You are getting a couple of different things conflated here.
"Take a look at the price difference for an iPhone 3 vs an iPhone 5 for example. The base price of a new iPhone doesn't really change (if anything, it goes up), but it's a very quickly depreciating asset."
The value (in terms of utility, and other ways too) of an iPhone 5 is also higher than that of an iPhone 3. If you are arguing that prices have been going up in terms of the same value, you would be wrong. The quantity and quality of the computing is still going up dramatically versus your dollar.
"The base price of a new iPhone doesn't really change (if anything, it goes up), but it's a very quickly depreciating asset."
Depreciation doesn't matter in the slightest. Used wheat isn't worth much, but if tomorrow's load of wheat costs less than today's load of the same size, it's still deflation.
"I don't think computer industry fits, at all, the definition of deflationary."
"Deflationary" means the value of your dollar increases, rather than decreases. This is definitely true of the market for computer-related goods.
The reason WHY doesn't matter. If your dollar increases in value versus a given commodity, that is deflation. At least in regard to that particular commodity. And yes, that is the definition.
"Yahoo data release? I don't know anything about that."
Back in around 2005-2006, give or take, Yahoo released a large batch of "anonymized" data to the public, as a "public service" and to demonstrate how "benign" that data was.
Boy, were they wrong. It really backfired. In a very short time, people started pulling "innocent" data out of the file and matching it up with names, and inside a day or two there were newspaper articles about how hundreds of identities were very easily pulled out of the data in a very short time, and much more could be had if someone wanted to spend real time on it.
Much like what you report about the Netflix situation, except these weren't even "security researchers", they were just plain old journalists who were curious.
"Have you ever been to Canada? Americophiles are surprisingly common there, and "moving to America" is a goal of quite a few young Canadians with ambitions that go beyond free healthcare."
Ahem. I happen to know that a lot of Canadians come to the U.S. for healthcare they can't get at home.
Usually because it takes too long to get in Canada. Being put on a waiting list for a year for major surgery is often unacceptable for someone who is suffering from a malady that requires major surgery. Even if it's "free".
No, I am not exaggerating. True, it's not always that bad. But in some cases it is.
This is premature BS. This info is based on the first tests, which were not conclusive. That's why your "source" says they are "waiting for further tests results"!!!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: so far not a single large "cloud" provider has been anywhere near as reliable as either my (relatively small) hosting provider, or my own servers.
When they can offer uptime comparable to what I already have, I might consider using them for important things. Not until.
"Yes, but he's quite right that this means that BitCoin is not money now. Partly that's because of all this speculation..."
Disagree 100%. Speculation in currencies has sometimes caused them to fluctuate wildly in a single day, making Bitcoin's volatility seem like molasses in comparison. That didn't, and doesn't, make those currencies "not money".
"... and partly it's because there is a limited community that will actually accept is for goods and services."
THAT can make it "not money". No matter what its intrinsic worth may be, a currency has to be accepted by people as money or it's dead in the water.
"Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production."
You almost have it right, but not quite.
Bitcoin is designed to become more difficult to mine when more are created. But it is a slow process; there is still a very long way to go.
The design of Bitcoin doesn't prevent resources from being used to mine them. Bitcoins can be mined as fast as anyone who has the resources cares to mine them... for a short period. But eventually the increased difficulty will catch up with them. But the key word here is "eventually".
"I view the wild fluctuations of bitcoin a function of it being new and people not knowing quite what to make of it yet"
This is what I've been saying. You hit the nail on the head.
If you could make and distribute 100-lot of rolls of toilet paper for $30, and they were selling on the market for $250, wouldn't everybody jump into toilet paper manufacturing? Of course they would, because the market value is way higher than cost, or any intrinsic value.
Similarly, with Bitcoin still around $30 or so amortized cost to mine, why were they selling for $250??? They were obviously grossly overvalued and the market had to come down. And it will probably continue to come down until their market value is a lot closer to the cost to produce. That's what free, unregulated markets do.
Of course, if the government were to step in and try to "regulate" it, all bets are off. It would probably die on the vine, but even if not, chances are the market would get distorted.
When I say it is debatable, take a look at this. (I have shown this graph many times now on/., and it has been borrowed by others. It is derived from numbers out of "How Much Is That In Real Money" by John McCusker, a work that is considered to be the definitive historical work on dollar value. More recent years are government's own figures.)
Pay particular attention to the changes in inflation at 1913 (creation of the Fed), 1934 (F.D.R.) and 1971 (Nixon).
After being stable for nearly 200 years, at EACH of those points, considtent devaluation of the dollar (inflation) was changed for the worse.
A little background: you can see little inflationary bubbles that happened when the government borrowed money for wartime. But in EVERY case prior to 1913, dollar value came right back up afterward to its original level. The effect can also be seen for WWII, but it stops rebounding at the increased slope that started in 1934. In later years, any "wartime" bubble is simply lost in what historically should be considered rampant hyperinflation. (Even the government-claimed 2% annual rate -- which is complete fiction, by the way, it's provably much higher -- is disastrous to the economy in the long term.)
No, inflation is not "necessary" for a healthy economy. And yes, Nixon did a LOT of harm.
"Also it wasn't Nixon who stopped US citizens from exchanging gold to US dollars but again was the F.D.R. administration. To add further insult to injury the F.D.R. administration nationalized the gold holdings of the US and only allowed the private ownership of gold for industrial, jewelry, art, coins that had special collector status (not ones that would have them in the future), and foreign legal tender. "
This is a bit disingenuous. As you say, F.D.R. nationalized gold, in the sense that the Reserve banks had to turn their gold over to the treasury. However, he did not prohibit private ownership or sale of gold; only gold that was used as money.
It was indeed Nixon who halted just about all citizen gold trade. With pretty disastrous results.
By the way, just as an aside: by tossing out Bretton Woods, Nixon also effectively defaulted on U.S. debt. Quite intentionally. The people who said the "fiscal cliff" or not raising the debt limit would be the first time the U.S. defaulted on its debt are WAY off, by more than once.
YOU might not consider government defaulting on debt to be a bad thing. But other countries most definitely did.
"There are plenty of things to beat up Nixon on but this really isn't one of them."
Even if we accept that as true, deflation is not the bugaboo that Washington and Wall Street would have us believe.
Consider the computer industry. It is highly deflationary. Bang for the buck is going up all the time. Prices come down all the time.
Is there anything "unhealthy" about that? The market pretty much says no.
Washington and Wall Street want you to thing inflation is good, because they benefit from it. You don't.
(Note: I really don't want to spend the time getting into a discussion about why they benefit. If you want to argue that point, please argue with someone else.)
"Only because Gold was defined in terms of U.S. Dollars. Specifically, the major nations of the world got together and said "1 ounce of pure gold is $21 U.S. Dollars"."
NO, it wasn't. A lot of people haven't seemed to get this point but it's extremely important.
The DOLLAR was defined in terms of GOLD, not the other way around. To put it another way: gold was the standard, not the dollar.
At first glance that seems like splitting hairs, but it's not. They are to VERY different things.
"Money still fluctuates in value when you're on the gold standard. It just fluctuates in lockstep with the fluctuations in the value of gold. This means that it's unlikely to steadily decrease in value, but it doesn't mean it stops fluctuating."
Thank you. I was trying to explain this to some people the other day and it was like talking to a wall. It is obvious that many people don't understand the difference between price and value.
I would add that on the gold standard, it also fluctuated less, and much more slowly.
"The value of one U.S. dollar is exactaly one U.S. dollar. The value doesn't change, how much you can buy with it however, does change."
This kind of nonsense is exactly why so many people don't understand the economy.
There are three different issues to consider: value, price, and cost.
The value of a dollar is not one dollar, because a dollar has not had any intrinsic value since Nixon removed it in 1971. You can't compare a value to nothing. The value of a dollar is what you can buy for that dollar.
The price of a dollar is whatever it brings in the money market. But you have to compare it to other currencies to find out what that price is, simply because that's the only definition of price we have anymore.
The cost of a dollar is what it took to print it.
And all of that is without even going into the details of marginal prices, marginal values, marginal costs.
It's basically one group wants to stick a rebar up your ass, Obama says "no, a silicone dildo with lube will do", EFF says "don't stick anything up our asses."
Not really. One group wants to use the rebar. Obama says "we'll disguise it as a dildo".
We know ever since the Yahoo data release years ago that there is no such thing as "anonymized" data. Removing "personally identifiable information" doesn't work.
So even if Obama's proposed changes were adopted, it's still rebar.
"Why do you think they write software here? Do you disagree that programmers are cheaper elsewhere?"
They write software here because there are better programmers here. It is that simple.
I've had this conversation many times on Slashdot. Over the last year and a half or so, I have seen a pretty drastic pull back in offshoring of software. On the international job boards I have seen more and more ads for "North America and Western Europe ONLY".
The reason is that the "cheap offshoring" has turned out to be not so cheap. The most common complaints have been very poor quality and late- or non-delivery.
" H1B is encouraging out-sourcing, not stopping it."
Not only that, but studies have shown that the companies' excuse that H1-B workers are "the best and brightest" is nothing but hogwash. On average, they do not perform up to the level of the average Americans in the same positions.
"Just yesterday the owner gave me an agreement (NDA) he wanted me to sign, which transferred any and all IP I come with to the company along with a commitment from me I will not work for any of his customers or competitors for 24 months after termination."
I don't have a big problem with NDA, except I would want a provision to keep something for my professional portfolio.
By the way: if it transfers all "IP" (I hate that term because it's grossly inaccurate) it's far more than just an NDA. A plain NDA is just "non disclosure", it has nothing to do with actual ownership.
The document you were asked to sign was actually a combination of 3 agreements: a NDA, an agreement about copyright or patent, and a non-compete agreement. Generally, these will be separate agreements on separate pieces of paper. I've never heard of them all combined before. Because really, they have little to do with each other, except for an extremely broad concept.
Anyway, as I say I might sign an NDA. I will not sign an agreement to turn over any copy or patent rights, EXCEPT those that I come up with in my normal course of work, during work hours, for which I was paid. I have a relative who got royally screwed over that kind of agreement. And I would not sign a non-compete agreement. That throws away my ability to get another decent job... or at least my ability to use anything I learned.
Also, in some states non-compete agreements won't fly. In California, for example, they are completely illegal.
"It cost you more to watch it on Netflix than it would to just pirate it. You pay for Netflix by the month, but piracy is free."
So? This discussion was about Netflix and the people who use it.
If you already have Netflix, watching a movie 2 or 3 or 20 times does not cost you any more than watching it once.
"We're talking about people that will pay for Netflix for a month, rip ("download") some movies, and then NOT pay for Netflix for the next few months."
Did you actually read what I wrote? I don't believe that would happen. Granted, it's just my opinion, but it's based on knowing people who have Netflix as well as people who download.
"Then, when they want to rip a DIFFERENT movie, they will pay for Netflix for the month again."
I did read that argument and I understand it perfectly well, thank you very much. I just think it's bullshit.
"XML would be "just fine" if you could close tags with "". That's really the biggest problem. Long element names are sadly common, and that usage sometimes makes XML more noise than signal, for both human and machine reading."
There. Fixed that for you.
XML that is more noise than signal is poorly designed (usually poorly thought out) XML.
Having said that, I agree that an abbreviated closing tag would probably be a very good thing, at least in many cases. If it were up to me I would definitely include it as an option.
"XML somehow became popular for serializing data, but it's just not a very good tool for that. JSON is far simpler and less verbose for object serialization, but I couldn't see using it for sparse document markup."
No. XML became popular for doing that because it was designed for that and it's good at it. It can easily represent nearly any data you can throw at it, and it has the advantage that it is relatively easy for people to read, too.
Granted, XML can be a bit verbose at times, but depending on your data that can be a good thing.
JSON is certainly more lightweight, and somewhat easier to parse programmatically. So I won't argue that it's not more efficient for small collections of data, if that is your preference. But it is utter shit to read and parse by eye. And it is JSON that "somehow" came to be in more widespread use. It was not originally intended to be a standard means of data interchange.
Slashdot Mirror
"Take a look at the price difference for an iPhone 3 vs an iPhone 5 for example. The base price of a new iPhone doesn't really change (if anything, it goes up), but it's a very quickly depreciating asset."
The value (in terms of utility, and other ways too) of an iPhone 5 is also higher than that of an iPhone 3. If you are arguing that prices have been going up in terms of the same value, you would be wrong. The quantity and quality of the computing is still going up dramatically versus your dollar.
"The base price of a new iPhone doesn't really change (if anything, it goes up), but it's a very quickly depreciating asset."
Depreciation doesn't matter in the slightest. Used wheat isn't worth much, but if tomorrow's load of wheat costs less than today's load of the same size, it's still deflation.
"I don't think computer industry fits, at all, the definition of deflationary."
"Deflationary" means the value of your dollar increases, rather than decreases. This is definitely true of the market for computer-related goods.
The reason WHY doesn't matter. If your dollar increases in value versus a given commodity, that is deflation. At least in regard to that particular commodity. And yes, that is the definition.
"The physical currency used is largely irrelevant to the money supply."
This is completely irrelevant to what was being discussed, which was a monetary standard.
What you say may be true today, but it isn't true for a currency that has a hard standard.
"Yahoo data release? I don't know anything about that."
Back in around 2005-2006, give or take, Yahoo released a large batch of "anonymized" data to the public, as a "public service" and to demonstrate how "benign" that data was.
Boy, were they wrong. It really backfired. In a very short time, people started pulling "innocent" data out of the file and matching it up with names, and inside a day or two there were newspaper articles about how hundreds of identities were very easily pulled out of the data in a very short time, and much more could be had if someone wanted to spend real time on it.
Much like what you report about the Netflix situation, except these weren't even "security researchers", they were just plain old journalists who were curious.
"Have you ever been to Canada? Americophiles are surprisingly common there, and "moving to America" is a goal of quite a few young Canadians with ambitions that go beyond free healthcare."
Ahem. I happen to know that a lot of Canadians come to the U.S. for healthcare they can't get at home.
Usually because it takes too long to get in Canada. Being put on a waiting list for a year for major surgery is often unacceptable for someone who is suffering from a malady that requires major surgery. Even if it's "free".
No, I am not exaggerating. True, it's not always that bad. But in some cases it is.
"Source."
This is premature BS. This info is based on the first tests, which were not conclusive. That's why your "source" says they are "waiting for further tests results"!!!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: so far not a single large "cloud" provider has been anywhere near as reliable as either my (relatively small) hosting provider, or my own servers.
When they can offer uptime comparable to what I already have, I might consider using them for important things. Not until.
"Yes, but he's quite right that this means that BitCoin is not money now. Partly that's because of all this speculation..."
Disagree 100%. Speculation in currencies has sometimes caused them to fluctuate wildly in a single day, making Bitcoin's volatility seem like molasses in comparison. That didn't, and doesn't, make those currencies "not money".
"... and partly it's because there is a limited community that will actually accept is for goods and services."
THAT can make it "not money". No matter what its intrinsic worth may be, a currency has to be accepted by people as money or it's dead in the water.
"Gold is a little better self-regulating than bitcoin, in that (while there is considerable lag, obviously) an increase in demand for gold that drives up its price can increase the resources devoted to extracting gold, increasing quantity supplied and exerting some stabilizing force on the price. Bitcoin has a built in protocol specifically designed (even during the phase where bitcoins are still being produced) to prevent more total resources devoted to mining from resulting in a faster overall rate of bitcoin production."
You almost have it right, but not quite.
Bitcoin is designed to become more difficult to mine when more are created. But it is a slow process; there is still a very long way to go.
The design of Bitcoin doesn't prevent resources from being used to mine them. Bitcoins can be mined as fast as anyone who has the resources cares to mine them... for a short period. But eventually the increased difficulty will catch up with them. But the key word here is "eventually".
It is not exactly the same as you describe.
"I view the wild fluctuations of bitcoin a function of it being new and people not knowing quite what to make of it yet"
This is what I've been saying. You hit the nail on the head.
If you could make and distribute 100-lot of rolls of toilet paper for $30, and they were selling on the market for $250, wouldn't everybody jump into toilet paper manufacturing? Of course they would, because the market value is way higher than cost, or any intrinsic value.
Similarly, with Bitcoin still around $30 or so amortized cost to mine, why were they selling for $250??? They were obviously grossly overvalued and the market had to come down. And it will probably continue to come down until their market value is a lot closer to the cost to produce. That's what free, unregulated markets do.
Of course, if the government were to step in and try to "regulate" it, all bets are off. It would probably die on the vine, but even if not, chances are the market would get distorted.
Correction: I meant the WWI "inflationary bubble" only rebounded back to the increased slope of the inflation after 1913. Not WWII and 1934.
When I say it is debatable, take a look at this. (I have shown this graph many times now on /., and it has been borrowed by others. It is derived from numbers out of "How Much Is That In Real Money" by John McCusker, a work that is considered to be the definitive historical work on dollar value. More recent years are government's own figures.)
This graph.
Pay particular attention to the changes in inflation at 1913 (creation of the Fed), 1934 (F.D.R.) and 1971 (Nixon).
After being stable for nearly 200 years, at EACH of those points, considtent devaluation of the dollar (inflation) was changed for the worse.
A little background: you can see little inflationary bubbles that happened when the government borrowed money for wartime. But in EVERY case prior to 1913, dollar value came right back up afterward to its original level. The effect can also be seen for WWII, but it stops rebounding at the increased slope that started in 1934. In later years, any "wartime" bubble is simply lost in what historically should be considered rampant hyperinflation. (Even the government-claimed 2% annual rate -- which is complete fiction, by the way, it's provably much higher -- is disastrous to the economy in the long term.)
No, inflation is not "necessary" for a healthy economy. And yes, Nixon did a LOT of harm.
"Also it wasn't Nixon who stopped US citizens from exchanging gold to US dollars but again was the F.D.R. administration. To add further insult to injury the F.D.R. administration nationalized the gold holdings of the US and only allowed the private ownership of gold for industrial, jewelry, art, coins that had special collector status (not ones that would have them in the future), and foreign legal tender. "
This is a bit disingenuous. As you say, F.D.R. nationalized gold, in the sense that the Reserve banks had to turn their gold over to the treasury. However, he did not prohibit private ownership or sale of gold; only gold that was used as money.
It was indeed Nixon who halted just about all citizen gold trade. With pretty disastrous results.
By the way, just as an aside: by tossing out Bretton Woods, Nixon also effectively defaulted on U.S. debt. Quite intentionally. The people who said the "fiscal cliff" or not raising the debt limit would be the first time the U.S. defaulted on its debt are WAY off, by more than once.
YOU might not consider government defaulting on debt to be a bad thing. But other countries most definitely did.
"There are plenty of things to beat up Nixon on but this really isn't one of them."
That is VERY debatable.
"gold be definition is deflationary"
Even if we accept that as true, deflation is not the bugaboo that Washington and Wall Street would have us believe.
Consider the computer industry. It is highly deflationary. Bang for the buck is going up all the time. Prices come down all the time.
Is there anything "unhealthy" about that? The market pretty much says no.
Washington and Wall Street want you to thing inflation is good, because they benefit from it. You don't.
(Note: I really don't want to spend the time getting into a discussion about why they benefit. If you want to argue that point, please argue with someone else.)
s/to/two
"Only because Gold was defined in terms of U.S. Dollars. Specifically, the major nations of the world got together and said "1 ounce of pure gold is $21 U.S. Dollars"."
NO, it wasn't. A lot of people haven't seemed to get this point but it's extremely important.
The DOLLAR was defined in terms of GOLD, not the other way around. To put it another way: gold was the standard, not the dollar.
At first glance that seems like splitting hairs, but it's not. They are to VERY different things.
"Money still fluctuates in value when you're on the gold standard. It just fluctuates in lockstep with the fluctuations in the value of gold. This means that it's unlikely to steadily decrease in value, but it doesn't mean it stops fluctuating."
Thank you. I was trying to explain this to some people the other day and it was like talking to a wall. It is obvious that many people don't understand the difference between price and value.
I would add that on the gold standard, it also fluctuated less, and much more slowly.
"The value of one U.S. dollar is exactaly one U.S. dollar. The value doesn't change, how much you can buy with it however, does change."
This kind of nonsense is exactly why so many people don't understand the economy.
There are three different issues to consider: value, price, and cost.
The value of a dollar is not one dollar, because a dollar has not had any intrinsic value since Nixon removed it in 1971. You can't compare a value to nothing. The value of a dollar is what you can buy for that dollar.
The price of a dollar is whatever it brings in the money market. But you have to compare it to other currencies to find out what that price is, simply because that's the only definition of price we have anymore.
The cost of a dollar is what it took to print it.
And all of that is without even going into the details of marginal prices, marginal values, marginal costs.
It's basically one group wants to stick a rebar up your ass, Obama says "no, a silicone dildo with lube will do", EFF says "don't stick anything up our asses."
Not really. One group wants to use the rebar. Obama says "we'll disguise it as a dildo".
We know ever since the Yahoo data release years ago that there is no such thing as "anonymized" data. Removing "personally identifiable information" doesn't work.
So even if Obama's proposed changes were adopted, it's still rebar.
"Why do you think they write software here? Do you disagree that programmers are cheaper elsewhere?"
They write software here because there are better programmers here. It is that simple.
I've had this conversation many times on Slashdot. Over the last year and a half or so, I have seen a pretty drastic pull back in offshoring of software. On the international job boards I have seen more and more ads for "North America and Western Europe ONLY".
The reason is that the "cheap offshoring" has turned out to be not so cheap. The most common complaints have been very poor quality and late- or non-delivery.
" H1B is encouraging out-sourcing, not stopping it."
Not only that, but studies have shown that the companies' excuse that H1-B workers are "the best and brightest" is nothing but hogwash. On average, they do not perform up to the level of the average Americans in the same positions.
"Just yesterday the owner gave me an agreement (NDA) he wanted me to sign, which transferred any and all IP I come with to the company along with a commitment from me I will not work for any of his customers or competitors for 24 months after termination."
I don't have a big problem with NDA, except I would want a provision to keep something for my professional portfolio.
By the way: if it transfers all "IP" (I hate that term because it's grossly inaccurate) it's far more than just an NDA. A plain NDA is just "non disclosure", it has nothing to do with actual ownership.
The document you were asked to sign was actually a combination of 3 agreements: a NDA, an agreement about copyright or patent, and a non-compete agreement. Generally, these will be separate agreements on separate pieces of paper. I've never heard of them all combined before. Because really, they have little to do with each other, except for an extremely broad concept.
Anyway, as I say I might sign an NDA. I will not sign an agreement to turn over any copy or patent rights, EXCEPT those that I come up with in my normal course of work, during work hours, for which I was paid. I have a relative who got royally screwed over that kind of agreement. And I would not sign a non-compete agreement. That throws away my ability to get another decent job... or at least my ability to use anything I learned.
Also, in some states non-compete agreements won't fly. In California, for example, they are completely illegal.
"It cost you more to watch it on Netflix than it would to just pirate it. You pay for Netflix by the month, but piracy is free."
So? This discussion was about Netflix and the people who use it.
If you already have Netflix, watching a movie 2 or 3 or 20 times does not cost you any more than watching it once.
"We're talking about people that will pay for Netflix for a month, rip ("download") some movies, and then NOT pay for Netflix for the next few months."
Did you actually read what I wrote? I don't believe that would happen. Granted, it's just my opinion, but it's based on knowing people who have Netflix as well as people who download.
"Then, when they want to rip a DIFFERENT movie, they will pay for Netflix for the month again."
I did read that argument and I understand it perfectly well, thank you very much. I just think it's bullshit.
"XML would be "just fine" if you could close tags with "". That's really the biggest problem. Long element names are sadly common, and that usage sometimes makes XML more noise than signal, for both human and machine reading."
There. Fixed that for you.
XML that is more noise than signal is poorly designed (usually poorly thought out) XML.
Having said that, I agree that an abbreviated closing tag would probably be a very good thing, at least in many cases. If it were up to me I would definitely include it as an option.
"XML somehow became popular for serializing data, but it's just not a very good tool for that. JSON is far simpler and less verbose for object serialization, but I couldn't see using it for sparse document markup."
No. XML became popular for doing that because it was designed for that and it's good at it. It can easily represent nearly any data you can throw at it, and it has the advantage that it is relatively easy for people to read, too.
Granted, XML can be a bit verbose at times, but depending on your data that can be a good thing.
JSON is certainly more lightweight, and somewhat easier to parse programmatically. So I won't argue that it's not more efficient for small collections of data, if that is your preference. But it is utter shit to read and parse by eye. And it is JSON that "somehow" came to be in more widespread use. It was not originally intended to be a standard means of data interchange.