I'd love to see a la carte ISP options such as these. No one buys exactly the same car model as others, many people ask for their burgers made differently. ISPs shouldn't have a problem providing for options, with maybe real-time pricing.
Imagine having a website showing your actual options enabled as of right now, along with a bandwidth use total (up/down, period of time). If you wanted a burst option, the ISP could list the price for that option and period of time, based upon current demand on your network branch, trunk and uplink. If the price sounds good, you can add a "good til expire" approval, and pay the difference.
I wouldn't want to be an ISP of any kind, since I know just how much our own internal bandwidth issues clog up the pipes in my offices. We have some high end server hardware, but nothing helps when we do large-format prints and the RIP is puking a file over 1GB to the printer. If we throttle/shape the printer traffic, the print group gets mad. Move it to its own network, and the other users get mad. It's fun to balance just 20 high-bandwidth users in a gigabit network, I can't imagine trying to handle dozens or hundreds in a megabit network.
I own an HTC Trinity P3600. Unlocked of course. I paid full price for it. No big deal, I use it for hours a day so it's saving me more in 2 months than it cost.
If you want a TyTn II, you pay $799 for it. You get the AT&T Tilt for $299. Take that sim card, put it in the TyTn II. Sell the AT&T Tilt for $500 on eBay. Net cost for a TyTn II: $799+$299-$450 = $648. Only $100 more than AT&T locked phone.
Well, you addressed one of my points, but none of the others. Something I'd also be concerned about is proving acceptance of a rule-base. If I enter your property and you show me a set of rules, but it's been doctored and doesn't cover some of your rules, how do I prove after the fact that I wasn't entirely informed as such?
Sorry, it's been a busy morning. I'll try to review your questions again.
As for someone doctoring the rule base, the mutual-feedback system provides for this, except in the case of murder, which I, nor the current law, has any solution for.
If you enter my property, and I tell you that I adhere to rule-bases 101 (main standard), 567 (promising to charge you what I quoted), and 413 (not selling your information to others), and then I renege on one of the rules, you would note that in your feedback for me. You could leave feedback saying "Did not adhere to rules."
I'm thinking that Mutual-Feedback Systems would allow for some complexity in the feedback, such as having sub-feedback groups like "Service Level," and "Commitment to rules." This would allow you to give me a possible high feedback for my service, but a low feedback for breaking the rules I stipulated to adhering to.
Also, in a Unanimocracy, nothing prevents others from providing insurance for individuals to protect themselves from negative outcomes. In the United States today, it is illegal to offer negative outcome insurance for health care. This type of insurance would completely fix the tort problems and massive lawsuits and high cost of health care. You would purchase insurance for the amount of money you'd need to overcome a negative outcome, and the doctor/provider would be rated by the insurer based on past incidents. The same insurance could be provided for you to purchase for any transaction with a rated individual or group.
Example: You want to go to Best Buy to purchase a TV. They subscribe rule base 101, but also to 1407, which says "We don't guarantee that anything will work after you leave our premises." You could call up your insurance provider (or log on to their site), pick Best Buy, and purchasing an insurance plan protecting you against a bad product or a bad service experience. You select how much money you want to be protected against, and the insurer rates Best Buy based on past insurance claims (or non-claims) and provides you with a price. You're buying a $1000 TV, and instead of relying on a government-mandated warranty, you could pick your own warranty. The insurer looks you up (no claims on electronics for 5 years), they look up Best Buy (10% claims), and they look up Samsung, the product you want to buy (6% claims), and then tell you the insurance against defect would be $100 for 5 years, or $70 for 3 years. If you didn't know which product you wanted, they'd look at ALL TVs, and give you the highest rate that covered their policy payments, say $145 due to lots of cheaply built TVs.
Society runs better as each individual is knowledgable of their current and future needs. Pushing laws to protect people's health, finances or property does little to actually create a level of protection, but it creates massive bureaucracies which cost us a lot of money silently. Look at Corn Syrup subsidies. For each $1 in corn syrup that ADM sells, society eats a cost of $10. It's a massive loss for the consumer, and the producers who want to compete with subsidized industries. The same is true of health care, police defense, and financial protection (FDIC, etc). The silent costs are usually significant, and would be greatly reduced if each individual could chose the level of protection they so desire. A poor person may want a given product or service, and since the producer/retailer would not HAVE to offer protection from loss or defect, the poor person's market is opened up significantly by reducing the "one-size fits all" mentality we have today on consumer protections.
I've dedicated a good portion of my life and future to fleshing it out. Voluntary government IS a great idea, and one that I think can work as society progresses in a direction of freedom rather than force.
First of all, there is absolutely no reason for you to care what a given person's laws are. Maybe your neighbor believes that killing women over the age of 50 is legal. If you're a woman (or a man) over 50 (or under 50), the law has no purpose for you unless you actively try to enter their property. The decision to enter a person's land would be based on your knowledge of their rules. I believe that in a Unanimocracy, we'd have rule-bases of varying degrees. Go to Burger King, and they'll notify you of the rule-bases they believe in. I truly believe that some of the most important "laws" would be set up as a standard rule base: don't kill without warning, don't steal without informing, don't yell fire without there being smoke. The most important property rules would be fleshed out as a rule-base, whereas some less popular rules may end up in a smaller rule-base for you to peruse (online?) before entering the property of another.
Secondly, the process of following rules on a given person's property would be easy to rate for each individual. I believe in mutual-rating systems, a la eBay, where two individuals who have entered into an agreement would rate each other's actions for the world to see. A public "credit report" if you will. If you come to my property for lunch, you could rate me instantly via your cell phone, and I could rate you as well (Good customer, paid his bill, tipped well). Not all interactions could be rated, but is available if both parties consent to being rated on a publicly-accessible rating service. Feedback is key to knowing if you should interact with someone else. If someone does you harm (Food was bad, price was different than quoted, they tried to kill you, etc), you could leave them negative feedback and details of what they did, for future service-buyers to see.
It sounds complicated, but in reality we all know the basics of property rights, we just forget them in some situations. In a unanimocracy, what happens if someone kills you? You're dead. You can't leave feedback. The person gets off "scott free." But how does it differ from murders in today's legislative system? How many murderers get caught? What is the penalty for the majority of murders? How does the current legal system prevent murders from taking place, and how successful is it from preventing them? The law seems to do more harm than good, preventing you and I from defending ourselves, from enforcing the rules of our property, and from securing our own liberties by accepting personal responsibility for our actions.
Democracy doesn't work. We've had them for thousands of years, and they always fail as the majority learns they can just vote to steal from the minority. Superdemocracy is even worse.
The United States Beta that was started in the late 1700's had a great idea: let there be a pseudo-democracy at the Federal level, but limit is greatly. Don't let there be an easy way for the majority to steal from the minority. It worked for a while, until the People slowly upset the restrictions provided for in the Constitution. It was a sad day when Lincoln was elected, the first tyrant of many.
The idea of voting en masse online sounds like a good idea. I recall that MajorBBS founder, the late Tim Stryker (a man I knew personally) was a big proponent of a Superdemocracy. Back then I agreed with him, until I started to realize that the failings of a nation/society generally happen because the People want more without giving more.
My own political thought is what I call a Unanimocracy: a law doesn't get passed without unanimous consent. If you can't get it at the National level, try at the State level. Keep going down the ladder of size until you might end up with a law passed only in a home, or even only by an individual who restricts themselves. Sure, it's a grandious idea, but I feel it is the only fair way to set legislation. The Internet is a great Unanimocracy, with individuals deciding what limitations they'll accept, and others forming relationships based on agreeing to those limitation. You could say that the dreaded click-contracts are similar, although they're covered by "laws" rather that voluntary contracts that can be broken by either party.
The only way I'd accept a Democracy of any kind is if there was an agreement that 10% of any voting bloc can veto any legislation they disagree with. Let 50.1% say "We want to tax tall black men to pay for education of short asian women." Let the legislation be unless 10% of the population votes VETO. That's three ways to vote: Yes, I want it. No, but I don't really care. Veto, this is bad. A 10% veto requirement would get me to support government again, because the minority has power to stop a crazy, and theft-prone, majority.
I wrote about this a year ago in terms of YouTube being a great monetizing (that's AdSense-speak) product for all involved: Google, the publisher (website), and the advertiser. Flash-based videos are hard to "ad-block" plus people are more likely to actually notice an ad if it is discretely placed and doesn't interfere with the video. I think this is a great idea.
I like AdSense, it provides a reasonable enough income (although nowhere near 30%) for the sites I edit and host, but I think it is time that Google moves into a more targeted direction.
The amount of information that AdSense ads sends to Google is astonishing -- which is one reason most geeks probably block ads. I'm a fan of blocking ads if you don't have any desire in the advertisers, and I openly support it on my sites (some of them even provide a link to ad-blocking software). For me, interested parties who click ads make me more money than uninterested parties that accidentally click ads. Win, win, win.
Yet since Google has such a vast supply of information on people who don't MIND ads, why not start putting up ads that might be of interest to the user? If "John" goes from a site about gambling to a site about sports, Google knows it -- why not start displaying ads for "John" that combine all of his possible interests? The YouTube ads can be the same -- they know where you've been, so why not combine those keywords into ads that MIGHT be more interesting to you?
Sure, it's a privacy breach already, but that's what pays the bills for the sites you're visiting freely. Not many of us are going to pay for a subscription to a site (although I pay for many), so advertising has to be what it is -- it can just get better.
I'd also like to see a user-configurable plug-in that lets a user "vote" on ads. I'm sick of seeing certain ads on certain sites, so we should have the ability to tell Google "Don't show me these anymore." The content publisher (website) may prefer those ads because they pay CPM (pays per visit, not per click), but if the visitor doesn't want to see them, isn't it in the advertiser's and the visitor's best interest to turn them off for that user?
True on both (the comma and the use of myself instead of me). Slashdot's weakness (and strength) is that you can't edit your posts, and I noticed both even after previewing and then submitting. Doh.
Luckily, I don't get paid to edit my own posts, and on the sites I do edit for my own opinion, I rely on my readers to correct me, at which point I'll go edit the article.
I was trumped here by using "irregardless" once, and since then I have never used that non-term again. Slashdot CAN help your writing skills; thanks go to the grammar nazis.
I think the opinion of "bad versus good" falls nearly directly in how in-bed the writer was with the old media. For most old media writers, their "bosses" had massive control over the distribution of their form of media, be in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and journals. This was a "good thing" because the pseudo-monopoly gave them more income. It was bad for advertisers because they never knew how many impressions their ads received, who received them, and what their return was.
I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers. I've been a writer myself since the age of 13, and a newsletter editor since I was 18. The Internet has blown open the market for myself, and the writers I've hired to "pen" articles. We now know who reads our creations, how often they return, what they think of the articles, and even who they forwarded the articles to. Our advertisers know immediately what they're getting out of us, and they also have the ability to be selective over where they advertise and what form of advertising.
The other plus is that we can focus on shorter articles with links to articles providing more material within our own site. I know a site has gained power with our audience when the monthly stats pop up showing the average visitor has gone 4-6 pages deep and stayed over 10 minutes on the site. That's a VERY successful site, and makes excellent income for us via advertisements from direct sponsors who also know they're getting a return.
For many, the downside is competition, but to me this is the best thing possible. The more people that are writing about your topic, the bigger your audience grows. If you're a "top tier" writer in a given niche, your market is growing because of your competition, and they'll eventually find you. Another downside for old media authors is the lack of editors within the new media, because the financial overhead from the previous pseudo-monopoly is lost. I think there's a HUGE market for independent editors (I actually earn some money monthly editing other people's writings), but most old media editors don't like the idea of selling themselves to a large market and seem to prefer focusing on a few writers. The potential for being an editor is so large right now that I am turning away more work than I can manage (it was never meant to be an income source, but instead a form of education for me). The massive amount of corporate blogs, e-newsletters and e-journals is astonishing, and they all need outside consultants to help formulate the clearest writing and a decent SEO.
As to supporting the application, that's bunk. I spend about 10 minutes a week TOTAL on back-end support, and I use a "do it yourself" ISP to host my sites.
I'll write until the day I die, but most of my e-writings will continue for years after. For me, that's the ultimate profit: leaving a legacy of my opinions, teachings and ideas tomorrow and for the future.
And who told you that you can't allow a competitor to run a new cable to your property? It wasn't Verizon who made a regulation making them the sole provider -- it was your local and State government. Don't be mad at Verizon because your government is completely fraudulent and corrupt -- if you vote, kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions.
What I want to know is why Covad can't run their own lines to your home themselves. Sure, copper is expensive, and so is labor to run it, but if you offer a competitive service and provide for your customers, they tend to stick with you for years and years. What's preventing Covad from just dropping their own cables city by city? Let's forget any laws that force Verizon to allow competitors to use THEIR copper, and focus on why competitors can't have THEIR OWN copper, or fiber.
We're talking about a digital world, where the medium is far less important than the codec. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, whatever -- they're all about taking digital information, decoding it, and displaying it.
Since most of our movies are XViD (including our homemade videos), we've generally stopped using disc formats entirely. If I burn the XViD to CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray, it's still the data and codec that counts, not the medium.
Yes, people want to know if a given disc will work with their player, which is one reason why we need medium formats. Yet in a relatively free market, you'd see many multi-medium drives that work with almost anything (see most $49 DVD players today), so I'm guessing the number one reason for making new medium formats is control and DRM.
Is there any market reason for worrying about the medium, rather than the CODEC?
Doesn't it make more sense to consider the theories of the earlier universal structure (say, more independent gas and particle groups) that would bring the laws of gravity into the formation of both planetary masses and solar ones?
I imagine that the formation of planets (say, from those independent gas and particle groups attracting each other to collapse into planets/suns) would be easier to understand in an earlier universal structure, and may be less evident as the universe progressed to clumping into planets, etc?
Do we have a lot of evidence of areas of our own galaxy where there still might exist these independent gas and particle clouds, versus the chance that existing massive suns and planets are throwing off the chance for these clouds to exist?
Cool. Er, where does the Wii come into this again and when do you find the time to play it?
Funny you mention that, because the extra energy the Wii introduces into our entertainment (over just couch surfing to watch TV) has enhanced our sex life significantly. The weight loss also increases our mutual attraction towards one-another, something I think would be an advantage for the typical geek physique.
So true. My wife and I still play Wii Sports for at least 30 minutes a day (usually Tennis, too). Lots of fun and decent exercise considering how much we plow into each other in the living room...
Had a PS3 for about 2 days. Boxed it up and gave it to a friend's teenage kids -- the games were just not enticing for us (30-somethings). We buy a new Wii game at least once a month (not huge spenders) and all our games get fairly equal time if you remove Wii Sports from the daily spin.
The only reason we have an X360 is for using it as a remote Media Center expansion, and for its HD capabilities which we now don't worry about since we got an HD-DVD to work with our MCE. I don't even think we have any games for X360 anymore.
I like this idea, but I think it goes in a direction of a market that is already plummeting to zero code for recorded music (used primarily as a marketing resource to get fans to come to live shows or buy hard merchandise which isn't copied as easily or at a far greater cost).
I love MeetUp.com because I think it is a great way to get to know others in your area who have similar tastes as you do. But MeetUp has a few shortcomings in terms of active financial participation of those who are part of the group, so I think it falls short of being a strong market incentive to use as a direction for bands, public speakers, and others to find markets of interest.
There are websites where people can put up money to entice someone to visit their town, but I think they don't focus well on bands and speakers. Why don't we have more of a market support for live concerts, especially since they can be a "true market" resource for financing musicians and artist? Music has nearly infinite supply in MP3 format, with just the cost of bandwidth and hosting being the limiting factor for infinite supply (therefore zero or near zero market cost). Bands who produce great music at a low or no cost can produce a big profit if they entice people to go to their shows.
Why isn't there, yet, a mechanism for bartering for live music, between fans and artists?
Example:
Radiohead says they'll go on tour in the United States. www.BookABand.com (made up site, might exist) lets all the fans put up their own money to "vote" for a venue for Radiohead to play at (or a city, instead of a specific venue). I may love Radiohead, so I'd say I'll pay $200 per ticket to see them play, preferably in a smaller venue. Note that my wife and I pay outrageous sums of money to see artists play at The Pearl at the Palms Casino in Vegas (small venue, tickets can be $250 per seat for standing room) because we like the closer quarters and the opportunity after the show to talk to the musicians. Not everyone wants to pay that money, but we love small venues, so it is worth it to us.
Others can bid say $1, or $10 or $50 or whatever they feel is a cap. If Radiohead decides to pick that town, let's say Chicago, they can log in and say they'll play Chicago if they can raise $50,000 for the show. Venues can bid based on their capacity and what cut they want. We might have 10,000 Chicago Radiohead fans bidding between $1 and $500, 10 venues bidding between 1000 capacity and 10,000 capacity for a cut of say 10-30%, and Radiohead making the final decision. When they pick a venue, the rest is automatically calculated: fans pay what they think is a viable amount to pay, and the cut off occurs at the point that the band gets their $50,000+ total, with fans below the cut-off not attending. Anyone can raise or lower their bids up to approval by the band and the venue, and the band and venue can cancel their bid as well.
Sort of a Dutch auction of sorts, but with market forces providing the final cost and service provided.
Music sales may not be dead, but they're quickly heading in that direction. For every 1 album sold online, how many are pirated, given away, played on the radio or Pandora, or distributed at no cost or charge? 5? 10? 50? It would make sense for bands to try to make as much profit as possible -- based on their fans' financial desire -- and give more of their music away as a marketing cost.
Some bands, say my brother's band Maps & Atlases, might be happy to play for only $2500 and set up 10 dates for their fans to bid on around the country. They might get 250 people willing to pay $10 each, or 500 people willing to pay between $5 and $20, with venues kicking in a negative cost (meaning they'd pay the band instead of taking a per-ticket percentage) to bid for a semi-popular band such as them.
I don't understand why you morons have so much trouble with this concept: either Apple made substantive inventions that should be rewarded, or their competitors should be able to make their own inventions with trivial ease. You can't simultaneously ridicule what people produce while crying that you can't live without getting get it for free. (See also "Music sucks and that's why I have to steal it!"...)
Because all markets are justified in the end by supply and demand, and single features or even a composite of certain features do not make a marketable product alone.
You may have the absolute greatest invention for mobile communications, but that isn't a product nor would it entice a market. To produce a marketable product requires some invention (maybe), but it also requires a good interface, a proper price, the right combination of features (both unrestricted and restricted, maybe), a marketing budget, a technical support infrastructure, a viable middleman group to sell your product, and a customer base who wants what you sell and knows about it.
Just having the absolute greatest invention does almost nothing to acquire and support the rest of what you need.
Once you put the legal mandates and regulations in place, you instantly create a monopoly that prevents other people from developing their own unique solutions. If you invent something great, you also have to work to make it unique and workable and marketable. This is where your time and risk pays off: by presenting the market with something first, and best. Others may try to compete by directly copying your product 100%, but that's part of the risk.
Plumbers in your town have to compete, and they do. Some succeed, others fail. Yes, they have licensing to keep the market restricted, but overall the competition still works best for both service producers and consumers who need that service. The licensing could be done without government-regulation, by giving consumers the opportunity to use an unlicensed plumber at a significant discount, with risk attached. The same can be true of a mobile communication device: they could buy from the originator who had a great marketing base, a great technical support base, and a history of providing an excellent product, or they could buy from a third party who copied the product completely but may not have the infrastructure needed to support the product and the customer.
When it comes to mobile communications devices, I always laugh when I see two identical $49 cell phones released at the same time, with the same general operation and look-and-feel, that have a myriad of patents pending on their designs. They're nearly identical, and yet they feel they need to use a law-provided monopoly to protect their market even though there are literally hundreds of nearly identical competitive products that all also have their own myriad of patents for whatever reason.
Here's another situation where intellectual property laws really make the market unfriendly to both consumers and producers. Apple has a fantastic interface, but it is really nothing new and exciting -- just a mashup of previous functions that have existed in human interface design for years, if not decades. Yet competitors can't mimic anything because of the outrageously inept intellectual property laws that exist in the States and the in the International Law community.
I'm anti-IP completely, but I do understand why people feel there is a basic need for some sort of anti-competition protection. Since I feel the market always provides a great balance between consumers and producers, it is legislation that ends up harming both sides.
Nokia makes a great product. I had the N80 for a few weeks when it came out, but the interface was lacking and it just didn't flow well (too sluggish, IMHO). I still use my HTC Trinity, but even there I'm not 100% happy. There's so much more I'd like to see, a mixup of various interface and software designs from Apple, Nokia, Motorola, HTC and Samsung -- yet this can't happen because it would encroach on whatever patent rights each producer has, leaving us consumer with far-less-than-perfect products, and leaving producers unable to fill what the market desires.
I tried the iPhone for a week, and it also wasn't perfect. The lack of 3G is significant, the locking to a network is ridiculous, and the overall feel of the product was great but just not cohesive enough to be my primary device. I still travel with 6+ devices (I travel at least 2-3 days a week) and I know I could combine everything into 2 devices, had it not been for the ridiculous patent laws we have today.
There's no fix to this, and if anything things will get only worse as the companies merge and bring with them even more power in convincing the State that we need MORE laws to fix a problem that is caused by too many regulations in the first place.
...to enhance that brick wall? I'm thinking maybe some sharp aluminum spikes on the face of it, and possibly a webcam or two so we can watch the violence via YouTube.
I have an older employee who handles some contracts (hourly) that has a tendency to fall asleep. He's within a decade or less of retirement, and we've caught him napping a few times in recent months (as has the customer he's usually working at). We've talked, and it definitely seems like there's a medical issue here, so it leaves us with having to just compensate the customer for any billable time where he has fallen asleep. We've considered moving him to an internal job, but he's really good at the tasks he leads, and he also works very hard otherwise. The customer is also understanding because they have realized that his productive time more than compensates for his napping time, but there's always a fear that the contract could expire over this particular issue.
I'm sure most of the people polled here are younger, but it's definitely not just a laziness issue.
Except for the radioactive elements, NONE of them decay. Now, compounds (made of multiple elements) may break apart or reform into different compounds, and various metals certainly do corrode (usually forming oxides with the oxygen in the air or something). Also, gold can be dissolved in aqua regia, so you might want to open a chemistry book sometime. Further, you can create gold (and other elements) via neutron bombardment, it's just not economical at this point in time.
I know the chemical properties of gold, and aqua regia does not destroy gold in a way that makes it difficult to return to its metallic non-solution properties. It is quite easy to extract gold from aqua regia. As for creating gold from neutron bombardment, it surely could be done (from mercury, likely the easiest candidate) but the energy requirements would be enormous. If you found a solution to the energy requirements, I'd say that society would change overnight. By having nearly unlimited energy at will, people's lives would be changed much more than if someone found a way to counterfeit gold. I'm hedging that we'll never discover a cheap way to add or subtract neutrons and protons from heavier element easily.
Which can hurt the economy, because now we have to horde gold as money instead of using it to make useful things. You know, like the gold in that computer you're using.
Which is why it makes sense to motivate more people to extract it. Of course it would be an inflationary process (possibly) but it isn't done as easily as printing a dollar or two billion.
Only? No, there are plenty of other things like that, you did better with your earlier description saying "one of the only". I mean, I have to assume you at least know of platinum (which we need for catalytic converters, among other things)...
Platinum is not easily divisible -- it is expensive to divide platinum. It is not as ductile or flexible as gold, making it a bad medium of exchange. It is not easily recognizable, it is not useful as a transitionary savings tool such as jewelry, and it does not have anywhere near the uses that gold does.
Smart people saw that coming for a long time now. There was plenty of time to adjust before each bubble popped. I mean, they were only warning about them on every single financial program...
Sure there were, and yet smart people were hampered from investing because of the asset bubbles created. When people like me (saver) want to start a business, it is hard to read a market when you have so much malinvestment.
Also, if the economy *can't* expand, it won't. I don't see how that's a good thing here.
You're saying we can only call the economy as "expanding" if prices are going up, or GDP is going up, correct? I see it differently. In a relatively fixed-reserve standard (such as gold), we could say the economy was prospering if prices were falling, making things more affordable for even the poor. Instead of having wages go from $10,000 a year to $20,000 a year in a decade, and have consumer prices go from $5 to $10, you could have wages go from $10,000 a year to $7,000 a year for commodity wages, but consumer goods go from $5 to $2. $10k/5 = 2000 affordability ratio, 10 years later $7k/2 = 3500 affordability ratio. Affordability goes up, which is a good thing.
False. Excess demand for money cripples the economy -- see the financial crisis of 1873. Haven't we been through this before?
We have, and your lies about the Panic of 1873 have been destroyed before. The reason for the Panic was DIRECTLY due to government's mishandling of the money supply, exactly the problem that I speak of. Grant decided to contract the money supply when the investors wanted to put as much as they could into railway building. It was Grant, not the investors, that created the Panic.
In fact, the more you read about the Panic, the more you see that it was the final end result to what Lincoln started with his inflationary money system that attempted to pay for the War between States. See Mises for info on how the Panic ended this game by the government.
Hoarding of currency cause deflation, which causes additional hoarding, which cause additional deflation, etc... this results in a rapidly shrinking economy where there is little to no investment or cash outlay -- leading to massive unemployment and reduced demand for consumer goods, which feeds the fire further.
Hoarding of money is the DEFINITION of deflation: removing money from the economy. It is like saying "Untying your shoelaces creates untying of shoelaces." Duh. Deflation causes the demand for money to rise, which is symbolized by merchants dropping prices. Not everyone will hold out forever as merchants drop prices, and not all merchants will drop prices because they have products that people actually do need, or do want, rather than "oooh, cool, iphone, must have must have visa visa visa." This is good for the market. Massive unemployment isn't a side effect of deflating a currency supply -- yes, wages can go down, but prices are generally going down anyway, so the net result may not be unemployment or poverty. Saving is good, spending is good, but only if it is needy or truly wanted.
Sustained slow deflation might not be a terribly bad thing, but it is nearly impossible to sustain a slow rate of deflation when hoarding without money supply adjustments is a self-catalyzing suppressant of economic activity.
But hoarding doesn't just come from sticking it under the mattress. You could "hoard" by putting it into an interest-bearing demand deposit account with 90 day turn-over (say, a CD), and have that money loaned out to the market (unusable by you for those 90 days). In fact, the entire bond market should work this way -- people asking for a loan by issuing a bond, and bondholders keeping the bond or selling it to others when they're ready to move markets.
Fiat currency always harms the poor and enriches the powerful. It has always worked this way, even before the time of Christ. Fixed currencies give the poor hope for the future, with a savings that is actually worth something. People who take in money and are comfortable in their futures tend to spend some of it, especially if prices are right.
I agree with you on some of the dangers of inflation; however, I disagree about the nature of "value" in an asset.
Oh, I definitely agree that some of the assets you listed have value to SOME individuals, but there is generally NO asset that is valuable to all individuals -- except for gold, which I can not believe that another individual would not covet or desire if offered in trade for a profitable outcome (for both parties). Tools, to me, are not positive-income assets for all. Houses can be tools (for landlords), tractors can be tools (for farmers), but they're not universal.
A tractor has substantial value not in the same way a pile of gold bricks does, but because it performs a function.
As does gold -- as a unique, and historically safe, store of wealth. I am not sure that you can pick any one generation (from beginning to end, lets say 40 years) and see gold as dropping in value from the beginning to the end of that generation. I also believe you could pick any half generation and get the same solidity, and this is over 6000 years, including multiple gold rushes.
It represents a potential income stream to a farmer, which is why a farmer might want to own one. Thus the farmer goes to a bank and takes out a loan against the tractor, in order to purchase it. For the bank to make this loan, they want to ensure that the farmer isn't an idiot, and that he'll pay back the value of the tractor either faster than it depreciates (or he has some other assets that won't depreciate as quickly, in order to secure the loan). If they think this is the case, they can then go and create a pile of 'tractor-dollars', dollars that are backed by that tractor. Those dollars only stay in the system until the farmer pays off the loan, and assuming the loan was intelligently made, there should never be more tractor-dollars sloshing around than the tractor is actually worth (either in literal terms or as an income stream).
So they loan these tractor-dollars out to the farmer, who buys said tractor from a manufacturer. Who does the manufacturer redeem said tractor-dollars to? Or are we just saying they're dollars that say "secured by a tractor" on them versus fiat?
The same holds true for a factory, or anything else that helps create an income stream. Just because it's not a stable asset doesn't mean it's valueless; as long as you can predict the depreciation, you can still use it as collateral, and if you can use it as collateral, you can use it as the basis for new money. (As long as you trust the government to enforce the lien and let the bank repossess it, of course -- the real basis for debt banking is the threat of force by people with guns.)
Sure, this is why you need to have skin in the game -- something of your own that you also put in, and not just future labor. To loan against future labor with no consequence to previous labor makes little sense if you want your investment protected.
I also agree that banks have been supremely irresponsible with their lending practices, but I don't think that full-reserve banking is really the best solution. There are rules that need substantial tightening, but there's nothing inherently wrong with letting a bank use mortgaged assets as part of its reserves, as long as the value of those assets over time is computed, the loans made accordingly, and there's a iron-hard willingness by the government to liquidate those assets in the event of a default by the borrower.
So we need MORE regulation, which will make the banking monopoly even more exclusive? I definitely don't agree.
Loaning massive funds in a full reserve banking system is quite simple, and safe, and malinvestment resistant. For example, if you wanted to buy a $150,000 house with a 30 year loan, in a full reserve banking system, not many banks would be interested in giving you money for 30 years -- this is why fractional reserve banking with the MBS/CDO investment market is so culpable in the housing bubble.
If we were stuck on a gold or silver standard, we'd be in real trouble: there just isn't that much gold or silver around to make a a very good currency. We need a currency that can grow as the amount of real assets in circulation grows -- as we as a society and civilization create more valuable stuff, we need a way to pay for it. The debt money system uses all those real assets as the basis for its value, rather than an arbitrarily chosen precious metal.
We don't need something that can grow with the economic growth of the country. If we fixed to a gold standard, prices (in gold ounces or grains) would fall softly over time -- soft price declines. This encourages people to save rather than overspend, and only spend on things they need or are sure they want. Soft price declines are GOOD and happened for thousands of years when people used gold as a medium of exchange. This also allows for proper investment as people are not pushed to invest and can watch their savings grow in value even if they hoard their gold in the mattress.
Instead, we have fiat currency inflation (which just means more money is created than destroyed) which caused soft price increases -- this gives people incentive to spend and not save, even if they don't need or are sure they want something. It also creates malinvestment as people invest "just to protect their savings."
But a house, that has real value.
No it doesn't. Buy a home and ignore it for 5 years. The yard gets destroyed, pests and mold destroy the inside, roofs fall apart, windows need replacing, carpet goes stale, dust collects. A house has declining value.
A factory has value.
I'm sure all those horse-shoe manufacturing factories in 1889 are still valuable today. I'd say they weren't valuable within 30 years.
A John Deere tractor has value.
For about 7 years, at which point it is more costly to buy used than new in terms of lost productivity.
When people borrow money to pay for these things, the money is created and the newly-created money is backed by the pledged asset. So when I buy a house for $250k, two hundred and fifty thousand new dollars are created, but those dollars are backed by my house; they are, in one sense, actually my house, floating around out there. And then I work, and pay the loan principle back, and basically suck those 'house-dollars' back out of the market and put them back into my house.
Not quite, because when you have an inflationary fiat economy, people malinvest -- they take the easy new money as quickly as it comes, and that causes prices to rise extravagently. Your $250,000 house bought in 2005 may only be worth $175,000 today -- and if it is in Southern Florda, it may be worth only $125,000. Add to that your property taxes, maintenance, utility cost, and general upkeep, and the house is a terrible investment.
With a fixed amount of gold, you'd have massive inflation/deflation cycles as prices changed in response to the amount of available currency.
Inflation just means an increase in the money supply, deflation means a decrease in the money supply. You mean price rise/price decrease. This is _good_, actually, because it benefits the non-hoarders to pick up newly repriced assets that have dropped in value when they need them most, and it benefits hoarders in watching their money become more valuable even without investing.
Where you run into serious problems are when banks start making loans to people who don't have enough real assets behind them to cover the amount of money that's being created. IMO, this should be illegal, or at the very least the banks should be held directly responsible for ensuring that the loans they're making are backed by something (real property, or an income stream). If they don't, then they're magicking money into existence that has nothing behind it, and letting it out into the market
Gold has almost no real value. You can do very little with it other than make jewelry. Yet, like fiat currency, people have become collectively convinced that it is valuable. Because of this, we spend countless resources digging it up from the ground, then burying it back underground. If we actually started USING the 95% of the worlds gold that wastes away in vaults, the value of gold would be almost nothing due to inflation (19x increase in supply).
Gold is one of the only elements that does not deteriorate (ever), is not destroyed by any acid or chemical process, nor susceptible to environmental changes (rusting, corrosion, etc). Because of this, gold DOES have massive value as one thing: a store of value.
It is hard to come by (rare) -- industry uses up about as much gold as is mined per year.
It is useful in MANY modern and ancient processes, from electronics (computers, etc) to medical uses (fillings, etc) to consumer uses (jewelry, etc). It has significant value beyond just as a store of money.
Real value is power--the ability to control other people (aka labor). Whether the medium is gold coins or paper money or tootsie pops, what you are trading when you exchange money is labor.
No, you're not. What you're exchanging is an item of value. Labor is important in the initial creation of a product but it is not the only significant "cost" of a product. Rarity, longevity, storage requirements, transportation requirements and usefulness are all valuable towards the price of a product. Labor, while important, doesn't account for value alone. Paper money can be printed at will, tootsie pops can be manufactured by the billions. Only gold has the rare aspects of its composition and rarity that make it valuable as a store of value.
Inflation does not tax the poor: They have no cash savings.
Bull. The poor have no savings because they have no incentive to save -- their savings is destroyed by inflation.
Inflation does not tax the middle class: They keep their assets in real-estate and mutual funds.
And those assets are often-times in asset bubbles because of inflation's drive to create malinvestments. See the current housing market, see the stock market in 2015.
Inflation forces everyone else to invest in something, because hoarding money isn't good for the economy.
Hoarding money IS good for the economy -- when money is "hoarded," it creates a demand for money, and a demand for money brings prices DOWN for those who are not hoarding. Inflation makes prices go up, and not everyone should invest in something. I only invest in myself.
I'm sick of all the "money is a scam" articles on the internet recently.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see a la carte ISP options such as these. No one buys exactly the same car model as others, many people ask for their burgers made differently. ISPs shouldn't have a problem providing for options, with maybe real-time pricing.
Imagine having a website showing your actual options enabled as of right now, along with a bandwidth use total (up/down, period of time). If you wanted a burst option, the ISP could list the price for that option and period of time, based upon current demand on your network branch, trunk and uplink. If the price sounds good, you can add a "good til expire" approval, and pay the difference.
I wouldn't want to be an ISP of any kind, since I know just how much our own internal bandwidth issues clog up the pipes in my offices. We have some high end server hardware, but nothing helps when we do large-format prints and the RIP is puking a file over 1GB to the printer. If we throttle/shape the printer traffic, the print group gets mad. Move it to its own network, and the other users get mad. It's fun to balance just 20 high-bandwidth users in a gigabit network, I can't imagine trying to handle dozens or hundreds in a megabit network.
I own an HTC Trinity P3600. Unlocked of course. I paid full price for it. No big deal, I use it for hours a day so it's saving me more in 2 months than it cost.
If you want a TyTn II, you pay $799 for it. You get the AT&T Tilt for $299. Take that sim card, put it in the TyTn II. Sell the AT&T Tilt for $500 on eBay. Net cost for a TyTn II: $799+$299-$450 = $648. Only $100 more than AT&T locked phone.
Well, you addressed one of my points, but none of the others. Something I'd also be concerned about is proving acceptance of a rule-base. If I enter your property and you show me a set of rules, but it's been doctored and doesn't cover some of your rules, how do I prove after the fact that I wasn't entirely informed as such?
Sorry, it's been a busy morning. I'll try to review your questions again.
As for someone doctoring the rule base, the mutual-feedback system provides for this, except in the case of murder, which I, nor the current law, has any solution for.
If you enter my property, and I tell you that I adhere to rule-bases 101 (main standard), 567 (promising to charge you what I quoted), and 413 (not selling your information to others), and then I renege on one of the rules, you would note that in your feedback for me. You could leave feedback saying "Did not adhere to rules."
I'm thinking that Mutual-Feedback Systems would allow for some complexity in the feedback, such as having sub-feedback groups like "Service Level," and "Commitment to rules." This would allow you to give me a possible high feedback for my service, but a low feedback for breaking the rules I stipulated to adhering to.
Also, in a Unanimocracy, nothing prevents others from providing insurance for individuals to protect themselves from negative outcomes. In the United States today, it is illegal to offer negative outcome insurance for health care. This type of insurance would completely fix the tort problems and massive lawsuits and high cost of health care. You would purchase insurance for the amount of money you'd need to overcome a negative outcome, and the doctor/provider would be rated by the insurer based on past incidents. The same insurance could be provided for you to purchase for any transaction with a rated individual or group.
Example: You want to go to Best Buy to purchase a TV. They subscribe rule base 101, but also to 1407, which says "We don't guarantee that anything will work after you leave our premises." You could call up your insurance provider (or log on to their site), pick Best Buy, and purchasing an insurance plan protecting you against a bad product or a bad service experience. You select how much money you want to be protected against, and the insurer rates Best Buy based on past insurance claims (or non-claims) and provides you with a price. You're buying a $1000 TV, and instead of relying on a government-mandated warranty, you could pick your own warranty. The insurer looks you up (no claims on electronics for 5 years), they look up Best Buy (10% claims), and they look up Samsung, the product you want to buy (6% claims), and then tell you the insurance against defect would be $100 for 5 years, or $70 for 3 years. If you didn't know which product you wanted, they'd look at ALL TVs, and give you the highest rate that covered their policy payments, say $145 due to lots of cheaply built TVs.
Society runs better as each individual is knowledgable of their current and future needs. Pushing laws to protect people's health, finances or property does little to actually create a level of protection, but it creates massive bureaucracies which cost us a lot of money silently. Look at Corn Syrup subsidies. For each $1 in corn syrup that ADM sells, society eats a cost of $10. It's a massive loss for the consumer, and the producers who want to compete with subsidized industries. The same is true of health care, police defense, and financial protection (FDIC, etc). The silent costs are usually significant, and would be greatly reduced if each individual could chose the level of protection they so desire. A poor person may want a given product or service, and since the producer/retailer would not HAVE to offer protection from loss or defect, the poor person's market is opened up significantly by reducing the "one-size fits all" mentality we have today on consumer protections.
I've dedicated a good portion of my life and future to fleshing it out. Voluntary government IS a great idea, and one that I think can work as society progresses in a direction of freedom rather than force.
First of all, there is absolutely no reason for you to care what a given person's laws are. Maybe your neighbor believes that killing women over the age of 50 is legal. If you're a woman (or a man) over 50 (or under 50), the law has no purpose for you unless you actively try to enter their property. The decision to enter a person's land would be based on your knowledge of their rules. I believe that in a Unanimocracy, we'd have rule-bases of varying degrees. Go to Burger King, and they'll notify you of the rule-bases they believe in. I truly believe that some of the most important "laws" would be set up as a standard rule base: don't kill without warning, don't steal without informing, don't yell fire without there being smoke. The most important property rules would be fleshed out as a rule-base, whereas some less popular rules may end up in a smaller rule-base for you to peruse (online?) before entering the property of another.
Secondly, the process of following rules on a given person's property would be easy to rate for each individual. I believe in mutual-rating systems, a la eBay, where two individuals who have entered into an agreement would rate each other's actions for the world to see. A public "credit report" if you will. If you come to my property for lunch, you could rate me instantly via your cell phone, and I could rate you as well (Good customer, paid his bill, tipped well). Not all interactions could be rated, but is available if both parties consent to being rated on a publicly-accessible rating service. Feedback is key to knowing if you should interact with someone else. If someone does you harm (Food was bad, price was different than quoted, they tried to kill you, etc), you could leave them negative feedback and details of what they did, for future service-buyers to see.
It sounds complicated, but in reality we all know the basics of property rights, we just forget them in some situations. In a unanimocracy, what happens if someone kills you? You're dead. You can't leave feedback. The person gets off "scott free." But how does it differ from murders in today's legislative system? How many murderers get caught? What is the penalty for the majority of murders? How does the current legal system prevent murders from taking place, and how successful is it from preventing them? The law seems to do more harm than good, preventing you and I from defending ourselves, from enforcing the rules of our property, and from securing our own liberties by accepting personal responsibility for our actions.
Democracy doesn't work. We've had them for thousands of years, and they always fail as the majority learns they can just vote to steal from the minority. Superdemocracy is even worse.
The United States Beta that was started in the late 1700's had a great idea: let there be a pseudo-democracy at the Federal level, but limit is greatly. Don't let there be an easy way for the majority to steal from the minority. It worked for a while, until the People slowly upset the restrictions provided for in the Constitution. It was a sad day when Lincoln was elected, the first tyrant of many.
The idea of voting en masse online sounds like a good idea. I recall that MajorBBS founder, the late Tim Stryker (a man I knew personally) was a big proponent of a Superdemocracy. Back then I agreed with him, until I started to realize that the failings of a nation/society generally happen because the People want more without giving more.
My own political thought is what I call a Unanimocracy: a law doesn't get passed without unanimous consent. If you can't get it at the National level, try at the State level. Keep going down the ladder of size until you might end up with a law passed only in a home, or even only by an individual who restricts themselves. Sure, it's a grandious idea, but I feel it is the only fair way to set legislation. The Internet is a great Unanimocracy, with individuals deciding what limitations they'll accept, and others forming relationships based on agreeing to those limitation. You could say that the dreaded click-contracts are similar, although they're covered by "laws" rather that voluntary contracts that can be broken by either party.
The only way I'd accept a Democracy of any kind is if there was an agreement that 10% of any voting bloc can veto any legislation they disagree with. Let 50.1% say "We want to tax tall black men to pay for education of short asian women." Let the legislation be unless 10% of the population votes VETO. That's three ways to vote: Yes, I want it. No, but I don't really care. Veto, this is bad. A 10% veto requirement would get me to support government again, because the minority has power to stop a crazy, and theft-prone, majority.
...Rick Wakeman and Bill Bruford that their copyright is being violated.
Although I would support maybe the following domain names:
HeatoftheMoment.Asia
TheSmileHasLeftYourEyes.Asia
I wrote about this a year ago in terms of YouTube being a great monetizing (that's AdSense-speak) product for all involved: Google, the publisher (website), and the advertiser. Flash-based videos are hard to "ad-block" plus people are more likely to actually notice an ad if it is discretely placed and doesn't interfere with the video. I think this is a great idea.
I like AdSense, it provides a reasonable enough income (although nowhere near 30%) for the sites I edit and host, but I think it is time that Google moves into a more targeted direction.
The amount of information that AdSense ads sends to Google is astonishing -- which is one reason most geeks probably block ads. I'm a fan of blocking ads if you don't have any desire in the advertisers, and I openly support it on my sites (some of them even provide a link to ad-blocking software). For me, interested parties who click ads make me more money than uninterested parties that accidentally click ads. Win, win, win.
Yet since Google has such a vast supply of information on people who don't MIND ads, why not start putting up ads that might be of interest to the user? If "John" goes from a site about gambling to a site about sports, Google knows it -- why not start displaying ads for "John" that combine all of his possible interests? The YouTube ads can be the same -- they know where you've been, so why not combine those keywords into ads that MIGHT be more interesting to you?
Sure, it's a privacy breach already, but that's what pays the bills for the sites you're visiting freely. Not many of us are going to pay for a subscription to a site (although I pay for many), so advertising has to be what it is -- it can just get better.
I'd also like to see a user-configurable plug-in that lets a user "vote" on ads. I'm sick of seeing certain ads on certain sites, so we should have the ability to tell Google "Don't show me these anymore." The content publisher (website) may prefer those ads because they pay CPM (pays per visit, not per click), but if the visitor doesn't want to see them, isn't it in the advertiser's and the visitor's best interest to turn them off for that user?
True on both (the comma and the use of myself instead of me). Slashdot's weakness (and strength) is that you can't edit your posts, and I noticed both even after previewing and then submitting. Doh.
Luckily, I don't get paid to edit my own posts, and on the sites I do edit for my own opinion, I rely on my readers to correct me, at which point I'll go edit the article.
I was trumped here by using "irregardless" once, and since then I have never used that non-term again. Slashdot CAN help your writing skills; thanks go to the grammar nazis.
I think the opinion of "bad versus good" falls nearly directly in how in-bed the writer was with the old media. For most old media writers, their
"bosses" had massive control over the distribution of their form of media, be in newspapers, magazines, newsletters and journals. This was a "good thing" because the pseudo-monopoly gave them more income. It was bad for advertisers because they never knew how many impressions their ads received, who received them, and what their return was.
I'm a firm believer that the Internet is GOOD for writers. I've been a writer myself since the age of 13, and a newsletter editor since I was 18. The Internet has blown open the market for myself, and the writers I've hired to "pen" articles. We now know who reads our creations, how often they return, what they think of the articles, and even who they forwarded the articles to. Our advertisers know immediately what they're getting out of us, and they also have the ability to be selective over where they advertise and what form of advertising.
The other plus is that we can focus on shorter articles with links to articles providing more material within our own site. I know a site has gained power with our audience when the monthly stats pop up showing the average visitor has gone 4-6 pages deep and stayed over 10 minutes on the site. That's a VERY successful site, and makes excellent income for us via advertisements from direct sponsors who also know they're getting a return.
For many, the downside is competition, but to me this is the best thing possible. The more people that are writing about your topic, the bigger your audience grows. If you're a "top tier" writer in a given niche, your market is growing because of your competition, and they'll eventually find you. Another downside for old media authors is the lack of editors within the new media, because the financial overhead from the previous pseudo-monopoly is lost. I think there's a HUGE market for independent editors (I actually earn some money monthly editing other people's writings), but most old media editors don't like the idea of selling themselves to a large market and seem to prefer focusing on a few writers. The potential for being an editor is so large right now that I am turning away more work than I can manage (it was never meant to be an income source, but instead a form of education for me). The massive amount of corporate blogs, e-newsletters and e-journals is astonishing, and they all need outside consultants to help formulate the clearest writing and a decent SEO.
As to supporting the application, that's bunk. I spend about 10 minutes a week TOTAL on back-end support, and I use a "do it yourself" ISP to host my sites.
I'll write until the day I die, but most of my e-writings will continue for years after. For me, that's the ultimate profit: leaving a legacy of my opinions, teachings and ideas tomorrow and for the future.
And who told you that you can't allow a competitor to run a new cable to your property? It wasn't Verizon who made a regulation making them the sole provider -- it was your local and State government. Don't be mad at Verizon because your government is completely fraudulent and corrupt -- if you vote, kick everyone out on the next election, and keep doing it until someone removes the monopoly provisions.
What I want to know is why Covad can't run their own lines to your home themselves. Sure, copper is expensive, and so is labor to run it, but if you offer a competitive service and provide for your customers, they tend to stick with you for years and years. What's preventing Covad from just dropping their own cables city by city? Let's forget any laws that force Verizon to allow competitors to use THEIR copper, and focus on why competitors can't have THEIR OWN copper, or fiber.
We're talking about a digital world, where the medium is far less important than the codec. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, whatever -- they're all about taking digital information, decoding it, and displaying it.
Since most of our movies are XViD (including our homemade videos), we've generally stopped using disc formats entirely. If I burn the XViD to CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray, it's still the data and codec that counts, not the medium.
Yes, people want to know if a given disc will work with their player, which is one reason why we need medium formats. Yet in a relatively free market, you'd see many multi-medium drives that work with almost anything (see most $49 DVD players today), so I'm guessing the number one reason for making new medium formats is control and DRM.
Is there any market reason for worrying about the medium, rather than the CODEC?
Doesn't it make more sense to consider the theories of the earlier universal structure (say, more independent gas and particle groups) that would bring the laws of gravity into the formation of both planetary masses and solar ones?
I imagine that the formation of planets (say, from those independent gas and particle groups attracting each other to collapse into planets/suns) would be easier to understand in an earlier universal structure, and may be less evident as the universe progressed to clumping into planets, etc?
Do we have a lot of evidence of areas of our own galaxy where there still might exist these independent gas and particle clouds, versus the chance that existing massive suns and planets are throwing off the chance for these clouds to exist?
Cool. Er, where does the Wii come into this again and when do you find the time to play it?
Funny you mention that, because the extra energy the Wii introduces into our entertainment (over just couch surfing to watch TV) has enhanced our sex life significantly. The weight loss also increases our mutual attraction towards one-another, something I think would be an advantage for the typical geek physique.
So true. My wife and I still play Wii Sports for at least 30 minutes a day (usually Tennis, too). Lots of fun and decent exercise considering how much we plow into each other in the living room...
Had a PS3 for about 2 days. Boxed it up and gave it to a friend's teenage kids -- the games were just not enticing for us (30-somethings). We buy a new Wii game at least once a month (not huge spenders) and all our games get fairly equal time if you remove Wii Sports from the daily spin.
The only reason we have an X360 is for using it as a remote Media Center expansion, and for its HD capabilities which we now don't worry about since we got an HD-DVD to work with our MCE. I don't even think we have any games for X360 anymore.
I like this idea, but I think it goes in a direction of a market that is already plummeting to zero code for recorded music (used primarily as a marketing resource to get fans to come to live shows or buy hard merchandise which isn't copied as easily or at a far greater cost).
I love MeetUp.com because I think it is a great way to get to know others in your area who have similar tastes as you do. But MeetUp has a few shortcomings in terms of active financial participation of those who are part of the group, so I think it falls short of being a strong market incentive to use as a direction for bands, public speakers, and others to find markets of interest.
There are websites where people can put up money to entice someone to visit their town, but I think they don't focus well on bands and speakers. Why don't we have more of a market support for live concerts, especially since they can be a "true market" resource for financing musicians and artist? Music has nearly infinite supply in MP3 format, with just the cost of bandwidth and hosting being the limiting factor for infinite supply (therefore zero or near zero market cost). Bands who produce great music at a low or no cost can produce a big profit if they entice people to go to their shows.
Why isn't there, yet, a mechanism for bartering for live music, between fans and artists?
Example:
Radiohead says they'll go on tour in the United States. www.BookABand.com (made up site, might exist) lets all the fans put up their own money to "vote" for a venue for Radiohead to play at (or a city, instead of a specific venue). I may love Radiohead, so I'd say I'll pay $200 per ticket to see them play, preferably in a smaller venue. Note that my wife and I pay outrageous sums of money to see artists play at The Pearl at the Palms Casino in Vegas (small venue, tickets can be $250 per seat for standing room) because we like the closer quarters and the opportunity after the show to talk to the musicians. Not everyone wants to pay that money, but we love small venues, so it is worth it to us.
Others can bid say $1, or $10 or $50 or whatever they feel is a cap. If Radiohead decides to pick that town, let's say Chicago, they can log in and say they'll play Chicago if they can raise $50,000 for the show. Venues can bid based on their capacity and what cut they want. We might have 10,000 Chicago Radiohead fans bidding between $1 and $500, 10 venues bidding between 1000 capacity and 10,000 capacity for a cut of say 10-30%, and Radiohead making the final decision. When they pick a venue, the rest is automatically calculated: fans pay what they think is a viable amount to pay, and the cut off occurs at the point that the band gets their $50,000+ total, with fans below the cut-off not attending. Anyone can raise or lower their bids up to approval by the band and the venue, and the band and venue can cancel their bid as well.
Sort of a Dutch auction of sorts, but with market forces providing the final cost and service provided.
Music sales may not be dead, but they're quickly heading in that direction. For every 1 album sold online, how many are pirated, given away, played on the radio or Pandora, or distributed at no cost or charge? 5? 10? 50? It would make sense for bands to try to make as much profit as possible -- based on their fans' financial desire -- and give more of their music away as a marketing cost.
Some bands, say my brother's band Maps & Atlases, might be happy to play for only $2500 and set up 10 dates for their fans to bid on around the country. They might get 250 people willing to pay $10 each, or 500 people willing to pay between $5 and $20, with venues kicking in a negative cost (meaning they'd pay the band instead of taking a per-ticket percentage) to bid for a semi-popular band such as them.
I don't understand why you morons have so much trouble with this concept: either Apple made substantive inventions that should be rewarded, or their competitors should be able to make their own inventions with trivial ease. You can't simultaneously ridicule what people produce while crying that you can't live without getting get it for free. (See also "Music sucks and that's why I have to steal it!"...)
Because all markets are justified in the end by supply and demand, and single features or even a composite of certain features do not make a marketable product alone.
You may have the absolute greatest invention for mobile communications, but that isn't a product nor would it entice a market. To produce a marketable product requires some invention (maybe), but it also requires a good interface, a proper price, the right combination of features (both unrestricted and restricted, maybe), a marketing budget, a technical support infrastructure, a viable middleman group to sell your product, and a customer base who wants what you sell and knows about it.
Just having the absolute greatest invention does almost nothing to acquire and support the rest of what you need.
Once you put the legal mandates and regulations in place, you instantly create a monopoly that prevents other people from developing their own unique solutions. If you invent something great, you also have to work to make it unique and workable and marketable. This is where your time and risk pays off: by presenting the market with something first, and best. Others may try to compete by directly copying your product 100%, but that's part of the risk.
Plumbers in your town have to compete, and they do. Some succeed, others fail. Yes, they have licensing to keep the market restricted, but overall the competition still works best for both service producers and consumers who need that service. The licensing could be done without government-regulation, by giving consumers the opportunity to use an unlicensed plumber at a significant discount, with risk attached. The same can be true of a mobile communication device: they could buy from the originator who had a great marketing base, a great technical support base, and a history of providing an excellent product, or they could buy from a third party who copied the product completely but may not have the infrastructure needed to support the product and the customer.
When it comes to mobile communications devices, I always laugh when I see two identical $49 cell phones released at the same time, with the same general operation and look-and-feel, that have a myriad of patents pending on their designs. They're nearly identical, and yet they feel they need to use a law-provided monopoly to protect their market even though there are literally hundreds of nearly identical competitive products that all also have their own myriad of patents for whatever reason.
Here's another situation where intellectual property laws really make the market unfriendly to both consumers and producers. Apple has a fantastic interface, but it is really nothing new and exciting -- just a mashup of previous functions that have existed in human interface design for years, if not decades. Yet competitors can't mimic anything because of the outrageously inept intellectual property laws that exist in the States and the in the International Law community.
I'm anti-IP completely, but I do understand why people feel there is a basic need for some sort of anti-competition protection. Since I feel the market always provides a great balance between consumers and producers, it is legislation that ends up harming both sides.
Nokia makes a great product. I had the N80 for a few weeks when it came out, but the interface was lacking and it just didn't flow well (too sluggish, IMHO). I still use my HTC Trinity, but even there I'm not 100% happy. There's so much more I'd like to see, a mixup of various interface and software designs from Apple, Nokia, Motorola, HTC and Samsung -- yet this can't happen because it would encroach on whatever patent rights each producer has, leaving us consumer with far-less-than-perfect products, and leaving producers unable to fill what the market desires.
I tried the iPhone for a week, and it also wasn't perfect. The lack of 3G is significant, the locking to a network is ridiculous, and the overall feel of the product was great but just not cohesive enough to be my primary device. I still travel with 6+ devices (I travel at least 2-3 days a week) and I know I could combine everything into 2 devices, had it not been for the ridiculous patent laws we have today.
There's no fix to this, and if anything things will get only worse as the companies merge and bring with them even more power in convincing the State that we need MORE laws to fix a problem that is caused by too many regulations in the first place.
...to enhance that brick wall? I'm thinking maybe some sharp aluminum spikes on the face of it, and possibly a webcam or two so we can watch the violence via YouTube.
I have an older employee who handles some contracts (hourly) that has a tendency to fall asleep. He's within a decade or less of retirement, and we've caught him napping a few times in recent months (as has the customer he's usually working at). We've talked, and it definitely seems like there's a medical issue here, so it leaves us with having to just compensate the customer for any billable time where he has fallen asleep. We've considered moving him to an internal job, but he's really good at the tasks he leads, and he also works very hard otherwise. The customer is also understanding because they have realized that his productive time more than compensates for his napping time, but there's always a fear that the contract could expire over this particular issue.
I'm sure most of the people polled here are younger, but it's definitely not just a laziness issue.
Except for the radioactive elements, NONE of them decay. Now, compounds (made of multiple elements) may break apart or reform into different compounds, and various metals certainly do corrode (usually forming oxides with the oxygen in the air or something). Also, gold can be dissolved in aqua regia, so you might want to open a chemistry book sometime. Further, you can create gold (and other elements) via neutron bombardment, it's just not economical at this point in time.
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I know the chemical properties of gold, and aqua regia does not destroy gold in a way that makes it difficult to return to its metallic non-solution properties. It is quite easy to extract gold from aqua regia. As for creating gold from neutron bombardment, it surely could be done (from mercury, likely the easiest candidate) but the energy requirements would be enormous. If you found a solution to the energy requirements, I'd say that society would change overnight. By having nearly unlimited energy at will, people's lives would be changed much more than if someone found a way to counterfeit gold. I'm hedging that we'll never discover a cheap way to add or subtract neutrons and protons from heavier element easily.
Which can hurt the economy, because now we have to horde gold as money instead of using it to make useful things. You know, like the gold in that computer you're using.
Which is why it makes sense to motivate more people to extract it. Of course it would be an inflationary process (possibly) but it isn't done as easily as printing a dollar or two billion.
Only? No, there are plenty of other things like that, you did better with your earlier description saying "one of the only". I mean, I have to assume you at least know of platinum (which we need for catalytic converters, among other things)
Platinum is not easily divisible -- it is expensive to divide platinum. It is not as ductile or flexible as gold, making it a bad medium of exchange. It is not easily recognizable, it is not useful as a transitionary savings tool such as jewelry, and it does not have anywhere near the uses that gold does.
Smart people saw that coming for a long time now. There was plenty of time to adjust before each bubble popped. I mean, they were only warning about them on every single financial program...
Sure there were, and yet smart people were hampered from investing because of the asset bubbles created. When people like me (saver) want to start a business, it is hard to read a market when you have so much malinvestment.
Also, if the economy *can't* expand, it won't. I don't see how that's a good thing here.
You're saying we can only call the economy as "expanding" if prices are going up, or GDP is going up, correct? I see it differently. In a relatively fixed-reserve standard (such as gold), we could say the economy was prospering if prices were falling, making things more affordable for even the poor. Instead of having wages go from $10,000 a year to $20,000 a year in a decade, and have consumer prices go from $5 to $10, you could have wages go from $10,000 a year to $7,000 a year for commodity wages, but consumer goods go from $5 to $2. $10k/5 = 2000 affordability ratio, 10 years later $7k/2 = 3500 affordability ratio. Affordability goes up, which is a good thing.
False. Excess demand for money cripples the economy -- see the financial crisis of 1873. Haven't we been through this before?
We have, and your lies about the Panic of 1873 have been destroyed before. The reason for the Panic was DIRECTLY due to government's mishandling of the money supply, exactly the problem that I speak of. Grant decided to contract the money supply when the investors wanted to put as much as they could into railway building. It was Grant, not the investors, that created the Panic.
In fact, the more you read about the Panic, the more you see that it was the final end result to what Lincoln started with his inflationary money system that attempted to pay for the War between States. See Mises for info on how the Panic ended this game by the government.
Hoarding of currency cause deflation, which causes additional hoarding, which cause additional deflation, etc... this results in a rapidly shrinking economy where there is little to no investment or cash outlay -- leading to massive unemployment and reduced demand for consumer goods, which feeds the fire further.
Hoarding of money is the DEFINITION of deflation: removing money from the economy. It is like saying "Untying your shoelaces creates untying of shoelaces." Duh. Deflation causes the demand for money to rise, which is symbolized by merchants dropping prices. Not everyone will hold out forever as merchants drop prices, and not all merchants will drop prices because they have products that people actually do need, or do want, rather than "oooh, cool, iphone, must have must have visa visa visa." This is good for the market. Massive unemployment isn't a side effect of deflating a currency supply -- yes, wages can go down, but prices are generally going down anyway, so the net result may not be unemployment or poverty. Saving is good, spending is good, but only if it is needy or truly wanted.
Sustained slow deflation might not be a terribly bad thing, but it is nearly impossible to sustain a slow rate of deflation when hoarding without money supply adjustments is a self-catalyzing suppressant of economic activity.
But hoarding doesn't just come from sticking it under the mattress. You could "hoard" by putting it into an interest-bearing demand deposit account with 90 day turn-over (say, a CD), and have that money loaned out to the market (unusable by you for those 90 days). In fact, the entire bond market should work this way -- people asking for a loan by issuing a bond, and bondholders keeping the bond or selling it to others when they're ready to move markets.
Fiat currency always harms the poor and enriches the powerful. It has always worked this way, even before the time of Christ. Fixed currencies give the poor hope for the future, with a savings that is actually worth something. People who take in money and are comfortable in their futures tend to spend some of it, especially if prices are right.
I agree with you on some of the dangers of inflation; however, I disagree about the nature of "value" in an asset.
Oh, I definitely agree that some of the assets you listed have value to SOME individuals, but there is generally NO asset that is valuable to all individuals -- except for gold, which I can not believe that another individual would not covet or desire if offered in trade for a profitable outcome (for both parties). Tools, to me, are not positive-income assets for all. Houses can be tools (for landlords), tractors can be tools (for farmers), but they're not universal.
A tractor has substantial value not in the same way a pile of gold bricks does, but because it performs a function.
As does gold -- as a unique, and historically safe, store of wealth. I am not sure that you can pick any one generation (from beginning to end, lets say 40 years) and see gold as dropping in value from the beginning to the end of that generation. I also believe you could pick any half generation and get the same solidity, and this is over 6000 years, including multiple gold rushes.
It represents a potential income stream to a farmer, which is why a farmer might want to own one. Thus the farmer goes to a bank and takes out a loan against the tractor, in order to purchase it. For the bank to make this loan, they want to ensure that the farmer isn't an idiot, and that he'll pay back the value of the tractor either faster than it depreciates (or he has some other assets that won't depreciate as quickly, in order to secure the loan). If they think this is the case, they can then go and create a pile of 'tractor-dollars', dollars that are backed by that tractor. Those dollars only stay in the system until the farmer pays off the loan, and assuming the loan was intelligently made, there should never be more tractor-dollars sloshing around than the tractor is actually worth (either in literal terms or as an income stream).
So they loan these tractor-dollars out to the farmer, who buys said tractor from a manufacturer. Who does the manufacturer redeem said tractor-dollars to? Or are we just saying they're dollars that say "secured by a tractor" on them versus fiat?
The same holds true for a factory, or anything else that helps create an income stream. Just because it's not a stable asset doesn't mean it's valueless; as long as you can predict the depreciation, you can still use it as collateral, and if you can use it as collateral, you can use it as the basis for new money. (As long as you trust the government to enforce the lien and let the bank repossess it, of course -- the real basis for debt banking is the threat of force by people with guns.)
Sure, this is why you need to have skin in the game -- something of your own that you also put in, and not just future labor. To loan against future labor with no consequence to previous labor makes little sense if you want your investment protected.
I also agree that banks have been supremely irresponsible with their lending practices, but I don't think that full-reserve banking is really the best solution. There are rules that need substantial tightening, but there's nothing inherently wrong with letting a bank use mortgaged assets as part of its reserves, as long as the value of those assets over time is computed, the loans made accordingly, and there's a iron-hard willingness by the government to liquidate those assets in the event of a default by the borrower.
So we need MORE regulation, which will make the banking monopoly even more exclusive? I definitely don't agree.
Loaning massive funds in a full reserve banking system is quite simple, and safe, and malinvestment resistant. For example, if you wanted to buy a $150,000 house with a 30 year loan, in a full reserve banking system, not many banks would be interested in giving you money for 30 years -- this is why fractional reserve banking with the MBS/CDO investment market is so culpable in the housing bubble.
Instead, i
If we were stuck on a gold or silver standard, we'd be in real trouble: there just isn't that much gold or silver around to make a a very good currency. We need a currency that can grow as the amount of real assets in circulation grows -- as we as a society and civilization create more valuable stuff, we need a way to pay for it. The debt money system uses all those real assets as the basis for its value, rather than an arbitrarily chosen precious metal.
We don't need something that can grow with the economic growth of the country. If we fixed to a gold standard, prices (in gold ounces or grains) would fall softly over time -- soft price declines. This encourages people to save rather than overspend, and only spend on things they need or are sure they want. Soft price declines are GOOD and happened for thousands of years when people used gold as a medium of exchange. This also allows for proper investment as people are not pushed to invest and can watch their savings grow in value even if they hoard their gold in the mattress.
Instead, we have fiat currency inflation (which just means more money is created than destroyed) which caused soft price increases -- this gives people incentive to spend and not save, even if they don't need or are sure they want something. It also creates malinvestment as people invest "just to protect their savings."
But a house, that has real value.
No it doesn't. Buy a home and ignore it for 5 years. The yard gets destroyed, pests and mold destroy the inside, roofs fall apart, windows need replacing, carpet goes stale, dust collects. A house has declining value.
A factory has value.
I'm sure all those horse-shoe manufacturing factories in 1889 are still valuable today. I'd say they weren't valuable within 30 years.
A John Deere tractor has value.
For about 7 years, at which point it is more costly to buy used than new in terms of lost productivity.
When people borrow money to pay for these things, the money is created and the newly-created money is backed by the pledged asset. So when I buy a house for $250k, two hundred and fifty thousand new dollars are created, but those dollars are backed by my house; they are, in one sense, actually my house, floating around out there. And then I work, and pay the loan principle back, and basically suck those 'house-dollars' back out of the market and put them back into my house.
Not quite, because when you have an inflationary fiat economy, people malinvest -- they take the easy new money as quickly as it comes, and that causes prices to rise extravagently. Your $250,000 house bought in 2005 may only be worth $175,000 today -- and if it is in Southern Florda, it may be worth only $125,000. Add to that your property taxes, maintenance, utility cost, and general upkeep, and the house is a terrible investment.
With a fixed amount of gold, you'd have massive inflation/deflation cycles as prices changed in response to the amount of available currency.
Inflation just means an increase in the money supply, deflation means a decrease in the money supply. You mean price rise/price decrease. This is _good_, actually, because it benefits the non-hoarders to pick up newly repriced assets that have dropped in value when they need them most, and it benefits hoarders in watching their money become more valuable even without investing.
Where you run into serious problems are when banks start making loans to people who don't have enough real assets behind them to cover the amount of money that's being created. IMO, this should be illegal, or at the very least the banks should be held directly responsible for ensuring that the loans they're making are backed by something (real property, or an income stream). If they don't, then they're magicking money into existence that has nothing behind it, and letting it out into the market
Gold has almost no real value. You can do very little with it other than make jewelry. Yet, like fiat currency, people have become collectively convinced that it is valuable. Because of this, we spend countless resources digging it up from the ground, then burying it back underground. If we actually started USING the 95% of the worlds gold that wastes away in vaults, the value of gold would be almost nothing due to inflation (19x increase in supply).
Gold is one of the only elements that does not deteriorate (ever), is not destroyed by any acid or chemical process, nor susceptible to environmental changes (rusting, corrosion, etc). Because of this, gold DOES have massive value as one thing: a store of value.
It is hard to come by (rare) -- industry uses up about as much gold as is mined per year.
It is useful in MANY modern and ancient processes, from electronics (computers, etc) to medical uses (fillings, etc) to consumer uses (jewelry, etc). It has significant value beyond just as a store of money.
Real value is power--the ability to control other people (aka labor). Whether the medium is gold coins or paper money or tootsie pops, what you are trading when you exchange money is labor.
No, you're not. What you're exchanging is an item of value. Labor is important in the initial creation of a product but it is not the only significant "cost" of a product. Rarity, longevity, storage requirements, transportation requirements and usefulness are all valuable towards the price of a product. Labor, while important, doesn't account for value alone. Paper money can be printed at will, tootsie pops can be manufactured by the billions. Only gold has the rare aspects of its composition and rarity that make it valuable as a store of value.
Inflation does not tax the poor: They have no cash savings.
Bull. The poor have no savings because they have no incentive to save -- their savings is destroyed by inflation.
Inflation does not tax the middle class: They keep their assets in real-estate and mutual funds.
And those assets are often-times in asset bubbles because of inflation's drive to create malinvestments. See the current housing market, see the stock market in 2015.
Inflation forces everyone else to invest in something, because hoarding money isn't good for the economy.
Hoarding money IS good for the economy -- when money is "hoarded," it creates a demand for money, and a demand for money brings prices DOWN for those who are not hoarding. Inflation makes prices go up, and not everyone should invest in something. I only invest in myself.
I'm sick of all the "money is a scam" articles on the internet recently.
Paper money is a scam.