(And metallic mercury is "safe" - it's not bio-available. But there are many bio-available mercury compounds that are and contribute to mercury poisoning).
I cannot fathom how a post that ends like this is marked "+5 insightful."
Metalllic (elemental) mercury is nowhere near "safe." Sure, it's not particularly dangerous when handled carefully and knowledgeably in a lab environment.
However, elemental mercury can and does contribute to mercury poisoning. It isn't absorbed through the skin quickly, and even if ingested, only a tiny fraction is absorbed. So, unless you chronically handle mercury or ingest a decent amount, you're not likely to see effects.
But in a vapor form, it is readily absorbed into your bloodstream and can easily lead to poisoning. It will readily begin to evaporate at room temperature, particularly in small droplets or a fine mist. Any laboratory chemist will tell you, for example, never to heat mercury unless you REALLY know what you're doing and have sufficient ventilation. People have even absorbed fatal doses of elemental mercury from even heating a small amount and inhaling the vapor.
Now, back to your CFL -- the mercury that's contained there will be released in a fine mist or vapor if the bulb is broken. Much of it will vaporize almost immediately, making the area around the break unsafe until adequately ventilated. A number of scientific government studies (like this one) show residual mercury "powder" staying on carpets and porous surfaces for weeks or MONTHS after a CFL break. Enough so that the area above a carpet will have levels of mercury above safe levels when disturbed... by, say, an infant or small child playing.
I'm not saying that CFLs are very dangerous in terms of mercury content. Certainly they aren't anything bad compared to a broken thermometer spill on a rug that was never cleaned up. But at least the thermometer will generally released beads of mercury that can be easily collected on a hard surface. The CFL releases mercury vapor, which is the only form that elemental mercury is significantly hazardous in.
And by the way, yes -- organic mercury compounds (like methylmercury compounds) are generally significantly more hazardous, since they can often be absorbed more easily through ingestion or even through the skin. But how do you think the tuna or swordfish got those organic mercury compounds in its flesh? It absorbed elemental mercury slowly, and it built up. Same thing can happen for humans.
It could be anything. Seriously -- it makes about as much sense. If "probability of disaster" is somehow equated to a time duration, frankly I think we could say it's equal to just about anything.
My point about the shooter is that he started complaining to the texting guy, apparently because the texting process was bothering/interrupting his enjoyment of what was on the screen. If the shooter was truly interested in seeing the presentation then his best course of action would have been to wait for the texting to stop, relocate or wait for a theater employee to resolve the situation. If his goal was to see a film then discharging a firearm in the theater was diametrically opposed to his interests.
People don't, in a rational mindset, act in anything other their own self interest.
What the heck are you talking about?!? A guy apparently randomly shoots another guy in a movie theater, and you're trying to figure out if he was "rational"?? Of course not! Suppose shooting the guy would have achieved his goal -- say he decided not to see the movie, and was trying to leave to go to the bathroom, but this other guy got in his way... so the first guy shoots him. He walks over the body and goes to the bathroom... thus achieving his goal. Would that make him "in a rational mindset"?
Of course not. He started acting against his own self-interest the moment he decided to murder someone without being in any serious danger or anything else himself (at least according to media reports). Even if he managed to get to watch the film, he'd ultimately be arrested and go to jail. So... regardless of whether he could logically achieve his goal, it seems likely he was deranged or unstable in some way.
And it usually does, except for some of our basic units of measurement, which remain stubbornly stuck in the past. That's why it's an embarassment. The whooshing sound you heard is the point sailing over your head.
Umm, I'm pretty sure scientists have been working on the kilogram problem for some time. Your use of "stubbornly" implies that there's some sort of resistance to a redefinition. But I don't think there's any evidence that that's the case.
Here's a NYT article from 2003 detailing the then-current attempts at redefinition. I'm sure there are older things out there detailing the scientific efforts to work on this problem, too... this was literally one of the top three hits in an internet search.
Anyhow, in 2005, the International Committee for Weights and Measures formally recommended a redefinition. In 2011, the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed. If you want to see all the proposed revisions, they are nicely summarized in a Wikipedia article here.
It may be somewhat true that the kilogram redefinition lagged a bit behind other units, mostly because the other units had practical applications where the need for increased precision was rising more rapidly. But given that the attempts to provide a standard measurement system are ongoing, and the proposed redefinitions make use of technology that is still being refined to maintain a high-enough level of accuracy to supersede the old standard, there's no reason to call this an "embarrassment" "stubbornly stuck in the past."
Scientists are actively working on the problem -- and have been for quite some time.
And I also disagree that, as the article states, "labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability". What is needed for that is having an accepted place in society, and having an income you can depend on. In the current system, labour is generally a way to achieve both. But nothing says it must be.
This is by far the most insightful comment here. History shows that freedom from traditional wage-earning labor does not lead to social decay, as long as basic needs and provided for and there is some sort of "accepted place in society" for what people do when not occupied in standard "work."
When agrarian societies became more urban between 1850 and 1950 or so, women still were rarely "wage earners" outside the home. Yet even as they lost their agrarian work (feeding the livestock, milking the cows, etc.), they found novel standards that continued to occupy the new time (increasing emphasis on home cleanliness and order, more elaborate meals and hosted social functions, etc.). Obviously this was also a much more sexist time, and women's place in society was not as valued -- but it nevertheless was essential (and obviously some crucial tasks continued in this transition, like raising kids, etc.). The point is that even when women found new time due to mechanization that freed them from some household work, they found other things to replace that -- a whole new construction of the urban (and then suburban) "housewife."
In fact, extra time has often led to innovations or essential cultural "work." Medieval monks abstained from the normal economy and labors going around them in the secular world, but most of the knowledge we have from that time in Europe was transmitted because these monks copied manuscripts and passed on knowledge. For those who were more intelligent, they actually read these books and at times continued ancient traditions of learning that died out in the secular world -- that's where the scientific investigations and "deep thought" happened (as much as it did) in medieval Europe. Obviously there were also plenty of monks that did not participate in these sorts of endeavors, and many who were even more corrupt in their lifestyles -- especially in the later medieval period. But the fact that so much knowledge was preserved by the efforts of many monks shows that great things can sometimes come from those who are not forced to labor continuously in the standard work and lifestyle dictated by society.
I would only qualify one point in the parent's post: "having an income you can depend on" need not represent money in the traditional sense. What people need is a way that fundamental needs can be provided. Our current system revolves around "money" even for those essentials, but there's no reason it must always be so. In an advanced technological society that can provide more than enough resources to feed everyone with almost no labor, for example, food could simply be "made available" as a public resource, the way roads, libraries, etc. are available without explicit payment in money. (Of course, someone's going to point out that we do currently pay for roads and libraries and such through taxation, etc., but to get to the point I'm talking about, most of that monetary system would have to be reconfigured significantly... to the point that the "cost" of public resources may no longer be valued in money.)
But apparently since they didn't receive a salary for that, they didn't really "work".
What are you talking about? From your own quotation of the GP:
Between housewives and children less than 50% of people were employed, but a single person could provide for their family on an average wage. Wages have been depressed heavily since then so that a couple with children both need to [go to] work [to earn income].
It's very clear in the GP's passage that we're talking about "work" for a wage, requiring a specific employer/employee relationship, and bringing income to the home from an external source.
Yes, those times were more sexist, and women's "housework" may not have been valued as much by many. That is unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with viewpoints today and the GP's post.
This whole discussion is discussing "jobs" (i.e., employment which earns money), not "work" as an abstract concept. Back in the days of "respectable housewives" (as you put it), men also might be required to (lesser) amounts of work around the house. But even if a man painted the house, did maintenance on the car, whatever, that too would not bring external money into the household. That doesn't mean that painting the house or "housework" like washing clothes, preparing meals, etc. wasn't "work." It may in fact have been work that was quite necessary and important, but it did not provide a wage, which is the present discussion.
Back then, respectable housewives were expected to keep a spotless house, do all the laundry/ironing, prepare gourmet meals for their "hard working" husbands - and unexpected visits from the boss, and a lot of other stuff. [snip] Go further back to farm days, and you can not only add making cheese and butter, canning and other such agrarian domestic activities....
This is funny, because you're actually making the points that the GP and GGP were trying to make. Even when society began to transition from rural agrarian lifestyles to more urban situations, and mechanization made it possible for housewives to avoid a lot of manual farm chores, the housewives didn't go rioting out in the streets because they "had no work to do."
Instead, different metrics came into being -- women shifted their labor toward other tasks (less feeding the pigs and churning butter, more concern about cleanliness/order and more elaborate meals). The fact that more than 50% of the population was still not employed for a wage did not result in some sort of imminent social disaster, even when some of their previous work lessened or disappeared. People found other things to do with their time.
Thus, assuming the transition were gradual, and enough wages could be brought into the average household with only 50% working for pay, there's no reason to immediately assume that society will self-destruct and idleness will lead to gross social disorder (as many people like to predict -- which is what the GP and GGP were arguing against).
Processing food does not make it cheap or cheaper. It always adds cost.
False. In many cases, processing is used to increase shelf life. Less processed foods often spoil or deteriorate faster. Consumers thus often pay a significant premium for fresh foods, "whole" foods (which often contain spoilage elements removed in processing), and unprocessed foods in general -- since it costs more for stores to keep unprocessed foods in stock (waste due to spoilage) and often more to transport them.
Yeah, I know. I saw that the moment I hit submit. Oh well. I'll cop to not taking the time to proofread. At least my error was due to poor editing when I changed the wording of the sentence. I'm not sure that excuse applies to GP.
You're conflating prices for value. What really matters in terms of economic wealth is purchasing power - what one dollar can buy you. If today $1 buys you one hotdog and your salary is $10/hour, yet a year from now $1 buys you two hotdogs yet your salary is $7.50/hour, your salary has gone "down", yet your purchasing power has actually increased (assuming hotdogs are the only product in this small example). It doesn't matter what the absolute number of your wage is, what matters is your purchasing power.
Who is conflating prices and value? You give a contrived example where hot dogs just happen to get cheaper faster than your labor does. So what? The same thing can in an inflationary economy.
Here's where your system breaks down, since you obviously can't think on the larger scale. Who controls most of the money? Rich people. Do you think the rich people (the executives, managers, etc.) are going to voluntarily take pay cuts, even if deflation occurs? Not unless they absolutely have to.
So, all things being equal, if the economy is deflating and prices are going down, companies are making less money. People in charge of companies won't volunteer to take less money (even if it's worth more), so they cut jobs or wages for those "lower on the food chain." And because the profits of companies are constrained by the lower prices, your wages have to fall faster than prices (on average) in order for the companies to maintain their profits and pay the executive salaries even at a steady rate.
If you don't think this would happen, it's EXACTLY what happens today in inflationary economies. When a company makes more money in excess of inflation, do the lowly workers always get a raise? No -- the execs skim as much as they can off the top first, and dole out the smallest amount possible to retain their employees. Which means even if you're getting pay increases, they may not keep up with inflation... hence, your purchasing power is gradually decreasing, even if your salary comes up.
Deflationary economies would still maintain similar trends in businesses, except now owners aren't worried about how much their "bonus" will be, but whether they can take the same amount as last year (even if the value of that amount has increased). If deflation goes fast enough, you can bet that most companies will cut jobs or cut pay faster than prices are dropping. Sure, you might be lucky enough to work for a company or have a job where your pay goes down more slowly, but to make the general economy balance out, those lower prices will force wages overall to fall just as fast. Overall -- the population does not magically "win" in a deflationary economy.
If all products suddenly become twice as cheap to produce, and the prices are all halved, the result isn't a poorer economy - it's an economy in which everybody can buy twice as much stuff as before
Who the heck do you think makes all this stuff!?!?! I mean, really?? If all the prices go down, all the companies make less money overall, which means they can only pay less wages. There's no "free lunch." You can't say that prices everywhere are going down but somehow magically there's money somewhere that is keeping wages higher than prices. Your hot dog example seems to presume that wages will fall slower than prices, but that will only happen as long as there's still room for more efficiency. Eventually quality of goods will start to go down too, to keep lowering prices while not lowering wages as fast.
But this lower salary doesn't mean you are poorer, it means you have the same purchasing power as before.
Only if wages fall at the same rate as prices. Given that in inflationary economies, wages often don't keep up rising with inflation, how can you guarantee that in a deflationary one, wages will fall more slowly than overall deflation?
You are also confused about loans in that the interest rate f
I can't believe it's still considered informative to say "Deflation is bad because SMART people stop buying things that will be cheaper tomorrow". Consider the price of computers.
Consider the price of a house, which is one of the largest purchases most people will consider in their lifetimes. You're absolutely right that when you're talking about an industrial product, gradually lowering the price is often useful and represents more economic efficiency in the process.
Deflation is great for single products -- but here we're talking about deflation in the economy as a whole. That means that your wages are likely to go down too, as prices go down. It's not like you magically get to keep getting raises as prices go down, or even likely that businesses will be able to keep affording paying you want you do get. So you won't really be able to take advantage of those falling prices, since you'll bhe getting less and less in your paycheck too.
And talking about durable goods and property is a different story. Why would anyone except rich people with money to burn ever buy property or a house? With deflation going on, mortgages and loans are a TERRIBLE thing, since the principal owed stays the same as value goes down and your salary goes down. Meanwhile, your mortgage payment stays the same, so your loan costs more and more and more. To avoid loans, your average person would have to save for many years, maybe decades, to buy a house outright... only to -- wait for it -- depreciate like mad. Or, stupid people might still take out loans and all end up instantly underwater.
I can hear your response now: "But wait, people buy cars, and they rapidly depreciate!" Yes, but cars are treated as disposable for most people -- they expect to buy another one in a decade or so anyway. AND most people spend maybe 10 times or more on a house than they would on a car. It's a significant portion of a life's savings to buy a house. Nobody wants to save all that up just to throw it into something that's instantly going to start losing value... particularly as wages are plummeting due to deflation.
So, the real estate market collapses. Your wages are going in the toilet. But we're just getting started.
The fact is that prices going down is *not* in and of itself a bad thing. This is what you want - it generally means the economy is getting more and more efficient and that the wealth of the nation is increasing. As time goes on, in a free market, generally the quality of goods will increase and the prices will go down.
Yeah, I think you don't really understand what real deflation is. You think it's just increasing economic inefficiencies to introduce lower prices for some small subsets of goods. REAL deflation is pervasive in the economy and causes all sorts of values to drop everywhere -- wages, property values, etc. You won't be able to take advantage of those magical lower prices, because your salary is being "made more efficient" as well. Want to take out a home equity loan when disaster strikes? Oh, well, your house is only worth 25% of what it once was, and your loan principal will immediately start to increase in its percentage of your paycheck each year.
Meanwhile, without loans being made, capital available for investments and business starts begins to dry up. Most of the money in the economy is not just the actual "cash" the government releases, but all of the various "money" "created" by loans and investments using other people's money. That's what drives the economy to innovate and try out new things.
Innovation decreases, because investors don't want to take a chance unless it's a "sure thing." When the 1% stops spending, disaster really begins. Businesses are even more prone to downsize than they are today -- no one ever wants to risk having to borrow money. Eventually, if unchecked, it can lead to a deflationary spiral, which is just as bad an economic disaster as an i
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
To do a currency transaction? How about, umm, use cash? That is, in the actual government currency?
I don't know what country you live, so I don't know your government. Nevertheless, it's increasingly difficult to live by cash alone, but as long as you aren't doing huge transactions, in most countries it's still possible to do most of your business in cash, i.e., the "government endorsed" currency.
For most government currencies, at least in the short term, using cash means something that has relatively stable value. Even with craziness like the NSA scandals, I doubt most governments are really trying to track ALL cash transactions -- unless you're doing something illegal and/or using large amounts of bills, probably not as much to worry about.
I don't put a lot of faith in my government to always do the right thing. But if my choice is "get green piece of paper -- hand it to person I'm paying" vs. "depend on whole networks of unknown internet folks to not manipulate the currency or the various sets of transactions I have to go through to get the money to the person I'm pay in any way"... well, I know which I'd choose.
If you were only talking about electronic transactions to remote people (requiring credit cards, wire transfers, whatever), perhaps we can have an argument. But unless your country is going through some sort of major political or economic upheaval (in which case, probably any currency and any transactions are going to be problematic), the ease of transaction for cash is hard to beat in terms of reliability.
The Legal maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": "Silence gives consent".
The phrase is "qui tacet consentire videtur," which literally means, "he who is silent appears [videtur] to consent." Your phrase doesn't make grammatical sense. Literally, you said: "he who is silent, to consent."
In modern corporate legal language this translates to -- "(Consumer) Ignorence is (Our) Bliss".
Since we're on the topic of Latin, the English word ignorance comes from a first-conjugation Latin verb ignorare -- note the characteristics "a" of the first conjugation.
Pro-tip: whenever posting about "ignorance," check your sources.
There's more, but I think you can see the difference between the two scenarios.
Most of your argument makes the assumption that the patients are not close to death. What if they are? (Disaster scenario or something.) And what if the healthy guy says, "No!" even to the idea of donating some organs?
If you find it repugnant to kill him, do you still favor forced "donation" of his organs if it won't kill him, but will save the lives of other people in imminent danger of dying? After all, you seem in favor of killing a guy in one scenario to save five people, what's wrong with stealing a kidney?
(To be clear, I'm not arguing either side of anything in these debates. I'm just bringing in the kind of questions that moral philosophers do....)
If you are bumper-to-bumper you don't have an accident. The damage isn't done by cars touching. It's done by cars colliding at some speed difference. If these cars drive a two inches distance, there is very little force when they "collide".
Are you serious? I suppose you're also one of those people who say, "Yeah, falling doesn't actually kill you -- it's only hitting the ground at high speed that will."
You're right: two cars traveling at nearly identical speeds won't do much damage if they tap each other. The problem in the GP's scenario is the unpredictability introduced by one car's sudden change from "steady state" to "who knows what will happen next!?!"
The problem isn't the initial collision. It's whether the cars behind can react fast enough to deal with what happens next -- is the car in front going to fishtail, pull off the road, slow down suddenly, etc.? And what about the car behind car #2 in the train, and the one behind car #3? Eventually, you reach a situation where problems pile up (cars swerving in all directions to avoid the problem in front), and there's nowhere left to go... meanwhile, the car in front has likely now decelerated to a point that the next collision WILL be serious.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power
By the way, perhaps you were making a reference with your KNOWS. If not, I'd be careful about emphasizing the word knows when talking about the trolley problem, unless you've dug around in the vast philosophical literature on it, where knows in italics has special meaning. If you're not careful, pretty soon you end up piling on philosophical nonsense conundrums and end up with something like this.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
Yes, and that ultimately leads to the "next level" of utilitarian dilemmas. What if you're a doctor, with five terminal patients who all need different organs. In walks a healthy person who is (miraculously) compatible with all of them.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients? (For the sake of argument, we assume that the procedures involved have a high chance of success, so you'll definitely save a number of people by killing one.)
Many people who say we should flip the switch in the trolley problem think it's wrong to murder someone to harvest their organ and ensure the same outcome. Why is "inaction" appropriate for the doctor, but not in the case of the trolley?
(I'm not saying I have the right answers -- but once you start down the philosophical path of utilitarian hypotheticals, there's a whole world of wacko and bizarre situations waiting to challenge just about anyone's moral principles. I can't wait until the "I was kidnapped and forced to keep a famous violinist alive" scenarios come up!)
Lots of these people actually think their email account is tied to their computer. They think they would have to get a new computer to change email accounts.
I suppose that's possible. [snip] Though I will say in the 18 years I've been working with computers I've never seen this.
You obviously haven't worked very much with people over the age of 60, particularly blue-collar folks who never really had to do much with computers at a job.
Many older people just simply don't get the idea of the internet at all. They don't understand the difference between stuff that's on their computer vs. stuff stored online. They don't understand the difference between turning on their computer and "going online." They don't understand the difference between running a local application vs. doing something in a web browser. I know lots of older -- and even rather smart -- people who still don't really understand the difference between email and texting, since they only ever learned how to text on the iPhone someone convinced them to get after their kids got tired explaining how to use phones to them.
All they know is that there's a single interface where they type letters, buy stuff from Amazon, get email, play solitaire, and view cat pictures and videos. To them, it's all part of "one thing." We don't help things when we talk about stuff being "on their desktop."
So, when you tell someone that they're going to get a new computer, it's like telling them that you're going to replace their desk and everything on it and in it. What transfers and what doesn't? What has to be reinstalled, and what will simply still be there because it's "out there" on the intertubes?
They don't know. Because they simply don't understand where all the stuff is -- they just have a magical device that allows them to do some handful of tasks. And almost all of them know that there is always some stuff that doesn't move between computers, because they lost something before when they accidentally deleted something....
Well, I think it would be more fair to say marketing and current fads win. A bestselling author may not need to do any marketing at all, other than mentioning, "By the way, I'm coming out with another book," and it will probably still sell well. Books about famous people or written by celebrities will also often sell, regardless of whether they are marketed heavily. Similarly, books about current fads (diets, financial advice, etc.) may also sell pretty well -- the first book regarding a fad may need some marketing to get going, but subsequent books often just follow on that.
On the other hand, there are PLENTY of examples of things that were marketed like crazy and still fail.
My general point is that marketing is most critical when something isn't yet well-known or associated with something well-known. Ultimately, fame wins... particularly when we're talking about bestsellers. That, and random fads.
Gutenberg is stacked with classics. Stuff that has been successful over a long period of time. Some classics were flops when they were first published and some go periodically in and out of favor.
Or, in other words, what counts as a "classic" right now is simply what's popular today. I think the trends can be better seen in music history. Take, for example, Pachelbel's Canon in D, that piece which seemingly shows up everywhere as "classical music." Johann Pachelbel, however, was a master composer, well-known in his lifetime for all sorts of compositions. Today he has one stupid piece played at thousands of weddings and other occasions every year, just because of some whims of audiences in the late 1960s who got interested in it.
Take Antonio Vivaldi, who was hugely popular in his lifetime, then almost completely forgotten for centuries (he died a pauper, so his fame was as short-lived as many pop artists today), until some Italian archivists dug up his thousand-or-so compositions in the 1920s, and these pieces were then deliberately promoted as part of Italian cultural history beginning in the 1930s.
Or, heck, for a recent example, look at Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, a Renaissance motet that was pretty obscure until the past couple of years after it appeared in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Suddenly, recordings of the piece bounded up to the top of the charts, and it has led to a new interest in Renaissance music and certain early music performance groups.
I'm not saying that these pieces or composers don't have great value or that they shouldn't be "classics." But I do think that interest in particular "classics" is driven almost as much by current culture as actual current art/literature/music is. Measuring downloads from Project Gutenberg is giving us a particular snapshot into what is considered "classic" literature for the past few years. Fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago, I can guarantee you that the lists would be different -- and not just because of works written since then.
You've correctly pointed out that the only difference between gold and yak tears is that people are irrationally attracted to gold. But you haven't shown that there's any fundamental difference other than scarcity between gold and fiat currency.
Just because a government can inflate "fiat currency" doesn't mean that they must. Theoretically, the U.S. federal government could pay off all of its debts tomorrow, shut itself down completely (absolute minimal spending to satisfy Constitutional requirements), and then shut down all the presses and coin minting. If they still continued to claim the "legal tender" status for the dollar and only accepted dollars for tax payments, guess what? Dollars would start to become scarce. People would hoard them.
In practice, no government would EVER do this deliberately. Why? Because it would result in a deflationary spiral that would be economic suicide. Instead, most adopt a policy of moderate inflation for the reasons I outlined in my original post. Sometimes it gets out of control for random economic reasons or because governments can't rein in spending. Note that hyperinflation generally is not caused by governments printing money to pay debts in their own currency; it is generally caused when governments owe money in another currency, and as they print more, the value of the local currency plummets in relation to other international currencies, forcing an inflationary spiral to pay debt.
The U.S. debt, on the other hand, is almost all owed in dollars. That's a fundamental difference, though governments can still be stupid enough to ruin economies if they try.
Anyhow, the primary point you've failed to understand is that a precious metal standard does not prevent currency inflation (nor government running the "press" to make more money), as can be learned from reading any history. When governments run out of gold, it's not like everyone throws up their hands and says "Oh well, gold is a scarce resource, and we're out! So... oh well, let's just shut things down!"
No -- first governments switch to less precious metals, historically silver was important, but in the ancient world, currencies were even issued in things like giant iron "coins" (which corroded), just to keep up the spending.
But the next step is seigniorage, where governments start mixing in crap metals with precious ones or simply declaring that coins in a particular metal are worth more than the value of the raw metals. In good economic times, this may work okay. In bad economic times, it too can lead to an inflationary spiral.
You can believe all you want in some "magical" powers of a gold standard, but people will always find ways to screw up things economically with currencies, particularly if things get dire enough. Using gold or any other scarce -- but ultimately small-valued -- item won't fix that. The moment you convert actual "wealth" in useful goods (food, textiles for clothing, essential tools and weapons, etc.) into currency, you're taking a risk and trusting your wealth to the whims of others in power who have more currency than you do. It's only if you have the power and/or control the actual supplies of goods that you can have any guarantee of value.
In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year.
Umm, for the most part, that's by design. Since the Depression in the 1930s, the Fed's general policy has mostly been to encourage gradual inflation. Why? Well, a lot has to do with details of economic theory, but in simple terms, it encourages people to invest and spend money in the economy.
You can disagree with this idea (and there are people who do), but in the case of the dollar at least, it seems to have been effective. Between the Depression of the 1930s and 2008, we had nothing like the series of financial "panics" of the 1800s in the U.S.
When currency value rises (deflation), people hoard cash. They save. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn't encourage investment or innovation. Why should I bother taking a chance funding my brother's new small business (or even some crazy guy's cool new idea) if I can effectively increase my assets simply by hiding them under my mattress?
If deflation could occur at any moment, investors are also skittish. At a moment's notice, they could sense things decreasing in value and try to "cash out" of any investments, as happened in 2008. The main reason we don't experience such severe "runs on the market" (or actually runs from the market) every few years is because long-term investors believe that they'll still likely make a profit in the long run, at least due to the gradual rise in prices.
A targeted small rate of inflation makes it so the cash savers don't lose a lot of value, but the investors are encouraged. This is all by design.
Again, you can disagree with this strategy (and there are good reasons to question some assumptions), but that's what the Fed DESIGNED the system to do. You can't come back and say this is an inherent property of fiat currencies, since it isn't.
(And, by the way, all currencies that exceed their natural inherent value are effectively "fiat" -- if it weren't for speculation and some irrational attraction to shiny rocks, gold's value would be a lot lower. Thus, a "gold standard" is not inherently more stable, even if endorsed by a government -- lots of severe financial panics and depressions occurred while many countries were still under the gold standard. Contrary to popular belief, what makes a currency behave differently from a "fiat" currency isn't merely scarcity -- lots of things are scarce, and most of them have little to no value. In the long run and in dire circumstances, neither shiny rocks nor green pieces of paper nor Bitcoins are guaranteed to be of use -- only actual useful commodities that can be traded are.)
By the way, I'm not saying this implies anything good or bad about the quality of the study itself -- it just doesn't mean much that the name "Harvard" is on the journal in terms of ideological commitment.
as it is from Harvard (typically not a pro-gun source)
I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. The authors have no Harvard affiliation. The study is not endorsed by Harvard in any way. It is merely published in an independent law journal published by students at the Harvard Law School which is specifically described by Harvard as "the leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship." As with most major law schools, the students are a diverse group, and they often choose to organize peer-reviewed law journals with a variety of focuses. If the journal wasn't following accepted scholarly practices, Harvard might step in and shut it down or at least insist on removing its name from it -- but short of that, this journal probably operates pretty independently from the Harvard law faculty or Harvard University in general.
Kids have no right to free speech, or any right to reasonable search and seizure of their property
That's not true at all. Minors basically have most free speech rights and are protected by the 4th amendment against searches and seizures.
I think you're confusing the fact that parents and those acting in loco parentis (in the legal place of parents) can restrict speech of minors and search them. Schools, for example, can restrict the speech of minors and search their belongings while at school, since they are acting in the place of parents as effective guardians over them during schooltime and on the school's property.
HOWEVER, this absolutely does NOT mean that a cop could randomly arrest a kid for "free speech" that an adult would normally make, NOR can a cop randomly search a minor without a warrant -- though a parent or school might give them permission to do so. In the absence of permission from a parent, guardian, or the minor him/herself, the police have to accord with normal 1st and 4th amendment protections for minors in most circumstances.
Slashdot Mirror
(And metallic mercury is "safe" - it's not bio-available. But there are many bio-available mercury compounds that are and contribute to mercury poisoning).
I cannot fathom how a post that ends like this is marked "+5 insightful."
Metalllic (elemental) mercury is nowhere near "safe." Sure, it's not particularly dangerous when handled carefully and knowledgeably in a lab environment.
However, elemental mercury can and does contribute to mercury poisoning. It isn't absorbed through the skin quickly, and even if ingested, only a tiny fraction is absorbed. So, unless you chronically handle mercury or ingest a decent amount, you're not likely to see effects.
But in a vapor form, it is readily absorbed into your bloodstream and can easily lead to poisoning. It will readily begin to evaporate at room temperature, particularly in small droplets or a fine mist. Any laboratory chemist will tell you, for example, never to heat mercury unless you REALLY know what you're doing and have sufficient ventilation. People have even absorbed fatal doses of elemental mercury from even heating a small amount and inhaling the vapor.
Now, back to your CFL -- the mercury that's contained there will be released in a fine mist or vapor if the bulb is broken. Much of it will vaporize almost immediately, making the area around the break unsafe until adequately ventilated. A number of scientific government studies (like this one) show residual mercury "powder" staying on carpets and porous surfaces for weeks or MONTHS after a CFL break. Enough so that the area above a carpet will have levels of mercury above safe levels when disturbed... by, say, an infant or small child playing.
I'm not saying that CFLs are very dangerous in terms of mercury content. Certainly they aren't anything bad compared to a broken thermometer spill on a rug that was never cleaned up. But at least the thermometer will generally released beads of mercury that can be easily collected on a hard surface. The CFL releases mercury vapor, which is the only form that elemental mercury is significantly hazardous in.
And by the way, yes -- organic mercury compounds (like methylmercury compounds) are generally significantly more hazardous, since they can often be absorbed more easily through ingestion or even through the skin. But how do you think the tuna or swordfish got those organic mercury compounds in its flesh? It absorbed elemental mercury slowly, and it built up. Same thing can happen for humans.
So, if we're doomed in 5 minutes, what does 24 hours represent?
One ampere, perhaps?
A new standard for the kilogram?
It could be anything. Seriously -- it makes about as much sense. If "probability of disaster" is somehow equated to a time duration, frankly I think we could say it's equal to just about anything.
My point about the shooter is that he started complaining to the texting guy, apparently because the texting process was bothering/interrupting his enjoyment of what was on the screen. If the shooter was truly interested in seeing the presentation then his best course of action would have been to wait for the texting to stop, relocate or wait for a theater employee to resolve the situation. If his goal was to see a film then discharging a firearm in the theater was diametrically opposed to his interests. People don't, in a rational mindset, act in anything other their own self interest.
What the heck are you talking about?!? A guy apparently randomly shoots another guy in a movie theater, and you're trying to figure out if he was "rational"?? Of course not! Suppose shooting the guy would have achieved his goal -- say he decided not to see the movie, and was trying to leave to go to the bathroom, but this other guy got in his way... so the first guy shoots him. He walks over the body and goes to the bathroom... thus achieving his goal. Would that make him "in a rational mindset"?
Of course not. He started acting against his own self-interest the moment he decided to murder someone without being in any serious danger or anything else himself (at least according to media reports). Even if he managed to get to watch the film, he'd ultimately be arrested and go to jail. So... regardless of whether he could logically achieve his goal, it seems likely he was deranged or unstable in some way.
"Hello sir, we'd like you to have this flower on behalf of the Church of Religious consciousness, would you care to make a donation?"
Better call Hugh Jackman, or Hugh Grant, or maybe even Hugh Hefner when those pesky religious guys with the flowers come around.
After all, only Hugh can prevent florist friars.
And it usually does, except for some of our basic units of measurement, which remain stubbornly stuck in the past. That's why it's an embarassment. The whooshing sound you heard is the point sailing over your head.
Umm, I'm pretty sure scientists have been working on the kilogram problem for some time. Your use of "stubbornly" implies that there's some sort of resistance to a redefinition. But I don't think there's any evidence that that's the case.
Here's a NYT article from 2003 detailing the then-current attempts at redefinition. I'm sure there are older things out there detailing the scientific efforts to work on this problem, too... this was literally one of the top three hits in an internet search.
Anyhow, in 2005, the International Committee for Weights and Measures formally recommended a redefinition. In 2011, the General Conference on Weights and Measures agreed. If you want to see all the proposed revisions, they are nicely summarized in a Wikipedia article here.
It may be somewhat true that the kilogram redefinition lagged a bit behind other units, mostly because the other units had practical applications where the need for increased precision was rising more rapidly. But given that the attempts to provide a standard measurement system are ongoing, and the proposed redefinitions make use of technology that is still being refined to maintain a high-enough level of accuracy to supersede the old standard, there's no reason to call this an "embarrassment" "stubbornly stuck in the past."
Scientists are actively working on the problem -- and have been for quite some time.
And I also disagree that, as the article states, "labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal stability". What is needed for that is having an accepted place in society, and having an income you can depend on. In the current system, labour is generally a way to achieve both. But nothing says it must be.
This is by far the most insightful comment here. History shows that freedom from traditional wage-earning labor does not lead to social decay, as long as basic needs and provided for and there is some sort of "accepted place in society" for what people do when not occupied in standard "work."
When agrarian societies became more urban between 1850 and 1950 or so, women still were rarely "wage earners" outside the home. Yet even as they lost their agrarian work (feeding the livestock, milking the cows, etc.), they found novel standards that continued to occupy the new time (increasing emphasis on home cleanliness and order, more elaborate meals and hosted social functions, etc.). Obviously this was also a much more sexist time, and women's place in society was not as valued -- but it nevertheless was essential (and obviously some crucial tasks continued in this transition, like raising kids, etc.). The point is that even when women found new time due to mechanization that freed them from some household work, they found other things to replace that -- a whole new construction of the urban (and then suburban) "housewife."
In fact, extra time has often led to innovations or essential cultural "work." Medieval monks abstained from the normal economy and labors going around them in the secular world, but most of the knowledge we have from that time in Europe was transmitted because these monks copied manuscripts and passed on knowledge. For those who were more intelligent, they actually read these books and at times continued ancient traditions of learning that died out in the secular world -- that's where the scientific investigations and "deep thought" happened (as much as it did) in medieval Europe. Obviously there were also plenty of monks that did not participate in these sorts of endeavors, and many who were even more corrupt in their lifestyles -- especially in the later medieval period. But the fact that so much knowledge was preserved by the efforts of many monks shows that great things can sometimes come from those who are not forced to labor continuously in the standard work and lifestyle dictated by society.
I would only qualify one point in the parent's post: "having an income you can depend on" need not represent money in the traditional sense. What people need is a way that fundamental needs can be provided. Our current system revolves around "money" even for those essentials, but there's no reason it must always be so. In an advanced technological society that can provide more than enough resources to feed everyone with almost no labor, for example, food could simply be "made available" as a public resource, the way roads, libraries, etc. are available without explicit payment in money. (Of course, someone's going to point out that we do currently pay for roads and libraries and such through taxation, etc., but to get to the point I'm talking about, most of that monetary system would have to be reconfigured significantly... to the point that the "cost" of public resources may no longer be valued in money.)
But apparently since they didn't receive a salary for that, they didn't really "work".
What are you talking about? From your own quotation of the GP:
Between housewives and children less than 50% of people were employed, but a single person could provide for their family on an average wage. Wages have been depressed heavily since then so that a couple with children both need to [go to] work [to earn income].
It's very clear in the GP's passage that we're talking about "work" for a wage, requiring a specific employer/employee relationship, and bringing income to the home from an external source.
Yes, those times were more sexist, and women's "housework" may not have been valued as much by many. That is unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with viewpoints today and the GP's post.
This whole discussion is discussing "jobs" (i.e., employment which earns money), not "work" as an abstract concept. Back in the days of "respectable housewives" (as you put it), men also might be required to (lesser) amounts of work around the house. But even if a man painted the house, did maintenance on the car, whatever, that too would not bring external money into the household. That doesn't mean that painting the house or "housework" like washing clothes, preparing meals, etc. wasn't "work." It may in fact have been work that was quite necessary and important, but it did not provide a wage, which is the present discussion.
Back then, respectable housewives were expected to keep a spotless house, do all the laundry/ironing, prepare gourmet meals for their "hard working" husbands - and unexpected visits from the boss, and a lot of other stuff. [snip] Go further back to farm days, and you can not only add making cheese and butter, canning and other such agrarian domestic activities....
This is funny, because you're actually making the points that the GP and GGP were trying to make. Even when society began to transition from rural agrarian lifestyles to more urban situations, and mechanization made it possible for housewives to avoid a lot of manual farm chores, the housewives didn't go rioting out in the streets because they "had no work to do."
Instead, different metrics came into being -- women shifted their labor toward other tasks (less feeding the pigs and churning butter, more concern about cleanliness/order and more elaborate meals). The fact that more than 50% of the population was still not employed for a wage did not result in some sort of imminent social disaster, even when some of their previous work lessened or disappeared. People found other things to do with their time.
Thus, assuming the transition were gradual, and enough wages could be brought into the average household with only 50% working for pay, there's no reason to immediately assume that society will self-destruct and idleness will lead to gross social disorder (as many people like to predict -- which is what the GP and GGP were arguing against).
Processing food does not make it cheap or cheaper. It always adds cost.
False. In many cases, processing is used to increase shelf life. Less processed foods often spoil or deteriorate faster. Consumers thus often pay a significant premium for fresh foods, "whole" foods (which often contain spoilage elements removed in processing), and unprocessed foods in general -- since it costs more for stores to keep unprocessed foods in stock (waste due to spoilage) and often more to transport them.
Yeah, I know. I saw that the moment I hit submit. Oh well. I'll cop to not taking the time to proofread. At least my error was due to poor editing when I changed the wording of the sentence. I'm not sure that excuse applies to GP.
You're conflating prices for value. What really matters in terms of economic wealth is purchasing power - what one dollar can buy you. If today $1 buys you one hotdog and your salary is $10/hour, yet a year from now $1 buys you two hotdogs yet your salary is $7.50/hour, your salary has gone "down", yet your purchasing power has actually increased (assuming hotdogs are the only product in this small example). It doesn't matter what the absolute number of your wage is, what matters is your purchasing power.
Who is conflating prices and value? You give a contrived example where hot dogs just happen to get cheaper faster than your labor does. So what? The same thing can in an inflationary economy.
Here's where your system breaks down, since you obviously can't think on the larger scale. Who controls most of the money? Rich people. Do you think the rich people (the executives, managers, etc.) are going to voluntarily take pay cuts, even if deflation occurs? Not unless they absolutely have to.
So, all things being equal, if the economy is deflating and prices are going down, companies are making less money. People in charge of companies won't volunteer to take less money (even if it's worth more), so they cut jobs or wages for those "lower on the food chain." And because the profits of companies are constrained by the lower prices, your wages have to fall faster than prices (on average) in order for the companies to maintain their profits and pay the executive salaries even at a steady rate.
If you don't think this would happen, it's EXACTLY what happens today in inflationary economies. When a company makes more money in excess of inflation, do the lowly workers always get a raise? No -- the execs skim as much as they can off the top first, and dole out the smallest amount possible to retain their employees. Which means even if you're getting pay increases, they may not keep up with inflation... hence, your purchasing power is gradually decreasing, even if your salary comes up.
Deflationary economies would still maintain similar trends in businesses, except now owners aren't worried about how much their "bonus" will be, but whether they can take the same amount as last year (even if the value of that amount has increased). If deflation goes fast enough, you can bet that most companies will cut jobs or cut pay faster than prices are dropping. Sure, you might be lucky enough to work for a company or have a job where your pay goes down more slowly, but to make the general economy balance out, those lower prices will force wages overall to fall just as fast. Overall -- the population does not magically "win" in a deflationary economy.
If all products suddenly become twice as cheap to produce, and the prices are all halved, the result isn't a poorer economy - it's an economy in which everybody can buy twice as much stuff as before
Who the heck do you think makes all this stuff!?!?! I mean, really?? If all the prices go down, all the companies make less money overall, which means they can only pay less wages. There's no "free lunch." You can't say that prices everywhere are going down but somehow magically there's money somewhere that is keeping wages higher than prices. Your hot dog example seems to presume that wages will fall slower than prices, but that will only happen as long as there's still room for more efficiency. Eventually quality of goods will start to go down too, to keep lowering prices while not lowering wages as fast.
But this lower salary doesn't mean you are poorer, it means you have the same purchasing power as before.
Only if wages fall at the same rate as prices. Given that in inflationary economies, wages often don't keep up rising with inflation, how can you guarantee that in a deflationary one, wages will fall more slowly than overall deflation?
You are also confused about loans in that the interest rate f
I can't believe it's still considered informative to say "Deflation is bad because SMART people stop buying things that will be cheaper tomorrow". Consider the price of computers.
Consider the price of a house, which is one of the largest purchases most people will consider in their lifetimes. You're absolutely right that when you're talking about an industrial product, gradually lowering the price is often useful and represents more economic efficiency in the process.
Deflation is great for single products -- but here we're talking about deflation in the economy as a whole. That means that your wages are likely to go down too, as prices go down. It's not like you magically get to keep getting raises as prices go down, or even likely that businesses will be able to keep affording paying you want you do get. So you won't really be able to take advantage of those falling prices, since you'll bhe getting less and less in your paycheck too.
And talking about durable goods and property is a different story. Why would anyone except rich people with money to burn ever buy property or a house? With deflation going on, mortgages and loans are a TERRIBLE thing, since the principal owed stays the same as value goes down and your salary goes down. Meanwhile, your mortgage payment stays the same, so your loan costs more and more and more. To avoid loans, your average person would have to save for many years, maybe decades, to buy a house outright ... only to -- wait for it -- depreciate like mad. Or, stupid people might still take out loans and all end up instantly underwater.
I can hear your response now: "But wait, people buy cars, and they rapidly depreciate!" Yes, but cars are treated as disposable for most people -- they expect to buy another one in a decade or so anyway. AND most people spend maybe 10 times or more on a house than they would on a car. It's a significant portion of a life's savings to buy a house. Nobody wants to save all that up just to throw it into something that's instantly going to start losing value... particularly as wages are plummeting due to deflation.
So, the real estate market collapses. Your wages are going in the toilet. But we're just getting started.
The fact is that prices going down is *not* in and of itself a bad thing. This is what you want - it generally means the economy is getting more and more efficient and that the wealth of the nation is increasing. As time goes on, in a free market, generally the quality of goods will increase and the prices will go down.
Yeah, I think you don't really understand what real deflation is. You think it's just increasing economic inefficiencies to introduce lower prices for some small subsets of goods. REAL deflation is pervasive in the economy and causes all sorts of values to drop everywhere -- wages, property values, etc. You won't be able to take advantage of those magical lower prices, because your salary is being "made more efficient" as well. Want to take out a home equity loan when disaster strikes? Oh, well, your house is only worth 25% of what it once was, and your loan principal will immediately start to increase in its percentage of your paycheck each year.
Meanwhile, without loans being made, capital available for investments and business starts begins to dry up. Most of the money in the economy is not just the actual "cash" the government releases, but all of the various "money" "created" by loans and investments using other people's money. That's what drives the economy to innovate and try out new things.
Innovation decreases, because investors don't want to take a chance unless it's a "sure thing." When the 1% stops spending, disaster really begins. Businesses are even more prone to downsize than they are today -- no one ever wants to risk having to borrow money. Eventually, if unchecked, it can lead to a deflationary spiral, which is just as bad an economic disaster as an i
So yeah, it really is a "choose your poison" situation -- but IMO, my own government has proven itself shady, not at all trustworthy, and relatively inept at accomplishing stated goals in a timely manner and under budget. By contrast, the people running the mining pools and exchanges I've used are still more of an "unknown" - but ones who so far, appear to have treated me fairly. So I know which one I'd rather place trust in right now.
To do a currency transaction? How about, umm, use cash? That is, in the actual government currency?
I don't know what country you live, so I don't know your government. Nevertheless, it's increasingly difficult to live by cash alone, but as long as you aren't doing huge transactions, in most countries it's still possible to do most of your business in cash, i.e., the "government endorsed" currency.
For most government currencies, at least in the short term, using cash means something that has relatively stable value. Even with craziness like the NSA scandals, I doubt most governments are really trying to track ALL cash transactions -- unless you're doing something illegal and/or using large amounts of bills, probably not as much to worry about.
I don't put a lot of faith in my government to always do the right thing. But if my choice is "get green piece of paper -- hand it to person I'm paying" vs. "depend on whole networks of unknown internet folks to not manipulate the currency or the various sets of transactions I have to go through to get the money to the person I'm pay in any way"... well, I know which I'd choose.
If you were only talking about electronic transactions to remote people (requiring credit cards, wire transfers, whatever), perhaps we can have an argument. But unless your country is going through some sort of major political or economic upheaval (in which case, probably any currency and any transactions are going to be problematic), the ease of transaction for cash is hard to beat in terms of reliability.
The Legal maxim is "Qui tacet consentire": "Silence gives consent".
The phrase is "qui tacet consentire videtur," which literally means, "he who is silent appears [videtur] to consent." Your phrase doesn't make grammatical sense. Literally, you said: "he who is silent, to consent."
In modern corporate legal language this translates to -- "(Consumer) Ignorence is (Our) Bliss".
Since we're on the topic of Latin, the English word ignorance comes from a first-conjugation Latin verb ignorare -- note the characteristics "a" of the first conjugation.
Pro-tip: whenever posting about "ignorance," check your sources.
There's more, but I think you can see the difference between the two scenarios.
Most of your argument makes the assumption that the patients are not close to death. What if they are? (Disaster scenario or something.) And what if the healthy guy says, "No!" even to the idea of donating some organs?
If you find it repugnant to kill him, do you still favor forced "donation" of his organs if it won't kill him, but will save the lives of other people in imminent danger of dying? After all, you seem in favor of killing a guy in one scenario to save five people, what's wrong with stealing a kidney?
(To be clear, I'm not arguing either side of anything in these debates. I'm just bringing in the kind of questions that moral philosophers do....)
If you are bumper-to-bumper you don't have an accident. The damage isn't done by cars touching. It's done by cars colliding at some speed difference. If these cars drive a two inches distance, there is very little force when they "collide".
Are you serious? I suppose you're also one of those people who say, "Yeah, falling doesn't actually kill you -- it's only hitting the ground at high speed that will."
You're right: two cars traveling at nearly identical speeds won't do much damage if they tap each other. The problem in the GP's scenario is the unpredictability introduced by one car's sudden change from "steady state" to "who knows what will happen next!?!"
The problem isn't the initial collision. It's whether the cars behind can react fast enough to deal with what happens next -- is the car in front going to fishtail, pull off the road, slow down suddenly, etc.? And what about the car behind car #2 in the train, and the one behind car #3? Eventually, you reach a situation where problems pile up (cars swerving in all directions to avoid the problem in front), and there's nowhere left to go... meanwhile, the car in front has likely now decelerated to a point that the next collision WILL be serious.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power
By the way, perhaps you were making a reference with your KNOWS. If not, I'd be careful about emphasizing the word knows when talking about the trolley problem, unless you've dug around in the vast philosophical literature on it, where knows in italics has special meaning. If you're not careful, pretty soon you end up piling on philosophical nonsense conundrums and end up with something like this.
He is not only a witness if he KNOWS that he had the power to prevent the five deaths at the cost of one other. Inaction is also an action by itself.
Yes, and that ultimately leads to the "next level" of utilitarian dilemmas. What if you're a doctor, with five terminal patients who all need different organs. In walks a healthy person who is (miraculously) compatible with all of them.
Should you kill the healthy person, harvest the organs, and save the five terminal patients? (For the sake of argument, we assume that the procedures involved have a high chance of success, so you'll definitely save a number of people by killing one.)
Many people who say we should flip the switch in the trolley problem think it's wrong to murder someone to harvest their organ and ensure the same outcome. Why is "inaction" appropriate for the doctor, but not in the case of the trolley?
(I'm not saying I have the right answers -- but once you start down the philosophical path of utilitarian hypotheticals, there's a whole world of wacko and bizarre situations waiting to challenge just about anyone's moral principles. I can't wait until the "I was kidnapped and forced to keep a famous violinist alive" scenarios come up!)
Lots of these people actually think their email account is tied to their computer. They think they would have to get a new computer to change email accounts.
I suppose that's possible. [snip] Though I will say in the 18 years I've been working with computers I've never seen this.
You obviously haven't worked very much with people over the age of 60, particularly blue-collar folks who never really had to do much with computers at a job.
Many older people just simply don't get the idea of the internet at all. They don't understand the difference between stuff that's on their computer vs. stuff stored online. They don't understand the difference between turning on their computer and "going online." They don't understand the difference between running a local application vs. doing something in a web browser. I know lots of older -- and even rather smart -- people who still don't really understand the difference between email and texting, since they only ever learned how to text on the iPhone someone convinced them to get after their kids got tired explaining how to use phones to them.
All they know is that there's a single interface where they type letters, buy stuff from Amazon, get email, play solitaire, and view cat pictures and videos. To them, it's all part of "one thing." We don't help things when we talk about stuff being "on their desktop."
So, when you tell someone that they're going to get a new computer, it's like telling them that you're going to replace their desk and everything on it and in it. What transfers and what doesn't? What has to be reinstalled, and what will simply still be there because it's "out there" on the intertubes?
They don't know. Because they simply don't understand where all the stuff is -- they just have a magical device that allows them to do some handful of tasks. And almost all of them know that there is always some stuff that doesn't move between computers, because they lost something before when they accidentally deleted something....
Tl;dr: marketing wins.
Well, I think it would be more fair to say marketing and current fads win. A bestselling author may not need to do any marketing at all, other than mentioning, "By the way, I'm coming out with another book," and it will probably still sell well. Books about famous people or written by celebrities will also often sell, regardless of whether they are marketed heavily. Similarly, books about current fads (diets, financial advice, etc.) may also sell pretty well -- the first book regarding a fad may need some marketing to get going, but subsequent books often just follow on that.
On the other hand, there are PLENTY of examples of things that were marketed like crazy and still fail.
My general point is that marketing is most critical when something isn't yet well-known or associated with something well-known. Ultimately, fame wins... particularly when we're talking about bestsellers. That, and random fads.
Gutenberg is stacked with classics. Stuff that has been successful over a long period of time. Some classics were flops when they were first published and some go periodically in and out of favor.
Or, in other words, what counts as a "classic" right now is simply what's popular today. I think the trends can be better seen in music history. Take, for example, Pachelbel's Canon in D, that piece which seemingly shows up everywhere as "classical music." Johann Pachelbel, however, was a master composer, well-known in his lifetime for all sorts of compositions. Today he has one stupid piece played at thousands of weddings and other occasions every year, just because of some whims of audiences in the late 1960s who got interested in it.
Take Antonio Vivaldi, who was hugely popular in his lifetime, then almost completely forgotten for centuries (he died a pauper, so his fame was as short-lived as many pop artists today), until some Italian archivists dug up his thousand-or-so compositions in the 1920s, and these pieces were then deliberately promoted as part of Italian cultural history beginning in the 1930s.
Or, heck, for a recent example, look at Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, a Renaissance motet that was pretty obscure until the past couple of years after it appeared in the novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Suddenly, recordings of the piece bounded up to the top of the charts, and it has led to a new interest in Renaissance music and certain early music performance groups.
I'm not saying that these pieces or composers don't have great value or that they shouldn't be "classics." But I do think that interest in particular "classics" is driven almost as much by current culture as actual current art/literature/music is. Measuring downloads from Project Gutenberg is giving us a particular snapshot into what is considered "classic" literature for the past few years. Fifty years ago, or a hundred years ago, I can guarantee you that the lists would be different -- and not just because of works written since then.
You've correctly pointed out that the only difference between gold and yak tears is that people are irrationally attracted to gold. But you haven't shown that there's any fundamental difference other than scarcity between gold and fiat currency.
Just because a government can inflate "fiat currency" doesn't mean that they must. Theoretically, the U.S. federal government could pay off all of its debts tomorrow, shut itself down completely (absolute minimal spending to satisfy Constitutional requirements), and then shut down all the presses and coin minting. If they still continued to claim the "legal tender" status for the dollar and only accepted dollars for tax payments, guess what? Dollars would start to become scarce. People would hoard them.
In practice, no government would EVER do this deliberately. Why? Because it would result in a deflationary spiral that would be economic suicide. Instead, most adopt a policy of moderate inflation for the reasons I outlined in my original post. Sometimes it gets out of control for random economic reasons or because governments can't rein in spending. Note that hyperinflation generally is not caused by governments printing money to pay debts in their own currency; it is generally caused when governments owe money in another currency, and as they print more, the value of the local currency plummets in relation to other international currencies, forcing an inflationary spiral to pay debt.
The U.S. debt, on the other hand, is almost all owed in dollars. That's a fundamental difference, though governments can still be stupid enough to ruin economies if they try.
Anyhow, the primary point you've failed to understand is that a precious metal standard does not prevent currency inflation (nor government running the "press" to make more money), as can be learned from reading any history. When governments run out of gold, it's not like everyone throws up their hands and says "Oh well, gold is a scarce resource, and we're out! So... oh well, let's just shut things down!"
No -- first governments switch to less precious metals, historically silver was important, but in the ancient world, currencies were even issued in things like giant iron "coins" (which corroded), just to keep up the spending.
But the next step is seigniorage, where governments start mixing in crap metals with precious ones or simply declaring that coins in a particular metal are worth more than the value of the raw metals. In good economic times, this may work okay. In bad economic times, it too can lead to an inflationary spiral.
You can believe all you want in some "magical" powers of a gold standard, but people will always find ways to screw up things economically with currencies, particularly if things get dire enough. Using gold or any other scarce -- but ultimately small-valued -- item won't fix that. The moment you convert actual "wealth" in useful goods (food, textiles for clothing, essential tools and weapons, etc.) into currency, you're taking a risk and trusting your wealth to the whims of others in power who have more currency than you do. It's only if you have the power and/or control the actual supplies of goods that you can have any guarantee of value.
In the 100 years since the formation of the Federal Reserve, the US dollar has fallen in value by a factor of 23 as measured by the consumer price index ( ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt ) , an average rate of -3.2% per year.
Umm, for the most part, that's by design. Since the Depression in the 1930s, the Fed's general policy has mostly been to encourage gradual inflation. Why? Well, a lot has to do with details of economic theory, but in simple terms, it encourages people to invest and spend money in the economy.
You can disagree with this idea (and there are people who do), but in the case of the dollar at least, it seems to have been effective. Between the Depression of the 1930s and 2008, we had nothing like the series of financial "panics" of the 1800s in the U.S.
When currency value rises (deflation), people hoard cash. They save. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but it doesn't encourage investment or innovation. Why should I bother taking a chance funding my brother's new small business (or even some crazy guy's cool new idea) if I can effectively increase my assets simply by hiding them under my mattress?
If deflation could occur at any moment, investors are also skittish. At a moment's notice, they could sense things decreasing in value and try to "cash out" of any investments, as happened in 2008. The main reason we don't experience such severe "runs on the market" (or actually runs from the market) every few years is because long-term investors believe that they'll still likely make a profit in the long run, at least due to the gradual rise in prices.
A targeted small rate of inflation makes it so the cash savers don't lose a lot of value, but the investors are encouraged. This is all by design.
Again, you can disagree with this strategy (and there are good reasons to question some assumptions), but that's what the Fed DESIGNED the system to do. You can't come back and say this is an inherent property of fiat currencies, since it isn't.
(And, by the way, all currencies that exceed their natural inherent value are effectively "fiat" -- if it weren't for speculation and some irrational attraction to shiny rocks, gold's value would be a lot lower. Thus, a "gold standard" is not inherently more stable, even if endorsed by a government -- lots of severe financial panics and depressions occurred while many countries were still under the gold standard. Contrary to popular belief, what makes a currency behave differently from a "fiat" currency isn't merely scarcity -- lots of things are scarce, and most of them have little to no value. In the long run and in dire circumstances, neither shiny rocks nor green pieces of paper nor Bitcoins are guaranteed to be of use -- only actual useful commodities that can be traded are.)
By the way, I'm not saying this implies anything good or bad about the quality of the study itself -- it just doesn't mean much that the name "Harvard" is on the journal in terms of ideological commitment.
as it is from Harvard (typically not a pro-gun source)
I'm not sure what you mean by this statement. The authors have no Harvard affiliation. The study is not endorsed by Harvard in any way. It is merely published in an independent law journal published by students at the Harvard Law School which is specifically described by Harvard as "the leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship." As with most major law schools, the students are a diverse group, and they often choose to organize peer-reviewed law journals with a variety of focuses. If the journal wasn't following accepted scholarly practices, Harvard might step in and shut it down or at least insist on removing its name from it -- but short of that, this journal probably operates pretty independently from the Harvard law faculty or Harvard University in general.
Kids have no right to free speech, or any right to reasonable search and seizure of their property
That's not true at all. Minors basically have most free speech rights and are protected by the 4th amendment against searches and seizures.
I think you're confusing the fact that parents and those acting in loco parentis (in the legal place of parents) can restrict speech of minors and search them. Schools, for example, can restrict the speech of minors and search their belongings while at school, since they are acting in the place of parents as effective guardians over them during schooltime and on the school's property.
HOWEVER, this absolutely does NOT mean that a cop could randomly arrest a kid for "free speech" that an adult would normally make, NOR can a cop randomly search a minor without a warrant -- though a parent or school might give them permission to do so. In the absence of permission from a parent, guardian, or the minor him/herself, the police have to accord with normal 1st and 4th amendment protections for minors in most circumstances.