Really? So I assume that you either don't believe in a god or that the god you choose to believe in is a complete no-op. He doesn't do things like dump these things on you and expect you to obey, right? Or tell you to slaughter folks? In that case, I can certainly see being totally willing to ignore questions of actual existence and just assume. I mean, I couldn't care less about gods who don't have any effect on the real world.
But a lot of gods seem to want their followers to do stuff that they might not otherwise do. In a case like that, a good sanity check like, "Am I doing this in the name of Grand Cosmic Righteousness or because of voices in my head?" seems totally appropriate.
Many, previously non-religious people - atheists and agnostics alike - have had religious or supernatural experiences that they lack the ability to explain.
What's telling is that if it shifts them toward religion, it almost always steers them to the religion most generally accepted in the culture they grew up in. That's pretty strong evidence that it's still very much a "because somebody said this" phenomenon and not a revelation of some deep universal truth.
If the experience of Europe is any indication it will have little positive effect, but will offer American gays and lesbians a chance to participate in the expense, pain, and acrimony of divorce.
"Little positive" for you and me maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the people who weren't able to get married would probably see something positive in it. I'm glad to see that over the years the goalposts have moved from, "Gay marriage will cause plagues of locusts and give us all Dutch elm disease," to, "Well, gay marriage won't cure cancer."
Would you favor abolishing marriage in general in order to save us all from the acrimony of divorce?
The rough definition of the "intrinsic value" of an item is the value you (a person) would place on it when "I can trade it for something else" is not part of the valuation process. It's not some physical constant, and it was never implied to be.
I did read the article. I'm not sure how the point "The Chinese have a lot more people than we do" is negated by pointing out that the phenomenon is really, "The Chinese + the populations of a bunch of other nations." That just makes the point even more true. We can become marginally more productive or more educated than we are, but we're never going to do so as fast as country of uneducated farmers sending their first generation of kids to newly-built engineering schools. The bottom line is that we're about 4.5% of the world's population (and falling) and we're producing 21% of the academic papers. There's simply no possible way for that to continue while the rest of the world develops. Assuming our percentage of the world's population stays the same (and it won't), I'd expect us to asymptotically approach 4.5% of the world's papers even with top notch academics.
I'm all for more R&D funding as a percentage of GDP, but again, "growth in R&D funding as a percentage of GDP" is a questionable metric to compare to developing nations. What percentage of South Korea's GDP was spent on R&D 50 years ago compared to ours? What is it now compared to ours? Should ours have grown at the same rate as theirs? Probably not.
The thing is, we should be losing ground by metrics like "absolute number of scientific papers produced." China has 4 times as many people as we do and is in the process of increasing the percentage of its population that gets advanced education and participates in the industrial economy. China surpassing the US in papers produced is inevitable. They'll do it as soon as they're 1/4th as academically productive per capita as we are. Or, stated differently, we would have to remain permanently 4x as productive as the Chinese to stay ahead forever. Not going to happen.
In effect you're saying the US is little better than a banana republic, where the public officials (and therefore laws) are for sale, and if you have enough money you can have whatever you want.
Yes and no. In a real banana republic situation, you can't get rid of your corrupt lawmakers even if they're doing thing that the majority absolutely hates. The corruption is so ingrained that elections are basically meaningless. In a functioning democracy, you get voted out if you're doing something offensive enough that the public notices and considers it bad enough to override whatever reasons they had for voting you in to begin with. As long as the corruption you engage in is esoteric or small scale enough that the public doesn't notice or care enough to remove you, you can get away with it in any democracy. Tweaking the auto sales distribution rules probably qualifies.
Why do states wish to entrench a specific business model or exclude someone from it?
Because while it's expensive to buy US Senators and other high profile offices, it's pretty cheap to buy state legislators--well within the grasp of one of the district's wealthier entrepenurs. Like a guy who owns a major car dealership.
I'm just always a little weirded out when an HVAC contractor or a dental hygenist gets all furious that people in vocations like "acting" or "comic strips" have opinions about stuff. How dare they? I mean, it's not like modern democracy is based on the notion that everybody gets to voice opinions about how society functions, right? Especially the people who are personally and directly affected by the policy--I can't get over those douchebags wanting to bend my ear about their problems.
If they were politicians I certainly might care what they have to say. Lucky for us, those guys are selected from among the elite vocations that should be allowed a voice.
I get the guys in pain, that his dad is in pain but if his mind is "98%" gone as he says then his dad is suffering less than he is. If his dad had a living will requesting to not be left on life support than it likely wouldn't be an issue. There are legal ways around assisted suicide, it just seems Scott would rather ignore them and point fingers like every other douche on the planet.
Since we're using a person's vocation to decide whether or not their opinion is valid, what do you do for a living?
Competent administration is incredibly important, but I'm not seeing the connection. I don't remember anything about Groves being an MBA or studying business. He was a career military officer who spent his adult life running government engineering projects, which is pretty much exactly what you'd want in a manager who runs huge government engineering projects.
I think we all realize that MBA programs purport to teach students how to manage these types of projects. We're just qestioning whether they actually do so. I'd say that understanding basic accounting and finance are really important, but how much of the remainder of the management process is really a "science" that can be be made systematic and taught well in a classroom?
Yeah, this shouldn't really be an Earth-shattering surprise. In fact, I've always thought that the DOD interest in directed energy weapons was specifically for shooting down cheap flimsy things like drones. Even countries with tiny military budgets could build large fleets of drones that we would have a hard time shooting down with conventional missiles. I just figured that HERF weapons and the like were the simplest solution to swatting a lot of lightweight threats in a reliable cost-effective way.
Dude, you wrote on one that a rise in the value of currency:
...increases the pool of savings available for investment in productive economic activity at lower interest rates...
which is just flatly, empiricially not true. It's also not true in any basic economic model. It's also not the same as saying that altering interest rates shifts investment back and forth between capital goods and consumption goods independent of the absolute amount of investment, which sounds more along the lines of what you're getting at.
I doubt you'll take the time to read it, but you should.
I've ready my Rothbard and Mises. I've also read the standard basic econ textbooks. But here's a question: Have you read anything but the Austrian version of economics? Because discussing economics with somebody who has only read Rothbard and Mises is a lot like discussing economics with somebody who has only read Marx. They don't realize that their models and terminology aren't the only ones and, in fact, aren't really used by anybody else, and they get upset when nobody agrees with them. They can talk for hours about the things in their own little models and how the mainstream people are crazy, but they usually can't explain the mainstream position to save their lives.
So let's take the Bitcoin situation. Let's say that because new people are adopting Bitcoin constantly, the price of Bitcoin is climbing--say 25% per year. Let's say you have 100 BTC. At what rate would you be willing to loan me that 100 BTC to finance my investment project? Second, what must the rate of return on my investment project be to justify borrowing the Bitcoin at that rate? What useful signal is the climbing price of Bitcoin sending to would-be builders of productive investments?
This is one of the weirder arguments I've heard. The summary is, "All fiat currency regimes have failed. Except the ones that haven't. Therefore, the ones that haven't failed will fail."
Though certainly true that rapid fluctuations in a currency's value make it inconvenient as a medium of exchange (the problem with BTC right now), a rise in the value of a currency rewards savers and increases the pool of savings available for investment in productive economic activity at lower interest rates.
It rewards hoarders of the medium of exchange, that's true. But that's not really a good thing, and hoarding the medium of exchange doensn't make more funds available for investment. The quantity of Bitcoin is not a function of its price. Further, the supply of loanable/investable Bitcoin is partially a (negative) function of the expected future value of Bitcoin. If I expect the value of Bitcoin to double in the next year, I will not engage in any investment that produces less than a 100% return over the next year. It makes more sense to hold onto the Bitcoin. You can partially get around that by making the Bitcoin economy completely closed, but even then, it only works in some long-run equilibrium that you'll never hit.
An endlessly inflated fiat currency has the opposite effect: it encourages malinvestment in unproductive economic activity (also known as "bubbles" - e.g., internet stocks and real estate), punishing savers and rewarding debtors.
Both of these claims cannot simultaneously be true. You just said that both increases and decreases in the value of the currency increase the pool of funds available for investment and that one is good and the other is bad because they produce the same result. The problem here is that people reason backward from prices, which is wrong. Prices are set by supply and demand, not the other way around. So increasing the quantity of money decreases its price. Decreasing the expected future value of currency decreases the opportunity cost of investment and increases the pool of money available for investment. Deflation works in exactly the opposite way.
Also, please stop using your own personal definition for the word "inflation." Yes, it used to have another meaning back at the dawn of monetary economics, but that's not the way it's generally used now. The word "nice" used to mean somthing along the lines of "stupid" or "simple" but we don't have people jumping up and down in Slashdot forums trying to turn the clock back on that one. It just causes confusion, especially in a technical discussion.
We rented the low-end 500 on a trip last year. Such bad visibility that it has convex mirrors like an RV. Lousy acceleration (the higher end models are likely spunkier, but still, this car weighs nothing). Bizarre layout for all of the instruments. It was like driving a little tiny garbage truck.
Yes, prohibition caused a lot of extra crime associated with the black market. But you know what? Most people managed to get through prohibition without murdering people. Sure, the people who didn't were responding rationally to financial incentives, but they were also awful, awful people who murdered folks over money.
The current policy is discouraging the accumulation of savings while encouraging the assumption of ever increasing debt loads at all levels of society: individual, corporate, and governmental.
The current policy is discouraging the accumulation of savings accounts (and cash in your matress) and encouraging savers to put their money to more productive use. That's a good thing when the economy is performing below its potential. Thought experiment: if savings accounts started paying 20% tomorrow, what would happen to investment in productive activities?
What prevents you from simply borrowing them and selling them? That seems like an operation that should be completely doable with any good that is traded as freely as bitcoin.
So you "invest" it in the stock market. But with the relatively rare exception of an IPO (a few per day, mostly small) or buyback plan, most money placed into the stock market just sits there, never to be used by any company for capital investments.
Money doesn't go "into" the stock market. It goes through the stock market and ends up in the hands of whomever you bought the shares from. That's a critical distinction that causes serious trouble for your theory.
OK, so I'm going to feed the troll here and do a few seconds of heavy lifting:
According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, the adjusted per-capita victimization rate of rape has declined from about 2.4 per 1000 people (age 12 and above) in 1980 (that is, 2.4 persons from each 1000 people 12 and older were raped during that year) to about 0.4 per 1000 people, a decline of about 85%.
So what am I missing, aside from the fact that I might be a big fat stupid head?
Slashdot Mirror
Really? So I assume that you either don't believe in a god or that the god you choose to believe in is a complete no-op. He doesn't do things like dump these things on you and expect you to obey, right? Or tell you to slaughter folks? In that case, I can certainly see being totally willing to ignore questions of actual existence and just assume. I mean, I couldn't care less about gods who don't have any effect on the real world.
But a lot of gods seem to want their followers to do stuff that they might not otherwise do. In a case like that, a good sanity check like, "Am I doing this in the name of Grand Cosmic Righteousness or because of voices in my head?" seems totally appropriate.
What's telling is that if it shifts them toward religion, it almost always steers them to the religion most generally accepted in the culture they grew up in. That's pretty strong evidence that it's still very much a "because somebody said this" phenomenon and not a revelation of some deep universal truth.
If God is telling me what to do and what not to do, the question of whether or not God exists seems pretty important.
Apparently you do, but only if you're in the religious voting majority.
"Little positive" for you and me maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the people who weren't able to get married would probably see something positive in it. I'm glad to see that over the years the goalposts have moved from, "Gay marriage will cause plagues of locusts and give us all Dutch elm disease," to, "Well, gay marriage won't cure cancer."
Would you favor abolishing marriage in general in order to save us all from the acrimony of divorce?
The rough definition of the "intrinsic value" of an item is the value you (a person) would place on it when "I can trade it for something else" is not part of the valuation process. It's not some physical constant, and it was never implied to be.
I did read the article. I'm not sure how the point "The Chinese have a lot more people than we do" is negated by pointing out that the phenomenon is really, "The Chinese + the populations of a bunch of other nations." That just makes the point even more true. We can become marginally more productive or more educated than we are, but we're never going to do so as fast as country of uneducated farmers sending their first generation of kids to newly-built engineering schools. The bottom line is that we're about 4.5% of the world's population (and falling) and we're producing 21% of the academic papers. There's simply no possible way for that to continue while the rest of the world develops. Assuming our percentage of the world's population stays the same (and it won't), I'd expect us to asymptotically approach 4.5% of the world's papers even with top notch academics.
I'm all for more R&D funding as a percentage of GDP, but again, "growth in R&D funding as a percentage of GDP" is a questionable metric to compare to developing nations. What percentage of South Korea's GDP was spent on R&D 50 years ago compared to ours? What is it now compared to ours? Should ours have grown at the same rate as theirs? Probably not.
The thing is, we should be losing ground by metrics like "absolute number of scientific papers produced." China has 4 times as many people as we do and is in the process of increasing the percentage of its population that gets advanced education and participates in the industrial economy. China surpassing the US in papers produced is inevitable. They'll do it as soon as they're 1/4th as academically productive per capita as we are. Or, stated differently, we would have to remain permanently 4x as productive as the Chinese to stay ahead forever. Not going to happen.
Yes and no. In a real banana republic situation, you can't get rid of your corrupt lawmakers even if they're doing thing that the majority absolutely hates. The corruption is so ingrained that elections are basically meaningless. In a functioning democracy, you get voted out if you're doing something offensive enough that the public notices and considers it bad enough to override whatever reasons they had for voting you in to begin with. As long as the corruption you engage in is esoteric or small scale enough that the public doesn't notice or care enough to remove you, you can get away with it in any democracy. Tweaking the auto sales distribution rules probably qualifies.
Because while it's expensive to buy US Senators and other high profile offices, it's pretty cheap to buy state legislators--well within the grasp of one of the district's wealthier entrepenurs. Like a guy who owns a major car dealership.
Yeah, we had that discussion in my HOA: Sure, the park is kept clean and the common gardens are well maintained, but do we have enough rape kits?
I'm just always a little weirded out when an HVAC contractor or a dental hygenist gets all furious that people in vocations like "acting" or "comic strips" have opinions about stuff. How dare they? I mean, it's not like modern democracy is based on the notion that everybody gets to voice opinions about how society functions, right? Especially the people who are personally and directly affected by the policy--I can't get over those douchebags wanting to bend my ear about their problems.
If they were politicians I certainly might care what they have to say. Lucky for us, those guys are selected from among the elite vocations that should be allowed a voice.
Since we're using a person's vocation to decide whether or not their opinion is valid, what do you do for a living?
Competent administration is incredibly important, but I'm not seeing the connection. I don't remember anything about Groves being an MBA or studying business. He was a career military officer who spent his adult life running government engineering projects, which is pretty much exactly what you'd want in a manager who runs huge government engineering projects.
I think we all realize that MBA programs purport to teach students how to manage these types of projects. We're just qestioning whether they actually do so. I'd say that understanding basic accounting and finance are really important, but how much of the remainder of the management process is really a "science" that can be be made systematic and taught well in a classroom?
Yeah, this shouldn't really be an Earth-shattering surprise. In fact, I've always thought that the DOD interest in directed energy weapons was specifically for shooting down cheap flimsy things like drones. Even countries with tiny military budgets could build large fleets of drones that we would have a hard time shooting down with conventional missiles. I just figured that HERF weapons and the like were the simplest solution to swatting a lot of lightweight threats in a reliable cost-effective way.
which is just flatly, empiricially not true. It's also not true in any basic economic model. It's also not the same as saying that altering interest rates shifts investment back and forth between capital goods and consumption goods independent of the absolute amount of investment, which sounds more along the lines of what you're getting at.
I've ready my Rothbard and Mises. I've also read the standard basic econ textbooks. But here's a question: Have you read anything but the Austrian version of economics? Because discussing economics with somebody who has only read Rothbard and Mises is a lot like discussing economics with somebody who has only read Marx. They don't realize that their models and terminology aren't the only ones and, in fact, aren't really used by anybody else, and they get upset when nobody agrees with them. They can talk for hours about the things in their own little models and how the mainstream people are crazy, but they usually can't explain the mainstream position to save their lives.
So let's take the Bitcoin situation. Let's say that because new people are adopting Bitcoin constantly, the price of Bitcoin is climbing--say 25% per year. Let's say you have 100 BTC. At what rate would you be willing to loan me that 100 BTC to finance my investment project? Second, what must the rate of return on my investment project be to justify borrowing the Bitcoin at that rate? What useful signal is the climbing price of Bitcoin sending to would-be builders of productive investments?
This is one of the weirder arguments I've heard. The summary is, "All fiat currency regimes have failed. Except the ones that haven't. Therefore, the ones that haven't failed will fail."
It rewards hoarders of the medium of exchange, that's true. But that's not really a good thing, and hoarding the medium of exchange doensn't make more funds available for investment. The quantity of Bitcoin is not a function of its price. Further, the supply of loanable/investable Bitcoin is partially a (negative) function of the expected future value of Bitcoin. If I expect the value of Bitcoin to double in the next year, I will not engage in any investment that produces less than a 100% return over the next year. It makes more sense to hold onto the Bitcoin. You can partially get around that by making the Bitcoin economy completely closed, but even then, it only works in some long-run equilibrium that you'll never hit.
Both of these claims cannot simultaneously be true. You just said that both increases and decreases in the value of the currency increase the pool of funds available for investment and that one is good and the other is bad because they produce the same result. The problem here is that people reason backward from prices, which is wrong. Prices are set by supply and demand, not the other way around. So increasing the quantity of money decreases its price. Decreasing the expected future value of currency decreases the opportunity cost of investment and increases the pool of money available for investment. Deflation works in exactly the opposite way.
Also, please stop using your own personal definition for the word "inflation." Yes, it used to have another meaning back at the dawn of monetary economics, but that's not the way it's generally used now. The word "nice" used to mean somthing along the lines of "stupid" or "simple" but we don't have people jumping up and down in Slashdot forums trying to turn the clock back on that one. It just causes confusion, especially in a technical discussion.
We rented the low-end 500 on a trip last year. Such bad visibility that it has convex mirrors like an RV. Lousy acceleration (the higher end models are likely spunkier, but still, this car weighs nothing). Bizarre layout for all of the instruments. It was like driving a little tiny garbage truck.
Yes, prohibition caused a lot of extra crime associated with the black market. But you know what? Most people managed to get through prohibition without murdering people. Sure, the people who didn't were responding rationally to financial incentives, but they were also awful, awful people who murdered folks over money.
The current policy is discouraging the accumulation of savings accounts (and cash in your matress) and encouraging savers to put their money to more productive use. That's a good thing when the economy is performing below its potential. Thought experiment: if savings accounts started paying 20% tomorrow, what would happen to investment in productive activities?
What prevents you from simply borrowing them and selling them? That seems like an operation that should be completely doable with any good that is traded as freely as bitcoin.
Money doesn't go "into" the stock market. It goes through the stock market and ends up in the hands of whomever you bought the shares from. That's a critical distinction that causes serious trouble for your theory.
In fact, they'd have no choice but to replace him with Janet Yellen in the interim. She's the Vice Chair, so she takes over in his absence anyway.
So what am I missing, aside from the fact that I might be a big fat stupid head?