The value of gold is quite limited, because jewellery also has a limited value. If the economy is bad, the value of jewellery bottoms out, as no one will buy it. Yes, there are a few industrial uses for gold, manly in electronics and in chemistry, but they use only 10% of the world's supply. About half of the gold goes into two countries: China and India. Why? Because there, the marriage gifts for brides are traditionally made of gold. So China uses 30% and India about 25% of the world's gold supply to marry their daughters.
I wonder if it makes sense to have a currency whose value is based mainly on the marriage traditions of two countries.
There is a thing in socioeconomics called the "Mackenroth thesis". It says that the social expenditure of a given time period can only be generated in the same time period. From a socioeconomic point of, there is no such thing as "saving money for the future", because money has only the value we give it at the time we exchange it, and it plays no role if the money is printed on paper or coined in precious metals, because precious metals also have only the value we give them at the time we exchange them, as they have no intrinsic value. You can't neither build a house from dollar bills nor eat gold coins.
If a generation saves too much money for their retirement, at the time they want to spend it, inflation will eat into the retirement savings until their value comes close to the amount of goods and services society as a whole is ready to give to people not generating any goods and services right now. It was always so, and it l always be the same. Providing non-working people, may they be retired, too young for work, sick or just unemployed, with goods and services is always a redistribution of wealth. The only difference is how that redistribution is organized.
There is another thing where supply and demand determine the price. As soon as my costs for manufacturing and distribution are covered by the price I can call, they are no longer part of the equation. If my costs sink, but demand remains the same, there is no reason for me to lower the price.
What type of predictions? Were they given as ranges (scientific predictions mostly are), and the results did not came out right in the middle of the range? Were the ranges given with probabilities, and the probabilities just ignored? Where were the predictions published? Were they really predictions from scientific papers, or were they just expolations by reporters telling about the papers? Or were they just made up to fill an article how wrong the scientists are?
And more so: How many predictions were actually coming true and not being reported by the Drudge report? If you dig into ten thousands of papers, you might get 100,000 predictions, and of them, just 110 didn't come true the way the authors of Drudge Report would like to have them being true. This would give a success rate close to 99 percent. Yeah for Science!
Oh, that was not a given. I just wanted to point out that "being a sign" and "being a landmark" are not the distinguished properties the great-grandparent postulated.
If a sign is a landmark, it's value lies in the fact, that it marks a certain land. If you remove it from the land it stands on, it loses the very property that makes it valuabe. So I can understand AMPEX that they don't want the disassembled sign on their premises, as there it is just a disassembled sign, not a landmark.
The problem is that pure capitalism is totally instable. If you don't have strong institutions in place that keep the peace (in all meanings of the word), no one hinders someone to hire enough thugs and plunder the marketplace. In reality, capitalism only works if it is embedded in a legal and administrative framework, which some people like to call "socialist", but which is the building block on which a free marketplace is founded. Capitalism doesn't defend against anything. It just changes the roles of the actors. If the thugs take over, the free floating marketplace of goods and services turns into a marketplace of free floating weapons and coalitions of gangs and mobs (which then monopolize into a marketplace of kings and dictators).
Personal freedom is nothing that exists per se, personal freedom has to be created and maintained by a society dedicated to keep it as a principle. No one is able to defend himself all on his own. He can build a himself fortress to shift the balance of power to his advantage, but then he is locked into his fortress, and his personal freedom of movement is limited, and until his fortress is ready, his freedom of doing business is limited, because he has to dedicate all free resources to fortress building.
The only other alternative is to move out and go into the wilderness -- that is, if you find any wilderness left. And this is only a temporary solution until some developer finds your wilderness, when you are thrown back into fortress building.
No, all that personal freedom you have today, you have only because we as a society provide for it.
You are not forced to trust the government. That's why we have checks and balances. That's why a free press is essential to a working democracy. That's why you are entitled to challenge in court every governmental decision affecting you.
No, it's your very task as a citizen not to trust your government, but to keep yourself informed and ready to challenge anything that you don't like, by speaking out, by voting and by going to court, if all else fails. A government is made by humans, and like any humans, it can err, it follows an agenda, open or hidden, and it will be blind to some serious effects of its decisions.
1199: Pope Innocent III forbade the "reading of the bible in private".
1229: Pope Gregor IX on the Council of Toulouse (Concil Tolosanum):
Prohibemus etiam, ne libros veteris testamenti aut novi laici permittantur habere; nisi forte psalterium vel breviarium pro divinis officiis aut horas beatae Mariae aliquis ex devotione habere velit.
(We also prohibit the laity to have the books of the Old Testament or the New, except, perhaps, the psalter or a breviary, for divine service or the hours of the Holy Mary, or if a person wishes to have them out of devotion.)
Maybe it's because FBI, CIA and Congressial Republicans all agree that there has been a Russian collusion during the election. And when Donald Trump, after meeting Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, first denied it, he backtracked the day after and admitted that there has been a strong Russian influence on the election.
In this case, it is, as the town center of the old Colonia Agrippina was exactly where the town center of today's Cologne is. There is a continuous development from Colonia Agrippina to today's Cologne (and on the other side of the Rhine river, where today's Cologne-Deutz is, was the Roman fortress Castrum Divitensium. Even the churches in Cologne's town center were mostly built on the foundations of Roman temples.
There was even a time, when owning a bible was forbidden (as one could read oneself and then get new ideas how to interpret the Bible), when the Cathars in the 12th century started to get hold in Southern France.
Sadly, (10) Hygiea is by far the largest Carbonacerous asteroid out there. I doubt, all other asteroids together provide enough carbon to fill the remaining gap. And (10) Hygiea is a 400-km-diameter-piece of rock circling Sun at about 2.5 AU, meaning the closest it gets to Mars is about 1 AU. Imagine the energy necessary to move it closer to Mars to have it dropped on the surface! And who knows what remains of Mars after the impact of 9*10^18 kg of stuff.
This is not what the original article was talking about.
It was not about creating a breathable atmosphere, but an atmosphere which you can walk through without wearing a pressure suit (but you would still need to carry your own oxygen). Apparently, there is not much of nitrogenium on Mars you could make an atmosphere from, and for oxygen, you need green plants (or an equivalent) to refresh it all the time. This leaves us with carbondioxide as the main component of a potential atmosphere of higher pressure.
"A few" would amount to "about any Carbonacerous asteroid we know of in the Asteroid Belt". Compared with a planet, the mass of all asteroids taken together is miniscule (it's about 5% the mass of the Moon or.5% the mass of Mars). For terraforming, only the asteroids of spectral class C (Carbonaceous asteroids) are of any interest, and albeit they make up about 75% of all objects in the Asteroid belt, they are rather small, and only about 3% of their mass is Carbon. The largest one, (10) Hygiea, may contain about 3*10^17 kg of Carbon, which burned to Carbondioxide, gives about 10^18 kg. On Mars, this would increase the pressure of the atmosphere by another 25 millibars, still a far cry away from the 1000 millibars we need.
Fiat currency is nothing else than IOUs. If you ban fiat currency, you ban lending and borrowing.
Currency made out of precious things (may it be gold, cocoa beans or cowrie shells) is just a very expensive and cumbersome method of keeping track of all the IOUs. The value of any money, if printed on paper or made out of generally expensive stuff, lies in the acceptance of your counterpart to take it as payment. Croesus, in the 6th century BC king of ancient Lydia, who often gets hailed as the inventor of coined money, knew this: You can increase the value of your currency if you give a warranty of acceptance by tagging it with your seal, e.g. by minting coins out of the raw metal.
And the story of Musa I. of Mali should serve as a warning example for precious-metal-currencies: When he went on his pilgrimage to Mecca in the early 14th century, he inadvertedly ruined the economies of Cairo, Mecca and Medina due to the big influx of gold into their markets, as he was probably the richest person in history, and the amount of gold he carried with his pilgrimage procession could easily have exceeded US$ 300 billion at today's market value. His spending habits caused galloping inflations in all places he was visiting, and it took decades until the value of gold normalized.
The problem is not, if a patent is valid or not. The problem is how to determine if a patent is valid or not. If someone can claim souvereignity, the processual possibilities to invalidate a patent in his ownership are limited. Basicly he can say: Don't touch it, it's mine! And because the USPTO once agreed to the claims and issued the patent, it is valid as of now, and because of the don't-touch-it-doctrin, the state of validity can't be changed.
Hindsight is always 20/20. What we don't know is how many flawed entries would have been in a more complete database. Now that all dots are connected we know which ones were part of the pictures, and which ones were just specks of dust and fly spots.
Just because you have your data pre-sorted doesn't make it any more correct.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if it makes sense to have a currency whose value is based mainly on the marriage traditions of two countries.
If a generation saves too much money for their retirement, at the time they want to spend it, inflation will eat into the retirement savings until their value comes close to the amount of goods and services society as a whole is ready to give to people not generating any goods and services right now. It was always so, and it l always be the same. Providing non-working people, may they be retired, too young for work, sick or just unemployed, with goods and services is always a redistribution of wealth. The only difference is how that redistribution is organized.
There is another thing where supply and demand determine the price. As soon as my costs for manufacturing and distribution are covered by the price I can call, they are no longer part of the equation. If my costs sink, but demand remains the same, there is no reason for me to lower the price.
And more so: How many predictions were actually coming true and not being reported by the Drudge report? If you dig into ten thousands of papers, you might get 100,000 predictions, and of them, just 110 didn't come true the way the authors of Drudge Report would like to have them being true. This would give a success rate close to 99 percent. Yeah for Science!
And finally: Does the article even exist?
Oh, that was not a given. I just wanted to point out that "being a sign" and "being a landmark" are not the distinguished properties the great-grandparent postulated.
No. You can actually remove landmarks. Then that part of the land is no longer marked by the sign.
If a sign is a landmark, it's value lies in the fact, that it marks a certain land. If you remove it from the land it stands on, it loses the very property that makes it valuabe. So I can understand AMPEX that they don't want the disassembled sign on their premises, as there it is just a disassembled sign, not a landmark.
Those attributes are not mutually exclusive. If you can tell from the sight of a sign that you are at a certain place makes this sign a landmark.
Depends on how you count the backwheels. Yes, there are two of them, close together, like in the original Isetta.
Personal freedom is nothing that exists per se, personal freedom has to be created and maintained by a society dedicated to keep it as a principle. No one is able to defend himself all on his own. He can build a himself fortress to shift the balance of power to his advantage, but then he is locked into his fortress, and his personal freedom of movement is limited, and until his fortress is ready, his freedom of doing business is limited, because he has to dedicate all free resources to fortress building.
The only other alternative is to move out and go into the wilderness -- that is, if you find any wilderness left. And this is only a temporary solution until some developer finds your wilderness, when you are thrown back into fortress building.
No, all that personal freedom you have today, you have only because we as a society provide for it.
Two large continental plates and a a small plate (the Caribbean plate) locked inbetween.
It's a good proxy to determine how democratic a country is: How much ammo do you need to change the government?
No, it's your very task as a citizen not to trust your government, but to keep yourself informed and ready to challenge anything that you don't like, by speaking out, by voting and by going to court, if all else fails. A government is made by humans, and like any humans, it can err, it follows an agenda, open or hidden, and it will be blind to some serious effects of its decisions.
All four factors rate quite highly in the educational success of children.
So the real question is: How well fare the homeschooled children compared with children at public schools if you correct for those factors?
1229: Pope Gregor IX on the Council of Toulouse (Concil Tolosanum):
Prohibemus etiam, ne libros veteris testamenti aut novi laici permittantur habere; nisi forte psalterium vel breviarium pro divinis officiis aut horas beatae Mariae aliquis ex devotione habere velit.
(We also prohibit the laity to have the books of the Old Testament or the New, except, perhaps, the psalter or a breviary, for divine service or the hours of the Holy Mary, or if a person wishes to have them out of devotion.)
Maybe it's because FBI, CIA and Congressial Republicans all agree that there has been a Russian collusion during the election. And when Donald Trump, after meeting Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, first denied it, he backtracked the day after and admitted that there has been a strong Russian influence on the election.
In this case, it is, as the town center of the old Colonia Agrippina was exactly where the town center of today's Cologne is. There is a continuous development from Colonia Agrippina to today's Cologne (and on the other side of the Rhine river, where today's Cologne-Deutz is, was the Roman fortress Castrum Divitensium. Even the churches in Cologne's town center were mostly built on the foundations of Roman temples.
There was even a time, when owning a bible was forbidden (as one could read oneself and then get new ideas how to interpret the Bible), when the Cathars in the 12th century started to get hold in Southern France.
Sadly, (10) Hygiea is by far the largest Carbonacerous asteroid out there. I doubt, all other asteroids together provide enough carbon to fill the remaining gap. And (10) Hygiea is a 400-km-diameter-piece of rock circling Sun at about 2.5 AU, meaning the closest it gets to Mars is about 1 AU. Imagine the energy necessary to move it closer to Mars to have it dropped on the surface! And who knows what remains of Mars after the impact of 9*10^18 kg of stuff.
It was not about creating a breathable atmosphere, but an atmosphere which you can walk through without wearing a pressure suit (but you would still need to carry your own oxygen). Apparently, there is not much of nitrogenium on Mars you could make an atmosphere from, and for oxygen, you need green plants (or an equivalent) to refresh it all the time. This leaves us with carbondioxide as the main component of a potential atmosphere of higher pressure.
"A few" would amount to "about any Carbonacerous asteroid we know of in the Asteroid Belt". Compared with a planet, the mass of all asteroids taken together is miniscule (it's about 5% the mass of the Moon or .5% the mass of Mars). For terraforming, only the asteroids of spectral class C (Carbonaceous asteroids) are of any interest, and albeit they make up about 75% of all objects in the Asteroid belt, they are rather small, and only about 3% of their mass is Carbon. The largest one, (10) Hygiea, may contain about 3*10^17 kg of Carbon, which burned to Carbondioxide, gives about 10^18 kg. On Mars, this would increase the pressure of the atmosphere by another 25 millibars, still a far cry away from the 1000 millibars we need.
We are terraforming Earth, albeit not in a planned way.
Currency made out of precious things (may it be gold, cocoa beans or cowrie shells) is just a very expensive and cumbersome method of keeping track of all the IOUs. The value of any money, if printed on paper or made out of generally expensive stuff, lies in the acceptance of your counterpart to take it as payment. Croesus, in the 6th century BC king of ancient Lydia, who often gets hailed as the inventor of coined money, knew this: You can increase the value of your currency if you give a warranty of acceptance by tagging it with your seal, e.g. by minting coins out of the raw metal.
And the story of Musa I. of Mali should serve as a warning example for precious-metal-currencies: When he went on his pilgrimage to Mecca in the early 14th century, he inadvertedly ruined the economies of Cairo, Mecca and Medina due to the big influx of gold into their markets, as he was probably the richest person in history, and the amount of gold he carried with his pilgrimage procession could easily have exceeded US$ 300 billion at today's market value. His spending habits caused galloping inflations in all places he was visiting, and it took decades until the value of gold normalized.
The problem is not, if a patent is valid or not. The problem is how to determine if a patent is valid or not. If someone can claim souvereignity, the processual possibilities to invalidate a patent in his ownership are limited. Basicly he can say: Don't touch it, it's mine! And because the USPTO once agreed to the claims and issued the patent, it is valid as of now, and because of the don't-touch-it-doctrin, the state of validity can't be changed.
Just because you have your data pre-sorted doesn't make it any more correct.