Yes, python's syntax is too functional. It starts when you can't get out of the interpreter without typing parentheses at the end of "exit". And regex in Python is a pain because of the function-argument syntax. Ruby's is much easier to use because you don't have to escape a regex to fit it into a string, and you can use the infix operator =~.
And Jefferson talked about state's rights and free speech and limiting the power of the central government, but he bought Louisiana on his own authority and started prosecuting journalists:
Callendar's numerous exposes caused one of the most avid supporters of the First Amendment to secretly metamorphose into a prosecutor of the freedom of the press. Jefferson, the foremost advocate of man's right to freedom of speech and press, gradually transformed into its private enemy, urging state officials to accuse members of the press of sedition by the end of his second term.
Why does knowledge have to change the value of the dollar? If the number of assets increases or decreases, why does that have to affect the value of the dollar? What physical necessity ties them together?
My position is that there is no physical connection. It's purely psychological. We don't think of dollars as tied to the number of assets. Even if some of us do, that's a choice, not physical necessity. It's psychology, and can change.
Why not include a heuristic processor in the AI, that would override the statistical training in certain cases?
So you could tell the program, in real time while its playing, something like "Watch out for bombs while moving left or right" and it would be able to ignore what its statistical training told it to do, in a context where the training told it to move right but that would send it into a bomb.
Say you write software, and you charge $100/hour. $100 is stolen from me, used to buy one hour of your time. I am given $100, created out of thin air. Why would you now charge me more than $100 for an hour of your time? If you did, why wouldn't someone else see an opportunity to undercut you and charge the same $100 that he charges now? So why would I pay more for your time than I could get from another who didn't raise his prices just because some money was created to reimburse me?
That's not even what the quantity theory of money says. Your theory is very naive and not supported by evidence.
When a bank creates a loan, it creates money out of thin air. There's no connection between money and assets.
When the stock market goes down, does that mean the value of my money goes up? Since assets just decreased? So prices at the grocery store should deflate?
You have $100 worth of goods. I have $100. Now someone steals my $100, and uses it to buy your goods, say. Then the bank creates $100 and gives it to me. You buy more of the same amount of goods you just sold for $100. But suddenly, because I have $100 that I didn't have before, you have to raise your prices? Why? Your cost didn't change. The only thing that changed was your knowledge that I had been given $100? And that alone makes you devalue your money, even though your costs didn't change? That's psychology, pure and simple. There's no necessity for you to devalue the money. It's a choice, one that you shouldn't make.
Why would that be? If you suddenly realize that I have more money, do you have to raise your prices even if your production costs haven't increased, just because... you can? So inflation is purely psychological? What if your psychology changed so that you didn't measure your worth relative to me, but simply by what made you happy, independent of me?
The monetary system is designed to function like one bank. With one bank, deposits are just transferred around. There's no drain on reserves since the deposits are the reserves. So when something is stolen, the bank doesn't pay for it. It can simply create more deposits and transfer them to the victims. These are simply accounting entries. The bank likes to make you think someone has to pay for it, but that's just so they can whine about how much they're suffering when they're really not, the only cost is the electricity involved in deleting one computer entry and adding another.
America's never symbolized what you're thinking it has. Thomas Jefferson was denounced as being a Jacobin, wanting to take away everyone's property to give it to the poor. And yet he wrote the Declaration of Independence! America has always had an active, radical left.
The private banking system evolved of its own accord towards a centralized system where clearinghouses played a role similar to the Fed today. There was a need for a central bank that could provide elasticity in times of crises, and it was convenient for all the banks to settle payments once a day at a clearinghouse, instead of many times with each bank someone had written a check on or cashed a check at. A centralized system made sense.
The problem with the centralized system was that it didn't provide enough elasticity because it was still controlled by a private profit-motivated person, such as J P Morgan for example. Morgan stepped up to help the country in the Panic of 1907, expanding the money supply on his own by issuing clearinghouse certificates. But leaving such control in the hands of a private citizen was recognized by all concerned as a bad idea, because Morgan could choose only to help those he liked for example. That was the motivation for the Fed, to create a more equitable central bank which wouldn't play favorites as a private individual could. Also the Fed is not profit-motivated; it operates in the public interest. It is required to return all interest on Treasury bonds to the Treasury, for example.
The problem with not having an interest rate target is that, in times of crisis, the banks will raise interest rates and contract credit. And people, who had no part in the making of the crisis, will suffer. The government is mandated by the Constitution to "provide for the General Welfare". I think direct payments to individuals (fiscal policy) is a better way, but the Fed is trying to do what it can. It is a learning process; in the 1929 crash it didn't act fast enough to provide elasticity, for example.
Once again, I would provide a basic income guarantee for all, and then let institutions fail. I would backstop individuals rather than institutions. Until we get there though, the Fed is doing what it can. It's better than letting the private banks alone control the money supply and interest rates. We tried that and it led to so many panics and so much inconvenience that the private system on its own evolved a centralized bank system.
Re:For a dying language Ruby is doing great
on
Ruby 2.1.0 Released
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"In this light, when the central bank sets interest rates, it is actually paying the markets to see interest rates as being in a certain range. This primes the pump for putting money in any available high leverage investments since suddenly there's no low risk investments with good interest payments out there. And once money starts flowing into such a bubble, it develops an attractive short term trend which brings in more money."
Your story doesn't take into account that the Fed doesn't set interest rates (except the Discount Rate which is set a fixed amount above the natural private rate). It can try to target rates, but the rates are ultimately negotiated by the private institutions themselves.
Also, looking carefully at the Fed Funds rate graph, it's clear that the Fed started raising interest rates in 2004, long before the crash in 2008. Your claim that the rates were lower for years than in the 1960s isn't really accurate; the Fed kept the lowest rate in the 2000s for about a year only, not "years". And then the rate of increase was steeper than in the 1960s. But there were very different consequences, supporting my claim that the Fed didn't cause the asset "bubble". It was market psychology, not interest rates, that was the primary cause.
"My view is that it is better to just let the recession happen rather than go through all this effort to short circuit it and return to economic growth conditions. Recessions reduce the extent of bubbles (in large part by rewarding parties who didn't participate) and they cull poorly run businesses. If the recession is bad enough that it's going to destroy an entire industry, then limited intervention might be warranted just so a few survivors can pull through. This manipulating of the perception of future risk is IMHO a large part of the reason we currently have these large boom-bust cycles in developed world economies."
I agree, as long as there's a robust safety net. Let the market play, but don't force all of us to play in its game. Provide individuals with the choice of a Basic Income guarantee, so we can pursue our own ideas of how to advance knowledge and technology without taking part in the perverse incentives and moral hazards that capitalism promotes. Encourage individuals to maximize their native-born instinct for wonder and creativity with challenges. When an individual comes up with a great disruptive idea, it can then be turned over to biz to do what it does best: incrementally innovate.
I think the point is that before an unobstructed open-mouthed sound at the beginning of a word, you make a phonetic liason with the vowel sound of a preceding indefinite article. H is obstructive enough not to make the liason. Y is as well, "a unique".
Regarding OPEC: there was no supply and demand problem with oil. In economic terms, the price should not have risen because there was no production capacity problem. The reason prices rose were purely a matter of politics, of psychology, of policy. Not physical necessity. The proof is that prices later dropped to $10/barrel. So there was no production capacity problem. There was only a psychological problem.
Regarding UBS's liquidity risk: according to Prof. Mehrling's story, UBS was getting funding from money-market funds, which are purely private organizations with private investors. The Fed had nothing to do with it (also this was in Europe so it would be the Eurodollar market, which the Fed has no control over). It was not easy money made possible by the Fed that fueled the "bubble", it was easy money created by the private sector. The Fed's interest rates, in non-crisis times such as for several years before 2008, are set higher than the private rates. That's why the Fed is a lender of last resort, because the banks go to each other first for better rates; only if they can't get anything do they resort to the Fed's discount window, which is dangerous because it can give them a bad reputation if they go to it too often.
So the Fed was not providing easy money that fueled the "bubble". The private sector was providing the easy money, creating it out of thin air.
UBS's problem was that they believed they had a risk-free asset, and booked years and years of future profits immediately (and paid huge bonuses on those expected, risk-free profits). Since they believed the CDOs were riskfree, they didn't hedge fully by taking out enough insurance (CDSes). When market emotion and groupthink started to take hold and the riskfree CDO AAA "supersenior" tranches lost market trust (even though defaults were not reducing their value), the trade value of the "riskfree" asset suddenly dropped and no one wanted them. The money-market funds (private entitites) would no longer accept them as collateral. None of this had anything to do with the Fed. This was purely private sector activity. UBS was using CDOs as a replacement for T-bills in fact, maintaining they were as safe with better yields. The banks were creating money without any need for the Fed or govt bonds.
After the crisis almost took down AIG, the Fed stepped in and backstopped the losses. It wasn't the Fed's easy money that caused the crisis; it was the Fed's response of increasing elasticity during the crisis that prevented it from getting worse.
"At some point, someone finds a leak in the dike and can apply low interest rate credit in some way to investment in a highly leveraged sector (that is, most of the investment is via borrowed money, and it can be quite extreme such as the 50 to 1 leverage I mentioned earlier). "
The point is that the "leak" was not a leak to Fed money. It was privately created money. The Fed's monetary policies had nothing to do with it. The regulators didn't even know what was going on, the Fed wasn't keeping track of the shadow banks' activities. The shadow banks were getting their funding from private money-market funds and creating money based on that, not based on Fed money. As I said, the CDOs and MBSes were sold as being better than T-bills because they were riskfree and had high yields. The shadow banks didn't need Fed money. Until market groupthink soured on them and the crisis was well underway.
OPEC psychology created the oil shocks. There was no production capacity problem. There was a psychological issue.
Regarding UBS, here's a quote from the Economics of Money and Banking class, Lecture 20 Notes:
UBS was doing something it called a Negative Basis Trade in which it paid AIG 11 bp for 100% credit protection on a supersenior CDO tranche, and financed its holding of that tranche in the wholesale money market. In its report to shareholders, to explain why it lost so much of their money, it states that this trade netted an apparently riskfree arbitrage profit of 20 bp. Because it was apparently riskfree, they did massive amounts of it. The risk turned out to be liquidity risk, when money market funding dried up and they could not sell their AAA tranche. Their CDS hedge did them no good since they could not use it to raise funding. (To make matters worse, the CDS hedge was typically only against the first 2% loss, leaving UBS exposed for everything more than that.)
So it wasn't a margin call. The money-market funds just stopped rolling over the loans. UBS was left holding CDOs that they couldn't sell, and that they hadn't insured enough. So they wrote down those assets, even though they were AAA and hadn't experienced enough defaults to make them drop in value; but the negative psychology of the market took over and no one would buy the CDOs anymore, because there was a perception they weren't worth anything. Cahan describes the mood that took over Wall Street in the book "House of Cards". Clearly, it was an emotional, psychological phenomenon. It had very little to do with actual defaults since they weren't enough to affect the AAA-rated top-tranche CDOs that UBS was holding.
As for interest rates being held low for a year, are you then predicting an imminent crash, since interest rates have been low for a number of years? When will this crash occur, are you able to commit to a time period, since your "theory" is so fully supported?
Count the technology that has increased since 1971. Remember when TVs didn't have remote controls? Before there were computers? What about civil rights, Joe McCarthy? The Depression lasted much longer than the most recent crash, because the Fed acted quicker and created more elasticity. The greatest economic expansions have occurred since 1971. Have you heard of Hoovervilles?
Anyway the point is that the solution is to create more money. The government can and should spend more to guarantee a basic standard of living, and encourage innovation through challenges which the private sector can also hold (Google bug bounties for example). Innovation should be the real focus. As long as we keep advancing the pace of knowledge advancement, we can create as much money as we want.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, security through obscurity is the best way.
Yes, python's syntax is too functional. It starts when you can't get out of the interpreter without typing parentheses at the end of "exit". And regex in Python is a pain because of the function-argument syntax. Ruby's is much easier to use because you don't have to escape a regex to fit it into a string, and you can use the infix operator =~.
And Jefferson talked about state's rights and free speech and limiting the power of the central government, but he bought Louisiana on his own authority and started prosecuting journalists:
http://www.monticello.org/library/pdfs/Elon2005Keough.pdf
Why does knowledge have to change the value of the dollar? If the number of assets increases or decreases, why does that have to affect the value of the dollar? What physical necessity ties them together?
My position is that there is no physical connection. It's purely psychological. We don't think of dollars as tied to the number of assets. Even if some of us do, that's a choice, not physical necessity. It's psychology, and can change.
Why not include a heuristic processor in the AI, that would override the statistical training in certain cases?
So you could tell the program, in real time while its playing, something like "Watch out for bombs while moving left or right" and it would be able to ignore what its statistical training told it to do, in a context where the training told it to move right but that would send it into a bomb.
You would be able to tell a real AI its mistake, and it would be able to figure out how to correct it. 3D print its own smell sensors...
Say you write software, and you charge $100/hour. $100 is stolen from me, used to buy one hour of your time. I am given $100, created out of thin air. Why would you now charge me more than $100 for an hour of your time? If you did, why wouldn't someone else see an opportunity to undercut you and charge the same $100 that he charges now? So why would I pay more for your time than I could get from another who didn't raise his prices just because some money was created to reimburse me?
Shouldn't competition nullify that?
That's not even what the quantity theory of money says. Your theory is very naive and not supported by evidence.
When a bank creates a loan, it creates money out of thin air. There's no connection between money and assets.
When the stock market goes down, does that mean the value of my money goes up? Since assets just decreased? So prices at the grocery store should deflate?
You have $100 worth of goods. I have $100. Now someone steals my $100, and uses it to buy your goods, say. Then the bank creates $100 and gives it to me. You buy more of the same amount of goods you just sold for $100. But suddenly, because I have $100 that I didn't have before, you have to raise your prices? Why? Your cost didn't change. The only thing that changed was your knowledge that I had been given $100? And that alone makes you devalue your money, even though your costs didn't change? That's psychology, pure and simple. There's no necessity for you to devalue the money. It's a choice, one that you shouldn't make.
Why would that be? If you suddenly realize that I have more money, do you have to raise your prices even if your production costs haven't increased, just because ... you can? So inflation is purely psychological? What if your psychology changed so that you didn't measure your worth relative to me, but simply by what made you happy, independent of me?
The monetary system is designed to function like one bank. With one bank, deposits are just transferred around. There's no drain on reserves since the deposits are the reserves. So when something is stolen, the bank doesn't pay for it. It can simply create more deposits and transfer them to the victims. These are simply accounting entries. The bank likes to make you think someone has to pay for it, but that's just so they can whine about how much they're suffering when they're really not, the only cost is the electricity involved in deleting one computer entry and adding another.
America's never symbolized what you're thinking it has. Thomas Jefferson was denounced as being a Jacobin, wanting to take away everyone's property to give it to the poor. And yet he wrote the Declaration of Independence! America has always had an active, radical left.
Why not fund research into energy storage technologies so when the grid is overloaded, the energy can be saved and used later?
The private banking system evolved of its own accord towards a centralized system where clearinghouses played a role similar to the Fed today. There was a need for a central bank that could provide elasticity in times of crises, and it was convenient for all the banks to settle payments once a day at a clearinghouse, instead of many times with each bank someone had written a check on or cashed a check at. A centralized system made sense.
The problem with the centralized system was that it didn't provide enough elasticity because it was still controlled by a private profit-motivated person, such as J P Morgan for example. Morgan stepped up to help the country in the Panic of 1907, expanding the money supply on his own by issuing clearinghouse certificates. But leaving such control in the hands of a private citizen was recognized by all concerned as a bad idea, because Morgan could choose only to help those he liked for example. That was the motivation for the Fed, to create a more equitable central bank which wouldn't play favorites as a private individual could. Also the Fed is not profit-motivated; it operates in the public interest. It is required to return all interest on Treasury bonds to the Treasury, for example.
The problem with not having an interest rate target is that, in times of crisis, the banks will raise interest rates and contract credit. And people, who had no part in the making of the crisis, will suffer. The government is mandated by the Constitution to "provide for the General Welfare". I think direct payments to individuals (fiscal policy) is a better way, but the Fed is trying to do what it can. It is a learning process; in the 1929 crash it didn't act fast enough to provide elasticity, for example.
Once again, I would provide a basic income guarantee for all, and then let institutions fail. I would backstop individuals rather than institutions. Until we get there though, the Fed is doing what it can. It's better than letting the private banks alone control the money supply and interest rates. We tried that and it led to so many panics and so much inconvenience that the private system on its own evolved a centralized bank system.
Isn't there something you can do?
"In this light, when the central bank sets interest rates, it is actually paying the markets to see interest rates as being in a certain range. This primes the pump for putting money in any available high leverage investments since suddenly there's no low risk investments with good interest payments out there. And once money starts flowing into such a bubble, it develops an attractive short term trend which brings in more money."
Your story doesn't take into account that the Fed doesn't set interest rates (except the Discount Rate which is set a fixed amount above the natural private rate). It can try to target rates, but the rates are ultimately negotiated by the private institutions themselves.
Also, looking carefully at the Fed Funds rate graph, it's clear that the Fed started raising interest rates in 2004, long before the crash in 2008. Your claim that the rates were lower for years than in the 1960s isn't really accurate; the Fed kept the lowest rate in the 2000s for about a year only, not "years". And then the rate of increase was steeper than in the 1960s. But there were very different consequences, supporting my claim that the Fed didn't cause the asset "bubble". It was market psychology, not interest rates, that was the primary cause.
"My view is that it is better to just let the recession happen rather than go through all this effort to short circuit it and return to economic growth conditions. Recessions reduce the extent of bubbles (in large part by rewarding parties who didn't participate) and they cull poorly run businesses. If the recession is bad enough that it's going to destroy an entire industry, then limited intervention might be warranted just so a few survivors can pull through. This manipulating of the perception of future risk is IMHO a large part of the reason we currently have these large boom-bust cycles in developed world economies."
I agree, as long as there's a robust safety net. Let the market play, but don't force all of us to play in its game. Provide individuals with the choice of a Basic Income guarantee, so we can pursue our own ideas of how to advance knowledge and technology without taking part in the perverse incentives and moral hazards that capitalism promotes. Encourage individuals to maximize their native-born instinct for wonder and creativity with challenges. When an individual comes up with a great disruptive idea, it can then be turned over to biz to do what it does best: incrementally innovate.
I think the point is that before an unobstructed open-mouthed sound at the beginning of a word, you make a phonetic liason with the vowel sound of a preceding indefinite article. H is obstructive enough not to make the liason. Y is as well, "a unique".
Regarding OPEC: there was no supply and demand problem with oil. In economic terms, the price should not have risen because there was no production capacity problem. The reason prices rose were purely a matter of politics, of psychology, of policy. Not physical necessity. The proof is that prices later dropped to $10/barrel. So there was no production capacity problem. There was only a psychological problem.
Regarding UBS's liquidity risk: according to Prof. Mehrling's story, UBS was getting funding from money-market funds, which are purely private organizations with private investors. The Fed had nothing to do with it (also this was in Europe so it would be the Eurodollar market, which the Fed has no control over). It was not easy money made possible by the Fed that fueled the "bubble", it was easy money created by the private sector. The Fed's interest rates, in non-crisis times such as for several years before 2008, are set higher than the private rates. That's why the Fed is a lender of last resort, because the banks go to each other first for better rates; only if they can't get anything do they resort to the Fed's discount window, which is dangerous because it can give them a bad reputation if they go to it too often.
So the Fed was not providing easy money that fueled the "bubble". The private sector was providing the easy money, creating it out of thin air.
UBS's problem was that they believed they had a risk-free asset, and booked years and years of future profits immediately (and paid huge bonuses on those expected, risk-free profits). Since they believed the CDOs were riskfree, they didn't hedge fully by taking out enough insurance (CDSes). When market emotion and groupthink started to take hold and the riskfree CDO AAA "supersenior" tranches lost market trust (even though defaults were not reducing their value), the trade value of the "riskfree" asset suddenly dropped and no one wanted them. The money-market funds (private entitites) would no longer accept them as collateral. None of this had anything to do with the Fed. This was purely private sector activity. UBS was using CDOs as a replacement for T-bills in fact, maintaining they were as safe with better yields. The banks were creating money without any need for the Fed or govt bonds.
After the crisis almost took down AIG, the Fed stepped in and backstopped the losses. It wasn't the Fed's easy money that caused the crisis; it was the Fed's response of increasing elasticity during the crisis that prevented it from getting worse.
"At some point, someone finds a leak in the dike and can apply low interest rate credit in some way to investment in a highly leveraged sector (that is, most of the investment is via borrowed money, and it can be quite extreme such as the 50 to 1 leverage I mentioned earlier). "
The point is that the "leak" was not a leak to Fed money. It was privately created money. The Fed's monetary policies had nothing to do with it. The regulators didn't even know what was going on, the Fed wasn't keeping track of the shadow banks' activities. The shadow banks were getting their funding from private money-market funds and creating money based on that, not based on Fed money. As I said, the CDOs and MBSes were sold as being better than T-bills because they were riskfree and had high yields. The shadow banks didn't need Fed money. Until market groupthink soured on them and the crisis was well underway.
OPEC psychology created the oil shocks. There was no production capacity problem. There was a psychological issue.
Regarding UBS, here's a quote from the Economics of Money and Banking class, Lecture 20 Notes:
So it wasn't a margin call. The money-market funds just stopped rolling over the loans. UBS was left holding CDOs that they couldn't sell, and that they hadn't insured enough. So they wrote down those assets, even though they were AAA and hadn't experienced enough defaults to make them drop in value; but the negative psychology of the market took over and no one would buy the CDOs anymore, because there was a perception they weren't worth anything. Cahan describes the mood that took over Wall Street in the book "House of Cards". Clearly, it was an emotional, psychological phenomenon. It had very little to do with actual defaults since they weren't enough to affect the AAA-rated top-tranche CDOs that UBS was holding.
As for interest rates being held low for a year, are you then predicting an imminent crash, since interest rates have been low for a number of years? When will this crash occur, are you able to commit to a time period, since your "theory" is so fully supported?
Count the technology that has increased since 1971. Remember when TVs didn't have remote controls? Before there were computers? What about civil rights, Joe McCarthy? The Depression lasted much longer than the most recent crash, because the Fed acted quicker and created more elasticity. The greatest economic expansions have occurred since 1971. Have you heard of Hoovervilles?
Anyway the point is that the solution is to create more money. The government can and should spend more to guarantee a basic standard of living, and encourage innovation through challenges which the private sector can also hold (Google bug bounties for example). Innovation should be the real focus. As long as we keep advancing the pace of knowledge advancement, we can create as much money as we want.
Did he even plead guilty? The accounts I've looked at indicate he maintained he'd done nothing wrong.
I think it's the peers that are terrible at life.
So if we realize that expanding the money supply doesn't decrease its value, we can all have a Basic Income without funding it through taxes?
So if everyone decided oxygen had no value, we wouldn't need it anymore?
The lesson Quantitive Easing is that stimulus works. We should have more fiscal stimulus in the form of direct payments to individuals.