With a 1% negative interest rate you can loan as much money as you want, put aside 99% of it to be paid back and keep the remaining 1% to do whatever you want with it.
Essentially free money as long as someone doesn't rob you of the money you put aside to pay back.
Something I've always wondered: how, exactly, are you going to get that $10+interest back unless at least enough new money to cover the interest is actually *created* rather than just *loaned out*?
That is actually quite simple and something many fiat money opponents don't seem to grasp. (not saying anything about you, just pointing out that I have seen this reasoning used in various places such as the "Money as Debt" movie that is often linked to)
Anyway, the answer lies in the fact that money circulates. Any interest I get from loaning out money to you, I can use to buy goods/services from you which you in turn can use to pay back the loan.
In fact, even if you and I had an economy that consisted of a single dollar bill, we could still use that single dollar bill, you could still pay back a $10 loan if I just used that dollar bill to buy something from you every time you payed back part of the loan.
As long as loans are taken for actual investments they can be a good thing. And no, a car or house for bragging is not an investment. A second hand car that allows you to get to the job can be one however. As can a small house in a decent location be. Credit card debt however is pretty much all "bad" debt as it rarely is used for actual investments.
What about the daily quest where hungry walrus men ask you to collect innocent puppies, killing their mothers while doing so. It is pretty obvious what those hungry walrus men are going to do with the puppies. They must really like puppy meat considering that it is a daily quest.
And people do that quest repeatedly just so they can get their hands on an epic fishing pole and a penguin pet.
And what when 50% +1 of the ruler class doesn't like you in a republic? Really, only a fool thinks that a republic can handle the situation any better. In fact, in a republic it is enough to be disliked by the wrong 1% of the population.
A disliked minority is always screwed. If your minority don't provide enough of bargin measures compared to how much others dislike you, you should get the hell out. When over 50% of the population dislike you enough to want you dead, you are in trouble. Unfortunally that is the sad truth.
And please don't begin rabbling about control mechanisms and such, because that is in no way unique to republics. All modern democracies have some kind of control mechanism to prevent abuse of power, just like republics do.
There is a mechanism that protects minorities in democracies. It is the fact that there are several subjects to vote on.
Minorities can focus on protecting their most important interests and compromise in other areas. It is extremly rarely beneficial to run over a minority when you instead could get their support on a large number of issues in return for protecting their main interests.
This is also the main flaw of direct democracy where you don't have the same possibliity of negotiating. Republic also have a problem in that regard, because minorities may end up with noone representing their interests.
No, if you want the best protection for minorities you really want an indirect democracy with low limits on getting representation as that allows minorities the best possibilities for negotiation.
But then again, advertisers are one of the biggest problems and inefficencies of a capitalistic society. Trying to brainwash people using simple psychologic tricks to get them to allocate their money inefficently.
I will go out of my way to not watch ads and make sure others don't have to watch them either. It is my duty as someone who values the efficency that the free market claims to create. And I care absolutly nothing about scum like you who promote inefficency and waste of resources.
And yes, that includes google ads. I don't care if it is less annoying. It is the subtle manipulation of the mind that is the worst thing about ads. And that doesn't go away just because it is text ads instead of graphical ads. And no, I don't care that you think that YOUR product deserves that extra bit of attention, because you are no different than the multitude of other people that reason in the exact same way.
Now, MS can't really bring use these threats as effectively because people would point to the Bilski decision to counter.
Microsoft can't use those threats? Pretty much all such threats I have seen have been from Free software supporters who don't like projects like Mono or wine.
Still, there is some truth in that when such threats (whatever the source) don't have less to back them up, it does present a slight negative for Microsoft. But in reality that is a very small difference, because those threats have always been kind of paranoid.
implementing the rule of the majority always ignores the minority
Not true. That only applies if there is only one issue on the table.
Because there is no majority. There is just lots of minorities that will bargin over a large amount of issues, prioritizing the ones they feel are important, while giving way on the less important ones.
That is as long as you don't deal with a large amount of fundamentalists (or sheeps controlled by fundamentalists), because fundamentalists are by they nature uncapable of bargining because of how they see their own viewpoint as the only one.
The number one trick for regular expressions is not a regular expression at all. It is simply the habit of always using the ignore whitespace flag to format and comment your regular expressions. Code maintenance and general readability is simply a must for any real developer.
If you don't give your money to the poor, they will rob you. To prevent robberies, the government should take your money and give it to them.
And it is a very good argument, because give me one reason why those worse of shouln't rob you. By transferring some money to the poor you make it less likely to happen. (while at the same time counteracting the troublematic natural flow of money from bottom to top)
Of course, you also have to provide carrots so people don't want to stay poor. Work needs to be rewarding, giving you more than you can get from simply taking a welfare check. Also, things like ensuring decent working conditions makes people more interested in working. Whatever you think, people usually like to take care of themselves. Make it easy for them to do so and they will.
Here in Sweden atleast blank ballots are counted seperatly.
And there is a big difference. Not voting means that you are lazy bum that doesn't care enough to get to your voting location. Such lazy bums are ignored, because their opinions are worthless. There is no need for politicians to cater to someone who doesn't vote. Someone who is voting blank on the other hand is not ignored, because anyone who takes the time to go to the voting location and make a blank vote will likely also vote in the next election.
A blank vote is a vote worth competing over in the next election. A non-vote is zero, nada, nothing.
Sorry, but you are wrong. I quote the page (http://www.ssb.no/ikthus/tab-2008-09-18-09.html)
"Andel av de som har brukt Internett de siste 3 måneder, etter kjønn og alder. 2. kvartal 2008. Prosent"
I am swedish not norwegian, but it roughly translates to "Share of those who have used internet in the last 3 months by gender and age. 2nd quarter 2008. Percentage.". And the column he is quoting says "Utvekslet musikk, filmer ved fildeling" which translates into "Exchanged music, movies by filesharing".
Of the 19%, 47% are the aforementioned under-age kids
No, 47% is the percentage of 16-25 years that have done filesharing in the last three months. It is NOT a split of the 47% number. So the grandparent is correct. If 47% of 16-24 year olds are filesharing, and with the mentioned overall male-female ratio it is extremly likely that young male filesharers are in a majority. And that probably stands for the combined 16-34 bracket also.
The stats become even more telling when you begin to look at the combined usage patterns. Older people are far less likely to view any media on the internet, pirated or not. The usage habit of older people is more in favor of reading news and similar activities, so they simply don't have a reason for file sharing in the first place.
True. But you can never protect idiots. It is doomed from the start.
However, modern operating systems fails to even protect people who aren't stupid. It is way too easy to get malware installed on machinem and far too difficult to remove it.
It is perfectly possible to run programs that aren't trusted. You just can't allow them to do certain things. This is the main principle of sandboxing, and a good operating system should sandbox every single application completly, unless someone with administrator privileges requests otherwise. And even such requests should only be exceptions to the sandboxing.
I am running every program I don't trust sandboxed with sandboxie. It isn't a perfect solution as it isn't as well integrated into the system as it could be. There is also the problem that I don't have a 64 bit upgrade path because Microsoft is preventing low level security programs from working on their x64 operating systems.
When I install a game I want to be able to say:
"By default you'll have access to the same things as any program and that is read access to executables/libraries and settings registered as public. I'll also grant special rights to access the internet, but because of that you won't be able to access my documents folder (even in read mode) because that would constitute a security risk."
Finally, a whitelist to authorize installation of well known libraries (DirectX, Java, etc.) would further reduce the burden of making hard security decisions.
The credit system is very inefficent (and the developers know it). It rewards waiting over actually sharing back. Especially the basic emule client where the credit system is extremly watered down. Any attempt to implement something more efficent is banned from the official forums.
Especially swarming/tit-for-tat which was the big efficency improvement of bittorrent. It is looked down upon by the offical developers. The reason I think is that they want a higher percentage of the bandwidth going to rare files instead of "trading", but that reasoning is flawed. By allowing people to trade you raise their perception of the network, making them stay online longer with higher bandwidth limits. Thereby indirectly increasing the supply of rare files.
One counterargument is that rare bittorrent files go dead, which indicates that rarity isn't rewarded. But that isn't actually true. The reason bittorrent files go dead has more to do with the centralized approach of bittorrent. The only way you can share files with bittorrent is by either finding another torrent file that contains your files, or create a new torrent file and upload it to a torrent site. Both those ways are too complicated to do all the time.
Emule on the other hand uses a file by file system, so sharing is as simple as putting it in your emule sharing folder. That is why emule and other file p2p networks have more rare files on them. Bittorrent on the other hand relies more heavily on either a permanent seeder, however small the upload, or the torrent having enough traffic that it never reaches an abandoned state. The second alternative is why you see main torrent files that group lots of files together. That reduced the chance of a torrent file getting abandoned as you have more people on it at once.
How can BitTorrent, as it's been suggested, start downloading almost immediately when eDonkey supposedly takes longer?
Noone said that it would go fast. You'll download at about the speed of your upload (and sometimes slower when it is a badly seeded torrent) which still is far better than emule. Of course, on well seeded torrents you get higher speeds as seeders contribute bandwidth without taking any.
However, the real difference between bittorrent and emule is trust in the system. Bittorrent users have a far higher trust that peers on the other side will share as sharing is rewarded by higher upload speeds. That trust leads to people in turn sharing more which reinforces that trust. A simple positive feedback effect of a good trading system.
Note, that this happens even though some people can leech. As long as most ordinary good people concieve the other side as sharing, they will go to more effort to share themselves. If that trust changes, maybe by an influx of people who just leech, then sharing will start to go down.
Contrast that with emule that claims to be a sharing network instead of trading network. What this basically means is that they pretty much don't reward sharing, and direct trading is discouraged or punished. This decreases trust in the system. Why should you share when you can't trust that the other side does. Therefore people share less and leech more.
The idea of trust is one of the basics in economics, which unfortunally is not so well understood by most, especially politicians. The goverment should stay away from things that reduce trust in the market and instead do neutral stuff (simple taxing without a myriad of exceptions) or even positive stuff that increase market trust (jailing scammer and liers as well as generally enforce laws or creating laws that make it more difficult to lie and scam)
A free market requires transparency, but Wall Street spent the last 20 years constructing very non-transparent investment "vehicles" that their rocket scientists couldn't understand
And I think you will find many free market advocates that also advocate that goverment also regulate the market to be more transparent.
Individuals on the market can profit from the whole by hiding facts and decieving others. It is one of the biggest flaws of the pure free market. Sure, you would expect such regulatory organisations to be created by the market, but it turns out that they are in turn controlled by individuals that profit by hiding things.
Of course the goverment is also individuals, so creating a regulatory institution won't do any good. What you need is simple regulatory laws that forces everyone in the market to show what they actually got.
Because what needs to be done is quite easy; move to 100% reserve requirements and market based interest rates.
With 100% reserve requirements (I am assuming you are talking about fractional reserve banking) the interest rates on savings accounts are zero (plus added fees) because loaning out that money is impossible.
Of course the "problem" with FRB (the so called creation of money) doesn't disappear because of that. It just moves to the M2 and M3 money markets instead. Any loan is a creation of money, because the one loaning out is expecting to get his money back while the loaner is getting money to spend. This isn't bad at all.
The problem occurs when money is lent out to non investments (consumption) and bad investments (speculation). And that will happen with or without an FRB economy. Atleast unless you want to completly forbid any kind of investing, which will really stop the economy.
What is worse is when the goverment rewards behavior by saving investors who did bad investments. This is called moral hazard and hurts the economic system very much by indirectly punishing good behavior.
The goverment should mostly stay out of the free market, except for enforcing a good playing field by encouraging/enforcing open books and punishing liers/scammers. Detail managing the market is called plan economy and is a recipe for failure.
The goverment should provide a safety net for those that fail so that they don't starve to death. That is simply the human thing to do. Providing extra employment opportunities in bad times to stimulate the economy and make sure resources (people) are put to work. Who should pay for this. The answer is simple, those who benefit the most from having a society that enforces property rights via law and order. That would be the richer part of the society for those who didn't get it.
Yes, the rich have earned their wealth, but that wealth only exists because the society enforces it. By taking some of it and providing for those worse of, the society remains stable. And as long as you have a proper progressive taxing system, it is still worth working more to earn more.
Did it have devastating consequences when we did base our currency on it? More so than now, I mean? I don't think so....
Actually, yes. The economies of 1800s and the early 1900s were far more unstable than nowadays.
Btw, the fiat currency isn't what is behind this crash. Speculation that caused the crash has very little to do with the currency base. Fractional reserve banking (which is possible with or without a gold standard) have a small role to play in increasing the bubble, but even with full reserve banking you are just moving loaning (a.k.a. money creation) to M2 and M3 instead and get the exact same problem.
Some regulation is important for a functioning market. At the minimum you need open detailed company books to allow any buyer on the stock market to see what he actually is buying and any lender to see who he actually is lending out to. You also need to severly and swiftly punish lying and criminal dealings, all the way from the top down to the bottom. (Selective punishment won't help)
Secrecy and lies is at the core of this crisis.
The free market used to be about both parties profiting by doing mutually benefitial trades, creating efficency. Nowadays however it has become more about trying to fool as many gullible people as possible into buying something that has little worth and that they can't afford. That is the opposite of efficency and should be punished just as harshly as violent crime, because the cost is great.
Of course, this doesn't only apply to the market only. Politicians are just as guilty. Lying through their teeth all the time. A society based on lying can go no other way than down. And that is what is happening now. Noone trusts anyone any more and that is as I said the foundation of the crisis, secrecy and lies.
Btw, the US isn't alone. This is a systematic disease throughout the whole capitalistic and political systems down to ordinary workers that are getting just as good at lying. From what I have heard it very much resembles the pre-war (20s and 30s) mentality that was so harmful and destructive. Until that mentality is changed things won't change for the better.
Which makes sense if you think those in power mainly are interested in creating artifical scarcity to maintain control. A shoplifted CD doesn't decrease scarcity, while a copied one does.
On the other hand, here in Sweden illegally obtained evidence can be used in the court of law, with a few exceptions of client privileges (communication with priests, lawyers, etc).
So even if a police officer gets fired for obtaining material illegally, you can still get found guilty in court because of that material.
Just an interesting note on how laws differ between countries.
he DMCA as currently implemented preventing legitimate content from being posted.
One problem with the US law is that fair use is in no way accuratly defined. It is in fact about as vague as you can get for a law.
First of all, the list of things failing under fair use is incomplete by using the phrase "for purposes such as". Secondly, even though something belongs to the list it can still be infringement because of the part "the factors to be considered shall include", which btw doesn't say anything about how the four listed factors should be considered.
The magic they were performing was due to their being government enterprises, thus the securities were government backed
Except of course that the securities were in no way goverment backed. Anyone who says so have either never seen one, or don't possess the reading level of a 12 year old.
I quote the title page of a Fannie Mae certificate (except that the certificate has this in capitalized letters in a big font): "The certificates and payment of principal and interest on the certificates are not guaranteed by the United States, and do not constitute a debt or obligation of the United States or any of its agencies or instrumentalities other than Fannie Mae"
Unless you've been through university on some Economics degree - you were probably unaware of this.
You mean unaware of the fact that banks lend out what you put into them? Anyone with two braincells and who notice that bank give you interest should be aware of that.
That movie is one of the biggest lies on the internet, completly misrepresenting how money flows in the economy by only showing selected parts.
Oh god. Not that crappy movie again (and I admit I was fooled by it for a while until I began to understand its deceptions). It is so wrong in many of its assertions while hiding it in a few truths of how the money system is working.
Yes, Money is debt. So what? Money is needed because you want to be able to do trades between 3 or more people where ordinary trade of goods doesn't work. As such you need an intermediate. What that intermediate is doesn't matter as long as all parties trust it.
The gold standard isn't very special and doesn't really matter that much in this context. It has some advantages and disadvantages compared to a Fiat currency but Fractional Reserve Banking (FRB) which is what the video is about works just as well under a gold standard. That you don't understand that is a clear indication that you have been fooled by the movie.
FRB is the simple idea of putting your savings (gold or fiat money) to use (earning you interest) by allowing the banker to invest them while still having a degree of availability to that money. The opposite of FRB is to put your money in the bank vault and let them rot at zero percent interest and a storage fee.
Also, just because you have a high degree of availability to your money, doesn't mean that it actually is money. A savings account is an investment just like putting your money into a ten year fond is. The banker guarantees that a certain percentage of the money will be availible in vaults, but incase of a bank run you may not be able to get yours out. (this is a slight simplification as the laws and regulations surrounding this are complex, but whenever you put money into an account that earns you interest, it should be obvious that the bank will relend your money)
Finally, to address the biggest lie in the movie, the debt+interest being greater than the total amount of money (I suppose it means M1 and not M0) doesn't result in an infinite exponential debt trap. It completly fails to take into consideration that those who lend out money also buy services and goods from those in debt. The person lending the money is betting on investing it in such a way that his production increase is higher than the interest, thereby profiting.
Of course, when you have idiots lending for consumption (including overprices houses, SUVs, gambling on financial market) instead of investing smartly you get a problem which hurts both parties in a lending transaction, but that is another issue.
Slashdot Mirror
With a 1% negative interest rate you can loan as much money as you want, put aside 99% of it to be paid back and keep the remaining 1% to do whatever you want with it.
Essentially free money as long as someone doesn't rob you of the money you put aside to pay back.
Something I've always wondered: how, exactly, are you going to get that $10+interest back unless at least enough new money to cover the interest is actually *created* rather than just *loaned out*?
That is actually quite simple and something many fiat money opponents don't seem to grasp. (not saying anything about you, just pointing out that I have seen this reasoning used in various places such as the "Money as Debt" movie that is often linked to)
Anyway, the answer lies in the fact that money circulates. Any interest I get from loaning out money to you, I can use to buy goods/services from you which you in turn can use to pay back the loan.
In fact, even if you and I had an economy that consisted of a single dollar bill, we could still use that single dollar bill, you could still pay back a $10 loan if I just used that dollar bill to buy something from you every time you payed back part of the loan.
As long as loans are taken for actual investments they can be a good thing. And no, a car or house for bragging is not an investment. A second hand car that allows you to get to the job can be one however. As can a small house in a decent location be. Credit card debt however is pretty much all "bad" debt as it rarely is used for actual investments.
Atleast that was a pretty evil guy you tortured.
What about the daily quest where hungry walrus men ask you to collect innocent puppies, killing their mothers while doing so. It is pretty obvious what those hungry walrus men are going to do with the puppies. They must really like puppy meat considering that it is a daily quest.
And people do that quest repeatedly just so they can get their hands on an epic fishing pole and a penguin pet.
And what when 50% +1 of the ruler class doesn't like you in a republic? Really, only a fool thinks that a republic can handle the situation any better. In fact, in a republic it is enough to be disliked by the wrong 1% of the population.
A disliked minority is always screwed. If your minority don't provide enough of bargin measures compared to how much others dislike you, you should get the hell out. When over 50% of the population dislike you enough to want you dead, you are in trouble. Unfortunally that is the sad truth.
And please don't begin rabbling about control mechanisms and such, because that is in no way unique to republics. All modern democracies have some kind of control mechanism to prevent abuse of power, just like republics do.
There is a mechanism that protects minorities in democracies. It is the fact that there are several subjects to vote on.
Minorities can focus on protecting their most important interests and compromise in other areas. It is extremly rarely beneficial to run over a minority when you instead could get their support on a large number of issues in return for protecting their main interests.
This is also the main flaw of direct democracy where you don't have the same possibliity of negotiating. Republic also have a problem in that regard, because minorities may end up with noone representing their interests.
No, if you want the best protection for minorities you really want an indirect democracy with low limits on getting representation as that allows minorities the best possibilities for negotiation.
But then again, advertisers are one of the biggest problems and inefficencies of a capitalistic society. Trying to brainwash people using simple psychologic tricks to get them to allocate their money inefficently.
I will go out of my way to not watch ads and make sure others don't have to watch them either. It is my duty as someone who values the efficency that the free market claims to create. And I care absolutly nothing about scum like you who promote inefficency and waste of resources.
And yes, that includes google ads. I don't care if it is less annoying. It is the subtle manipulation of the mind that is the worst thing about ads. And that doesn't go away just because it is text ads instead of graphical ads. And no, I don't care that you think that YOUR product deserves that extra bit of attention, because you are no different than the multitude of other people that reason in the exact same way.
Now, MS can't really bring use these threats as effectively because people would point to the Bilski decision to counter.
Microsoft can't use those threats? Pretty much all such threats I have seen have been from Free software supporters who don't like projects like Mono or wine.
Still, there is some truth in that when such threats (whatever the source) don't have less to back them up, it does present a slight negative for Microsoft. But in reality that is a very small difference, because those threats have always been kind of paranoid.
implementing the rule of the majority always ignores the minority
Not true. That only applies if there is only one issue on the table.
Because there is no majority. There is just lots of minorities that will bargin over a large amount of issues, prioritizing the ones they feel are important, while giving way on the less important ones.
That is as long as you don't deal with a large amount of fundamentalists (or sheeps controlled by fundamentalists), because fundamentalists are by they nature uncapable of bargining because of how they see their own viewpoint as the only one.
The number one trick for regular expressions is not a regular expression at all. It is simply the habit of always using the ignore whitespace flag to format and comment your regular expressions. Code maintenance and general readability is simply a must for any real developer.
One liners are for show, not for actual usage.
If you don't give your money to the poor, they will rob you. To prevent robberies, the government should take your money and give it to them.
And it is a very good argument, because give me one reason why those worse of shouln't rob you. By transferring some money to the poor you make it less likely to happen. (while at the same time counteracting the troublematic natural flow of money from bottom to top)
Of course, you also have to provide carrots so people don't want to stay poor. Work needs to be rewarding, giving you more than you can get from simply taking a welfare check. Also, things like ensuring decent working conditions makes people more interested in working. Whatever you think, people usually like to take care of themselves. Make it easy for them to do so and they will.
Here in Sweden atleast blank ballots are counted seperatly.
And there is a big difference. Not voting means that you are lazy bum that doesn't care enough to get to your voting location. Such lazy bums are ignored, because their opinions are worthless. There is no need for politicians to cater to someone who doesn't vote. Someone who is voting blank on the other hand is not ignored, because anyone who takes the time to go to the voting location and make a blank vote will likely also vote in the next election.
A blank vote is a vote worth competing over in the next election. A non-vote is zero, nada, nothing.
Sorry, but you are wrong. I quote the page (http://www.ssb.no/ikthus/tab-2008-09-18-09.html)
"Andel av de som har brukt Internett de siste 3 måneder, etter kjønn og alder. 2. kvartal 2008. Prosent"
I am swedish not norwegian, but it roughly translates to "Share of those who have used internet in the last 3 months by gender and age. 2nd quarter 2008. Percentage.". And the column he is quoting says "Utvekslet musikk, filmer ved fildeling" which translates into "Exchanged music, movies by filesharing".
Of the 19%, 47% are the aforementioned under-age kids
No, 47% is the percentage of 16-25 years that have done filesharing in the last three months. It is NOT a split of the 47% number. So the grandparent is correct. If 47% of 16-24 year olds are filesharing, and with the mentioned overall male-female ratio it is extremly likely that young male filesharers are in a majority. And that probably stands for the combined 16-34 bracket also.
The stats become even more telling when you begin to look at the combined usage patterns. Older people are far less likely to view any media on the internet, pirated or not. The usage habit of older people is more in favor of reading news and similar activities, so they simply don't have a reason for file sharing in the first place.
True. But you can never protect idiots. It is doomed from the start.
However, modern operating systems fails to even protect people who aren't stupid. It is way too easy to get malware installed on machinem and far too difficult to remove it.
It is perfectly possible to run programs that aren't trusted. You just can't allow them to do certain things. This is the main principle of sandboxing, and a good operating system should sandbox every single application completly, unless someone with administrator privileges requests otherwise. And even such requests should only be exceptions to the sandboxing.
I am running every program I don't trust sandboxed with sandboxie. It isn't a perfect solution as it isn't as well integrated into the system as it could be. There is also the problem that I don't have a 64 bit upgrade path because Microsoft is preventing low level security programs from working on their x64 operating systems.
When I install a game I want to be able to say:
"By default you'll have access to the same things as any program and that is read access to executables/libraries and settings registered as public. I'll also grant special rights to access the internet, but because of that you won't be able to access my documents folder (even in read mode) because that would constitute a security risk."
Finally, a whitelist to authorize installation of well known libraries (DirectX, Java, etc.) would further reduce the burden of making hard security decisions.
The credit system is very inefficent (and the developers know it). It rewards waiting over actually sharing back. Especially the basic emule client where the credit system is extremly watered down. Any attempt to implement something more efficent is banned from the official forums.
Especially swarming/tit-for-tat which was the big efficency improvement of bittorrent. It is looked down upon by the offical developers. The reason I think is that they want a higher percentage of the bandwidth going to rare files instead of "trading", but that reasoning is flawed. By allowing people to trade you raise their perception of the network, making them stay online longer with higher bandwidth limits. Thereby indirectly increasing the supply of rare files.
One counterargument is that rare bittorrent files go dead, which indicates that rarity isn't rewarded. But that isn't actually true. The reason bittorrent files go dead has more to do with the centralized approach of bittorrent. The only way you can share files with bittorrent is by either finding another torrent file that contains your files, or create a new torrent file and upload it to a torrent site. Both those ways are too complicated to do all the time.
Emule on the other hand uses a file by file system, so sharing is as simple as putting it in your emule sharing folder. That is why emule and other file p2p networks have more rare files on them. Bittorrent on the other hand relies more heavily on either a permanent seeder, however small the upload, or the torrent having enough traffic that it never reaches an abandoned state. The second alternative is why you see main torrent files that group lots of files together. That reduced the chance of a torrent file getting abandoned as you have more people on it at once.
How can BitTorrent, as it's been suggested, start downloading almost immediately when eDonkey supposedly takes longer?
Noone said that it would go fast. You'll download at about the speed of your upload (and sometimes slower when it is a badly seeded torrent) which still is far better than emule. Of course, on well seeded torrents you get higher speeds as seeders contribute bandwidth without taking any.
However, the real difference between bittorrent and emule is trust in the system. Bittorrent users have a far higher trust that peers on the other side will share as sharing is rewarded by higher upload speeds. That trust leads to people in turn sharing more which reinforces that trust. A simple positive feedback effect of a good trading system.
Note, that this happens even though some people can leech. As long as most ordinary good people concieve the other side as sharing, they will go to more effort to share themselves. If that trust changes, maybe by an influx of people who just leech, then sharing will start to go down.
Contrast that with emule that claims to be a sharing network instead of trading network. What this basically means is that they pretty much don't reward sharing, and direct trading is discouraged or punished. This decreases trust in the system. Why should you share when you can't trust that the other side does. Therefore people share less and leech more.
The idea of trust is one of the basics in economics, which unfortunally is not so well understood by most, especially politicians. The goverment should stay away from things that reduce trust in the market and instead do neutral stuff (simple taxing without a myriad of exceptions) or even positive stuff that increase market trust (jailing scammer and liers as well as generally enforce laws or creating laws that make it more difficult to lie and scam)
A free market requires transparency, but Wall Street spent the last 20 years constructing very non-transparent investment "vehicles" that their rocket scientists couldn't understand
And I think you will find many free market advocates that also advocate that goverment also regulate the market to be more transparent.
Individuals on the market can profit from the whole by hiding facts and decieving others. It is one of the biggest flaws of the pure free market. Sure, you would expect such regulatory organisations to be created by the market, but it turns out that they are in turn controlled by individuals that profit by hiding things.
Of course the goverment is also individuals, so creating a regulatory institution won't do any good. What you need is simple regulatory laws that forces everyone in the market to show what they actually got.
Because what needs to be done is quite easy; move to 100% reserve requirements and market based interest rates.
With 100% reserve requirements (I am assuming you are talking about fractional reserve banking) the interest rates on savings accounts are zero (plus added fees) because loaning out that money is impossible.
Of course the "problem" with FRB (the so called creation of money) doesn't disappear because of that. It just moves to the M2 and M3 money markets instead. Any loan is a creation of money, because the one loaning out is expecting to get his money back while the loaner is getting money to spend. This isn't bad at all.
The problem occurs when money is lent out to non investments (consumption) and bad investments (speculation). And that will happen with or without an FRB economy. Atleast unless you want to completly forbid any kind of investing, which will really stop the economy.
What is worse is when the goverment rewards behavior by saving investors who did bad investments. This is called moral hazard and hurts the economic system very much by indirectly punishing good behavior.
The goverment should mostly stay out of the free market, except for enforcing a good playing field by encouraging/enforcing open books and punishing liers/scammers. Detail managing the market is called plan economy and is a recipe for failure.
The goverment should provide a safety net for those that fail so that they don't starve to death. That is simply the human thing to do. Providing extra employment opportunities in bad times to stimulate the economy and make sure resources (people) are put to work. Who should pay for this. The answer is simple, those who benefit the most from having a society that enforces property rights via law and order. That would be the richer part of the society for those who didn't get it.
Yes, the rich have earned their wealth, but that wealth only exists because the society enforces it. By taking some of it and providing for those worse of, the society remains stable. And as long as you have a proper progressive taxing system, it is still worth working more to earn more.
Did it have devastating consequences when we did base our currency on it? More so than now, I mean? I don't think so....
Actually, yes. The economies of 1800s and the early 1900s were far more unstable than nowadays.
Btw, the fiat currency isn't what is behind this crash. Speculation that caused the crash has very little to do with the currency base. Fractional reserve banking (which is possible with or without a gold standard) have a small role to play in increasing the bubble, but even with full reserve banking you are just moving loaning (a.k.a. money creation) to M2 and M3 instead and get the exact same problem.
Some regulation is important for a functioning market. At the minimum you need open detailed company books to allow any buyer on the stock market to see what he actually is buying and any lender to see who he actually is lending out to. You also need to severly and swiftly punish lying and criminal dealings, all the way from the top down to the bottom. (Selective punishment won't help)
Secrecy and lies is at the core of this crisis.
The free market used to be about both parties profiting by doing mutually benefitial trades, creating efficency. Nowadays however it has become more about trying to fool as many gullible people as possible into buying something that has little worth and that they can't afford. That is the opposite of efficency and should be punished just as harshly as violent crime, because the cost is great.
Of course, this doesn't only apply to the market only. Politicians are just as guilty. Lying through their teeth all the time. A society based on lying can go no other way than down. And that is what is happening now. Noone trusts anyone any more and that is as I said the foundation of the crisis, secrecy and lies.
Btw, the US isn't alone. This is a systematic disease throughout the whole capitalistic and political systems down to ordinary workers that are getting just as good at lying. From what I have heard it very much resembles the pre-war (20s and 30s) mentality that was so harmful and destructive. Until that mentality is changed things won't change for the better.
Which makes sense if you think those in power mainly are interested in creating artifical scarcity to maintain control. A shoplifted CD doesn't decrease scarcity, while a copied one does.
On the other hand, here in Sweden illegally obtained evidence can be used in the court of law, with a few exceptions of client privileges (communication with priests, lawyers, etc).
So even if a police officer gets fired for obtaining material illegally, you can still get found guilty in court because of that material.
Just an interesting note on how laws differ between countries.
he DMCA as currently implemented preventing legitimate content from being posted.
One problem with the US law is that fair use is in no way accuratly defined. It is in fact about as vague as you can get for a law.
First of all, the list of things failing under fair use is incomplete by using the phrase "for purposes such as". Secondly, even though something belongs to the list it can still be infringement because of the part "the factors to be considered shall include", which btw doesn't say anything about how the four listed factors should be considered.
The magic they were performing was due to their being government enterprises, thus the securities were government backed
Except of course that the securities were in no way goverment backed. Anyone who says so have either never seen one, or don't possess the reading level of a 12 year old.
I quote the title page of a Fannie Mae certificate (except that the certificate has this in capitalized letters in a big font): "The certificates and payment of principal and interest on the certificates are not guaranteed by the United States, and do not constitute a debt or obligation of the United States or any of its agencies or instrumentalities other than Fannie Mae"
Unless you've been through university on some Economics degree - you were probably unaware of this.
You mean unaware of the fact that banks lend out what you put into them? Anyone with two braincells and who notice that bank give you interest should be aware of that.
That movie is one of the biggest lies on the internet, completly misrepresenting how money flows in the economy by only showing selected parts.
Oh god. Not that crappy movie again (and I admit I was fooled by it for a while until I began to understand its deceptions). It is so wrong in many of its assertions while hiding it in a few truths of how the money system is working.
Yes, Money is debt. So what? Money is needed because you want to be able to do trades between 3 or more people where ordinary trade of goods doesn't work. As such you need an intermediate. What that intermediate is doesn't matter as long as all parties trust it.
The gold standard isn't very special and doesn't really matter that much in this context. It has some advantages and disadvantages compared to a Fiat currency but Fractional Reserve Banking (FRB) which is what the video is about works just as well under a gold standard. That you don't understand that is a clear indication that you have been fooled by the movie.
FRB is the simple idea of putting your savings (gold or fiat money) to use (earning you interest) by allowing the banker to invest them while still having a degree of availability to that money. The opposite of FRB is to put your money in the bank vault and let them rot at zero percent interest and a storage fee.
Also, just because you have a high degree of availability to your money, doesn't mean that it actually is money. A savings account is an investment just like putting your money into a ten year fond is. The banker guarantees that a certain percentage of the money will be availible in vaults, but incase of a bank run you may not be able to get yours out. (this is a slight simplification as the laws and regulations surrounding this are complex, but whenever you put money into an account that earns you interest, it should be obvious that the bank will relend your money)
Finally, to address the biggest lie in the movie, the debt+interest being greater than the total amount of money (I suppose it means M1 and not M0) doesn't result in an infinite exponential debt trap. It completly fails to take into consideration that those who lend out money also buy services and goods from those in debt. The person lending the money is betting on investing it in such a way that his production increase is higher than the interest, thereby profiting.
Of course, when you have idiots lending for consumption (including overprices houses, SUVs, gambling on financial market) instead of investing smartly you get a problem which hurts both parties in a lending transaction, but that is another issue.