"So what you're saying is that he's not gunning for a c-level position at Comcast, Sprint, or T-Mobile? Guess we'll have to see how favorable he acts to Verizon and AT&T."
The really telling thing here is that he said he was "skeptical" of the idea. Until the last decade or so, any FCC chairman would have publicly rolled on the floor laughing at the idea.
Anonymous Brave Guy might not have been 100% correct, but he did have some good points. Getting shouted down does not mean he was wrong about everything.
Recent abuse of government does not mean the whole concept of government is bad. In the same vein, recent abuse by copyright holders does not mean the concept of copyright is bad. It served us well for most of 200 years. It still can.
The trick is to rein in the abuse, not to destroy something that demonstrably works well when it is allowed to.
"Your comment completely ignores the economic situation of creators."
And YOUR comment gets both the law and some of the economics wrong.
DOWNLOADING IS NOT PIRACY. Piracy is a 150-year-old legal term that (generally) means bulk copying for profit. Get it through your head and start using the word properly. Downloading without permission is a copyright violation, but not piracy. Uploading without permission is also a copyright violation but usually, unless you have a profit motive, that's not piracy either. Piracy has a narrower and different definition than how you used it. Someone in China selling bootleg copies of a CD is a pirate. Somebody downloading (or uploading!) a low-res rip of "Scary Movie" is not. (Which, BTW, is usually not even close to "verbatim".)
Having said that: yes, overhead is a large part of the cost. But you are ignoring 2 important relevant facts: first, the studios' own business model is to make back that money via those small per-unit sales you mention. And second, there is no good evidence that downloading hurts sales. On the contrary: studies that have been done over the last 15 years (since Napster came on the scene) have pretty consistently shown that it HELPS sales.
Most downloading occurs in situations in which there would NOT have been a sale in the first place. (Due to lack of money, lack of transportation, whatever.) Which means the studio really hasn't lost a sale. On the other hand, it provides good "word of mouth" about a product (movie, CD, whatever), which can be considered free advertising. The ones who lose are those who get box office revenue by drawing people in to what turns out to be a shitty movie. So it could be said that downloading helps the industry weed out the bad actors.
And further yet, when somebody downloads, even if you assume that it was a lost sale, all the studios and "the artists" lose is the profit that would have been made on the sale, which is usually a small fraction of the retail price. Which is one reason downloading has actually helped the studios and artists make more money, rather than lose it.
"yes, technology has certainly armed you, Bill Gates, you twisted evil fuck"
Well, this certainly does illustrate how much Bill Gates is actually a closet Statist. But those who have followed what the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation do already knew that. At first I was happy to see Gates spending much of his fortune on "charity"... until I learned what they were actually doing with the money.
Like supporting "Common Core" education... which is worse than you probably think. Contrary to what supporters say, while it may not technically be a "government" program, the government had a heavy hand in its formation. And there is a lot more to the whole story.
You can bet that if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is behind it, it has a Statist purpose.
There are a number of services and applications that use OpenStreetMap as a back end. As mentioned, some of them are available on Android. Others are available for the desktop.
"... and if anything, the internet has opened horizons."
Exactly. Trying to credit San Francisco (or Palo Alto, or Seattle) for the "tech boom" is kind of like trying to credit AT&T for the development of smart phones. Um, no.
Especially, as you point out, with the development of the internet. I've been working "remotely" since 2009 (and on and off before that, actually) and it can work just fine. If anything, it is places like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle etc. that have been trying to buck this trend and expect all their workers to be local. They're behind the times. It's a paradigm that is starting to fail.
I highly recommend the book by DHH: Remote: No Office Required". I was working remotely long before that book came out, but companies that want to keep up with the times should start gearing up for their programmers and even some IT staff to work outside the office.
Pardon me. For the sake of accuracy, I will amend the third sentence above. It should have read:
"... the rates are required by law to be based on the probability of that disaster occurring to you, and the cost of treatment."
And even that should probably say "were required" rather than "are required", because since Obamacare was passed, insurance isn't really insurance anymore.
NO. Insurance is a fund YOU pay into, and if some particular disaster you are insured against occurs, they pay you. That's a contract between you and your insurance company, and the payouts are determined (by law) to be based on the probability of that disaster or accident occurring.
However, when you are forced to pay for someone else's insurance, a rates-based-on-probabilty scheme is no longer possible. Instead it becomes nothing more than de facto socialized medicine. The very foundation of what insurance is, according to both the commonly accepted and legal definitions of "insurance", no longer applies. Even more so when you force acceptance of pre-existing conditions. It isn't possible to "insure" against pre-existing conditions! That's not insurance, again by the very definition of what insurance is. It's socialized medicine.
"Are you entirely forgetting about the mandate? Where do you get that fewer young people have insurance? That, like the other anecdotes about huge cost increases, sounds entirely made up."
I'm not "forgetting" about anything. It's a fact you can look up. More and more young people are foregoing insurance altogether, because it's cheaper for them to pay for their own minor health issues and the fine at the end of the year, than to pay the new inflated rates. For the very reason I mentioned above: the rates are no longer tied to THEIR probability of disease or accident, but instead they are forced to pay for other people as well.
Not only is it a fact you can look up, it is a fact that anybody with a brain should have expected to happen, for the reasons I already mentioned.
By the way... I am one of those people. I have zero intention to sign up for Obamacare. And most young people I know are saying the same, if it isn't 100% paid by their employer.
Not only this -- I suspect that a large part of the 90% drop in complaints has to do with the fact that it makes it a lot harder for people to lie about their interaction with a police officer.
I agree with this, BUT...
Having been a victim of what I definitely consider to be police abuse... in a situation in which video that was clearly being made somehow later "went missing", I also have to agree that this very much works both ways.
I agree with the ACLU, to the extent that I agree there should be independent oversight of these videos, and any "missing" video should be a cause for reprimand at the very LEAST.
Because I also happen to live in an area that has experienced many years of police "incidents" in which innocent people somehow end up injured or dead, but there was no independent investigation, and the internal "investigations" have almost invariably exonerated the policeman, even when no reasonable person looking at the same evidence would (or does) conclude that no wrong had been committed.
I agree that most police are probably fine people. I even have relatives who are or have been police. But the few who aren't good can cause a hell of a lot of damage, especially when there is more than one of them and they scratch each others' backs.
Okay. Well, I apologize as well if I misunderstood you.
I agree that "equivalent" is ambiguous but that's the nature of the beast. One of the big quibbles I have with the U.S. government is how they decide what is an "equivalent" good when they calculate CPI. The whole exercise is arguably subjective; still, the methods the government uses are hardly reasonable, and lie outside what I would even call subjective. I think "dishonest" is a far more accurate description.
But the same problem arises in cases like that chart I linked to earlier in this thread. How does one compare, say, a horse & cart from 1650 with a Ford from 2014? Well, McCusker's answer was that you can't, really. You can, however, compare them in the best ways you can, including the cost of what they do. In other words, you might compare the relative cost (i.e., the cost as a percentage of your annual income) of a trip to New York from Baltimore. Other things can be treated more equally, such as the cost and maintenance of the whole "vehicle" (vehicle plus horse), and fuel (horse feed).
That's the goddamned definition of inflation: a rise in the cost of equivalent goods over time.
If you want it to mean something else for your own purposes, fine, but then you should make up your own word to go with it. Don't accuse me of "abusing English" for using a technical word properly in context. How rude.
Whoa. Hold on there. I am not of the generation you are blaming but you need to step back and get a little perspective. At least I think I'm not... because "your generation" is rather ambiguous. I am probably older than you, but a lot of these things were actually done by a full generation before me. (If you define "generation", as the time it takes for someone to grow up and have children, which these days averages almost 30 years.)
Yes, the early boomers did rape Social Security "for their own benefit", and now they want later society to make up the difference. That *IS* their fault. If you know history, it's not reasonable to try to deny this. But let's look at the following sentences, one point at a time:
"Then you voted to privatize prisons, stratify wealth, defund social outreach to try and lift people out of poverty and get them into being tax payers."
Privatize prisons: yes. That was an experiment that has pretty much failed. Society needs to own up to the fact that prisons are a legitimate societal cost, and pay for them directly out of tax money.
Stratify wealth: No. Just no. There is a huge assumption in this assertion that must not go unchallenged. In fact, the freer markets have been, the LESS income inequality there has been. Government programs to "help the poor" have invariably led to greater income inequality. It's history. Just look around you today. More government intervention in the economy and more entitlement spending than ever before... and the highest income inequality just about ever. You need to re-examine your assumptions here. Don't assume that just because the intent is to lower inequality, that you will get that result with a Government program. It doesn't work that way, and never has. You need to evaluate government programs by their results, not by their intentions.
Defund social outreach "to try to lift people out of poverty": since when? The early boomers didn't do this. There is more "social outreach" than when I was a child. That means my parents increased it, not decreased it. But again: it hasn't let to fewer poor people. "Try to" is the operative phrase here. That is the intent. The result, on average, has been the opposite.
"Voted to defund schools, give yourselves a tax break..."
Schools are another area that is better "funded" than when I was a child. So this assertion is false. As for tax breaks, people pay more in taxes than they did then, too, when you adjust for inflation. So these assertions are nonsense. By the way: studies have clearly and consistently shown that beyond a certain point, throwing more money at schools does not make them any better. In my area, 80% of the money spent on education goes to administration. Clearly that is a badly lopsided bureaucracy. More money won't cure it. Less government would help.
"... reform capital gains tax to actually collect income or properly fund the IRS so it can catch tax cheats (did you know it has a 7 to 1 payback at the moment?"
Capital gains taxes WERE reformed... to end the government stealing of savings that was taking place. In an inflationary market, a homeowner who buys a house, lives in it 10 years, then sells it (at a higher value, of course, because of inflating prices), hasn't earned any real capital gains. For the simple reason that buying another, similar house would cost them just as much as the sale price of their existing house. Inflation has eaten all the "capital gains". It used to be that government was taxing this money, so that homeowners actually LOST money when they sold their homes. That's one of the many insidious ways that inflation steals from productive people. Capital gains taxes were amended to prevent this government theft. But the exemption isn't supposed to apply to people who "flip" homes for a profit, or otherwise buy investment homes
"Minimums are needed because cross subsidisation is rather integral to having affordable healthcare for everyone."
Yes. Cross-subsidization (also known as "socialism") has resulted in most people I have spoken to paying 40% to 60% more on their premiums, with a higher deductible.
It has also resulted in fewer young people with insurance, because their premiums went way up. It's DUMB to raise rates on the demographic that (A) is essential to funding the program, and (B) needs it the least.
I grant that it is a good thing to get insurance away from ties to "traditional" employment. But doing so through Obamacare is kind of like cleaning your windows by taking a sledgehammer to them.
"My point is the products you've described change over time, so an electronic component with a much smaller area of expensive silicon for example can't really be considered deflation - it's a different item that happens to be made of parts that add up to a lower total."
It is deflation by the very same criteria that the government uses to measure inflation: the utility of the product for the amount of money you pay.
It doesn't matter what it's made of. It doesn't matter how it's made. If the end product is better than last year, for the same or less money, it's deflation.
"Actually, I want to know why bitcoin wouldn't be government protected. Trading bitcoins for some good or service would just be a type of barter exchange. So unless what is being purchased is illegal, then the law, police and courts would still apply to handle situations like fraud and theft."
Bitcoin *IS* protected, approximately as much as cash is protected. That is to say, laws against fraud and the like still apply.
The problem (as the government sees it) is that also like cash, Bitcoin is anonymous. And the government doesn't like anonymous cash flows. It sees that as a threat.
Which is why, of course, everybody else sees a "government-sponsored" cryptocurrency as a threat. You can bet your ass they would try to make sure they had tabs on who spent exactly how much, exactly where and when.
And if that happens, you can kiss your freedom goodby.
"Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously."
No, you're just talking about a different scale. There is overall inflation, and there is inflation (or the lack of it) in individual markets. It's still inflation, it's just about a particular thing rather than the overall economy. I would say you're exaggerating the difference, but it's worse than that... you are saying they're different concepts when they're not. Inflation is inflation. The same basic principles apply.
"Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply."
Who is being disingenuous here? It wasn't me. If you inflate the money supply, TVs get more expensive. If you make them cheaper to produce, they get less expensive. It's still inflation or its opposite, because it all has to do with the relative price of goods. Trying to argue about inflation without acknowledging that is like trying to build a house in the air without a foundation under it. Your argument is going to fall down.
"Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash."
You're making my point for me. Mainstream economists try to tell us that "steady, moderate" inflation *IS* good. They HAVE been saying that, for 100 years. And that chart I linked to above shows exactly what that's done.
"The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody."
Sounds like you've already drunk the Kool-Aid. Look at that chart again. For almost 300 years, the economy in N. America was mildly deflationary, except around wartime (the labeled boxes), when government borrowed money. It didn't hurt anybody... the standard of living was steadily increasing.
It isn't enough to listen to the economists spout their pet theories. It pays to look at the real history, and what actually happened, when.
"You are confusing productivity with the aggregate supply for money in aggregate (inflation)."
No, I am not. It is possible to have deflationary markets within an economy that is overall inflationary. It is also possible to have inflationary markets in an overall economy that is deflationary. The only difference here is that I was talking about an individual market, not the economy as a whole.
"Having a low inflation rate has not always been the goal of the central bank."
No shit, Sherlock. That was part of my point.
"There have been times (70s in particular) when the Fed cranked up inflation."
Yep. Leading directly to "stagflation". Right. Another example of the government's (and Fed's) consistent failure to change the economy through intervention.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're experiencing stagflation again right now: a period of relatively high inflation coupled with a persistently high unemployment rate.
"They now know they were wrong."
Yep. But it took the Austrians, and Monetarists like Milton Friedman, to explain to them how they're wrong. Yet "mainstream" (Neo-classical and Keynesian) economists keep rejecting Austrian and Monetarist principles, even though those schools have provably been better at not just explaining, but also predicting major economic events.
"Read up on the issues and flaws of using a price index to measure inflation -- It is one of the better measures we have but there are still flaws. Factor in that the data prior to 1912 is second rate. Then redo your chart us a log scale, which you should do when looking at percent changes."
Just no. Your points, one at a time:
First, the ONLY semi-reliable way to determine "inflation" is to compare the price levels of equivalent goods over time. There is no way around that. I mean, that's what inflation is a measure of!
Second, the data prior to 1913 (not 1912) is data from the acknowledged expert in the field, and he didn't just pull the numbers out of his ass. It is the best data there is, so there's no point bitching about it. You have to live with what you've got. And it's not as bad as you appear to be implying. I could just as easily argue that the data since 1913 are second-rate, because they were obtained government's own calculations, which are known to be skewed.
Third, since the graph does not show a percentage difference at all, but rather absolute amounts, a log scale would be inappropriate.
"No.
The are not the same items like a lump of copper (for example) is."
The economics of it don't care whether it's a TV or a lump of copper. They're both commodities that have production costs. In the case of copper, the cost is digging it up and smelting. In the case of a TV, the cost is in manufacture. While the two physical processes might be very different, the basic economic process is still the same.
Slashdot Mirror
"So what you're saying is that he's not gunning for a c-level position at Comcast, Sprint, or T-Mobile? Guess we'll have to see how favorable he acts to Verizon and AT&T."
The really telling thing here is that he said he was "skeptical" of the idea. Until the last decade or so, any FCC chairman would have publicly rolled on the floor laughing at the idea.
That should cause you some concern.
Anonymous Brave Guy might not have been 100% correct, but he did have some good points. Getting shouted down does not mean he was wrong about everything.
Recent abuse of government does not mean the whole concept of government is bad. In the same vein, recent abuse by copyright holders does not mean the concept of copyright is bad. It served us well for most of 200 years. It still can.
The trick is to rein in the abuse, not to destroy something that demonstrably works well when it is allowed to.
"Your comment completely ignores the economic situation of creators."
And YOUR comment gets both the law and some of the economics wrong.
DOWNLOADING IS NOT PIRACY. Piracy is a 150-year-old legal term that (generally) means bulk copying for profit. Get it through your head and start using the word properly. Downloading without permission is a copyright violation, but not piracy. Uploading without permission is also a copyright violation but usually, unless you have a profit motive, that's not piracy either. Piracy has a narrower and different definition than how you used it. Someone in China selling bootleg copies of a CD is a pirate. Somebody downloading (or uploading!) a low-res rip of "Scary Movie" is not. (Which, BTW, is usually not even close to "verbatim".)
Having said that: yes, overhead is a large part of the cost. But you are ignoring 2 important relevant facts: first, the studios' own business model is to make back that money via those small per-unit sales you mention. And second, there is no good evidence that downloading hurts sales. On the contrary: studies that have been done over the last 15 years (since Napster came on the scene) have pretty consistently shown that it HELPS sales.
Most downloading occurs in situations in which there would NOT have been a sale in the first place. (Due to lack of money, lack of transportation, whatever.) Which means the studio really hasn't lost a sale. On the other hand, it provides good "word of mouth" about a product (movie, CD, whatever), which can be considered free advertising. The ones who lose are those who get box office revenue by drawing people in to what turns out to be a shitty movie. So it could be said that downloading helps the industry weed out the bad actors.
And further yet, when somebody downloads, even if you assume that it was a lost sale, all the studios and "the artists" lose is the profit that would have been made on the sale, which is usually a small fraction of the retail price. Which is one reason downloading has actually helped the studios and artists make more money, rather than lose it.
"The large number of persons who also idolized Steve Jobs, I suspect."
Wow. I have very strong doubts about that. Two very different people, those two.
But regardless: while I have a lot of respect for both of them for some of the things they did, their politics aren't among those things.
"yes, technology has certainly armed you, Bill Gates, you twisted evil fuck"
Well, this certainly does illustrate how much Bill Gates is actually a closet Statist. But those who have followed what the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation do already knew that. At first I was happy to see Gates spending much of his fortune on "charity"... until I learned what they were actually doing with the money.
Like supporting "Common Core" education... which is worse than you probably think. Contrary to what supporters say, while it may not technically be a "government" program, the government had a heavy hand in its formation. And there is a lot more to the whole story.
You can bet that if the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is behind it, it has a Statist purpose.
There are a number of services and applications that use OpenStreetMap as a back end. As mentioned, some of them are available on Android. Others are available for the desktop.
"Can you give a specific example of how free speech is limited in europe?"
Yes. Libel laws in the UK. What a joke.
"... and if anything, the internet has opened horizons."
Exactly. Trying to credit San Francisco (or Palo Alto, or Seattle) for the "tech boom" is kind of like trying to credit AT&T for the development of smart phones. Um, no.
Especially, as you point out, with the development of the internet. I've been working "remotely" since 2009 (and on and off before that, actually) and it can work just fine. If anything, it is places like San Francisco, Portland, Seattle etc. that have been trying to buck this trend and expect all their workers to be local. They're behind the times. It's a paradigm that is starting to fail.
I highly recommend the book by DHH: Remote: No Office Required". I was working remotely long before that book came out, but companies that want to keep up with the times should start gearing up for their programmers and even some IT staff to work outside the office.
Pardon me. For the sake of accuracy, I will amend the third sentence above. It should have read:
"... the rates are required by law to be based on the probability of that disaster occurring to you, and the cost of treatment."
And even that should probably say "were required" rather than "are required", because since Obamacare was passed, insurance isn't really insurance anymore.
"That's not what socialism is, that's insurance."
NO. Insurance is a fund YOU pay into, and if some particular disaster you are insured against occurs, they pay you. That's a contract between you and your insurance company, and the payouts are determined (by law) to be based on the probability of that disaster or accident occurring.
However, when you are forced to pay for someone else's insurance, a rates-based-on-probabilty scheme is no longer possible. Instead it becomes nothing more than de facto socialized medicine. The very foundation of what insurance is, according to both the commonly accepted and legal definitions of "insurance", no longer applies. Even more so when you force acceptance of pre-existing conditions. It isn't possible to "insure" against pre-existing conditions! That's not insurance, again by the very definition of what insurance is. It's socialized medicine.
"Are you entirely forgetting about the mandate? Where do you get that fewer young people have insurance? That, like the other anecdotes about huge cost increases, sounds entirely made up."
I'm not "forgetting" about anything. It's a fact you can look up. More and more young people are foregoing insurance altogether, because it's cheaper for them to pay for their own minor health issues and the fine at the end of the year, than to pay the new inflated rates. For the very reason I mentioned above: the rates are no longer tied to THEIR probability of disease or accident, but instead they are forced to pay for other people as well.
Not only is it a fact you can look up, it is a fact that anybody with a brain should have expected to happen, for the reasons I already mentioned.
By the way... I am one of those people. I have zero intention to sign up for Obamacare. And most young people I know are saying the same, if it isn't 100% paid by their employer.
Not only this -- I suspect that a large part of the 90% drop in complaints has to do with the fact that it makes it a lot harder for people to lie about their interaction with a police officer.
I agree with this, BUT...
Having been a victim of what I definitely consider to be police abuse... in a situation in which video that was clearly being made somehow later "went missing", I also have to agree that this very much works both ways.
I agree with the ACLU, to the extent that I agree there should be independent oversight of these videos, and any "missing" video should be a cause for reprimand at the very LEAST.
Because I also happen to live in an area that has experienced many years of police "incidents" in which innocent people somehow end up injured or dead, but there was no independent investigation, and the internal "investigations" have almost invariably exonerated the policeman, even when no reasonable person looking at the same evidence would (or does) conclude that no wrong had been committed.
I agree that most police are probably fine people. I even have relatives who are or have been police. But the few who aren't good can cause a hell of a lot of damage, especially when there is more than one of them and they scratch each others' backs.
Just imagine: all the benefits of a commune without getting your hands dirty. Courtesy of capitalism.
Okay. Well, I apologize as well if I misunderstood you.
I agree that "equivalent" is ambiguous but that's the nature of the beast. One of the big quibbles I have with the U.S. government is how they decide what is an "equivalent" good when they calculate CPI. The whole exercise is arguably subjective; still, the methods the government uses are hardly reasonable, and lie outside what I would even call subjective. I think "dishonest" is a far more accurate description.
But the same problem arises in cases like that chart I linked to earlier in this thread. How does one compare, say, a horse & cart from 1650 with a Ford from 2014? Well, McCusker's answer was that you can't, really. You can, however, compare them in the best ways you can, including the cost of what they do. In other words, you might compare the relative cost (i.e., the cost as a percentage of your annual income) of a trip to New York from Baltimore. Other things can be treated more equally, such as the cost and maintenance of the whole "vehicle" (vehicle plus horse), and fuel (horse feed).
Pardon me. If I'm being technical, I should have written that inflation is "A rise in the price of equivalent goods over time." Not cost. My mistake.
"Want to phrase it that way"?
That's the goddamned definition of inflation: a rise in the cost of equivalent goods over time.
If you want it to mean something else for your own purposes, fine, but then you should make up your own word to go with it. Don't accuse me of "abusing English" for using a technical word properly in context. How rude.
"Well that is more or less your exact fault."
Whoa. Hold on there. I am not of the generation you are blaming but you need to step back and get a little perspective. At least I think I'm not... because "your generation" is rather ambiguous. I am probably older than you, but a lot of these things were actually done by a full generation before me. (If you define "generation", as the time it takes for someone to grow up and have children, which these days averages almost 30 years.)
Yes, the early boomers did rape Social Security "for their own benefit", and now they want later society to make up the difference. That *IS* their fault. If you know history, it's not reasonable to try to deny this. But let's look at the following sentences, one point at a time:
"Then you voted to privatize prisons, stratify wealth, defund social outreach to try and lift people out of poverty and get them into being tax payers."
Privatize prisons: yes. That was an experiment that has pretty much failed. Society needs to own up to the fact that prisons are a legitimate societal cost, and pay for them directly out of tax money.
Stratify wealth: No. Just no. There is a huge assumption in this assertion that must not go unchallenged. In fact, the freer markets have been, the LESS income inequality there has been. Government programs to "help the poor" have invariably led to greater income inequality. It's history. Just look around you today. More government intervention in the economy and more entitlement spending than ever before... and the highest income inequality just about ever. You need to re-examine your assumptions here. Don't assume that just because the intent is to lower inequality, that you will get that result with a Government program. It doesn't work that way, and never has. You need to evaluate government programs by their results, not by their intentions.
Defund social outreach "to try to lift people out of poverty": since when? The early boomers didn't do this. There is more "social outreach" than when I was a child. That means my parents increased it, not decreased it. But again: it hasn't let to fewer poor people. "Try to" is the operative phrase here. That is the intent. The result, on average, has been the opposite.
"Voted to defund schools, give yourselves a tax break..."
Schools are another area that is better "funded" than when I was a child. So this assertion is false. As for tax breaks, people pay more in taxes than they did then, too, when you adjust for inflation. So these assertions are nonsense. By the way: studies have clearly and consistently shown that beyond a certain point, throwing more money at schools does not make them any better. In my area, 80% of the money spent on education goes to administration. Clearly that is a badly lopsided bureaucracy. More money won't cure it. Less government would help.
"... reform capital gains tax to actually collect income or properly fund the IRS so it can catch tax cheats (did you know it has a 7 to 1 payback at the moment?"
Capital gains taxes WERE reformed... to end the government stealing of savings that was taking place. In an inflationary market, a homeowner who buys a house, lives in it 10 years, then sells it (at a higher value, of course, because of inflating prices), hasn't earned any real capital gains. For the simple reason that buying another, similar house would cost them just as much as the sale price of their existing house. Inflation has eaten all the "capital gains". It used to be that government was taxing this money, so that homeowners actually LOST money when they sold their homes. That's one of the many insidious ways that inflation steals from productive people. Capital gains taxes were amended to prevent this government theft. But the exemption isn't supposed to apply to people who "flip" homes for a profit, or otherwise buy investment homes
"Minimums are needed because cross subsidisation is rather integral to having affordable healthcare for everyone."
Yes. Cross-subsidization (also known as "socialism") has resulted in most people I have spoken to paying 40% to 60% more on their premiums, with a higher deductible.
It has also resulted in fewer young people with insurance, because their premiums went way up. It's DUMB to raise rates on the demographic that (A) is essential to funding the program, and (B) needs it the least.
I grant that it is a good thing to get insurance away from ties to "traditional" employment. But doing so through Obamacare is kind of like cleaning your windows by taking a sledgehammer to them.
"My point is the products you've described change over time, so an electronic component with a much smaller area of expensive silicon for example can't really be considered deflation - it's a different item that happens to be made of parts that add up to a lower total."
It is deflation by the very same criteria that the government uses to measure inflation: the utility of the product for the amount of money you pay.
It doesn't matter what it's made of. It doesn't matter how it's made. If the end product is better than last year, for the same or less money, it's deflation.
"How remote is remote? Are we talking over the internet/sms or are we talking if you control a cell tower?"
Doesn't matter. Nobody likes to get "backdoored" without their consent.
"Actually, I want to know why bitcoin wouldn't be government protected. Trading bitcoins for some good or service would just be a type of barter exchange. So unless what is being purchased is illegal, then the law, police and courts would still apply to handle situations like fraud and theft."
Bitcoin *IS* protected, approximately as much as cash is protected. That is to say, laws against fraud and the like still apply.
The problem (as the government sees it) is that also like cash, Bitcoin is anonymous. And the government doesn't like anonymous cash flows. It sees that as a threat.
Which is why, of course, everybody else sees a "government-sponsored" cryptocurrency as a threat. You can bet your ass they would try to make sure they had tabs on who spent exactly how much, exactly where and when.
And if that happens, you can kiss your freedom goodby.
"Um... seems to me we have some duplication here.
I don't know about anybody else, but I sure thought this is what that other thread was all about."
Isn't it hilarious when people mod you "redundant" without checking the time stamps? That was the second post in this topic. The first was from an AC.
Come on, modders. Get your shit together.
"Absolutely totally wrong. First of all, Inflation and deflation have zero to do with prices of individual products or market segments - they are global to all products, services, wages and prices simultaneously."
No, you're just talking about a different scale. There is overall inflation, and there is inflation (or the lack of it) in individual markets. It's still inflation, it's just about a particular thing rather than the overall economy. I would say you're exaggerating the difference, but it's worse than that... you are saying they're different concepts when they're not. Inflation is inflation. The same basic principles apply.
"Secondly, industry changes have nothing to do with money supply changes. Electronics getting cheaper due to technology improvements, competition, supply, and manufacturing having nothing to do with the money supply."
Who is being disingenuous here? It wasn't me. If you inflate the money supply, TVs get more expensive. If you make them cheaper to produce, they get less expensive. It's still inflation or its opposite, because it all has to do with the relative price of goods. Trying to argue about inflation without acknowledging that is like trying to build a house in the air without a foundation under it. Your argument is going to fall down.
"Thirdly, while steady inflation is not good, deflation is worse as it causes the market to stop investing in industry and growth and instead invest in hoarding cash."
You're making my point for me. Mainstream economists try to tell us that "steady, moderate" inflation *IS* good. They HAVE been saying that, for 100 years. And that chart I linked to above shows exactly what that's done.
"The rich can become richer regardless of whether the market is inflating or deflating if they use their money intelligently, this is always the case. But deflation causes slow and negative growth in the overall economy and reduction in standard of living, which is bad for everybody."
Sounds like you've already drunk the Kool-Aid. Look at that chart again. For almost 300 years, the economy in N. America was mildly deflationary, except around wartime (the labeled boxes), when government borrowed money. It didn't hurt anybody... the standard of living was steadily increasing.
It isn't enough to listen to the economists spout their pet theories. It pays to look at the real history, and what actually happened, when.
"You are confusing productivity with the aggregate supply for money in aggregate (inflation)."
No, I am not. It is possible to have deflationary markets within an economy that is overall inflationary. It is also possible to have inflationary markets in an overall economy that is deflationary. The only difference here is that I was talking about an individual market, not the economy as a whole.
"Having a low inflation rate has not always been the goal of the central bank."
No shit, Sherlock. That was part of my point.
"There have been times (70s in particular) when the Fed cranked up inflation."
Yep. Leading directly to "stagflation". Right. Another example of the government's (and Fed's) consistent failure to change the economy through intervention.
In case you hadn't noticed, we're experiencing stagflation again right now: a period of relatively high inflation coupled with a persistently high unemployment rate.
"They now know they were wrong."
Yep. But it took the Austrians, and Monetarists like Milton Friedman, to explain to them how they're wrong. Yet "mainstream" (Neo-classical and Keynesian) economists keep rejecting Austrian and Monetarist principles, even though those schools have provably been better at not just explaining, but also predicting major economic events.
"Read up on the issues and flaws of using a price index to measure inflation -- It is one of the better measures we have but there are still flaws. Factor in that the data prior to 1912 is second rate. Then redo your chart us a log scale, which you should do when looking at percent changes."
Just no. Your points, one at a time:
First, the ONLY semi-reliable way to determine "inflation" is to compare the price levels of equivalent goods over time. There is no way around that. I mean, that's what inflation is a measure of!
Second, the data prior to 1913 (not 1912) is data from the acknowledged expert in the field, and he didn't just pull the numbers out of his ass. It is the best data there is, so there's no point bitching about it. You have to live with what you've got. And it's not as bad as you appear to be implying. I could just as easily argue that the data since 1913 are second-rate, because they were obtained government's own calculations, which are known to be skewed.
Third, since the graph does not show a percentage difference at all, but rather absolute amounts, a log scale would be inappropriate.
"No. The are not the same items like a lump of copper (for example) is."
The economics of it don't care whether it's a TV or a lump of copper. They're both commodities that have production costs. In the case of copper, the cost is digging it up and smelting. In the case of a TV, the cost is in manufacture. While the two physical processes might be very different, the basic economic process is still the same.
"I smell a dupe. And I'm not referring to the people who keep voting for Feinstein, either."
Haha. This is mod-worthy. But it was "under my threshold" when I came to this page and I didn't see it.