They used to get blueprints for clothes they wanted and produce them themselves.
You mean "patterns". My mother did this in America! In fact, a number of women in her circle of friends did that, and they would trade and/or reuse the patterns. You could buy them at fabric stores. Oh man, being a kid getting dragged to the fabric store with your mom. Not fun. If you were good, maybe icecream later. I think earlier in the 20th century a lot of women did this, and sewing was considered a basic skill of womanhood. I'm not a sexist. I'm just telling you how it was.
If you only look at taxes in isolation (as might happen in theoretical examinations) then all of this might be true. The problem is that by not having a viable solution to the debt problem, we create inflation. The inflation is a defacto tax. Worse yet, it's regressive. It hits the middle class particularly hard since they're most likely to have cash savings. Note--those savings are now earning virtually no interest while prices rise. The low interest is due to actions of the Fed. The high prices are due to a lack of faith in the currency.
OK. So you raise taxes, restore faith in the currency, decreaase commodity prices and suddenly it's like the middle class isn't being taxed so much. If we're back to paying $2/gal for gasoline because of that... just think of the stimulative effect to the economy! The irony is that it might not hurt the rich so much either. They pay more taxes, but what they lose in taxes gets returned in increasing share prices due to the stimulus effect.
There's no telling if it would play out like this or not. It's just as speculative as your theory; but at least I'm pulling in more parts of the picture.
The way I see it, it's simple. If one king had all the gold, what would be the price of gold? It would be essentially undefined. On the way there, if gold had been functioning as money it would become unreliable as it became too scarce to function as a currency. The value of gold would initially go up, but then it might ironicly decline as people turned to substitute currencies. Sound like something you know? When did the dollar peak against other currencies? True, we don't have one king owning all the dollars; but we're doing a pretty good job of approximating it.
It's the same system that was designed when there were 1,000 computers on ARPANET.
Sometime after that, Netscape decided that HTML would make mail look pretty. The rest is history.
I remember being on some mailing list when this started. The admins put instructions to disable HTML in the FAQ, and admonished posters who had it enabled. Alas, the windmills won.
Johnson, get in here. Our statistics show dramaticly increased consumer demand for graham crackers, milk and sleeping mats. Call Amazon and let them know.
Hmmm... A speeder potentially endangers the lives of several people and gets, oh, maybe $1000 fine in severe cases.
A guy makes available 30 songs that could be legally taped off the air at a quality that isn't really all that bad, and he gets driven into bankrputcy.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. (sarcasm).
IMHO, a fair penalty would be the streaming media license fee for the period in question X2 for restitution.
This is just an aftershock from Japan's big one. It isn't interesting. What's interesting?
The slight to moderate quakes across the entire US are interesting. The Virginia quake is the biggest; but if you look on the map now you can still see a triangular pattern that covers Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Those are smaller quakes--3 to 4 magnitude. There was one in Alabama too.
Quakes in that range are not unheard of in the eastern and midwest US; but it seems like there have been a lot more of them lately. Unfortunately, I don't have rigorous stats to back that up, or to distinguish it from the expected outcome based on pure chance.
Yesterday's 7.3 Fiji quake was interesting too because it was so deep.
I missed the point. I was focused on the abuses in described in the app, and pointing out that Android isn't an alternative if you care about that. If you just care about being able to install whatever you want on your toy, then yeah, Android is better.
Today it's probably close to $0.184/gal (my source leaves off in '08). On a percentage basis, we're paying much less in fuel taxes. Our infrastructure shows it.
Another factor is profit margin in the business. The lows in the 60s occured during a price war at the retail level. Today the profit margins on gas are also razor thin--they want you to buy overpriced groceries when you fill up. At other points, gasoline might have been more important to the bottom line.
That's not to say that inflation isn't a factor, and yes; if you cash out your junk silver you can indeed buy more gas today than you could ever before. It's just that it's not the end-all do-all that you make it out to be.
You're a lot more interested in this than I am. Go on and work on your data. Maybe you should write a book. I'm done for the day.
I heard one estimate that 3% of PG & E's power goes towards indoor grows. There would probably be a lot less indoor growing if it were legal.
Another factor is the ongoing housing mess. Poor people conserve electricity in a variety of ways: Moving back home with the folks, not keeping the lights on in the investment house that they plan to flip (it's decaying instead), and not providing jobs for illegal immigrants who are either moving back or enterring at lower rates.
Then of course there's the CFLs and other devices that do the same thing with less energy.
"If present trends continue" is one of those phrases that will come back to haunt you. If the economy picks up and kids move out of the house, hire illegals to do their outside gardening, use growlights for their indoor gardening, and drive a spiffy new electric car to work then we'll be back to talking about how the grid can't handle it.
This is interesting when you consider OSS/FS. Since all such software is published as soon as it's developed, the prior art is right out in the open and usually logged and mirrored with dates in source code repositories all over the world.
The possibility of the prior art being hidden only exists if your source code is closed. This reform could be an unintentional boost to OSS/FS, or at least quasi-open licenses that let the public view the source.
money doesn't fail. There is always reason to invest, as 19 century USA has clearly shown - there was monetary deflation and prices were falling and yet USA was extremely productive and competitive and innovative
OK, much as the "store of value" function isn't boolean, the "medium of exchange" function isn't boolean either. Perhaps it's my bad to say "fail" and not qualify it, although this is beginning to look like one of those threads where you'd have to specify the entire unbounded set of qualifiers in order to "win".
Anyway, the medium of exchange function has indeed begun to show signs of failure under the kinds of systems that Austrian (economists) favor. In fact, one of the more famous examples of a currrency failing and being successfully replaced by a local currency took place in Austria during the Great Depression. (pure coincidence that this happened in Austria). Googling around it seems that Austria had already abandoned the gold standard at that point; although it's unclear from my quick search as to whether or not they attempted Keynesian stimulus. The incident is a strong argument for free banking; but since it's just a small town it's hard to say if it argues for or against Keynesian stimulus at the national level.
Anyway, money can fail. As for the US during the 19th century, we were exploiting natural resources at unchecked rates, taking Indian lands, exploiting cheap labor from Irish and other immigrants, and (during the first half) exploiting slave labor. It's an apples and oranges sort of comparison, loaded with externalities, measured with meters and sold for miles. I've grown tired of this, and don't care to debate the other points...
Money is store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. USD doesn't work as a store of value, here is the proof [long list of commodity price increases, snip]
The "store of value" function isn't boolean. Without some incentive to spend or invest, the money fails. In particular, it fails as a medium of exchange since there is no incentive to spend or invest. Now note, I used the abstract "incentive" without referring to inflation. Inflation is simply the most convenient incentive we've found to compel people to spend or invest their money. Yes, it does gradually erode the store of value function. It's not a bug. It's a feature.
Aside from that, there is a large range of increases in your commodity prices. If it were all due to dollar devaluation, they shoulud be roughly the same. Iron ore is up the most, I suspect, because of China's massive construction boom. You've also chosen a timeframe during which the Fed has engaged in some controversial policies that have driven commodity speculation. If Slashdot existed in 1988, and you chose 1980 as your baseline, this would be a very different discussion.
Any law that turns ordinary activities into beurocratic chores is a stupid law and deserves to be broken. That's exactly what happens to a lot of laws. This one is so far over the edge that not only does it get broken, we don't even realize it's getting broken. How broken is that?
Heck, even building codes get broken all the time in California and it doesn't even get noticed until there's a fire or you sell your house. There was some town down south, I forget which. They went around and surveyed additions, fences, garages, all the crap that people build without it ever occuring to them that the government should be involved. Something like 30% of the town had some level of noncompliance. The town council basicly gave the equivalent of a "fuckit, we ain't gonna bother you unless it's obviously dangerous to people" resolution.
Silly us. We're brought up thinking it's a free country, and we're shocked when we find out it isn't. There's some hope though. When it gets so far into absurdity, even guys in suits and office holders can do the right thing. That's what's happening with "use tax". It's absurd, and even the most tie-choked official still has enough brain cells to see that.
Yep. In fact many modern intentional communities work this way. It can work because you aren't going to screw your neighbors when you live, work and sleep all within a few blocks. Many of these communities are also run by consensus instead of having a hierarchy or authority figure. The problems you see with "communism" at the state level don't emerge until you have a community large enough so that there are "strangers". People will willingly screw a stranger. I've heard that this starts to happen when you get 150 people in the community. In other words, communism doesn't scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you will about Walmart; but they deal hard. I wonder how much they are paying per watt for this installation.
They used to get blueprints for clothes they wanted and produce them themselves.
You mean "patterns". My mother did this in America! In fact, a number of women in her circle of friends did that, and they would trade and/or reuse the patterns. You could buy them at fabric stores. Oh man, being a kid getting dragged to the fabric store with your mom. Not fun. If you were good, maybe icecream later. I think earlier in the 20th century a lot of women did this, and sewing was considered a basic skill of womanhood. I'm not a sexist. I'm just telling you how it was.
If you only look at taxes in isolation (as might happen in theoretical examinations) then all of this might be true. The problem is that by not having a viable solution to the debt problem, we create inflation. The inflation is a defacto tax. Worse yet, it's regressive. It hits the middle class particularly hard since they're most likely to have cash savings. Note--those savings are now earning virtually no interest while prices rise. The low interest is due to actions of the Fed. The high prices are due to a lack of faith in the currency.
OK. So you raise taxes, restore faith in the currency, decreaase commodity prices and suddenly it's like the middle class isn't being taxed so much. If we're back to paying $2/gal for gasoline because of that... just think of the stimulative effect to the economy! The irony is that it might not hurt the rich so much either. They pay more taxes, but what they lose in taxes gets returned in increasing share prices due to the stimulus effect.
There's no telling if it would play out like this or not. It's just as speculative as your theory; but at least I'm pulling in more parts of the picture.
The way I see it, it's simple. If one king had all the gold, what would be the price of gold? It would be essentially undefined. On the way there, if gold had been functioning as money it would become unreliable as it became too scarce to function as a currency. The value of gold would initially go up, but then it might ironicly decline as people turned to substitute currencies. Sound like something you know? When did the dollar peak against other currencies? True, we don't have one king owning all the dollars; but we're doing a pretty good job of approximating it.
Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'
Check the date. It's eerily prescient.
"It works just like regular money, but it's, uh . . . fun."
It's the same system that was designed when there were 1,000 computers on ARPANET.
Sometime after that, Netscape decided that HTML would make mail look pretty. The rest is history.
I remember being on some mailing list when this started. The admins put instructions to disable HTML in the FAQ, and admonished posters who had it enabled. Alas, the windmills won.
An $800 toy that spies on you for Apple Corp.
Johnson, get in here. Our statistics show dramaticly increased consumer demand for graham crackers, milk and sleeping mats. Call Amazon and let them know.
Hmmm... A speeder potentially endangers the lives of several people and gets, oh, maybe $1000 fine in severe cases.
A guy makes available 30 songs that could be legally taped off the air at a quality that isn't really all that bad, and he gets driven into bankrputcy.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. (sarcasm).
IMHO, a fair penalty would be the streaming media license fee for the period in question X2 for restitution.
This is just an aftershock from Japan's big one. It isn't interesting. What's interesting?
The slight to moderate quakes across the entire US are interesting. The Virginia quake is the biggest; but if you look on the map now you can still see a triangular pattern that covers Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. Those are smaller quakes--3 to 4 magnitude. There was one in Alabama too.
Quakes in that range are not unheard of in the eastern and midwest US; but it seems like there have been a lot more of them lately. Unfortunately, I don't have rigorous stats to back that up, or to distinguish it from the expected outcome based on pure chance.
Yesterday's 7.3 Fiji quake was interesting too because it was so deep.
I missed the point. I was focused on the abuses in described in the app, and pointing out that Android isn't an alternative if you care about that. If you just care about being able to install whatever you want on your toy, then yeah, Android is better.
Because the product lifecycle on those is controlled according to the highest standards? Yeah, right.
Of course you're leaving out a lot. The biggest ommission is taxes. Throughout most of the 60s, The Federal tax alone was $0.04/gal. (citation: http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/1067.html).
Today it's probably close to $0.184/gal (my source leaves off in '08). On a percentage basis, we're paying much less in fuel taxes. Our infrastructure shows it.
Another factor is profit margin in the business. The lows in the 60s occured during a price war at the retail level. Today the profit margins on gas are also razor thin--they want you to buy overpriced groceries when you fill up. At other points, gasoline might have been more important to the bottom line.
That's not to say that inflation isn't a factor, and yes; if you cash out your junk silver you can indeed buy more gas today than you could ever before. It's just that it's not the end-all do-all that you make it out to be.
You're a lot more interested in this than I am. Go on and work on your data. Maybe you should write a book. I'm done for the day.
measured in gold, the oil is cheapest in history
Nope. Not even close.
The gold-oil ratio is 1855.40/87.01= approx. 21.3. Visit http://www.incrediblecharts.com/economy/gold_oil_ratio.php and scroll down to the gold-oil ratio chart.
I heard one estimate that 3% of PG & E's power goes towards indoor grows. There would probably be a lot less indoor growing if it were legal.
Another factor is the ongoing housing mess. Poor people conserve electricity in a variety of ways: Moving back home with the folks, not keeping the lights on in the investment house that they plan to flip (it's decaying instead), and not providing jobs for illegal immigrants who are either moving back or enterring at lower rates.
Then of course there's the CFLs and other devices that do the same thing with less energy.
"If present trends continue" is one of those phrases that will come back to haunt you. If the economy picks up and kids move out of the house, hire illegals to do their outside gardening, use growlights for their indoor gardening, and drive a spiffy new electric car to work then we'll be back to talking about how the grid can't handle it.
C is not a strict subset of C++. There are just enough subtleties to be annoying; perhaps even dangerous.
Please note though, I'm not placing myself in the "C/C++" pedant camp. I just see it as shorthand for "C or C++" and it never really bothered me.
This is interesting when you consider OSS/FS. Since all such software is published as soon as it's developed, the prior art is right out in the open and usually logged and mirrored with dates in source code repositories all over the world.
The possibility of the prior art being hidden only exists if your source code is closed. This reform could be an unintentional boost to OSS/FS, or at least quasi-open licenses that let the public view the source.
Is Google really lumping C and C++ as "C/C++"? That was an easy way to troll comp.lang.c last time I checked.
money doesn't fail. There is always reason to invest, as 19 century USA has clearly shown - there was monetary deflation and prices were falling and yet USA was extremely productive and competitive and innovative
OK, much as the "store of value" function isn't boolean, the "medium of exchange" function isn't boolean either. Perhaps it's my bad to say "fail" and not qualify it, although this is beginning to look like one of those threads where you'd have to specify the entire unbounded set of qualifiers in order to "win".
Anyway, the medium of exchange function has indeed begun to show signs of failure under the kinds of systems that Austrian (economists) favor. In fact, one of the more famous examples of a currrency failing and being successfully replaced by a local currency took place in Austria during the Great Depression. (pure coincidence that this happened in Austria). Googling around it seems that Austria had already abandoned the gold standard at that point; although it's unclear from my quick search as to whether or not they attempted Keynesian stimulus. The incident is a strong argument for free banking; but since it's just a small town it's hard to say if it argues for or against Keynesian stimulus at the national level.
Anyway, money can fail. As for the US during the 19th century, we were exploiting natural resources at unchecked rates, taking Indian lands, exploiting cheap labor from Irish and other immigrants, and (during the first half) exploiting slave labor. It's an apples and oranges sort of comparison, loaded with externalities, measured with meters and sold for miles. I've grown tired of this, and don't care to debate the other points...
Double knot.
Money is store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. USD doesn't work as a store of value, here is the proof [long list of commodity price increases, snip]
The "store of value" function isn't boolean. Without some incentive to spend or invest, the money fails. In particular, it fails as a medium of exchange since there is no incentive to spend or invest. Now note, I used the abstract "incentive" without referring to inflation. Inflation is simply the most convenient incentive we've found to compel people to spend or invest their money. Yes, it does gradually erode the store of value function. It's not a bug. It's a feature.
Aside from that, there is a large range of increases in your commodity prices. If it were all due to dollar devaluation, they shoulud be roughly the same. Iron ore is up the most, I suspect, because of China's massive construction boom. You've also chosen a timeframe during which the Fed has engaged in some controversial policies that have driven commodity speculation. If Slashdot existed in 1988, and you chose 1980 as your baseline, this would be a very different discussion.
Any law that turns ordinary activities into beurocratic chores is a stupid law and deserves to be broken. That's exactly what happens to a lot of laws. This one is so far over the edge that not only does it get broken, we don't even realize it's getting broken. How broken is that?
Heck, even building codes get broken all the time in California and it doesn't even get noticed until there's a fire or you sell your house. There was some town down south, I forget which. They went around and surveyed additions, fences, garages, all the crap that people build without it ever occuring to them that the government should be involved. Something like 30% of the town had some level of noncompliance. The town council basicly gave the equivalent of a "fuckit, we ain't gonna bother you unless it's obviously dangerous to people" resolution.
Silly us. We're brought up thinking it's a free country, and we're shocked when we find out it isn't. There's some hope though. When it gets so far into absurdity, even guys in suits and office holders can do the right thing. That's what's happening with "use tax". It's absurd, and even the most tie-choked official still has enough brain cells to see that.
I likened drinking that coffee to being poisoned. That's not OK
Oh yes it is. They actually post Prop 65 warnings in coffee shops now.
It's creepy that the map in the time's article displays the cemetarys as being 100% occupied
Well, somebody has to make sure the mayor wins re-election.
Sounds like some kind of cult.
Yep. In fact many modern intentional communities work this way. It can work because you aren't going to screw your neighbors when you live, work and sleep all within a few blocks. Many of these communities are also run by consensus instead of having a hierarchy or authority figure. The problems you see with "communism" at the state level don't emerge until you have a community large enough so that there are "strangers". People will willingly screw a stranger. I've heard that this starts to happen when you get 150 people in the community. In other words, communism doesn't scale.
I often wonder what kind of a programmer I'd be if I had never purchased and used The Commodore 64 Programmers Reference Guide.