From your reply, I can see we're not going to agree -- yet.
Have you read Rothbard's (free e-)book I linked to? Here is another link. It's a simple book, you can read it in one sitting.
Have you read Cheuvreux's report I linked to? Here is another link. It isn't quite as simple, but it offers great insight for an investment house that realizes how much collusion has been involved in the markets -- stock, currency, housing and consumer.
You may feel wealthier than the previous generation, but you aren't. The previous generation owned 70% of their homes by the age of 35, our average homeowner at 35 owns less than 10% -- and with house prices as inflated as they are, that number might actually be negative ownership. The previous generation would put their gold-backed currency in the bank to keep it safe, but they also allowed the bank to loan out a portion of that gold at a nice interest rate to people with real business plans and real plans to pay the bank back. Today, debt is based on nothing, so there is no real reason to pay it back over time (this is why bankruptcies are so high and consumer debt is out of control).
Both the links I provided offer a very strong argument for returning to a free market currency. Let Chase offer gold-backed dollars (100% reserve), let Citibank offer silver-backed dollars, let First Bank of Kansas offer corn-backed dollars. In the end, the market will decide what is the best medium of exchange.
That's the problem with gold and silver today -- people ask "How much is it worth in dollars?" when people over the age of 56 today understand that gold and silver weren't valued in dollars, they were dollars.
1 dollar in 1900 was worth 1/20th an ounce of silver. 1 dollar was just a receipt for 0.05 ounces of gold. Gold wasn't "worth" dollars, it was the other way around.
Government found that they can not control people unless they control the money supply. I just blogged about it a few minutes ago -- government is mandated to make money in gold and silver only, and can not hand out IOUs for future payment -- dollars are to be backed by currently available hard metal.
If you're younger than 56, you don't remember what money really is -- it is just a figment of faith. In the "old days," our government was restrained as they couldn't create money out of thin air. Now government does nothing but create money out of thin air, and I want to make sure those under the age of 56 realize that you're being duped: by your banks, by your brokers and even by your bosses.
I stopped accepting dollars as savings a few years ago. I also stopped using the banking cartels and the credit card companies as none of them are helping the situation any.
Gold is rising very quickly now, yes, but over the long term it is a very unwise investment.
Or has it? Your mutual funds have tracked higher due to inflationary manipulations of the money base -- the government prints new money, you get it, you put it into stocks, but so does everyone else who gets the new money, so the stocks (and housing and consumer goods and other stuff) goes up in price. Because gold had "crashed" in the 80s, people avoided it, so the price was depressed. In the 80s and on, the central banking cartels had manipulated the gold prices by leasing gold out of the reserves, in order to keep the gold price down and mask their inflationary manipulations. For 4 years people called me a kook, but Cheureux's report confirms what I've been saying: gold is too cheap right now and has a lot of room to blow up as the currencies fall.
If you're smart, you'd take advantage of your profits in the manipulated stock market and get out. What goes up through coercion always come down, what goes up because of market creation tends to stay up until someone else finds a new way to copy it. Currency can be copied, infinitely. Gold can only be mined. Which will be around in 5 years? 50 years? 500 years?
I've gone out on a limb and said that the stock market has about 85% overinflated value to lose. I believe that gold is depreciated somewhere between 85% and 850% -- I think that gold could see a jump to US$682 in the next 12-18 months, but it could go as high as US$5000 if things were REALLY bad. I doubt the latter figure, but I believe the real number will fall in between the two. Cheuvreux is the first huge investment house to say that US$2000 figure is reasonable.
Where will mutual funds be then? Where will the housing market be?
No one really knows, but if you google Iran Oil Bourse, you'll see theories about Iran proposing a gold-based petrocurrency, a euro one, even a bourse of different currencies entirely. It just seems odd that Saddam proposed one in 91 and was attacked, then re-proposed it again and was attacked, and then Iran proposes it and the war drums beat again.
Can you tell me where you intend to post your research?
Originally within a group of my peers who help me fact check (as much as is possible). I'm actually getting involved in more online fact checking groups, but slashdot is a surprisingly good one for finding me right and wrong.
I'll end up writing about it at my website (www.unanimocracy.com) or my gold market manipulation blog (dadasays.blogspot.com).
I could be very very wrong, but the more I go back into the history books and read speeches, newspapers and central banking records, the more scared I get in realizing that some of my crazy opinions might be closer to the truth than some crank theory. I've always said the person I want to least believe is myself!
I'm still doing the research, but I feel very strong about what I've found so far:
1. France was starting to horde gold in massive amounts just before WWII. Gold was the international currency, even if the British Pound Sterling was considered the best form of paper to swap in terms of gold/silver.
2. Going back even to the late 1800's, Germany was a huge threat to England. In 1897 this was coming to a head, as the Saturday Review wrote "If Germany were extinguished tomorrow, the day after tomorrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be richer. Nations have fought for years over a city or right of succession; must they not fight for two hundred fifty million pounds sterling of yearly commerce?" Over the next 40 years, England was producing a very strong paper currency but was definitely inflating it more than they could guarantee in payout.
3. The U.S. government might have had a conspiracy intent to watch the Pound inflate beyond what they could guarantee in hard metal payment, in order to replace it with another global standard. I believe there might have been some connection between the race for the nuke and the desire for empire, backed by the new form of empire: currency.
Right now I am just keeping most of my research close to my chest, but I hope to start finding more real connections between seemingly different perspectives. As history becomes more "connectable" due to the Internet, some old conspiracies start looking more and more like the truth. Even to a tinfoil hat wearer such as myself, I freak at the thought of some of my theories being 100% true.
Whenever we find something new, we look to how we can make our lives better with it. Some people can use this new product or service to save them time or money, and others will use this new product or service to directly make money. Look at the TV, the VCR and now the Internet.
I truly believe that Spyware has always had a market provision for it -- to find a way to capitalize on this "new" medium. Initially spyware may have been created by the big media companies -- Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve and the rest. They never had any opportunity to really sell the informaion of their users, so most of them gave up the flagrant "violations" of user privacy. Of course ISPs likely still have ways to make money on user information, but not like they thought they would.
Spyware was then taken over by individuals and foreign companies who might have been duped into thinking there was a profit. Most spam comes in from out of the U.S., but the value of spam has decreased majorly in the last year -- not due to laws or government regulations but through the end user finding ways to avoid even seeing spam. I think by next year spam will decrease greatly and in the next 5 years we'll have forgotten it entirely.
Spyware is now on that last phase, as well. With firewalls and spyware-detecting software, the power of spyware is decreased majorly. As operating systems are released that are aware of spyware and the implications of being known as a spyware-enabling operating system, manufacturers will take a big step in combating spyware before the fact, rather than after the fact. Yet the spyware will be beaten down by market choices not by government action or mandates.
By the time the law is created, it is already outdated. 10 years from now SPAM and spyware laws will still be on the books, but the market will have provided users with the proper way to fight it. As the next generation of users is accustomed to requesting information in the the way they want it, spyware companies and spammers will have to find new ways to make a profit: they won't be able to trick the next generation as easily.
Yet along with the market ending spyware, the market also seems to be trying to find ways to destroy the previous financial structure of information -- advertising. I use Google AdSense to monetize most of my sites, but it would never truly pay the bills. If I didn't have people volunteering money, I'd have to look into new ways to pay for my time. I actually prefer not to charge for information, I'd rather get my thoughts and opinions out in the market so that I can back up my billable rate by offering people the knowledge that I spend a lot of time researching my businesses. Having to find a new way to pay for media you want (TV, music, whatever) will be the unintended consequence of our market decision to get rid of all advertising and ad-ware type of programs. It'll be interesting to see how quickly the market recovers, though, as it always does: to give the best balance between the needs of party A (the producer) and party B (the consumer).
Actually, Clinton never balanced the budget, that was a myth that was created by the government in power at the time. Rmemeber, Clinton's "balanced budget" came from a few key elements:
Greenspan was inflating the currency base faster than even. The CPI did not keep up with the M3 money supply. This put more money into the economy, inflating consumer prices but also inflating the stock market, causing higher than expected profits which in turn put more money back into the government in the form of taxes. More money gave the government more spending allowances, but inflationary cycles can't last forever before someone realizes that the growth was due to the printing press at the Fed, not real economic growth.
Clinton's regime also used social security income as an income line item, instead of storing it in a non-existant "social security lockbox." That's like asking your boss for a loan against future income, and then calling that loan income even though you'd have to pay it back someday.
Lastly, much of government's real debt was listed as long term liability instead of actually calling it debt, so certain payable line items were taken off the budget books.
Viola, fake balanced budget. If any private individual or corporation balanced their books this way, they'd go to jail.
I used to drive Land Rovers, now I drive a used 96 Toyota Corolla. Why? Because I find more value in an old used car that leaves my wealth to be used better -- for travel, for business expansion and for security.
Are BMWs lower in reliability than Hyundais? Maybe so, but the BMW is more rare (as you put it) and I believe it is more solidly built. I know, my home has had both cars and the BMW has a higher build quality in the parts used. It is also a much more complex vehicle, and BMW owners will hold their car to a higher standard than a Hyundai owner generally will -- which might be why BMWs are rated less reliable.
Nonetheless, BMWs do offer a higher price for a reason more than just "faith of the consumer." My family mechanic work primarily on German autos, and he's shown me the difference in the BMW 3-series and the 7-series in build quality. Comparing apples to apples in the auto business is VERY hard to do, so the price gives me a good measuring stick. See US auto maker bankruptcies to see that price is a great measure of quality, if we think the price is higher than the quality we receive, we don't buy.
Actually, you are very close to being correct in refuting my "since 1913" idea, but I have been spending a LOT of time lately reading up on how the US helped prop up the Sterling for decades and it seems that they/we may have done so in order to help it crash and be replaced. I'm hoping that I'll have performed enough research to back it up in the next few months -- which is why I am holding to the theory.
I've been watching Wilkerson's speeches and interviews and opinions since early 2005. He's been one of the highest ranking officials to speak about the cabal that is in control of the White House now, but he also has inferred that the cabal has been in power for longer than the currency administration has been. For those who are anti-Bush, do not believe the Clinton was not part of the power party, either.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power. I also believe that almost every war and military action we've been involved in since 1913 has been primarily for control of the global currency base, not for oil or trade or communism or any of the usual suspects.
Iran's current oil bourse theories came along just before the power party started beating the war drums against Iraq. I posted today the link to the Cheuvreux Report that reconfirms my crazy tinfoil hat theories about the control of the dollar, and this time from a huge international investment bank. War is the health of the State, said Randolph Bourne. For millenia, war was always about directly controlling others. Yet in the recent centuries, war has been about controlling others indirectly -- by controlling the means of barter between people.
No matter what Bush or Rice or Clinton or Nixon or Kennedy have said, hindsight lets us see what they were really about -- making sure that their peers and families and cronies were at the front of the welfare lines when our Federal Reserve was handing out newly printed paper dollars. To believe anything else is to continue to be a pawn to the system.
Re:Your understanding of money is incomplete
on
PayPal vs Google(Buy)
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Money is very easy to understand, but it's not time--it is a placeholder for value.
I'm not sure I agree with you -- I've looked at the Austrian, Keynesian and a multitude of other market theories and I don't see money as a store of value. For all of us, when we do a job ourselves, it is because we can do that job cheaper than paying someone else. Some mow their own lawns, others pay others. Why would someone pay someone else to do something? Because it would cost them more to do it themselves.
You can call this "value" but I call it time-savings. When I buy a toaster, I am saving time over building one myself (or toasting bread the old way). When I buy a car, I am saving time in transportation and I am saving time in building my own vehicle. For me, money is time -- time saved and time redeemed. Money is not only my time but the time of others.
Monetary value is imaginary--without human agreement it does not exist.
I completely disagree! Money is real -- the time you save when you use money for the time of others is very real. If money is stable and market driven through competitive standards, you'll be more easily able to value a product. The problem with using fiat currency (ie, paper dollars backed by nothing), you have no idea how many dollars are in existance as government continues to add more to the market. If someone drops US$100 in your pocket today, you'll spend it or invest it or put it somewhere. Now picture everyone getting US$100 more at the same time -- we'll all want to spend it, chasing prices higher. This is inflation, caused by central banking and fiat currency. You can't create gold out of thin air, though.
Whereas if I want to buy a certain amount of gold, someone has to sell it to me.
Yes, this is a good thing. Instead of creating money out of thin air (causing everyone else's money to drop in value), you have to find someone willing to part with their wealth! This makes investors more likely to think about their investments rather than have some imaginary placeholder to use. When we make investments today, we think "what will one dollar be worth in 20 years?" With gold, we don't have to do that -- $1 today is $1 tomorrow is $1 100 years from now. From 1800 to 1913 when we were on the gold standard, $1 was $1 was $1, EXCEPT the War between States when Lincoln created fiat currency and the dollar dropped (until we returned to the gold standard). From 1913 to 2005, $1 became $0.04 in just 92 years.
What "time" is represented by the rapid valuation of that company?
Their products save you time -- instead of writing a physical letter, you send a gmail. Instead of looking in 100 books for an answer, you use the search engine. They save you time. I believe they are overvalued against real currency because of the inflation of dollars, though..did the BMW take 3 times as long to make as the Hyundai? Consider salary differences...if money==time, why does a CEO make so much more money than you?
A BMW does take 3 times as long to support as a Hyundai. BMW dealers offer quick service, free loaners, coffee and donuts, stronger build quality and many other aspects. Over 10 years, the BMW likely will offer more time savings for those who can afford it than the Hyundai can. A higher quality car would cost you personally much more time to make (go through materials, check for compliance, check for quality install, etc, etc) plus the enhanced support.
Why does a CEO make so much more? I am a CEO -- the work I perform is much more difficult than my entry-level worker. I have to have knowledge of more than just "type program into computer" -- I have to be on top of what my competitors are doing, what they might do, and where they are heading. I have to watch consumer prices and demand for my product, and make decisions to keep the company profitable. I have to understand how to manage my managers and my employees, and I save my investors the time of running their o
Re:Can third party transfer survive?
on
PayPal vs Google(Buy)
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Please explain, dada21, where lies the conspiracy?
If you go to my website I list the M3 money supply figure as reported by the Fed. This figure shows the true inflation of the dollar and is reflected in many consumer goods price increases since 1913. Yet in recent times, I do believe that the central banks have been hiding inflation by manipulating their gold reserves through leases, swaps and call options. Instead of feeling the true hit of 20% inflation, we're seeing gentle 3-5% inflation because the price of gold has been kept low through the various manipulations. The Cheuvreux report (PDF warning) came out the other day, and it is the first international brokerage company to actually validate what I've been saying for 4 years.
If you're familiar with my Rothbard link and the Cheuvreaux Report, you'll be really worried for the near and long term future of this country. The dollar's manipulations are finally coming to the surface, and much of our empire's growth in the past 50 years can be tied to holding on to hiding the manipulations. I hate the tinfoil hat side of my beliefs, though, but it is so hard to find where I've been wrong -- every day I read more and more confirmations of what was once considered "crazy."
Re:Can third party transfer survive?
on
PayPal vs Google(Buy)
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Money is VERY easy to understand -- it is merely a store of time. You perform some work for someone, instead of bartering for their services or products, they can give you some of their time that they have earned in the form of something valuable, divisible and easy to recognize. This has historically been gold or silver (or wheat or oxen or dirt). Gold and silver have been the best forms of money as they are near impossible to counterfeit or duplicate.
As society evolved, people wanted to be secure with their savings, so they stored it into banks of security. These banks issued receipts for the gold or silver. Banking was private, they all had their own "dollar" bills that were private -- banks competed by offering good rates for secure savings or they helped you invest your gold/silver by loaning it to others.
You could always redeem your receipts (or the receipts of others) for the physical gold/silver if you wanted. This all changed in around 1913 (and a few times before in US history) when the government said gold wasn't valuable and that paper receipts were. Of course, central banks up until the early 1970's still balanced their accounts with gold, and central banks still store gold in reserves. Crazy how the general public loves paper, but governments and central banks loves gold.
Can third party transfer survive?
on
PayPal vs Google(Buy)
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As the banking cartel finds new ways of transfering money "instantly" I wonder if Paypal (and Google Buy) will be able to last without actually becoming licensed and regulated banks themselves. The banking industry has the most collusion (and conspiracy theories) of any industry you'll ever research, and I don't see them just giving up the control of the currency base. Paypal appeared out of the blue (in a bank's reference time) with their services, and it wouldn't surprise me if the banking cartel creates a new standard for money transfers that puts up huge roadblocks for Paypal in the name of "fighting terrorism and money laundering."
I don't like paper cash, and I definitely don't like digital cash. The banking cartel, on the other hand, worked very hard to separate paper receipts for gold from the actual gold, and then the paper receipts became valuable. Now they've made almost 80% of currency digital already (compare M1 versus M3 money supply figures), and I'm even more hesitant to become part of that system. Paypal has embraced it entirely, but I wonder how quickly they'll be forced out of the business if they don't become part of the system.
In the end, competition is destroyed, and we the consumer will end up with pretty much what we've always had.
Considering I was modded troll before the debate could even begin, I guess the majority of slashdotters agree with you.
But ICANN isn't a private corporation, no matter how much it wants to defend itself as such. Just as NASA is a monopoly government organization, its defenders want to call it a group of private corporations that are doing something through government that the market couldn't do on its own.
DNS can be handled by a private, competitive market of companies wanting to beat one another in price and performance. There's a huge amount of cash to be made in the business of domain name serving, yet we're letting government take it over and give that profit to their cronies, and we the consumers will suffer in decreased service and increased pricing.
I've been researching similar technologies over the past few years because I believe we can see an amazing communications "utopia" by deregulating (or at least minimizing regulations) all the frequencies we're blocking for specific uses.
Software radios are not new technology, but the implementation has been fairly worthless as frequencies are set up for specific purposes. At any given moment in any given area, there is a ton of bandwidth going unused. Frequency hopping is already pretty well documented in how to maximize its use, and power allocation specifications have been out since pre-cell phone days. Combine that with a much wider bandwidth and we can see higher data rates, lower battery usage and maximum bandwidth allocation everywhere you go.
I know the FCC will never give up the bandwidth to the open market -- it is too lucrative for the few who are in cahoots with the licensing body. But I see so much happening just in the WiFi "unreglated" spectrum that I would really love to live in a world where all that analog TV, digital TV, analog radio, digital radio, CB, HAM and every other heavily regulated piece of spectrum could be allocated to being used for just information transmission. Software radios would set themselves to the best frequency possible to maximize transmission distance (as needed) and minimize power consumption (as needed).
What we have now is more kludge than efficiency. Can you imagine how incredible the Internet would be if we had nearly infinite spectrum to use (compared to the limited spectrum we have now)?
Sure, some people will say "What prevents Megacorp YYY from blasting 100,000 watts over every frequency?" That's pretty simple -- energy costs make it prohibitive to transmit anything but profitable data. The FCC has existed long past its useful life, maybe it is time to open up little bits of unregulated spectrum piece-by-piece and let's see what happens. These software radios are a huge step in the right direction.
They got most of the article right, but it isn't Total Mess + Government = ???. It's Total Mess = Government. I guess that's all the article really needed to say.
Honestly, most of us use just one anti-virus application. They're all pretty much equal on what viruses they detect, and the entire Kama Sutra situation called for one simple procedure: "There's a virus possibly hitting Friday, so make sure you update your anti-virus." There really isn't much need to name the virus the same across all AV apps or even countries or any of that, just warn people, use the name you think is decent, and get them to update their AV files.
NASA is a monopoly, one that is in a unique situation that is very hard to debate in terms of allowing more free market competition. I understand that the market doesn't like spaceflight because there doesn't seem to be a profit -- yet. Of course, when computers were first built, there wasn't much room for profit but it is my opinion that the competitive atmosphere of the computer market did more to facilitate cheap and common PCs than any government body did.
When you have a monopoly, you'll have corruption and laziness. There is no one else offering your product for possibly less money, or at a higher quality, or with more choice. The customer is stuck with what you decide to give.
It's funny to me that it is the IG that is under investigation. My experience with my state's own IG shows that it is probably more common than not to see shortfalls in those who "police the police" but yet are paid by the "police" they're "policing."
If no one here is willing to deregulate spaceflight and offer NASA some real competition, how does anyone foresee proper market policing of NASA's spending and development? In the open competitive market, companies fail all the time when they try to take advantage of the consumer. The biggest failures in the open competitive market are usualy companies that are given some monopoly status or public funding (Enron, etc) or are given some form of government power to manipulate the way they report their business financing (Worldcom, etc). There are rarely failures of companies that make truly competitive products at competitive prices.
I wonder if spaceflight would be different if we spun it out of the federal budget and allowed it to be funded directly by states or even world organizations. Could NASA exist solely on donations of the wealthy and the poor, and could NASA exist on its own without any taxpayer allotment?
If not, I would argue that we don't need it right now. NASA to me was always a ploy to keep us aware of communism and the USSR. Sure, some good things came out of NASA, but how many of those things might have come to the market cheaper and quicker without it? We'll never know, but I do know I can see what we've spent over the decades, and I'm not sure that I can accept future spending when we know it is getting wasted by bad management of this monopoly organization.
I'm not seeing why people are moaning about EA's product quality. I stopped buying almost all PC game in the past 2 years as they're all buggy and badly written. I bought Civ4 and I had to actually pirate it to get my official copy to work. No more for me.
But let's look at the market and why it is operating the way it does. First of all, no company is getting boycotted for bad quality games. In fact, the average gamer that I talk to has no problem with a month or three of bugs -- it seems that the first few months is considered an open paid beta. I personally don't like it, but that's why I stopped buying games. Most gamers haven't.
Second, buggy games on the powerful PC platform is part of the reason why gaming companies love the gaming consoles. If everyone could afford a PC, I think the gaming companies might find the money needed to make the game correctly the first time, but they have a better platform to write for now -- powerful consoles.
Beyond that, we have to look at who EA is. I really hate it when people say "I hate Company YYY." That company is nothing but hundreds or thousands of independent producers getting together under one title to make a product. I see the same names on games over and over, so why aren't gamers taking it personally and avoiding games by the same people? I have 2 friends in the gaming industry (both whose names I see in the games I like playing) and I make it a point to let them know that I like what I'm playing. Yet when there is a bug (Morrowind comes to mind), I'll go out of my way to let them know that I'm pissed. Don't go to EA, go find someone involved in the game and let them know. Trust me, gaming design teams are a close knit community, word gets around quickly.
In the end, EA is providing the market what it has accepted as a level of quality: a not-quite-ready model of product selling before finalization. The more I think abou it, the more I realize I probably should accept this model. EA can't buy every hardware and software combination out there, and when I hear 10,000 other people complaining, I'm ignoring the fact that 90,000 people might be happily playing the game. Civ4 was very frustrating, but they eventually fixed it, and maybe they did because of some of my complaints. This is good for the market, to know that the company can adapt as quickly as it can.
...and prepare yourself for finding ways to avoid the major providers. A few months back, I was messing around with finding ways to provide a wireless network within my community mostly for file sharing but also for finding ways to minimize our reliance on the pipes coming in (Comcast, SBC and 3 WiFi high speed providers) so we won't have to worry about it in the future.
Then it occurred to me that these minornets could very well be linked to one another -- microwave or other wireless connections. Sure, the latency goes up, but the reliance on the communications cartels (there is definitely a collusive conspiracy theory there!) is reduced greatly. You tie into the main Internet at a few points, set up your routing to get everyone into the main Internet in the fastest fashion, and you're set. It might be complicated initially but the software and hardware is out there to make it happen, IF NEEDED.
I really think that the whole idea of relying on the big boys' land lines might not be necessary. I was a endpoint on Fidonet, and got along just fine as technology progressed -- some people used X.25, some used landlines, some used ISDN lines, but we all got along. It was slow, but it worked, and it became better over time.
We have to thank the big providers for really being confused for so long as to how they can take advantage of the net. Now we have many ways to stay connected -- I connect to the web via my PDA (and my laptop) through my Samsung t809 with a Bluetooth connection. I'm using it right now, and I get 150kbps downloads -- more than enough. If I didn't have T-Mobile's great package, I know I have about 5 other wireless providers I could buy bandwidth from.
Give it time. Those who try to control you will not realize that there are those who know they can offer less control at a better price. Don't like the monopoly tiered service in your community? Go get a T1, and run a WiFi provider in your area. 3 of my neighbors pay me US$10 a month to get on my megapipe already. I could probably get another 20 of them if I really went out to try.
Tiered service MIGHT be what the average household wants, though. If the monopolies try it and no one comes in to offer a cheaper/less controlled service, the free market will have answered that question. I'd like to hear what the more authoritarian slashdotters here have to say about how the free market could fail the individual user in this case.
Just remember one thing -- if MegaCorp X is a monopoly provider of high speed bandwidth in your town, it isn't MegaCorp X's fault. Go blame the government who gave them the monopoly. If MegaCorp Y created their connections over previous monopoly status, don't ask MegaCorp Y to give you back what you gave them originally -- the right to be a monopoly. This is why I am against government licensing and regulations -- it creates these monopolies which come to affect us decades later.
It isn't the monopolies' fault that you let your local government give up your rights in exchange for bad service. In the old days, maybe it was OK -- it was either bad service or no service. Yet we see the slippery slope and how it affects us in the future, and we need to carefully think about the programs we're asking for today that might become bad monopoly services in the future.
Mobile homes are inefficient to heat, shoddily-constructed, and have grossly limited options for placement, especially in regards to local economic opportunities and necessary utility provisions. On top of that $750/m is certainly not a value with a minimum-wage income. It has virtually no resale value because of continual depreciation. A poor investment for sure.
I've moved at least 50 people in mobile homes in the past 12 months. All of them are happier than they were in the older homes. Inefficient to heat? My mobile home is over 1000 square feet (soon to be 2000 square feet). My heating bill in November and December was under $180 for the two months. My mother lives in a house -- same square footage. Her gas bill (1/2 hour away from my house) was over $630 for those two months.
Shoddy construction? The recent repo I bought was build in 1989. It is meticulously assembled and when I did a test of energy efficiency, I only had to replace one window.
All homes should continually depreciate -- all of them. Only land can appreciate in value, friend. The housing bubble will prove you very wrong when it bursts. I like living in a house that depreciates. I bought my home for under US$10,000 last year and its great. Every friend of mine who has visited me says it is better than the 2500 square foot home I owned previously just 2-3 miles from where I live now. That house is worth around US$350,000 and offered a lower standard of living compared to my life now.
$300k would be a mean debt of $15k. Depending on the rate and purpose of the debt, that isn't a lot of debt. Contrary to what you think, having debt isn't necessarily bad and can be quite beneficial.
No, you should never have debt on depreciating assets -- cars, physical portions of your home (not land value), clothing, food or appliances. Anything depreciating should be owned outright if you plan on building wealth and being able to resist life's ups and downs. People ask how I could prepare for a terrible tragedy? I do it buy building wealth -- real equity -- and avoiding debt in depreciating assets (such as the physical part of the home).
Debt is bad. This country will learn this very soon I believe. Just as we did in the 80s and Japan did in the 90s.
After taxes and fixed costs, it would be rather unlikely for a single person with an annual income of $60,000 to become a "millionaire" in 6-8 years, especially while eschewing debt. Please share with us the investment strategy and projected expenses for an engineer or IT monkey making $60k to earn $2M in 8 years.
I can't. My newsletter offers this advice and I'm not going to give it away for free. I also don't have room to add any more members to it, until I move it online.
US$60,000 can be turned into US$1 million in 8 years easily, if you downsize your debt, downsize your living costs (no mortgage, own a mobile home or other such inexpensive property) and maximize your savings and investments. For example, rather than invest in the sucker's stock market (no dividends, P:E ratios over the maximum of 6, etc), invest in local businesses with a set business plan and attention to cash flow concerns. My investments in local businesses offer me a yearly dividend usually over 20% annually. Some are as high as 50% if the business is really well maintained and competitive.
My living expenses in the Chicago area when I was living in my house and keeping up with the Joneses was over US$4400 per month plus food. My living expenses today are less than US$800 per month plus food. I put the rest into gold and local businesses. That US$3600 per month that I save is approximately US$43,200 plus my usual 25% net dividends on previous investments is what I base my forecasts on.
Also, most geeks making US$60,000 annually in a salaried position could double that income if they struck out on their own. Charging US$60 per hour and finding 40 hours a week of contract work is very easy and brings with it many more write-offs and tax savings than being a W2 employee.
Slashdot Mirror
i've held a similar position to yours for years, I believe that all wars have been based in economics.
;)
Have you ever written on the subject?
Funny UID, btw, we just added a new cat to the family: Valentine
From your reply, I can see we're not going to agree -- yet.
Have you read Rothbard's (free e-)book I linked to? Here is another link. It's a simple book, you can read it in one sitting.
Have you read Cheuvreux's report I linked to? Here is another link. It isn't quite as simple, but it offers great insight for an investment house that realizes how much collusion has been involved in the markets -- stock, currency, housing and consumer.
You may feel wealthier than the previous generation, but you aren't. The previous generation owned 70% of their homes by the age of 35, our average homeowner at 35 owns less than 10% -- and with house prices as inflated as they are, that number might actually be negative ownership. The previous generation would put their gold-backed currency in the bank to keep it safe, but they also allowed the bank to loan out a portion of that gold at a nice interest rate to people with real business plans and real plans to pay the bank back. Today, debt is based on nothing, so there is no real reason to pay it back over time (this is why bankruptcies are so high and consumer debt is out of control).
Both the links I provided offer a very strong argument for returning to a free market currency. Let Chase offer gold-backed dollars (100% reserve), let Citibank offer silver-backed dollars, let First Bank of Kansas offer corn-backed dollars. In the end, the market will decide what is the best medium of exchange.
That's the problem with gold and silver today -- people ask "How much is it worth in dollars?" when people over the age of 56 today understand that gold and silver weren't valued in dollars, they were dollars.
1 dollar in 1900 was worth 1/20th an ounce of silver. 1 dollar was just a receipt for 0.05 ounces of gold. Gold wasn't "worth" dollars, it was the other way around.
Government found that they can not control people unless they control the money supply. I just blogged about it a few minutes ago -- government is mandated to make money in gold and silver only, and can not hand out IOUs for future payment -- dollars are to be backed by currently available hard metal.
If you're younger than 56, you don't remember what money really is -- it is just a figment of faith. In the "old days," our government was restrained as they couldn't create money out of thin air. Now government does nothing but create money out of thin air, and I want to make sure those under the age of 56 realize that you're being duped: by your banks, by your brokers and even by your bosses.
I stopped accepting dollars as savings a few years ago. I also stopped using the banking cartels and the credit card companies as none of them are helping the situation any.
Definitely a typo, but I agree on the +1 funny side of it ;)
Gold is rising very quickly now, yes, but over the long term it is a very unwise investment.
Or has it? Your mutual funds have tracked higher due to inflationary manipulations of the money base -- the government prints new money, you get it, you put it into stocks, but so does everyone else who gets the new money, so the stocks (and housing and consumer goods and other stuff) goes up in price. Because gold had "crashed" in the 80s, people avoided it, so the price was depressed. In the 80s and on, the central banking cartels had manipulated the gold prices by leasing gold out of the reserves, in order to keep the gold price down and mask their inflationary manipulations. For 4 years people called me a kook, but Cheureux's report confirms what I've been saying: gold is too cheap right now and has a lot of room to blow up as the currencies fall.
If you're smart, you'd take advantage of your profits in the manipulated stock market and get out. What goes up through coercion always come down, what goes up because of market creation tends to stay up until someone else finds a new way to copy it. Currency can be copied, infinitely. Gold can only be mined. Which will be around in 5 years? 50 years? 500 years?
I've gone out on a limb and said that the stock market has about 85% overinflated value to lose. I believe that gold is depreciated somewhere between 85% and 850% -- I think that gold could see a jump to US$682 in the next 12-18 months, but it could go as high as US$5000 if things were REALLY bad. I doubt the latter figure, but I believe the real number will fall in between the two. Cheuvreux is the first huge investment house to say that US$2000 figure is reasonable.
Where will mutual funds be then? Where will the housing market be?
No one really knows, but if you google Iran Oil Bourse, you'll see theories about Iran proposing a gold-based petrocurrency, a euro one, even a bourse of different currencies entirely. It just seems odd that Saddam proposed one in 91 and was attacked, then re-proposed it again and was attacked, and then Iran proposes it and the war drums beat again.
Can you tell me where you intend to post your research?
Originally within a group of my peers who help me fact check (as much as is possible). I'm actually getting involved in more online fact checking groups, but slashdot is a surprisingly good one for finding me right and wrong.
I'll end up writing about it at my website (www.unanimocracy.com) or my gold market manipulation blog (dadasays.blogspot.com).
I could be very very wrong, but the more I go back into the history books and read speeches, newspapers and central banking records, the more scared I get in realizing that some of my crazy opinions might be closer to the truth than some crank theory. I've always said the person I want to least believe is myself!
I'm still doing the research, but I feel very strong about what I've found so far:
1. France was starting to horde gold in massive amounts just before WWII. Gold was the international currency, even if the British Pound Sterling was considered the best form of paper to swap in terms of gold/silver.
2. Going back even to the late 1800's, Germany was a huge threat to England. In 1897 this was coming to a head, as the Saturday Review wrote "If Germany were extinguished tomorrow, the day after tomorrow there is not an Englishman in the world who would not be richer. Nations have fought for years over a city or right of succession; must they not fight for two hundred fifty million pounds sterling of yearly commerce?" Over the next 40 years, England was producing a very strong paper currency but was definitely inflating it more than they could guarantee in payout.
3. The U.S. government might have had a conspiracy intent to watch the Pound inflate beyond what they could guarantee in hard metal payment, in order to replace it with another global standard. I believe there might have been some connection between the race for the nuke and the desire for empire, backed by the new form of empire: currency.
Right now I am just keeping most of my research close to my chest, but I hope to start finding more real connections between seemingly different perspectives. As history becomes more "connectable" due to the Internet, some old conspiracies start looking more and more like the truth. Even to a tinfoil hat wearer such as myself, I freak at the thought of some of my theories being 100% true.
Whenever we find something new, we look to how we can make our lives better with it. Some people can use this new product or service to save them time or money, and others will use this new product or service to directly make money. Look at the TV, the VCR and now the Internet.
I truly believe that Spyware has always had a market provision for it -- to find a way to capitalize on this "new" medium. Initially spyware may have been created by the big media companies -- Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve and the rest. They never had any opportunity to really sell the informaion of their users, so most of them gave up the flagrant "violations" of user privacy. Of course ISPs likely still have ways to make money on user information, but not like they thought they would.
Spyware was then taken over by individuals and foreign companies who might have been duped into thinking there was a profit. Most spam comes in from out of the U.S., but the value of spam has decreased majorly in the last year -- not due to laws or government regulations but through the end user finding ways to avoid even seeing spam. I think by next year spam will decrease greatly and in the next 5 years we'll have forgotten it entirely.
Spyware is now on that last phase, as well. With firewalls and spyware-detecting software, the power of spyware is decreased majorly. As operating systems are released that are aware of spyware and the implications of being known as a spyware-enabling operating system, manufacturers will take a big step in combating spyware before the fact, rather than after the fact. Yet the spyware will be beaten down by market choices not by government action or mandates.
By the time the law is created, it is already outdated. 10 years from now SPAM and spyware laws will still be on the books, but the market will have provided users with the proper way to fight it. As the next generation of users is accustomed to requesting information in the the way they want it, spyware companies and spammers will have to find new ways to make a profit: they won't be able to trick the next generation as easily.
Yet along with the market ending spyware, the market also seems to be trying to find ways to destroy the previous financial structure of information -- advertising. I use Google AdSense to monetize most of my sites, but it would never truly pay the bills. If I didn't have people volunteering money, I'd have to look into new ways to pay for my time. I actually prefer not to charge for information, I'd rather get my thoughts and opinions out in the market so that I can back up my billable rate by offering people the knowledge that I spend a lot of time researching my businesses. Having to find a new way to pay for media you want (TV, music, whatever) will be the unintended consequence of our market decision to get rid of all advertising and ad-ware type of programs. It'll be interesting to see how quickly the market recovers, though, as it always does: to give the best balance between the needs of party A (the producer) and party B (the consumer).
Actually, Clinton never balanced the budget, that was a myth that was created by the government in power at the time. Rmemeber, Clinton's "balanced budget" came from a few key elements:
Greenspan was inflating the currency base faster than even. The CPI did not keep up with the M3 money supply. This put more money into the economy, inflating consumer prices but also inflating the stock market, causing higher than expected profits which in turn put more money back into the government in the form of taxes. More money gave the government more spending allowances, but inflationary cycles can't last forever before someone realizes that the growth was due to the printing press at the Fed, not real economic growth.
Clinton's regime also used social security income as an income line item, instead of storing it in a non-existant "social security lockbox." That's like asking your boss for a loan against future income, and then calling that loan income even though you'd have to pay it back someday.
Lastly, much of government's real debt was listed as long term liability instead of actually calling it debt, so certain payable line items were taken off the budget books.
Viola, fake balanced budget. If any private individual or corporation balanced their books this way, they'd go to jail.
I used to drive Land Rovers, now I drive a used 96 Toyota Corolla. Why? Because I find more value in an old used car that leaves my wealth to be used better -- for travel, for business expansion and for security.
Are BMWs lower in reliability than Hyundais? Maybe so, but the BMW is more rare (as you put it) and I believe it is more solidly built. I know, my home has had both cars and the BMW has a higher build quality in the parts used. It is also a much more complex vehicle, and BMW owners will hold their car to a higher standard than a Hyundai owner generally will -- which might be why BMWs are rated less reliable.
Nonetheless, BMWs do offer a higher price for a reason more than just "faith of the consumer." My family mechanic work primarily on German autos, and he's shown me the difference in the BMW 3-series and the 7-series in build quality. Comparing apples to apples in the auto business is VERY hard to do, so the price gives me a good measuring stick. See US auto maker bankruptcies to see that price is a great measure of quality, if we think the price is higher than the quality we receive, we don't buy.
Actually, you are very close to being correct in refuting my "since 1913" idea, but I have been spending a LOT of time lately reading up on how the US helped prop up the Sterling for decades and it seems that they/we may have done so in order to help it crash and be replaced. I'm hoping that I'll have performed enough research to back it up in the next few months -- which is why I am holding to the theory.
That's like 1,000,000,000 Grammar nazi points!!!!
;)
I don't meta-grammar nazi, so I don't get grammar nazi points
Actually, looking back at the sentence makes me laugh, so look at it as a +1 Funny Monday morning joke maybe, hah.
I've been watching Wilkerson's speeches and interviews and opinions since early 2005. He's been one of the highest ranking officials to speak about the cabal that is in control of the White House now, but he also has inferred that the cabal has been in power for longer than the currency administration has been. For those who are anti-Bush, do not believe the Clinton was not part of the power party, either.
I strongly believe that the true case for war was to keep the petrodollar in power. I also believe that almost every war and military action we've been involved in since 1913 has been primarily for control of the global currency base, not for oil or trade or communism or any of the usual suspects.
Iran's current oil bourse theories came along just before the power party started beating the war drums against Iraq. I posted today the link to the Cheuvreux Report that reconfirms my crazy tinfoil hat theories about the control of the dollar, and this time from a huge international investment bank. War is the health of the State, said Randolph Bourne. For millenia, war was always about directly controlling others. Yet in the recent centuries, war has been about controlling others indirectly -- by controlling the means of barter between people.
No matter what Bush or Rice or Clinton or Nixon or Kennedy have said, hindsight lets us see what they were really about -- making sure that their peers and families and cronies were at the front of the welfare lines when our Federal Reserve was handing out newly printed paper dollars. To believe anything else is to continue to be a pawn to the system.
Money is very easy to understand, but it's not time--it is a placeholder for value.
.did the BMW take 3 times as long to make as the Hyundai? Consider salary differences...if money==time, why does a CEO make so much more money than you?
I'm not sure I agree with you -- I've looked at the Austrian, Keynesian and a multitude of other market theories and I don't see money as a store of value. For all of us, when we do a job ourselves, it is because we can do that job cheaper than paying someone else. Some mow their own lawns, others pay others. Why would someone pay someone else to do something? Because it would cost them more to do it themselves.
You can call this "value" but I call it time-savings. When I buy a toaster, I am saving time over building one myself (or toasting bread the old way). When I buy a car, I am saving time in transportation and I am saving time in building my own vehicle. For me, money is time -- time saved and time redeemed. Money is not only my time but the time of others.
Monetary value is imaginary--without human agreement it does not exist.
I completely disagree! Money is real -- the time you save when you use money for the time of others is very real. If money is stable and market driven through competitive standards, you'll be more easily able to value a product. The problem with using fiat currency (ie, paper dollars backed by nothing), you have no idea how many dollars are in existance as government continues to add more to the market. If someone drops US$100 in your pocket today, you'll spend it or invest it or put it somewhere. Now picture everyone getting US$100 more at the same time -- we'll all want to spend it, chasing prices higher. This is inflation, caused by central banking and fiat currency. You can't create gold out of thin air, though.
Whereas if I want to buy a certain amount of gold, someone has to sell it to me.
Yes, this is a good thing. Instead of creating money out of thin air (causing everyone else's money to drop in value), you have to find someone willing to part with their wealth! This makes investors more likely to think about their investments rather than have some imaginary placeholder to use. When we make investments today, we think "what will one dollar be worth in 20 years?" With gold, we don't have to do that -- $1 today is $1 tomorrow is $1 100 years from now. From 1800 to 1913 when we were on the gold standard, $1 was $1 was $1, EXCEPT the War between States when Lincoln created fiat currency and the dollar dropped (until we returned to the gold standard). From 1913 to 2005, $1 became $0.04 in just 92 years.
What "time" is represented by the rapid valuation of that company?
Their products save you time -- instead of writing a physical letter, you send a gmail. Instead of looking in 100 books for an answer, you use the search engine. They save you time. I believe they are overvalued against real currency because of the inflation of dollars, though.
A BMW does take 3 times as long to support as a Hyundai. BMW dealers offer quick service, free loaners, coffee and donuts, stronger build quality and many other aspects. Over 10 years, the BMW likely will offer more time savings for those who can afford it than the Hyundai can. A higher quality car would cost you personally much more time to make (go through materials, check for compliance, check for quality install, etc, etc) plus the enhanced support.
Why does a CEO make so much more? I am a CEO -- the work I perform is much more difficult than my entry-level worker. I have to have knowledge of more than just "type program into computer" -- I have to be on top of what my competitors are doing, what they might do, and where they are heading. I have to watch consumer prices and demand for my product, and make decisions to keep the company profitable. I have to understand how to manage my managers and my employees, and I save my investors the time of running their o
Please explain, dada21, where lies the conspiracy?
If you go to my website I list the M3 money supply figure as reported by the Fed. This figure shows the true inflation of the dollar and is reflected in many consumer goods price increases since 1913. Yet in recent times, I do believe that the central banks have been hiding inflation by manipulating their gold reserves through leases, swaps and call options. Instead of feeling the true hit of 20% inflation, we're seeing gentle 3-5% inflation because the price of gold has been kept low through the various manipulations. The Cheuvreux report (PDF warning) came out the other day, and it is the first international brokerage company to actually validate what I've been saying for 4 years.
If you're familiar with my Rothbard link and the Cheuvreaux Report, you'll be really worried for the near and long term future of this country. The dollar's manipulations are finally coming to the surface, and much of our empire's growth in the past 50 years can be tied to holding on to hiding the manipulations. I hate the tinfoil hat side of my beliefs, though, but it is so hard to find where I've been wrong -- every day I read more and more confirmations of what was once considered "crazy."
Rothbard in his (free e-) book What Has Government Done to our Money? proves that paper money was a conspiracy for control, definitely.
Money is VERY easy to understand -- it is merely a store of time. You perform some work for someone, instead of bartering for their services or products, they can give you some of their time that they have earned in the form of something valuable, divisible and easy to recognize. This has historically been gold or silver (or wheat or oxen or dirt). Gold and silver have been the best forms of money as they are near impossible to counterfeit or duplicate.
As society evolved, people wanted to be secure with their savings, so they stored it into banks of security. These banks issued receipts for the gold or silver. Banking was private, they all had their own "dollar" bills that were private -- banks competed by offering good rates for secure savings or they helped you invest your gold/silver by loaning it to others.
You could always redeem your receipts (or the receipts of others) for the physical gold/silver if you wanted. This all changed in around 1913 (and a few times before in US history) when the government said gold wasn't valuable and that paper receipts were. Of course, central banks up until the early 1970's still balanced their accounts with gold, and central banks still store gold in reserves. Crazy how the general public loves paper, but governments and central banks loves gold.
As the banking cartel finds new ways of transfering money "instantly" I wonder if Paypal (and Google Buy) will be able to last without actually becoming licensed and regulated banks themselves. The banking industry has the most collusion (and conspiracy theories) of any industry you'll ever research, and I don't see them just giving up the control of the currency base. Paypal appeared out of the blue (in a bank's reference time) with their services, and it wouldn't surprise me if the banking cartel creates a new standard for money transfers that puts up huge roadblocks for Paypal in the name of "fighting terrorism and money laundering."
I don't like paper cash, and I definitely don't like digital cash. The banking cartel, on the other hand, worked very hard to separate paper receipts for gold from the actual gold, and then the paper receipts became valuable. Now they've made almost 80% of currency digital already (compare M1 versus M3 money supply figures), and I'm even more hesitant to become part of that system. Paypal has embraced it entirely, but I wonder how quickly they'll be forced out of the business if they don't become part of the system.
In the end, competition is destroyed, and we the consumer will end up with pretty much what we've always had.
Considering I was modded troll before the debate could even begin, I guess the majority of slashdotters agree with you.
But ICANN isn't a private corporation, no matter how much it wants to defend itself as such. Just as NASA is a monopoly government organization, its defenders want to call it a group of private corporations that are doing something through government that the market couldn't do on its own.
DNS can be handled by a private, competitive market of companies wanting to beat one another in price and performance. There's a huge amount of cash to be made in the business of domain name serving, yet we're letting government take it over and give that profit to their cronies, and we the consumers will suffer in decreased service and increased pricing.
I've been researching similar technologies over the past few years because I believe we can see an amazing communications "utopia" by deregulating (or at least minimizing regulations) all the frequencies we're blocking for specific uses.
Software radios are not new technology, but the implementation has been fairly worthless as frequencies are set up for specific purposes. At any given moment in any given area, there is a ton of bandwidth going unused. Frequency hopping is already pretty well documented in how to maximize its use, and power allocation specifications have been out since pre-cell phone days. Combine that with a much wider bandwidth and we can see higher data rates, lower battery usage and maximum bandwidth allocation everywhere you go.
I know the FCC will never give up the bandwidth to the open market -- it is too lucrative for the few who are in cahoots with the licensing body. But I see so much happening just in the WiFi "unreglated" spectrum that I would really love to live in a world where all that analog TV, digital TV, analog radio, digital radio, CB, HAM and every other heavily regulated piece of spectrum could be allocated to being used for just information transmission. Software radios would set themselves to the best frequency possible to maximize transmission distance (as needed) and minimize power consumption (as needed).
What we have now is more kludge than efficiency. Can you imagine how incredible the Internet would be if we had nearly infinite spectrum to use (compared to the limited spectrum we have now)?
Sure, some people will say "What prevents Megacorp YYY from blasting 100,000 watts over every frequency?" That's pretty simple -- energy costs make it prohibitive to transmit anything but profitable data. The FCC has existed long past its useful life, maybe it is time to open up little bits of unregulated spectrum piece-by-piece and let's see what happens. These software radios are a huge step in the right direction.
They got most of the article right, but it isn't Total Mess + Government = ???. It's Total Mess = Government. I guess that's all the article really needed to say.
Honestly, most of us use just one anti-virus application. They're all pretty much equal on what viruses they detect, and the entire Kama Sutra situation called for one simple procedure: "There's a virus possibly hitting Friday, so make sure you update your anti-virus." There really isn't much need to name the virus the same across all AV apps or even countries or any of that, just warn people, use the name you think is decent, and get them to update their AV files.
NASA is a monopoly, one that is in a unique situation that is very hard to debate in terms of allowing more free market competition. I understand that the market doesn't like spaceflight because there doesn't seem to be a profit -- yet. Of course, when computers were first built, there wasn't much room for profit but it is my opinion that the competitive atmosphere of the computer market did more to facilitate cheap and common PCs than any government body did.
When you have a monopoly, you'll have corruption and laziness. There is no one else offering your product for possibly less money, or at a higher quality, or with more choice. The customer is stuck with what you decide to give.
It's funny to me that it is the IG that is under investigation. My experience with my state's own IG shows that it is probably more common than not to see shortfalls in those who "police the police" but yet are paid by the "police" they're "policing."
If no one here is willing to deregulate spaceflight and offer NASA some real competition, how does anyone foresee proper market policing of NASA's spending and development? In the open competitive market, companies fail all the time when they try to take advantage of the consumer. The biggest failures in the open competitive market are usualy companies that are given some monopoly status or public funding (Enron, etc) or are given some form of government power to manipulate the way they report their business financing (Worldcom, etc). There are rarely failures of companies that make truly competitive products at competitive prices.
I wonder if spaceflight would be different if we spun it out of the federal budget and allowed it to be funded directly by states or even world organizations. Could NASA exist solely on donations of the wealthy and the poor, and could NASA exist on its own without any taxpayer allotment?
If not, I would argue that we don't need it right now. NASA to me was always a ploy to keep us aware of communism and the USSR. Sure, some good things came out of NASA, but how many of those things might have come to the market cheaper and quicker without it? We'll never know, but I do know I can see what we've spent over the decades, and I'm not sure that I can accept future spending when we know it is getting wasted by bad management of this monopoly organization.
I'm not seeing why people are moaning about EA's product quality. I stopped buying almost all PC game in the past 2 years as they're all buggy and badly written. I bought Civ4 and I had to actually pirate it to get my official copy to work. No more for me.
But let's look at the market and why it is operating the way it does. First of all, no company is getting boycotted for bad quality games. In fact, the average gamer that I talk to has no problem with a month or three of bugs -- it seems that the first few months is considered an open paid beta. I personally don't like it, but that's why I stopped buying games. Most gamers haven't.
Second, buggy games on the powerful PC platform is part of the reason why gaming companies love the gaming consoles. If everyone could afford a PC, I think the gaming companies might find the money needed to make the game correctly the first time, but they have a better platform to write for now -- powerful consoles.
Beyond that, we have to look at who EA is. I really hate it when people say "I hate Company YYY." That company is nothing but hundreds or thousands of independent producers getting together under one title to make a product. I see the same names on games over and over, so why aren't gamers taking it personally and avoiding games by the same people? I have 2 friends in the gaming industry (both whose names I see in the games I like playing) and I make it a point to let them know that I like what I'm playing. Yet when there is a bug (Morrowind comes to mind), I'll go out of my way to let them know that I'm pissed. Don't go to EA, go find someone involved in the game and let them know. Trust me, gaming design teams are a close knit community, word gets around quickly.
In the end, EA is providing the market what it has accepted as a level of quality: a not-quite-ready model of product selling before finalization. The more I think abou it, the more I realize I probably should accept this model. EA can't buy every hardware and software combination out there, and when I hear 10,000 other people complaining, I'm ignoring the fact that 90,000 people might be happily playing the game. Civ4 was very frustrating, but they eventually fixed it, and maybe they did because of some of my complaints. This is good for the market, to know that the company can adapt as quickly as it can.
...and prepare yourself for finding ways to avoid the major providers. A few months back, I was messing around with finding ways to provide a wireless network within my community mostly for file sharing but also for finding ways to minimize our reliance on the pipes coming in (Comcast, SBC and 3 WiFi high speed providers) so we won't have to worry about it in the future.
Then it occurred to me that these minornets could very well be linked to one another -- microwave or other wireless connections. Sure, the latency goes up, but the reliance on the communications cartels (there is definitely a collusive conspiracy theory there!) is reduced greatly. You tie into the main Internet at a few points, set up your routing to get everyone into the main Internet in the fastest fashion, and you're set. It might be complicated initially but the software and hardware is out there to make it happen, IF NEEDED.
I really think that the whole idea of relying on the big boys' land lines might not be necessary. I was a endpoint on Fidonet, and got along just fine as technology progressed -- some people used X.25, some used landlines, some used ISDN lines, but we all got along. It was slow, but it worked, and it became better over time.
We have to thank the big providers for really being confused for so long as to how they can take advantage of the net. Now we have many ways to stay connected -- I connect to the web via my PDA (and my laptop) through my Samsung t809 with a Bluetooth connection. I'm using it right now, and I get 150kbps downloads -- more than enough. If I didn't have T-Mobile's great package, I know I have about 5 other wireless providers I could buy bandwidth from.
Give it time. Those who try to control you will not realize that there are those who know they can offer less control at a better price. Don't like the monopoly tiered service in your community? Go get a T1, and run a WiFi provider in your area. 3 of my neighbors pay me US$10 a month to get on my megapipe already. I could probably get another 20 of them if I really went out to try.
Tiered service MIGHT be what the average household wants, though. If the monopolies try it and no one comes in to offer a cheaper/less controlled service, the free market will have answered that question. I'd like to hear what the more authoritarian slashdotters here have to say about how the free market could fail the individual user in this case.
Just remember one thing -- if MegaCorp X is a monopoly provider of high speed bandwidth in your town, it isn't MegaCorp X's fault. Go blame the government who gave them the monopoly. If MegaCorp Y created their connections over previous monopoly status, don't ask MegaCorp Y to give you back what you gave them originally -- the right to be a monopoly. This is why I am against government licensing and regulations -- it creates these monopolies which come to affect us decades later.
It isn't the monopolies' fault that you let your local government give up your rights in exchange for bad service. In the old days, maybe it was OK -- it was either bad service or no service. Yet we see the slippery slope and how it affects us in the future, and we need to carefully think about the programs we're asking for today that might become bad monopoly services in the future.
Mobile homes are inefficient to heat, shoddily-constructed, and have grossly limited options for placement, especially in regards to local economic opportunities and necessary utility provisions. On top of that $750/m is certainly not a value with a minimum-wage income. It has virtually no resale value because of continual depreciation. A poor investment for sure.
I've moved at least 50 people in mobile homes in the past 12 months. All of them are happier than they were in the older homes. Inefficient to heat? My mobile home is over 1000 square feet (soon to be 2000 square feet). My heating bill in November and December was under $180 for the two months. My mother lives in a house -- same square footage. Her gas bill (1/2 hour away from my house) was over $630 for those two months.
Shoddy construction? The recent repo I bought was build in 1989. It is meticulously assembled and when I did a test of energy efficiency, I only had to replace one window.
All homes should continually depreciate -- all of them. Only land can appreciate in value, friend. The housing bubble will prove you very wrong when it bursts. I like living in a house that depreciates. I bought my home for under US$10,000 last year and its great. Every friend of mine who has visited me says it is better than the 2500 square foot home I owned previously just 2-3 miles from where I live now. That house is worth around US$350,000 and offered a lower standard of living compared to my life now.
$300k would be a mean debt of $15k. Depending on the rate and purpose of the debt, that isn't a lot of debt. Contrary to what you think, having debt isn't necessarily bad and can be quite beneficial.
No, you should never have debt on depreciating assets -- cars, physical portions of your home (not land value), clothing, food or appliances. Anything depreciating should be owned outright if you plan on building wealth and being able to resist life's ups and downs. People ask how I could prepare for a terrible tragedy? I do it buy building wealth -- real equity -- and avoiding debt in depreciating assets (such as the physical part of the home).
Debt is bad. This country will learn this very soon I believe. Just as we did in the 80s and Japan did in the 90s.
After taxes and fixed costs, it would be rather unlikely for a single person with an annual income of $60,000 to become a "millionaire" in 6-8 years, especially while eschewing debt. Please share with us the investment strategy and projected expenses for an engineer or IT monkey making $60k to earn $2M in 8 years.
I can't. My newsletter offers this advice and I'm not going to give it away for free. I also don't have room to add any more members to it, until I move it online.
US$60,000 can be turned into US$1 million in 8 years easily, if you downsize your debt, downsize your living costs (no mortgage, own a mobile home or other such inexpensive property) and maximize your savings and investments. For example, rather than invest in the sucker's stock market (no dividends, P:E ratios over the maximum of 6, etc), invest in local businesses with a set business plan and attention to cash flow concerns. My investments in local businesses offer me a yearly dividend usually over 20% annually. Some are as high as 50% if the business is really well maintained and competitive.
My living expenses in the Chicago area when I was living in my house and keeping up with the Joneses was over US$4400 per month plus food. My living expenses today are less than US$800 per month plus food. I put the rest into gold and local businesses. That US$3600 per month that I save is approximately US$43,200 plus my usual 25% net dividends on previous investments is what I base my forecasts on.
Also, most geeks making US$60,000 annually in a salaried position could double that income if they struck out on their own. Charging US$60 per hour and finding 40 hours a week of contract work is very easy and brings with it many more write-offs and tax savings than being a W2 employee.