The ratings are used as a prefilter on your brick-and-mortar selection by said shops' managers. So while they have no legal weight other than age verification at the point of sale a la movies, they impact your ability to obtain a physical copy of some games. Walmart was one of the first and most successful to do this sort of thing among the well known store brands and they're still more conservative than say, EB or (insert mall software shop here.) As to why people still patronize brick and mortar stores, it has several factors.
Most importantly is the available bandwidth in most homes. While you may be sitting on your cable modem on an under-subscribed segment or on your FiOS link or whatever, most of America, and indeed most of the gaming world has less than a 1Mbps pipe. This makes 7+GB downloads intolerable, especially since most of us have alternate uses for our internet service. Yes you can get a browser that will throttle your download in order to allow other traffic, but that just slows down the download.
Alternatively, some of us like having backup copies of the games we play and don't trust magnetic media for it.
Further, there is still a strong psychological tie to purchasing something physical, which trend is especially prevalent in the previous generations buying for their children and grandchildren. Think about it: would all of these businesses maintain shop space in all these cities and personnel to staff them if it weren't profitable. It's not like it's a lark that a single chain recently took that has yet to prove itself.
Try speaking to a Cockney from London or a Creole from Louisiana.
And while I understand and mostly agree with you, I'm still a contrarian.
And accent aside, I find most Indians who speak English do so more proficiently than the average American. So it's mostly a matter of regional accent, cultural context, and idiom which is where I agree with you.
"(you know, where I asked you a couple of simple questions about your sweeping statement about fiscal irresponsibility that as far as I can tell you still haven't answered)."
Right. So, for brevity, I'll not consider the traditional conservative arguments for fiscal responsibility that you are clearly not interested in, even though I consider them to be valid. It's taken me a while to disentangle my additional reasons from them and trace them to their origins.
So, back when we had a relatively free market, people would game one another in that market. This led to the robber-baron exploitation that has formed the (fairly legitimate, if overplayed and less relevant today) basis for liberal mistrust of business and markets. It also led to leveraged investment which, when margin calls were made, led to the market crash that preceded the Great Depression. Entire bookcases of texts have been written on the topic, and I suppose the best I can hope to do is summarize adequately, and perhaps throw in a few of my (to you and many others) oddball observations of trends I've long ago identified which are starting to rise to be clear.
The important thing is that that crash led us to understand that the market is more important to our society than previously suspected. This led to an urge to *try* to control the gaming in order to prevent *unnecessary* market crashes/volatility. Over the remainder of the intervening time people refined their gaming techniques to fit in or even play against the regulations. We had various "scandals" and large losses along the way. It has been eerily reminiscent of the trends among those on the dole to game those programs.
The interesting thing is that as we continued to increase regulation it seems to me that our reasons for regulating changed. Somewhere along the way it has become unacceptable for the market to decline more than so much or for more than so long. It is unacceptable to people even if the legitimate wealth (value of companies/investments) in the market itself becomes lower. This is deeply troubling to me, because there are many ways in which the "unacceptable" can happen legitimately, and without market fear being the main culprit. More troubling to me is my inference that given the similarity between the market and the dole in terms of people's tendency to game them it seems likely that the very regulations that we intend to prevent protracted market devaluation are instead more than capable of causing a systemic failure.
How? Lazy people. In a truly free market companies and people who produce, improve goods, or provide services that are valued less than their compensation (or resource consumption, depending) fail and those people find other work. Essentially, I assert that companies game the market in a variety of ways, most focusing on debt leverage and obfuscating that leverage into the market as a whole so it becomes a systemic vulnerability. We have a market where failure is not a possibility (large scale) and wherein debt is easy to obtain, even with a bad track record. As an example, look at Silicon Graphics as a microcosm of the results in corporate America of this trend. They failed to adapt to the shrinking valuation of their sort of product and made many, many mistakes, including always using the most rosy projections when planning. This is evident from the quarter-by-quarter layoffs. In a free market SGI would have failed and that would have been the end. Instead, they keep getting chances, some of them mandated by the government under questionable chapter 11 reorganization plans. Each pile of money they get is a loss to their investors, be they stockholders, debtors, or private equity firms. In many cases the investors are institutional, which means that there is 1. a tendency to view the investment relatively dispassionately (sometimes even in a blase manner) and 2. the same expectation of heroic measures of corporate life support.
The current problem is the now self-evident over-leverage of private equity,
umm... it seems to me that >80% of Britons want out of Iraq. It also seems to me that Blair was replaced to accomplish that. For a little bit now we've been hearing the Brits are getting out of Iraq per popular demand. Then this week we hear the Brits are staying. Two days after a Bush - Brit pow-wow at Camp David... Seems a bit puppetish to me. Maybe this doesn't reflect the relationship as a whole, but then again...
I'm sure there are a few, but i think the point of TFA is that the majors "ought" to be in that market. The point underlying theirs seems to be one primarily concerned with brand acceptance in the business community and the increased adoption of games for training, etc. that they feel would result from companies being solicited by EA Corporate Training vs. Bob's Corporate Game Shack.
Not the same. This is mostly an organizational / business thing. Most companies don't have the time or expertise to mod a game. If the makers of Half-life had set up a group to make Half life customized to train specific business' employees to do something particular. Now repeat that, make it a common element to each game company, and include different genres of games for those groups to customize. Get off your "Welcome to 1999" soapbox, Mr. Snide. And nothing's free. They provided a game editor for modders and level editors. If you'd like, please examine the Marathon series of games from Bungie in the mid 1990s. (Bungie got eaten and Marathon became Halo.)
What they're saying is essentially: "How can the game industry find a low-overhead way to get business revenue that doesn't interfere with their main operation?" In a near-ideal world, you'd have an expert system web services virtual consultant that would interpret business desires for their game and have it modify the stuff your consumer market developers produced last go-around to meet the need and make a quick, unobtrusive buck. In reality, this means spinning up a subsidiary that focuses on requirements analysis and B2B customer hand-holding / BD. They'd have a small group of programmers and artists to customize the previous generation offerings. You could even use this subsidiary as a "minor-league for your code jockeys and artists.
"I thought I was clear that I considered the discussion of my sig to be a bit off topic,"
umm... thank God our political discourse isn't completely set by fiats like yours yet. Oh, wait, that's what Rove and his next candidate will enact. Just listened to Huckabee this morning. He looks like a good one for that. He said, "...domestic policing is a national security matter that requires presidential and federal attention." He then went on to place that attention on par with defense from external threats. Yeah! Federal police state! (I don't know if Laura Ingram has podcasts of her shows, and I ordinarily find her so vapid that I'm unwilling to check her website for you. Occasionally she and the others have interesting guests. Huckabee is interesting, if also threatening.
"How does that change anything? Interest paid is just another government outlay. A government's ability to service it's debt depends solely on the size of it's economy. There is nothing wrong with the government continuing to borrow to meet its financial obligations as long as the economy continues to grow."
So you're a gambling man. Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop gambling with my grandchildren's future. The same as I'd appreciate it if the Democrats would do the same. Beyond that, there is a philosophical and credibility problem if you claim to be for smaller government during the election cycle and then spend like a fiend in office. Like Republicans have done. Beyond that, one presumes that fiscal conservatives had valid reasons for wanting smaller government. For brevity I won't go into them here. (you know, those of us Ann Coulter officially booted out of the party. "The Republican platform calls for expanding government at a slower pace than Democrats." How much slower, exactly? $0.01 a year? There's no difference between the two parties other than who the benefactors of their largess are. And yeah, I know she has no "official" standing to make committments for the party, but you and I both know that demagogues like her exist in part to say the unpleasant things for the party.)
"You don't think the market factors inflation into the interest rates that it demands on the money that it loans?"
Not for end consumers, especially in retirement accounts. And no, given the incestuous relationship the Fed has with business (providing "liquidity" by buying bad loans (simplified, I know, but the actual internals are fairly inscrutable even once you have some grasp of the mechanisms.)
"Oh, and did that comment add anything to this discussion?"
Yes, I had the foresight based on our interaction to date to predict you would question the sources as invalid unless I provided some indication that ones you might trust (or be unwilling to repudiate.) You see, I've gone and read some of your other posts. You use a variety of tactics in your arguments, like cherrypicking statistics you know to be misleading and playing heartstrings without meaning it, as in your treatment of motivations for Iraq. You see, in that one you had me painted as a liberal or a compassionate conservative and tried to use that against me solely to get me to abandon my position without a convincing reason that you believe in underlying your argument. (I married a state debate champion. Needless to say, you can take your Linclon-Douglass techniques out of the picture: they're unsuitable for meaningful discourse.)
"What does that mean? You can look up exactly how much money we are spending and exactly how much debt we have (to the penny!) any time you want."
Yes, but there is little attention paid until recently to the exposure it places us in, and unlike Saddam, is actually a national security threat to *us*. More on that below.
"I think we are talking about two different things. The Chinese dollar holdings consist of US Treasury securities, private sector bonds, and cash, and the aggregate total of these holdings is likely in the range of $1-1.3 trillion. The only one of these that our monetary
Hmm... an argument to every point except the erosion of freedom in America... Well, I'll at least address your arguments as they stand.
"Well, first, I don't know where you got the idea that the interest on our debt is compounding. It is straight simple interest. Somebody buys a new security from the treasury, and the government pays him fixed interest payments every six months until maturity, at which time the principle is paid off. It never compounds.
Of course deficits add to the debt. The question is, as long as the economy is growing, why do we need to pay the debt off at all?
Yes, Social Security will be underfunded starting in about 40 years, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intragovernmental debt. Just like any treasury security that you or I buy, the securities held by the Social Security trust fund are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and have the same 0% chance of being defaulted on. No, Social Security's problems are more systemic with it promising more benefits to more retirees, but fewer workers are paying into the system to fund the benefits.
Oh, and these intragovernmental debts are not at all hidden. The Treasury Dept includes them in their published numbers."
What you say is true only if the government is not also borrowing money from you to pay me the interest and will in turn have to borrow still more from me in order to pay you interest... ad nauseam. Besides, if the government gives me my money back and it's worth half as much as it was when I put it in... I've lost money. I believe in charity, but let's call it what it is. As to current valuation of the dollar, are all media outlets including (probably your favorite) FOX wrong when they report the dollar to have dropped "dangerously close to historic support value"? And the figures are hidden because they are not discussed because both parties want to spend like it's going out of style.
"I've happily poked my head out from under my rock, and I see that inflation is still low, the market-determined yields on US Treasury securities are still below historical averages (meaning the market still considers them very low risk), and although the value of the dollar is off from its peak, the dollar is still stronger today than it was 10 years ago (trade weighted currency index of 103 this month compared to the Jan 1998 baseline of 100). I also see that our currency has appreciated significantly over the past 3 years compared to 2 out of our 4 top trading partners. Again, where is your fear of impending hyperinflation coming from?"
Remember the S&L collapse during the 80s? Our current debt/financing of mortgages combined with a similar arrangement in "Private Equity" is deeply reminiscent of the debt for investment trends in the 1920s that the Great Depression was blamed on and which led to the creation of the SEC. Tell me, why should I personally be unable to borrow more than a certain percentage of the money I invest when a publicly traded "private equity" company can do so? http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/06/markets/privateequ itybubble.fortune/index.htm
"The Chinese currently own about 4% of our debt (source). They aren't even the biggest foreign holder of US debt. They could probably do some damage to our currency if they liquidated all of their dollar holdings, but there is no way that would hurt us more than it would hurt them. In the meantime, lets be happy that they are helping to subsidize our low tax rates and helping our economy."
Because the previous time the Dems were in the WH they ran big deficits. It's also how the Dems (Franklin Roosevelt) solved the great depression. Kind of establishes a track record. Also, Clinton had a Republican Congress for most of his tenure. It's kind of hard to spend money the Congress won't authorize. We call it the "power of the purse" and that's the only direct control the Congress has over the executive. It's not always effective. Read about Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet for an illustration of this being subverted. Moreover, the president can make it not politically expedient, which is the reason the Dems haven't stopped the Iraq war by refusing to pass the spending bills.
Structured ASICs typically have several (7-9 being common) metal routing layers which can and do cross without interconnect on a regular basis. Vias == pillars comprised by layering dots in each layer. crossing is accomplished with other materials which may or may not be removed depending on your expense/yield/dielectric properties needs. The last impacts EM coupling of traces and inter-symbol interference, and by extension speed.
short term deficits are not that big an issue. However, we've run a deficit for the vast majority of my lifetime. The magic thing is that deficits accumulate into debt. Add the extra magic of compounding interest and you're in for a real treat. The debt is my primary concern.
Secondarily, I am worried by the methods the government use to come up with the figures you mention without citations. I am more disturbed, however by the means the government use to hide deficit and debt, namely "borrowing" from the "separate, never to be touched" social security funds and highway trust. Both of those funds are dramatically underfunded for their obligations, and those underfundings are only going to be exacerbated with time. Where I'm from, we call it "robbing Peter to pay Paul."
In addition to a legitimate fear of impending hyperinflation (get out from under your rock and look into the current state of the money markets) I am deeply concerned with the direct threat to our sovereignty it represents. Just look at the Chinese trial balloon with respect to shorting our debt. They *can* do it. It would hurt them. At this point in their development, it would hurt us worse.
BTW: the unspoken part of your signature is "and we will throw out previous definitions of just war in order to satisfy our urge to spread "freedom" through tyranny." I also find it darkly amusing that your "freedom loving" quote comes from the president who has done the most to erode our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms while at the same time expanding executive power to unprecedented levels given the lack of a direct threat to the nation's continued existence. (Lincoln had slightly more, but most sane people would agree that the US was under a great deal more threat at the time than now.)
Think about executive power this way: if you would be uncomfortable with the idea of a president you disagree with (in your case Hillary, I'd guess) having that power, why on earth would you let someone you like set the precedent for the power to be taken and used in the first place?!?
Actually, I find fiscal irresponsibility, which is the hallmark of the current platforms of both major parties to be repugnant and unsustainable. I just hope we as a country wake up and realize it before our grandchildren aren'table to pay for our largesse.
As to your assertion regarding Rove, I'm sure you can infer from your belief that the party works for him that he will actively, if inscrutibly (or at least unattributably) work against Paul (or any non-neocon) in the primaries. 'nuf said.
Whichever candidate takes him on is a candidate i'll not vote for in the primary. My guess would be Romney or whichever wins the social conservatives between Huckabee and Brownbeck. Of course, if it's one of those three it's convenient because I would have voted for them in the first place. Now if Giulianni takes him on... the only choice left is Paul.
"Free" Market. I understand. I also actually read Adam Smith, who placed several caveats on his theory that make it an unattainable ideal. Holding primacy among these is the availability of perfect information. (And the unspoken addendum that the volume of perfect information must be evaluable (i.e. instantly having perfect information from the correct context.))
What we have today is, at best, mercantilism. The biggest thing you ignore in your assertion are "barriers to entry", which as any silicon valley executive can tell you are impenetrable when Microsoft is in the market. A startup's best chance for profit in a Microsoft market is for MS to buy them out. This happened lots in the 80's ad 90's, with most of those companies' products and innovations heading straight for the MS dustbin. So, your assertion about others filling the void to keep MS on their toes is wishful thinking. I'm not defending the current occupants of the market: their business models are antiquated and inefficient.
A cash cow by whose standards? going by market capitalization (a flawed metric, but something.) Adobe who are the market leader in this space are at $23,978.8 Million. Microsoft are at $271,139.2 Million. That's over an order of magnitude in business size. The graphics market at a discount (in order to kill Adobe) from Adobe's pricing is quite small in relative terms. Add to that the trend towards freeish software led by Google and you have a shrinking market in dollars, even if you have a larger user base. It's like the browser wars. It doesn't really matter who wins, because everyone loses economically. Remember Netscape Communications Corp?
By the way, MS never has to sell people on the next version. They just cease support for the version before last and corporate customers adopt the last version. Wash, rinse, repeat. See other discussions regarding their other product lines most notably windows, office, and Visual Studio.
From The Wealth of Nations: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." (Book 1, Chapter 10).
Mercantilist domestic policy was more fragmented than its trade policy. While Adam Smith portrayed mercantilism as supportive of strict controls over the economy, many mercantilists disagreed. The early modern era was one of letters patent and government-imposed monopolies; some mercantilists supported these, but others acknowledged the corruption and inefficiency of such systems. Many mercantilists also realized the inevitable result of quotas and price ceilings were black markets. One notion mercantilists widely agreed upon was the need for economic oppression of the working population; laborers and farmers were to live at the "margins of subsistence". The goal was to maximize production, with no concern for consumption. Extra money, free time, or education for the "lower classes" was seen to inevitably lead to vice and laziness, and would result in harm to the economy.[7]
When you're the $50 billion gorilla, you get to send expeditions into many difficult markets/areas without feeling the pinch much. Who cares if you disturb the local flora and fauna? They might just accidentally win with their foray. Germs and Guns, anyone?
Of course, what happens if they wipe out the market competition and later leave the market by taking the same sort of lark that brought them there in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
The ratings are used as a prefilter on your brick-and-mortar selection by said shops' managers. So while they have no legal weight other than age verification at the point of sale a la movies, they impact your ability to obtain a physical copy of some games. Walmart was one of the first and most successful to do this sort of thing among the well known store brands and they're still more conservative than say, EB or (insert mall software shop here.) As to why people still patronize brick and mortar stores, it has several factors.
Most importantly is the available bandwidth in most homes. While you may be sitting on your cable modem on an under-subscribed segment or on your FiOS link or whatever, most of America, and indeed most of the gaming world has less than a 1Mbps pipe. This makes 7+GB downloads intolerable, especially since most of us have alternate uses for our internet service. Yes you can get a browser that will throttle your download in order to allow other traffic, but that just slows down the download.
Alternatively, some of us like having backup copies of the games we play and don't trust magnetic media for it.
Further, there is still a strong psychological tie to purchasing something physical, which trend is especially prevalent in the previous generations buying for their children and grandchildren. Think about it: would all of these businesses maintain shop space in all these cities and personnel to staff them if it weren't profitable. It's not like it's a lark that a single chain recently took that has yet to prove itself.
Leisure Suit Larry
Try speaking to a Cockney from London or a Creole from Louisiana.
And while I understand and mostly agree with you, I'm still a contrarian.
And accent aside, I find most Indians who speak English do so more proficiently than the average American. So it's mostly a matter of regional accent, cultural context, and idiom which is where I agree with you.
obsequious was the wrong word. disingenuous and counterproductive are better.
"(you know, where I asked you a couple of simple questions about your sweeping statement about fiscal irresponsibility that as far as I can tell you still haven't answered)."
Right. So, for brevity, I'll not consider the traditional conservative arguments for fiscal responsibility that you are clearly not interested in, even though I consider them to be valid. It's taken me a while to disentangle my additional reasons from them and trace them to their origins.
So, back when we had a relatively free market, people would game one another in that market. This led to the robber-baron exploitation that has formed the (fairly legitimate, if overplayed and less relevant today) basis for liberal mistrust of business and markets. It also led to leveraged investment which, when margin calls were made, led to the market crash that preceded the Great Depression. Entire bookcases of texts have been written on the topic, and I suppose the best I can hope to do is summarize adequately, and perhaps throw in a few of my (to you and many others) oddball observations of trends I've long ago identified which are starting to rise to be clear.
The important thing is that that crash led us to understand that the market is more important to our society than previously suspected. This led to an urge to *try* to control the gaming in order to prevent *unnecessary* market crashes/volatility. Over the remainder of the intervening time people refined their gaming techniques to fit in or even play against the regulations. We had various "scandals" and large losses along the way. It has been eerily reminiscent of the trends among those on the dole to game those programs.
The interesting thing is that as we continued to increase regulation it seems to me that our reasons for regulating changed. Somewhere along the way it has become unacceptable for the market to decline more than so much or for more than so long. It is unacceptable to people even if the legitimate wealth (value of companies/investments) in the market itself becomes lower. This is deeply troubling to me, because there are many ways in which the "unacceptable" can happen legitimately, and without market fear being the main culprit. More troubling to me is my inference that given the similarity between the market and the dole in terms of people's tendency to game them it seems likely that the very regulations that we intend to prevent protracted market devaluation are instead more than capable of causing a systemic failure.
How? Lazy people. In a truly free market companies and people who produce, improve goods, or provide services that are valued less than their compensation (or resource consumption, depending) fail and those people find other work. Essentially, I assert that companies game the market in a variety of ways, most focusing on debt leverage and obfuscating that leverage into the market as a whole so it becomes a systemic vulnerability. We have a market where failure is not a possibility (large scale) and wherein debt is easy to obtain, even with a bad track record. As an example, look at Silicon Graphics as a microcosm of the results in corporate America of this trend. They failed to adapt to the shrinking valuation of their sort of product and made many, many mistakes, including always using the most rosy projections when planning. This is evident from the quarter-by-quarter layoffs. In a free market SGI would have failed and that would have been the end. Instead, they keep getting chances, some of them mandated by the government under questionable chapter 11 reorganization plans. Each pile of money they get is a loss to their investors, be they stockholders, debtors, or private equity firms. In many cases the investors are institutional, which means that there is 1. a tendency to view the investment relatively dispassionately (sometimes even in a blase manner) and 2. the same expectation of heroic measures of corporate life support.
The current problem is the now self-evident over-leverage of private equity,
umm... it seems to me that >80% of Britons want out of Iraq. It also seems to me that Blair was replaced to accomplish that. For a little bit now we've been hearing the Brits are getting out of Iraq per popular demand. Then this week we hear the Brits are staying. Two days after a Bush - Brit pow-wow at Camp David... Seems a bit puppetish to me. Maybe this doesn't reflect the relationship as a whole, but then again...
The guy pointing out the mistake went to MS from the FCC... Does that make it a comedy of errors?
Actually, I rather thought the parent to my previous post was being a pompous, condescending ass, so i responded in kind.
I'm sure there are a few, but i think the point of TFA is that the majors "ought" to be in that market. The point underlying theirs seems to be one primarily concerned with brand acceptance in the business community and the increased adoption of games for training, etc. that they feel would result from companies being solicited by EA Corporate Training vs. Bob's Corporate Game Shack.
Not the same. This is mostly an organizational / business thing. Most companies don't have the time or expertise to mod a game. If the makers of Half-life had set up a group to make Half life customized to train specific business' employees to do something particular. Now repeat that, make it a common element to each game company, and include different genres of games for those groups to customize. Get off your "Welcome to 1999" soapbox, Mr. Snide. And nothing's free. They provided a game editor for modders and level editors. If you'd like, please examine the Marathon series of games from Bungie in the mid 1990s. (Bungie got eaten and Marathon became Halo.)
What they're saying is essentially: "How can the game industry find a low-overhead way to get business revenue that doesn't interfere with their main operation?" In a near-ideal world, you'd have an expert system web services virtual consultant that would interpret business desires for their game and have it modify the stuff your consumer market developers produced last go-around to meet the need and make a quick, unobtrusive buck. In reality, this means spinning up a subsidiary that focuses on requirements analysis and B2B customer hand-holding / BD. They'd have a small group of programmers and artists to customize the previous generation offerings. You could even use this subsidiary as a "minor-league for your code jockeys and artists.
"computer-aided training simulators"
It has to be catchy, but serious. Strategy Sharpeners? I dunno.
oh and this just in:
0 00779fd2ac.html
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/80fa0a2c-49ef-11dc-9ffe-0
because of GMO e.coli used to make it. :P
"I thought I was clear that I considered the discussion of my sig to be a bit off topic,"
umm... thank God our political discourse isn't completely set by fiats like yours yet. Oh, wait, that's what Rove and his next candidate will enact. Just listened to Huckabee this morning. He looks like a good one for that. He said, "...domestic policing is a national security matter that requires presidential and federal attention." He then went on to place that attention on par with defense from external threats. Yeah! Federal police state! (I don't know if Laura Ingram has podcasts of her shows, and I ordinarily find her so vapid that I'm unwilling to check her website for you. Occasionally she and the others have interesting guests. Huckabee is interesting, if also threatening.
"How does that change anything? Interest paid is just another government outlay. A government's ability to service it's debt depends solely on the size of it's economy. There is nothing wrong with the government continuing to borrow to meet its financial obligations as long as the economy continues to grow."
So you're a gambling man. Well, I'd appreciate it if you'd stop gambling with my grandchildren's future. The same as I'd appreciate it if the Democrats would do the same. Beyond that, there is a philosophical and credibility problem if you claim to be for smaller government during the election cycle and then spend like a fiend in office. Like Republicans have done. Beyond that, one presumes that fiscal conservatives had valid reasons for wanting smaller government. For brevity I won't go into them here. (you know, those of us Ann Coulter officially booted out of the party. "The Republican platform calls for expanding government at a slower pace than Democrats." How much slower, exactly? $0.01 a year? There's no difference between the two parties other than who the benefactors of their largess are. And yeah, I know she has no "official" standing to make committments for the party, but you and I both know that demagogues like her exist in part to say the unpleasant things for the party.)
"You don't think the market factors inflation into the interest rates that it demands on the money that it loans?"
Not for end consumers, especially in retirement accounts. And no, given the incestuous relationship the Fed has with business (providing "liquidity" by buying bad loans (simplified, I know, but the actual internals are fairly inscrutable even once you have some grasp of the mechanisms.)
"Oh, and did that comment add anything to this discussion?"
Yes, I had the foresight based on our interaction to date to predict you would question the sources as invalid unless I provided some indication that ones you might trust (or be unwilling to repudiate.) You see, I've gone and read some of your other posts. You use a variety of tactics in your arguments, like cherrypicking statistics you know to be misleading and playing heartstrings without meaning it, as in your treatment of motivations for Iraq. You see, in that one you had me painted as a liberal or a compassionate conservative and tried to use that against me solely to get me to abandon my position without a convincing reason that you believe in underlying your argument. (I married a state debate champion. Needless to say, you can take your Linclon-Douglass techniques out of the picture: they're unsuitable for meaningful discourse.)
"What does that mean? You can look up exactly how much money we are spending and exactly how much debt we have (to the penny!) any time you want."
Yes, but there is little attention paid until recently to the exposure it places us in, and unlike Saddam, is actually a national security threat to *us*. More on that below.
"I think we are talking about two different things. The Chinese dollar holdings consist of US Treasury securities, private sector bonds, and cash, and the aggregate total of these holdings is likely in the range of $1-1.3 trillion. The only one of these that our monetary
Hmm... an argument to every point except the erosion of freedom in America... Well, I'll at least address your arguments as they stand.
"Well, first, I don't know where you got the idea that the interest on our debt is compounding. It is straight simple interest. Somebody buys a new security from the treasury, and the government pays him fixed interest payments every six months until maturity, at which time the principle is paid off. It never compounds.
Of course deficits add to the debt. The question is, as long as the economy is growing, why do we need to pay the debt off at all?
Yes, Social Security will be underfunded starting in about 40 years, but that has absolutely nothing to do with intragovernmental debt. Just like any treasury security that you or I buy, the securities held by the Social Security trust fund are backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and have the same 0% chance of being defaulted on. No, Social Security's problems are more systemic with it promising more benefits to more retirees, but fewer workers are paying into the system to fund the benefits.
Oh, and these intragovernmental debts are not at all hidden. The Treasury Dept includes them in their published numbers."
What you say is true only if the government is not also borrowing money from you to pay me the interest and will in turn have to borrow still more from me in order to pay you interest... ad nauseam. Besides, if the government gives me my money back and it's worth half as much as it was when I put it in... I've lost money. I believe in charity, but let's call it what it is. As to current valuation of the dollar, are all media outlets including (probably your favorite) FOX wrong when they report the dollar to have dropped "dangerously close to historic support value"? And the figures are hidden because they are not discussed because both parties want to spend like it's going out of style.
"I've happily poked my head out from under my rock, and I see that inflation is still low, the market-determined yields on US Treasury securities are still below historical averages (meaning the market still considers them very low risk), and although the value of the dollar is off from its peak, the dollar is still stronger today than it was 10 years ago (trade weighted currency index of 103 this month compared to the Jan 1998 baseline of 100). I also see that our currency has appreciated significantly over the past 3 years compared to 2 out of our 4 top trading partners. Again, where is your fear of impending hyperinflation coming from?"
Remember the S&L collapse during the 80s? Our current debt/financing of mortgages combined with a similar arrangement in "Private Equity" is deeply reminiscent of the debt for investment trends in the 1920s that the Great Depression was blamed on and which led to the creation of the SEC. Tell me, why should I personally be unable to borrow more than a certain percentage of the money I invest when a publicly traded "private equity" company can do so? http://money.cnn.com/2007/08/06/markets/privateequ itybubble.fortune/index.htm
"The Chinese currently own about 4% of our debt (source). They aren't even the biggest foreign holder of US debt. They could probably do some damage to our currency if they liquidated all of their dollar holdings, but there is no way that would hurt us more than it would hurt them. In the meantime, lets be happy that they are helping to subsidize our low tax rates and helping our economy."
The Wall St. Journal and other media outlets seem to think your source underestimates the debt holdings. Their estimates run in the $1-1.3 Trillion range. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/m oney/2007/08/07/bcnchina107a.xml My guess would be that they only consider the govern
Because the previous time the Dems were in the WH they ran big deficits. It's also how the Dems (Franklin Roosevelt) solved the great depression. Kind of establishes a track record. Also, Clinton had a Republican Congress for most of his tenure. It's kind of hard to spend money the Congress won't authorize. We call it the "power of the purse" and that's the only direct control the Congress has over the executive. It's not always effective. Read about Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet for an illustration of this being subverted. Moreover, the president can make it not politically expedient, which is the reason the Dems haven't stopped the Iraq war by refusing to pass the spending bills.
Structured ASICs typically have several (7-9 being common) metal routing layers which can and do cross without interconnect on a regular basis. Vias == pillars comprised by layering dots in each layer. crossing is accomplished with other materials which may or may not be removed depending on your expense/yield/dielectric properties needs. The last impacts EM coupling of traces and inter-symbol interference, and by extension speed.
short term deficits are not that big an issue. However, we've run a deficit for the vast majority of my lifetime. The magic thing is that deficits accumulate into debt. Add the extra magic of compounding interest and you're in for a real treat. The debt is my primary concern.
Secondarily, I am worried by the methods the government use to come up with the figures you mention without citations. I am more disturbed, however by the means the government use to hide deficit and debt, namely "borrowing" from the "separate, never to be touched" social security funds and highway trust. Both of those funds are dramatically underfunded for their obligations, and those underfundings are only going to be exacerbated with time. Where I'm from, we call it "robbing Peter to pay Paul."
In addition to a legitimate fear of impending hyperinflation (get out from under your rock and look into the current state of the money markets) I am deeply concerned with the direct threat to our sovereignty it represents. Just look at the Chinese trial balloon with respect to shorting our debt. They *can* do it. It would hurt them. At this point in their development, it would hurt us worse.
BTW: the unspoken part of your signature is "and we will throw out previous definitions of just war in order to satisfy our urge to spread "freedom" through tyranny." I also find it darkly amusing that your "freedom loving" quote comes from the president who has done the most to erode our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms while at the same time expanding executive power to unprecedented levels given the lack of a direct threat to the nation's continued existence. (Lincoln had slightly more, but most sane people would agree that the US was under a great deal more threat at the time than now.)
Think about executive power this way: if you would be uncomfortable with the idea of a president you disagree with (in your case Hillary, I'd guess) having that power, why on earth would you let someone you like set the precedent for the power to be taken and used in the first place?!?
Actually, I find fiscal irresponsibility, which is the hallmark of the current platforms of both major parties to be repugnant and unsustainable. I just hope we as a country wake up and realize it before our grandchildren aren'table to pay for our largesse.
As to your assertion regarding Rove, I'm sure you can infer from your belief that the party works for him that he will actively, if inscrutibly (or at least unattributably) work against Paul (or any non-neocon) in the primaries. 'nuf said.
Of course, if it's one of those three it's convenient because I would have *NOT* voted for them in the first place.
damn slip-up.
Whichever candidate takes him on is a candidate i'll not vote for in the primary. My guess would be Romney or whichever wins the social conservatives between Huckabee and Brownbeck. Of course, if it's one of those three it's convenient because I would have voted for them in the first place. Now if Giulianni takes him on... the only choice left is Paul.
"Free" Market. I understand. I also actually read Adam Smith, who placed several caveats on his theory that make it an unattainable ideal. Holding primacy among these is the availability of perfect information. (And the unspoken addendum that the volume of perfect information must be evaluable (i.e. instantly having perfect information from the correct context.))
r e_about/a_modest_man_named_smith/
What we have today is, at best, mercantilism. The biggest thing you ignore in your assertion are "barriers to entry", which as any silicon valley executive can tell you are impenetrable when Microsoft is in the market. A startup's best chance for profit in a Microsoft market is for MS to buy them out. This happened lots in the 80's ad 90's, with most of those companies' products and innovations heading straight for the MS dustbin. So, your assertion about others filling the void to keep MS on their toes is wishful thinking. I'm not defending the current occupants of the market: their business models are antiquated and inefficient.
A cash cow by whose standards?
going by market capitalization (a flawed metric, but something.) Adobe who are the market leader in this space are at $23,978.8 Million. Microsoft are at $271,139.2 Million. That's over an order of magnitude in business size. The graphics market at a discount (in order to kill Adobe) from Adobe's pricing is quite small in relative terms. Add to that the trend towards freeish software led by Google and you have a shrinking market in dollars, even if you have a larger user base. It's like the browser wars. It doesn't really matter who wins, because everyone loses economically. Remember Netscape Communications Corp?
By the way, MS never has to sell people on the next version. They just cease support for the version before last and corporate customers adopt the last version. Wash, rinse, repeat. See other discussions regarding their other product lines most notably windows, office, and Visual Studio.
From The Wealth of Nations:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." (Book 1, Chapter 10).
http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/index.php/smith/mo
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism :
Mercantilist domestic policy was more fragmented than its trade policy. While Adam Smith portrayed mercantilism as supportive of strict controls over the economy, many mercantilists disagreed. The early modern era was one of letters patent and government-imposed monopolies; some mercantilists supported these, but others acknowledged the corruption and inefficiency of such systems. Many mercantilists also realized the inevitable result of quotas and price ceilings were black markets. One notion mercantilists widely agreed upon was the need for economic oppression of the working population; laborers and farmers were to live at the "margins of subsistence". The goal was to maximize production, with no concern for consumption. Extra money, free time, or education for the "lower classes" was seen to inevitably lead to vice and laziness, and would result in harm to the economy.[7]
When you're the $50 billion gorilla, you get to send expeditions into many difficult markets/areas without feeling the pinch much. Who cares if you disturb the local flora and fauna? They might just accidentally win with their foray. Germs and Guns, anyone?
Of course, what happens if they wipe out the market competition and later leave the market by taking the same sort of lark that brought them there in the first place?
Protoss and Zerg