Inflation is a measure of what money can buy. All the money and all the things. You might care about the price of food, or fuel, but this mostly depends not on the value of money, but on production and demand. You probably don't care about the price of land or battleships, or whole corporations, but these things money buys also.
The FED cares about the global supply of money, and what it can buy, not the price of consumer goods (thank goodness, that is what consumer protection agencies are for, not an institution devoted to macroeconomic adjustments!)
A country is not an individual. It is sovereign. It can decide not to pay its debt, just like that. The interest it usually pays reflects the risk of that happening in the eyes of the lender, and this is all.
So a country can default, and this happens. But a country can't go bust, this is the big difference.
Many, many defaults occurred through inflation, and only very little of them led to hyper-inflation. It is very difficult to actually cause hyper inflation. In a depression, when the rates are as close to 0 as you can make them, bonds and cash are equally liquid.
While people actually believe there will be no inflation, they will buy your bonds at the crazy low rates -- such as now. And you can keep pumping money in the system without creating inflation -- even if you would like to!
In fact, this is the greatest challenge of the FED these days, they need to avoid deflation, but don't seem to be able to manage it.
It only matters that the debt goes up proportionately to the GDP. Whether it goes up or down in absolute terms is completely irrelevant. Once the people obsessed with making other people's lives miserable understand that, we might get something.
Basically, if you decided to stop the government, and only use tax only to pay the debt, you would soon have no debt, and no economy either.
He is saying (and is right) that a free market is not a philosophical construct. It is a very well defined concept. It also cannot exist for very long without external interference.
By the government, whose role it is to keep the market free and undistorted, because "the market" can't do that on its own.
No. He is wrong. He (like you apparently) assumes there is one team, and some sort of hierarchy, and that developer resources are attributed arbitrarily.
This is wrong, and ignorance is not a valid point of view.
Oh, you can pick and choose, in the sense that you are free of your choices. However, your choices stay constrained by what is technologically possible: ontology based content searching cannot work without file indexing and SPARQL-like access to information. To display your mails/news/contacts across devices requires a consistent, more generic backend -- which is not so useful when you only use a stand-alone mailer on the desktop.
If you want to get "the file attached by X on one of his last week's email" -- which is to me a highly useful use-case -- you basically need your whole desktop integrated, with all manners of as-of-yet unproven technology. Now of course you can pick and choose, but you will only get meh software, the point of which will elude you.
And then you bitch about the fact that they wanted _this_ feature and not _that_ feature (_that_ feature is a load of crap, you say). And the dev who had found a clever way of providing both features in an integrated, generic way becomes sad, depressed, and goes to work for MS (people still hate him, but at least the pay is good).
It's a bit of a philosophical point, about progress and change. Basically, when some new thing becomes possible, it probably became possible because some resources got devoted to it. These resources are therefore no longer available for the things previously possible, which get crowded out. It is a very Human thing to lament those things gone, and fail to appreciate that the new stuff is, all things considered, a better compromise.
The die-hard KDE3 users are a bit like that: they had found the ultimate desktop, and the rug was pulled under their feet. Of course the desktop they like is still there, and KDE4 can do all that KDE3 could -- and even look like it. But it does more, and thus consumes more resources, in terms of computing power, but also in terms of user attention (in that you will see the new stuff). Overall (in my opinion), what the users get to do with their time is more, but I have no measure of that. If it happened that you do not want to try the new things, the desktop becomes worse (though frankly not by much).
I think the opensource community has grown larger, and the old farts (amongst which I suspect I am -- I had a low 5 digit slashdot account, a long time ago) as a reaction to the influx of new blood have become more conservative. This is sad, because it used to be that the Technically Right Thing(TM) would be admired, and leeway was given to those who tried new things.
But why? GNOME exists for you. Use it. What is the point of inventing a jet engine, if you really just want to go to the grocer's store two blocks away?
Some of us use the advanced features, the directory view plasmoid, the integrated search, the file dialogue and its remote capabilities, the tabbed window managing and so on. Different users have different needs.
Progress, technology and infrastructure are not pick-and choose propositions. You get the whole package, good and bad, or nothing. If you want no change, you get no change, and soon enough, no improvement either. This is fine, but then don't get envious of those that took the leap.
As the interface of KDE4 is far more streamlined than the interface of KDE3, I call bullshit on your "I can't stand KDE4". In reality, you can't stand KDE in general -- but you probably thought it more effective to bash the 4 version.
As for design and workflow... Let us just say some of us use our desktops [1], and some of us either are clueless or use only their xterms anyway. In the second case, they should switch to using konsole over gterm -- but as WM, they probably use ratpoison.
[1] the faceted search in the latest beta's dolphin is brilliant, the kio-slaves have always been great (KDE has the best file dialog in the whole of computing, bar none), the runners are great (seriously, I used to use google for my unit conversion, but not anymore), kile is the best LaTeX editor on any platform. Kdevelop has become a great IDE for c++. The notification system is unobtrusive, tells you what is going on, and keeps the messages. The directory viewer plasmoid is seriously cool: pre-filtered views of arbitrary local and remote location? Kmail, for all its flaws is the only not-annoying mailer I know of.
"They" did not decide anything. Because "they" are different groups of developers working along in the same community, but doing completely different stuff. You clearly have no idea how open source works (in fact how software development works: I don't think the guys responsible for MS Office consult much with the guys responsible for the media player component of windows...) And you hide your fundamental ignorance under the usage of technical-sounding acronyms.
As for the 3 DBs...
1) you can configure each of these applications to use the system one if you so wish 2) memory overhead is tiny, so you could argue that the extra robustness could be worth it 3) your comment is akin to saying "I will not use this app, because it was coded by a vegetarian, and I think this is abhorrent". This is not even broken logic, it is no logic at all. 4) do you think flat files would be better? Do you _know_? No clearly, you just spout ignorant opinions.
>What if other governments are simply more efficient than our government? All of them? You guys must really suck.
>What about the fact that healthcare isn't really a free "private" market in the US since it is heavily regulated? So? The system is still less efficient. More regulated systems are more efficient.
>What about private implementations that actual allow for competition instead of "insurance company negotiated rates"? How would that magically happen? Insurances are going to become non-profit overnight?
>What about differences in citizen lifestyle or country size? UK lifestyle is more unhealthy than US lifestyle (amazing isn't it? They eat as much junk and drink more). Country size is irrelevant, we are comparing GDP percentages. Note also that US GDP per capita is very high.
>What about any number of extraneous factors and countless variable that matter a whole hell of alot when judging a massive system? That skew the result by a factor 2? Every socialised system is better. Every last one of them. And they are all completely different. So odds are, the common factor (they are public/socialised) is the explanation.
Also it makes sense, because private health care is exactly like legalised mugging (wanna live? pay up) so the alternative _has_ to be better, even for very large degrees of corruption and inefficiency (which experience tells us stays pretty low: doctors and nurses usually try to help people).
The process of hiring, for an employer, and finding a job, for a prospective employee is hard to optimise. Probably, everyone has a dream job which is just right for him and his employer. However finding it would take an ungodly amount of time. Conversely, taking the first available job is probably neither really good for you nor your employer: odds are, you are not a perfect match:)
Empirically, when all goes well, about 5% people are unemployed. They will find their jobs in a sufficiently short amount of time, and be a good match for their employer. At 2%, the employees should be happy, but the economy suffers because the matches are not very good: the employer has to take the first available candidate -- for whom also it might not be the best job. At 8%, the employers should be happy, but the economy suffers because the employees have to take the first available job, which might not be the best fit in the economy.
Basically, if I take your perfect job, I can't have mine, because I have a job, and you can't have yours because it's taken. This means that the total output of the economy is diminished by the mismatch of two jobs.
Again, the 5% number comes from empirical observation. It seems to correspond, for the US market to the number which allows the best match of employers and employees.
You practise what you preach? Then good for you. You are wrong, but hey, one has to learn the hard way, I guess. And your morals clearly have everything to do with it, otherwise you would do away with the preachy lazy American talk. And the fetish about manufacturing (clearly India cannot grow: they are going the service route...).
Oh, the US is headed the wrong way, but mostly because of dismal infrastructure, poor social safety net, falling education standards (not higher education, though -- but the US citizens are not really the ones benefiting). In fact because of gov under-intervention.
For a hater of gov intervention, having businesses in Germany and China is hilarious. Clearly, you hate statists societies, but spend your life making them richer.
Hedging your bets, I guess. One of us has a consistent understanding of the world -- and it isn't you.
But you should follow you own advice, and buy lots of gold. In fact, you should borrow as many dollars as you can for that. Because if you are right, you will become a multi-billionaire in no time, due to the FED policy.
If you don't, well, that makes you a hypocrite. As if saying the market is right when pricing gold and wrong when pricing bonds was not ridiculous enough.
Magical thought reigns. Someone who does not understand the difference between price and utility explains his view of the world. And of course it makes no sense.
I always thought that the people who wanted to go back to the 19th were absurd strawmen. Clearly not: you guys exist.
Oh and The Government Lies To Us ('cause disturbing facts must be lies).
Think: Japan has debt of 200% its GDP, prints lots of money, borrows at nearly 0%, and regular bouts of deflation. How is that possible in your world?
And yes, utility is born from nothing: just imagination and work. Money is just a token representation of it.
Fact: France and the UK spend half what the US spends on health, they get better outcome. Their systems might be inefficient, but compared to the US version, they are crazy good...
And since these are more or less the alternative, I think it is clear what works best.
You seem to fear hyperinflation. Worry not, the US will end up like Japan: high debt, high unemployment, no inflation. Of course, it will be worse, because the social safety net in the US is much weaker. But hey, you approve of that, no?
You seem to think the gold standard is a good idea. It is not. There are no reason whatsoever to think that the availability of an ore can be magically adjusted to fit the economy's need.
You seem to think China is a freer market than the US: HAHAHAHAHA. Seriously, person.
For your edification, imagine the following. A tiny universe. it has a bank, a central bank and a worker.
The worker needs one unit of credit to produce two units of value. He starts off with nothing, and goes to the bank to borrow the unit. The bank has nothing and goes to the central bank to borrow the unit. The central bank prints the unit and emits one unit of debt. the bank lends the unit to the worker, who produces. He puts the product in the bank, who does not reimburse the central bank, but rather buys the debt, and uses that to further borrow something to lend to the worker, who produces. Note that the net of the two banks is 0, the worker has produced four, two of which went to the bank. The money in circulation is 4, only two of which were printed. There was no inflation, which is not desirable -- but hey:)
This is how value gets created out of nothing (actually, out of work and creativity). because in the end, money is created as the economy grows, and it doesn't matter. Only the actual goods and services produced (and consumed -- the system breaks down if the worker's work is not used up: a demand shock). Debt is irrelevant: in this example, riches are added to the system at the same rate as debt, but the ratio of debt to riches is constant.
Money is just a convenient counter for value. Nothing else. Fiat money is so much more flexible and convenient than gold it's not funny. Why would you want to prevent the amount of bills to grow with the economy rather than with the production of gold? This makes no sense.
Shorter: I don't believe in progress, thus I believe a policy of disguised mass murder is expedient and fair. I have rarely seen a Libertarian so ready to admit to its bloodthirsty instincts.
About the debt ceiling: any value given in absolute numbers is temporary and absurd. Enough damage has been done because it was thought that the T-word would be too frightening.
If I could borrow at the rates the US can, I would, because an investment which brings more than 2% is easy to find. In fact, it would criminal of the US gov not to borrow as much as it could given the current circumstances: people are literally paying to carry US debt.
About the trade imbalance (there, you give another meaningless number: %GDP, or you are talking out of your fear-mongering ass), pray tell, if we were all to export, to which planet would that be?
Also, you do realise that if the US pays down its debt, on a global level, there is less money to go around? It is impossible for everyone to simultaneously wind down debt, unless the economy expands by the amount of the wind-down. Which is highly unlikely (in fact impossible), because everyone winding down is strongly contractionary. I'll let you think about that.
shorter: business got the right to fuck up the market which it did. This proves government intervention is detrimental.
a) Markets for health make no sense: your granny is sick, how much is her life worth to you? How many other grannies will you price out of the market?
b) Saying that the "NHS provides the same thing for a lower price" as an argument in favour of the free market makes no sense. Saying it further proves government intervention is detrimental is silly.
c) In a free market, all products for which people will pay for are available. Notably insurances, this is a requisite for a perfect market, BTW. Thus people will pay for insurance which covers doctor visits. This is desirable from a public health perspective: prevention is cheaper than cure. However, because there are no regulations on a market which cannot function properly (health) because of asymmetries of information, and because as I said above, a transaction in this market is legalised mugging, is fails horribly. Big surprise.
Libertarian ideal make for good science fiction, but terrible public policy decision.
Also, the thing about refreshing ideals with the blood of patriots was not meant to condone stupid policies that cause the death of innocent people: Freedom is not Moloch, despite what the Libertarian priests would have you believe.
this is irrelevant: this only means that the money earmarked for the system falls shot and that money needs to be transferred from other parts of the budget.
This is completely orthogonal to the amount of money actually spent on health care: half of what the US spends, for better outcomes.
Well done with your non-sequitur as an example of non faulty knowledge!
The fact is that the US health system costs 10 points of GDP more than socialised systems with better outcomes. So as far as efficiency goes, experience shows public health care is massively more efficient than private one.
And this is obvious: you cannot ask someone to decide objectively how much to spend on their health when their life is on the line. This is exactly equivalent to legal mugging.
Basically, you are arguing that 10% of US GDP (way more than the average deficit even with the Bush madness) is well spent just because instead of staying in the pockets of the people, goes to line the pockets of private companies? For no benefit to the public at all? Because you are not getting better outcomes, you are not getting better innovation, you are not getting more employment. You do get better catering, but if you think hospitals should be run as glorified hotels you need to look up on what is expected of a hospital.
No they won't. By then, only utter idiots will buy macs, because only utter idiots would buy a computer on which you can only install approved programs. And apple will slip back into irrelevance. During the 90s, it lost because windows/the IBM PC was more open.
Random page. Just go through at random, and you will find the articles which should not be there.
And you know they should not be there, because they contain no information, or are a terrible idea in themselves. For example: "Superiority of the Western Culture" is a terrible idea for an article. "My Widget Which I Am Trying To Sell" is another terrible example. "My Webcomic" (three entries and I am working towards a fourth) is yet another article which should not be there.
This is due to ever-increasing inequality. Arguably, it is precisely because the rates on the rich have gone down that they pay a larger proportion of all the taxes: the redistributive function of taxes is disappearing... Redistribution is not a matter of taking money from the rich to give it to the poor. Instead, it is about building an infrastructure and basic services used by all. That way, Society is structured in a way that the starting point in life matters less than how good you are at creating value from the common infrastructure. And you should feel compelled to contribute back to it.
And that being rich to begin with in necessary to be able to use the common infrastructure does not bode well for the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Inflation is a measure of what money can buy. All the money and all the things. You might care about the price of food, or fuel, but this mostly depends not on the value of money, but on production and demand. You probably don't care about the price of land or battleships, or whole corporations, but these things money buys also.
The FED cares about the global supply of money, and what it can buy, not the price of consumer goods (thank goodness, that is what consumer protection agencies are for, not an institution devoted to macroeconomic adjustments!)
A country is not an individual. It is sovereign. It can decide not to pay its debt, just like that. The interest it usually pays reflects the risk of that happening in the eyes of the lender, and this is all.
So a country can default, and this happens. But a country can't go bust, this is the big difference.
Insightful? an ignorant talking point.
Many, many defaults occurred through inflation, and only very little of them led to hyper-inflation. It is very difficult to actually cause hyper inflation. In a depression, when the rates are as close to 0 as you can make them, bonds and cash are equally liquid.
While people actually believe there will be no inflation, they will buy your bonds at the crazy low rates -- such as now. And you can keep pumping money in the system without creating inflation -- even if you would like to!
In fact, this is the greatest challenge of the FED these days, they need to avoid deflation, but don't seem to be able to manage it.
It only matters that the debt goes up proportionately to the GDP. Whether it goes up or down in absolute terms is completely irrelevant. Once the people obsessed with making other people's lives miserable understand that, we might get something.
Basically, if you decided to stop the government, and only use tax only to pay the debt, you would soon have no debt, and no economy either.
He is saying (and is right) that a free market is not a philosophical construct. It is a very well defined concept. It also cannot exist for very long without external interference.
By the government, whose role it is to keep the market free and undistorted, because "the market" can't do that on its own.
No. He is wrong. He (like you apparently) assumes there is one team, and some sort of hierarchy, and that developer resources are attributed arbitrarily.
This is wrong, and ignorance is not a valid point of view.
Oh, you can pick and choose, in the sense that you are free of your choices. However, your choices stay constrained by what is technologically possible: ontology based content searching cannot work without file indexing and SPARQL-like access to information. To display your mails/news/contacts across devices requires a consistent, more generic backend -- which is not so useful when you only use a stand-alone mailer on the desktop.
If you want to get "the file attached by X on one of his last week's email" -- which is to me a highly useful use-case -- you basically need your whole desktop integrated, with all manners of as-of-yet unproven technology. Now of course you can pick and choose, but you will only get meh software, the point of which will elude you.
And then you bitch about the fact that they wanted _this_ feature and not _that_ feature (_that_ feature is a load of crap, you say). And the dev who had found a clever way of providing both features in an integrated, generic way becomes sad, depressed, and goes to work for MS (people still hate him, but at least the pay is good).
It's a bit of a philosophical point, about progress and change. Basically, when some new thing becomes possible, it probably became possible because some resources got devoted to it. These resources are therefore no longer available for the things previously possible, which get crowded out. It is a very Human thing to lament those things gone, and fail to appreciate that the new stuff is, all things considered, a better compromise.
The die-hard KDE3 users are a bit like that: they had found the ultimate desktop, and the rug was pulled under their feet. Of course the desktop they like is still there, and KDE4 can do all that KDE3 could -- and even look like it. But it does more, and thus consumes more resources, in terms of computing power, but also in terms of user attention (in that you will see the new stuff). Overall (in my opinion), what the users get to do with their time is more, but I have no measure of that. If it happened that you do not want to try the new things, the desktop becomes worse (though frankly not by much).
I think the opensource community has grown larger, and the old farts (amongst which I suspect I am -- I had a low 5 digit slashdot account, a long time ago) as a reaction to the influx of new blood have become more conservative. This is sad, because it used to be that the Technically Right Thing(TM) would be admired, and leeway was given to those who tried new things.
But why? GNOME exists for you. Use it. What is the point of inventing a jet engine, if you really just want to go to the grocer's store two blocks away?
Some of us use the advanced features, the directory view plasmoid, the integrated search, the file dialogue and its remote capabilities, the tabbed window managing and so on. Different users have different needs.
Progress, technology and infrastructure are not pick-and choose propositions. You get the whole package, good and bad, or nothing. If you want no change, you get no change, and soon enough, no improvement either. This is fine, but then don't get envious of those that took the leap.
As the interface of KDE4 is far more streamlined than the interface of KDE3, I call bullshit on your "I can't stand KDE4". In reality, you can't stand KDE in general -- but you probably thought it more effective to bash the 4 version.
As for design and workflow... Let us just say some of us use our desktops [1], and some of us either are clueless or use only their xterms anyway. In the second case, they should switch to using konsole over gterm -- but as WM, they probably use ratpoison.
[1] the faceted search in the latest beta's dolphin is brilliant, the kio-slaves have always been great (KDE has the best file dialog in the whole of computing, bar none), the runners are great (seriously, I used to use google for my unit conversion, but not anymore), kile is the best LaTeX editor on any platform. Kdevelop has become a great IDE for c++. The notification system is unobtrusive, tells you what is going on, and keeps the messages. The directory viewer plasmoid is seriously cool: pre-filtered views of arbitrary local and remote location? Kmail, for all its flaws is the only not-annoying mailer I know of.
You, sir, are ignorant.
"They" did not decide anything. Because "they" are different groups of developers working along in the same community, but doing completely different stuff. You clearly have no idea how open source works (in fact how software development works: I don't think the guys responsible for MS Office consult much with the guys responsible for the media player component of windows...) And you hide your fundamental ignorance under the usage of technical-sounding acronyms.
As for the 3 DBs...
1) you can configure each of these applications to use the system one if you so wish
2) memory overhead is tiny, so you could argue that the extra robustness could be worth it
3) your comment is akin to saying "I will not use this app, because it was coded by a vegetarian, and I think this is abhorrent". This is not even broken logic, it is no logic at all.
4) do you think flat files would be better? Do you _know_? No clearly, you just spout ignorant opinions.
>What if other governments are simply more efficient than our government?
All of them? You guys must really suck.
>What about the fact that healthcare isn't really a free "private" market in the US since it is heavily regulated?
So? The system is still less efficient. More regulated systems are more efficient.
>What about private implementations that actual allow for competition instead of "insurance company negotiated rates"?
How would that magically happen? Insurances are going to become non-profit overnight?
>What about differences in citizen lifestyle or country size?
UK lifestyle is more unhealthy than US lifestyle (amazing isn't it? They eat as much junk and drink more). Country size is irrelevant, we are comparing GDP percentages. Note also that US GDP per capita is very high.
>What about any number of extraneous factors and countless variable that matter a whole hell of alot when judging a massive system?
That skew the result by a factor 2? Every socialised system is better. Every last one of them. And they are all completely different. So odds are, the common factor (they are public/socialised) is the explanation.
Also it makes sense, because private health care is exactly like legalised mugging (wanna live? pay up) so the alternative _has_ to be better, even for very large degrees of corruption and inefficiency (which experience tells us stays pretty low: doctors and nurses usually try to help people).
The process of hiring, for an employer, and finding a job, for a prospective employee is hard to optimise. Probably, everyone has a dream job which is just right for him and his employer. However finding it would take an ungodly amount of time. Conversely, taking the first available job is probably neither really good for you nor your employer: odds are, you are not a perfect match :)
Empirically, when all goes well, about 5% people are unemployed. They will find their jobs in a sufficiently short amount of time, and be a good match for their employer. At 2%, the employees should be happy, but the economy suffers because the matches are not very good: the employer has to take the first available candidate -- for whom also it might not be the best job. At 8%, the employers should be happy, but the economy suffers because the employees have to take the first available job, which might not be the best fit in the economy.
Basically, if I take your perfect job, I can't have mine, because I have a job, and you can't have yours because it's taken. This means that the total output of the economy is diminished by the mismatch of two jobs.
Again, the 5% number comes from empirical observation. It seems to correspond, for the US market to the number which allows the best match of employers and employees.
You practise what you preach? Then good for you. You are wrong, but hey, one has to learn the hard way, I guess. And your morals clearly have everything to do with it, otherwise you would do away with the preachy lazy American talk. And the fetish about manufacturing (clearly India cannot grow: they are going the service route...).
Oh, the US is headed the wrong way, but mostly because of dismal infrastructure, poor social safety net, falling education standards (not higher education, though -- but the US citizens are not really the ones benefiting). In fact because of gov under-intervention.
For a hater of gov intervention, having businesses in Germany and China is hilarious. Clearly, you hate statists societies, but spend your life making them richer.
Hedging your bets, I guess. One of us has a consistent understanding of the world -- and it isn't you.
You confuse your morals with economic mechanisms.
But you should follow you own advice, and buy lots of gold. In fact, you should borrow as many dollars as you can for that. Because if you are right, you will become a multi-billionaire in no time, due to the FED policy.
If you don't, well, that makes you a hypocrite. As if saying the market is right when pricing gold and wrong when pricing bonds was not ridiculous enough.
Magical thought reigns. Someone who does not understand the difference between price and utility explains his view of the world. And of course it makes no sense.
I always thought that the people who wanted to go back to the 19th were absurd strawmen. Clearly not: you guys exist.
Oh and The Government Lies To Us ('cause disturbing facts must be lies).
Think: Japan has debt of 200% its GDP, prints lots of money, borrows at nearly 0%, and regular bouts of deflation. How is that possible in your world?
And yes, utility is born from nothing: just imagination and work. Money is just a token representation of it.
Fact: France and the UK spend half what the US spends on health, they get better outcome. Their systems might be inefficient, but compared to the US version, they are crazy good...
And since these are more or less the alternative, I think it is clear what works best.
No, the 19th and 20th centuries were essentially the same in terms of wealth creation:
actual history of the increase in wealth in the US over two centuries
You seem to fear hyperinflation. Worry not, the US will end up like Japan: high debt, high unemployment, no inflation. Of course, it will be worse, because the social safety net in the US is much weaker. But hey, you approve of that, no?
You seem to think the gold standard is a good idea. It is not. There are no reason whatsoever to think that the availability of an ore can be magically adjusted to fit the economy's need.
You seem to think China is a freer market than the US: HAHAHAHAHA. Seriously, person.
For your edification, imagine the following. A tiny universe. it has a bank, a central bank and a worker.
The worker needs one unit of credit to produce two units of value. He starts off with nothing, and goes to the bank to borrow the unit. The bank has nothing and goes to the central bank to borrow the unit. The central bank prints the unit and emits one unit of debt. the bank lends the unit to the worker, who produces. He puts the product in the bank, who does not reimburse the central bank, but rather buys the debt, and uses that to further borrow something to lend to the worker, who produces. Note that the net of the two banks is 0, the worker has produced four, two of which went to the bank. The money in circulation is 4, only two of which were printed. There was no inflation, which is not desirable -- but hey :)
This is how value gets created out of nothing (actually, out of work and creativity). because in the end, money is created as the economy grows, and it doesn't matter. Only the actual goods and services produced (and consumed -- the system breaks down if the worker's work is not used up: a demand shock). Debt is irrelevant: in this example, riches are added to the system at the same rate as debt, but the ratio of debt to riches is constant.
Money is just a convenient counter for value. Nothing else. Fiat money is so much more flexible and convenient than gold it's not funny. Why would you want to prevent the amount of bills to grow with the economy rather than with the production of gold? This makes no sense.
Shorter: I don't believe in progress, thus I believe a policy of disguised mass murder is expedient and fair. I have rarely seen a Libertarian so ready to admit to its bloodthirsty instincts.
About the debt ceiling: any value given in absolute numbers is temporary and absurd. Enough damage has been done because it was thought that the T-word would be too frightening.
If I could borrow at the rates the US can, I would, because an investment which brings more than 2% is easy to find. In fact, it would criminal of the US gov not to borrow as much as it could given the current circumstances: people are literally paying to carry US debt.
About the trade imbalance (there, you give another meaningless number: %GDP, or you are talking out of your fear-mongering ass), pray tell, if we were all to export, to which planet would that be?
Also, you do realise that if the US pays down its debt, on a global level, there is less money to go around? It is impossible for everyone to simultaneously wind down debt, unless the economy expands by the amount of the wind-down. Which is highly unlikely (in fact impossible), because everyone winding down is strongly contractionary. I'll let you think about that.
WTF?
shorter: business got the right to fuck up the market which it did. This proves government intervention is detrimental.
a) Markets for health make no sense: your granny is sick, how much is her life worth to you? How many other grannies will you price out of the market?
b) Saying that the "NHS provides the same thing for a lower price" as an argument in favour of the free market makes no sense. Saying it further proves government intervention is detrimental is silly.
c) In a free market, all products for which people will pay for are available. Notably insurances, this is a requisite for a perfect market, BTW. Thus people will pay for insurance which covers doctor visits. This is desirable from a public health perspective: prevention is cheaper than cure. However, because there are no regulations on a market which cannot function properly (health) because of asymmetries of information, and because as I said above, a transaction in this market is legalised mugging, is fails horribly. Big surprise.
Libertarian ideal make for good science fiction, but terrible public policy decision.
Also, the thing about refreshing ideals with the blood of patriots was not meant to condone stupid policies that cause the death of innocent people: Freedom is not Moloch, despite what the Libertarian priests would have you believe.
this is irrelevant: this only means that the money earmarked for the system falls shot and that money needs to be transferred from other parts of the budget.
This is completely orthogonal to the amount of money actually spent on health care: half of what the US spends, for better outcomes.
Well done with your non-sequitur as an example of non faulty knowledge!
The fact is that the US health system costs 10 points of GDP more than socialised systems with better outcomes. So as far as efficiency goes, experience shows public health care is massively more efficient than private one.
And this is obvious: you cannot ask someone to decide objectively how much to spend on their health when their life is on the line. This is exactly equivalent to legal mugging.
Basically, you are arguing that 10% of US GDP (way more than the average deficit even with the Bush madness) is well spent just because instead of staying in the pockets of the people, goes to line the pockets of private companies? For no benefit to the public at all? Because you are not getting better outcomes, you are not getting better innovation, you are not getting more employment. You do get better catering, but if you think hospitals should be run as glorified hotels you need to look up on what is expected of a hospital.
You fail at basic logic and basic knowledge.
No they won't. By then, only utter idiots will buy macs, because only utter idiots would buy a computer on which you can only install approved programs. And apple will slip back into irrelevance. During the 90s, it lost because windows/the IBM PC was more open.
Now History repeats itself.
The Poisson ratio of water is 0.499975, which is not nearly close enough to 0.5 to be acceptable.
Random page. Just go through at random, and you will find the articles which should not be there.
And you know they should not be there, because they contain no information, or are a terrible idea in themselves. For example: "Superiority of the Western Culture" is a terrible idea for an article. "My Widget Which I Am Trying To Sell" is another terrible example. "My Webcomic" (three entries and I am working towards a fourth) is yet another article which should not be there.
This is due to ever-increasing inequality. Arguably, it is precisely because the rates on the rich have gone down that they pay a larger proportion of all the taxes: the redistributive function of taxes is disappearing... Redistribution is not a matter of taking money from the rich to give it to the poor. Instead, it is about building an infrastructure and basic services used by all. That way, Society is structured in a way that the starting point in life matters less than how good you are at creating value from the common infrastructure. And you should feel compelled to contribute back to it.
And that being rich to begin with in necessary to be able to use the common infrastructure does not bode well for the future.