Fiat money always starts with being tied to something of value, there is no money without some value. Real value only comes out of production.
There, I said it, value is about production, not about consumption, not about buying things. Value is in producing, creating stuff.
Gold acts as means of exchange between parties, because it is difficult to exchange 'chickens'. Gold has beautiful properties for exchange, it can divided into small quantities, it can be made into a solid piece, it can stored and transferred around easier than other items. Most importantly, and what geeks here do not understand, is the reason for gold being assigned exchange value is because it does not deteriorate with time.
When you say 'gold allows banks to control money more' - that in itself does not even make sense, but I can answer with something: if you produce anything that anyone wants and they find you and you find them somehow and they want to take the thing you produce from you and you are willing to give it in exchange for something, it makes sense for you to exchange in items of some sort.
Again, since exchange a chicken for a bucket of wheat makes life more difficult, we use gold. It's great since it's not going to grow mold (as wheat can) and it will not die of a disease (as chicken could).
A government, when it is formed, consists of mostly military power (let's say a bunch of thugs with big sticks, who are willing to kill, this is an oversimplification but it works) and does not posses anything of value and it cannot create anything of value. Everything it will own will come from actual producers and there are no producers in government. But since government wants to control the producers, it will want to do so by creating means of exchange, an ability to take the products and give something for them (if nothing is given at all, there will be a fight and even thugs with sticks can be killed).
So government sets up a currency and in the beginning of doing so it attaches the units of currency to some units of gold (or whatever it is, that society uses as means of exchange before the government intervention.)
(a side not to avoid this discussion: Often a government is not an outsider and comes out of the society itself, it can be a benevolent government, but with any type of government there will be people opposing it and always viewing it as thugs with sticks.)
Since the government is not a producing force, its only way to get income is through taxation, but the other wonderful way of getting income is through money printing and government delegates that power to itself. Printing money is the ultimate power to take products of labor from people. Of-course there is also borrowing, which is a chapter in itself.
As with anything that people make into means of income, it will be abused. So the money supply will always be increased not in a way that corresponds to the production capacity of the people. It will be increased whenever government grows beyond its current ability to spend, and this plank never goes down, it only goes up.
Inflation and growing prices are a way that market deals with the growing money supply. Another way is by turning away from the currency of the government and going to whatever does not feel like deteriorating every day, and obviously it is gold.
You are saying: banks will hoard gold like they hoard money. Well, that's a nice theory. In reality, the fractional banking and money printing creates 'money' that should not even exist.
Gold accumulates in the banks not as property of the bank, but by virtue of what a bank IS.
A bank is primarily (before the government fiat BS) a storage facility for people's gold. Bank notes are pieces of paper that can be directly exchanged for gold. It is a more convenient and probably a more safe to do gold transactions on paper As Long As there is Actual Gold to back up the transaction in the bank.
Why am I saying it is really BS, what you are proposing, about banks accumulating gold?
A loaf of bread took much more energy to produce a thousand years ago than it takes today, thus it makes no sense to expect that the same loaf of bread from a 1000 years ago should cost the same in gold today.
Why would it? It took a number of people doing hard manual work to produce one loaf of bread, today most of the work is automated, and what is not automated completely is done with people who operate complex machines anyway.
It is not loafs of bread, whose value we measure, it is value of the work of people. If bread making did not change from 1000 years ago to our time and if the demand for bread did not change, then bread would cost the same amount of gold from 1000 years ago to our time. However there are different foods today that people did not have 1000 years ago, bread and meat and fish and milk and just very few types of vegetation are not the only foods people eat. There are complex foods that are created in food laboratories and their ingredients are designed to be as cheap as possible.
Nixon did not only get US and the rest of the world off the gold standard and set minimum wage laws, (all done for the political expedience), he also succeeded in fixing prices on food, which were fluctuating prior to that and were an issue during federal elections that Nixon wanted to get rid of.
So he did that and a consequence of that became the epidemic of obesity, hypertension and various other fructose related diseases, because the corn is subsidized so it is the cheapest (for the food producers) way to manufacture food, to take the subsidized material and put it everywhere.
None of what Nixon did had any good long terms effects, all of his actions were directed at short term gains for himself, it shows.
Well, if you start your comment with an insult, then I suppose you do not expect any kind of a normal conversation.
I'll tell you this: if you haven't been buying gold for the past 10 years, then it is you, who is a moron. Also it is a moronic thing to do, to buy gold in coins, when bars give the best value.
Gold has been the standard for thousands of years. Nixon did not kill the gold when he got off the standard, he killed the fiat money (in the long run.) That is the lesson from history, I did not come up with it no matter how illogical it seems that strange yellow metal should be considered valuable at all, but when fiat currencies fail, then there is this thing, which does what it does and people exchange in it yet again.
Gold certainly can be used in complex financial trades, but that does not diminish the value of gold.
That diminishes the value of paper currencies. If you don't get it, look at the current market from 15 years ago till now. Gold has been going up steadily while all currencies have been going down measured in gold.
All currencies start with a fixed value to gold, then they diverge when politicians find it politically profitable to do so and then currencies start the slow process of deterioration until they are destroyed. This has been a very consistent theme throughout thousands of years of history. If you think today will be different from all those other times, well maybe you are right, history will tell. But I bet on the consistency that was shown previously every time.
The bidding wars and all that jazz is irrelevant, it is not the fundamental reason for the gold prices to go up. The fundamental reasons are that originally fiat currencies are based on gold, then they are moved off of gold when politicians decide they need to finance another war or their favorite bill to stay in power, but they don't want to do the unpopular, but honest thing and raise taxes. So that's the moment when prices diverge and eventually the fiat currency fails.
If you think this is a new concept, maybe you should check what happened to every currency through the history of this world. Today's currencies will fail in the same way.
Bidding wars and wild swings excluded, if you switch from cash to the metal, when cash will fail you will have some way to exchange for items you'll need to survive.
Gold maybe totally worthless, but so is everything else. Gold has shown itself to be a great store of value through thousands of years of human history.
Fiat currencies come and go, if you didn't notice, they come and they disappear. Every currency in existence today did not appear that long ago and all of them will be gone eventually. Gold will still beat them all. When a piece of gold is lost, hundreds or thousands of years later it is found in the same condition. When paper is lost, it only probably takes a few years for it to disintegrate. Even this fact alone shows that gold stores value better:) learn history. When everything else fails (even check the history of US in the thirties, the 'gold clause' of contracts, which was fought against by the US government) when fiat money fails, people switch to gold, no matter how much you protest.
Wall Mart, Best Buy, Clear Channel and pretty much all other large businesses are working with the government, they are Government propped Monopolies. They have been paying politicians to get tax breaks and various other perks forever, something that small and medium size businesses cannot receive out of government.
That only supports my point that government creates giant monopolies by its policies and kills off small/medium size business.
Your fatal misunderstanding of economics if where your model fails. It's where this economy will fail. It's the main cause of the current collapse: Government creating giant monopolies that easily move jobs out of the country on one hand, while propping up debt based consumption and dictating various laws that are designed to kill economy in the long run, while in the short run helping politicians to stay in power. That's the minimum wage laws and various other regulations.
I am not going to argue about this much, I will be just setting more short positions against t-bills and various municipal bonds and taking more long positions in gold.
Gold 'prices' do not deflate. Gold is the actual measure of value, like 1 gram = 1 unit of value. Gold can be accepted as the axis at 0,0,0 and everything else rotates around that axis.
Gold and Dow prices will meet, then you will know that buying it is probably not better than buying Dow. However before that happens, Gold is still a good purchase. It's relative price in dollars is irrelevant as long as Dow's dollar price is much higher, only relative prices matter.
A perpetually growing economy usually involves the average wage rising so average people can buy more stuff while still working less.
- that is a misunderstanding.
In the Free Market the wages are NOT supposed to rise all the time, with the efficiency in the market it is the prices, that are supposed to decrease. In fact the minimum wage law is the single biggest reason for the unemployment. The proof of this is of-course what happened after the WWII, while the Keynesians 'predicted' that the US will be worse off after the war ends (because Keynesians believe that Government must provide consumption, even if fueled by debt or stupid attempt to employ people in public sector to move stones from one side to another and back), by the Austrian school of economics, once the war was over the supply of workers, who would come home, would cause a boom in production and thus a rising economy.
The reason you 'need less people' is because once the USSR fell apart and the world globalized, China supplied huge number of cheaper work force and the Monopolies, which are government created structures and are economies of scale moved production to that country. By following Keynes ideas and propping up a credit economy of consumption, by setting minimum wages and by creating huge monopolies, the US government killed off too many small/medium size businesses in the country and those are the reason for the unemployment and for the failing economy.
Too BAD? Do you see anyone else making stuff like what Sony does? They are clearly always a step or 10 ahead of everyone else. They maybe assholes about many things, but first of all, the company is big and different people are responsible for different things, their research is great. Secondly, they are likely to sell licenses on production to other companies as well, so you will see these screens on other pieces of electronic equipment that is not directly coming out of Sony.
As to Chinese knockoffs, that will come eventually, but the manufacturing of these devices may be about as difficult as creating the technology in the first place.
Warn a user who is switching from one screen to another with a 'allow always/never/this time/stay on this page' in case a site is running scripts on the background and then white-list the site automatically if the 'allow always' button is pushed.
There is also a possibility of showing the user what the page used to look like before the user left it and what it looks like now. This has pretty much the same problem though, if the user does not understand why the page used to look one way and now looks differently, as in the user decides that "sure, the page changed to this 'sign on' screen, that's fine, let me log into it".
Oh, Christ, I am also blind, not a 23-foot, a 23-floor. OK. So HOW FUCKING TALL IS IT?
Apparently it's the second paragraph of TFA:
The 235-foot (72 m) long airship, known as the Bullet 580, has a top speed of 80 mph (129 km/h) and can serve as a high-flying sentinel that stays aloft for long periods of time.
- so why couldn't this be the first sentence and the short description on/.?
"A huge inflatable vehicle as long as a 23-floor skyscraper is tall has become the world's largest airship in its bid to serve as a stratospheric satellite, or 'stratellite,' according to its developers."
- it is a single sentence, one fucking sentence. How difficult is is to proofread one stinking sentence? I may make construct an unreadable sentence in my comments, I may make grammatical or syntax errors, but it is a comment, not a story on the front page.
What the fuck is "as long as a 23-foot skyscraper is tall"?
It is not actually true, since most websites do not run javascript on the background, most sites use real time scripts. Those that do that, set timeouts or expect an asynchronous AJAX response for example are in minority.
There is no HTTP push, but I can set a response to be delayed and send the data into the browser upon a server event, it's better than browser polling, but results in the browser displaying the 'loading' status until the response is complete and it does not reliably work through proxies.
Slashdot Mirror
Fiat money always starts with being tied to something of value, there is no money without some value. Real value only comes out of production.
There, I said it, value is about production, not about consumption, not about buying things. Value is in producing, creating stuff.
Gold acts as means of exchange between parties, because it is difficult to exchange 'chickens'. Gold has beautiful properties for exchange, it can divided into small quantities, it can be made into a solid piece, it can stored and transferred around easier than other items. Most importantly, and what geeks here do not understand, is the reason for gold being assigned exchange value is because it does not deteriorate with time.
When you say 'gold allows banks to control money more' - that in itself does not even make sense, but I can answer with something: if you produce anything that anyone wants and they find you and you find them somehow and they want to take the thing you produce from you and you are willing to give it in exchange for something, it makes sense for you to exchange in items of some sort.
Again, since exchange a chicken for a bucket of wheat makes life more difficult, we use gold. It's great since it's not going to grow mold (as wheat can) and it will not die of a disease (as chicken could).
A government, when it is formed, consists of mostly military power (let's say a bunch of thugs with big sticks, who are willing to kill, this is an oversimplification but it works) and does not posses anything of value and it cannot create anything of value. Everything it will own will come from actual producers and there are no producers in government. But since government wants to control the producers, it will want to do so by creating means of exchange, an ability to take the products and give something for them (if nothing is given at all, there will be a fight and even thugs with sticks can be killed).
So government sets up a currency and in the beginning of doing so it attaches the units of currency to some units of gold (or whatever it is, that society uses as means of exchange before the government intervention.)
(a side not to avoid this discussion: Often a government is not an outsider and comes out of the society itself, it can be a benevolent government, but with any type of government there will be people opposing it and always viewing it as thugs with sticks.)
Since the government is not a producing force, its only way to get income is through taxation, but the other wonderful way of getting income is through money printing and government delegates that power to itself. Printing money is the ultimate power to take products of labor from people. Of-course there is also borrowing, which is a chapter in itself.
As with anything that people make into means of income, it will be abused. So the money supply will always be increased not in a way that corresponds to the production capacity of the people. It will be increased whenever government grows beyond its current ability to spend, and this plank never goes down, it only goes up.
Inflation and growing prices are a way that market deals with the growing money supply. Another way is by turning away from the currency of the government and going to whatever does not feel like deteriorating every day, and obviously it is gold.
You are saying: banks will hoard gold like they hoard money. Well, that's a nice theory. In reality, the fractional banking and money printing creates 'money' that should not even exist.
Gold accumulates in the banks not as property of the bank, but by virtue of what a bank IS.
A bank is primarily (before the government fiat BS) a storage facility for people's gold. Bank notes are pieces of paper that can be directly exchanged for gold. It is a more convenient and probably a more safe to do gold transactions on paper As Long As there is Actual Gold to back up the transaction in the bank.
Why am I saying it is really BS, what you are proposing, about banks accumulating gold?
No, the real question is 'Will It Blend?'
A loaf of bread took much more energy to produce a thousand years ago than it takes today, thus it makes no sense to expect that the same loaf of bread from a 1000 years ago should cost the same in gold today.
Why would it? It took a number of people doing hard manual work to produce one loaf of bread, today most of the work is automated, and what is not automated completely is done with people who operate complex machines anyway.
It is not loafs of bread, whose value we measure, it is value of the work of people. If bread making did not change from 1000 years ago to our time and if the demand for bread did not change, then bread would cost the same amount of gold from 1000 years ago to our time. However there are different foods today that people did not have 1000 years ago, bread and meat and fish and milk and just very few types of vegetation are not the only foods people eat. There are complex foods that are created in food laboratories and their ingredients are designed to be as cheap as possible.
Nixon did not only get US and the rest of the world off the gold standard and set minimum wage laws, (all done for the political expedience), he also succeeded in fixing prices on food, which were fluctuating prior to that and were an issue during federal elections that Nixon wanted to get rid of.
So he did that and a consequence of that became the epidemic of obesity, hypertension and various other fructose related diseases, because the corn is subsidized so it is the cheapest (for the food producers) way to manufacture food, to take the subsidized material and put it everywhere.
None of what Nixon did had any good long terms effects, all of his actions were directed at short term gains for himself, it shows.
Well, if you start your comment with an insult, then I suppose you do not expect any kind of a normal conversation.
I'll tell you this: if you haven't been buying gold for the past 10 years, then it is you, who is a moron. Also it is a moronic thing to do, to buy gold in coins, when bars give the best value.
Gold has been the standard for thousands of years. Nixon did not kill the gold when he got off the standard, he killed the fiat money (in the long run.) That is the lesson from history, I did not come up with it no matter how illogical it seems that strange yellow metal should be considered valuable at all, but when fiat currencies fail, then there is this thing, which does what it does and people exchange in it yet again.
Gold certainly can be used in complex financial trades, but that does not diminish the value of gold.
That diminishes the value of paper currencies. If you don't get it, look at the current market from 15 years ago till now. Gold has been going up steadily while all currencies have been going down measured in gold.
All currencies start with a fixed value to gold, then they diverge when politicians find it politically profitable to do so and then currencies start the slow process of deterioration until they are destroyed. This has been a very consistent theme throughout thousands of years of history. If you think today will be different from all those other times, well maybe you are right, history will tell. But I bet on the consistency that was shown previously every time.
The bidding wars and all that jazz is irrelevant, it is not the fundamental reason for the gold prices to go up. The fundamental reasons are that originally fiat currencies are based on gold, then they are moved off of gold when politicians decide they need to finance another war or their favorite bill to stay in power, but they don't want to do the unpopular, but honest thing and raise taxes. So that's the moment when prices diverge and eventually the fiat currency fails.
If you think this is a new concept, maybe you should check what happened to every currency through the history of this world. Today's currencies will fail in the same way.
Bidding wars and wild swings excluded, if you switch from cash to the metal, when cash will fail you will have some way to exchange for items you'll need to survive.
Gold maybe totally worthless, but so is everything else. Gold has shown itself to be a great store of value through thousands of years of human history.
Fiat currencies come and go, if you didn't notice, they come and they disappear. Every currency in existence today did not appear that long ago and all of them will be gone eventually. Gold will still beat them all. When a piece of gold is lost, hundreds or thousands of years later it is found in the same condition. When paper is lost, it only probably takes a few years for it to disintegrate. Even this fact alone shows that gold stores value better :) learn history. When everything else fails (even check the history of US in the thirties, the 'gold clause' of contracts, which was fought against by the US government) when fiat money fails, people switch to gold, no matter how much you protest.
Wall Mart, Best Buy, Clear Channel and pretty much all other large businesses are working with the government, they are Government propped Monopolies. They have been paying politicians to get tax breaks and various other perks forever, something that small and medium size businesses cannot receive out of government.
That only supports my point that government creates giant monopolies by its policies and kills off small/medium size business.
Your fatal misunderstanding of economics if where your model fails. It's where this economy will fail. It's the main cause of the current collapse: Government creating giant monopolies that easily move jobs out of the country on one hand, while propping up debt based consumption and dictating various laws that are designed to kill economy in the long run, while in the short run helping politicians to stay in power. That's the minimum wage laws and various other regulations.
I am not going to argue about this much, I will be just setting more short positions against t-bills and various municipal bonds and taking more long positions in gold.
Gold 'prices' do not deflate. Gold is the actual measure of value, like 1 gram = 1 unit of value. Gold can be accepted as the axis at 0,0,0 and everything else rotates around that axis.
Gold and Dow prices will meet, then you will know that buying it is probably not better than buying Dow. However before that happens, Gold is still a good purchase. It's relative price in dollars is irrelevant as long as Dow's dollar price is much higher, only relative prices matter.
A perpetually growing economy usually involves the average wage rising so average people can buy more stuff while still working less.
- that is a misunderstanding.
In the Free Market the wages are NOT supposed to rise all the time, with the efficiency in the market it is the prices, that are supposed to decrease. In fact the minimum wage law is the single biggest reason for the unemployment. The proof of this is of-course what happened after the WWII, while the Keynesians 'predicted' that the US will be worse off after the war ends (because Keynesians believe that Government must provide consumption, even if fueled by debt or stupid attempt to employ people in public sector to move stones from one side to another and back), by the Austrian school of economics, once the war was over the supply of workers, who would come home, would cause a boom in production and thus a rising economy.
The reason you 'need less people' is because once the USSR fell apart and the world globalized, China supplied huge number of cheaper work force and the Monopolies, which are government created structures and are economies of scale moved production to that country. By following Keynes ideas and propping up a credit economy of consumption, by setting minimum wages and by creating huge monopolies, the US government killed off too many small/medium size businesses in the country and those are the reason for the unemployment and for the failing economy.
well this is strange then, I don't remember playing strip-poker.
It differs because you are no Tom Cruise.
Or ARE YOU? oO
The phones, the music players, all that is done by firms like Apple today is just regurgitation and evolutionary improvements.
This screen is a revolutionary improvement, that's what I expect from Sony.
about 20 years from now the prices will be in the range that you'll like, before then, if you have to ask about the price - you can't afford it.
Too BAD? Do you see anyone else making stuff like what Sony does? They are clearly always a step or 10 ahead of everyone else. They maybe assholes about many things, but first of all, the company is big and different people are responsible for different things, their research is great. Secondly, they are likely to sell licenses on production to other companies as well, so you will see these screens on other pieces of electronic equipment that is not directly coming out of Sony.
As to Chinese knockoffs, that will come eventually, but the manufacturing of these devices may be about as difficult as creating the technology in the first place.
Atom decay detected, insert proton. (Insert, Abort, Cancel)
a slow moving trainwreck at that, which may or may not be entertaining.
they don't really need to figure it out.
Warn a user who is switching from one screen to another with a 'allow always/never/this time/stay on this page' in case a site is running scripts on the background and then white-list the site automatically if the 'allow always' button is pushed.
There is also a possibility of showing the user what the page used to look like before the user left it and what it looks like now. This has pretty much the same problem though, if the user does not understand why the page used to look one way and now looks differently, as in the user decides that "sure, the page changed to this 'sign on' screen, that's fine, let me log into it".
There is no stopping an ignorant user.
Oh, Christ, I am also blind, not a 23-foot, a 23-floor. OK. So HOW FUCKING TALL IS IT?
Apparently it's the second paragraph of TFA:
The 235-foot (72 m) long airship, known as the Bullet 580, has a top speed of 80 mph (129 km/h) and can serve as a high-flying sentinel that stays aloft for long periods of time.
- so why couldn't this be the first sentence and the short description on /.?
"A huge inflatable vehicle as long as a 23-floor skyscraper is tall has become the world's largest airship in its bid to serve as a stratospheric satellite, or 'stratellite,' according to its developers."
- it is a single sentence, one fucking sentence. How difficult is is to proofread one stinking sentence? I may make construct an unreadable sentence in my comments, I may make grammatical or syntax errors, but it is a comment, not a story on the front page.
What the fuck is "as long as a 23-foot skyscraper is tall"?
sure, there is also a possibility of a delayed HTTP response to a request, a so-called server push.
It is not actually true, since most websites do not run javascript on the background, most sites use real time scripts. Those that do that, set timeouts or expect an asynchronous AJAX response for example are in minority.
There is no HTTP push, but I can set a response to be delayed and send the data into the browser upon a server event, it's better than browser polling, but results in the browser displaying the 'loading' status until the response is complete and it does not reliably work through proxies.
at least you can't accuse this story of hypocrisy and of not living up to its expectations.