Also, lol. The part of the Constitution that you cited, that was amended, and that you didn't quote fully, contains the infamous "three-fifths" phrase, referring to slaves. The Constitution was written with the intent that such mistakes would be fixed through amendments.
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
Also, the amendments are part of the Constitution. The Constitution was designed to be amended.
Hence, the Constitution gives the government unlimited powers of taxation.
"Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance)."
Intelligence seems to be one of those acquired characteristics. Why wouldn't Lamarckism be a mechanism for the Flynn effect?
one way to see changes in norms over time is to conduct a study in which the same test-takers take both an old and new version of the same test. Doing so confirms IQ gains over time. Some IQ tests, for example tests used for military draftees in NATO countries in Europe, report raw scores, and those also confirm a trend of rising scores over time.
The Constitution, of course, gave Congress unlimited powers of taxation. So it's not "stealing", because it's an explicit Constitutional power. But there are other solutions: simply create money, or have the Fed expand its balance sheet to buy govt bonds. By law the Fed returns all interest on govt bonds to the Treasury, so the cost of borrowing is zero.
The Constitution is not capitalistic then, because it mandates the government to provide for the General Welfare. Money doesn't care about the suffering of people. It's perfectly willing to allow human sacrifice.
Quantum mechanics showed that certain events, such as atomic transitions and nuclear decays, happen spontaneously. Accidents happen (including accidental violations of the first law). Everything that occurs in the Universe is not pre-determined by natural law. In fact, our so-called laws just apply to ensembles of systems, only guaranteeing the statistical behaviour of the ensemble while leaving the behaviour of an individual system to the vagaries of chance.
I think you're assuming that all dealers have zero inventories and are not exposed to price risk. But real dealing gets messy because they're working within an outside spread, which gives them a lot of room to maneuver within. So when dealers suffer a liquidity crunch, for example, they push prices away from efficient levels. That's when the central bank can step in and provide a backstop, supporting the outside spread, and preventing gross price distortions. The point is that dealers are not always able to provide efficient prices. Depending on their positions they can often push prices away from fundamental value.
So for example when Libya was in turmoil, oil shot up to many times its fundamental value. Why? Groupthink, emotion, fear, etc. all played a role. Prices went way out of proportion to their efficient levels.
Suppose that fundamental value is the price that dealers would quote if their inventories were exactly zero, so they are not exposed to any price risk. The Treynor model then shows how market making by dealers pushes price away from fundamental value, on one side or another, by more or less depending on the size of the outside spread and the dealer’s maximum long and short position limits. Standard asset price theory abstracts from this effect, in effect treating the outside spread as collapsed around fundamental value, so there is no need for dealers. Some markets are close approximations to this, but others are not; some times are close approximations to this, but others are not.
A Social Credit system would be implemented through simple bookkeeping. The funding of the National Dividend would be drawn from a national credit account which would include all factors which give rise to production costs and create new capital assets.
No need to regulate dealers. Simply give everyone a choice whether they want to enter the market and do something like deal, or not. With a basic income, an individual can pursue his own ideas, taking risks in the lab, rather than in finance.
I have a completely different viewpoint: risks should be taken in the lab, not in finance. Quoting Lee Smolin: "As Dick Feynman once said to me, you have to be prepared to make every possible mistake and have every possible stupid idea before you can have the right idea." Finance wants to value the ideas in terms of money, payoff, etc. Finance (and economics) wants to throw out ideas without testing them. But the real goal. the way science progresses and knowledge advances, is to figure out a way to test all ideas in the lab.
Finance may help us to get to the point where we have developed the tools that allow us easily to test any idea. But I think it will take longer than if we abandoned the idea that money measures value, and worked directly on developing new technology instead of working on how to finance it.
It's an example of making a trade that's legal, but is dishonest. You said: " If the trading is legal, then it is honest." I provided a counterexample.
If you sell someone a lemon, and you know it's a lemon, and you misrepresent it as a great product, that's dishonest. It may be legal, but it's the kind of perverse incentive and moral hazard that capitalism rewards.
"So let's go to the real question. What is the primary purposes of currency? To be a convenient medium of exchange and a temporary store of value."
No, currency is a ticketing system. See C. H. Douglas, Social Credit:
According to economists, money is a medium of exchange. Douglas argued that this may have once been the case when the majority of wealth was produced by individuals who subsequently exchanged it with each other. But in modern economies, division of labour splits production into multiple processes, and wealth is produced by people working in association with each other. For instance, an automobile worker does not produce any wealth (i.e., the automobile) by himself, but only in conjunction with other auto workers, the producers of roads, gasoline, insurance, etc. In this view, wealth is a pool upon which people can draw, and money becomes a ticketing system. The efficiency gained by individuals cooperating in the productive process was coined by Douglas as the “unearned increment of association” – historic accumulations of which constitute what Douglas called the cultural heritage.
Think of wikipedia, open source, slashdot comments. Why are you exchanging comments with me right now? There is no currency involved. Why can't all trading be like this? I grow food because I have a green thumb, because I enjoy it, because I have everything else I want and what I choose to do is grow food for fun. And/or, a robot grows food.
Currency is a step on the way towards developing the technology for each of us to enjoy maximum freedom, simultaneously. Capitalism, fetishizing scarcity, creates it unnecessarily and slows down the advance of knowledge and technology.
Ambiguity is natural langauge's strength. It's what allows it to adapt to changing conditions. So "mouse" took on a new meaning when technology advanced, creating ambiguity with the old usage, that is resolved by context. Same with the "No"s in the title of this story.
Your understanding differs from mine. I can elide the words "use of the" in the second sign, and the meaning is clear to me. Natural language doesn't use formal logic conventions. It's clear from the context that the "no" in "No restrooms for non-customers, either" would mean something slightly different from the first two "no"s in "No shirt, no shoes, no service."
What's wrong with creating more liquidity? The whole capitalist system is built on an artificial imposition of scarcity of liquidity. Dealers arise because of this lack of liquidity, and profit from the artificial scarcity. The artificial scarcity of money creates a dog-eat-dog mentality where people "innovate" new ways of ripping others off. A large part of this artificial scarcity is due to the automatic attaching of debt plus interest to money created out of thin air by banks. Since the banks don't create enough money to pay back both the loans and the interest, the only way a borrower can pay back his loan is by making another borrower default on his loan.
Instead, end the artificial scarcity of money. The banking system has arisen to meet the demand for liquidity, and they do shady things like shadow banking where they book profits today on instruments they believe are risk-free (because they are rated AAA). UBS is an example, paying huge bonuses on RMBS instruments that subsequently they couldn't sell. Note that UBS didn't suffer; but their mistakes resulted in global repurcussions that caused unnecessary suffering for billions.
So instead of trusting the banks to meet the demand for liquidity, just create it and give it directly to people. Then encourage them to innovate on their own or in ad-hoc collaborations made possible through the unprecedencted communication tool of the internet, with challenges for example. As long as we keep advancing knowledge and technology, we can create as much money as we feel like, because knowledge is what is likely to raise survival fitness the most by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
The dishonesty comes in telling the ones you're selling the RMBS to, "It's safe! Look, we have $500 million invested in it too!" while not mentioning that you also have a $2 billion bet against it.
The basic problem is that market makers exist only because there are inefficiencies in the market. Use technology to bypass them, and prices will be more efficient, because there's no middleman inserting himself into the process, seeking only profit.
You don't speak for me. I say context in natural language is probably its key characteristic. When someone says "I could care less", the implied negation is understood from the context. Do you maintain that "awful" still means "awe-inspiring"?
The problem with style guides is that they're stuck in the past. I bet you can find style guides that would criticize your putting a question-mark outside of quotation marks, and then (inconsistently) putting a period within quotation marks. Live by the style guide, die by the style guide!
Slashdot Mirror
It's a public outlet. Why shouldn't the public use it?
It's like the locks they put over many outlets in public places like parks. Unreasonable.
I'm complaining about the War on Drugs, started by Nixon, which made US law subservient to UN drug policies.
Non-locality is at least as weird.
Also, lol. The part of the Constitution that you cited, that was amended, and that you didn't quote fully, contains the infamous "three-fifths" phrase, referring to slaves. The Constitution was written with the intent that such mistakes would be fixed through amendments.
Article 1, Section 8:
Also, the amendments are part of the Constitution. The Constitution was designed to be amended.
Hence, the Constitution gives the government unlimited powers of taxation.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism:
"Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance)."
Intelligence seems to be one of those acquired characteristics. Why wouldn't Lamarckism be a mechanism for the Flynn effect?
From the wikipedia article on the Flynn effect:
So why are IQ scores getting higher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect)? The more we use our brain, the smarter our offspring get.
Lamarckian evolution applies to memetics.
The Constitution, of course, gave Congress unlimited powers of taxation. So it's not "stealing", because it's an explicit Constitutional power. But there are other solutions: simply create money, or have the Fed expand its balance sheet to buy govt bonds. By law the Fed returns all interest on govt bonds to the Treasury, so the cost of borrowing is zero.
The Constitution is not capitalistic then, because it mandates the government to provide for the General Welfare. Money doesn't care about the suffering of people. It's perfectly willing to allow human sacrifice.
The universe is the ultimate free lunch.
So, free lunches are statistically likely.
I think you're assuming that all dealers have zero inventories and are not exposed to price risk. But real dealing gets messy because they're working within an outside spread, which gives them a lot of room to maneuver within. So when dealers suffer a liquidity crunch, for example, they push prices away from efficient levels. That's when the central bank can step in and provide a backstop, supporting the outside spread, and preventing gross price distortions. The point is that dealers are not always able to provide efficient prices. Depending on their positions they can often push prices away from fundamental value.
So for example when Libya was in turmoil, oil shot up to many times its fundamental value. Why? Groupthink, emotion, fear, etc. all played a role. Prices went way out of proportion to their efficient levels.
I quote again from Mehrling's Lecture 10 Notes:
Like a basic income, financed by a balance-sheet entry. Consider, for example, Richard Cook's article, An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States:
No need to regulate dealers. Simply give everyone a choice whether they want to enter the market and do something like deal, or not. With a basic income, an individual can pursue his own ideas, taking risks in the lab, rather than in finance.
I have a completely different viewpoint: risks should be taken in the lab, not in finance. Quoting Lee Smolin: "As Dick Feynman once said to me, you have to be prepared to make every possible mistake and have every possible stupid idea before you can have the right idea." Finance wants to value the ideas in terms of money, payoff, etc. Finance (and economics) wants to throw out ideas without testing them. But the real goal. the way science progresses and knowledge advances, is to figure out a way to test all ideas in the lab.
Finance may help us to get to the point where we have developed the tools that allow us easily to test any idea. But I think it will take longer than if we abandoned the idea that money measures value, and worked directly on developing new technology instead of working on how to finance it.
It's an example of making a trade that's legal, but is dishonest. You said: " If the trading is legal, then it is honest." I provided a counterexample.
If you sell someone a lemon, and you know it's a lemon, and you misrepresent it as a great product, that's dishonest. It may be legal, but it's the kind of perverse incentive and moral hazard that capitalism rewards.
"So let's go to the real question. What is the primary purposes of currency? To be a convenient medium of exchange and a temporary store of value."
No, currency is a ticketing system. See C. H. Douglas, Social Credit:
Think of wikipedia, open source, slashdot comments. Why are you exchanging comments with me right now? There is no currency involved. Why can't all trading be like this? I grow food because I have a green thumb, because I enjoy it, because I have everything else I want and what I choose to do is grow food for fun. And/or, a robot grows food.
Currency is a step on the way towards developing the technology for each of us to enjoy maximum freedom, simultaneously. Capitalism, fetishizing scarcity, creates it unnecessarily and slows down the advance of knowledge and technology.
Ambiguity is natural langauge's strength. It's what allows it to adapt to changing conditions. So "mouse" took on a new meaning when technology advanced, creating ambiguity with the old usage, that is resolved by context. Same with the "No"s in the title of this story.
Your understanding differs from mine. I can elide the words "use of the" in the second sign, and the meaning is clear to me. Natural language doesn't use formal logic conventions. It's clear from the context that the "no" in "No restrooms for non-customers, either" would mean something slightly different from the first two "no"s in "No shirt, no shoes, no service."
What's wrong with creating more liquidity? The whole capitalist system is built on an artificial imposition of scarcity of liquidity. Dealers arise because of this lack of liquidity, and profit from the artificial scarcity. The artificial scarcity of money creates a dog-eat-dog mentality where people "innovate" new ways of ripping others off. A large part of this artificial scarcity is due to the automatic attaching of debt plus interest to money created out of thin air by banks. Since the banks don't create enough money to pay back both the loans and the interest, the only way a borrower can pay back his loan is by making another borrower default on his loan.
Instead, end the artificial scarcity of money. The banking system has arisen to meet the demand for liquidity, and they do shady things like shadow banking where they book profits today on instruments they believe are risk-free (because they are rated AAA). UBS is an example, paying huge bonuses on RMBS instruments that subsequently they couldn't sell. Note that UBS didn't suffer; but their mistakes resulted in global repurcussions that caused unnecessary suffering for billions.
So instead of trusting the banks to meet the demand for liquidity, just create it and give it directly to people. Then encourage them to innovate on their own or in ad-hoc collaborations made possible through the unprecedencted communication tool of the internet, with challenges for example. As long as we keep advancing knowledge and technology, we can create as much money as we feel like, because knowledge is what is likely to raise survival fitness the most by better enabling us to predict and adapt to sudden catastrophic change.
The dishonesty comes in telling the ones you're selling the RMBS to, "It's safe! Look, we have $500 million invested in it too!" while not mentioning that you also have a $2 billion bet against it.
The basic problem is that market makers exist only because there are inefficiencies in the market. Use technology to bypass them, and prices will be more efficient, because there's no middleman inserting himself into the process, seeking only profit.
You don't speak for me. I say context in natural language is probably its key characteristic. When someone says "I could care less", the implied negation is understood from the context. Do you maintain that "awful" still means "awe-inspiring"?
The problem with style guides is that they're stuck in the past. I bet you can find style guides that would criticize your putting a question-mark outside of quotation marks, and then (inconsistently) putting a period within quotation marks. Live by the style guide, die by the style guide!