But if A loans $1 to B with 10% interest, B certainly can't repay A.
Sure B can, in installments assuming A did something with the money besides hoarding it.
If the top lenders decide to take in more money in interest than they pay out in wages, there is an instability that means the assets of the top lenders will grow
The stockholders would like a word with you about dividends. All non-failing businesses take in more money than they pay out in wages, some of which goes to the government, some paid as dividends, some to pay back loans of their own, and some accumulated to be spent later.
And so?
You seem to think it matters that the M1 is bigger than the M0, but you haven't explained why. What would anyone do with a large collection of dollar bills? What would the point of that be? If you're not willing to spend them, invest them, or loan them, then they're just paper.
I think the FDIC is very successful at prevent runs on a few individual banks. What would it do in a scenario if there was a run on ALL banks?
Historically, that was a result of several banks failing and everyone panicking - but there's no reason to worry about bank failures, no reason to rush to withdraw money, if you're guaranteed to get your money back.
It's not about force. You can't "print" bitcoins, because...
It's always about force. When the dollar was gold-based, and FDR was pissing in the pool, he simply outlawed private ownership of gold. In previous centuries, the King would just send the army to the banks and take all the gold from the vaults. If you can't extract money from your population by force then you're not a government, because you lack the (effective) power to tax.
You forgot "fraud protection", the gaping hole in BTC and the main reason people put up with the 2-3% Visa Tax on all transactions. But as soon as BTC is used in any way for consumer lending, the money supply increases by the amount of each loan.
I think the FDIC is only useful if your particular bank goes under.
Yes, it's useful for that (protection you don't have with a "Eurodollar" account - dollars deposited in a European bank). But it was created to prevent bank runs. The fact that you have that protection prevents the collapse of the entire banking system due to bank runs. That's kind of important.
The government can;t piss in the bitcoin pool (well atleast not as much), because it doesn;t have the power to print bitcoins.
The government always finds a way. Funny what you can get away with when you have a monopoly on force.
Banks can't magically create more physical dollar bills either! There's absolutely no difference.
A bank could entice someone to deposit 300 bitcoins in a CD by paying interest, then lend those 300 bitcoins to someone else to buy a house. Bang, money supply doubled. And if most of that 300 BTC ended up deposited in the banking system again, and loaned out again, well, you get an M1 that's about 10x the M0, like we have today.
I guess I was lucky that I was taught this stuff in high school. We did all this as a class exercise - do they really not teach this any more?
Something funny is going on, and lenders create money in the system by continually creating new debts that cannot physically be repaid.
I see you've mistaken what currency is for. It's the "most easily exchanged commodity" used to mediate barter. It's not for hoarding, because it has no value other than convenience, nor does it need to. Of course the debts can all be repaid - because the difference between the M1 and the M0 is money we've loaned one another in a network. If A loans $1 to B who loans it to C who loans it to D (and the money supply is just that $1), then those loans could certainly be repaid with that $1 in the reverse order of the loans, but the whole question is silly to begin with.
There's a group of people who just don't understand how money works: dollars don't have value, dollars measure value. The means of production have value. Goods produced and not yet consumed have value. It's quite OK that dollars are not suitable for hoarding!
You don't see how outlawing commonplace activities, then having the executive decide where to enforce the law (thus giving the power to arrest anyone at a whim) is dictatorial control? Selective enforcement is the tool of the tyrant.
Yup - top fuel is special. For any claims about engine power, it really matters where on the scale from "rebuilt every 3 minutes of operation" to "rebuilt every 300k miles" the engine lies.
The money supply has almost nothing to do with the amount of physical currency, because of fractional-reserve banking (and other games without handy names). Do you think inflation in America has anything to do with the umber of printed dollar bills in circulation?
For bitcoin to be mainstream, used by ordinary people for shopping, there will need to be BTC-denominated savings accounts, CDs, and credit cards (and likely insurance policies as well). In other words: fractional-reserve banking.
You can get insane power out of any engine, but you use up the engine quite fast. A topfuel engine (~8L) can have 1k HP just of parasitic loss to the supercharger, but still make 8-10,000 HP. Getting 1000-1250 HP/l happens everywhere topfuel is run, but there's a significant risk the engine won't even last 1/4 mile! (Or however long topfuel runs these days - they shortened the race as the cars had become overly dangerous.)
What impressive about this car is it's built for an endurance race: LeMans and a few others leading up to it. Anyone skilled can turn the turbo pressure up on an EVO engine, but getting it to run at power for 24 hours that way is something far more impressive.
Any currency that "goes mainstream" will include fractional reserve banking. Do you really think everyday shoppers will use a currency that you can't have a savings account or credit card for?
Why would you say fractional reserve banking is unsustainable? So far it has held up as well as any other currency idea that's been tried (though admittedly I wouldn't deposit too much w/o FDIC backing). Whatever currency you use, the government will eventually find some way to piss in the pool, because that's what governments do.
For all the trash that gets talked about Texas in this regard, it barely registers here, and only for some sort of "Responsive Ed charter school" that a Texan might explain better - sounds like it's not the normal school system.
Some people think bitcoin is deflationary because there is a cap to the supply. That's naive of course - the money supply has little to do with the amount of physical currency, and everything to do with fractional reserve banking. But then, people make the same mistake about gold. For bitcoin to "go mainstream" there would need to be BTC-denominated savings accounts and CDs, meaning fractional reserve banking would be happening (well, 0-reserve banking would be happening, but USD is the same way).
This is really monumental IMO - not because of bitcoin per se, but because the government is finally realizing that if the law already covers X, you don't need new laws for X on the internet. It's about time,
Yes, all quite true. I was merely highlighting that the rule of law is a good ideal to aspire to, not claiming that we had it today in America. The growing trend under by current and former presidents to simply ignore or change laws by "executive order" was proof enough of that, even before the NSA scandal.
You should be able to get away with doing something bad "merely" by following all the relevant laws, because the other way of doing things leads inevitably to dictatorial control of the state (what power has the legislative branch when laws don't matter?).
You were sarcastic, but that is the whole freaking point of the rule of law: a list of rules such that, if you follow those rules, you won't be arrested. It makes for a far better society than one where you can be arrested whenever you annoy someone important, regardless of the rules.
When Slashdot was very young, before we had a mode system, the was an article on "the four horsemen of the internet apocalypse": that our rights online were sure to erode in the name of fighting terrorism, CP, hacking, and/or drug dealing. Wow, that was an amazing prediction - if we include "torrenting ripped media" in hacking, that's been right on target. I hadn't been understanding the "drug dealing" part until the Silk Road bust, but sure enough.
This is why I resist giving the government any special power only to be used in extremes - excuses are so readily available that "extremes" becomes commonplace in a few years. And whatever the real motivation for the various TOR busts, WikiLeaks is effectively dead now as a result, with their TOR service is gone.
You can certainly see the FBI wanting TOR just strong enough to leak information from the Iranian government safely, but not strong enough to leak information about the US government safely. Sad that it seems to have come to that.
I don't care at all if Google "tracks my searches," since they're tracking most of my web habits anyhow via all their cleverness and ad networks. There's no escaping that. But I don't need to hand them a real-world identity to connect all that stuff to, or an easy way to connect me-on-one-machine with me-on-another.
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
COBOL had a lot of traction with business programming too. Didn't make it pleasant to program in.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it
In many ways Java is the new COBOL, not because of language features (though the same fortyCharacterColobesqueVariableNames are common) but because all the same old boring stuff that used to be done in COBOL is now done in Java.
I'm careful to ensure the word "Java" doesn't appear on my resume, not because the language is all that bad (though the lack of modern list processing really gets old), but because I never want to write an inventory database, or a payroll program, or a SCM/CRM/ERP system - or anything with an Oracle DB involved, really.
Could you say that again, except coherently this time?
Libertarianism is an attempt to solve the problem of providing safety and basic social order with the minimum possible government that gets the job done. It's an optimization exercise. There's very little agreement on what that looks like, exactly, but widespread agreement that fraud prevention and contact enforcement (and some sort of criminal justice system) are part of it.
Anarchism is the claim that we can have safety and basic social order with no central leadership at all (anarchy means "no leader", not "no laws"). I view this like Marxist communism: cool idea, wrong species.
Well, that depends of whether your goal is "great" or "not awful". If you're content with "not awful", you could make this work. QT does an OK job of looking like a native app on each platform is runs on. At least all the UI widgets are the ones you're used to.
Really, with a bit of refinement and well-funded usability testing, I think you could get something pretty good. E.g., for "wizards" (multi-page dialogs), a bit of hinting about what controls really need to be on the same screen would be enough; let the library "cut the scroll" into individual pages.
I see you crossing the line from "libertarian" to "anarchist" if you don't see a legitimate role in the government preventing this sort of collusion. Much like there are rules on all the commodities exchanges, backed by laws, that prevent collusion to corner the market in any given commodity. It's a very minimal low-touch sort of role for the government to prevent this sort of thing.
Had this been 2 small companies no one cares about colluding, I wouldn't see much problem either, but this is a non-trivial portion of all software jobs in the valley, enough to distort the market. This is exactly why you're not allowed to control more than 10% (or whatever it is, but I think that's right) of a specific commodity contract.
Slashdot Mirror
But if A loans $1 to B with 10% interest, B certainly can't repay A.
Sure B can, in installments assuming A did something with the money besides hoarding it.
If the top lenders decide to take in more money in interest than they pay out in wages, there is an instability that means the assets of the top lenders will grow
The stockholders would like a word with you about dividends. All non-failing businesses take in more money than they pay out in wages, some of which goes to the government, some paid as dividends, some to pay back loans of their own, and some accumulated to be spent later.
And so?
You seem to think it matters that the M1 is bigger than the M0, but you haven't explained why. What would anyone do with a large collection of dollar bills? What would the point of that be? If you're not willing to spend them, invest them, or loan them, then they're just paper.
I think the FDIC is very successful at prevent runs on a few individual banks. What would it do in a scenario if there was a run on ALL banks?
Historically, that was a result of several banks failing and everyone panicking - but there's no reason to worry about bank failures, no reason to rush to withdraw money, if you're guaranteed to get your money back.
It's not about force. You can't "print" bitcoins, because ...
It's always about force. When the dollar was gold-based, and FDR was pissing in the pool, he simply outlawed private ownership of gold. In previous centuries, the King would just send the army to the banks and take all the gold from the vaults. If you can't extract money from your population by force then you're not a government, because you lack the (effective) power to tax.
And so? An old fashioned FTP server was a useful thing. Onedrive and Dropbox and etc are just as useful.
You forgot "fraud protection", the gaping hole in BTC and the main reason people put up with the 2-3% Visa Tax on all transactions. But as soon as BTC is used in any way for consumer lending, the money supply increases by the amount of each loan.
I think the FDIC is only useful if your particular bank goes under.
Yes, it's useful for that (protection you don't have with a "Eurodollar" account - dollars deposited in a European bank). But it was created to prevent bank runs. The fact that you have that protection prevents the collapse of the entire banking system due to bank runs. That's kind of important.
The government can;t piss in the bitcoin pool (well atleast not as much), because it doesn;t have the power to print bitcoins.
The government always finds a way. Funny what you can get away with when you have a monopoly on force.
Banks can't magically create more physical dollar bills either! There's absolutely no difference.
A bank could entice someone to deposit 300 bitcoins in a CD by paying interest, then lend those 300 bitcoins to someone else to buy a house. Bang, money supply doubled. And if most of that 300 BTC ended up deposited in the banking system again, and loaned out again, well, you get an M1 that's about 10x the M0, like we have today.
I guess I was lucky that I was taught this stuff in high school. We did all this as a class exercise - do they really not teach this any more?
Something funny is going on, and lenders create money in the system by continually creating new debts that cannot physically be repaid.
I see you've mistaken what currency is for. It's the "most easily exchanged commodity" used to mediate barter. It's not for hoarding, because it has no value other than convenience, nor does it need to. Of course the debts can all be repaid - because the difference between the M1 and the M0 is money we've loaned one another in a network. If A loans $1 to B who loans it to C who loans it to D (and the money supply is just that $1), then those loans could certainly be repaid with that $1 in the reverse order of the loans, but the whole question is silly to begin with.
There's a group of people who just don't understand how money works: dollars don't have value, dollars measure value. The means of production have value. Goods produced and not yet consumed have value. It's quite OK that dollars are not suitable for hoarding!
You don't see how outlawing commonplace activities, then having the executive decide where to enforce the law (thus giving the power to arrest anyone at a whim) is dictatorial control? Selective enforcement is the tool of the tyrant.
Yup - top fuel is special. For any claims about engine power, it really matters where on the scale from "rebuilt every 3 minutes of operation" to "rebuilt every 300k miles" the engine lies.
You completely bypassed the point I was making.
The money supply has almost nothing to do with the amount of physical currency, because of fractional-reserve banking (and other games without handy names). Do you think inflation in America has anything to do with the umber of printed dollar bills in circulation?
For bitcoin to be mainstream, used by ordinary people for shopping, there will need to be BTC-denominated savings accounts, CDs, and credit cards (and likely insurance policies as well). In other words: fractional-reserve banking.
You can get insane power out of any engine, but you use up the engine quite fast. A topfuel engine (~8L) can have 1k HP just of parasitic loss to the supercharger, but still make 8-10,000 HP. Getting 1000-1250 HP/l happens everywhere topfuel is run, but there's a significant risk the engine won't even last 1/4 mile! (Or however long topfuel runs these days - they shortened the race as the cars had become overly dangerous.)
What impressive about this car is it's built for an endurance race: LeMans and a few others leading up to it. Anyone skilled can turn the turbo pressure up on an EVO engine, but getting it to run at power for 24 hours that way is something far more impressive.
Right - you're saying we don't have the rule of law in the US. I would agree completely. It would be great if we did, however.
Any currency that "goes mainstream" will include fractional reserve banking. Do you really think everyday shoppers will use a currency that you can't have a savings account or credit card for?
Why would you say fractional reserve banking is unsustainable? So far it has held up as well as any other currency idea that's been tried (though admittedly I wouldn't deposit too much w/o FDIC backing). Whatever currency you use, the government will eventually find some way to piss in the pool, because that's what governments do.
For all the trash that gets talked about Texas in this regard, it barely registers here, and only for some sort of "Responsive Ed charter school" that a Texan might explain better - sounds like it's not the normal school system.
Louisiana and Tennessee OTOH - ouch!
Some people think bitcoin is deflationary because there is a cap to the supply. That's naive of course - the money supply has little to do with the amount of physical currency, and everything to do with fractional reserve banking. But then, people make the same mistake about gold. For bitcoin to "go mainstream" there would need to be BTC-denominated savings accounts and CDs, meaning fractional reserve banking would be happening (well, 0-reserve banking would be happening, but USD is the same way).
This is really monumental IMO - not because of bitcoin per se, but because the government is finally realizing that if the law already covers X, you don't need new laws for X on the internet. It's about time,
Yes, all quite true. I was merely highlighting that the rule of law is a good ideal to aspire to, not claiming that we had it today in America. The growing trend under by current and former presidents to simply ignore or change laws by "executive order" was proof enough of that, even before the NSA scandal.
You should be able to get away with doing something bad "merely" by following all the relevant laws, because the other way of doing things leads inevitably to dictatorial control of the state (what power has the legislative branch when laws don't matter?).
Hey now, are you saying that the same old thing on the internet isn't new and patent-worthy? Heresy!
You were sarcastic, but that is the whole freaking point of the rule of law: a list of rules such that, if you follow those rules, you won't be arrested. It makes for a far better society than one where you can be arrested whenever you annoy someone important, regardless of the rules.
When Slashdot was very young, before we had a mode system, the was an article on "the four horsemen of the internet apocalypse": that our rights online were sure to erode in the name of fighting terrorism, CP, hacking, and/or drug dealing. Wow, that was an amazing prediction - if we include "torrenting ripped media" in hacking, that's been right on target. I hadn't been understanding the "drug dealing" part until the Silk Road bust, but sure enough.
This is why I resist giving the government any special power only to be used in extremes - excuses are so readily available that "extremes" becomes commonplace in a few years. And whatever the real motivation for the various TOR busts, WikiLeaks is effectively dead now as a result, with their TOR service is gone.
You can certainly see the FBI wanting TOR just strong enough to leak information from the Iranian government safely, but not strong enough to leak information about the US government safely. Sad that it seems to have come to that.
I don't care at all if Google "tracks my searches," since they're tracking most of my web habits anyhow via all their cleverness and ad networks. There's no escaping that. But I don't need to hand them a real-world identity to connect all that stuff to, or an easy way to connect me-on-one-machine with me-on-another.
So stop using gmail. When it was new it was special - clean simple webmail. Those days are long past. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Some people like Yahoo mail. Neither company does the ubiquitous tracking and analysis that Google does.
COBOL had a lot of traction with business programming too. Didn't make it pleasant to program in.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it
In many ways Java is the new COBOL, not because of language features (though the same fortyCharacterColobesqueVariableNames are common) but because all the same old boring stuff that used to be done in COBOL is now done in Java.
I'm careful to ensure the word "Java" doesn't appear on my resume, not because the language is all that bad (though the lack of modern list processing really gets old), but because I never want to write an inventory database, or a payroll program, or a SCM/CRM/ERP system - or anything with an Oracle DB involved, really.
Could you say that again, except coherently this time?
Libertarianism is an attempt to solve the problem of providing safety and basic social order with the minimum possible government that gets the job done. It's an optimization exercise. There's very little agreement on what that looks like, exactly, but widespread agreement that fraud prevention and contact enforcement (and some sort of criminal justice system) are part of it.
Anarchism is the claim that we can have safety and basic social order with no central leadership at all (anarchy means "no leader", not "no laws"). I view this like Marxist communism: cool idea, wrong species.
Well, that depends of whether your goal is "great" or "not awful". If you're content with "not awful", you could make this work. QT does an OK job of looking like a native app on each platform is runs on. At least all the UI widgets are the ones you're used to.
Really, with a bit of refinement and well-funded usability testing, I think you could get something pretty good. E.g., for "wizards" (multi-page dialogs), a bit of hinting about what controls really need to be on the same screen would be enough; let the library "cut the scroll" into individual pages.
I see you crossing the line from "libertarian" to "anarchist" if you don't see a legitimate role in the government preventing this sort of collusion. Much like there are rules on all the commodities exchanges, backed by laws, that prevent collusion to corner the market in any given commodity. It's a very minimal low-touch sort of role for the government to prevent this sort of thing.
Had this been 2 small companies no one cares about colluding, I wouldn't see much problem either, but this is a non-trivial portion of all software jobs in the valley, enough to distort the market. This is exactly why you're not allowed to control more than 10% (or whatever it is, but I think that's right) of a specific commodity contract.