Years back I saw a chip-level presentation on the topic. It wasn't just a matter of decrypting the Blu-ray and reencrypting HDCP. Every content signal that came to a chip I/O was encrypted. The intent was that you wouldn't be able to buy hardware, open it up, hang probes on any chip, and capture "their" content.
Way more encryption hardware than you've suggested, but it's also specialized encryption/decryption engines, not GP processors.
Consider that today if anyone owns our NAT devices, it's China. If there are any hidden backdoors on them, they're Chinese. Or did you think that the electronics inside that slick, cheap plastic box were US made? Last I heard, the most common commodity router gut-maker was Xyxel, a Chinese company. Makes you wonder how often the NSA goes to Best Buy, gets a NAT box, and reverse-engineers it, just to see what's really happening inside. Then it makes you wonder about the idea of pre-owning only a fraction of the NAT boxes, to reduce risks of forementioned checking.
I will say this, however. The Republicans and Democrats are not interchangable, however much it may be in vogue to espouse that. There are similarities, yes, but there are also differences. One difference key to the current discussion is that the Republicans (so far) are a heck of a lot more unified and effective. That in itself is an argument in favor of the Democrats, simply because they'll have a tougher time pulling together to pass anything chipping away at our rights. Not only that, but the Republicans will reflexively vote against as a bloc. Were the shoe on the other foot, while many/most Democrats would reflexively against such a Republican agenda, there usually have been a few crossing the aisle.
My own pet conspiracy theory is that some amount of spam is really covert communications, be it by terrorists, governments, corporations, NGOs, or space aliens, hidden with steganography. Heck, what better place to hide your covert messages than in plain sight - in a place where people make extensive efforts not to look at it? A few weeks back, on an appropriate topic, I threw this one out on Bruce Schneier's weblog, and was promptly given a link to http://www.spammimic.com/ - which does exactly what I was talking about.
Last year for my birthday, my wife got me a case of Dr. Pepper bottled in Waco, Tx - real sugar.
Years back, a local Mom'n'Pop carried Jolt - so I tried some. "All sugar and twice the caffeine" aside, I was surprised that it was a very good-tasting cola. This was before the anti-HFCS wave got started, so it was only later that I though to associate the better flavor with real sucrose.
I was thinking more of the original star when mentioning the Chandrasekhar limit. The situation is obviously quite complex, but the main point I was trying to get across is that "largest diamond in the galaxy" is very likely erroneous. We just figured out what that this one exists, and haven't really been looking.
Not very likely - merely the largest diamond within 50 or so light years. How extensive a survey have we made looking for dead-star diamonds? We weren't even looking for this one, just trying to understand and explain its behavior. Likely the truly largest diamond - in the universe, not just the galaxy - will be found approaching Chandrasekhar's Limit.
This is a sad commentary. It has been posted many times, many places, and I once saw a fascinating response by a lawyer.
Essentially:
Absent the Law, we are all at the mercy of the powerful. The Law is what gives the little guy some rights, and makes it so he doesn't have to simply and always say "How high?" when someone rich and powerful says, "Jump!" Lawyers are supposed to be the people who give the masses access to those rights under the Law. Sure, there are bad apples among lawyers, but when the masses start to lose faith in the entire practice, they start to lose the effective underpinnings of their freedom.
My comment:
This makes a sort of sense, as it used to be the Kings Word was the Law, until the days of the Magna Charta. (Really, that document only shared power from the King to the nobles, but after that some kept flowing downhill.) In general, one might say that the Law exists to protect the little guys from the rich and powerful, and that the rich and powerful can generally take care of themselves. I guess it's reasonable that the Law also protects the rich and powerful from masses of little guys, though I think if they need that protection, circumstances require very careful examination. Sometimes I think that that's where we are moving in the US, today.
> A bit like Eru Iluvatar doing a rm -rf/arda/Numenor/* && umount/arda/maiar/sauron or remount/arda/maiar/gandalf && > bleach -white/arda/maiar/gandalf && rmnod/dev/maiar/balrogs/durins_bane
This deserves some sort of comment or comeback, but I can't for the life of me determine what that should be or what would be appropriate.
Surely someone must have patented this "business method" or the software used to enable it. Can't the Trolls do something "right" for a change, and come out with the lawsuits to stop this silly practice?
One of the fundamental requirements for a free market is an informed consumer with choices.
One could interpret matters like this as suppliers trying to keep their dirty laundry quiet, trying to keep consumers in the dark, keep them from making fully informed choices. Obviously if available information is clearly incorrect that needs to be fixed, but it's also not clear that that's the case here.
Most people have been looking at this from a freedom-of-speech point of view, and that's valid. But there are other problems with it as well, and the free market implications are one of those.
I'll have to differ in another way... I don't believe in the "free market", either, nor do I worship it, as it seems that some people do. (I'm not accusing you of that.)
I think the "free market" is a neat concept, and a very potent economic tool, perhaps the most potent one we have. But I also think that the "free market" is inherently unstable, in that all of its participants are actively trying to destroy it. Let's face it, no successful business wants a "free market" in its established business line. They want a monopoly, the ability to set their own prices, profits, etc. Those who want a "free market" are trying to gain a foothold, and the free market gives them that opportunity. Theoretically a free market would keep someone from becoming a monopoly through competition, but in practice that doesn't really work. Microsoft and Intel are prime examples.
I'm going to pick on Intel, for the moment. Intel is an effective monopoly. AMD is there, but Intel could sink them any time they please, if there weren't antitrust implications. Intel also has been making very good products lately, so I won't fault them for making junk - now. I will fault them for 2 specific things, both the aberrations of a monopolist - IA64 and NetBurst.
IA64 happened because Intel didn't like the competition from cloners like AMD and Cyrix, so they set about to create a completely legally closed architecture, covered by no patent cross-licensing with anyone. I won't even fault the IA64 architecture itself at this point. What I'll say is that IA64 happened as a result if Intel's business desires first, and serving customers' needs was secondary. Intel deserved a BIG spanking for a customer-disregarding move like IA64, and to some extent they got it. AMD came in with the K8, which was much better aligned to customers' needs. Intel got some spanking, and AMD got some success from the IA64/K8 generation, but Intel DID flex its monopoly muscle to limit AMD's success. Intel didn't get nearly the whacking they deserved for that one. The "free market" failed to work, because Intel is just too big. NetBurst was just an aberration born of marketing triumph over engineering, another "internal squabble" that disregarded marketplace needs.
Most other market segments have examples of monopolies and duopolies. Duopolies aren't monopolies, but they're pretty much as resistant to the entry of new players into that marketplace.
I like the idea of a "free market", but I also believe that without some level of regulation and intervention, it can't exist. You hit part of the problem sideways, too. Regulation is influenced by business, therefore what comes out is seldom what was desired.
One other thing, "people will lose their jobs, but this is good, as now freed resources will be used more productively in some other industries, where demand will rise." carries the implicit assumption that demand will rise somewhere else. I insist that this still requires a balance between consumption and investment economies, which we don't have now. If consumption and investment economies are balanced, then "somebody else" will take up the slack creating the demand you cite. Today's economy is so far out of balance that there is no "somebody else" to create demand. So when those jobs are lost, demand drops, causing other jobs to be lost, causing demand to drop...
I did similar programming, connected with an EE class. We had our prototype board that plugged into the (dating myself) S100 "mainframe." Our lab projects were combinations of hardware and software. Few things teach you the value of time while computing better than writing a bit-banging UART. For your example, take your DAC and see what sort of AC frequency response you could get out of it. Then give the "A" in the class to the team with the best combination of transient response, frequency response, and overall accuracy.
My first job in the working world involved programming memory testers. At that point you drop down to microcode on an individual cycle basis, controlling timings within the cycle on pulse shaper cards. You had to know what each and every cycle was doing, and do them all correctly. Now THAT's low-level.
I wasn't really talking about creating wealth, though I did so in a "cousin post" to someone else. But I'll quickly say that saving and investing doesn't create wealth - it just moves money from place to place. The wealth creation happens when saving and investing enables others to create wealth.
But that wasn't the point of my post, this is:
It seems that most people who love to talk economics practically worship saving and investing, and denigrate spending. There's one little problem there, though. If nobody spends, there's no need for those factories that people save and invest in.
The simple reality is that you need balance. If investing isn't somehow matched to spending then you have overproduction. When you have overproduction, either you lower prices until demand (spending!) picks up, or you idle facilities, perhaps laying off workers. Oh, and laid-off workers are generally financially strapped, and not very likely to contribute to demand for the factory's output.
As for "sticking it to the rich guy", that wasn't the point of my post at all. Keep in mind that comparatively, the rich guy is spending very little, and most of his money is in savings and investment. That really means that today our economy has more money in savings and investment than at any point since the 1920's - on the brink of the Great Depression. My point is that all of that money in savings and investment hasn't given us a great economy - in fact because that money came out of the consumption economy, it's causing the current problems. There simply isn't enough money available to create demand to keep factories full or stimulate investment in new factories. (Substitute whatever facilities you want for "factories".)
My point is that the balance is broken, and we need to restore it. That may sound like "sticking it to the rich", but it's really not meant that way. There's a lot of money in the wrong place, and until it's in the right place the economy won't move. How many other mechanisms do you know of to "move money" in such a gross fashion besides taxation?
"As to why bubbles form. Its easy TOO much money in the system." I think I agreed with this, with the caveat that I think it's too much fluid investment money. I don't disagree that we need a large investment sector, because after all, SOMEBODY has to own all of that land, bricks, and mortar. (Unfortunately I fear we've sold off too much of our land, bricks, and mortar to foreigners, turning it into fluid investment money, and then gone and done stupid things with it.)
I beg to differ. In my opinion, which does not include an economics degree, but does include >30 years in the workforce, neither spending nor saving and investing creates wealth.
I'll give a definition here for people to take pot-shots at. You create wealth by rearranging "stuff" and increasing it's market value. Rather a vague definition, but I think it's fairly encompassing. For my specific wealth creation, I sell sand to Arabs, or am part of a rather large team that does. We take sand, purify it, melt it into silicon ingots, slice it, contaminate those slices with precise patterns, test, package, and test again. The resulting devices go into computers, cell phones, cars, maybe not everything made today, but certainly a high fraction. Other people create wealth by digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into gasoline, lubricating oil, etc. Still others create wealth by rearranging fields of force into patterns that others consider valuable. (AKA, software)
I think we agree that spending does not create wealth. I differ in that saving and investing doesn't create wealth either, at least not on their own. Saving (presuming a typical banking system that then loans that money to others) and investing ENABLE others to create wealth. Again, my opinion, if saving and investing appear to create wealth in and of themselves, it's probably some sort of shell game, and the "creation" is a fiction.
As for spending, you can't do without it. Nobody is going to invest in a factory if they don't think that they can sell the resulting goods. That's exactly where we are now - there aren't enough people who have enough money to spend it, either to use the capacity for wealth creation that we have now, or to supply incentive for anyone to build new facilities for more wealth creation. In fact, in the US today if you gave more money to those who save and invest, and I'd bet that a substantial amount of that money would be invested overseas, creating wealth there, and doing little (I guess it might drop prices, some.) to improve the economy here.
Now if we can just reconstitute the economy with polar bears and woodland squirrels, the economy and everything else will be just dandy.
If you deserved any sort of serious response, I would remind you that my GP was based in pragmatism, not any sort of estimate of who deserves what. So go right ahead, collect all of the acorns, and leave the other woodland squirrels to starve. Because woodland squirrels are not social (NO implication of socialistic, here.) animals. So there's no society composed of woodland squirrels to be concerned about, not woodland squirrel economy to go into the toilet.
I saw that chart years ago. During the Clinton years, everybody did better. But the poor and middle did more better than the wealthy did, so in relative terms the wealthy lost even though they gained in absolute terms. What's even funnier is that in absolute terms the wealthy gained more than they did under more unequal policies. It supports your supposition.
Well at the moment they're campaigning on fiscal policy while at the same time urging that the Bush top-bracket tax cuts be made permanent. Plus during the last election cycle they were running on eliminating the top tax bracket entirely - putting ME in the same tax bracket as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
I have a slightly different view...
The inequity of distribution of income and wealth is at the highest point since the 1920's. I say simply this: The "ordinary economy", the part where people buy and sell goods and services, is broken. There simply isn't enough money in the ordinary economy for it to work right. As a side effect, there's too much fluid money in the "investment economy", so when too many investors rush into some sector or another, they generate a bubble. After all, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, and that can hold for "investment goods" as well as real goods. Plus when too much investment money goes into some commodity or other, (like crude oil) that investment money can drive the price up regardless of the consumption-drive supply and demand.
The economy will continue to be broken until more money moves into the ordinary economy.
It doesn't matter if American executives, wealthy, elite, etc deserve every cent they have, and more besides. It doesn't matter if I'm "supposed" to surrender my middle-class status, take a 2/3 (or more) pay cut, and live on an Indian or South American style salary. It doesn't matter if the minimum wage should go away, the those people live on far less.
The reality is that: American executives, wealthy, elite, etc spend very little compared to their wealth and income. I don't trust the long-term prospects of my job, so while I'm still comfortable, I'm not about to take out a loan for a big-ticket item. When you have to decide between food and clothing, or shelter and medical care, you do only what you have to, and what you can. None of this drives economic recovery.
If the American executives, wealthy, elite, etc had a little less, it would make no difference to their lives. Their egos would take a slight bruising in their investment portfolios. If I had more long-term confidence in my job, I'd finance a car. My 12 year old Ford is a little long-in-the-tooth, and getting to be unreliable. If someone deciding between food and clothing had more money, he'd buy both.
This isn't principle, it's pragmatism. Notice that I haven't really said anything about who deserves what, though there is a tone to what I've written. It's just a simple matter of what it takes to make the economy work. Until money "moves down" the economy will continue to be in the doldrums. But unfortunately there's no acceptable way to "move money down", because that's "wealth transfer" and thereby evil. Of course when wealth transfers up, as has happened faster since 1980, that's "natural" and "good". But we've transferred so much money up, that those below haven't got enough to make the economy work, any more.
The other side of this is that Obama did nothing to fix this problem. None of what he did did a thing to affect the distribution of wealth and income in the country. Perhaps running the printing press for the stimulus and bailouts has "created" extra cash, though all things told, I'm not sure that more of that money really went "down" with the stimulus than went "up" with the bailouts.
Nor am I entirely against supply-side solutions - they have their place. It's just that supply-side solutions aren't universally applicable, and this is one place where they're not. I'll moderate that a bit, and say that I'm in favor of incentives for small businesses, even at this point.
Taggants are small chips of plastic embedded in all commercial explosives. They basically build up a whole bunch of thin layers of plastic, each layer distinctive. Think of the sequence of layers as a "manufacturing hash" allowing you to inspect the taggants and tell who made the explosives, and some additional information, pehaps some generic and some manufacturer-specific about that explosive. The multi-layered plastic is shredded into tiny pieces and mixed into the explosive.
It's so small and so light that at least some survives the explosion.
But there are those who are concerned that with years of wind, construction use explosions, taggants will be practically everywhere. So check the sight of a criminal explosion, and you have to start quantitatively sifting the debris to figure out which taggants are associated with the immediate problem, especially if there was recent construction nearby.
RFID may wind up the same way. Too many RFID devices, perhaps too little adherence to standards making boku crosstalk problems. It still wouldn't be a problem walking through the short-range theft detectors in a store, but long range RFID snooping might become very difficult, given time and ubiquity.
Slashdot Mirror
Years back I saw a chip-level presentation on the topic. It wasn't just a matter of decrypting the Blu-ray and reencrypting HDCP. Every content signal that came to a chip I/O was encrypted. The intent was that you wouldn't be able to buy hardware, open it up, hang probes on any chip, and capture "their" content.
Way more encryption hardware than you've suggested, but it's also specialized encryption/decryption engines, not GP processors.
Consider that today if anyone owns our NAT devices, it's China. If there are any hidden backdoors on them, they're Chinese. Or did you think that the electronics inside that slick, cheap plastic box were US made? Last I heard, the most common commodity router gut-maker was Xyxel, a Chinese company. Makes you wonder how often the NSA goes to Best Buy, gets a NAT box, and reverse-engineers it, just to see what's really happening inside. Then it makes you wonder about the idea of pre-owning only a fraction of the NAT boxes, to reduce risks of forementioned checking.
Aren't you glad your parents weren't thinking that way?
I will say this, however. The Republicans and Democrats are not interchangable, however much it may be in vogue to espouse that. There are similarities, yes, but there are also differences. One difference key to the current discussion is that the Republicans (so far) are a heck of a lot more unified and effective. That in itself is an argument in favor of the Democrats, simply because they'll have a tougher time pulling together to pass anything chipping away at our rights. Not only that, but the Republicans will reflexively vote against as a bloc. Were the shoe on the other foot, while many/most Democrats would reflexively against such a Republican agenda, there usually have been a few crossing the aisle.
Vote for gridlock.
My own pet conspiracy theory is that some amount of spam is really covert communications, be it by terrorists, governments, corporations, NGOs, or space aliens, hidden with steganography. Heck, what better place to hide your covert messages than in plain sight - in a place where people make extensive efforts not to look at it? A few weeks back, on an appropriate topic, I threw this one out on Bruce Schneier's weblog, and was promptly given a link to http://www.spammimic.com/ - which does exactly what I was talking about.
Of course. Keep in mind that it also sells (at least) 2 tickets every time.
Bigelow
Hundred Mile High Club
Profit$$$
Last year for my birthday, my wife got me a case of Dr. Pepper bottled in Waco, Tx - real sugar.
Years back, a local Mom'n'Pop carried Jolt - so I tried some. "All sugar and twice the caffeine" aside, I was surprised that it was a very good-tasting cola. This was before the anti-HFCS wave got started, so it was only later that I though to associate the better flavor with real sucrose.
I was thinking more of the original star when mentioning the Chandrasekhar limit. The situation is obviously quite complex, but the main point I was trying to get across is that "largest diamond in the galaxy" is very likely erroneous. We just figured out what that this one exists, and haven't really been looking.
Not very likely - merely the largest diamond within 50 or so light years. How extensive a survey have we made looking for dead-star diamonds? We weren't even looking for this one, just trying to understand and explain its behavior. Likely the truly largest diamond - in the universe, not just the galaxy - will be found approaching Chandrasekhar's Limit.
That's a .sig if ever I saw one: "If you stick your head in the sand, you make it easy to get your ass kicked."
This is a sad commentary. It has been posted many times, many places, and I once saw a fascinating response by a lawyer.
Essentially:
Absent the Law, we are all at the mercy of the powerful. The Law is what gives the little guy some rights, and makes it so he doesn't have to simply and always say "How high?" when someone rich and powerful says, "Jump!" Lawyers are supposed to be the people who give the masses access to those rights under the Law. Sure, there are bad apples among lawyers, but when the masses start to lose faith in the entire practice, they start to lose the effective underpinnings of their freedom.
My comment:
This makes a sort of sense, as it used to be the Kings Word was the Law, until the days of the Magna Charta. (Really, that document only shared power from the King to the nobles, but after that some kept flowing downhill.) In general, one might say that the Law exists to protect the little guys from the rich and powerful, and that the rich and powerful can generally take care of themselves. I guess it's reasonable that the Law also protects the rich and powerful from masses of little guys, though I think if they need that protection, circumstances require very careful examination. Sometimes I think that that's where we are moving in the US, today.
> A bit like Eru Iluvatar doing a rm -rf /arda/Numenor/* && umount /arda/maiar/sauron or remount /arda/maiar/gandalf && /arda/maiar/gandalf && rmnod /dev/maiar/balrogs/durins_bane
> bleach -white
This deserves some sort of comment or comeback, but I can't for the life of me determine what that should be or what would be appropriate.
Surely someone must have patented this "business method" or the software used to enable it. Can't the Trolls do something "right" for a change, and come out with the lawsuits to stop this silly practice?
One of the fundamental requirements for a free market is an informed consumer with choices.
One could interpret matters like this as suppliers trying to keep their dirty laundry quiet, trying to keep consumers in the dark, keep them from making fully informed choices. Obviously if available information is clearly incorrect that needs to be fixed, but it's also not clear that that's the case here.
Most people have been looking at this from a freedom-of-speech point of view, and that's valid. But there are other problems with it as well, and the free market implications are one of those.
"Starburst" by Fred Pohl, except it was a beam of kaons that influenced radioactive decay, not neutrinos. Hilarity ensued.
I'll have to differ in another way... I don't believe in the "free market", either, nor do I worship it, as it seems that some people do. (I'm not accusing you of that.)
I think the "free market" is a neat concept, and a very potent economic tool, perhaps the most potent one we have. But I also think that the "free market" is inherently unstable, in that all of its participants are actively trying to destroy it. Let's face it, no successful business wants a "free market" in its established business line. They want a monopoly, the ability to set their own prices, profits, etc. Those who want a "free market" are trying to gain a foothold, and the free market gives them that opportunity. Theoretically a free market would keep someone from becoming a monopoly through competition, but in practice that doesn't really work. Microsoft and Intel are prime examples.
I'm going to pick on Intel, for the moment. Intel is an effective monopoly. AMD is there, but Intel could sink them any time they please, if there weren't antitrust implications. Intel also has been making very good products lately, so I won't fault them for making junk - now. I will fault them for 2 specific things, both the aberrations of a monopolist - IA64 and NetBurst.
IA64 happened because Intel didn't like the competition from cloners like AMD and Cyrix, so they set about to create a completely legally closed architecture, covered by no patent cross-licensing with anyone. I won't even fault the IA64 architecture itself at this point. What I'll say is that IA64 happened as a result if Intel's business desires first, and serving customers' needs was secondary. Intel deserved a BIG spanking for a customer-disregarding move like IA64, and to some extent they got it. AMD came in with the K8, which was much better aligned to customers' needs. Intel got some spanking, and AMD got some success from the IA64/K8 generation, but Intel DID flex its monopoly muscle to limit AMD's success. Intel didn't get nearly the whacking they deserved for that one. The "free market" failed to work, because Intel is just too big. NetBurst was just an aberration born of marketing triumph over engineering, another "internal squabble" that disregarded marketplace needs.
Most other market segments have examples of monopolies and duopolies. Duopolies aren't monopolies, but they're pretty much as resistant to the entry of new players into that marketplace.
I like the idea of a "free market", but I also believe that without some level of regulation and intervention, it can't exist. You hit part of the problem sideways, too. Regulation is influenced by business, therefore what comes out is seldom what was desired.
One other thing, "people will lose their jobs, but this is good, as now freed resources will be used more productively in some other industries, where demand will rise." carries the implicit assumption that demand will rise somewhere else. I insist that this still requires a balance between consumption and investment economies, which we don't have now. If consumption and investment economies are balanced, then "somebody else" will take up the slack creating the demand you cite. Today's economy is so far out of balance that there is no "somebody else" to create demand. So when those jobs are lost, demand drops, causing other jobs to be lost, causing demand to drop...
I call for balance.
I did similar programming, connected with an EE class. We had our prototype board that plugged into the (dating myself) S100 "mainframe." Our lab projects were combinations of hardware and software. Few things teach you the value of time while computing better than writing a bit-banging UART. For your example, take your DAC and see what sort of AC frequency response you could get out of it. Then give the "A" in the class to the team with the best combination of transient response, frequency response, and overall accuracy.
My first job in the working world involved programming memory testers. At that point you drop down to microcode on an individual cycle basis, controlling timings within the cycle on pulse shaper cards. You had to know what each and every cycle was doing, and do them all correctly. Now THAT's low-level.
I wasn't really talking about creating wealth, though I did so in a "cousin post" to someone else. But I'll quickly say that saving and investing doesn't create wealth - it just moves money from place to place. The wealth creation happens when saving and investing enables others to create wealth.
But that wasn't the point of my post, this is:
It seems that most people who love to talk economics practically worship saving and investing, and denigrate spending. There's one little problem there, though. If nobody spends, there's no need for those factories that people save and invest in.
The simple reality is that you need balance. If investing isn't somehow matched to spending then you have overproduction. When you have overproduction, either you lower prices until demand (spending!) picks up, or you idle facilities, perhaps laying off workers. Oh, and laid-off workers are generally financially strapped, and not very likely to contribute to demand for the factory's output.
As for "sticking it to the rich guy", that wasn't the point of my post at all. Keep in mind that comparatively, the rich guy is spending very little, and most of his money is in savings and investment. That really means that today our economy has more money in savings and investment than at any point since the 1920's - on the brink of the Great Depression. My point is that all of that money in savings and investment hasn't given us a great economy - in fact because that money came out of the consumption economy, it's causing the current problems. There simply isn't enough money available to create demand to keep factories full or stimulate investment in new factories. (Substitute whatever facilities you want for "factories".)
My point is that the balance is broken, and we need to restore it. That may sound like "sticking it to the rich", but it's really not meant that way. There's a lot of money in the wrong place, and until it's in the right place the economy won't move. How many other mechanisms do you know of to "move money" in such a gross fashion besides taxation?
"As to why bubbles form. Its easy TOO much money in the system." I think I agreed with this, with the caveat that I think it's too much fluid investment money. I don't disagree that we need a large investment sector, because after all, SOMEBODY has to own all of that land, bricks, and mortar. (Unfortunately I fear we've sold off too much of our land, bricks, and mortar to foreigners, turning it into fluid investment money, and then gone and done stupid things with it.)
BALANCE!
I beg to differ. In my opinion, which does not include an economics degree, but does include >30 years in the workforce, neither spending nor saving and investing creates wealth.
I'll give a definition here for people to take pot-shots at. You create wealth by rearranging "stuff" and increasing it's market value. Rather a vague definition, but I think it's fairly encompassing. For my specific wealth creation, I sell sand to Arabs, or am part of a rather large team that does. We take sand, purify it, melt it into silicon ingots, slice it, contaminate those slices with precise patterns, test, package, and test again. The resulting devices go into computers, cell phones, cars, maybe not everything made today, but certainly a high fraction. Other people create wealth by digging stuff out of the ground and turning it into gasoline, lubricating oil, etc. Still others create wealth by rearranging fields of force into patterns that others consider valuable. (AKA, software)
I think we agree that spending does not create wealth. I differ in that saving and investing doesn't create wealth either, at least not on their own. Saving (presuming a typical banking system that then loans that money to others) and investing ENABLE others to create wealth. Again, my opinion, if saving and investing appear to create wealth in and of themselves, it's probably some sort of shell game, and the "creation" is a fiction.
As for spending, you can't do without it. Nobody is going to invest in a factory if they don't think that they can sell the resulting goods. That's exactly where we are now - there aren't enough people who have enough money to spend it, either to use the capacity for wealth creation that we have now, or to supply incentive for anyone to build new facilities for more wealth creation. In fact, in the US today if you gave more money to those who save and invest, and I'd bet that a substantial amount of that money would be invested overseas, creating wealth there, and doing little (I guess it might drop prices, some.) to improve the economy here.
I bow to your superior wisdom.
Now if we can just reconstitute the economy with polar bears and woodland squirrels, the economy and everything else will be just dandy.
If you deserved any sort of serious response, I would remind you that my GP was based in pragmatism, not any sort of estimate of who deserves what. So go right ahead, collect all of the acorns, and leave the other woodland squirrels to starve. Because woodland squirrels are not social (NO implication of socialistic, here.) animals. So there's no society composed of woodland squirrels to be concerned about, not woodland squirrel economy to go into the toilet.
I saw that chart years ago. During the Clinton years, everybody did better. But the poor and middle did more better than the wealthy did, so in relative terms the wealthy lost even though they gained in absolute terms. What's even funnier is that in absolute terms the wealthy gained more than they did under more unequal policies. It supports your supposition.
Well at the moment they're campaigning on fiscal policy while at the same time urging that the Bush top-bracket tax cuts be made permanent. Plus during the last election cycle they were running on eliminating the top tax bracket entirely - putting ME in the same tax bracket as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
I have a slightly different view...
The inequity of distribution of income and wealth is at the highest point since the 1920's. I say simply this: The "ordinary economy", the part where people buy and sell goods and services, is broken. There simply isn't enough money in the ordinary economy for it to work right. As a side effect, there's too much fluid money in the "investment economy", so when too many investors rush into some sector or another, they generate a bubble. After all, inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, and that can hold for "investment goods" as well as real goods. Plus when too much investment money goes into some commodity or other, (like crude oil) that investment money can drive the price up regardless of the consumption-drive supply and demand.
The economy will continue to be broken until more money moves into the ordinary economy.
It doesn't matter if American executives, wealthy, elite, etc deserve every cent they have, and more besides.
It doesn't matter if I'm "supposed" to surrender my middle-class status, take a 2/3 (or more) pay cut, and live on an Indian or South American style salary.
It doesn't matter if the minimum wage should go away, the those people live on far less.
The reality is that:
American executives, wealthy, elite, etc spend very little compared to their wealth and income.
I don't trust the long-term prospects of my job, so while I'm still comfortable, I'm not about to take out a loan for a big-ticket item.
When you have to decide between food and clothing, or shelter and medical care, you do only what you have to, and what you can.
None of this drives economic recovery.
If the American executives, wealthy, elite, etc had a little less, it would make no difference to their lives. Their egos would take a slight bruising in their investment portfolios.
If I had more long-term confidence in my job, I'd finance a car. My 12 year old Ford is a little long-in-the-tooth, and getting to be unreliable.
If someone deciding between food and clothing had more money, he'd buy both.
This isn't principle, it's pragmatism. Notice that I haven't really said anything about who deserves what, though there is a tone to what I've written. It's just a simple matter of what it takes to make the economy work. Until money "moves down" the economy will continue to be in the doldrums. But unfortunately there's no acceptable way to "move money down", because that's "wealth transfer" and thereby evil. Of course when wealth transfers up, as has happened faster since 1980, that's "natural" and "good". But we've transferred so much money up, that those below haven't got enough to make the economy work, any more.
The other side of this is that Obama did nothing to fix this problem. None of what he did did a thing to affect the distribution of wealth and income in the country. Perhaps running the printing press for the stimulus and bailouts has "created" extra cash, though all things told, I'm not sure that more of that money really went "down" with the stimulus than went "up" with the bailouts.
Nor am I entirely against supply-side solutions - they have their place. It's just that supply-side solutions aren't universally applicable, and this is one place where they're not. I'll moderate that a bit, and say that I'm in favor of incentives for small businesses, even at this point.
Taggants are small chips of plastic embedded in all commercial explosives. They basically build up a whole bunch of thin layers of plastic, each layer distinctive. Think of the sequence of layers as a "manufacturing hash" allowing you to inspect the taggants and tell who made the explosives, and some additional information, pehaps some generic and some manufacturer-specific about that explosive. The multi-layered plastic is shredded into tiny pieces and mixed into the explosive.
It's so small and so light that at least some survives the explosion.
But there are those who are concerned that with years of wind, construction use explosions, taggants will be practically everywhere. So check the sight of a criminal explosion, and you have to start quantitatively sifting the debris to figure out which taggants are associated with the immediate problem, especially if there was recent construction nearby.
RFID may wind up the same way. Too many RFID devices, perhaps too little adherence to standards making boku crosstalk problems. It still wouldn't be a problem walking through the short-range theft detectors in a store, but long range RFID snooping might become very difficult, given time and ubiquity.
Couldn't possibly happen, because the Russians have prior art on this: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Russian_Woodpecker
The conspiracy-theories for the Russian Woodpecker were primarily mind control and weather modification.
But then again, if they didn't patent it, maybe we could use it after all.
Sarcasm alert - I know that citing patents and prior art against secret government weapons is silly. Sometimes the secret government weapons are, too.