I love how they call it counterfeit, like it's somehow of lesser quality than the chinese shit they sell themselves.
It might be the identical product off the same line but when you buy something you aren't just paying for the good itself. You are paying for a brand and what that implies including the entire process of how that product is delivered to you and who stands behind it if there is a problem with it. Counterfeit goods are a problem because of the free rider problem. If you can solve that problem then you might have a point.
The problem is that those people selling it out the back door don't have to pay for advertising, product development, brand development, R&D or any of a number of other costs that make it worthwhile to sell that product in the first place.
How, exactly, do people purchasing a good cost the world economy anything?
In a variety of ways depending on the nature of the counterfeit good. Some problems with counterfeits are more serious than others.
1) Many counterfeit goods are produced by criminal (think Mafia, etc) organizations. Purchasing these goods subsidizes these organizations. 2) Counterfeit goods weaken incentives to produce innovative and/or higher quality goods 3) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate safety standards and constitute a health/safety hazard. 4) Counterfeits undermine the relationship between customer and buyer as the buyer can no longer be sure of the product they are receiving 5) Counterfeits damage brand reputations and value (and yes these are important) 6) Counterfeits weaken incentives to conduct research and development. No point in paying for research if everyone else doesn't have to. 7) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate performance and quality standards. Some are outright frauds such as placebo pills.
Wait, an official NFL jersey costs $250-$300?? Fucking really? No wonder they need the government to enforce their monopoly!
Sure because people are willing to pay that. It's not like anyone has a gun to their head when buying one. It's the very definition of a discretionary purchase.
I think the people spend that much money on a jersey have a room temperature IQ but it's their money...
After that experience, I'm 100% convinced they're not "counterfeit" in the manufacturing sense, but instead they're pulled straight from the line on which the same "$200" jerseys are made, and sold on the side.
Happens all the time actually. I've been to China and spoken with business owners there. It is ridiculously common for contract manufacturers to do exactly what you are describing. They'll make extra and simply divert some through a distribution channel other than what the customer intended.
And people die from falling down. Sometimes you have to take personal responsibility and your own safety into account.
Ahh yes the classic macho "personal responsibility" response. You know what? There are some things you just can handle yourself. Sometimes disasters happen that you simply cannot protect yourself from. Situations that require a community effort to respond to. Bad snowstorms are one of them. Cities have snow removal equipment because it is a PUBLIC safety issue. (see the emphasis there?) The city leadership in Atlanta has failed in multiple ways - inadequate equipment, ignoring weather forecasts, inadequate communication with the public, bad planning, underinvestment, etc. This is not a personal responsibility issue beyond a person exercising prudent common sense regarding their immediate surroundings but that is not enough. When an entire city is shut down, that is not and cannot be merely a question of personal responsibility. Even if you are able to take care of yourself there are other people who are not so capable and need help. Saying it is merely a matter of personal responsibility here really is a way of saying you don't give a crap about your fellow human beings or their safety.
If people are foolish enough to believe that they'll be safe when a bad weather system bears down on them, then it's their own fault if they don't get out of the way.
And if the information you are being given is bad information then what? The city leaders should have been telling people to take this seriously. They should have shut schools and non-essential government operations down. Unlike a hurricane or earthquake there is plenty that can be done to prepare for a snowstorm in advance but this seems to have been largely neglected.
If you have snow rarely in an area, there's no justification for heavy snow removal equipment rather just some common sense.
That's not true for a major metropolitan area. They have to be prepared for situations like this which are occasional but severe. They have to stockpile equipment that they won't need very often and have contingency plans in place. They also need to exercise appropriate caution when they know a weather event is coming (and they were warned by the weather service) and yet they fail to act upon that information in a timely manner. Some people died needlessly because they waited to long to tell everyone to stay home.
Yes, I still feel that purchasing this type of equipment is a waste of taxpayer money to prepare for an event that happens maybe for one day every 5 years at the most.
So shutting a major city down for several days and calling in the national guard isn't a waste of money? You think there are no dual purpose vehicles (earthmovers, pickup trucks, etc) that could be used? Salt isn't hugely expensive to stockpile and it's a rock so it's not going to disappear as long as you keep it dry. Have city vehicles equipped with plow mounts and keep the plows and salt spreaders in a storage lot somewhere.
It was more of a problem with ice than snow. The roads had started to form a pretty thick layer of ice on Monday morning (I know because I had to drive through it).
This is always the problem in more southern climes, the snow comes down and then becomes ice. So, duh, invest in salting equipment and contingency plows and be prepared for the occasional ice storm. It WILL happen and southern cities NEVER prepare for it.
I've been told that there are eight salt-spreading trucks in Georgia. Eight, for the entire state. How the fuck were they supposed to prepare? Purchase more snow management equipment on short notice? Maintain a large fleet of trucks for the rare occasions that stuff like this happens?
I should think the answer to that is rather obvious. Buy more trucks ahead of time. You cannot use equipment you do not have. But instead they did an expected return analysis and came up snake eyes. You tell me which is cheaper, shutting an entire major city down for a day or investing in a bit of infrastructure to deal with a rare but serious weather conditions. Nobody expects them to have the same snow removal equipment as say Cleveland or Buffalo but they under-invested even for Atlanta and what happened is perfectly predictable. It's a bit like how they built much of New Orleans below sea level when the inevitable flooding occurs they claim they never could have predicted this.
When I was driving in to work yesterday, the roads were nearly deserted. The few cars that were on the road were flying all over the place. While it's possible to drive [relatively] safely in such conditions, it's a skill that I don't expect Georgians to have. This just doesn't happen that often down here.
That is an important part of the problem. I lived down south for a while and quite frankly the people down there are generally very very bad at driving in sloppy conditions. They either panic and creep along very slowly to the point where they impede traffic or they try to drive like it is dry pavement and get in trouble.
The roads were entirely covered in a solid sheet of ice. Ice, with no road salt, no gravel, no sand. If you live in an area that regularly receives some snowfall, you've never driven on anything quite like this, because you've got snow crews prepping roads before the snowfall, plowing for the duration of the snowfall, and then conditioning the road surfaces after the snowfall.
Not true at all because lots of roads simply don't receive immediate attention, particularly in rural areas. I live in the outskirts of a major city and after a recent snowfall we had people at my office that didn't get their road plowed for 2-3 days in an area that by and large has adequate snow removal equipment. I drive regularly on roads that might not see a plow for 3-5 days after a snow fall and certainly do not get prepped in advance.
You think that never happens up north? That's par for the course much of the time. Folks down south (and yes I've lived there) have this notion that temperatures in the northern states go down to somewhere around the freezing point of nitrogen and stay there until April. Doesn't really work like that. The difference is that we have appropriate and adequate snow removal equipment and we are accustomed to dealing with snow and ice. I grew up in the heaviest part of the snow belt along Lake Erie and I didn't have a single snow day in four years of high school despite annual snowfall of between 60-80 inches per year. When I lived down south the only snow removal tool they had was a calendar.
Ah, I think I get what you're trying to explain to me, you're saying that injection moulding and other trad methods can be beat on price, by current printers, for niche (short-run) products? Is this the case?
Correct. There are very large tooling costs that have to be amortized into the piece price for traditional methods. The cost of the plastic itself is generally only a concern at high volumes because it is very low compared with the cost of tooling at low volumes. Tooling and overhead are fixed costs (same price whether you produce 1 or 1 million) whereas plastic and direct labor are variable costs (same price per unit regardless of number produced). Piece price = Variable Costs + (Fixed Costs / Number of units produced) Since tooling for injection molding can easily be tens of thousands of dollars for each product, you need to produce a very large quantity to make the fixed costs per unit low. Get the unit volume high enough and the fixed costs become a pretty good approximation of zero.
Does anybody see anything wrong with this approach?
The power requirements primarily. Accelerating/decelerating the entire trip requires a vast amount of power. Not feasible with chemical rockets except for relatively short distances. This is well beyond the capabilities of any technology we presently have for space flight of any meaningful distance. Would likely require some form of nuclear (fusion or fission) propulsion.
bar superficial things like the ability to make ridiculously expensive full-colour prototypes of things that need moulding to make en masse.
Superficial? Hardly. Tooling is incredibly expensive for molded plastic products and 3D printers make producing small quantities of plastic parts MUCH cheaper in many cases. If you think this is unimportant or trivial then you are wrong. This is a Very Big Deal.
In the U.S. consumers don't pay the transaction fees on credit and debit cards, and in many states merchants are prohibited from adding a surcharge to cover this fee or offering a discount for a cash transaction.
Ohh I assure you that the consumers pay the fees even if they aren't aware of it. The merchants aren't going to eat a 2-4% fee. That gets passed on through an increase in the price of the product which is shared by everyone even if they don't use a credit card.
Note merchants tend to convert bitcoins to USD immediately upon receipt, the fee for this conversion is usually far far lower than the credit/debit card fee.
Conversion prices are relatively low because otherwise no one would bother. There is certainly no advantage in using an alternate currency if you don't have to. Bitcoin benefits from not having any meaningful transaction infrastructure in place (like credit card machines) which doesn't come cheap. Clearing and accounting for all the transactions also has a big cost that hasn't been fully realized. Sure the credit card processors are taking a cut as a middle man but if you think the same thing won't happen with bitcoin you are being naive. Bitcoin is avoiding fees because the middle men cannot charge them, not because they will not.
Cheaper because you don't have to pay money transfer fees.
That doesn't make it cheaper. That is merely one of MANY costs with bitcoin. You haven't considered the costs of currency exchange, the opportunity cost and risk of holding bitcoins, the cost of volatility, cost of transaction handling, cost of accounting time and more. You HAVE to consider the cost of bitcoin on a risk adjusted basis and account for all of the costs. You are not doing this whereas any Transaction fees are merely one of many costs to consider and you are taking on a LOT of risk to avoid these fees.
It is WAY faster than most forms of sending payment.
Demonstrably not true when compared against the faster forms of sending money, especially once you include time for currency conversion and the fact that both parties need to be already set up for the exchange. I'm a certified accountant and I do this sort of stuff of a living. I can get dollars to anyone on the globe within hours or even minutes should the need arise.
It is also much safer insofar as a business cannot arbitrarily reverse the transfer.
There are plenty of means of transferring money that cannot be easily reversed. This is not unique to bitcoin. It also does not make a transaction necessarily safer any more than a cash transaction does. It makes it safer for the seller but riskier for the buyer.
Crypto currency is clearly better.
Only to the financially illiterate. I have yet to see a supporter of crypto currencies give an honest and informed appraisal of the problems with them. Personally I'm agnostic about them from an ideological standpoint and realistic about them from a financial viewpoint. For the most part they seem to be an ill informed attempt to get back to a gold standard with all its attendant problems plus a few new ones.
Most people don't realize that the money system they are using has no underlying foundation.
However people that actually work in finance/accounting (like myself) are very clear on the topic. Fortunately people understanding that the only thing that gives any asset value is belief is not required for the system to work. They don't have to understand this fact in an abstract intellectual form. People very naturally understand whether an asset is desired by others or not and behave accordingly.
Those pieces have paper are valuable because people agree they are, not because they are backed by any product or valuable ore
Ahh, we come to the root of your confusion. Guess what? ANY asset, including gold, dollars, bitcoins, wheat or anything else, is only valuable because people believe it is valuable. People who desire a return to some sort of gold standard are under the delusion that they are making things more stable by "backing" a currency with some other asset. All they are really doing is turning currency into a derivative asset much like a commodity future. The only thing that gives gold its value is the fact that people believe it has value which is no different than with a fiat currency.
People are uncomfortable with bartering using stuff they thing is "worthless" (not backed by anything).
Most people demonstrably are not worried about this at all. As you said, most don't even realize their currency is not supported by anything other than faith.
So to you , "showing interest" is basically wholesale adoption by every big institution.
To some extent yes. It doesn't have to be a primary focus but those are the sorts of events you should expect to see if "the market" starts taking bitcoin seriously. In reality though if it even sees adoption to the level of Paypal I'll be rather surprised.
The market currently says 1 bitcoin is roughly worth 1000x 1 dollar with a ~$10 billion market cap.
Snicker.
So let me get this straight. An illiquid and volatile currency that barely anyone accepts and that relatively few people even know about has a frothy beenie-baby bubble like valuation among a bunch of wannabe finance geeks and you think that somehow implies an enormous valuation? This is nothing more than a game of "who's the bigger fool". This is the sort of pump and dump asset that boiler room salesmen can only dream of.
I don't know what you think "the market place is showing interest in bitcoin" would look like, but hopefully it would not require the complete replacement of the dollar to reach this threshold.
What would it look like? Investment banks would set up divisions to speculate in bitcoin. Banks (real banks) would start taking deposits and lending in bitcoin. Retail transaction infrastructure similar to the credit card industry would be set up en-masse. Companies like Amazon and Walmart would start taking payment in bitcoin. Currency exchanges would commonly trade bitcoin for other currencies. Commodities would be bought and sold in bitcoin.
It's not question of replacing the dollar. That will never happen.
Bitcoin doesn't have to be stopped. It just has to be ignored which is what most people are doing. For 99%+ of people out here in the real world, bitcoin does not solve any real world problems for them. Bitcoin does not allow me (or anyone I know) to do any transactions I currently do easier, cheaper, faster or safer. Most people who use it are either doing so for ideological reasons (hate the Fed, etc) or because they are looking to avoid legal scrutiny of their transactions (money laundering). It's probably of some minor interest to economic academics.
It's a competing currency. The marketplace says "we have no faith in your dollars.
Nonsense. The marketplace has mostly yawned and ignored bitcoin - and rightfully so. There is plenty of evidence that the market has lots of faith in dollars and very little in bitcoin.
The Pistons play in Auburn Hills, not Detroit. So if you are going "downtown" for stuff as the poster stated, you are not seeing the pistons.
You will note that I did not mention the Pistons. Of course if basketball is your thing, Auburn Hills is just a short drive right up I-75 and just off the highway. 20 Minute drive from the northern border of Detroit, traffic permitting. They also hold games sometimes at Ford Field downtown - college and Final Four stuff usually.
Eventually the Pistons are probably going to move downtown just like the other sports teams. Right now the Palace is still in pretty nice shape unlike the Silverdome and the old (now torn down) Tiger's stadium. I've already heard talk about it. The Red Wings are trying to get a replacement for Joe Louis Arena which is getting pretty shabby looking.
High tech companies need HIGHLY skilled workers. Most of the unemployed autoworkers in Detroit are not highly skilled.
Detroit Metro has a HUGE supply of highly skilled engineers and other high tech workers. There are only 3-4 cities in the entire US with more high tech jobs than around Metro Detroit. The problem is that these folks are already employed out in the suburbs were about 5/6 of the population lives. There are a surprising number of companies moving to downtown Detroit and they are bringing workers with them.
And nothing that Detroit has to offer except being close to Canada would appeal to me, and that's just not enough.
I'm pretty sure you've never actually spent any time in Detroit or you'd realize what you just said is very ignorant. Yes Detroit has its problems but it's hardly the hell hole it is made out to be. There are excellent employers, plenty of entertainment within easy reach, great restaurants, and more. Plus you have easy access to the Great Lakes, Michigan and Canada which are all amazing. I could easily see myself living in downtown Detroit under the right circumstances. I live not far from Detroit as it is and I go downtown regularly. Like any big city it has its nicer areas and other areas you probably should steer away from. People go downtown all the time for sporting events (Lions, Tigers and Red Wings), cultural events (DIA), casinos, restaurants and more.
There's a lot of decay in Detroit, so much so that it's unattractive to new businesses.
Actually lots of businesses see Detroit as long term attractive. There are numerous people like Dan Gilbert who are buying up property left and right and moving businesses downtown. You can get property REALLY cheap and make a killing if you know what you are doing. There is a LOT of opportunity in Detroit City for those who are entrepreneurial. I have relatives who just opened up a coffee shop and others who have restaurants in downtown Detroit. It's a terrific place to do business.
Even if you get get more workers into Detroit, what would they do for a living?
How about go to work for General Motors (their headquarters and much engineering are downtown), or Compuware, or Quicken Loans, or American Axle or Ernst & Young or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, or Blue Cross or HP Enterprise Services, or many others. There are jobs in law, finance, medicine, biomedical research, engineering, software and marketing. Good, high paying jobs.
Plow down more blocks of vacant, dilapidated houses?
Already happening. Detroit City used to have a lot more people than it does not. Much of the land is going to get re-purposed in the coming years. Yeah, it'll take quite a while to finish the job but they've already started.
You think the great lakes are inexhaustible fresh water?
Inexhaustible? Nope. But they are vast and very few other places on earth have anything like them. The Great Lakes have around 84% of the surface fresh water in the US. Like any resource it needs careful tending but folks who don't live around the Great Lakes don't really grasp how big they are. They properly should be termed inland Seas. With the possible exception of the Mississippi river watershed there is no more important source of water in the entire US. It's no exaggeration to say that the economy of the US and Canada would be greatly diminished without them.
Also, they are getting more and more polluted and more and more water is being removed each year
Actually the lakes have been getting significantly cleaner for the past few decades. Had you spent any effort looking you would find copious evidence proving that fact. I've lived around the great lakes for most of my life so I've seen it first hand. Lake Erie was a lot more polluted when I was a child than it is today.
Lake Michigan and Huron are historically low but it is still within the range of normal and has been more or less steady for the past several years. Water level in the lakes fluctuate by as much as several feet from year to year normally. People do divert water (particularly around Chicago) but the Great Lakes Compact will largely prevent any mass removal of water from the watershed.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how they call it counterfeit, like it's somehow of lesser quality than the chinese shit they sell themselves.
It might be the identical product off the same line but when you buy something you aren't just paying for the good itself. You are paying for a brand and what that implies including the entire process of how that product is delivered to you and who stands behind it if there is a problem with it. Counterfeit goods are a problem because of the free rider problem. If you can solve that problem then you might have a point.
The problem is that those people selling it out the back door don't have to pay for advertising, product development, brand development, R&D or any of a number of other costs that make it worthwhile to sell that product in the first place.
How, exactly, do people purchasing a good cost the world economy anything?
In a variety of ways depending on the nature of the counterfeit good. Some problems with counterfeits are more serious than others.
1) Many counterfeit goods are produced by criminal (think Mafia, etc) organizations. Purchasing these goods subsidizes these organizations.
2) Counterfeit goods weaken incentives to produce innovative and/or higher quality goods
3) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate safety standards and constitute a health/safety hazard.
4) Counterfeits undermine the relationship between customer and buyer as the buyer can no longer be sure of the product they are receiving
5) Counterfeits damage brand reputations and value (and yes these are important)
6) Counterfeits weaken incentives to conduct research and development. No point in paying for research if everyone else doesn't have to.
7) Many counterfeit goods are not produced to appropriate performance and quality standards. Some are outright frauds such as placebo pills.
Wait, an official NFL jersey costs $250-$300?? Fucking really? No wonder they need the government to enforce their monopoly!
Sure because people are willing to pay that. It's not like anyone has a gun to their head when buying one. It's the very definition of a discretionary purchase.
I think the people spend that much money on a jersey have a room temperature IQ but it's their money...
After that experience, I'm 100% convinced they're not "counterfeit" in the manufacturing sense, but instead they're pulled straight from the line on which the same "$200" jerseys are made, and sold on the side.
Happens all the time actually. I've been to China and spoken with business owners there. It is ridiculously common for contract manufacturers to do exactly what you are describing. They'll make extra and simply divert some through a distribution channel other than what the customer intended.
Wealthy people and corps should pay more taxes because they use our legal framework more often (and it's usually crafted to their benefit).
They generally DO pay more taxes. The question is whether they pay a fair amount. What constitutes a "fair" amount is the matter under debate.
And people die from falling down. Sometimes you have to take personal responsibility and your own safety into account.
Ahh yes the classic macho "personal responsibility" response. You know what? There are some things you just can handle yourself. Sometimes disasters happen that you simply cannot protect yourself from. Situations that require a community effort to respond to. Bad snowstorms are one of them. Cities have snow removal equipment because it is a PUBLIC safety issue. (see the emphasis there?) The city leadership in Atlanta has failed in multiple ways - inadequate equipment, ignoring weather forecasts, inadequate communication with the public, bad planning, underinvestment, etc. This is not a personal responsibility issue beyond a person exercising prudent common sense regarding their immediate surroundings but that is not enough. When an entire city is shut down, that is not and cannot be merely a question of personal responsibility. Even if you are able to take care of yourself there are other people who are not so capable and need help. Saying it is merely a matter of personal responsibility here really is a way of saying you don't give a crap about your fellow human beings or their safety.
If people are foolish enough to believe that they'll be safe when a bad weather system bears down on them, then it's their own fault if they don't get out of the way.
And if the information you are being given is bad information then what? The city leaders should have been telling people to take this seriously. They should have shut schools and non-essential government operations down. Unlike a hurricane or earthquake there is plenty that can be done to prepare for a snowstorm in advance but this seems to have been largely neglected.
If you have snow rarely in an area, there's no justification for heavy snow removal equipment rather just some common sense.
That's not true for a major metropolitan area. They have to be prepared for situations like this which are occasional but severe. They have to stockpile equipment that they won't need very often and have contingency plans in place. They also need to exercise appropriate caution when they know a weather event is coming (and they were warned by the weather service) and yet they fail to act upon that information in a timely manner. Some people died needlessly because they waited to long to tell everyone to stay home.
Yes, I still feel that purchasing this type of equipment is a waste of taxpayer money to prepare for an event that happens maybe for one day every 5 years at the most.
So shutting a major city down for several days and calling in the national guard isn't a waste of money? You think there are no dual purpose vehicles (earthmovers, pickup trucks, etc) that could be used? Salt isn't hugely expensive to stockpile and it's a rock so it's not going to disappear as long as you keep it dry. Have city vehicles equipped with plow mounts and keep the plows and salt spreaders in a storage lot somewhere.
It was more of a problem with ice than snow. The roads had started to form a pretty thick layer of ice on Monday morning (I know because I had to drive through it).
This is always the problem in more southern climes, the snow comes down and then becomes ice. So, duh, invest in salting equipment and contingency plows and be prepared for the occasional ice storm. It WILL happen and southern cities NEVER prepare for it.
I've been told that there are eight salt-spreading trucks in Georgia. Eight, for the entire state. How the fuck were they supposed to prepare? Purchase more snow management equipment on short notice? Maintain a large fleet of trucks for the rare occasions that stuff like this happens?
I should think the answer to that is rather obvious. Buy more trucks ahead of time. You cannot use equipment you do not have. But instead they did an expected return analysis and came up snake eyes. You tell me which is cheaper, shutting an entire major city down for a day or investing in a bit of infrastructure to deal with a rare but serious weather conditions. Nobody expects them to have the same snow removal equipment as say Cleveland or Buffalo but they under-invested even for Atlanta and what happened is perfectly predictable. It's a bit like how they built much of New Orleans below sea level when the inevitable flooding occurs they claim they never could have predicted this.
When I was driving in to work yesterday, the roads were nearly deserted. The few cars that were on the road were flying all over the place. While it's possible to drive [relatively] safely in such conditions, it's a skill that I don't expect Georgians to have. This just doesn't happen that often down here.
That is an important part of the problem. I lived down south for a while and quite frankly the people down there are generally very very bad at driving in sloppy conditions. They either panic and creep along very slowly to the point where they impede traffic or they try to drive like it is dry pavement and get in trouble.
The roads were entirely covered in a solid sheet of ice. Ice, with no road salt, no gravel, no sand. If you live in an area that regularly receives some snowfall, you've never driven on anything quite like this, because you've got snow crews prepping roads before the snowfall, plowing for the duration of the snowfall, and then conditioning the road surfaces after the snowfall.
Not true at all because lots of roads simply don't receive immediate attention, particularly in rural areas. I live in the outskirts of a major city and after a recent snowfall we had people at my office that didn't get their road plowed for 2-3 days in an area that by and large has adequate snow removal equipment. I drive regularly on roads that might not see a plow for 3-5 days after a snow fall and certainly do not get prepped in advance.
You think that never happens up north? That's par for the course much of the time. Folks down south (and yes I've lived there) have this notion that temperatures in the northern states go down to somewhere around the freezing point of nitrogen and stay there until April. Doesn't really work like that. The difference is that we have appropriate and adequate snow removal equipment and we are accustomed to dealing with snow and ice. I grew up in the heaviest part of the snow belt along Lake Erie and I didn't have a single snow day in four years of high school despite annual snowfall of between 60-80 inches per year. When I lived down south the only snow removal tool they had was a calendar.
Ah, I think I get what you're trying to explain to me, you're saying that injection moulding and other trad methods can be beat on price, by current printers, for niche (short-run) products? Is this the case?
Correct. There are very large tooling costs that have to be amortized into the piece price for traditional methods. The cost of the plastic itself is generally only a concern at high volumes because it is very low compared with the cost of tooling at low volumes. Tooling and overhead are fixed costs (same price whether you produce 1 or 1 million) whereas plastic and direct labor are variable costs (same price per unit regardless of number produced). Piece price = Variable Costs + (Fixed Costs / Number of units produced) Since tooling for injection molding can easily be tens of thousands of dollars for each product, you need to produce a very large quantity to make the fixed costs per unit low. Get the unit volume high enough and the fixed costs become a pretty good approximation of zero.
Does anybody see anything wrong with this approach?
The power requirements primarily. Accelerating/decelerating the entire trip requires a vast amount of power. Not feasible with chemical rockets except for relatively short distances. This is well beyond the capabilities of any technology we presently have for space flight of any meaningful distance. Would likely require some form of nuclear (fusion or fission) propulsion.
bar superficial things like the ability to make ridiculously expensive full-colour prototypes of things that need moulding to make en masse.
Superficial? Hardly. Tooling is incredibly expensive for molded plastic products and 3D printers make producing small quantities of plastic parts MUCH cheaper in many cases. If you think this is unimportant or trivial then you are wrong. This is a Very Big Deal.
In the U.S. consumers don't pay the transaction fees on credit and debit cards, and in many states merchants are prohibited from adding a surcharge to cover this fee or offering a discount for a cash transaction.
Ohh I assure you that the consumers pay the fees even if they aren't aware of it. The merchants aren't going to eat a 2-4% fee. That gets passed on through an increase in the price of the product which is shared by everyone even if they don't use a credit card.
Note merchants tend to convert bitcoins to USD immediately upon receipt, the fee for this conversion is usually far far lower than the credit/debit card fee.
Conversion prices are relatively low because otherwise no one would bother. There is certainly no advantage in using an alternate currency if you don't have to. Bitcoin benefits from not having any meaningful transaction infrastructure in place (like credit card machines) which doesn't come cheap. Clearing and accounting for all the transactions also has a big cost that hasn't been fully realized. Sure the credit card processors are taking a cut as a middle man but if you think the same thing won't happen with bitcoin you are being naive. Bitcoin is avoiding fees because the middle men cannot charge them, not because they will not.
Cheaper because you don't have to pay money transfer fees.
That doesn't make it cheaper. That is merely one of MANY costs with bitcoin. You haven't considered the costs of currency exchange, the opportunity cost and risk of holding bitcoins, the cost of volatility, cost of transaction handling, cost of accounting time and more. You HAVE to consider the cost of bitcoin on a risk adjusted basis and account for all of the costs. You are not doing this whereas any Transaction fees are merely one of many costs to consider and you are taking on a LOT of risk to avoid these fees.
It is WAY faster than most forms of sending payment.
Demonstrably not true when compared against the faster forms of sending money, especially once you include time for currency conversion and the fact that both parties need to be already set up for the exchange. I'm a certified accountant and I do this sort of stuff of a living. I can get dollars to anyone on the globe within hours or even minutes should the need arise.
It is also much safer insofar as a business cannot arbitrarily reverse the transfer.
There are plenty of means of transferring money that cannot be easily reversed. This is not unique to bitcoin. It also does not make a transaction necessarily safer any more than a cash transaction does. It makes it safer for the seller but riskier for the buyer.
Crypto currency is clearly better.
Only to the financially illiterate. I have yet to see a supporter of crypto currencies give an honest and informed appraisal of the problems with them. Personally I'm agnostic about them from an ideological standpoint and realistic about them from a financial viewpoint. For the most part they seem to be an ill informed attempt to get back to a gold standard with all its attendant problems plus a few new ones.
Most people don't realize that the money system they are using has no underlying foundation.
However people that actually work in finance/accounting (like myself) are very clear on the topic. Fortunately people understanding that the only thing that gives any asset value is belief is not required for the system to work. They don't have to understand this fact in an abstract intellectual form. People very naturally understand whether an asset is desired by others or not and behave accordingly.
Those pieces have paper are valuable because people agree they are, not because they are backed by any product or valuable ore
Ahh, we come to the root of your confusion. Guess what? ANY asset, including gold, dollars, bitcoins, wheat or anything else, is only valuable because people believe it is valuable. People who desire a return to some sort of gold standard are under the delusion that they are making things more stable by "backing" a currency with some other asset. All they are really doing is turning currency into a derivative asset much like a commodity future. The only thing that gives gold its value is the fact that people believe it has value which is no different than with a fiat currency.
People are uncomfortable with bartering using stuff they thing is "worthless" (not backed by anything).
Most people demonstrably are not worried about this at all. As you said, most don't even realize their currency is not supported by anything other than faith.
So to you , "showing interest" is basically wholesale adoption by every big institution.
To some extent yes. It doesn't have to be a primary focus but those are the sorts of events you should expect to see if "the market" starts taking bitcoin seriously. In reality though if it even sees adoption to the level of Paypal I'll be rather surprised.
The market currently says 1 bitcoin is roughly worth 1000x 1 dollar with a ~$10 billion market cap.
Snicker.
So let me get this straight. An illiquid and volatile currency that barely anyone accepts and that relatively few people even know about has a frothy beenie-baby bubble like valuation among a bunch of wannabe finance geeks and you think that somehow implies an enormous valuation? This is nothing more than a game of "who's the bigger fool". This is the sort of pump and dump asset that boiler room salesmen can only dream of.
I don't know what you think "the market place is showing interest in bitcoin" would look like, but hopefully it would not require the complete replacement of the dollar to reach this threshold.
What would it look like? Investment banks would set up divisions to speculate in bitcoin. Banks (real banks) would start taking deposits and lending in bitcoin. Retail transaction infrastructure similar to the credit card industry would be set up en-masse. Companies like Amazon and Walmart would start taking payment in bitcoin. Currency exchanges would commonly trade bitcoin for other currencies. Commodities would be bought and sold in bitcoin.
It's not question of replacing the dollar. That will never happen.
Bitcoin can not be stopped
Bitcoin doesn't have to be stopped. It just has to be ignored which is what most people are doing. For 99%+ of people out here in the real world, bitcoin does not solve any real world problems for them. Bitcoin does not allow me (or anyone I know) to do any transactions I currently do easier, cheaper, faster or safer. Most people who use it are either doing so for ideological reasons (hate the Fed, etc) or because they are looking to avoid legal scrutiny of their transactions (money laundering). It's probably of some minor interest to economic academics.
It's a competing currency. The marketplace says "we have no faith in your dollars.
Nonsense. The marketplace has mostly yawned and ignored bitcoin - and rightfully so. There is plenty of evidence that the market has lots of faith in dollars and very little in bitcoin.
The Pistons play in Auburn Hills, not Detroit. So if you are going "downtown" for stuff as the poster stated, you are not seeing the pistons.
You will note that I did not mention the Pistons. Of course if basketball is your thing, Auburn Hills is just a short drive right up I-75 and just off the highway. 20 Minute drive from the northern border of Detroit, traffic permitting. They also hold games sometimes at Ford Field downtown - college and Final Four stuff usually.
Eventually the Pistons are probably going to move downtown just like the other sports teams. Right now the Palace is still in pretty nice shape unlike the Silverdome and the old (now torn down) Tiger's stadium. I've already heard talk about it. The Red Wings are trying to get a replacement for Joe Louis Arena which is getting pretty shabby looking.
High tech companies need HIGHLY skilled workers. Most of the unemployed autoworkers in Detroit are not highly skilled.
Detroit Metro has a HUGE supply of highly skilled engineers and other high tech workers. There are only 3-4 cities in the entire US with more high tech jobs than around Metro Detroit. The problem is that these folks are already employed out in the suburbs were about 5/6 of the population lives. There are a surprising number of companies moving to downtown Detroit and they are bringing workers with them.
And nothing that Detroit has to offer except being close to Canada would appeal to me, and that's just not enough.
I'm pretty sure you've never actually spent any time in Detroit or you'd realize what you just said is very ignorant. Yes Detroit has its problems but it's hardly the hell hole it is made out to be. There are excellent employers, plenty of entertainment within easy reach, great restaurants, and more. Plus you have easy access to the Great Lakes, Michigan and Canada which are all amazing. I could easily see myself living in downtown Detroit under the right circumstances. I live not far from Detroit as it is and I go downtown regularly. Like any big city it has its nicer areas and other areas you probably should steer away from. People go downtown all the time for sporting events (Lions, Tigers and Red Wings), cultural events (DIA), casinos, restaurants and more.
There's a lot of decay in Detroit, so much so that it's unattractive to new businesses.
Actually lots of businesses see Detroit as long term attractive. There are numerous people like Dan Gilbert who are buying up property left and right and moving businesses downtown. You can get property REALLY cheap and make a killing if you know what you are doing. There is a LOT of opportunity in Detroit City for those who are entrepreneurial. I have relatives who just opened up a coffee shop and others who have restaurants in downtown Detroit. It's a terrific place to do business.
Even if you get get more workers into Detroit, what would they do for a living?
How about go to work for General Motors (their headquarters and much engineering are downtown), or Compuware, or Quicken Loans, or American Axle or Ernst & Young or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, or Blue Cross or HP Enterprise Services, or many others. There are jobs in law, finance, medicine, biomedical research, engineering, software and marketing. Good, high paying jobs.
Plow down more blocks of vacant, dilapidated houses?
Already happening. Detroit City used to have a lot more people than it does not. Much of the land is going to get re-purposed in the coming years. Yeah, it'll take quite a while to finish the job but they've already started.
You think the great lakes are inexhaustible fresh water?
Inexhaustible? Nope. But they are vast and very few other places on earth have anything like them. The Great Lakes have around 84% of the surface fresh water in the US. Like any resource it needs careful tending but folks who don't live around the Great Lakes don't really grasp how big they are. They properly should be termed inland Seas. With the possible exception of the Mississippi river watershed there is no more important source of water in the entire US. It's no exaggeration to say that the economy of the US and Canada would be greatly diminished without them.
Also, they are getting more and more polluted and more and more water is being removed each year
Actually the lakes have been getting significantly cleaner for the past few decades. Had you spent any effort looking you would find copious evidence proving that fact. I've lived around the great lakes for most of my life so I've seen it first hand. Lake Erie was a lot more polluted when I was a child than it is today.
Lake Michigan and Huron are historically low but it is still within the range of normal and has been more or less steady for the past several years. Water level in the lakes fluctuate by as much as several feet from year to year normally. People do divert water (particularly around Chicago) but the Great Lakes Compact will largely prevent any mass removal of water from the watershed.