I mean, deflation is wonderful if most of your assets are dollars.
True. And inflation is wonderful if most of your liabilities are dollars. Let's see, who has an absurdly high dollar liability and no real invested assets... ah yes, the same federal government that has (indirect) control of the money supply. Hm.
If you own anything of value though, like say a gold stockpile, or a house, or if you like jobs, deflation is very very bad.
This one's not so true. Deflation and inflation have no particular effect on the value of "real" goods such as gold or housing. After all, regardless of the value of currency, you will still be able to exchange that house for another house, and that gold for a similar amount of food or other goods as you could have before. When people say that gold is a good thing to own during inflation, they only mean that it's relatively good compared to anything dollar-denominated like a CD.
The effect on jobs is a separate issue, and definitely more complicated, but in short: deflation and job loss as both symptoms of a recession or depression. Neither one is a primary cause (although they can act as secondary causes through a diminishing spiral effect). Many recessions, including the most recent one, are "catch-up" periods where we over-borrowed and over-consumed and then have to pay it back. Obviously consumption will be down during that type of environment, which means there is less demand for goods than money (for investment/debt repayment), which means the prices of goods decreases and the price of investing increases (which is equivalent to the interest rate decreasing).
Since companies overconsumed in labor by hiring too many workers during boom periods, probably financed with loans since they expected their markets to keep expanding, they now have to cut back to the size they should have been all along (or smaller if they have to devote some of their revenue to paying back those loans), which means job losses.
This post is getting a bit long-winded already so I won't go into the various causes of the initial overconsumption, except to say that you can't simply stimulate it away because there's still a debt that needs to be paid (figuratively and literally). Stimulus is like taking more drugs to avoid withdrawal symptoms: a short-sighted fix that appears to work great, which is the perfect choice for politicians who just care about the next election. The point is that both deflation and job loss are mostly common results of the same cause; neither one particularly causes the other except (as another poster noted) a smaller job-loss effect due to wage stickiness where companies might respond to 5% deflation with 5% layoffs instead of a 5% "reduction" in wages, even though the wage reduction would leave people with the same purchasing power, because wage reductions look bad to people who don't understand inflation.
And there is approximately zero chance of Zimbabwe-style inflation in any imaginable non-post-apocalyptic America over the next fifty years.
This, I agree with. I don't understand why so many who are concerned about inflation seem to go to the extreme and jump on the OMGHYPERINFLATION bandwagon.
It seems pretty obvious that the significant increase in the money supply that began under Bush/Greenspan and hasn't really slowed with Obama/Bernanke is going to cause huge inflation (as soon as we have paid back our imbalance in consumption through this recession and the demand for consumption comes back). Dollars are not backed by anything, so if there are twice as many dollars in circulation, then those dollars will each be worth half as much. I have a portion of my long-term investments in commodities as protection against this. I can't tell you when it's going to happen, since it's so dependent on government policy, so I don't try to play the market... but the fundamentals of supply and demand say that the dollar is headed for a serious
You can already get this for email. Encrypt. Put your public key on a popular keyserver (e.g. http://pgp.mit.edu/ and give some simple indication (e.g. in your email signature or business card) that you accept PGP encrypted email and your key is available, key ID 1A2B3C4D. If you have a little more room, include the PGP fingerprint (40 hex digits).
Then anyone who wants to send you email in an "envelope" can do so, and nobody else will be able to read it. Anyone who doesn't care will continue to send "postcard" style email that is essentially public.
How is this article news for nerds? [...] I'm surprised at kdawson
I'm surprised at your surprise! kdawson is notorious for posting ridiculous articles, for example ones where a simple Google search or any other basic fact check would show them to be complete fabrications and/or fanboy nonsense. If I were going to block one editor from my front page, it would be kdawson.
I happened to find this article interesting because I appreciate the topics of economics and liberty, but I recognize and agree with you that it probably doesn't belong on Slashdot, and so it was no surprise to me to see who posted it.
"[...] is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for saying that there is no evidence for claims that visiting a chiropractor has health benefits."
That alone is not why Mr. Singh is being sued. The issue is specifically driven by his use of the word "bogus." The judge has taken it to mean "consciously dishonest." Not just peddling an ineffective treatment, but knowing that it's ineffective and still claiming otherwise. If Singh just claimed it was an ineffective treatment, he would not be criticizing the BCA directly, so it wouldn't be actionable... However, the judge and the BCA took him to be saying that the BCA are knowingly and intentionally dishonest in their promotion of the treatment.
I wouldn't think to interpret "bogus" in this way, but that seems to be the original meaning. I hope the judge realizes Singh was using it in a more modern sense, but if it's interpreted as the BCA claims, then it certainly explains how far this lawsuit has gone, and invalidates many of the comments here so far including the inflammatory summary. Singh can criticize the effectiveness of the treatments to his heart's content, as long as he doesn't accuse the BCA of fraud! You can read some more linguistic analysis of this lawsuit and the evolving meaning of "bogus" over at the Language Log.
Infant death is more common with low birth-weight and/or early babies. Lifestyle choices in the US, such as obesity and teenage motherhood, drive more low-birth-weight babies than in other countries. That has nothing to do with the health care system, unless you include "social measures" (in this case forcing people to adhere to your personal standards).
The real test of a health care system is to control for those factors. Strip away the effect of the number of low-weight babies are born here, and ask: if you're going to have a low-weight baby, where is it more likely to survive?
No one denies the problem. Our infant mortality rate is double that of Japan or Sweden. But we live different lives, on average, than people in those places. We suffer more obesity (about 10 times as much as the Japanese), and we have more births to teenagers (seven times more than the Swedes). Nearly 40 percent of American babies are born to unwed mothers.
Factors like these are linked to low birth weight in babies, which is a dangerous thing. In a 2007 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists June O'Neill and Dave O'Neill noted that "a multitude of behaviors unrelated to the health-care system such as substance abuse, smoking and obesity" are connected "to the low birth weight and pre-term births that underlie the infant death syndrome." [...] The National Bureau of Economic Research paper points out that among the smallest infants, survival rates are better on this side of the border. What that suggests is that if we lived under the Canadian health-care system, we would not have a lower rate of infant mortality. We would have a higher one.
250,000 years?? Thanks for just making up a big number. Current reactor designs have a 10,000 year problem, which most people agree is beyond our ability to manage. No civilization has existed for anything close to that amount of time, so there's no way we can guarantee its safety, no matter how well it's stored. The reason the waste is dangerous for so long is (I'm simplifying a little) because there's still a lot of energy left to extract from it.
However, there are more recent reactor designs (such as "breeder" reactors) that actually extract that energy by recycling the fuel multiple times. This means two things: 1. They get more power with less fuel (efficiency! And, the "peak uranium" problem is pushed back by many more centuries). 2. Their waste is only radioactive for ~100 years, not ~10,000.
Nobody with any sense is advocating for more 70's style reactors, because of the waste problem among other things. Nuclear advocates are almost always thinking of the new breeder designs or something similar. They still have a waste problem, but not an intractable one. And unlike coal, none of the waste is spewed into the atmosphere, so at least we have the potential to handle it well.
In a few weeks, they'll finish their bankruptcy and that 677 million in market cap is guaranteed to drop to 0.
+5 Informative? Jeebus. $677 million represents what people are actually willing to pay for the stock. If it were "guaranteed" to drop to zero in a couple weeks, nobody would be willing to pay anything for it. From the very fact that the stock price is above zero, you can imply that many people disagree with your statement strongly enough that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Presumably they are expecting some nonzero chance of GM emerging from bankruptcy after discharging some debts and obligations e.g. with the help of government decree.
Feel free to short the stock if you disagree that strongly. You'll be helping bring the stock to (in your opinion) its true value, and as a side effect you'll make some "guaranteed" money. Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, deflation is wonderful if most of your assets are dollars.
True. And inflation is wonderful if most of your liabilities are dollars. Let's see, who has an absurdly high dollar liability and no real invested assets... ah yes, the same federal government that has (indirect) control of the money supply. Hm.
If you own anything of value though, like say a gold stockpile, or a house, or if you like jobs, deflation is very very bad.
This one's not so true. Deflation and inflation have no particular effect on the value of "real" goods such as gold or housing. After all, regardless of the value of currency, you will still be able to exchange that house for another house, and that gold for a similar amount of food or other goods as you could have before. When people say that gold is a good thing to own during inflation, they only mean that it's relatively good compared to anything dollar-denominated like a CD.
The effect on jobs is a separate issue, and definitely more complicated, but in short: deflation and job loss as both symptoms of a recession or depression. Neither one is a primary cause (although they can act as secondary causes through a diminishing spiral effect). Many recessions, including the most recent one, are "catch-up" periods where we over-borrowed and over-consumed and then have to pay it back. Obviously consumption will be down during that type of environment, which means there is less demand for goods than money (for investment/debt repayment), which means the prices of goods decreases and the price of investing increases (which is equivalent to the interest rate decreasing).
Since companies overconsumed in labor by hiring too many workers during boom periods, probably financed with loans since they expected their markets to keep expanding, they now have to cut back to the size they should have been all along (or smaller if they have to devote some of their revenue to paying back those loans), which means job losses.
This post is getting a bit long-winded already so I won't go into the various causes of the initial overconsumption, except to say that you can't simply stimulate it away because there's still a debt that needs to be paid (figuratively and literally). Stimulus is like taking more drugs to avoid withdrawal symptoms: a short-sighted fix that appears to work great, which is the perfect choice for politicians who just care about the next election. The point is that both deflation and job loss are mostly common results of the same cause; neither one particularly causes the other except (as another poster noted) a smaller job-loss effect due to wage stickiness where companies might respond to 5% deflation with 5% layoffs instead of a 5% "reduction" in wages, even though the wage reduction would leave people with the same purchasing power, because wage reductions look bad to people who don't understand inflation.
And there is approximately zero chance of Zimbabwe-style inflation in any imaginable non-post-apocalyptic America over the next fifty years.
This, I agree with. I don't understand why so many who are concerned about inflation seem to go to the extreme and jump on the OMGHYPERINFLATION bandwagon.
It seems pretty obvious that the significant increase in the money supply that began under Bush/Greenspan and hasn't really slowed with Obama/Bernanke is going to cause huge inflation (as soon as we have paid back our imbalance in consumption through this recession and the demand for consumption comes back). Dollars are not backed by anything, so if there are twice as many dollars in circulation, then those dollars will each be worth half as much. I have a portion of my long-term investments in commodities as protection against this. I can't tell you when it's going to happen, since it's so dependent on government policy, so I don't try to play the market... but the fundamentals of supply and demand say that the dollar is headed for a serious
You can already get this for email. Encrypt. Put your public key on a popular keyserver (e.g. http://pgp.mit.edu/ and give some simple indication (e.g. in your email signature or business card) that you accept PGP encrypted email and your key is available, key ID 1A2B3C4D. If you have a little more room, include the PGP fingerprint (40 hex digits).
Then anyone who wants to send you email in an "envelope" can do so, and nobody else will be able to read it. Anyone who doesn't care will continue to send "postcard" style email that is essentially public.
How is this article news for nerds?
[...]
I'm surprised at kdawson
I'm surprised at your surprise! kdawson is notorious for posting ridiculous articles, for example ones where a simple Google search or any other basic fact check would show them to be complete fabrications and/or fanboy nonsense. If I were going to block one editor from my front page, it would be kdawson.
I happened to find this article interesting because I appreciate the topics of economics and liberty, but I recognize and agree with you that it probably doesn't belong on Slashdot, and so it was no surprise to me to see who posted it.
"[...] is currently being sued by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for saying that there is no evidence for claims that visiting a chiropractor has health benefits."
That alone is not why Mr. Singh is being sued. The issue is specifically driven by his use of the word "bogus." The judge has taken it to mean "consciously dishonest." Not just peddling an ineffective treatment, but knowing that it's ineffective and still claiming otherwise. If Singh just claimed it was an ineffective treatment, he would not be criticizing the BCA directly, so it wouldn't be actionable... However, the judge and the BCA took him to be saying that the BCA are knowingly and intentionally dishonest in their promotion of the treatment.
I wouldn't think to interpret "bogus" in this way, but that seems to be the original meaning. I hope the judge realizes Singh was using it in a more modern sense, but if it's interpreted as the BCA claims, then it certainly explains how far this lawsuit has gone, and invalidates many of the comments here so far including the inflammatory summary. Singh can criticize the effectiveness of the treatments to his heart's content, as long as he doesn't accuse the BCA of fraud! You can read some more linguistic analysis of this lawsuit and the evolving meaning of "bogus" over at the Language Log.
Infant death is more common with low birth-weight and/or early babies. Lifestyle choices in the US, such as obesity and teenage motherhood, drive more low-birth-weight babies than in other countries. That has nothing to do with the health care system, unless you include "social measures" (in this case forcing people to adhere to your personal standards).
The real test of a health care system is to control for those factors. Strip away the effect of the number of low-weight babies are born here, and ask: if you're going to have a low-weight baby, where is it more likely to survive?
No one denies the problem. Our infant mortality rate is double that of Japan or Sweden. But we live different lives, on average, than people in those places. We suffer more obesity (about 10 times as much as the Japanese), and we have more births to teenagers (seven times more than the Swedes). Nearly 40 percent of American babies are born to unwed mothers.
Factors like these are linked to low birth weight in babies, which is a dangerous thing. In a 2007 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists June O'Neill and Dave O'Neill noted that "a multitude of behaviors unrelated to the health-care system such as substance abuse, smoking and obesity" are connected "to the low birth weight and pre-term births that underlie the infant death syndrome."
[...]
The National Bureau of Economic Research paper points out that among the smallest infants, survival rates are better on this side of the border. What that suggests is that if we lived under the Canadian health-care system, we would not have a lower rate of infant mortality. We would have a higher one.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0823chapmanaug23,0,7962367.column
When people say "People do/have/are/etc." they actually mean "I do/have/are/etc."
What, no +1 funny mods yet? Looks like a recursive joke to me :-).
250,000 years?? Thanks for just making up a big number. Current reactor designs have a 10,000 year problem, which most people agree is beyond our ability to manage. No civilization has existed for anything close to that amount of time, so there's no way we can guarantee its safety, no matter how well it's stored. The reason the waste is dangerous for so long is (I'm simplifying a little) because there's still a lot of energy left to extract from it.
However, there are more recent reactor designs (such as "breeder" reactors) that actually extract that energy by recycling the fuel multiple times. This means two things:
1. They get more power with less fuel (efficiency! And, the "peak uranium" problem is pushed back by many more centuries).
2. Their waste is only radioactive for ~100 years, not ~10,000.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
Nobody with any sense is advocating for more 70's style reactors, because of the waste problem among other things. Nuclear advocates are almost always thinking of the new breeder designs or something similar. They still have a waste problem, but not an intractable one. And unlike coal, none of the waste is spewed into the atmosphere, so at least we have the potential to handle it well.
In a few weeks, they'll finish their bankruptcy and that 677 million in market cap is guaranteed to drop to 0.
+5 Informative? Jeebus. $677 million represents what people are actually willing to pay for the stock. If it were "guaranteed" to drop to zero in a couple weeks, nobody would be willing to pay anything for it. From the very fact that the stock price is above zero, you can imply that many people disagree with your statement strongly enough that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Presumably they are expecting some nonzero chance of GM emerging from bankruptcy after discharging some debts and obligations e.g. with the help of government decree.
Feel free to short the stock if you disagree that strongly. You'll be helping bring the stock to (in your opinion) its true value, and as a side effect you'll make some "guaranteed" money. Good luck.
You already can't prevent vote buying. It's called an absentee ballot. I watch you fill it out and put it in the mailbox, then I pay you $10.