A civil marriage takes about 5 minutes, what would you gain from automation?
- efficiency. Fewer people are required in total, because 5 minutes time means what, 12 certificates an hour with highest human efficiency? I don't think it takes 5 minutes BTW., it easily will take 20 minutes for sure. Why does it take that long? Fill out the form on line and have it done automagically in microseconds, then the certificate is printed and sent out, all automated.
The fewer humans are involved in everything that government does, the less spending is required, and even if 100 architects/developers are involved in building this stuff, how many tens of thousands of positions can be relieved of human workers? It's excellent, get rid of as many humans from government as possible, have the cases start and end on line, only the most difficult ones need to go to a human judge, and even this needs to be eliminated.
If you can't have an algorithm deciding a case, you can't have a human deciding it either.
I've seen plenty of bullshit both, from employers but also from employees in my time and I can easily imagine that this guy does not in fact have "company's full support". He might have asked one of the managers and gotten an 'OK', but that does not equate to full support, etc., as it's unlikely this went through the legal department and the higher management.
The guy says he spent 2 years building his framework while working for the company for 5 years. It's most likely that he built this 'framework' as part of the project that he worked on for the company. The most likely explanation to this story is that the higher management found out about him releasing the code under a Free license and enforced their copyright (and if it's written under contract for a project that company pays for, it's likely he signed away his copyright.)
If the guy does not have copyright, he can't release the code under any license, it's not his code to release.
I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years. During the last 2 years of that time, I created a simple web framework and contributed it to open source. We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor! Recently I found out that they have removed all of the licenses from the files (GPL and MIT), gave it a silly name, and have the intention of marketing it as a product. What should I do? I am trying to get past the fact that I am upset that I was terminated â" that pissed me off â" but the fact that they are taking credit for my work and making it proprietary is really bothering me! What should I do?
I just might have found the reason for your termination. Were you doing things that went beyond what your employer allowed you to do? You were employed and you were so called 'contributing' code under GPL without your employer explicit permission to do this, and from the text it looks like you have so called 'contributed' the code that you wrote for your employer.
This is like saying: I took this guys stuff and 'contributed' it for the good of the public, but I didn't ask the guy if he is OK with it and now he is forcing everybody to return the stuff I 'contributed' to him and he called the cops. I am really pissed off, what should I do?
Yeah, I think I did find the reason for your termination.
The couple wrote the 'computer program' to marry them on their own background, I suppose it was just a document that was read by a voice generator, or something of that sort. But they did it because they couldn't find a minister to do the work, but they will still have to have 'justice of the peace' sign the papers. This brings up a good question: why not automate this type of work away and cut some spending this way? Start small, with computer program marrying and signing licenses for couples, then move on to the traffic violations and petty infractions, landlord/tenant disputes, small debts and other small claims, then misdemeanors and restraining orders, etc.
With computers presiding over cases, there will be little chance of personal influence upon the justice, bribes, etc. Efficiency must go up, as cases can be looked at over the Internet, computers can work around the clock as well and they only require maintenance.
--
Of-course if this is done money can be saved, that's without a question, the only concern must be that it can't be Diebold, who writes this. It needs to be Free and free source software and even hardware. Integrity of elections is arguably more important than integrity of any particular computer system built to perform Justice of the Peace duties, but integrity of a virtual judge is more personal to the individuals involved in the cases.
I disagree, while the demand has increased in China, USA sees demand lower than it was 5 years ago directly because it is more expensive to buy energy with US dollars, so overall demand is changed very slightly, while the prices have gone up dramatically. This is not real demand that's driving prices up, it's artificial demand created by inflation, where more dollars are chasing the same supply.
What you are missing is that with increase in consumption in growing economies, the supply is also increasing - capitalism in action.
Just FYI. Yes, the so called ceiling is a ruse. The real problem is not what Congress thinks they should be able to borrow and spend, the real problem is what do those think, who give USA the credit and those who make the goods USA consumes.
Nobody would give a shit if the government did that.
Right, except for prices and bond values and thus interest rates, nobody would give a shit.
It might actually be a better solution to raising the debt ceiling.
- well, what's the difference? Either case it means US continues spending beyond what it can, there is no difference from spending POV.
The difference comes in terms of inflation. If US prints the cash, then it's inflation that originates in USA and has to be exported by exporting dollars. If US prints the Treasuries, then it has to sell them, and this will let a number of people around the world to offload their US dollars to the Treasury (of-course if they decide that it is a good move, rather than buying anything, aluminum, gold, silver, you name it, to offload the obviously worthless fiat.)
Besides, even if everybody else abandoned the dollar and started buying gold, you do know that Fort Knox is full of the stuff, right?
- assuming that there is gold there, that would be a move so stupid, en par with dumping the oil reserves that US did just a month or so ago.
If the dollar is plunging you don't want to get rid of your gold, you want to keep it. As to prices of gold - if US decides to sell its reserves, the prices won't go down. China will buy up every single last bar of it, as it's doing now even though it's also the world's largest producer of the stuff today. They know which way the wind is blowing.
Africa has been playing ground for all sorts of world governments, who wage their wars in Africa for the African resources. With that in mind I wouldn't call them utopias of any kind, never mind libertarian.
If you steal value of everybody's money via inflation you are US Congress and the White House and "saving the global economy".
Anybody with 2 brain cells knows US is inflating and has been ever since 1913. In 1921 this caused a depression. Starting from 1925 they inflated more to buy out UK debt, so in 1929 that caused an inflated agriculture bubble to burst, then from that time up until 1945 they were printing so much, the depression would never have ended but they finally let it go once the war ended and economy restructured, of-course US was in a position of virtual manufacturing monopoly for maybe 15 years past war, so that helped. By 1970 the spending grew so much (and wars were recognized to be profitable), that US couldn't stop inflating, so it defaulted on the promise to redeem dollars for gold in 71, since then the inflation has been rampant. But it really caught up starting from mid nineties, especially with the discount rate being 1% under Clinton and Greenspan and then 0% with Bush and Bernanke.
I put together a little chart showing how much commodities have gone up in their USD denominated prices from 2003 to 2010.
sugar Dec 2003: 20.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 36.97 cents/pound, price up by over 81% Beef Dec 2003: 105.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 193.00 cents/pound, price up by over 83% Barley Dec 2003: 100.77 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 208.70 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 107% Rice Dec 2003: 197.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 500.57 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 154% Cocoa Beans Dec 2003: 1,646.58 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 3,113.52 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 89% Tea Dec 2003: 205.22 cents/KG, Apr 2011: 325.33 cents/KG, price up by over 58% Rubber Dec 2003: 57.31cents/pound, Apr 2011: 265.49cents/pound, price up by over 363% Corn Dec 2003: 111.98 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 318.45 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 184% Bananas Dec 2003: 371.43 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 1,013.47 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 172% Propane Dec 2003: 0.63 USD/Gallon, Apr 2011: 1.45 USD/Gallon, price up by over 130% Wheat Dec 2003: 165.57 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 336.30 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 103% Oranges Dec 2003: 583.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 881.00 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 51% Salmon Dec 2003: 3.12 USD/Kg, Apr 2011: 7.86 USD/Kg, price up by over 151% Chicken Dec 2003: 68.98 cents/pound, Apr 201
Public schools definitely shouldn't be done by any governments. As to police and fire, this is up to localities. The only one that's left to the government is national defense, and it looks like they turned it into quite a profitable little enterprise, doesn't it?
They should do it, just the lulz value of it will exceed 5 Trillion in no time, never mind the value of gold, that will double in a heartbeat, as people run in panic out of all USD denominated assets.
Alan Mually's statement absolutely does not mean that Ford, as a business would have been worse off with GM and Chrysler going bankrupt. While Alan Mually is an excellent CEO for Ford, neither he, nor any business should be in a position to ask government for any money under any circumstances, and government must never be allowed to give money to private businesses, be it banks or otherwise.
Of-course you have what you have and that's why US economy is what it is.
Pretty sure health care is affordable if you stick to early 1900s standards of care. Good luck healing from an infection or surviving any kind of surgery.
Medical costs would be falling steadily without government money in the industry. Here is a comment, I don't want to repeat, which has data that compares insurance preferences of US consumers prior to 1965.
Nobody can argue that microprocessors are as complex today as they have ever been and they are similar in terms of investment costs to drug manufacturing. The heavy costs are all upfront, and then the product can be made relatively cheaply, the cost are recouped based on mass production. Person computers today are as cheap and as powerful as never before, prices are falling and industry is working on new designs and features, etc.
This should be exactly the case with health industry, but it is not specifically because government money is in it, with all the taxes and regulations and subsidies, the costs cannot go down as the market would have them. Nobody gets a TV subsidy, yet everybody has a TV or 2 or more, and costs are going down while features and quality are increasing.
Basically you can thank your government for terrible health and health insurance costs and low volume of innovation in those areas. --
Back to Ford: their CEO giving a speech absolutely does not mean that whatever he is saying is economic reality. His reasons for giving speeches are political, as all speeches are, and not economic. From POV of economics, Ford would have gained huge advantage if GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. While Mulally can talk about supply chain that he shares with those 2 companies, he was conveniently forgetting the rest of the car companies that are manufacturing in USA, though they are foreign companies, like Toyota, Honda, VW, BMW, etc., they also have supply chains and if push comes to shove deals can always be made, and Canadian Magna would only be too happy to supply Ford with everything it needs as well.
Ford and other manufacturers would have bought out the failed GM and Chrysler factories for pennies on the dollar and would have restored the capacity in their own vision. The way things are now, the people who got bailed out are unions and the investors got stiffed, US public owes the debt of those companies and those car makers will still go bankrupt anyway, as the reasons behind them going bankrupt are all still there.
The biggest myth of all in this regard is the notion that telephone service is a natural monopoly. Economists have taught generations of students that telephone service is a "classic" example of market failure and that government regulation in the "public interest" was necessary. But as Adam D. Thierer recently proved, there is nothing at all "natural about the telephone monopoly enjoyed by AT&T for so many decades; it was purely a creation of government intervention."
Once AT&T's initial patents expired in 1893, dozens of competitors sprung up. "By the end of 1894 over 80 new independent competitors had already grabbed 5 percent of total market share . . . after the turn of the century, over 3,000 competitors existed. In some states there were over 200 telephone companies operating simultaneously. By 1907, AT&T's competitors had captured 51 percent of the telephone market and prices were being driven sharply down by the competition. Moreover, there was no evidence of economies of scale, and entry barriers were obviously almost nonexistent, contrary to the standard account of the theory of natural monopoly as applied to the telephone industry"
The eventual creation of the telephone monopoly was the result of a conspiracy between AT&T and politicians who wanted to offer "universal telephone service" as a pork-barrel entitlement to their constituents. Politicians began denouncing competition as "duplicative," "destructive," and "wasteful," and various economists were paid to attend congressional hearings in which they somberly declared telephony a natural monopoly.
"There is nothing to be gained by competition in the local telephone business," one congressional hearing concluded.
The crusade to create a monopolistic telephone industry by govern- ment fiat finally succeeded when the federal government used World War I as a n excuse to nationalize the industry in 1918. AT&T still operated its phone system, but it was controlled by a government commission headed by the Postmaster General. Like so many other instances of government regulation, AT&T quickly "capturedn the regulators and used the regulatory apparatus to eliminate its competitors. "By 1925 not only had virtually every state established strict rate regulation guidelines, but local telephone competition was either discouraged or explicitly prohibited within many of those jurisdictions."
The complete demise of competition in the industry, Thierer con- cludes, was brought about by the following forces: exclusionary licensing policies; protected monopolies for "dominant carriers"; guaranteed revenues or regulated phone companies; the mandated government policy of "universal telephone entitlement" which called for a single provider to more easily carry out regulatory commands; and rate regulation designed to achieve the socialistic objective of "universal service."
That free-market competition was the source of the telephone monopoly in the early twentieth century is the biggest lie ever told by the economics profession. The free market never "failed"; it was government that failed to permit free-market competition as it concocted its corporatist scheme to the benefit of the phone companies, a t the expense of consumers and potential competitors.
Ridiculous assertion that Ford would have wanted his competitors to be bailed out by the government, no less, with all sorts of consequences arising from that.
If GM was allowed to fail, Ford could have probably cleaned the house, bought the assets at a fire-sale and have the factories operational in no time, probably filled with the same people, but under different conditions.
We are talking about Ford, a company that was paying its employees 5 dollars a day in early 19 hundreds, which means they were getting 25USD/week, or 1.25 ounces of gold, which is equivalent of about 2000USD/week today. That's tax free, as there were no income taxes. That's also in real money, not in today's garbage, so those employees could afford their own medical care, which was awfully cheap at the time, without government involvement, and they could retire on their own.
104000USD take home salary, considering the purchasing power of those dollars, that is definitely more than 200K today, maybe 250K. And that's without unions, without any government assistance, building the best cars in the world at the time.
Yeah, you need government. To steal everything you have.
The problem was government involvement into the entire operation.
Henry Ford paid his assembly line employees 5 dollars a day. That's 25 dollars a week. Given that 20 dollars was equal 1 ounce of gold, that's 1.25 ounces, or about 2000USD in today's prices.
Given that there were no income taxes at the time, those workers were actually getting that money into their pockets, they had stay at home wives and bunch of kids, they could support family on that money and Fords were affordable cars.
How much would a today's assembly line worker be getting as a salary to even come close, to what they were getting at the time?
Sure, they didn't have SS and Medicare, but they had extremely cheap health care, because there was no government money in it. Insurance was mostly for accidents, not for everyday treatments, so it was ridiculously cheap. Making 2000USD/week is about 104,000 USD a year, and without taxes it could be double that easy, probably more than double, considering there were no State income taxes either and houses and food were also extremely cheap.
Of-course those workers weren't part of any unions, but by today's standard, they were paid much more than anybody is in any union. Which union auto-worker makes over 250K today?
Government has more resources than a single individual, that is true, however government does not have more interest than any particular individual in any particular thing or property rights or anything, that deals with owning any asset, government is not an owner. A number of private individuals, all of who would suffer some consequences, if their property became poisoned would be a big enough force, especially given absence of government power, which would free up space for competing companies, who'd take the role of solving cases like this one, and the resources could be covered by insurance. So I disagree with your premise that government either can or is interested in dealing with anything of this sort, especially given what we have observed historically from governments.
US saw multiple oil spills, thousands in the Guelph of Mexico and other locations. More dictatorial government, like USSR and China saw huge technological catastrophes. It seems it does not matter what side of spectrum the government is supposedly on, it never finds a way to protect private property of its citizens from being destroyed, so I say forget the government, it's you, who is ultimately responsible for your private property.
And when you say about 'suspending the freedoms of those who break the law', I can't imagine why you would welcome a government doing it.
And again, you don't have to be a specialist farmer to eat greens, why would you have to be a specialist investigator/lawyer/enforcer to deal with these problems?
do you really expect me to drop my day job while I poke around a neighbour's private property to collect evidence of mercury poisoning
- I expect that as a property owner you would be much more concerned about this than any government ever would.
thus deem the onus of investigation/prosecution to be on society's collective representative - the executive and judicial branches of government.
- I disagree. It's your private property that is suffering, and then it's your neighbors private properties, and whoever has personal/business connections to those properties. That's how it has to be solved.
I am using PostgreSQL for my line of products, all in retail, would never consider Oracle based on cost and ability to talk to support in IRC online at any time.
Can you explain to me how you are supposed to deal with all of the same exact problem you listed when there is government and regulations, how exactly does it make it ANY easier to find out what happened exactly, who dumped what where, if it was done on purpose by somebody to spoil your water?
What, does government have a magic power to pinpoint who exactly decided to be the 'terrorist' this time around? Because if history shows anything, it's that government is very terrible at this sort of thing, first, figuring out who did what, second actually coming up with a sensible way of dealing with it.
No, having private competing owners would be much better in this case, because more people with property, and thus something to lose would be involved.
That's a limitation of the free market - it will never tie the cost of a car to the costs of the effects of driving a car. There is no feedback mechanism unless the government interferes. Dead and maimed people cost the economy billions in health care, lost productivity, and wasted education and experience.
- that's a misunderstanding. There are 2 ways to get liability
1. Private insurance. 2. Court system.
That's all it takes, and it doesn't even require government involvement (and I think all of it would be better without government involvement.)
The feedback mechanism is through the court system, the costs should be covered by private insurance.
As to air pollution - nobody wants to breath polluted air, but only wealthy economies can take care of pollution. So the poorer the economy is, the less likely it is to take care of any pollution, air, water, ground, it doesn't matter, all of it doesn't matter if people don't have the food. The wealthier the economy becomes, the more likely it is to start bothering with the conditions of the surrounding environment, and of-course none of the assets should be owned by the government, because we all know how 'good' governments are at owning stuff. They are not owners, they don't care. That's why there were liability caps on deep water oil drilling set at around 70Million dollars, which is ridiculous and shouldn't have ever existed.
How is it moot? The highways exist, like it or not. Even if we shut off subsidy to highways, they would still exist for a long, long time. Most would probably live on as toll roads. Turning off the highway subsidy will not reduce oil consumption in the short term.
- if you shut down the highway subsidies right now, sell the assets to private companies and have ACTUAL costs of operation be transfered to the users of the highways, you will start seeing reduction in usage immediately. People would start moving in closer to city centers, leaving their suburban sprawls, moving closer to places were they work if they actually have to pay for they use of that impossible infrastructure.
That's why free market works as opposed to government subsidies, because free market doesn't create the crazy resource mis-allocations that cause massive pollution and oil dependence, which means wars, and impossible to pay for privately infrastructure in the first place.
There definitely must not be any subsidies to any business.
But there definitely must not be any regulations of any business and there definitely must not be any taxing of income or profits for either businesses or individuals.
However, with that point that the White House was making, about these so called subsidies to oil producers, that's a huge lie as well.
They are talking about writing off costs against their profits and they are talking about foreign production and foreign sales, that never see the US shores, so they have nothing to do with US taxes.
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Also, to add on the subject of government BS., how do you like all that nonsense about 'corporate jets'?
Do you know what it was about? When an air-line buys an airplane, they are forced to write the costs against the revenue over a period of 7 years. But when a company buys a jet that is not an air-line, they are allowed to write the costs off in 5 years, not 7. So that's what they were talking about.
AFAIC obviously there should be no such thing, as writing off depreciation costs of asset purchases over period of time. All of the costs should be written off immediately, in the year, in which the purchase was made.
It is absolute theft that a company is forced to depreciate the costs of capital asset purchases over a number of years, this can even mean that a company has to borrow money just to pay its taxes, because the amount that a capital asset was purchased for is greater than the profit, that the company made that year! That's pure robbery by the government and I am amazed how few people understand this or care.
Slashdot Mirror
A civil marriage takes about 5 minutes, what would you gain from automation?
- efficiency. Fewer people are required in total, because 5 minutes time means what, 12 certificates an hour with highest human efficiency? I don't think it takes 5 minutes BTW., it easily will take 20 minutes for sure. Why does it take that long? Fill out the form on line and have it done automagically in microseconds, then the certificate is printed and sent out, all automated.
The fewer humans are involved in everything that government does, the less spending is required, and even if 100 architects/developers are involved in building this stuff, how many tens of thousands of positions can be relieved of human workers? It's excellent, get rid of as many humans from government as possible, have the cases start and end on line, only the most difficult ones need to go to a human judge, and even this needs to be eliminated.
If you can't have an algorithm deciding a case, you can't have a human deciding it either.
I've seen plenty of bullshit both, from employers but also from employees in my time and I can easily imagine that this guy does not in fact have "company's full support". He might have asked one of the managers and gotten an 'OK', but that does not equate to full support, etc., as it's unlikely this went through the legal department and the higher management.
The guy says he spent 2 years building his framework while working for the company for 5 years. It's most likely that he built this 'framework' as part of the project that he worked on for the company. The most likely explanation to this story is that the higher management found out about him releasing the code under a Free license and enforced their copyright (and if it's written under contract for a project that company pays for, it's likely he signed away his copyright.)
If the guy does not have copyright, he can't release the code under any license, it's not his code to release.
I have no such agreement. It was done on my own time with the companyâ(TM)s full support. They knew it was open source
- right, but is this code something that he built for company, as in is this code that is part of code that the company is building?
As to "company's full support" - this also can be questioned. One manager's verbal agreement to something does not equate to "company's full support".
FTFS:
I was terminated from a company that I worked day and night for for about 5 years. During the last 2 years of that time, I created a simple web framework and contributed it to open source. We had always used open source, so it was high time we became a contributor! Recently I found out that they have removed all of the licenses from the files (GPL and MIT), gave it a silly name, and have the intention of marketing it as a product. What should I do? I am trying to get past the fact that I am upset that I was terminated â" that pissed me off â" but the fact that they are taking credit for my work and making it proprietary is really bothering me! What should I do?
I just might have found the reason for your termination. Were you doing things that went beyond what your employer allowed you to do? You were employed and you were so called 'contributing' code under GPL without your employer explicit permission to do this, and from the text it looks like you have so called 'contributed' the code that you wrote for your employer.
This is like saying: I took this guys stuff and 'contributed' it for the good of the public, but I didn't ask the guy if he is OK with it and now he is forcing everybody to return the stuff I 'contributed' to him and he called the cops. I am really pissed off, what should I do?
Yeah, I think I did find the reason for your termination.
The couple wrote the 'computer program' to marry them on their own background, I suppose it was just a document that was read by a voice generator, or something of that sort. But they did it because they couldn't find a minister to do the work, but they will still have to have 'justice of the peace' sign the papers. This brings up a good question: why not automate this type of work away and cut some spending this way? Start small, with computer program marrying and signing licenses for couples, then move on to the traffic violations and petty infractions, landlord/tenant disputes, small debts and other small claims, then misdemeanors and restraining orders, etc.
With computers presiding over cases, there will be little chance of personal influence upon the justice, bribes, etc. Efficiency must go up, as cases can be looked at over the Internet, computers can work around the clock as well and they only require maintenance.
--
Of-course if this is done money can be saved, that's without a question, the only concern must be that it can't be Diebold, who writes this. It needs to be Free and free source software and even hardware. Integrity of elections is arguably more important than integrity of any particular computer system built to perform Justice of the Peace duties, but integrity of a virtual judge is more personal to the individuals involved in the cases.
I disagree, while the demand has increased in China, USA sees demand lower than it was 5 years ago directly because it is more expensive to buy energy with US dollars, so overall demand is changed very slightly, while the prices have gone up dramatically. This is not real demand that's driving prices up, it's artificial demand created by inflation, where more dollars are chasing the same supply.
What you are missing is that with increase in consumption in growing economies, the supply is also increasing - capitalism in action.
What do you mean "under the impression that 12 hours x 7 days equals 100hrs/wk?"
It is much more likely that it's actually 9.5hours x 5.5 days.... equals 100hrs/wk on the invoice.
Just FYI. Yes, the so called ceiling is a ruse. The real problem is not what Congress thinks they should be able to borrow and spend, the real problem is what do those think, who give USA the credit and those who make the goods USA consumes.
The GDP is revised down all the time, the actual economy is shrinking and has been for a while
Meanwhile GDP is bogus.
Nobody would give a shit if the government did that.
Right, except for prices and bond values and thus interest rates, nobody would give a shit.
It might actually be a better solution to raising the debt ceiling.
- well, what's the difference? Either case it means US continues spending beyond what it can, there is no difference from spending POV.
The difference comes in terms of inflation. If US prints the cash, then it's inflation that originates in USA and has to be exported by exporting dollars. If US prints the Treasuries, then it has to sell them, and this will let a number of people around the world to offload their US dollars to the Treasury (of-course if they decide that it is a good move, rather than buying anything, aluminum, gold, silver, you name it, to offload the obviously worthless fiat.)
Besides, even if everybody else abandoned the dollar and started buying gold, you do know that Fort Knox is full of the stuff, right?
- assuming that there is gold there, that would be a move so stupid, en par with dumping the oil reserves that US did just a month or so ago.
If the dollar is plunging you don't want to get rid of your gold, you want to keep it. As to prices of gold - if US decides to sell its reserves, the prices won't go down. China will buy up every single last bar of it, as it's doing now even though it's also the world's largest producer of the stuff today. They know which way the wind is blowing.
Africa has been playing ground for all sorts of world governments, who wage their wars in Africa for the African resources. With that in mind I wouldn't call them utopias of any kind, never mind libertarian.
If you mint silver or gold coins in US, name them 'Liberty Dollars' and try to circulate them, the US government will call you 'terrorist'.
If you steal some cash from an ATM, you are a crook and go to jail.
If you steal value of everybody's money via inflation you are US Congress and the White House and "saving the global economy".
Anybody with 2 brain cells knows US is inflating and has been ever since 1913. In 1921 this caused a depression. Starting from 1925 they inflated more to buy out UK debt, so in 1929 that caused an inflated agriculture bubble to burst, then from that time up until 1945 they were printing so much, the depression would never have ended but they finally let it go once the war ended and economy restructured, of-course US was in a position of virtual manufacturing monopoly for maybe 15 years past war, so that helped. By 1970 the spending grew so much (and wars were recognized to be profitable), that US couldn't stop inflating, so it defaulted on the promise to redeem dollars for gold in 71, since then the inflation has been rampant. But it really caught up starting from mid nineties, especially with the discount rate being 1% under Clinton and Greenspan and then 0% with Bush and Bernanke.
I put together a little chart showing how much commodities have gone up in their USD denominated prices from 2003 to 2010.
sugar Dec 2003: 20.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 36.97 cents/pound, price up by over 81%
Beef Dec 2003: 105.40 cents/pound, Apr 2011: 193.00 cents/pound, price up by over 83%
Barley Dec 2003: 100.77 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 208.70 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 107%
Rice Dec 2003: 197.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 500.57 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 154%
Cocoa Beans Dec 2003: 1,646.58 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 3,113.52 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 89%
Tea Dec 2003: 205.22 cents/KG, Apr 2011: 325.33 cents/KG, price up by over 58%
Rubber Dec 2003: 57.31cents/pound, Apr 2011: 265.49cents/pound, price up by over 363%
Corn Dec 2003: 111.98 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 318.45 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 184%
Bananas Dec 2003: 371.43 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 1,013.47 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 172%
Propane Dec 2003: 0.63 USD/Gallon, Apr 2011: 1.45 USD/Gallon, price up by over 130%
Wheat Dec 2003: 165.57 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 336.30 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 103%
Oranges Dec 2003: 583.00 USD/Metric Ton, Apr 2011: 881.00 USD/Metric Ton, price up by over 51%
Salmon Dec 2003: 3.12 USD/Kg, Apr 2011: 7.86 USD/Kg, price up by over 151%
Chicken Dec 2003: 68.98 cents/pound, Apr 201
Public schools definitely shouldn't be done by any governments. As to police and fire, this is up to localities. The only one that's left to the government is national defense, and it looks like they turned it into quite a profitable little enterprise, doesn't it?
They should do it, just the lulz value of it will exceed 5 Trillion in no time, never mind the value of gold, that will double in a heartbeat, as people run in panic out of all USD denominated assets.
Rural areas would have been off the common grid, totally energy independent and more efficient.
Alan Mually's statement absolutely does not mean that Ford, as a business would have been worse off with GM and Chrysler going bankrupt. While Alan Mually is an excellent CEO for Ford, neither he, nor any business should be in a position to ask government for any money under any circumstances, and government must never be allowed to give money to private businesses, be it banks or otherwise.
Of-course you have what you have and that's why US economy is what it is.
Pretty sure health care is affordable if you stick to early 1900s standards of care. Good luck healing from an infection or surviving any kind of surgery.
- The medical costs are where they are exactly because government money is in it. FDA is the main reason for the prices of medications being so high, and Medicare and Medicaid are the reasons for health insurance prices skyrocketing.
Medical costs would be falling steadily without government money in the industry. Here is a comment, I don't want to repeat, which has data that compares insurance preferences of US consumers prior to 1965.
Nobody can argue that microprocessors are as complex today as they have ever been and they are similar in terms of investment costs to drug manufacturing. The heavy costs are all upfront, and then the product can be made relatively cheaply, the cost are recouped based on mass production. Person computers today are as cheap and as powerful as never before, prices are falling and industry is working on new designs and features, etc.
This should be exactly the case with health industry, but it is not specifically because government money is in it, with all the taxes and regulations and subsidies, the costs cannot go down as the market would have them. Nobody gets a TV subsidy, yet everybody has a TV or 2 or more, and costs are going down while features and quality are increasing.
Basically you can thank your government for terrible health and health insurance costs and low volume of innovation in those areas.
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Back to Ford: their CEO giving a speech absolutely does not mean that whatever he is saying is economic reality. His reasons for giving speeches are political, as all speeches are, and not economic. From POV of economics, Ford would have gained huge advantage if GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. While Mulally can talk about supply chain that he shares with those 2 companies, he was conveniently forgetting the rest of the car companies that are manufacturing in USA, though they are foreign companies, like Toyota, Honda, VW, BMW, etc., they also have supply chains and if push comes to shove deals can always be made, and Canadian Magna would only be too happy to supply Ford with everything it needs as well.
Ford and other manufacturers would have bought out the failed GM and Chrysler factories for pennies on the dollar and would have restored the capacity in their own vision. The way things are now, the people who got bailed out are unions and the investors got stiffed, US public owes the debt of those companies and those car makers will still go bankrupt anyway, as the reasons behind them going bankrupt are all still there.
something to look at
The biggest myth of all in this regard is the notion that telephone service is a natural monopoly. Economists have taught generations of students that telephone service is a "classic" example of market failure and that government regulation in the "public interest" was necessary. But as Adam D. Thierer recently proved, there is nothing at all "natural about the telephone monopoly enjoyed by AT&T for so many decades; it was purely a creation of government intervention."
Once AT&T's initial patents expired in 1893, dozens of competitors
sprung up. "By the end of 1894 over 80 new independent competitors had already grabbed 5 percent of total market share . . . after the turn of the century, over 3,000 competitors existed. In some states there were over 200 telephone companies operating simultaneously. By 1907, AT&T's competitors had captured 51 percent of the telephone market and prices were being driven sharply down by the competition. Moreover, there was no evidence of economies of scale, and entry barriers were obviously almost nonexistent, contrary to the standard account of the theory of natural monopoly as applied to the telephone industry"
The eventual creation of the telephone monopoly was the result of
a conspiracy between AT&T and politicians who wanted to offer "universal telephone service" as a pork-barrel entitlement to their constituents. Politicians began denouncing competition as "duplicative," "destructive," and "wasteful," and various economists were paid to attend congressional hearings in which they somberly declared telephony a natural monopoly.
"There is nothing to be gained by competition in the local telephone business," one congressional hearing concluded.
The crusade to create a monopolistic telephone industry by govern-
ment fiat finally succeeded when the federal government used World War I as a n excuse to nationalize the industry in 1918. AT&T still operated its phone system, but it was controlled by a government commission headed by the Postmaster General. Like so many other instances of government regulation, AT&T quickly "capturedn the regulators and used the regulatory apparatus to eliminate its competitors. "By 1925 not only had virtually every state established strict rate regulation guidelines, but local telephone competition was either discouraged or explicitly prohibited
within many of those jurisdictions."
The complete demise of competition in the industry, Thierer con-
cludes, was brought about by the following forces: exclusionary licensing policies; protected monopolies for "dominant carriers"; guaranteed revenues or regulated phone companies; the mandated government policy of "universal telephone entitlement" which called for a single provider to more easily carry out regulatory commands; and rate regulation designed to achieve the socialistic objective of "universal service."
That free-market competition was the source of the telephone monopoly in the early twentieth century is the biggest lie ever told by the economics profession. The free market never "failed"; it was government that failed to permit free-market competition as it concocted its corporatist scheme to the benefit of the phone companies, a t the expense of consumers and potential competitors.
Ridiculous assertion that Ford would have wanted his competitors to be bailed out by the government, no less, with all sorts of consequences arising from that.
If GM was allowed to fail, Ford could have probably cleaned the house, bought the assets at a fire-sale and have the factories operational in no time, probably filled with the same people, but under different conditions.
We are talking about Ford, a company that was paying its employees 5 dollars a day in early 19 hundreds, which means they were getting 25USD/week, or 1.25 ounces of gold, which is equivalent of about 2000USD/week today. That's tax free, as there were no income taxes. That's also in real money, not in today's garbage, so those employees could afford their own medical care, which was awfully cheap at the time, without government involvement, and they could retire on their own.
104000USD take home salary, considering the purchasing power of those dollars, that is definitely more than 200K today, maybe 250K. And that's without unions, without any government assistance, building the best cars in the world at the time.
Yeah, you need government. To steal everything you have.
The problem was government involvement into the entire operation.
Henry Ford paid his assembly line employees 5 dollars a day. That's 25 dollars a week. Given that 20 dollars was equal 1 ounce of gold, that's 1.25 ounces, or about 2000USD in today's prices.
Given that there were no income taxes at the time, those workers were actually getting that money into their pockets, they had stay at home wives and bunch of kids, they could support family on that money and Fords were affordable cars.
How much would a today's assembly line worker be getting as a salary to even come close, to what they were getting at the time?
Sure, they didn't have SS and Medicare, but they had extremely cheap health care, because there was no government money in it. Insurance was mostly for accidents, not for everyday treatments, so it was ridiculously cheap. Making 2000USD/week is about 104,000 USD a year, and without taxes it could be double that easy, probably more than double, considering there were no State income taxes either and houses and food were also extremely cheap.
Of-course those workers weren't part of any unions, but by today's standard, they were paid much more than anybody is in any union. Which union auto-worker makes over 250K today?
Government has more resources than a single individual, that is true, however government does not have more interest than any particular individual in any particular thing or property rights or anything, that deals with owning any asset, government is not an owner. A number of private individuals, all of who would suffer some consequences, if their property became poisoned would be a big enough force, especially given absence of government power, which would free up space for competing companies, who'd take the role of solving cases like this one, and the resources could be covered by insurance. So I disagree with your premise that government either can or is interested in dealing with anything of this sort, especially given what we have observed historically from governments.
US saw multiple oil spills, thousands in the Guelph of Mexico and other locations. More dictatorial government, like USSR and China saw huge technological catastrophes. It seems it does not matter what side of spectrum the government is supposedly on, it never finds a way to protect private property of its citizens from being destroyed, so I say forget the government, it's you, who is ultimately responsible for your private property.
And when you say about 'suspending the freedoms of those who break the law', I can't imagine why you would welcome a government doing it.
And again, you don't have to be a specialist farmer to eat greens, why would you have to be a specialist investigator/lawyer/enforcer to deal with these problems?
do you really expect me to drop my day job while I poke around a neighbour's private property to collect evidence of mercury poisoning
- I expect that as a property owner you would be much more concerned about this than any government ever would.
thus deem the onus of investigation/prosecution to be on society's collective representative - the executive and judicial branches of government.
- I disagree. It's your private property that is suffering, and then it's your neighbors private properties, and whoever has personal/business connections to those properties. That's how it has to be solved.
I am using PostgreSQL for my line of products, all in retail, would never consider Oracle based on cost and ability to talk to support in IRC online at any time.
Can you explain to me how you are supposed to deal with all of the same exact problem you listed when there is government and regulations, how exactly does it make it ANY easier to find out what happened exactly, who dumped what where, if it was done on purpose by somebody to spoil your water?
What, does government have a magic power to pinpoint who exactly decided to be the 'terrorist' this time around? Because if history shows anything, it's that government is very terrible at this sort of thing, first, figuring out who did what, second actually coming up with a sensible way of dealing with it.
No, having private competing owners would be much better in this case, because more people with property, and thus something to lose would be involved.
That's a limitation of the free market - it will never tie the cost of a car to the costs of the effects of driving a car. There is no feedback mechanism unless the government interferes. Dead and maimed people cost the economy billions in health care, lost productivity, and wasted education and experience.
- that's a misunderstanding. There are 2 ways to get liability
1. Private insurance.
2. Court system.
That's all it takes, and it doesn't even require government involvement (and I think all of it would be better without government involvement.)
The feedback mechanism is through the court system, the costs should be covered by private insurance.
As to air pollution - nobody wants to breath polluted air, but only wealthy economies can take care of pollution. So the poorer the economy is, the less likely it is to take care of any pollution, air, water, ground, it doesn't matter, all of it doesn't matter if people don't have the food. The wealthier the economy becomes, the more likely it is to start bothering with the conditions of the surrounding environment, and of-course none of the assets should be owned by the government, because we all know how 'good' governments are at owning stuff. They are not owners, they don't care. That's why there were liability caps on deep water oil drilling set at around 70Million dollars, which is ridiculous and shouldn't have ever existed.
How is it moot? The highways exist, like it or not. Even if we shut off subsidy to highways, they would still exist for a long, long time. Most would probably live on as toll roads. Turning off the highway subsidy will not reduce oil consumption in the short term.
- if you shut down the highway subsidies right now, sell the assets to private companies and have ACTUAL costs of operation be transfered to the users of the highways, you will start seeing reduction in usage immediately. People would start moving in closer to city centers, leaving their suburban sprawls, moving closer to places were they work if they actually have to pay for they use of that impossible infrastructure.
That's why free market works as opposed to government subsidies, because free market doesn't create the crazy resource mis-allocations that cause massive pollution and oil dependence, which means wars, and impossible to pay for privately infrastructure in the first place.
There definitely must not be any subsidies to any business.
But there definitely must not be any regulations of any business and there definitely must not be any taxing of income or profits for either businesses or individuals.
However, with that point that the White House was making, about these so called subsidies to oil producers, that's a huge lie as well.
They are talking about writing off costs against their profits and they are talking about foreign production and foreign sales, that never see the US shores, so they have nothing to do with US taxes.
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Also, to add on the subject of government BS., how do you like all that nonsense about 'corporate jets'?
Do you know what it was about? When an air-line buys an airplane, they are forced to write the costs against the revenue over a period of 7 years. But when a company buys a jet that is not an air-line, they are allowed to write the costs off in 5 years, not 7. So that's what they were talking about.
AFAIC obviously there should be no such thing, as writing off depreciation costs of asset purchases over period of time. All of the costs should be written off immediately, in the year, in which the purchase was made.
It is absolute theft that a company is forced to depreciate the costs of capital asset purchases over a number of years, this can even mean that a company has to borrow money just to pay its taxes, because the amount that a capital asset was purchased for is greater than the profit, that the company made that year! That's pure robbery by the government and I am amazed how few people understand this or care.