Anyway, I don't object to the gold standard per se. I honestly don't know if it's a good idea or not. I just object to the gold standard being described as the only reasonable way to run things, because gold has "intrinsic value". It has a little intrinsic value because it resists corrosion and that's about it. Most of its value comes from collective delusion, just like fiat currency. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be recognized when advocating its use for backing currency.
You misunderstand how nuclear safety is produced. Or really, how safety of any kind is produced.
You do not avoid mistakes at all cost. The space program relies on this because it's simply far too expensive for them to do it any other way. But of course this doesn't work too well, because people always make mistakes.
You achieve safety through redundancy. If you knew about the true incidence of failures in Western nuclear power plants it would probably make your hair stand on end. But they don't become serious because the plant is designed to withstand failures and mistakes and idiocy.
The Mars lander failed because it relied on a single figure which had to be exactly right. Nuclear plants are safe because they don't rely on any single anything to be right, and are designed to withstand failures in their design.
I'm not missing anything. People like $100 bills because of how they look too. My point is that gold's value is no more "intrinsic" than paper money's value.
I can see the value in using gold because it's limited. It makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure if it's good economics, but I won't say that it's not.
It's just that being scarce isn't the same as being valuable. A lot of people advocating for a gold standard don't seem to understand this. They speak of "intrinsic worth" in almost religious terms. I can see that you don't make that mistake, though!
You didn't refute anything. Both Saturn and the S&P 500 share a common cause: time. In other words, the situation is the last one described, that of C->A and C->B, where C is "time passing". They're both cyclical and happen to have similar periods, so they correlate well.
Hint: older console gamers may be ordering their stuff online. Or simply making quick in-and-out runs to the store instead of hanging out all the time because they have nothing better to do.
The price of a good has nothing to do with rationality, but how much people pay for them. Heroin is not cheap. Beer is cheap, but never as cheap as I'd like. Cigarettes, Jesus, I'm just happy I don't live in Europe. Those are not 'rationally useful' products, they are basically ways to die in slow gear, but they are much more expensive than air, which is essential to life, but so abundant as to be free. Wouldn't be so cheap on a space station. Its utility didn't change though, its scarcity did.
My point is merely that gold is no different from the rest of these. It's all just "how much people pay for them". There's nothing magical about gold, even though people talk constantly about its "intrinsic value". It has no such thing. Gold is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it.
Anyway, if gold is as useless as you say it is, then lets just trade. I got 300 new 1 dollar bills. Just get me two gold bars for them and we'll leave it at that.
Let's do the reverse. If paper money is so worthless, why don't you give me enough $100 bills to fill a suitcase and I will give you an ounce of gold in return. I'm sure that the gold will be more than enough to pay for the cotton and ink.
I don't buy it at all. You don't need central banks to get boom and bust cycles. All you need is a system which contains feedback and lag. Booms and busts simply fall out of the differential equations which describe such systems. There were probably boom and bust cycles in ancient greece involving wine and pottery and statues, long before anyone ever invented central banks.
They may make it worse, I don't know. But they certainly aren't the sole cause.
Value is related to scarcity and utility. People are always forgetting about that second part.
For example, if I sculpt my shit into a likeness of Jimmy Carter and call it "art", we have something that is extremely scarce. It is quite literally a one-of-a-kind item. Total value? Essentially zero. It may be worth something as fertilizer, but it's probably not worth transporting it to where it could be useful.
On the other hand, air is quite valuable. (If you don't believe that because you don't pay for it, just try doing without it for a while.) It is also about as far from scarce as you can get.
Gold has very little utility. Before the modern age it had basically zero utility. This is, quite simply, because people are irrational and assigned a value to it which is beyond its inherent worth. Exactly what the gold-standard crowd says people do to $20 bills.
Well I'll just stop asking leading questions and cut to the chase.
My understanding of economic history is that there have always been economic cycles. Cycles are inherent to any system with complex feedback loops. You seem to be blaming cycles on fiat currency, paper money, or fractional reserve banking, which just makes no sense in that context.
He did not say a limited commodity, he said a valuable commodity. If the only thing you need is for the supply to be limited then he should have said that. But he said "valuable", which gold really isn't, so I want to know what the proper backing is.
You know, sometimes it is bad to change your mind. But sometimes it is good. If you criticize someone solely for changing his mind and not because of why he changed his mind then you are an idiot.
"Flip-flopping" is a stupid criticism and anyone who uses it is a stupid person. Or possibly a smart person who happens to be evil and manipulative.
Are you saying there were no economic cycles back when all currency was either precious metals or backed by them? Because that doesn't square with my understanding of economic history at all.
The answer all the libertarians seem to give is "gold". But this is nonsensical. Gold is not particularly valuable. It has some worth in certain industrial processes and such, but mostly its value comes because people are collectively nuts. In this way, the value of gold is not much different from the value of the un-backed $20 bills in my wallet.
Sure. You're never going to hear me say that smoking marijuana is particularly unhealthy. I fly unpowered aircraft for fun, and that's way more dangerous. But it is either stupid, disingenuous, or just plain ignorant to state that marijuana causes absolutely zero deaths whatsoever.
The cost of putting more transistors has started going up, thus ending Moore's law.
Really? From what I've seen, CPU transistor counts keep right on increasing, and CPU prices are staying roughly constant, thus continuing Moore's law. GHz has ceased to increase, but that was never a part of Moore's law, just a consequence of it for a while. Am I wrong?
You are the average Joe. You see an article which uses "0.03K" to describe temperature. Do you:
a) Remember that K stands for Kelvin, a measure of temperature in which 0 is absolute zero. b) Google for "temperature K", find the Wikipedia page, and discover what Kelvin is. c) Mutter something about those stupid journalists writing stuff nobody can understand, and skip to the next article.
You do realize that when you smoke marijuana you absorb the THC by, you know, breathing smoke.
Breathing smoke is bad for you. It causes cancer and other lung problems. It may not be as bad as breathing nicotine directly into your lungs but it's still not good. I am sure that there are some deaths due to marijuana simply because breathing in smoke is unhealthy, even if those deaths happen much later and the link is uncertain to those who see it happen.
That's fine. But once again, jailbreaking itself does not void your warranty. What voids your warranty is damaging your device. Sometimes jailbreaking damages your device, but it's the damage, not the jailbreaking, which voids the warranty.
(And it only voids the warranty on the damage. It does not void the warranty for the entire product. This is another crucial distinction that people miss.)
"Quite the contrary, it has gone up." This is false. I suggest you look at how many 100's of thousands of people dies in WWI and WWII.
I'm aware of the figures, apparently more than you, as the number of soldiers who died in WWII alone was something like 20 million. (And that's not counting civilian dead at all, no holocaust, no strategic bombing, nothing.)
Are you aware of how many people died in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the dozens of other proxy wars fought throughout the Cold War? It's a lot.
None of the countries you listed are industrialized nations;which was the posters point.
And my point was that nuclear deterrence hasn't saved lives, it has merely changed who gets killed.
It hasn't mysteriously moved, it isn't some nebulous magical force.
I never said it was a "nebulous magical force", and I can't begin to conceive why you would say that. The reason is obvious: the nuclear-armed nations don't dare fight amongst each other. However, contrary to the implication of the original poster, this has not led to a decrease of deaths from war. War has simply changed from killing the youth of the richest nations to killing large swaths of the population of the poorest. Not, to my mind, a net gain, although as a citizen of one of the richest nations it's certainly a win for me.
A couple of months ago I read a post about this subject, I think on Freakonomics. It discussed how unanimity may not be as great as we think, since you need a unanimous verdict both to be considered guilty and innocent. If they can't agree then you just get a new trial. And since juries like to go home, people who disagree with the majority will often change their minds just to make the trial finish.
In any case, I didn't know that any places actually did this, so it's interesting to know.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm looking at buying an airplane myself, as it happens. (Not one that costs millions of dollars, obviously.) Am I, therefore, "out of touch"? Why?
Yes, the price of gold is awfully stable....
Anyway, I don't object to the gold standard per se. I honestly don't know if it's a good idea or not. I just object to the gold standard being described as the only reasonable way to run things, because gold has "intrinsic value". It has a little intrinsic value because it resists corrosion and that's about it. Most of its value comes from collective delusion, just like fiat currency. There's nothing wrong with that, but it needs to be recognized when advocating its use for backing currency.
Did it have devastating consequences when we did base our currency on it? More so than now, I mean? I don't think so....
You misunderstand how nuclear safety is produced. Or really, how safety of any kind is produced.
You do not avoid mistakes at all cost. The space program relies on this because it's simply far too expensive for them to do it any other way. But of course this doesn't work too well, because people always make mistakes.
You achieve safety through redundancy. If you knew about the true incidence of failures in Western nuclear power plants it would probably make your hair stand on end. But they don't become serious because the plant is designed to withstand failures and mistakes and idiocy.
The Mars lander failed because it relied on a single figure which had to be exactly right. Nuclear plants are safe because they don't rely on any single anything to be right, and are designed to withstand failures in their design.
I'm not missing anything. People like $100 bills because of how they look too. My point is that gold's value is no more "intrinsic" than paper money's value.
I can see the value in using gold because it's limited. It makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure if it's good economics, but I won't say that it's not.
It's just that being scarce isn't the same as being valuable. A lot of people advocating for a gold standard don't seem to understand this. They speak of "intrinsic worth" in almost religious terms. I can see that you don't make that mistake, though!
So the multiple bank panics and recessions in the United States between 1837 and 1913, when there was no central bank, did not happen? Interesting....
You didn't refute anything. Both Saturn and the S&P 500 share a common cause: time. In other words, the situation is the last one described, that of C->A and C->B, where C is "time passing". They're both cyclical and happen to have similar periods, so they correlate well.
Right, because retail workers know everything.
Hint: older console gamers may be ordering their stuff online. Or simply making quick in-and-out runs to the store instead of hanging out all the time because they have nothing better to do.
The price of a good has nothing to do with rationality, but how much people pay for them. Heroin is not cheap. Beer is cheap, but never as cheap as I'd like. Cigarettes, Jesus, I'm just happy I don't live in Europe. Those are not 'rationally useful' products, they are basically ways to die in slow gear, but they are much more expensive than air, which is essential to life, but so abundant as to be free. Wouldn't be so cheap on a space station. Its utility didn't change though, its scarcity did.
My point is merely that gold is no different from the rest of these. It's all just "how much people pay for them". There's nothing magical about gold, even though people talk constantly about its "intrinsic value". It has no such thing. Gold is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it.
Anyway, if gold is as useless as you say it is, then lets just trade. I got 300 new 1 dollar bills. Just get me two gold bars for them and we'll leave it at that.
Let's do the reverse. If paper money is so worthless, why don't you give me enough $100 bills to fill a suitcase and I will give you an ounce of gold in return. I'm sure that the gold will be more than enough to pay for the cotton and ink.
I don't buy it at all. You don't need central banks to get boom and bust cycles. All you need is a system which contains feedback and lag. Booms and busts simply fall out of the differential equations which describe such systems. There were probably boom and bust cycles in ancient greece involving wine and pottery and statues, long before anyone ever invented central banks.
They may make it worse, I don't know. But they certainly aren't the sole cause.
Value is related to scarcity and utility. People are always forgetting about that second part.
For example, if I sculpt my shit into a likeness of Jimmy Carter and call it "art", we have something that is extremely scarce. It is quite literally a one-of-a-kind item. Total value? Essentially zero. It may be worth something as fertilizer, but it's probably not worth transporting it to where it could be useful.
On the other hand, air is quite valuable. (If you don't believe that because you don't pay for it, just try doing without it for a while.) It is also about as far from scarce as you can get.
Gold has very little utility. Before the modern age it had basically zero utility. This is, quite simply, because people are irrational and assigned a value to it which is beyond its inherent worth. Exactly what the gold-standard crowd says people do to $20 bills.
Well I'll just stop asking leading questions and cut to the chase.
My understanding of economic history is that there have always been economic cycles. Cycles are inherent to any system with complex feedback loops. You seem to be blaming cycles on fiat currency, paper money, or fractional reserve banking, which just makes no sense in that context.
He did not say a limited commodity, he said a valuable commodity. If the only thing you need is for the supply to be limited then he should have said that. But he said "valuable", which gold really isn't, so I want to know what the proper backing is.
Hell fucking yes.
You know, sometimes it is bad to change your mind. But sometimes it is good. If you criticize someone solely for changing his mind and not because of why he changed his mind then you are an idiot.
"Flip-flopping" is a stupid criticism and anyone who uses it is a stupid person. Or possibly a smart person who happens to be evil and manipulative.
Are you saying there were no economic cycles back when all currency was either precious metals or backed by them? Because that doesn't square with my understanding of economic history at all.
What commodity should money be backed by, then?
The answer all the libertarians seem to give is "gold". But this is nonsensical. Gold is not particularly valuable. It has some worth in certain industrial processes and such, but mostly its value comes because people are collectively nuts. In this way, the value of gold is not much different from the value of the un-backed $20 bills in my wallet.
Yes, but it's not generally very pleasant for the bungle-ee. Even less pleasant than the other way, I mean.
Sure. You're never going to hear me say that smoking marijuana is particularly unhealthy. I fly unpowered aircraft for fun, and that's way more dangerous. But it is either stupid, disingenuous, or just plain ignorant to state that marijuana causes absolutely zero deaths whatsoever.
The cost of putting more transistors has started going up, thus ending Moore's law.
Really? From what I've seen, CPU transistor counts keep right on increasing, and CPU prices are staying roughly constant, thus continuing Moore's law. GHz has ceased to increase, but that was never a part of Moore's law, just a consequence of it for a while. Am I wrong?
You are the average Joe. You see an article which uses "0.03K" to describe temperature. Do you:
a) Remember that K stands for Kelvin, a measure of temperature in which 0 is absolute zero.
b) Google for "temperature K", find the Wikipedia page, and discover what Kelvin is.
c) Mutter something about those stupid journalists writing stuff nobody can understand, and skip to the next article.
If you chose A or B, you are incorrect!
You do realize that when you smoke marijuana you absorb the THC by, you know, breathing smoke.
Breathing smoke is bad for you. It causes cancer and other lung problems. It may not be as bad as breathing nicotine directly into your lungs but it's still not good. I am sure that there are some deaths due to marijuana simply because breathing in smoke is unhealthy, even if those deaths happen much later and the link is uncertain to those who see it happen.
That's fine. But once again, jailbreaking itself does not void your warranty. What voids your warranty is damaging your device. Sometimes jailbreaking damages your device, but it's the damage, not the jailbreaking, which voids the warranty.
(And it only voids the warranty on the damage. It does not void the warranty for the entire product. This is another crucial distinction that people miss.)
"Quite the contrary, it has gone up."
This is false. I suggest you look at how many 100's of thousands of people dies in WWI and WWII.
I'm aware of the figures, apparently more than you, as the number of soldiers who died in WWII alone was something like 20 million. (And that's not counting civilian dead at all, no holocaust, no strategic bombing, nothing.)
Are you aware of how many people died in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and the dozens of other proxy wars fought throughout the Cold War? It's a lot.
None of the countries you listed are industrialized nations;which was the posters point.
And my point was that nuclear deterrence hasn't saved lives, it has merely changed who gets killed.
It hasn't mysteriously moved, it isn't some nebulous magical force.
I never said it was a "nebulous magical force", and I can't begin to conceive why you would say that. The reason is obvious: the nuclear-armed nations don't dare fight amongst each other. However, contrary to the implication of the original poster, this has not led to a decrease of deaths from war. War has simply changed from killing the youth of the richest nations to killing large swaths of the population of the poorest. Not, to my mind, a net gain, although as a citizen of one of the richest nations it's certainly a win for me.
Thank you for the information!
A couple of months ago I read a post about this subject, I think on Freakonomics. It discussed how unanimity may not be as great as we think, since you need a unanimous verdict both to be considered guilty and innocent. If they can't agree then you just get a new trial. And since juries like to go home, people who disagree with the majority will often change their minds just to make the trial finish.
In any case, I didn't know that any places actually did this, so it's interesting to know.