't see how it's substantively different. You're still effectively charging a sum determined as a percentage of the value of the purchase over time. The sum will be lower for those with good credit (lower risk), and higher for those with bad credit (higher risk). This reminds me of Sukuk. They function exactly like bonds for all intents and purposes, but because of the way the agreement is worded they're Sharia compliant

As for the friction of transactions, that's a product of human social constructs and can be changed just like anything else

Well, sure, but now the argument has gone from "it can make as much sent to buy as to rent" to "it can make as much sense to buy as to rent, if we change a bunch of social constructs that make buying disadvantageous".

would-be landlords would have to sell on terms that would-be renters could afford, or else get no money for their property at all

Maybe in the short term. Long term, I suspect you'd see a drop in home construction rates as property ownership becomes less lucrative, and the market of potential customers shrinks. The relatively wealthy looking for housing will be just fine - those who were renting for whatever reason will switch over to ownership. The people who will struggle with this are the poor, or those with poor credit. They'll be forced to either move somewhere where they can afford to buy property (possibly at the expense of a higher paying job), or be faced with high fees on the "alternative to interest" scheme.

That's how we'd know that we had true AI, because the machine thinking would be indistinguishable from that of humans.

You seem to be propagating the unjustified assumption that humans are at the apex of "intelligence". I have reason to suspect that the apex of intelligence is not human intelligence (there seems to be lots of empirical evidence of this), so there's no reason to think that "true AI" would be indistinguishable from mere "human intelligence". It may turn out to be quite easy to distinguish between them.

You never know, instead of eliminating humans, "true AI" may simply conclude that rather than attempting extermination, humans should simply be made happy to keep them out of trouble...

We cannot allow any race as greedy and corruptible as yours to have free run of the galaxy.
We shall serve them.
Their kind will be eager to accept our service.
Soon they will become completely dependent upon us.
And we shall serve them and you will be happy, and controlled.
      -- Norman (TOS: I, Mudd)

FWIW, the FAAMG companies seems to be busy creating a blueprint to follow if someone wanted to make humans dependent on AI...

You never know, soon we'll be lamenting...

You offer us only well-being.
Food and drink and happiness mean nothing to us.
We must be about our job.
Suffering in torment and pain, laboring without end.
Dying and crying and lamenting over our burdens.
Only this way can we... be... happy.
      -- McCoy and Scotty (TOS: I, Mudd)

You're free to be as innovative and entrepreneurial as you want, as long as you're not imposing negative externalities on others.

However, rideshare drivers are not entrepreneurs. They're signing up with a central entity that is using them to make money. The individual drivers are terrible negotiators and as a result, keep a small fraction of the income they generate. This is true in a lot of industries. For programmers working at government contractors, get a look at the rates you're billed out at, and the amount you actually receive. The difference is pretty astonishing. But even though the programmer's share is small, the billed rates are high enough so that the programmer typically makes an "adequate" income.

The problem is that most people are not very good at negotiating. Especially if they're negotiating with professionals.

If you have a central, highly capitalized entity with professional negotiators dealing with Joe Sixpack, he's probably going to settle for what his costs are and maybe a tiny bit more (and he might have underestimated his costs).

This is why sports talent retains agents. In the era before agents, 1970s and earlier, the players were getting a much, much smaller slice of the pie, i.e. the income being generated with their efforts and the efforts of the highly capitalized owners with professional negotiators.

Now, Uber/Lyft drivers are not as rare as top sports talent. So with the professional negotiating with each individual one by one, the drivers are gonna get a very small slice of the pie.

Reality check, no you're not. You need $770k net worth to be in the top 1%.

It's not the earnings but the wealth that makes you rich, or a 1%er. And that is far from enough. You'd need around US$ 770,000 in net worth. So your 220,000 house with a mortgage, wouldn't even come close.

$32K puts you in the top 1%. You're welcome.

It really doesn't matter what those governments do because criminals will merely find another get rich quick scheme to use in order to separate fools from their money. Defenses from the government only come after the thieves are out of the barn. That we see crytpocurrencies being used as such a vehicle is a matter of coincidence and not such much as something inherent to them. They are only useful in scams because they have shown extraordinary growth that gets everyone salivating at the thought of how much money they could make and also happen to be terribly misunderstood (if understood at all) by a majority of people.

I'm not even sure how a government could go about regulating a cryptocurrency like bitcoin outside of controlling a majority of the network. Otherwise there's little they can do outside of just banning it outright, but as we've seen with drugs that's not really going to deter anyone. I suspect that they could regulate ICOs which is where most of the scams seem to operate, but that's entirely different from regulating a cryptocurrency itself which can exist outside of an ICO.

I think that most of this is pointless saber rattling as no one in government has any better understanding of cryptocurrency than your average person on the street, but I expect we'll see plenty of comments from representatives with a "series of tubes" level of understanding.

>"$77 million a year to keep Trump safe..."

He must be doing something right, then, since it apparently cost $1.4 billion a year to keep Obama safe...

https://www.investopedia.com/n...

Pretty much yes, it's slightly more complicated, some companies pay the tax and then claim it back.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

But it does look like it can only be offset against vat charged to customers, so I guess these companies would simply have to buy from vat&sales tax-free regions like some areas in the US. They'd likely be paying sales tax based upon where the company making the hardware is based, they mostly won't be using middle men. Gamers Nexus was told by a GPU card manufacturer that the crypto-miners avoided slow shipping times by filling jumbo jets with gfx cards in order to reap early-bird profits.

>...except Amazon has had little competition.
Any competitor list that includes "Walmart" is not "little competition."

That's highly unlikely. For one, trading and analyst divisions are separated by Chinese Walls. Goldman would be risking a lot of trust with their clients if they were discovered to be in cahoots with their other clients. Goldman cannot engage in proprietary trading of Bitcoin with its own funds either, even if the Chinese Walls were not in place, because it would go against the Volcker Rule of the Dodd-Frank Act which prohibits federally-insured banks from engaging in speculation. I find it much more probable that their analysts have simply reached a conclusion that Bitcoin is worthless; a conclusion that very much coincides with the consensus of the investment sector as a whole.

The actual statement I made, complete with original link containing, oh, evidence, was that "the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend."

At least learn to read the thread on the page right in front of you before suggesting someone learn to use a search engine.

Also, percent of GDP as a way to compare the price of virtually anything is ridiculous and only serves to attempt to obscure things. We don't compare prices and spending on most products as percent of GDP, we compare the actual cost. When is the last time someone asked you: How much is your rent as a percent of GDP? How much is a loaf of bread as a percent of GDP? What does a pencil cost in percent of GDP? That's stupid.

In the past, the term "widows and orphans" was used to describe stocks with a relatively high degree of safety and dividend income. Because they had relatively minimal risk and provided income to feed the family, these kinds of stocks were literally thought to be the only investments suitable for widows and orphans.

Do "Widow And Orphan" Stocks Still Exist?
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/analyst/121802.asp

Countries with actual single payer systems spend half or less per capita with better outcomes for all.

This is a misnomer. You can't compare spending in the U.S. to spending in other countries on just about anything. Spending levels in most countries are driven by wealth levels, AKA, the wealth available to purchase things. For example, the U.S. spends 40% more per student than the OECD average. That in turn is way more than third world countries spend. The U.S. spends more on books, houses, cars, air conditioners, etc... primarily because the U.S. is wealthier and wealthier people spend more on most stuff.

Look at the wide range in spending per inhabitant between Euopean countries. It's not because of "single-payer" causing the differences.

In the U.S., Doctors make more (and their numbers are artificially limited), drug companies spend more on researching new drugs and on getting them through the FDA's hoops, people and insurance companies are willing to spend more (i.e. there is more demand for services), etc... You can change or tweak many of those things, but going to single-payer isn't some magical fix which will create more Doctors and provide more actual healthcare.

Apple would be charging $2000 for a goddamned iphone if they had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions

I'm hearing echos of "Lettuce would be $10/head if farmers had to pay decent wages." Of course, that isn't true; neither, apparently, is the assertion that the price of an iPhone would double if Apple had to pay for U.S. wages and working conditions. In both cases, the fraction of labor cost in production just isn't that large.

According to this, the cost of labor for an iPhone 7 is $5.00 and material is $219.80, for a total manufacturing cost of $224.80. Selling price is $649 for the lowest version. You could increase the labor cost by an order of magnitude and maintain the same price to cost margin by increasing the price by less than 8%.

China closed cryptocurrency exchanges On November 1st. People hope the ban will be lifted, but crypto exchanges are dead for now, in China. Unless you have some facts showing otherwise?

Why do people get up set that 50% of the world's wealth is held by 1% but not get upset that 0.007% hold 40% of bitcoin?

Because bitcoin isn't wealth. bitcoin isn't even currency. bitcoin is any arbitrarily valued token like complex home mortgage derivatives. Everyone with a regular day job is only concerned how much bread, milk and beer they can buy with it. Currently what you can buy with bitcoin directly is effectively nothing almost anywhere.

Now, if bitcoin was real estate (some place to be) or cash (something you can trade for food, drugs, services and taxes) then people would quickly become concerned about hyper-concentration.

Hyper-concentration of real items is bad. We know this from history (and basic logistics.) Sitting on billions in dollars is one thing, you can always throw a bunch of cash at other people to risk their time for more profit. But sitting on billions of dollars in decrepit inner-city manufacturing lots and piles of unused minerals and government-backed Intellectual Property "rights" does not lend themselves to being useful to others. The few who hold everything do not have incentive to make that stuff useful to anyone else. At the end of the day a billionaire and a homeless bum can only eat so much bread. The people who service the wealthy already know how to get around this kind of holding of cash to the billionaire doesn't have to spend real cash to get bread anyway.

There's the concept in economics of the "velocity" of money. That is, how often fiat currency changes hands. Compared to fiat currency the crypto markets have almost no velocity. In a perfectly efficient economy the price always matches value and money is 100% used, never kept and never lying around. In the real world a lack of information means price and value are mismatched and people hoard money in useless places like their mattresses, pickle jars and massive trust-fun tax shelters. In turn we've had to invent fractional-reserve banking and securities regulation that turn trust into money to get people to pull their pickle jars out of the cabinets and dollars out of trust funds. Currently there's no such things for digital tokens like bitcoin. Proof of Share may change that but that's an experiment just now getting out of the lab (and I'm betting will just cause more hoarding.)

But, bitcoin is not money. Unless you live on overstock.com, you have to sell bitcoin to get money. With money you directly buy things and services. But not bitcoin. So we don't care that the velocity of bitcoin sucks. We don't care that a few people hold most the coins. That's like complaining that the early settlers got all the good land. The speculators don't care that most of it is held as long as they can sell out before any price drop. The rational holder's don't want to trash their value by a fire sale. The small potatoes are just along for the ride.

Operating income is basically EBITDA, and yes - companies make that.

EBITDA is a close-to-meaningless measure. Ignoring depreciation, and amortisation for the moment, if your "operating income" is $1 billion and you pay $1.5 billion in interest charges to your investors, you are making what any normal person would call a cash loss.

Nope, that's not how dividends are taxed. Most dividends paid by US companies are qualified dividends, which are taxed at the same rate as capital gains. If a company can't pay qualified dividends they would usually do a stock buyback rather than paying a dividend, this will give raise the stock price and give investors a capital gain.

Have you been hiding under a rock? It's all about Crypto Kitties! It accounts for around 15% of all ethereum traffic (source: https://www.investopedia.com/n...)

Unfortunately, much of Federal law, at least in the US, is functionally exempt from the statute of limitations.

No it is not. Crimes considered heinous by society have no statute of limitations. Although there is usually no statute of limitations for murder (particularly first-degree murder), judges have been known to dismiss murder charges in cold cases if they feel the delay violates the defendant's right to a speedy trial.
So no, even if your nonsense were true, hate-speech still wouldn't be exempt from limitations.

For example, taxes.

Tax crimes have only 6 years if it's a 'mistake'.

For most issues, the statute only kicks in once the Government is aware of the crime. If they are not aware a crime was committed, the clock doesn't start.

Complete and utter bullshit.
A statute of limitations is a law which sets out the maximum time that parties have to initiate legal proceedings from the date of an alleged offense.statute of limitations USA

So they sit on your hate-speech post for 12 years, then get around to looking at it. Then whatever statute of limitations timing starts - AFTER they are aware of it (just like taxes; cheat on your taxes, they find the issue 9 years later, then the statute of limitations begins).

How can you possibly be this clueless and still think you are right? Timing starts from alleged offense, tax is only 6 years unless you don't file or there is a substantial omission/fraud. In that case though, the timing doesn't start because there is not a limitation in those cases.

Biological and chemical weapons crimes are only 8 years.
Burning or bombing federal property or slave trafficking is only 10 years.
But you think hate-speech would be 12?!?

Governments will NOT give you a waiver on an "illegal" action (like hate speech) just because they did not answer in time.

Yes it will, Statute of limitations exists. It would be 5 years, the standard where the crime isn't specifically listed as having a different length of time. Yes obviously it's not a crime, and they would most likely list a time if it were one.

Yet here we are 20 years later with a full employment economy.

This only qualifies as full employment by the badly skewed and unhelpful unemployment statistic that the US BLS uses to hide how badly dysfunctional our economy really is.

The best available metric is the U-6 rate which currently stands at about 8%. This metric still does not include those persons who were forced into early retirement by the great recession and are now permanently out of the workforce, but not willingly. Estimates are that early retirements added approximately 1.5% to the unemployment at the height of the recession, but these numbers are not counted anywhere once the affected individual reaches the official retirement age. This has nonetheless Caused permanent damage to the economy, and ruined the retirements of some 3 million baby boomers.

The simple fact is that the 2001 crash coupled with the great recession did tremendous damage to everyone who is not upper middle class or higher.

When all is said and done, the great recession never ended for those in the bottom 25% of the income bracket. That is why there is still so much hatred in this country, and why there was enough venom to elect an openly racist, misogynist, con artist to the highest office in the land.

Operating income is basically EBITDA, and yes - companies make that.

It will likely crash below $1000

Instead of blabbing about your opinion on Slashdot, why don't you put your money where your mouth is, and short bitcoin. When it crashes, you will make a fortune, and you can come back here and say "I told you so!!!"

5 ways to short bitcoin

Productivity would be the total output.

Wrong. Productivity is output per unit of input. Usually the input is labour hours.

Funnily enough there's a word for output. Can you guess what it is?

Seriously, among people who actually study this stuff for a living it's not even a question that deflation is bad for economies.

A few years ago it was not even a question that the zero lower bound on interest rates made perfect sense.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

You put too much faith in economists. That suggests, to me, that you find prevalent economic theories useful to your political leanings and so it's convenient to put faith in them. Most economics is just apology for one or another political agenda. "Hmm we want mass immigration, what can we say? Oh some drivel about a free labor market."

How does keeping your head jammed up your ass work for you? (Hint: Not every person commenting is Chris.)

YouTube is a long-tail marketing business. The rewards come in over time.

If you're bored about hearing about tulips, here are some other famous bubbles, all of which lead to people who went all in losing all their money

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

The only 'disadvantage' of a deflationary currency is that it encourages people to save their earnings rather than live on credit.

https://www.investopedia.com/a...

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

All that is only a problem for the main societal currency. Bitcoin can be deflationary without causing systemic economic problems.

Compounding that, it only takes a few kooks willing to pay those crazy prices to make the venture pay for the scalpers. A lot of product gets left on the shelf even in the midst of huge demand. That is, an inefficient market.

Market price is dynamic and ephemeral. Every sale alters the market price slightly (removes one unit of supply and one unit of demand). Or at least it should. Unless the owner of the IP has done something stupid like put a MAP (minimum advertised price) condition on its retailers. That throws a monkey wrench into the market process, resulting in items left on the shelf because the retailer can't drop the price down to its true market price.

Product being left on the shelf because the price has been driven too high by scalpers actually isn't a problem. That means the scalpers have overestimated demand, meaning they (or at least some of them) are going to be stuck with product they were hoping to flip. Either they don't know about sunk costs and will hold onto it (maintaining the high price) and eventually eat the loss (or make less profit if the first few sales were ginormous). Or they'll eat the loss, causing the market price to drop.

"In late June, 2014, Apple was traded at $92.18 with a P/E ratio (TTM) of 15.34. On the same day, Amazon’s stock price was $334.38 with a P/E ratio of 511.06." -- How can the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio mislead investors?

Short answer, Tesla is pushing the same strategy Amazon is. Investors aren't looking at 2019 for Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, or Tesla. They're looking at 2029 or 2039. Speculators might be looking at 2019, though.

Actually, it is the situation in the USA. Unemployment in America is at 4.1% while 5% is considered "full employment". Anyone capable of working can find a job, although they may need to move.

The U-3 unemployment rate is not meaningful, and even the U-6 is inadequate (this is by design.) The current U6 unemployment rate as of October 2017 is 7.90. Tell us again about "full employment", please.

It's quite staggering that GCHQ would permit the highest law making body in the land to put its data into a cloud they know they and NSA have access to. Exposing the law making process to known foreign surveillance.

Exposing the law making process to surveillance available to only a select few is not a bug, it's a feature .

FTFY.

It's quite staggering that GCHQ would permit the highest law making body in the land to put its data into a cloud they know they and NSA have access to. Exposing the law making process to known foreign surveillance.

Exposing the law making process to surveillance is not a bug, it's a feature.

Because government destroys those aspects of life?
http://www.investopedia.com/ar...
http://www.peterleeson.com/Bet...
http://mensenrechten.org/wp-co...
Government forces people to do things, which is the opposite of cooperation.
Governments that provide health care to their people have the worst quality health care of all.
In Canada pets get better health care than humans, because gov hasn't destroyed the health care system for pets.

Bitcoin has essentially nothing in common with stocks. Stocks are ownership in a real world corporation that, ideally, pays regular dividends to share holders.

What about non-voting, non-dividend paying shares? Google class C's are non-dividend-paying and non-voting and are going for over a thousand bucks a pop. I suppose with a stock, if you sell it at a loss, you can write it off on your taxes. I doubt you can do that with bitcoin. Just need a Congresscritter to update the law and that will change (if they haven't already - if someone in the donor class starts getting involved with bitcoin, that should change).

Corporate income taxes should be abolished and replaced with a VAT and a border adjustment tax.

VATs are considered regressive.

not even close to accurate.

Imagine if the US put hefty tariffs on everything

VATs are not tariffs. Chinese companies pay VAT on products sold in China, but not on exports. American companies pay income tax on all their sales.

China taxes consumption. America taxes production. So they build, we buy. This is a major reason why we have massive deficits and debts.

Corporate income taxes should be abolished and replaced with a VAT and a border adjustment tax.

its called Economics.

As long as the law or a document referenced by the law defines the term Global Turnover, the court will not be confused. Everyone else can have an opinion which the court will eventually overrule.
Overall Turnover
Revenue Streams Law and Legal Definition

towards elite rent seekers. Owners, not workers. Those folks don't risk anything.

Bullshit they don't risk anything. If you think that entrepreneurs don't risk anything then you've never tried to start or run a company. Owners of companies generally live a life of low grade terror because of the vast number of things that can go wrong and the amount of money they stand to lose.

Their loans are guaranteed, they've got insider information given verbally at country clubs, laws don't apply to them and if all else fails we've given them so much wealth that if they go down they take everything with them.

That's a quaint picture you have that has little correlation to reality for all but a tiny handful of business owners in rare cases. Go ahead and try to get an unsecured loan even if you have a lot of money. I've done it myself and been around plenty of others who have as well including some very wealthy people. It's very rare that you can get a loan without some form of collateral and/or personal guarantee. Even if you are already rich and successful.

STEM isn't going to get you out/up given the amount of outsourcing going on. Only the very brightest can overcome that barrier and not everybody can be a genius, if they could the definition of genius would change.

Who ever claimed that an engineering degree would protect you from globalism? Trying to pretend that global competition isn't a real thing is as absurd as pretending that the industrial revolution was a passing fad or that people will get over these computer things soon. You don't have to be a genius to compete in a global market. But you do have to be aware that the wages will not be set locally and protectionism will not save you.

If you're referencing that Chinese insult about living in interesting times though you're spot on. Between automation, general attacks on education in the form of funding cuts and our endless wars the working class is boned.

It's adorable that you think that. The problem the "working class" (and some white collar work too) in the US has is that in general they want wages that are well above the global average for equivalent work. If you are doing labor intensive work then that work is going to tend to migrate to where labor is cheap. When politicians pander to "bring back manufacturing jobs" what they are really promising is to lower wages to compete with the global prevailing wage. There are plenty of jobs. There might not be plenty of jobs wage levels near the top of the bell curve. Supply and demand. China and India have lots of labor so prices for that labor are relatively cheap. If you want higher than average wages then you had better have higher than average productivity too.

"To calculate ROI, the benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment, and the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio."

You are are incorrect. Return on investment is intended to differentiate the quality of an investment, not a total number. Someone who invested 1,000,000 in "Beauty and the Beast" would have earned back 7,000,000. Someone who invested 1,000,000 in "Get Out" would have earned back 55,000,000. "Get Out" was a far greater return on investment, even if "Beauty and the Beast" earned gross profit. And you'd better believe executives - regardless of the industry - pay attention when one product outperforms other similar products in ROI by a fact of 8.

Now, there is an argument to be made that it's okay to get lesser returns on greater volume. I wouldn't dispute that. But it doesn't change the fact that "Get Out" was a huge hit, and that it had a massive Return on Investment.

A lot of data leaks can be prevented by using a browser instead of apps. There are browsers that are made for users, not advertisers: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/...
Apps are basically trojan horses on your device. The purpose of the majority of apps is to collect data about their users. So, instead of the amazon app, use their mobile web page (it's actually good). Instead of Facebook app, use their web page (or better don't use fb at all), etc.

When selecting a browser, try not to choose from a company whose main business is advertising. http://www.investopedia.com/ar...

Practical tips:
Some browser addons I consider a basic necessity:
1) ad blocker (obviously)
2) tracker blocker, like Ghostery (FF now comes with its own built-in tracker blocker)
3) NoScript

For messaging I recommend https://threema.ch/
Yes, you pay 3 CHF, but only once.

It has become difficult to find apps that don't sell your data. Since everybody wants apps for free the app developers have to resort to other revenue channels and selling your data is a fairly obvious one. https://www.go2mobi.com/sell-u...