Thanks. So far, you're the second person to comment on it. I have to admit that I didn't come up with it, and I don't remember who did. I just though it was incredibly funny at the time. It's./ appropriate, anyway.
But that's the point, that you don't NEED very many of them for it to happen. You only need... about 19 of them to knock down some buildings actually.
And had it been only those 19, this whole thing would be over. Had it been only those 19 plus a few more running the operations, the remainder would have been turned over to us and would be rotting in jail and the whole mess would be over. The fact that it was those 19 plus thousands of people who are pissed off enough at us that they've dropped whatever they're doing to support these nut cases is a direct result of our extraordinary unpopularity in some areas.
The point is that you can't make policy like that. There is NO policy that won't make somebody, somewhere want to come and cause violence. It's how large a threat they have the potential or have PROVEN themselves to be versus the resources needed to defend against them. And of course, try not to deliberately antagonize either when you don't have to, but regardless, I repeat that there is NO policy that won't piss somebody, somewhere, off enough to want to cause harm.
There's no reason to make policies to keep the crazy people happy. You just have to make policies that keep the crazy people in an obvious minority so they're easily policed and neutralized. Domestic terrorists in the US, while they do occasionally succeed (see Oklahoma City), don't typically get very far because their friends and neighbors think they're fucking nuts. They don't say, "You have a legitimate grievance and the American government deserves what it gets when you blow up their buildings. I will look the other way or provide financial or material support in your efforts." They say, "You want to do WHAT?!?!?" and call the police. If the same thing held true in the regions these terrorist groups operated in, we'd be in much better shape.
Basically, do reasonable things to keep reasonable people happy, and that fixes 99% of your problems with the unreasonable ones. The other 1% can be left to law enforcement and the military with the blessing of the reasonable people.
Then I guess I didn't get it right and I'll spend the rest of eternity in Hell along with you everyone else who didn't get it right.:)
Which is why the most rational decision is to worship the meanest, nastiest, most spiteful god out there. Hedge your bets. You don't want to be on his bad side if he turns out to exist.
If God came up with a good design for the great apes, why not reuse His own material when creating humans? When I write code, I frequently dig back into old projects and copy&paste stuff I'd written before.
So why does He sometimes glue them together for no apparent reason? Why should non-coding DNA be common? Further, why should non-coding DNA between common pieces of DNA overlap less and less as our apparent relationship to an organism decreases? I can't think of an analogous code cut-and-paste behavior for the latter.
Try telling that to Einstein. Einstein turned Newtonian physics, including universal gravitation, on its head.
It wasn't "doubting gravity" that made useful predictions. That was replacing it with a different theoretical framework that made useful predictions. That's something the ID camp has repeatedly failed to do. They're still in the stage of just doubting. It's a fine starting point, but their work needs to grow up a bit before it even steps into the realm of useful theory.
Should we immediately disregard something that may be true, just because it does not meet our testability criteria?
No, certainly not. We just can't call it a useful scientific theory at that point in its development, and as such, it's really not a subject that we should bother covering in science class.
With this being said, I do believe that intelligent design is at least somewhat testable. To test it, we simply need to disallow the cop-out arguments of the "God put evolutionary evidence there to test us" nature.
I agree with you. The problem is that the vast majority of ID supporters are simply religious people who like the way ID validates their beliefs rather than people who are interested in setting up a real test to see where the evidence leads them. The major people behind ID are simply PR organizations that are pushing it as a re-branding of creationism. I strongly suspect that's why nobody, not even the vaunted Dembski or Behe, have bothered coming up with and testing a testable claim. Until they do that, it's all philosophical hand waving.
There is plenty taught in schools that is no more falsifiable than intelligent design. One example is naturalism. When evolution is taught in schools, it is almost always taught from a naturalistic standpoint.
Hold that thought for a moment. ALL of science is taught from a naturalistic standpoint. Why not complain that physics is also taught from a naturalistic standpoint? The orbits of the planets could be gravity, or they could be gravity + intelligent agency. If I suggested that, people would point and laugh. Why should biology be different?
That is, the first life is taught to have arisen through exclusively natural phenomena. Is this a falsifiable claim? Since life must have begun through either supernatural (intelligent design) or natural means (it must be one or the other), the only way to falsify this claim is to prove that life begun supernaturally.
You've had your hand slapped for conflating evolutionary theory with abiogenesis elsewhere in this thread, so I won't bother doing it again. In my experience, the subject you're bringing up is typically only given a few minutes' time and the answer amounts to "we don't know yet, but here are some thoughts." Again, we could apply the same standard to physics. "We know that electrons behave this way. We don't know why. Some physicists theorize X, and some people think that God likes them to behave that way."
You also might consider the work on irreducible complexity by Behe.
Hasn't IC already been thoroughly roasted to death? Behe has never answered the point that one need not always *add* pieces to get to an IC system. He also doesn't appear to have done any useful work in the area, and every potentially IC system he has come up with has a number of theoretically possible pathways that he simply dismisses because they upset him. Sadly for ID, Behe is about the best they've got.
I think we should teach intelligent design right along side it, because like it or not, it is a feasible explanation for life (and in my opinion, it is the only feasible explanation).
As long as they allow the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his Noodly Glory as well.
Why is it not possible to study science without evolution?
Why should we have to study science without any of its important theories simply because some people are offended by it? It's possible to study physics without relativity or quantum mechanics. It's possible to study chemistry and skip over oxidation and reduction. We can study US history and slice out 1895-1902 if somebody's deity so commands. The question is, why should we when that knowledge is available and worth studying?
Well, to paraphrase something from the talk.origins newsgroup, if you showed a creationist a mutation that gave wings to a flightless animal, they'd categorize it as "loss of the inability to fly."
We all knew it was a pigs tooth even though the discovery was famous enough to still be around.
Can you name any biologist in the past couple of generations who has used Nebraska man as an actual example of a prehistoric ape? This is old news, and it hardly invalidates the numerous other interesting hominids that have been unearthed.
One mistake doesn't invalidate an entire body of work. If you believe otherwise, you may want to take a look at Carl Baugh's "Glen Rose Man" which was used to validate the creationists' Paluxy river nonsense. It was a fish tooth. And this was recent. What conclusions can you draw about the creation "research" program from that?
No it doesn't. The DNA evidence is where we see that Humans and Pigs share a lot of DNA and the Fossil "evidence" is the weakest part of Evolution's attempt to explain origin (which was never part of the original theory).
The genetic evidence is fascinating if you choose to look at it. We do share quite a bit of DNA with pigs, but that's to be expected. We're omnivorous mammals with a lot of other things in common with pigs. We share more DNA with apes. Now, it's not particularly surprising to either modern biologists or creationists that we share DNA for similar traits as it's obvious cause and effect. What's surprising is that we share DNA that doesn't code for traits that we share. We share lots of non-coding DNA with apes, less of it with pigs, even less of it with bananas, etc. Creationists offer no explanation of this except that God wanted it that way, whereas when viewed in the framework of evolutionary theory, it creates an amazing nested hierarchy that was predicted well before we knew anything about DNA.
Of course, you've made the opposite assertion with no reasoning to back it up, so you must be well schooled in the topic and correct by fiat. I assume that by scare quoting "evidence" with respect to fossils that you've also examined quite a few fossils and found all of modern biology to be in error. Kudos.
Nobody argues that mutation doesn't take place or that one might be beneficial.
I see that argument made all the time in these very forums.
One does have trouble imagining how organs like the eye developed through mutation.
There's actually quite a bit of literature on it. Darwin himself discussed it a century and a half ago. Just because it strains the credulity of somebody who is not well versed in the theory doesn't mean it's wrong.
Even scientists who promote Evolution don't agree that we came from monkeys. Some think we came from pigs, some thing we came from primordial ooze through another mammal.
Errr... you (or somebody else) totally fabricated that. It's simply not true. I'll be simply amazed if you can find any mainstream biologist who proposes that humans came from something other than an ape-like common ancestor to modern apes. Pigs? WTF?
It's not the premise of Evolution that poses a problem. It's that one specific take on it dominates High School science classes and is taught as though concensus exists on it even though it does not. You'll never find HS Science teaching anything other then we evolved from some primate.
That's true for the same reason that we don't teach high school students that light travels through the aether or that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a sharp decline in the number of PEZ factories. It's not part of (or even debated in) modern theory.
People do have a problem with Evolution trying to take on speciation though. We may have parts in common with various animals but that doesn't imply we evolved from them. Maybe they de-evolved from us. Or maybe species started out very similar to what they are now and only changed a little over all that time.
The genetic and fossil evidence strongly recommends the current interpretation over the ones you've suggested.
Maybe I'm living under a rock here, but I've never really seen evolution demonstrated. I've heard plenty of explanations and leaps of logic attached to it, but I've never actually seen anything evolve.
Try a lab demonstration in creating an antibiotic resistant population of bacteria.
What I don't understand is how the evolutionists, who are supposed to be the more objective and open minded of the two groups, can be so "holier than thou" as to suggest that the creationists' theory doesn't even deserve a place.
They deserve a place in the arena of intellectual debate, and they're more than welcome to submit their work for review. What they don't deserve is a place in the classroom, which is where children go to learn established theory and methodology. We can, for example, debate whether smoking crack is a good thing. As adults, we can engage in a data driven conversation about it and express our opinions. Nobody stops that. You'll find, however, that the established conclusion that smoking crack is bad for you and that people who disagree tend to be crack heads is what we teach in health class. At least, until somebody can come up with a compelling argument otherwise.
It's no wonder that creationists lash back with ill-conceived regulations prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution - this is really just balance when you look at how much flack the "intelligent design" group has been getting recently.
People have been trying to prohibit the teaching of evolution since long before the "intelligent design" movement appeared. ID is simply a way of dressing up creationism to get it into schools to work toward the end of discrediting evolution. Nothing has changed over the past few generations on that front. The creationists have just been defeated so many times that they have to try to be clever about it.
Science shouldn't worry so damn much about what people think, it should be about the truth, finding it and offering it, not making people believe it.
Scientists don't worry about what people think nearly as much as they do about what is being taught as good science in classrooms.
Somebody gets the new money FIRST. That's a huge advantage; that advantage comes at the expense of unknowing others.
Who, specifically, and how? I'm trying to get you to answer this for a very good reason. Your analysis is flawed. When I asked you how the Fed tweaks interest rates and the money supply, that's why I asked. You're jumping to a very strange conclusion based on what is, as far as I can see, only a vague understanding of the actual flows of money in these operations.
The Fed manipulates interest rates as well, and this is another area of "macroeconomics" rife with fundamental errors. Ceteris paribus, the Fed can artificially lower the interest rate but that *only* results in a shortage of savings.
Please *show your work* when you make assertions like this. Asserting your conclusion forcefully doesn't usually work, especially when you're talking monetary economics.
But MORONS believe this can "increase investment". They're too stupid to realize that money is just another good, and just a piece of paper good with no physically productive capacity in a world of real scarcity.
This is where things get sticky, depending on which school you think best describes it. You're right that no matter which way you slice it, tweaking the money supply causes short run behaviors that aren't entirely rational. This is one reason why I'm not a big fan of monetary policy as an economic stimulus. This is true because of another thing that we all probably agree on: In the long run, the Fed can only change nominal variables. The question is why these things work. I don't really buy into the Austrian interpretation as you seem to, but the reality is that tweaking nominal interest rates does cause a measurable difference in investment. Thought experiments don't change that.
No, actually it's very simple: inflation is purely Quantity of Money at Time2 > Quantity of Money at Time 1. The Fed now refuses to publish this basic M3 data because the inflation is MASSIVE.
Holy crap, are you serious? If you measure it that way, exactly what useful information does it provide? Anything about purchasing power? Cost of living? Standard of living? Anything at all? Money's value is tied directly into the quantity of goods and services available for purchase with that money. The quantity of money is meaningless without that value taken into account. It's like using number of stock shares in a company to determine its market capitalization without asking what the share price is.
And it should be and is, in spite of the obstacles which only inefficiently hinder the inevitable pull towards real prices, subject to the exact same supply and demand signals as all goods and services. Yet the slightly inflated wages mask what should be massively lower costs for all other goods and services which have been looted by the bankers siphoning off the lion's share of increased productivity to their own elite private pockets.
Think of it this way: What can the average person buy with an hour of work now, and what could the average person buy with an hour of work 20 years ago? That's the number you should be worried about. Whether you divide that hour of work up into twenty $1 pieces or forty $1 pieces, the real question is purchasing power. Complaining about the change in nominal prices is like complaining that the 14" pizza you bought has 12 slices and you wanted 20 slices. It doesn't matter. It's the same amount of pizza.
M3 credit actually *DWARFS* the rest of the money supply (even before the Fed stopped printing the number).
That's because M3 includes M2 (which includes M1 which includes M0) by definition. Looking at it a different way, you'll find that M3-M2
It emanates purely from government enforced contract, the promises be viol
That's *exactly* what they are doing, though the jets tend to be military grade. Ain't no "rhetoric" buddy.
You're missing a very important factor. The people who buy the goods and the services are different from the people who decide whether or not to expand the money supply. If they weren't, then we'd have a problem, but they are. Your problem seems to be with deficit spending rather than fiat money.
It's pure and simple observation. If you xerox some hundred dollar bills and get away with xeroxing those hundred dollar bills, you are devaluing everybody else's monetary holdings.
That's certainly true. You're acting like that's a surprise.
They who get the newly created money first benefit the most (at the irrefutable expense of the rest of society) as they purchase goods and services with those newly created dollars before the prices adjust through the market; that means both the bankers and the government are profiting by screwing over others (and washing away the debts incurred by the welfare state through massive inflation).
I had to read that a couple of times to figure out what you meant. Let's talk about how this money gets into the economy for a moment. Let's say the Fed wants to do something expansionary, so it decides to lower the Fedral Funds Rate. Can you explain how that happens and where the money goes?
You don't know what you are talking about. You've adopted false "monetary theory" with assumes equation of value between goods and money, when all trade whatsoever only occurs because that which is received is valued MORE than that which is given away in exchange, including the exchange of money for other goods or services. It's irrefutable. And that recognition of the epistemological reason for the occurrence of trade deflates the entire "subject" of "macroeconomics".
I really don't see how your observation of when trade occurs invalidates macroeconomic theory. Perhaps I took too many macro courses and got brainwashed, but I'm starting to suspect that you think that macroeconomics is what random crackpots on the Internet say is.
The difference is between natural market occurrences and politically violently manipulated occurrences. People are very used to "jarring deflation" of the value of electronics, automobiles, etc. over time.
You chose some interesting examples for deflation. Yes, those goods experience price deflation. How about some goods that don't? Like wages? Deflation seems great at first glance until you realize that your salary is a price just like everything else.
Don't be so naive in assuming the Fed operates benevolently; there meetings are held in secret, they fail to publish the full data, the politically manipulate the baskets which measure inflation. It's a criminal scam which loots the productive value created by society plain and simple.
How would you suggest that we measure inflation? It's a problem economists have because it's really hard. It's not just the government that changes baskets of goods and has multiple methodologies. If they really wanted to rig the deflation figures, wouldn't it be easier to choose lots goods like the ones you pointed out: goods whose values deflate over time and skew the basket?
Artificially limited by threats of violence. By definition a built in mother load bubble into the economy at the inception of fiat money. Any other demonstrations?
Lots of things are artificially limited by threats of violence. Private property is protected by threats of violence. That doesn't make it "wrong" or an unnatural distortion of the economy. As for the bubble theory, you don't particularly like fiat money, but you seem to love fiat arguments. I don't know what to say to that, really.
I was thinking about that 40k to 200k analysis earlier today, and it really depending on spending habits. From the looks of the graph, it appears as though the rich were simply buying more cd's and movies then the 40k to 200k bracket not mansions or yachts. Therefore, I don't completely agree with the articles predicted outcome.
Well, the question is whether they buy those things on an annual basis or not. I suspect that all but the wealthiest people do not, so you'd be seeing that increased consumption averaged over the years between purchases. In any case, I think that you'll find that the marginal propensity to consume is lower as income increases in general. It comes pretty much directly from the diminishing marginal utility of money. For a person making $400K per year to consistently spend the same percentage of his income that a person making $40K per year, he would have to be quite a consumer. Sure, there are cases of this type of behavior, but I would guess that they're outliers.
You are someone with a yearly income of a million. You pay your 40% tax, but then put most of that in other currency's and as such most of your interest earned is then outside of the country and not taxed as heavily as it would be in America. Because most of their savings are now not in the dollar, the dollar is not as valuable as it could be. Thus, the rest of us are unable to buy as much with the dollar because you have several wealthy Americans with the majority of their money in other currencies.
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I suspect that the incentive toward foreign investment isn't driven mainly by tax policy. More importantly, I'll venture to guess that the value of the dollar has just as much to do with foreign investment in the US as the other way around.
Now under the Fair Tax, they'd have an incentive to keep their money in the form of the American Dollar keeping the value of the dollar higher (perhaps only modestly more then it is now, but every bit helps).
I suppose one might say it takes away the incentive for foreign investments. I'm not sure about the tax benefits, though. As far as I know, you'll be paying capital gains tax whether it's in the US or outside the US. Maybe I'm mistaken?
In either case, the Fair Tax hasn't really had it's ground laid out completely so I'm sure there is room to change, but the longer we keep the current tax system, the longer more laws are created that allow politicians and their rich friends loopholes for paying taxes anyway.
Well, I can't say I'm a fan of the current tax system. It needs to be drastically simplified. At this point, I'm pretty well convinced that the Fair Tax would distort our system in unhealthy ways, but I'm certainly not against a huge overhaul. Our economy has a huge dead weight loss associated with paying taxes. Very few Americans even know whether they're doing it correctly or not. The fact that there's a multi-billion dollar industry associated with helping people to fill out forms that they're legally obligated to fill out should tell us that we need to reformat and start again. A straight progressive income tax on all income without exception (with some reasonable personal deductions for the basic costs of living) would probably be just as effective without the nasty side effects.
Protons do not move. Hydrogen ions can move through liquids or gases, but this guy's device looks like a solid.
To echo the GP's response, the fuel cell designers who use polymer electrolyte membranes would be surprised to hear that. I think the problem is not that the designer doesn't understand high school chemistry, but rather the fact that you're attempting to apply theoretical high school chemistry to disprove observed facts.
I really don't see anything on his web site that indicates that he misunderstands either chemistry or thermodynamics the way you seem to think he does. Yes, the article that pointed to his stuff is the typical popular science media crap, but we're talking about a person with some pretty solid credentials in the relevant field and a history of good engineering work. I know that energy conversion is one area where it pays to be skeptical, but I don't think that your instincts are serving you well here, since the claims aren't all that outrageous and the design doesn't appear to be based on any form of quackery.
I'd be far more skeptical if I could find real problems with the overview and if the project wasn't being run by somebody who has an honest to god, verifiable background in energy conversion and thermodynamics.
It feels as though the article is not calculating for the expensive toys the rich buy. Flights into on Spaceone at 100k a pop, those that spend $5 million on a new mansion, or those that just have to have a yacht. The 23% or 30% will actually hit the rich hard although in reality, those who let money burn their pockets and feel like they have to spend every penny will probably end up with less material goods in the end.
This is key. The rich will still pay "more" taxes than the poor, but because consumption is a much lower percentage of their income, they'll be paying a lower percentage of their income in taxes.
As the article did note, those making between 40k and 200k would most likely hardest hit with the taxes.
Which is essentially everybody in the middle on up to the moderately well off (assuming that these figures are household figures and not individual figures). Seriously. Most normal working households in the US fall into that range. The people in the lower range are helped just as much by a progressive income tax situation. The households making more than $200K really don't need that much help. A tax plan designed to help the two tails of the distribution is not a very clever one.
On that same note, however, the article also doesn't explain the statistics it used for this analysis and I wonder if it looked at the spending patterns after the fair tax was implemented. I'm sure there are somethings you wouldn't purchase if you knew there was a 23% or 30% tax on it.
Unfortunately, that amounts to saying, "You won't be poorer. You'll just be able to afford less stuff."
Eliminate the FED: What's so special about a cartel of banks with a monopoly to print money? Couldn't the US Treasury do this just as well, without the extra percent or two of profit the reserve banks put in their pocket? We would still have a fiat currency, just without secret manipulations that cause bubbles and credit crunches. Seems like a pretty reasonable solution to me.
You'd be handing the ability to create money over to the same people who balance the budget. That doesn't work. Never has. The Fed's job is to maintain stability by responding to fluctuations in demand for money and credit. It has no incentive to cause runaway inflation. Putting it under the direct control of the Treasury would introduce that incentive.
Gold/Commodity backed currency: First, Ron isn't proposing we replace our fait currency or even that we tie it to gold like we did before 1971. All he wants is to allow hard money as an alternative currency. The key difference here is this; if I buy gold today for $100 and the dollar inflates 10% tomorrow my gold is now worth $110. Therefore, I would owe taxes on $10 because holding gold is considered an investment. This is the only thing preventing people from using gold certificates as currency today.
That's certainly an interesting idea. If you're into alternative currencies and currency speculation, why not just use whatever currency is out there? I could negotiate my pay in Euros or yuan. There are plenty of currencies out there competing with the dollar.
It would even be reasonable to negotiate your salary in whatever currency you prefer. Can you imagine having your paycheck deposited as x grams of gold? That alone would improve dollar stability as people would constantly be moving money back and forth; $75 for the water bill, 2.6gg (gold grams) for the car payment, etc.
Again, an interesting idea to kick around from a theory perspective, but I simply don't see it as a panacea the way Paul supporters do. It would rein in inflation the same way returning to a system where we barter would. I'm not sure that's a fantastic thing, though, because it brings with it all of the inconveniences that come with dealing with multiple prices and weird exchange rates.
It's artificially manipulated by political and elite private (Federal Reserve Banking System) interests at the expense of the rest of society.
So how, exactly, do you suggest that the Fed is manipulating things for its own interests and hurting the rest of society in the process? People who write stuff like this inevitably use rhetoric that implies that the people at the Fed are a bunch of evil bankers printing money and using it to pay for private jets and passing the expense on to everybody else.
The rest of "monetary theory" is just hocus-pocus bogus incorrect economic proclamations providing fodder for academics to have "macroeconomics" course material to be paid for "teaching".
That's right! Down with economic theory! Up with crackpottery and armchair voodoo economics!
Your statement about a "wet blanket of deflation causing everybody to suffer" is absurd.
In a world where credit and investment exist, your statement is far more absurd. It never ceases to amaze me that people scream bloody murder over predictable, stable inflation but think that jarring deflation would be wonderful thing.
"Money" itself is not immune to changing subjective value demand independent of its supply.
That's the whole point of this exercise. If you think that people who support fiat money believe something else, you're out in the weeds on this debate.
But why should the government be able to counterfeit the money supply whilst simultaneously prohibiting all others from doing the same?
Because the whole concept of "limited supply" goes out the window. Any other questions?
Instituting fiat money into the economy only by definition builds a mother load bubble into the economy from its inception.
How, exactly, is that the case? I know you're anti-macroeconomics here, so we may have a hard time finding a common language for a thought experiment, but I'm really interested in why you believe this to be true.
It's as if you didn't know that Ben Bernanke stated that the FED caused the Great Depression. But you probably don't care to read actual information.
The Fed of the Great Depression is a far cry from the Fed of today. There's nearly 100 years of economic theory and data between them.
What's interesting is that the FED stopped publishing money supply information beyond currency and small time deposits, so it's no longer possible to calculate actual inflation.
The Fed stopped publishing M3 statistics because they're not particularly useful for deciding on monetary policy. I would be interested in how you define "actual" inflation and how you'd calculate it if somebody were to hand you the missing data.
Now, if the money supply was bound to something tangible (like gold), it wouldn't be possible to manipulate the available currency in circulation.
That's a mixed bag, though. Your money supply grows with gold your ability to dig up gold and the number of goods an services available in your economy fluctuate with economic growth and contraction. There's no reason to think that will result in a stable currency. You'll hit deflation on a regular basis (given how much people bitch about inflation, I don't think you'd want to hear their complaints about deflation) and uncertainty about long term credit would increase. Basically, we've been there before, and I don't see a really compelling reason to think that it's worlds better.
I am not arguing for total lack of government, just a government that stays out of things better left to the free market.
I think that essentially everybody thinks that government should stay out of things that are better left to the free market. They just disagree on which things are better left to the free market. There's no objective fact or consensus on that front.
Take any econ 101 course and you will see taxes only take away from economic prosperity.
I must have missed that in 101. I think you'd have a hard time finding a serious public policy economist who would make such a statement.
Ohh yeah, a guy that can hook up an air pump to a water reservoir, he's WELL QUALIFIED to beat the laws of thermodynamics.
Errr... the guy has degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering and has worked for ORNL and JPL. In fact, some of his work has been in cooling systems. My guess is that he has a better handle on the laws of thermodynamics than most people.
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Thanks. So far, you're the second person to comment on it. I have to admit that I didn't come up with it, and I don't remember who did. I just though it was incredibly funny at the time. It's ./ appropriate, anyway.
There's no reason to make policies to keep the crazy people happy. You just have to make policies that keep the crazy people in an obvious minority so they're easily policed and neutralized. Domestic terrorists in the US, while they do occasionally succeed (see Oklahoma City), don't typically get very far because their friends and neighbors think they're fucking nuts. They don't say, "You have a legitimate grievance and the American government deserves what it gets when you blow up their buildings. I will look the other way or provide financial or material support in your efforts." They say, "You want to do WHAT?!?!?" and call the police. If the same thing held true in the regions these terrorist groups operated in, we'd be in much better shape.
Basically, do reasonable things to keep reasonable people happy, and that fixes 99% of your problems with the unreasonable ones. The other 1% can be left to law enforcement and the military with the blessing of the reasonable people.
Sounds like a pretty useful bridge. Why, then, aren't the locals at all interested in paying for a reasonable part of it themselves?
No, certainly not. We just can't call it a useful scientific theory at that point in its development, and as such, it's really not a subject that we should bother covering in science class.
I agree with you. The problem is that the vast majority of ID supporters are simply religious people who like the way ID validates their beliefs rather than people who are interested in setting up a real test to see where the evidence leads them. The major people behind ID are simply PR organizations that are pushing it as a re-branding of creationism. I strongly suspect that's why nobody, not even the vaunted Dembski or Behe, have bothered coming up with and testing a testable claim. Until they do that, it's all philosophical hand waving.
Hold that thought for a moment. ALL of science is taught from a naturalistic standpoint. Why not complain that physics is also taught from a naturalistic standpoint? The orbits of the planets could be gravity, or they could be gravity + intelligent agency. If I suggested that, people would point and laugh. Why should biology be different?
You've had your hand slapped for conflating evolutionary theory with abiogenesis elsewhere in this thread, so I won't bother doing it again. In my experience, the subject you're bringing up is typically only given a few minutes' time and the answer amounts to "we don't know yet, but here are some thoughts." Again, we could apply the same standard to physics. "We know that electrons behave this way. We don't know why. Some physicists theorize X, and some people think that God likes them to behave that way."
Hasn't IC already been thoroughly roasted to death? Behe has never answered the point that one need not always *add* pieces to get to an IC system. He also doesn't appear to have done any useful work in the area, and every potentially IC system he has come up with has a number of theoretically possible pathways that he simply dismisses because they upset him. Sadly for ID, Behe is about the best they've got.
As long as they allow the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his Noodly Glory as well.
Well, to paraphrase something from the talk.origins newsgroup, if you showed a creationist a mutation that gave wings to a flightless animal, they'd categorize it as "loss of the inability to fly."
One mistake doesn't invalidate an entire body of work. If you believe otherwise, you may want to take a look at Carl Baugh's "Glen Rose Man" which was used to validate the creationists' Paluxy river nonsense. It was a fish tooth. And this was recent. What conclusions can you draw about the creation "research" program from that?
Of course, you've made the opposite assertion with no reasoning to back it up, so you must be well schooled in the topic and correct by fiat. I assume that by scare quoting "evidence" with respect to fossils that you've also examined quite a few fossils and found all of modern biology to be in error. Kudos.
There's actually quite a bit of literature on it. Darwin himself discussed it a century and a half ago. Just because it strains the credulity of somebody who is not well versed in the theory doesn't mean it's wrong.
Errr... you (or somebody else) totally fabricated that. It's simply not true. I'll be simply amazed if you can find any mainstream biologist who proposes that humans came from something other than an ape-like common ancestor to modern apes. Pigs? WTF?
That's true for the same reason that we don't teach high school students that light travels through the aether or that the dinosaurs went extinct because of a sharp decline in the number of PEZ factories. It's not part of (or even debated in) modern theory.
The genetic and fossil evidence strongly recommends the current interpretation over the ones you've suggested.
They deserve a place in the arena of intellectual debate, and they're more than welcome to submit their work for review. What they don't deserve is a place in the classroom, which is where children go to learn established theory and methodology. We can, for example, debate whether smoking crack is a good thing. As adults, we can engage in a data driven conversation about it and express our opinions. Nobody stops that. You'll find, however, that the established conclusion that smoking crack is bad for you and that people who disagree tend to be crack heads is what we teach in health class. At least, until somebody can come up with a compelling argument otherwise.
People have been trying to prohibit the teaching of evolution since long before the "intelligent design" movement appeared. ID is simply a way of dressing up creationism to get it into schools to work toward the end of discrediting evolution. Nothing has changed over the past few generations on that front. The creationists have just been defeated so many times that they have to try to be clever about it.
Scientists don't worry about what people think nearly as much as they do about what is being taught as good science in classrooms.
Who, specifically, and how? I'm trying to get you to answer this for a very good reason. Your analysis is flawed. When I asked you how the Fed tweaks interest rates and the money supply, that's why I asked. You're jumping to a very strange conclusion based on what is, as far as I can see, only a vague understanding of the actual flows of money in these operations.
Please *show your work* when you make assertions like this. Asserting your conclusion forcefully doesn't usually work, especially when you're talking monetary economics.
This is where things get sticky, depending on which school you think best describes it. You're right that no matter which way you slice it, tweaking the money supply causes short run behaviors that aren't entirely rational. This is one reason why I'm not a big fan of monetary policy as an economic stimulus. This is true because of another thing that we all probably agree on: In the long run, the Fed can only change nominal variables. The question is why these things work. I don't really buy into the Austrian interpretation as you seem to, but the reality is that tweaking nominal interest rates does cause a measurable difference in investment. Thought experiments don't change that.
Holy crap, are you serious? If you measure it that way, exactly what useful information does it provide? Anything about purchasing power? Cost of living? Standard of living? Anything at all? Money's value is tied directly into the quantity of goods and services available for purchase with that money. The quantity of money is meaningless without that value taken into account. It's like using number of stock shares in a company to determine its market capitalization without asking what the share price is.
Think of it this way: What can the average person buy with an hour of work now, and what could the average person buy with an hour of work 20 years ago? That's the number you should be worried about. Whether you divide that hour of work up into twenty $1 pieces or forty $1 pieces, the real question is purchasing power. Complaining about the change in nominal prices is like complaining that the 14" pizza you bought has 12 slices and you wanted 20 slices. It doesn't matter. It's the same amount of pizza.
That's because M3 includes M2 (which includes M1 which includes M0) by definition. Looking at it a different way, you'll find that M3-M2
You're missing a very important factor. The people who buy the goods and the services are different from the people who decide whether or not to expand the money supply. If they weren't, then we'd have a problem, but they are. Your problem seems to be with deficit spending rather than fiat money.
That's certainly true. You're acting like that's a surprise.
I had to read that a couple of times to figure out what you meant. Let's talk about how this money gets into the economy for a moment. Let's say the Fed wants to do something expansionary, so it decides to lower the Fedral Funds Rate. Can you explain how that happens and where the money goes?
I really don't see how your observation of when trade occurs invalidates macroeconomic theory. Perhaps I took too many macro courses and got brainwashed, but I'm starting to suspect that you think that macroeconomics is what random crackpots on the Internet say is.
You chose some interesting examples for deflation. Yes, those goods experience price deflation. How about some goods that don't? Like wages? Deflation seems great at first glance until you realize that your salary is a price just like everything else.
How would you suggest that we measure inflation? It's a problem economists have because it's really hard. It's not just the government that changes baskets of goods and has multiple methodologies. If they really wanted to rig the deflation figures, wouldn't it be easier to choose lots goods like the ones you pointed out: goods whose values deflate over time and skew the basket?
Lots of things are artificially limited by threats of violence. Private property is protected by threats of violence. That doesn't make it "wrong" or an unnatural distortion of the economy. As for the bubble theory, you don't particularly like fiat money, but you seem to love fiat arguments. I don't know what to say to that, really.
I don't have any figures to back this up, but I suspect that the incentive toward foreign investment isn't driven mainly by tax policy. More importantly, I'll venture to guess that the value of the dollar has just as much to do with foreign investment in the US as the other way around.
I suppose one might say it takes away the incentive for foreign investments. I'm not sure about the tax benefits, though. As far as I know, you'll be paying capital gains tax whether it's in the US or outside the US. Maybe I'm mistaken?
Well, I can't say I'm a fan of the current tax system. It needs to be drastically simplified. At this point, I'm pretty well convinced that the Fair Tax would distort our system in unhealthy ways, but I'm certainly not against a huge overhaul. Our economy has a huge dead weight loss associated with paying taxes. Very few Americans even know whether they're doing it correctly or not. The fact that there's a multi-billion dollar industry associated with helping people to fill out forms that they're legally obligated to fill out should tell us that we need to reformat and start again. A straight progressive income tax on all income without exception (with some reasonable personal deductions for the basic costs of living) would probably be just as effective without the nasty side effects.
I really don't see anything on his web site that indicates that he misunderstands either chemistry or thermodynamics the way you seem to think he does. Yes, the article that pointed to his stuff is the typical popular science media crap, but we're talking about a person with some pretty solid credentials in the relevant field and a history of good engineering work. I know that energy conversion is one area where it pays to be skeptical, but I don't think that your instincts are serving you well here, since the claims aren't all that outrageous and the design doesn't appear to be based on any form of quackery.
I'd be far more skeptical if I could find real problems with the overview and if the project wasn't being run by somebody who has an honest to god, verifiable background in energy conversion and thermodynamics.
Which is essentially everybody in the middle on up to the moderately well off (assuming that these figures are household figures and not individual figures). Seriously. Most normal working households in the US fall into that range. The people in the lower range are helped just as much by a progressive income tax situation. The households making more than $200K really don't need that much help. A tax plan designed to help the two tails of the distribution is not a very clever one.
Unfortunately, that amounts to saying, "You won't be poorer. You'll just be able to afford less stuff."
That's certainly an interesting idea. If you're into alternative currencies and currency speculation, why not just use whatever currency is out there? I could negotiate my pay in Euros or yuan. There are plenty of currencies out there competing with the dollar.
Again, an interesting idea to kick around from a theory perspective, but I simply don't see it as a panacea the way Paul supporters do. It would rein in inflation the same way returning to a system where we barter would. I'm not sure that's a fantastic thing, though, because it brings with it all of the inconveniences that come with dealing with multiple prices and weird exchange rates.
That's right! Down with economic theory! Up with crackpottery and armchair voodoo economics!
In a world where credit and investment exist, your statement is far more absurd. It never ceases to amaze me that people scream bloody murder over predictable, stable inflation but think that jarring deflation would be wonderful thing.
That's the whole point of this exercise. If you think that people who support fiat money believe something else, you're out in the weeds on this debate.
Because the whole concept of "limited supply" goes out the window. Any other questions?
How, exactly, is that the case? I know you're anti-macroeconomics here, so we may have a hard time finding a common language for a thought experiment, but I'm really interested in why you believe this to be true.
The Fed stopped publishing M3 statistics because they're not particularly useful for deciding on monetary policy. I would be interested in how you define "actual" inflation and how you'd calculate it if somebody were to hand you the missing data.
That's a mixed bag, though. Your money supply grows with gold your ability to dig up gold and the number of goods an services available in your economy fluctuate with economic growth and contraction. There's no reason to think that will result in a stable currency. You'll hit deflation on a regular basis (given how much people bitch about inflation, I don't think you'd want to hear their complaints about deflation) and uncertainty about long term credit would increase. Basically, we've been there before, and I don't see a really compelling reason to think that it's worlds better.
I must have missed that in 101. I think you'd have a hard time finding a serious public policy economist who would make such a statement.