To me the worse thing here is that bitcoin is being generated illegally, bringing the bitcoin system even further into disrepute that it already is.
This is akin to stating "There was a news article about $500,000 that was spent on heroin from Guatemala. This certainly calls into question the practicality of the us dollar". These two things are completely separate, that's what is being pointed out. Bitcoin doesnt have a problem except for the fact that some people are doing something illegal (owning/operating a botnet) and their work on said botnet is related to Bitcoins.
Put an even simpler way just in case this isn't clear, if there were a botnet out there designed to crack into a secret, encrypted NSA document for unscrupulous purposes, would you be here arguing "boy the NSA sure is in the tank, they are out there illegally botnetting peoples computers all criminal like and shit"?
I'm sure the crackers will enjoy spending their virtual pennies on any of the varied goods and services available within the Bitcoin economy: herpes, home brewed acid, and yaoi themed web sites.
The point is that you are "supposed" to be able to mint bitcoins this way, it is in the design of the system. Why would there be anything wrong with doing something the system was designed to support? If you want to argue that it's wrong to get other peoples computers to do it for you, then that's one angle, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the act of mining bitcoins through CPU/GPU work, plain and simple, despite the TFA making it sound like it's akin to cracking online banking accounts just because there is money involved. It is not doing anything any one individual isn't supposed to be able to do.
Good for you for being an informed consumer, but if you are anything like a normal person you generally value your purchases based on some degree of personal satisfaction, and not based on the thought that everyone *else* is happy with it. In this regard, all too often people make the wrong choice at a rate proportionate with how much time they invested in "research" of said purchase, which runs contrary to expectations but it is nevertheless the outcome of many consumer behavior studies. It would seem that it is very easy to "over think" a purchase and weight the decision with the wrong set of criteria. Given that, it is also very easy to be influenced by subtle, almost unnoticeable factors that ultimately can swing a purchasing decision one direction or another. Unless you rely on a self-programmed computer, free of any human influence for all of your decisions, then chances are you are influenced by these things too.
Facebook doesn't know anything about me. I have subscribed there and posted there for a long time.
They sell the information they have collected on me to other companies and they make a tidy profit for it, but the funny thing is that what they are selling has nothing to do with me. It won't help someone market better to me. It won't help someone convince me to buy something.
The reason this kind of thing doesn't work is pretty easy. I'm the kind of person that makes purchasing decisions based on the actual products or services and my perception of them, along with my decision of whether to trust them. Anyone working with Facebook I automatically distrust. I never trusted Yahoo to begin with, especially when they had the overgrown mess of a website back when Google was starting its journey.
So it really doesn't surprise me that Facebook has partnered with Yahoo, but to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it.
This is just ivy league idiots passing money around. There is nothing more going on here.
How do you know for sure that your purchasing decisions are made by *intentional* perceptions of products, and not by the subtly controlled environment you subject yourself to when engaging in things like Facebook? Heck, by your own admission all I would have to do (as a marketer) is somehow dis-align my brand with Facebook and I will be excluded from your circle of distrust. After that it's only a matter of time before that distinction creeps into a purchase decision. People put so much more unconscious thought into purchases (and other things) than they tend to admit, and often its the ones going around saying "no that's not going to influence my purchases!" that are the most susceptible.
Seems like a really poor way to go about doing it. Might as well just do the calculations themselves. Much faster, and will produce a vastly more reliable answer.
I also enjoy the constant use of the adjectives "average" and "approximately" whenever the magic "six steps" are mentioned. I can tell you right now that everyone is on average, approximately 6 steps away from everyone else. (for certain large definitions of approximately, and for a certain averaging method which will be named later.)
Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code,
Hmm, no, actually most (but certainly not 100% of) manufacturers that embed Android comply with the redistribution clause in the GPL. Samsung (one of the biggest vendors) has a web site set up specifically to redistribute code, and others make it similarly easy. Do you really think that the multi billion dollar likes of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc didn't bother having a copyright lawyer look over the situation to make sure things are kosher? Surely there are some vendors out there that are abusing the system and not putting up code as required, but if any one of the major vendors did that why not come out and say who it was?
Of the android phone makers, Motorola is one of the two best. I'm glad Google went for them instead of Samsung... *shudder*
Hopefully that means there will be Motorola android phones on Sprint.
Google went for Motorola (at least in part) because Samsung's phone business is some ten times bigger, and even the mighty GOOG isn't able to bite off that much at this stage of the game.
Their various extensions into other markets, while probably driven partially by restless capital, also tend to be into areas that are calculated to enhance customer's abilities to continue to access core Google properties without involving intermediaries who have much to gain by either forcing Google out or forcing Google to pay for the privilege of remaining in.
I for one am looking forward to when Google buys up a 3g/4g nationwide/worldwide network and creates an actually competitive smartphone marketplace where $30 a month isnt the least you can pay for overhyped, underpowered service in an oppressive contract.
The folks at Sylvania can... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvania_Electric_Products_explosion is the story of one such "experiment" where waste thorium ended up releasing a lot more energy than expected, thereby paving the way (much as gasoline did when it was the overly energetic, under appreciated byproduct of refining heating oil) for future exploitation.
The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.
Maybe they have come to the conclusion (as many other groups have) that oil shale is so painfully difficult to get usable crude out of that conservation actually makes *sense* despite the promises of fifty trillion barrels "sitting right under our feet"? If we haven't already completely boned the environment with burning off all the light sweet crude we can find in easy to access deposits, the energy consumed and requisite pollution generated in just *gathering* the crude from the oil shale will certainly put us over the top.
Yeah, it must be the case that he was selective about his example and has nothing to do with the fact that the danziger bridge trial verdict was only 3 days ago.
Here, I'll try it just like you... How about the 1985 Dorothy Groce shooting, subsequent riots (plural), and eventual acquittal of the officer who shot her. Meanwhile, cayenne8 is still accurate in pointing out you guys riot and kill each other when your favorite soccer team loses a match.
LOL@ "you guys" I am not from the UK (or any other country that has "soccer" riots)...
so no: to confuse criminal rioting with genuine protesting is disgusting
But you admit that for almost any sufficiently long protest, criminal rioting is an inevitability... This is what causes confusion to some not intimately familiar with the details of the event.
I've been reading the headlines on this a couple of days....and I'm still not sure what all the rioting is about?
The police shoot someone over there, and they have a riot? What's the deal with that?
We don't lose our minds everytime someone get's shot over here unless it is something pretty egregious....I mean, we just finished the trial (not that much national exposure I don't think) about all the people shot on the Danziger bridge post Katrina by the cops. They had an orderly trial, etc. We didn't go all apeshit over it and riot in the streets over the shooting. The cops were caught, tried and found guilty, and convicted...end of story.
Then again, I don't understand it why other towns riot in the streets and burn cars when "their" football/basketball/baseball teams wins the championship.
Good thinking, point out a verdict that went in favor of "the people". When the Rodney King verdict came down (in the opposite direction) there were many significant riots... Forget about those? You are right, things are so different over there.
Easier answer: RIM said "holy ****, we still have users? sure, we will do whatever you want as long as it's proclaimed far and wide that we do indeed have users left!"
Consider how much water you use during a day that goes down a drain (shower, laundry, dishes, flushing toilets, etc). Compare that to how much water you drink a day. That puts an upper bound on how much "urine" you're looking at.
Most wastewater treatment plants put water back in the river that's cleaner than the rest of the river, anyway. Environmental regulations and the like.
That doesnt stop it from being piss... Did you know that water leaving via the wastewater plan is never actually filtered? Just rendered into clearer and clearer forms via patience and a few odd chemicals along the way. To get it back out and turn it to drinking water the same rules apply; no filters, just time and a few parts per million of chlorine. All that piss must be in there *somewhere*. Don't forget, animals have been drinking water for millions of years. The odds that the H20 you are drinking right now weren't peed out of some creature at some time are pretty low.
Government: We planned to increase the budget deficit by $4 trillion next few years, but now we're only increasing it by $2 trillion! We cut spending by $2 trillion dollars!
S&P: You still increased spending. You didn't cut anything. You still spend almost twice as much as you make. You are no longer credible.
Government: Traitors! Terrorists! Hostage takers! Can't you idiots in private industry do math?
Pathetic. Even the slashdot title of this article is complete rubbish.
It's more like
Government: Those numbers you used to affirm our AAA rating a few months ago... they look better now (they are 2T more toward being positive, however negative it is) and you still chose to take this opportunity to downgrade our rating? omgwtfbbq!
You're looking at a different measurement. Yours is probably also worth looking at of course, but it's a different measurement.
It is commonly call the debt-to-income ration, but that could certainly be called a poor choice of terms. It's about the accumulation of debt, not the total debt load. It is what I said it was: for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one. This does accumulate into a debt load over time, just like it does in businesses.
If I had a point (and I'm not sure I did), it was that those seeking for the govt to be run more like a business might be in for a nasty shock if they got what they asked for. The budget of a sovereign nation is very different from that of a household or a business and approaching it from either direction will lead you astray if you aren't careful.
It is misleading trying to frame a government like a business (mostly because of the ghastly overgrown monsters that governments have become in recent decades.) Alas, to your point, what business borrows as much as they take in each year, and then doesn't EVER pay it back? Your phrase of "for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one" isn't accurate for ANY business over the long term. Businesses use credit facilities to leverage themselves when they need to grow or realign, but none of them borrows just to pay the bills. If a business were habitually in the red at the end of the FY their credit rating would be "junk" after two or three years, if not less. They would no doubt be extinct in under a decade. Name one business that has been *severely* in the red for almost every one of the last 30 years, has outstanding debt of many times their annual earnings, and is still around (with a sterling credit rating, no less) today.
To that end, the biggest difference between a government and a business when it comes to debt is that governments are typically VERY convincing when it comes time to make good on their debts; they either pass a law, beg/borrow/steal, or generate downright charity in order to make ends meet. If any business (with the notable exception of certain very VERY large banks and auto makers) resorted to such tactics, they would get laughed into bankruptcy.
And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.
Excuse me? The federal government has an income about equal to the national debt? Ah, er, not sure where you got that math from but it's not quite right. They have borrowed about $15 trillion to date, and annually take in about $2 trillion (on a good year)... Explain how 15:2 is somewhere near 1:1...
The total debt US has is way too high anyway, if a person had same sort of debt load they would be insolvent.
That is a pretty astounding thing to say. Most people who have a mortgage have a far higher debt load than the US government, and sub-prime victims excepted, the vast majority of home-owners do not go insolvent in the process.
When the government has already borrowed to over 10x it's annual income and continues to borrow yearly at almost double its income, I can assure you it acts NOTHING like a normal person. If I had a $500,000 mortgage and only earned $50,000 a year but had a car note that cost me $100,000 a year... you think creditors would get anywhere near me! AAA?? More like FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU.
The common mistake with the "debt to gdp ratio" is that the federal government doesnt have a valid claim on every dollar in the GDP. They have a claim to what they have levied in taxes (it says so in our constitution). So saying "oh debt to gdp is better than anyone with a big mortgage" is like saying "oh the rest of the guys at my company all own a Porsche, i am just a janitor and my paycheck is 1/10th any of theirs but I can afford to get one too because WE all make TONS of money!"
My only comment to this is hindsight is 20/20. The problem with statements like this is that they very obviously weren't at the time. Not just from the rating agency's point of view but many economists were feeling the same way. There were a few economists who cautioned against them and had them correctly evaluated but they were far from the majority and even then most of their opinions were hedged with speculative language.
It sure is a good thing our national finance system operates on majority rule... We should just hold a vote that asks "who thinks foreign governments really have a valid claim on ~10 trillion in US government liability?" That will settle this once and for all.
Holding out till the market is desperate and prices are so high you have no hope of intelligent management of the scarce resource hasn't always worked out the way people expect either.
It may be unexpected to the countries choosing to rapidly exploit their resources (be they rare earth metals, oil, gas, uranium ore, military might, or comfortable beaches) that once they are out of their resource they face a world that is at once no longer willing to send them money and eager to charge a hefty premium for said resource... But it won't be unexpected for us*!
The suprising thing (to me at least) is that the Albrecht brothers (owners of ALDI) are two of the richest men in the world. You would think that having low prices and high quality would lead to thin margins and not much profit left over, but they have really done well with that company. They don't move anywhere near the volume of WalMart worldwide, and yet still park their yachts right next to the Waltons.
Slashdot Mirror
Then allow me to clarify:
To me the worse thing here is that bitcoin is being generated illegally, bringing the bitcoin system even further into disrepute that it already is.
This is akin to stating "There was a news article about $500,000 that was spent on heroin from Guatemala. This certainly calls into question the practicality of the us dollar". These two things are completely separate, that's what is being pointed out. Bitcoin doesnt have a problem except for the fact that some people are doing something illegal (owning/operating a botnet) and their work on said botnet is related to Bitcoins.
Put an even simpler way just in case this isn't clear, if there were a botnet out there designed to crack into a secret, encrypted NSA document for unscrupulous purposes, would you be here arguing "boy the NSA sure is in the tank, they are out there illegally botnetting peoples computers all criminal like and shit"?
I'm sure the crackers will enjoy spending their virtual pennies on any of the varied goods and services available within the Bitcoin economy: herpes, home brewed acid, and yaoi themed web sites.
omg lol.
The point is that you are "supposed" to be able to mint bitcoins this way, it is in the design of the system. Why would there be anything wrong with doing something the system was designed to support? If you want to argue that it's wrong to get other peoples computers to do it for you, then that's one angle, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the act of mining bitcoins through CPU/GPU work, plain and simple, despite the TFA making it sound like it's akin to cracking online banking accounts just because there is money involved. It is not doing anything any one individual isn't supposed to be able to do.
Good for you for being an informed consumer, but if you are anything like a normal person you generally value your purchases based on some degree of personal satisfaction, and not based on the thought that everyone *else* is happy with it. In this regard, all too often people make the wrong choice at a rate proportionate with how much time they invested in "research" of said purchase, which runs contrary to expectations but it is nevertheless the outcome of many consumer behavior studies. It would seem that it is very easy to "over think" a purchase and weight the decision with the wrong set of criteria. Given that, it is also very easy to be influenced by subtle, almost unnoticeable factors that ultimately can swing a purchasing decision one direction or another. Unless you rely on a self-programmed computer, free of any human influence for all of your decisions, then chances are you are influenced by these things too.
Facebook doesn't know anything about me. I have subscribed there and posted there for a long time.
They sell the information they have collected on me to other companies and they make a tidy profit for it, but the funny thing is that what they are selling has nothing to do with me. It won't help someone market better to me. It won't help someone convince me to buy something.
The reason this kind of thing doesn't work is pretty easy. I'm the kind of person that makes purchasing decisions based on the actual products or services and my perception of them, along with my decision of whether to trust them. Anyone working with Facebook I automatically distrust. I never trusted Yahoo to begin with, especially when they had the overgrown mess of a website back when Google was starting its journey.
So it really doesn't surprise me that Facebook has partnered with Yahoo, but to be honest I couldn't give a shit about it.
This is just ivy league idiots passing money around. There is nothing more going on here.
How do you know for sure that your purchasing decisions are made by *intentional* perceptions of products, and not by the subtly controlled environment you subject yourself to when engaging in things like Facebook? Heck, by your own admission all I would have to do (as a marketer) is somehow dis-align my brand with Facebook and I will be excluded from your circle of distrust. After that it's only a matter of time before that distinction creeps into a purchase decision. People put so much more unconscious thought into purchases (and other things) than they tend to admit, and often its the ones going around saying "no that's not going to influence my purchases!" that are the most susceptible.
Seems like a really poor way to go about doing it. Might as well just do the calculations themselves. Much faster, and will produce a vastly more reliable answer.
I also enjoy the constant use of the adjectives "average" and "approximately" whenever the magic "six steps" are mentioned. I can tell you right now that everyone is on average, approximately 6 steps away from everyone else. (for certain large definitions of approximately, and for a certain averaging method which will be named later.)
Patent gadfly Florian Mueller's latest post has made a fairly bold claim: that virtually all Android licensees are violating the GPL because of their failure to redistribute the code,
Hmm, no, actually most (but certainly not 100% of) manufacturers that embed Android comply with the redistribution clause in the GPL. Samsung (one of the biggest vendors) has a web site set up specifically to redistribute code, and others make it similarly easy. Do you really think that the multi billion dollar likes of Samsung, Motorola, HTC, etc didn't bother having a copyright lawyer look over the situation to make sure things are kosher? Surely there are some vendors out there that are abusing the system and not putting up code as required, but if any one of the major vendors did that why not come out and say who it was?
Of the android phone makers, Motorola is one of the two best. I'm glad Google went for them instead of Samsung... *shudder*
Hopefully that means there will be Motorola android phones on Sprint.
Google went for Motorola (at least in part) because Samsung's phone business is some ten times bigger, and even the mighty GOOG isn't able to bite off that much at this stage of the game.
Their various extensions into other markets, while probably driven partially by restless capital, also tend to be into areas that are calculated to enhance customer's abilities to continue to access core Google properties without involving intermediaries who have much to gain by either forcing Google out or forcing Google to pay for the privilege of remaining in.
I for one am looking forward to when Google buys up a 3g/4g nationwide/worldwide network and creates an actually competitive smartphone marketplace where $30 a month isnt the least you can pay for overhyped, underpowered service in an oppressive contract.
The folks at Sylvania can... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvania_Electric_Products_explosion is the story of one such "experiment" where waste thorium ended up releasing a lot more energy than expected, thereby paving the way (much as gasoline did when it was the overly energetic, under appreciated byproduct of refining heating oil) for future exploitation.
Taking bets on how long before a USB powered vacuum cleaner comes out of Asia!
Like this?
Please Note:
This is not a USB device
Yes, like this, only USB powered... like he said...
The fact that they are making the park green is noteworthy. Unlike many of the oil states in the region, Jordan's total oil reserve is comparatively small, but they do have a lot of oil shale http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_in_Jordan which becomes more valuable as people run out of oil. So it isn't completely clear why Jordan would want to promote green tech other than actual ideology (well and self-interest for when everyone else's oil runs out and they still want their stuff to not be insanely expensive. But that's surprisingly far-sighed in the circumstances). It should be interesting to see where this goes in the next few years.
Maybe they have come to the conclusion (as many other groups have) that oil shale is so painfully difficult to get usable crude out of that conservation actually makes *sense* despite the promises of fifty trillion barrels "sitting right under our feet"? If we haven't already completely boned the environment with burning off all the light sweet crude we can find in easy to access deposits, the energy consumed and requisite pollution generated in just *gathering* the crude from the oil shale will certainly put us over the top.
Yeah, it must be the case that he was selective about his example and has nothing to do with the fact that the danziger bridge trial verdict was only 3 days ago.
Here, I'll try it just like you... How about the 1985 Dorothy Groce shooting, subsequent riots (plural), and eventual acquittal of the officer who shot her. Meanwhile, cayenne8 is still accurate in pointing out you guys riot and kill each other when your favorite soccer team loses a match.
LOL@ "you guys" I am not from the UK (or any other country that has "soccer" riots)...
so no: to confuse criminal rioting with genuine protesting is disgusting
But you admit that for almost any sufficiently long protest, criminal rioting is an inevitability... This is what causes confusion to some not intimately familiar with the details of the event.
I've been reading the headlines on this a couple of days....and I'm still not sure what all the rioting is about?
The police shoot someone over there, and they have a riot? What's the deal with that?
We don't lose our minds everytime someone get's shot over here unless it is something pretty egregious....I mean, we just finished the trial (not that much national exposure I don't think) about all the people shot on the Danziger bridge post Katrina by the cops. They had an orderly trial, etc. We didn't go all apeshit over it and riot in the streets over the shooting. The cops were caught, tried and found guilty, and convicted...end of story.
Then again, I don't understand it why other towns riot in the streets and burn cars when "their" football/basketball/baseball teams wins the championship.
Good thinking, point out a verdict that went in favor of "the people". When the Rodney King verdict came down (in the opposite direction) there were many significant riots... Forget about those? You are right, things are so different over there.
Easier answer: RIM said "holy ****, we still have users? sure, we will do whatever you want as long as it's proclaimed far and wide that we do indeed have users left!"
Consider how much water you use during a day that goes down a drain (shower, laundry, dishes, flushing toilets, etc). Compare that to how much water you drink a day. That puts an upper bound on how much "urine" you're looking at.
Most wastewater treatment plants put water back in the river that's cleaner than the rest of the river, anyway. Environmental regulations and the like.
That doesnt stop it from being piss... Did you know that water leaving via the wastewater plan is never actually filtered? Just rendered into clearer and clearer forms via patience and a few odd chemicals along the way. To get it back out and turn it to drinking water the same rules apply; no filters, just time and a few parts per million of chlorine. All that piss must be in there *somewhere*. Don't forget, animals have been drinking water for millions of years. The odds that the H20 you are drinking right now weren't peed out of some creature at some time are pretty low.
Government: We planned to increase the budget deficit by $4 trillion next few years, but now we're only increasing it by $2 trillion! We cut spending by $2 trillion dollars!
S&P: You still increased spending. You didn't cut anything. You still spend almost twice as much as you make. You are no longer credible.
Government: Traitors! Terrorists! Hostage takers! Can't you idiots in private industry do math?
Pathetic. Even the slashdot title of this article is complete rubbish.
It's more like
Government: Those numbers you used to affirm our AAA rating a few months ago... they look better now (they are 2T more toward being positive, however negative it is) and you still chose to take this opportunity to downgrade our rating? omgwtfbbq!
You're looking at a different measurement. Yours is probably also worth looking at of course, but it's a different measurement.
It is commonly call the debt-to-income ration, but that could certainly be called a poor choice of terms. It's about the accumulation of debt, not the total debt load. It is what I said it was: for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one. This does accumulate into a debt load over time, just like it does in businesses.
Of course, right now the biggest owner of US debt is actually the Federal Reserve, which overshadowed China 2 months ago: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/fed-eclipses-china-top-owner-us-debt. So due to the weirdness that is the Fed, the govt now owes itself 1.4 Trillion.
If I had a point (and I'm not sure I did), it was that those seeking for the govt to be run more like a business might be in for a nasty shock if they got what they asked for. The budget of a sovereign nation is very different from that of a household or a business and approaching it from either direction will lead you astray if you aren't careful.
It is misleading trying to frame a government like a business (mostly because of the ghastly overgrown monsters that governments have become in recent decades.) Alas, to your point, what business borrows as much as they take in each year, and then doesn't EVER pay it back? Your phrase of "for every dollar they earn on a yearly basis, they borrow one" isn't accurate for ANY business over the long term. Businesses use credit facilities to leverage themselves when they need to grow or realign, but none of them borrows just to pay the bills. If a business were habitually in the red at the end of the FY their credit rating would be "junk" after two or three years, if not less. They would no doubt be extinct in under a decade. Name one business that has been *severely* in the red for almost every one of the last 30 years, has outstanding debt of many times their annual earnings, and is still around (with a sterling credit rating, no less) today.
To that end, the biggest difference between a government and a business when it comes to debt is that governments are typically VERY convincing when it comes time to make good on their debts; they either pass a law, beg/borrow/steal, or generate downright charity in order to make ends meet. If any business (with the notable exception of certain very VERY large banks and auto makers) resorted to such tactics, they would get laughed into bankruptcy.
And yet if a business ran the same levels of debt it would generally be considered to not be borrowing enough! The govt is running a debt-to-income ratio of right around 1 to 1. For every dollar they make in income they borrow 1 more. Most companies run somewhere in the 2-1 or 10-1 range, with several going much higher.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-05-24-Dont-believe-national-debt-hype_n.htm
Excuse me? The federal government has an income about equal to the national debt? Ah, er, not sure where you got that math from but it's not quite right. They have borrowed about $15 trillion to date, and annually take in about $2 trillion (on a good year)... Explain how 15:2 is somewhere near 1:1...
The total debt US has is way too high anyway, if a person had same sort of debt load they would be insolvent.
That is a pretty astounding thing to say. Most people who have a mortgage have a far higher debt load than the US government, and sub-prime victims excepted, the vast majority of home-owners do not go insolvent in the process.
When the government has already borrowed to over 10x it's annual income and continues to borrow yearly at almost double its income, I can assure you it acts NOTHING like a normal person. If I had a $500,000 mortgage and only earned $50,000 a year but had a car note that cost me $100,000 a year... you think creditors would get anywhere near me! AAA?? More like FFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUU.
The common mistake with the "debt to gdp ratio" is that the federal government doesnt have a valid claim on every dollar in the GDP. They have a claim to what they have levied in taxes (it says so in our constitution). So saying "oh debt to gdp is better than anyone with a big mortgage" is like saying "oh the rest of the guys at my company all own a Porsche, i am just a janitor and my paycheck is 1/10th any of theirs but I can afford to get one too because WE all make TONS of money!"
The rest of the world has too!
Citation, please. I am skeptical of this statement.
He meant "has to!" but mistyped it...
My only comment to this is hindsight is 20/20. The problem with statements like this is that they very obviously weren't at the time. Not just from the rating agency's point of view but many economists were feeling the same way. There were a few economists who cautioned against them and had them correctly evaluated but they were far from the majority and even then most of their opinions were hedged with speculative language.
It sure is a good thing our national finance system operates on majority rule... We should just hold a vote that asks "who thinks foreign governments really have a valid claim on ~10 trillion in US government liability?" That will settle this once and for all.
Um, not using a resource makes it not a resource.
Holding out till the market is desperate and prices are so high you have no hope of intelligent management of the scarce resource hasn't always worked out the way people expect either.
It may be unexpected to the countries choosing to rapidly exploit their resources (be they rare earth metals, oil, gas, uranium ore, military might, or comfortable beaches) that once they are out of their resource they face a world that is at once no longer willing to send them money and eager to charge a hefty premium for said resource... But it won't be unexpected for us*!
*for certain values of us
The suprising thing (to me at least) is that the Albrecht brothers (owners of ALDI) are two of the richest men in the world. You would think that having low prices and high quality would lead to thin margins and not much profit left over, but they have really done well with that company. They don't move anywhere near the volume of WalMart worldwide, and yet still park their yachts right next to the Waltons.