Also the housing crunch is what's prompting the fed to cut rates and try to inflate our way out of the crisis, which is the opposite of what they should be doing. If you're interested read Murray Rothbard's "What Has the Government Done to Our Money?". In several places I've seen it called the best book yet written explaining our monetary and banking system. I have to agree. It's short, free, and fascinating. If you google for the title and mp3 there's even a free audiobook version. It's pretty amazing.
You got me on the housing... I don't know what I was thinking. That was just a reflex on my part. I've been talking to people about a massive housing bubble for about 5 years now.
I would like to point out that if you adjust oil, or any other commodity for inflation then that kinda defeats the point of using it to measure inflation.:) I think there is certainly some speculation going on, as well as traditional supply and demand issues that has raised oil in relation to other commodities, but a large part of the increase in oil prices is the declining dollar. Other central banks are inflating like crazy to try to prop up the dollar, but the dollar is still dropping like a stone, so measured against commodities the dollar is falling even more precipitously than it is relative to other fiat currencies. This is scary. Once people start spending instead of saving or investing in anticipation of further devaluation, that's when it all comes apart. Inflation isn't only tied to the money supply. If a $100 bill gets spent twice a day, it has the same inflationary effect as two $100 bills that get spent once a day. When everyone tries to spend as fast as they can to get rid of the depreciating bank notes in favor of some commodity that will hold it's value, that's when run away inflation happens even the FED stopped creating new money altogether, which of course it wouldn't.
Too bad inflation is at 18%, as measured by the increase in the money supply. 10-15% measured by price increases, if you include the stuff the FED likes to leave out, you know, like housing, fuel, college education, health care, unimportant stuff like that which the average techie doesn't spend much of his income on.
The problem here is that very same subsidising of rural areas. By providing service to rural areas below cost you encourage inefficiency and wasted resources that other people are force to pay for whether they like it or not. If it costs more to provide a service to rural residents, they should pay more. This will either cause fewer of them to use those resources, or encourage people to move into higher density areas that cost less per person to service. Forcing me to pay for someone else's choice of location is wrong. This is the same problem with government disaster relief in flood/fire/hurricane/earthquake zones. If people insured their own property against such things, it would be prohibitively expensive to build in dangerous areas, so most people wouldn't do it. If they did, only they would be assuming the risk.
I just had some ringtones on there and the software verification failed. Had to do a full restore. It took longer and I have to re-hack it to get my cat-screech custom ringtone for the wife back, but otherwise painless.
correct... the parent is completely confused. The reason the telecoms don't, or barely compete is precisely because of government regulation. They don't need to compete because their markets are protected. Large monopolies or ogiopolies that are formed through regulation like phone companies... bad. Formed by providing great products at competitive prices relative to the competition like Intel and AMD... good. It's not so hard to understand. Fact is large monopolies or ogiopolies only form due to high barriers to market entry, either because of regulation or because the product in inherently difficult and expensive to develop or produce.
I don't really know, but I would suspect that those small scottish villages might be money losers for the providers if they didn't spread the cost of the infrastructure over the entire country. They are probably forced by regulators to provide equal service for the entire country, or at the very least their urban customers who travel to the villages are subsidizing the cost. If they for some reason could only provide service to those small villages, they'd go out of business.
The hardware is yours... the software is licensed and an at&t service plan is a stipulation of the license. You can disassemble it and use it for parts if you want.
Don't let him intimidate you... you were right. Check out the wiki article on Milton Friedman who's ideas he's exacerbated by. He's only the most influential economist of the 20th century, who counciled Regan on how to pull our fat out of the fire on stagflation. His radicle idea? Liberty works, socialism doesn't.
You know, as an economist, I sometimes wonder why people have such Friedmanian views on the economy Umm... because socialism has failed, spectacularly, and Friedman proven right over and over again? Because liberty actually works?
You know, I actually see this as a reason to invest in AT&T wireless. Remember when Apple announced they were switching to Intel and everyone was like, Intel?!? They're a sinking ship. Why the hell didn't they go with AMD? AMD's eating Intel's lunch!
Right now Verizon is the carrier to have for high speed wireless data with EVDO, but the thing about AT&T is that they're building out HSDPA which is several times faster than EVDO and the planned upgrade path for the majority of cell networks globally. AT&T might suck, but as far as I can tell they suck less than the competition. What carrier should they have picked instead? (I'm actually curious, that wasn't a rhetorical question) I've been using AT&T solely because they seem to be the most premissive about unlocked phones. It's all about the phone. The cell coverage seems to suck about equally no matter what carrier you go with.
What I'm trying to point out is that if there is no financial incentive, by definition it holds no value for the rest of society. That's what money is, a representation of value. If you are not willing to pay for it, it's not valuable to you. People use words like "profit" and "financial incentive" as if they are dirty words we should be ashamed of, when in actuality the more money you make (by legitimate means rather than by force or fraud) the more value you have produced for others. Like oil companies for instance. Their product is extremely valuable to the vast majority of the developed world, yet people complain about their profits. They don't seem to grasp that the more money oil producers are able to make, the more money and effort will be invested into producing more oil. If there's profit to be had, it's because people value it more than the cost of producing it. If oil production was not valuable, oil producers wouldn't be making profits.
I know it really upsets some tried-and-true capitalists, but not everyone in the world is in business just to make a buck. Some people actually have other goals too. Well, I suppose that might be true, but why should anyone care? The only thing that matters is that they produce a product that's worth more than the money they charge for it, and they are able to do it while turning a profit. Profit simply being spending less money than they receive from their customers, or put another way, consuming less value than they produce. This is whole "it" point of having trade and an economy in the first place. To produce that which has value.
The problem is as computers and communications technology improves, what constitutes a "short number" will change. What's the cut off anyway? Who get's to decide what that cut off is? You can represent a pretty offensive image in 3k.
No, figuring out how to make illegal coppies of their products and distribute them on a massive scale is not a revolt. At least not a real revolt compared to events in past history. A real revolt would be if people simply stopped consuming their products altogether on a massive scale. Fact is, we still want them to go on producing for us. I know I'm going to watch Spiderman 3 and Lost.
Isn't capitalism great? The way to make sure consumers' money lines your pockets is to produce something they all really want. Three cheers for the profit motive!
I'm sure there are a lot of blacks that would love to define whites as inferior non-persons to be preyed upon without consiquences, but as a white person I have to say I'm against this.
In all seriousness if we do take intelligence as the measuring stick of personhood, I think that presents the same problem. According to the freakenomics guy, if you control for socioeconomic status and age of the mother at time of birth, whites and blacks score equally well on standardized tests when entering kindergarden. But even when controlling for those factors, past kindergarden blacks fall behind whites on standardized tests. The fact that blacks tend to have children at a younger age and have lower socioeconomic status only serves to compound the problem. I personally believe this phenomena is purely a cultural one, not genetic, but the end result is the same. American blacks score significantly poorer than American whites on standardized tests. So if intelligence is the only criteria for personhood, you've just made a pretty good case that blacks are somehow less deserving of full personhood.
Species is a much better criteria. It's relatively well defined, not influenced by culture, and hasn't changed for many thousands of years.
"What if we do meet a more intellegent race? Is it okay to experiment on them and detain them simply because they aren't human?"
Hell yes. We've got to put those mofos down as fast as we can. Can you immagine the kind of threat they would represent. Can't have them showing up and taking away our dominant species status.
You are making the assumption that intelligence is the primary requisite attribute for personhood. I'm not sure that's the right criteria. I think species is a better one. I'm more concerned that giving chimps human rights will lower respect for human rights that I am concerned about what rights chimps have. They may be able to communicate with us, they may have complex social structures, they may have feelings, but they're not humans. Pigs have all those attributes, maybe not in the same measure, but I don't want be told that I can't have my bacon because pigs have rights. There's no reason to be cruel to animals, but they are not human beings. Treating them as if they are degrades humans.
That wouldn't be a concern then, except for the fact that the trend is currently to make as many citizens into criminals as possible. We do have hundreds of people who's full time job it is to make new federal laws for all of us to break:
US Prison, Parole and Probation Population Skyrockets; 1 in 32 Adults Incarcerated or Court Supervised, Department of Justice Report Shows
Slashdot Mirror
Also the housing crunch is what's prompting the fed to cut rates and try to inflate our way out of the crisis, which is the opposite of what they should be doing. If you're interested read Murray Rothbard's "What Has the Government Done to Our Money?". In several places I've seen it called the best book yet written explaining our monetary and banking system. I have to agree. It's short, free, and fascinating. If you google for the title and mp3 there's even a free audiobook version. It's pretty amazing.
You got me on the housing... I don't know what I was thinking. That was just a reflex on my part. I've been talking to people about a massive housing bubble for about 5 years now.
:) I think there is certainly some speculation going on, as well as traditional supply and demand issues that has raised oil in relation to other commodities, but a large part of the increase in oil prices is the declining dollar. Other central banks are inflating like crazy to try to prop up the dollar, but the dollar is still dropping like a stone, so measured against commodities the dollar is falling even more precipitously than it is relative to other fiat currencies. This is scary. Once people start spending instead of saving or investing in anticipation of further devaluation, that's when it all comes apart. Inflation isn't only tied to the money supply. If a $100 bill gets spent twice a day, it has the same inflationary effect as two $100 bills that get spent once a day. When everyone tries to spend as fast as they can to get rid of the depreciating bank notes in favor of some commodity that will hold it's value, that's when run away inflation happens even the FED stopped creating new money altogether, which of course it wouldn't.
I would like to point out that if you adjust oil, or any other commodity for inflation then that kinda defeats the point of using it to measure inflation.
Too bad inflation is at 18%, as measured by the increase in the money supply. 10-15% measured by price increases, if you include the stuff the FED likes to leave out, you know, like housing, fuel, college education, health care, unimportant stuff like that which the average techie doesn't spend much of his income on.
The problem here is that very same subsidising of rural areas. By providing service to rural areas below cost you encourage inefficiency and wasted resources that other people are force to pay for whether they like it or not. If it costs more to provide a service to rural residents, they should pay more. This will either cause fewer of them to use those resources, or encourage people to move into higher density areas that cost less per person to service. Forcing me to pay for someone else's choice of location is wrong. This is the same problem with government disaster relief in flood/fire/hurricane/earthquake zones. If people insured their own property against such things, it would be prohibitively expensive to build in dangerous areas, so most people wouldn't do it. If they did, only they would be assuming the risk.
works flawlessly. Didn't even need to zoom, perfectly ledgible in landscape.
Posted from my iPhone.
I just had some ringtones on there and the software verification failed. Had to do a full restore. It took longer and I have to re-hack it to get my cat-screech custom ringtone for the wife back, but otherwise painless.
correct... the parent is completely confused. The reason the telecoms don't, or barely compete is precisely because of government regulation. They don't need to compete because their markets are protected. Large monopolies or ogiopolies that are formed through regulation like phone companies... bad. Formed by providing great products at competitive prices relative to the competition like Intel and AMD... good. It's not so hard to understand. Fact is large monopolies or ogiopolies only form due to high barriers to market entry, either because of regulation or because the product in inherently difficult and expensive to develop or produce.
I don't really know, but I would suspect that those small scottish villages might be money losers for the providers if they didn't spread the cost of the infrastructure over the entire country. They are probably forced by regulators to provide equal service for the entire country, or at the very least their urban customers who travel to the villages are subsidizing the cost. If they for some reason could only provide service to those small villages, they'd go out of business.
The hardware is yours... the software is licensed and an at&t service plan is a stipulation of the license. You can disassemble it and use it for parts if you want.
Don't let him intimidate you... you were right. Check out the wiki article on Milton Friedman who's ideas he's exacerbated by. He's only the most influential economist of the 20th century, who counciled Regan on how to pull our fat out of the fire on stagflation. His radicle idea? Liberty works, socialism doesn't.
You know, I actually see this as a reason to invest in AT&T wireless. Remember when Apple announced they were switching to Intel and everyone was like, Intel?!? They're a sinking ship. Why the hell didn't they go with AMD? AMD's eating Intel's lunch!
Right now Verizon is the carrier to have for high speed wireless data with EVDO, but the thing about AT&T is that they're building out HSDPA which is several times faster than EVDO and the planned upgrade path for the majority of cell networks globally. AT&T might suck, but as far as I can tell they suck less than the competition. What carrier should they have picked instead? (I'm actually curious, that wasn't a rhetorical question) I've been using AT&T solely because they seem to be the most premissive about unlocked phones. It's all about the phone. The cell coverage seems to suck about equally no matter what carrier you go with.
What I'm trying to point out is that if there is no financial incentive, by definition it holds no value for the rest of society. That's what money is, a representation of value. If you are not willing to pay for it, it's not valuable to you. People use words like "profit" and "financial incentive" as if they are dirty words we should be ashamed of, when in actuality the more money you make (by legitimate means rather than by force or fraud) the more value you have produced for others. Like oil companies for instance. Their product is extremely valuable to the vast majority of the developed world, yet people complain about their profits. They don't seem to grasp that the more money oil producers are able to make, the more money and effort will be invested into producing more oil. If there's profit to be had, it's because people value it more than the cost of producing it. If oil production was not valuable, oil producers wouldn't be making profits.
The problem is as computers and communications technology improves, what constitutes a "short number" will change. What's the cut off anyway? Who get's to decide what that cut off is? You can represent a pretty offensive image in 3k.
No, figuring out how to make illegal coppies of their products and distribute them on a massive scale is not a revolt. At least not a real revolt compared to events in past history. A real revolt would be if people simply stopped consuming their products altogether on a massive scale. Fact is, we still want them to go on producing for us. I know I'm going to watch Spiderman 3 and Lost.
What about a really long number that, when run though a jpeg decoding algorithm, displays an image of child porn.
"He should have been hung as an enemy of our rights as Americans"
The man was a lobbiest. The poeple who should be hung are the legislators who accepted his bribes in exchange for our liberties.
Isn't capitalism great? The way to make sure consumers' money lines your pockets is to produce something they all really want. Three cheers for the profit motive!
I'm sure there are a lot of blacks that would love to define whites as inferior non-persons to be preyed upon without consiquences, but as a white person I have to say I'm against this.
In all seriousness if we do take intelligence as the measuring stick of personhood, I think that presents the same problem. According to the freakenomics guy, if you control for socioeconomic status and age of the mother at time of birth, whites and blacks score equally well on standardized tests when entering kindergarden. But even when controlling for those factors, past kindergarden blacks fall behind whites on standardized tests. The fact that blacks tend to have children at a younger age and have lower socioeconomic status only serves to compound the problem. I personally believe this phenomena is purely a cultural one, not genetic, but the end result is the same. American blacks score significantly poorer than American whites on standardized tests. So if intelligence is the only criteria for personhood, you've just made a pretty good case that blacks are somehow less deserving of full personhood.
Species is a much better criteria. It's relatively well defined, not influenced by culture, and hasn't changed for many thousands of years.
"What if we do meet a more intellegent race? Is it okay to experiment on them and detain them simply because they aren't human?"
Hell yes. We've got to put those mofos down as fast as we can. Can you immagine the kind of threat they would represent. Can't have them showing up and taking away our dominant species status.
You are making the assumption that intelligence is the primary requisite attribute for personhood. I'm not sure that's the right criteria. I think species is a better one. I'm more concerned that giving chimps human rights will lower respect for human rights that I am concerned about what rights chimps have. They may be able to communicate with us, they may have complex social structures, they may have feelings, but they're not humans. Pigs have all those attributes, maybe not in the same measure, but I don't want be told that I can't have my bacon because pigs have rights. There's no reason to be cruel to animals, but they are not human beings. Treating them as if they are degrades humans.
iPhone wasn't really a very good name to begin with. I thought the obvious choice was iMobile, being that it's much more than just a phone.
That wouldn't be a concern then, except for the fact that the trend is currently to make as many citizens into criminals as possible. We do have hundreds of people who's full time job it is to make new federal laws for all of us to break:
e ase/pr113006doj.cfm
US Prison, Parole and Probation Population Skyrockets; 1 in 32 Adults Incarcerated or Court Supervised, Department of Justice Report Shows
http://www.drugpolicy.org/news/pressroom/pressrel