As an industrial engineer (which I am) I would tell you that there is a lot of expense involved in parceling out territories that small and managing the large number of employees. There are insurance expenses to consider as well which are very significant. It is a solvable problem but that doesn't make it the most economic solution available.
Now forward that about 30 years, I happen to work with some pretty successful and wealthy people that came from nothing and got their start on a responsible paper route.
I would suggest to you that those people probably would have been quite successful regardless of whether they had a paper route or not. I've met a LOT of former paperboys in my time and while they mostly look back on their time delivering papers fondly not a one of them would claim that they would not have been successful without the paper route.
You never know what people are made of until you ask them to do something.
I'm not debating that. The problem from the standpoint of the business is that they do not know which children will be the reliable ones and there are extra costs to managing an unreliable workforce. Newspapers are not charities whose mission is to provide employment to children. There is simply a cost/benefit analysis that has determined that the cost of letting children be your interface with your customers outweighs the benefit of the cheap labor.
Times and circumstances have changed and young folks who want employment will have to look elsewhere. There is nothing wrong asking young folks to prove themselves but expecting a for-profit business to have some obligation to provide those opportunities is rather naive.
A generation ago, a paper route was the responsibility of the carrier (the 12 year old kid).
Then the newspapers finally realized that depending on the reliability of 12 year old children to deliver their product was a recipe for unreliable delivery, poor customer service and disappointed advertisers. Turnover was extremely high and productivity very low. Not to mention the liability involved in hiring children who can't even drive yet. I don't know about your paperboys but ours frequently failed to deliver, screwed up the billing, damaged the paper, overslept, etc. I'm fine with young people getting opportunities for responsibility but only if they can actually handle said responsibility.
We don't know and don't have a right to know
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Apple After Jobs
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· Score: 1
Jobs is 53 and has no life threatening illness.
Unless you are his doctor you cannot possibly know that. You might be right but you certainly don't know. Neither does anyone else except Jobs and probably, though not certainly, those with whom he is close.
The cancer he had in 2004 was of a type that usually doesn't recur, and both Apple and Jobs have said that it hasn't recurred.
Words are cheap. Probably true but that doesn't constitute evidence.
Thus the odds are that Jobs will be in charge for at least the next decade.
Apparently the odds tell us he has about 5-6 years. Apparently the type of tumor does have a better prognosis than other types of pancreatic tumors. The median survival if the disease was local and completely resected is apparently around 10 years or 6 years if confined to the region around the pancreas. It's been four since he underwent surgery. He has already outlived the life expectancy for someone with metastatic cells. Thus without additional information we should expect Steve to remain at the helm for no more than about 6 more years. Could it be more? Sure. But just going by the numbers that is what we know.
There's no point in speculating on how Apple would do without him that far in the future.
There is a point but without more data you can only draw certain conclusions. It's nice to know as accurately as possible the risks that one might face. However there is some information that you just don't have a right to know and you have to do the best you can with what you have.
I firmly believe his health is no ones else's business except Steve Jobs. He has every right to share or not share as he sees fit. Any investor who thinks they have a "right" to know is unbelievably self centered and delusional. Yes, Steve Jobs might get seriously ill - take that risk into consideration before buying the stock. I fully support Steve Jobs telling us whatever he wishes regarding his health, including no information at all if that is his choice.
The question at hand is simply if money should be abstracting (backed by) physical assets like gold or iron or not.
Absolutely, and the conclusion that pretty much every government and most (though not all) economists around the world has come to is that money does NOT need to be backed by tangible assets. Are they right? Only time will tell but I think so. There is no fundamentally sound argument I have ever heard that two parties seeking a mutually agreeable medium of exchange should insist that the medium be a tangible asset such as gold - there is ample evidence that intangible/abstract assets can do the job just fine.
Anti-statists, who think that governments can't be trusted with the power to create money out of thin air.
Which is normally a ridiculous argument because it usually confuses the concepts of money and value. No one should completely trust governments but governments have been creating money (which remember is an abstraction sometimes given tangible form) since time immemorial. If someone desires assets other than government backed cash to reduce risk there is no lack of alternative assets available.
Statists, who think that the idea of limiting governmental power is foolish.
I'm not sure I know anyone (except some of those presently in power) who think unlimited government power would be a good thing. Perhaps you mean something more nuanced?
"Agents of inertia", who assume that there must have been a good reason to change off the gold standard...
There WERE good reasons to eliminate the gold standard. You don't necessarily have to agree that switching off the gold standard was a good idea. However any reasonable evaluation of the Gold Standard and the Bretton Woods system will reveal that there were significant problems using gold backed money.
That still leaves us without the basic information on what the *economic* benefits and disadvantages are of the two options...
A quick bit of research on wikipedia and other sources will give you a pretty good overview of the arguments for either side. I've actually had extensive schooling including visits to foreign central banks to learn about the issues in question. It's an interesting topic with no truly definitive answers but a lot of experiential evidence for both sides.
...and if there are other options that might be better than both.and if there are other options that might be better than both.
It's not clear to me what those might be but it's an interesting notion to ponder.
What is the "full faith and credit of the united states government worth"? Hint: ask an innocent Iraqi walking down the street in downtown Baghdad
Why would an Iraqi care about the US government's ability to tax its citizens? You do know that is what full faith and credit in the context of money means, right?
Legal tender does not have intrinsic value
You are using the term but I do not think you understand the meaning of it. The concept of legal tender has nothing to do with the concept of intrinsic value.
(and I don't think that wikipedia article is correct; I believe creditors can refuse legal tender and insist on other forms of payment; try paying your mortgage in pennies, for example
There are a lot of nuances to the law but in the US legal tender means that currency printed by the US government is an acceptable and legal means of settling any debt. It does not mean that a private party has to accept any particular denomination of currency or cannot request payment in a particular form. Try reading the entire article next time.
Nobody has to accept cash, either.
Generally true but so what? Most folks will accept US dollars or other similar currency. Virtually no one accepts eGold and
In fact, all currencies are "private"...
Now you are just making stuff up.
Anything that you can trade with someone that they know they can trade with someone else can be considered to have the qualities of "money".
Yes that is the definition of money. Good job. You get a cookie. Money is a medium of exchange and it comes in many forms. Money is an abstract concept.
I'm disputing your claim that all metals are as good as each other when used as a trading tool.
Dispute all you want. I'll concede that no one will be using sodium as a coin anytime soon. Otherwise I think you are full opinions and few facts. There are plenty of metals that can and have been used as money. Nickel, steel, iron, copper, bronze, alumninum, gold, silver, platinum, and tin have all be used as coins or in coinage and many would be perfectly satisfactory as a monetary base if used the way gold was. Several others would make good candidates as well.
Are you still trying to say that all modes of transportation that gets you to your destination are interchangeable?
Don't be retarded. I ignored you the first time because your analogy was so absurd it wasn't worth responding to. If you can't understand the idea that money is an abstract concept and not inherently tied to a particular commodity then I am probably not going to be the one to help you see the light.
The only thing you're illustrating is your lack of reading and reasoning skills. If something was used in the past and the same conditions apply today then it is as good today as they were before.
OK to use your argument the same conditions do NOT apply today. Our monetary systems are considerably more sophisticated than they were even 50 years ago and not a single country in the world bases their currency on gold because of the problems in using it as a currency. Many of the factors that once made gold "special" no longer matter in today's economy and we barely even use gold in coins much less as a medium of exchange. QED you seem to be the one lacking reasoning skills.
If you're going to ignore half my post, call me a liar and cherry pick what to "answer" you can go fuck yourself and I'll go to bed.
Please do fuck yourself and go to bed. I never called you a liar - an idiot perhaps but never a liar.
For starters, time is usually very precious when such a car is needed.
Huh? Picking up/dropping off a rental car takes about 30 minutes total tops. Less if you plan ahead. I do it all the time. In most cities in the US there is a rental car agency within a few miles of wherever you live.
Such proposals have the consistent flaw of valuing the driver's time at zero.
Time has value to be sure but it's not the only economic consideration. I've rarely met anyone who is so busy however that they find it impossible to rent a car when one would be needed.
I'm sure your needs are different than mine but I drive relatively small cars normally and borrow or rent larger ones as the need arises. I've done the math and for my lifestyle it works out much better economically. A single tank of gas for my VW is around $50 right now. For a large truck it would easily be double that. I can rent a large truck for a whole day for $50-100 so we're basically talking the price differential on one or two tanks of gas. You might have different needs than me and that is fine but it's easy to work out scenarios where renting makes a lot of sense.
Then there's the extra driving and related fuel costs to pick up and drop off the specialty vehicle.
Some rental companies make it a key part of their advertising that they will pick you up. This is a non-issue.
Then there's the enormously higher cost per passenger mile of a rental vehicle
As opposed to the enormously higher operating cost of using a Ford F250 as a daily drive so you can haul all your trailer and gear a few times a year? Yes if you rent every day that would be stupid but no one would do that. Buying an oversized gas guzzler for features you might need once in a blue moon is stupid from an economic perspective not to mention irresponsible.
Then there's the risk of the vendor not having a suitable car when you need
There are about a zillion rental car companies. If one screws up us another. I've done a LOT of vehicle rentals and it is rarely a problem to find a suitable vehicle even for unusual needs.
Did you see me even mention the word money in my previous post?
You are posting in a thread about using gold as a basis for money. If you weren't discussing money then go find another thread.
Gold is VERY SPECIAL (see? I can use caps too) because it's relatively rare, doesn't corrode, is malleable and easily distinguished from other metals without special tools
Titanium VERY SPECIAL because it is very strong, has great corrosion resistance, and is can handle high temperatures. See? I can describe irrelevant properties of random metals too.
It's by no means the only reasonable metal to use for trading but it's one of the most popular as shown by history.
Exactly my point. Gold is now just another commodity. A useful and valuable one but nothing special as a basis for currency. Just because it was used in the past doesn't mean it is a good idea going forward.
Do you think it's reasonable to carry a mass spectrometer around?
Of course not. I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of using gold as a basis for money. Furthermore even under the gold standard no one actually carried gold around. It's quite possible to own an asset and not have it on your person. You simply claimed that it is important to be able to distinguish one element from another - something which is relatively easy in this day and age.
I asked a lot of questions but they are not rhetorical and I would really like answers to them.
True but that is not a good argument for continuing to use it.
Iron is a lot more common, so you'd have to have an awful lot of it to buy anything.
Under the gold standard we didn't actually exchange gold most of the time anyway. It would be absurd but we could have an iron repository at Fort Knox and issue notes based on a particular amount of iron. The point I'm making is that one should never confuse an asset (gold or iron) with money (a medium of exchange). Money is an abstraction layer. You *can* use tangible commodities (gold) as an form of money but that's a very crude medium of exchange. Countries issue fiat currency now precisely because of the limitations of gold.
No, you can't point to any metal on the periodic table.
Sure I can. Doesn't mean it's a good idea but the point is how absurd it is to base your monetary system on a specific metal. There is NOTHING special about gold as a basis for a money supply. Gold is an asset - it is NOT money. Don't confuse the two.
It needs to be rare (high value per weight/volume), not corrode and you need to be able to easily tell it apart from other metals and alloys. Only a few metals fit that bill and gold is one of them.
It's not hard to tell elements apart these days. The element does NOT need to be rare to be used as a currency basis - it just needs to be tangible, inaccessible (can't pick it up on the beach), and in known and relatively stable quantities. It also does not need to be a metal - merely a commodity. Oil could be used as a currency basis in theory. I'm not saying it's ideal for one or a good idea but it could be done. Remember that even under the gold standard the gold itself wasn't exchanged regularly.
Unlike the paper dollar, if the entire economy built on "IOUs" collapsed, a metallic based currency is still a given amount of metal, metal which can be put to a variety of uses.
You are confusing value with money. They are not the same thing. Money is not an IOU, it is a commonly accepted medium of exchange. As you rightly pointed out barter is difficult and money makes it easier to work out a mutually agreeable trade. Money in no way, shape or form requires a metal (gold or otherwise) to be involved. The metal is simply another form of asset. It's *possible* to use gold as a currency but that does not make it the best option. There is a good reason why NO country in the world uses gold as the basis for their currency anymore.
Metals on the otherhand, have some great properties for usage as currency
True and it has some terrible ones. It's heavy and difficult to move in any significant quantity, it's difficult to tailor to the fluctuating needs of a money supply, it susceptible to inflation as more is mined, and it requires a great deal of inspection and oversight to ensure one piece of gold is exactly like another. There are other problems besides. 100 years ago, gold was a usable basis for a currency. Not anymore.
I thought the Federal Reserve controls the currency (hence why dollars are legal "tender" now) and it's a corporation unrelated to the government.
You need to clarify what you mean by "controls". The Fed indirectly controls the money supply but their influence is typically highly overrated and frequently reactionary. Dollars are legal tender because acts of Congress have made them so. The Federal Reserve is actually a quasi-public entity consisting of several parts including a number of private entities.
I and many many others will take gold any day as it is more likely to keep its value than most anything else you can name.
I could say the same thing about any element on the periodic table. Point to any metal on the periodic table and you would have exactly as compelling an argument. We're not making any new platinum or copper either and both are equally useful in a practical sense as gold. Personally I find oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen to be FAR more valuable than gold. Perhaps you don't like breathing or food?
Gold is a fine asset to own but thinking of it primarily as money belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between money and value. I suspect that gold will remain a desirable asset well into the future but I don't expect it to be a better source of value than any number of other metals.
US dollars are backed by nothing but the whims of the federal reserve...
Wrong. US dollars (like any fiat currency) is backed by people's belief that they have value. The fed can influence the money supply but they can't give dollars value. Confidence in a currency is the ONLY thing that gives any currency actual value.
...and it's this very fact that has brought about America's current financial predicament.
Of course! It's all the Fed's fault. Thank you for clearing that up. Here I thought the economy was a complex thing with lots of players but it's much easier if you can just pin everything on the Fed. I'm sure Ben Bernake will eagerly turn over his job as Fed chairman to you because clearly you understand the issues better than he does.
E-Gold holds audited stocks of gold to the value of its deposits, which is a far safer store of wealth than the US dollar.
Really? Ignoring the idiotic idea that gold is some magical source of value, you trust a private company with no taxing authority issuing a private currency accepted by almost no one? Wow. You are NEVER going to have a job in the financial world because you have a very dangerous concept of risk. Gold is not some magical insurance against risk. It's a commodity like any other mined metal. No more and no less. If you trust a private company's audits (think Enron) more than the US government's taxing authority,...well, you're just an idiot who is likely to lose a lot of money in a money laundering scheme like eGold.
How is US currency "real money" any more than using gold as money?
Gold is a form of representative money whereas the present US dollar is a form of fiat currency. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but there are good reasons why virtually every government on the planet uses some form of fiat currency these days. It's not that either is more "real" but rather that there are practical reasons to prefer one over the other.
After trudging through the first 200 pages that practically dared the reader to continue, I gave up on it.
The first half of Quicksilver is something of a slog. Not Stephenson's finest work. However from the second half onward it gets MUCH better. The Baroque Cycle is overall well done (if overly long) and I quite enjoyed it but the series takes a while to get going.
Are there any other taxes for cell phones in the US which are directly charged to the consumer?
Yes there are various excise taxes levied on cell phone bills. The federal government as well as state and local government each levy their own taxes on wireless communications. This is a slightly outdated listing of taxes by state. For the most part it is a "because we can" sort of tax courtesy of our elected officials.
The trick behind multiple attackers is moving around enough so that they eventually line up and come at you one or two at a time.
Yeah I had my martial arts instructors tell me that too. Problem is that realistically you'll never be on favorable terrain and you aren't good enough to put your opponents down quickly or avoid entanglement. The human body can take a lot of abuse and odd are you'll get tied up with one opponent long enough for the others to get to you.
You *might* escape but that's the best you can hope for. Pretty much you have to hope the exit is close and you can get somewhere safe quickly. I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself but recognize that the odds are heavily against you.
Disclosure: I've been a martial arts student for about 20 years. I'm not any sort of exceptional talent but I do have enough experience (including real world) to understand what is possible. Multiple opponent situations are VERY difficult even if you are better armed and much better trained than those you are facing.
But basically it said that with 10,000 hours of training you can go from zero to a world class practitioner in *any* field you choose.
That's a load of crap unless you have a VERY low standard for "world class".
Athletics is an easy example but it applies equally to mental pursuits. I don't care how many hours of training you or I have, odds are you don't have the cardiovascular system to be a top endurance athlete. You are either born with it or you aren't and no amount of training will give it to you if you aren't. Likewise, you either have the muscle composition or don't to be a world class sprinter. Most sports tend to favor a particular physique - you either have it or you don't. Someone the size of an NFL linebacker is never going to win the Tour De France. There is of course an element of training but to get to the top level the right genetic component has to be there too.
There is a wide gulf between being competent and being world class. Very few people have the intellectual horsepower to be even close to the level of a Nobel prize winner or Olympic athlete. Certainly anyone can become more proficient. But world class? Pretty much by definition half the people are below average.
Slashdot Mirror
...No more than 30 homes.
As an industrial engineer (which I am) I would tell you that there is a lot of expense involved in parceling out territories that small and managing the large number of employees. There are insurance expenses to consider as well which are very significant. It is a solvable problem but that doesn't make it the most economic solution available.
Now forward that about 30 years, I happen to work with some pretty successful and wealthy people that came from nothing and got their start on a responsible paper route.
I would suggest to you that those people probably would have been quite successful regardless of whether they had a paper route or not. I've met a LOT of former paperboys in my time and while they mostly look back on their time delivering papers fondly not a one of them would claim that they would not have been successful without the paper route.
You never know what people are made of until you ask them to do something.
I'm not debating that. The problem from the standpoint of the business is that they do not know which children will be the reliable ones and there are extra costs to managing an unreliable workforce. Newspapers are not charities whose mission is to provide employment to children. There is simply a cost/benefit analysis that has determined that the cost of letting children be your interface with your customers outweighs the benefit of the cheap labor.
Times and circumstances have changed and young folks who want employment will have to look elsewhere. There is nothing wrong asking young folks to prove themselves but expecting a for-profit business to have some obligation to provide those opportunities is rather naive.
A generation ago, a paper route was the responsibility of the carrier (the 12 year old kid).
Then the newspapers finally realized that depending on the reliability of 12 year old children to deliver their product was a recipe for unreliable delivery, poor customer service and disappointed advertisers. Turnover was extremely high and productivity very low. Not to mention the liability involved in hiring children who can't even drive yet. I don't know about your paperboys but ours frequently failed to deliver, screwed up the billing, damaged the paper, overslept, etc. I'm fine with young people getting opportunities for responsibility but only if they can actually handle said responsibility.
Jobs is 53 and has no life threatening illness.
Unless you are his doctor you cannot possibly know that. You might be right but you certainly don't know. Neither does anyone else except Jobs and probably, though not certainly, those with whom he is close.
The cancer he had in 2004 was of a type that usually doesn't recur, and both Apple and Jobs have said that it hasn't recurred.
Words are cheap. Probably true but that doesn't constitute evidence.
Thus the odds are that Jobs will be in charge for at least the next decade.
Apparently the odds tell us he has about 5-6 years. Apparently the type of tumor does have a better prognosis than other types of pancreatic tumors. The median survival if the disease was local and completely resected is apparently around 10 years or 6 years if confined to the region around the pancreas. It's been four since he underwent surgery. He has already outlived the life expectancy for someone with metastatic cells. Thus without additional information we should expect Steve to remain at the helm for no more than about 6 more years. Could it be more? Sure. But just going by the numbers that is what we know.
There's no point in speculating on how Apple would do without him that far in the future.
There is a point but without more data you can only draw certain conclusions. It's nice to know as accurately as possible the risks that one might face. However there is some information that you just don't have a right to know and you have to do the best you can with what you have.
I firmly believe his health is no ones else's business except Steve Jobs. He has every right to share or not share as he sees fit. Any investor who thinks they have a "right" to know is unbelievably self centered and delusional. Yes, Steve Jobs might get seriously ill - take that risk into consideration before buying the stock. I fully support Steve Jobs telling us whatever he wishes regarding his health, including no information at all if that is his choice.
You can't copyright a game, but you *can* copyright a game board.
You also apparently can patent game mechanics.
The question at hand is simply if money should be abstracting (backed by) physical assets like gold or iron or not.
Absolutely, and the conclusion that pretty much every government and most (though not all) economists around the world has come to is that money does NOT need to be backed by tangible assets. Are they right? Only time will tell but I think so. There is no fundamentally sound argument I have ever heard that two parties seeking a mutually agreeable medium of exchange should insist that the medium be a tangible asset such as gold - there is ample evidence that intangible/abstract assets can do the job just fine.
Anti-statists, who think that governments can't be trusted with the power to create money out of thin air.
Which is normally a ridiculous argument because it usually confuses the concepts of money and value. No one should completely trust governments but governments have been creating money (which remember is an abstraction sometimes given tangible form) since time immemorial. If someone desires assets other than government backed cash to reduce risk there is no lack of alternative assets available.
Statists, who think that the idea of limiting governmental power is foolish.
I'm not sure I know anyone (except some of those presently in power) who think unlimited government power would be a good thing. Perhaps you mean something more nuanced?
"Agents of inertia", who assume that there must have been a good reason to change off the gold standard...
There WERE good reasons to eliminate the gold standard. You don't necessarily have to agree that switching off the gold standard was a good idea. However any reasonable evaluation of the Gold Standard and the Bretton Woods system will reveal that there were significant problems using gold backed money.
That still leaves us without the basic information on what the *economic* benefits and disadvantages are of the two options...
A quick bit of research on wikipedia and other sources will give you a pretty good overview of the arguments for either side. I've actually had extensive schooling including visits to foreign central banks to learn about the issues in question. It's an interesting topic with no truly definitive answers but a lot of experiential evidence for both sides.
...and if there are other options that might be better than both.and if there are other options that might be better than both.
It's not clear to me what those might be but it's an interesting notion to ponder.
More importantly I know about logic. A = B, B = C, does not mean A = C.
Apparently you don't know logic because that is exactly what it means.
What is the "full faith and credit of the united states government worth"? Hint: ask an innocent Iraqi walking down the street in downtown Baghdad
Why would an Iraqi care about the US government's ability to tax its citizens? You do know that is what full faith and credit in the context of money means, right?
Legal tender does not have intrinsic value
You are using the term but I do not think you understand the meaning of it. The concept of legal tender has nothing to do with the concept of intrinsic value.
(and I don't think that wikipedia article is correct; I believe creditors can refuse legal tender and insist on other forms of payment; try paying your mortgage in pennies, for example
There are a lot of nuances to the law but in the US legal tender means that currency printed by the US government is an acceptable and legal means of settling any debt. It does not mean that a private party has to accept any particular denomination of currency or cannot request payment in a particular form. Try reading the entire article next time.
Nobody has to accept cash, either.
Generally true but so what? Most folks will accept US dollars or other similar currency. Virtually no one accepts eGold and
In fact, all currencies are "private"...
Now you are just making stuff up.
Anything that you can trade with someone that they know they can trade with someone else can be considered to have the qualities of "money".
Yes that is the definition of money. Good job. You get a cookie. Money is a medium of exchange and it comes in many forms. Money is an abstract concept.
I'm disputing your claim that all metals are as good as each other when used as a trading tool.
Dispute all you want. I'll concede that no one will be using sodium as a coin anytime soon. Otherwise I think you are full opinions and few facts. There are plenty of metals that can and have been used as money. Nickel, steel, iron, copper, bronze, alumninum, gold, silver, platinum, and tin have all be used as coins or in coinage and many would be perfectly satisfactory as a monetary base if used the way gold was. Several others would make good candidates as well.
Are you still trying to say that all modes of transportation that gets you to your destination are interchangeable?
Don't be retarded. I ignored you the first time because your analogy was so absurd it wasn't worth responding to. If you can't understand the idea that money is an abstract concept and not inherently tied to a particular commodity then I am probably not going to be the one to help you see the light.
The only thing you're illustrating is your lack of reading and reasoning skills. If something was used in the past and the same conditions apply today then it is as good today as they were before.
OK to use your argument the same conditions do NOT apply today. Our monetary systems are considerably more sophisticated than they were even 50 years ago and not a single country in the world bases their currency on gold because of the problems in using it as a currency. Many of the factors that once made gold "special" no longer matter in today's economy and we barely even use gold in coins much less as a medium of exchange. QED you seem to be the one lacking reasoning skills.
If you're going to ignore half my post, call me a liar and cherry pick what to "answer" you can go fuck yourself and I'll go to bed.
Please do fuck yourself and go to bed. I never called you a liar - an idiot perhaps but never a liar.
For starters, time is usually very precious when such a car is needed.
Huh? Picking up/dropping off a rental car takes about 30 minutes total tops. Less if you plan ahead. I do it all the time. In most cities in the US there is a rental car agency within a few miles of wherever you live.
Such proposals have the consistent flaw of valuing the driver's time at zero.
Time has value to be sure but it's not the only economic consideration. I've rarely met anyone who is so busy however that they find it impossible to rent a car when one would be needed.
I'm sure your needs are different than mine but I drive relatively small cars normally and borrow or rent larger ones as the need arises. I've done the math and for my lifestyle it works out much better economically. A single tank of gas for my VW is around $50 right now. For a large truck it would easily be double that. I can rent a large truck for a whole day for $50-100 so we're basically talking the price differential on one or two tanks of gas. You might have different needs than me and that is fine but it's easy to work out scenarios where renting makes a lot of sense.
Then there's the extra driving and related fuel costs to pick up and drop off the specialty vehicle.
Some rental companies make it a key part of their advertising that they will pick you up. This is a non-issue.
Then there's the enormously higher cost per passenger mile of a rental vehicle
As opposed to the enormously higher operating cost of using a Ford F250 as a daily drive so you can haul all your trailer and gear a few times a year? Yes if you rent every day that would be stupid but no one would do that. Buying an oversized gas guzzler for features you might need once in a blue moon is stupid from an economic perspective not to mention irresponsible.
Then there's the risk of the vendor not having a suitable car when you need
There are about a zillion rental car companies. If one screws up us another. I've done a LOT of vehicle rentals and it is rarely a problem to find a suitable vehicle even for unusual needs.
Are you serious?
You didn't see any smileys did you?
Did you see me even mention the word money in my previous post?
You are posting in a thread about using gold as a basis for money. If you weren't discussing money then go find another thread.
Gold is VERY SPECIAL (see? I can use caps too) because it's relatively rare, doesn't corrode, is malleable and easily distinguished from other metals without special tools
Titanium VERY SPECIAL because it is very strong, has great corrosion resistance, and is can handle high temperatures. See? I can describe irrelevant properties of random metals too.
It's by no means the only reasonable metal to use for trading but it's one of the most popular as shown by history.
Exactly my point. Gold is now just another commodity. A useful and valuable one but nothing special as a basis for currency. Just because it was used in the past doesn't mean it is a good idea going forward.
Do you think it's reasonable to carry a mass spectrometer around?
Of course not. I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of using gold as a basis for money. Furthermore even under the gold standard no one actually carried gold around. It's quite possible to own an asset and not have it on your person. You simply claimed that it is important to be able to distinguish one element from another - something which is relatively easy in this day and age.
I asked a lot of questions but they are not rhetorical and I would really like answers to them.
Doesn't sound like it to me.
Gold has a history of use as money.
True but that is not a good argument for continuing to use it.
Iron is a lot more common, so you'd have to have an awful lot of it to buy anything.
Under the gold standard we didn't actually exchange gold most of the time anyway. It would be absurd but we could have an iron repository at Fort Knox and issue notes based on a particular amount of iron. The point I'm making is that one should never confuse an asset (gold or iron) with money (a medium of exchange). Money is an abstraction layer. You *can* use tangible commodities (gold) as an form of money but that's a very crude medium of exchange. Countries issue fiat currency now precisely because of the limitations of gold.
No, you can't point to any metal on the periodic table.
Sure I can. Doesn't mean it's a good idea but the point is how absurd it is to base your monetary system on a specific metal. There is NOTHING special about gold as a basis for a money supply. Gold is an asset - it is NOT money. Don't confuse the two.
It needs to be rare (high value per weight/volume), not corrode and you need to be able to easily tell it apart from other metals and alloys. Only a few metals fit that bill and gold is one of them.
It's not hard to tell elements apart these days. The element does NOT need to be rare to be used as a currency basis - it just needs to be tangible, inaccessible (can't pick it up on the beach), and in known and relatively stable quantities. It also does not need to be a metal - merely a commodity. Oil could be used as a currency basis in theory. I'm not saying it's ideal for one or a good idea but it could be done. Remember that even under the gold standard the gold itself wasn't exchanged regularly.
Unlike the paper dollar, if the entire economy built on "IOUs" collapsed, a metallic based currency is still a given amount of metal, metal which can be put to a variety of uses.
You are confusing value with money. They are not the same thing. Money is not an IOU, it is a commonly accepted medium of exchange. As you rightly pointed out barter is difficult and money makes it easier to work out a mutually agreeable trade. Money in no way, shape or form requires a metal (gold or otherwise) to be involved. The metal is simply another form of asset. It's *possible* to use gold as a currency but that does not make it the best option. There is a good reason why NO country in the world uses gold as the basis for their currency anymore.
Metals on the otherhand, have some great properties for usage as currency
True and it has some terrible ones. It's heavy and difficult to move in any significant quantity, it's difficult to tailor to the fluctuating needs of a money supply, it susceptible to inflation as more is mined, and it requires a great deal of inspection and oversight to ensure one piece of gold is exactly like another. There are other problems besides. 100 years ago, gold was a usable basis for a currency. Not anymore.
I thought the Federal Reserve controls the currency (hence why dollars are legal "tender" now) and it's a corporation unrelated to the government.
You need to clarify what you mean by "controls". The Fed indirectly controls the money supply but their influence is typically highly overrated and frequently reactionary. Dollars are legal tender because acts of Congress have made them so. The Federal Reserve is actually a quasi-public entity consisting of several parts including a number of private entities.
I and many many others will take gold any day as it is more likely to keep its value than most anything else you can name.
I could say the same thing about any element on the periodic table. Point to any metal on the periodic table and you would have exactly as compelling an argument. We're not making any new platinum or copper either and both are equally useful in a practical sense as gold. Personally I find oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen to be FAR more valuable than gold. Perhaps you don't like breathing or food?
Gold is a fine asset to own but thinking of it primarily as money belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between money and value. I suspect that gold will remain a desirable asset well into the future but I don't expect it to be a better source of value than any number of other metals.
US dollars are backed by nothing but the whims of the federal reserve...
Wrong. US dollars (like any fiat currency) is backed by people's belief that they have value. The fed can influence the money supply but they can't give dollars value. Confidence in a currency is the ONLY thing that gives any currency actual value.
...and it's this very fact that has brought about America's current financial predicament.
Of course! It's all the Fed's fault. Thank you for clearing that up. Here I thought the economy was a complex thing with lots of players but it's much easier if you can just pin everything on the Fed. I'm sure Ben Bernake will eagerly turn over his job as Fed chairman to you because clearly you understand the issues better than he does.
E-Gold holds audited stocks of gold to the value of its deposits, which is a far safer store of wealth than the US dollar.
Really? Ignoring the idiotic idea that gold is some magical source of value, you trust a private company with no taxing authority issuing a private currency accepted by almost no one? Wow. You are NEVER going to have a job in the financial world because you have a very dangerous concept of risk. Gold is not some magical insurance against risk. It's a commodity like any other mined metal. No more and no less. If you trust a private company's audits (think Enron) more than the US government's taxing authority, ...well, you're just an idiot who is likely to lose a lot of money in a money laundering scheme like eGold.
What do you mean, eGold works with bogus money?
Let's see:
Sounds pretty much like monopoly money to me.
How is US currency "real money" any more than using gold as money?
Gold is a form of representative money whereas the present US dollar is a form of fiat currency. Both have their advantages and disadvantages but there are good reasons why virtually every government on the planet uses some form of fiat currency these days. It's not that either is more "real" but rather that there are practical reasons to prefer one over the other.
After trudging through the first 200 pages that practically dared the reader to continue, I gave up on it.
The first half of Quicksilver is something of a slog. Not Stephenson's finest work. However from the second half onward it gets MUCH better. The Baroque Cycle is overall well done (if overly long) and I quite enjoyed it but the series takes a while to get going.
Are there any other taxes for cell phones in the US which are directly charged to the consumer?
Yes there are various excise taxes levied on cell phone bills. The federal government as well as state and local government each levy their own taxes on wireless communications. This is a slightly outdated listing of taxes by state. For the most part it is a "because we can" sort of tax courtesy of our elected officials.
I've been to France. If they can speak English fluently, they hide it really well.
Only if you arrogantly assume they ought to be speaking English.
Below median.
Right, because in a 6 billion sample normally distributed population there is a meaningful difference. Boy you showed me...
The trick behind multiple attackers is moving around enough so that they eventually line up and come at you one or two at a time.
Yeah I had my martial arts instructors tell me that too. Problem is that realistically you'll never be on favorable terrain and you aren't good enough to put your opponents down quickly or avoid entanglement. The human body can take a lot of abuse and odd are you'll get tied up with one opponent long enough for the others to get to you.
You *might* escape but that's the best you can hope for. Pretty much you have to hope the exit is close and you can get somewhere safe quickly. I'm not saying you shouldn't defend yourself but recognize that the odds are heavily against you.
Disclosure: I've been a martial arts student for about 20 years. I'm not any sort of exceptional talent but I do have enough experience (including real world) to understand what is possible. Multiple opponent situations are VERY difficult even if you are better armed and much better trained than those you are facing.
But basically it said that with 10,000 hours of training you can go from zero to a world class practitioner in *any* field you choose.
That's a load of crap unless you have a VERY low standard for "world class".
Athletics is an easy example but it applies equally to mental pursuits. I don't care how many hours of training you or I have, odds are you don't have the cardiovascular system to be a top endurance athlete. You are either born with it or you aren't and no amount of training will give it to you if you aren't. Likewise, you either have the muscle composition or don't to be a world class sprinter. Most sports tend to favor a particular physique - you either have it or you don't. Someone the size of an NFL linebacker is never going to win the Tour De France. There is of course an element of training but to get to the top level the right genetic component has to be there too.
There is a wide gulf between being competent and being world class. Very few people have the intellectual horsepower to be even close to the level of a Nobel prize winner or Olympic athlete. Certainly anyone can become more proficient. But world class? Pretty much by definition half the people are below average.
Not only do you get to *see* attractive females .. you also get to *hold* onto them!!
Try judo sometime if you want to hold on. Takes a special kind of gal to like to be thrown around.
Not that there is anything wrong with dance classes as a way to pick up chicks mind you...
No system, no possibility of system failure.
No possibility of success either. Brilliant! Let's all just go back to bed and forget about trying anything that might possibly fail...