For an economy, efficiency isn't just about doing a particular thing with fewer resources. You can also be inefficient by doing the wrong things. Think of the badly organized communist state which manufactures - very efficiently - twice as many left shoes as right. Or more plausible government that piles its country's resources in to terrorism prevention, whilst ignoring road safety.
- If the tax money collected by the government is spent on a program which yields a higher return (by increasing the nation's productivity) than if the money had remained in private hands, then tax evasion is stealing from other taxpayers.
It isn't quite as simple as that. Suppose you're a better carpenter than me and I'm a better gardner than you. And suppose there's some carpentry I want I could do myself in 10 hours, and you could do in 8. And suppose there's some gardening you want you could do in 10 hours and I could do in 8. The logical thing - the efficient thing - is to swap tasks and do each others. We both get what we wanted with less effort. Now suppose there's a 25% or more tax - for every 8 hours work you do, you have to do another 2 or more effectively for the government. This swap is no longer in our interests, and we're better off doing the work ourselves even though its less efficient. So, added to the cost to individuals of taking away some of what they consume to provide government services, there's an additional cost caused by reduced efficiency. Considering efficiency grounds only, the public program needs to provide higher economic welfare than the amount lost to the individuals who are taxed, plus the amount used up administering the tax, plus the efficiency loss caused by the distortion of economic decision making.
Of course, as any basic economics course will tell you, this effect can also be used to increase efficiency where purely private decision making comes out with poor results. Pollution is the classic case. And its also worth noting that the same effect occurs with monopoly prices.
But there's more to an economy than being efficient. Its purpose is to promote the economic welfare of its citizens. In the political view of most people, this includes some (widely varying) amount of redistribution, too. And if you take maximum overall economic welfare as the goal (which is tricky, because adding welfare across people is rather conceptually difficult), and notice that giving a little to a poor person produces a much bigger increase in his welfare than giving a little to a rich person, the logical outcome would involve quite a lot of this redistribution.
I think some variation between people has to be allowed for (not to mention locating households with several occupants who travel to different places). There are lot of differences between large cities and small towns/villages other than house size - air quality, noise levels, environment, leisure activities, crime levels and so on. Some people love the busy-ness, noise, access to shops, vibrancy and general shittiness of cities, whereas others hate those things. Those numbers aren't going to be the same for everybody - and some commuters will spend some chunk of their commuting time on foot, which makes a difference.
It's a lot better with adequate transport and well chosen locations. My first commute from a village involved a five minute walk, 26 minutes on a train to travel 30 miles (to London), then another five minute walk. Many people travel for much longer than that just inside the city. London is a bit different to most US cities, though.....most journeys to central London are by public transport, and it's almost totally inaccessible by car for most commuters (outer parts are different, though). (There also aren't actually enough homes in London for everyone who works there to live there). And central London salaries can be 40% greater (and a lot more for some people).
They may have the right, just as they have the right to close their border entirely or impose trade restrictions. It doesn't make it the right thing to do, nor make it illegitimate to criticise it, or seek to change it through politics. Nor would there be anything illegitimate in a country using diplomacy to try and make other countries treat its citizens better. (Not that the US would, they'd probably love to do it themselves).
This isn't the US. Far more likely to be a political maneuvre than some sort of corruption or lobbying. It isn't hard to imagine the Conservatives seeing it as a way to pander to their core voters (just before the local elections), and to make life hard for the Liberal Democrat half of the coalition, who are generally keener on civil liberties. The Conservatives are also even more under threat from UKIP (the UK Independence Party, anti-EU and more conservative than the Conservatives), especially in things like local elections because people don't think they actually matter.
That reminds me of a claim in a book I have (Software Estimation by Steve McConnell)....'Magne Jorgensen reports that increased experience in the activity being estimated does not lead to increased accuracy in the estimates for the activity'. Having found the study (http://www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su/publ/ebse/RK15-reviewexpertestim-jorgensen-jss04.pdf) I can't actually find anywhere obvious it says this. Still, it's going on my 'to read properly' list.
slashdot....where multiplication is +5 insightful. The point, of course, is to tell readers who may not know that 1GW might be a reasonable size for a power plant. That way, journalists can copy-paste the press release instead of having to do any actual work, so it's more likely to end up in news publications. I think they fail, however, for sticking two photos together on the right, and writing the captions in to the images. Presumably, if it makes the general news, it'll be illustrated with a generic light-bulb picture, possible with an unreasonably attractive somewhere in the background.
Why does population come into it? Does it really matter how many people there are in a country? Especially if a great deal of them are still barely scratching at the earth.
Does it really matter what political boundaries have been drawn around a person? Does a subsistence farming hermit in the US have a moral right to emit more greenhouse gases and particulates than a subsistence farming hermit in Montserrat, or Myanmar, or Uganda? Does person X have more moral right to impose costs on others via pollution than person Y merely because of his habitual location? It's hard to imagine a reason why.
Would people demand emission cutbacks from a country populated by a single cow, just because that country's methane output per capita was the highest in the world?
If the country has no population then I can't help thinking demanding cutbacks from the local wildlife would be ridiculous. Besides, it's consumption that matters, not production, so if this magical cow were to export its own milk to import grass then the pollution burden is being caused by its customers.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, economically speaking, wouldn't it be far better to measure pollution in relation to GDP (or another measure of national productivity)? A more "green" country is surely one which can manage to eke out more productivity with the same amount of pollution (or the same productivity while being less polluting). It surely shouldn't matter (in terms of ranking) if they manage that with solar power, people power, robots, or whatever?
A more efficient economy would product more stuff with less cost (and pollution is still a cost, even if there's often no transfer of money to represent it). That more efficient economy could provide more consumption to its participants for the same amount of pollution rights. But I don't see why person X consuming more than person Y would give person X more right to impose pollution costs on others than person Y. Aside from being a destructive and inequitable feedback loop that entrenches the current world balance of resource use, it makes no sense. There's nothing inherent about person X that makes him 'worth' more pollution and deserving of more of its products. He's just a random human, no more or less than person Y.
And FWIW, I have no idea which country would "win" using such a measure.
Why do countries matter? Giving everyone equal rights to pollute would, of course, mean those rights would have to be traded (because most people don't do the polluting themselves, they do it via trade (ie, buying stuff from people who do it for them)). The outcome would be that most especially high consumers (but almost everyone to some degree) in the industrialized world would have to pay to buy pollution rights from low consumers outside it. There'd be very strong incentives to produce more efficiently, very strong incentives to substitue certain kinds of consumption for other kinds, and a large transfer of consumption to poorer parts of the world. In some ways it'd be a sort of global basic income. We'd all suffer lower pollution costs, but most people on slashdot (including me) would be a lot poorer. For that reason - self interest - neither I, nor most people here, nor our politicians are going to push for this. But don't pretend there's a moral excuse. There isn't.
Complaining to Facebook is complaining to a software program.
Ah, so they outsource their call centre, too?
I can't help thinking that if a company makes money out of publishing large amounts of known false information which is damaging to others, then 'oh, but that's not how our business works' is not a legitimate response to being challenged. If your business model doesn't work without doing this, then you should either fix it by finding an appropriate mechanism to deal with this, or shut yourself down (or you should get shut down by appropriate laws and the courts). Being a household name isn't an excuse for acting like a twat.
Hmm, I wonder how they cope with the German laws on service providers providing their users with a way to communicate with them which were referenced on slashdot recently...(not that this necessarily would help him, as he's not one of their users).
I think that blaming someone for the actions of others merely because he lives in the same geographical area where those others lived and died is a bit of a stretch. However, I do think it's next to impossible to come up with any morally defensible position that doesn't start with assuming everyone has a right to an equal share of the planet's pollution carrying capacity. That's a problem for industrialized countries (and most especially some individuals within them), and it'd be politically impossible for their politicians to start there. So instead of it being about what's fair, it's always been about power, and it'll remain all about power unless technology can make the problem obsolete.
My point was that violence is inherently anti-social.
Hmm, is it really? Some violence perhaps, like the mass/serial killer examples (though if one serial killer is copying his hero, is that social behaviour or not?). But take, say, Northern Irish terrorism, or perhaps extreme religious terrorism, too. Or gang violence. Couldn't that be caused in part by inherently social processes? By people wanting to belong to the group, to be admired by the group, or a group talking each other in to more and more extreme and 'pure' views? The most extreme example - war - is a very social activity indeed. Being anti-violence in a war can itself be seen as anti-social by others.
I wouldn't want to say that (especially) bizarre behaviour motivated by extreme religious views or behaviour isn't a mental health issue as well, though, one that sometimes turns in to a criminal issue. But it isn't easy to draw the line (Jonestown? Al Qaeda in 2001? The crusades? Terrorist groups responding to relatives killed by US drones? The Westboro nutters?).
Only if the rate at which the money changes hands stays the same. If a recession causes money to change hands half as often then doubling the money supply might just put you back where you started, to give a hopelessly naive example. And, of course, the two may affect each other. You could print a load of money and give it all to people who just hoard it, for example, in which case those two things change simultaneously.
Money != resources. People's time, land, oil, capital (roads, factories), etc are resources. Money is not (and it doesn't get used up). Resources will, of course, be used to produce output which is sent abroad to bring in money which can be sent back out again to pay foreign creditors. But when people say 'recovery' they're not talking about domestic consumption. They're talking about domestic production - ie, GDP, jobs and growth.
It's pretty much the same with and without the gold standard. There is no such thing as an absolute amount of 'value'. Money is a relative thing: it relates an amount of apples to an amount of oranges, an amount of labour to an amount of land, an amount of labour to an amount of gold, an amount of apples now to an amount of apples in six months. Given a random unknown currency you know nothing about, the number X$1 gives you no information at all. You need to know the price of at least one thing to know if that's a lot or a little. That's still true if the currency uses the gold standard. All the gold standard does is say that the price of gold a year from now (or any other time) will be the same as it is now, assuming no political upheaval that abolishes it. All of the other prices can still vary freely, relative to each other and to gold. It doesn't fix the price of labour to the price of apples, or of land to oranges, or anything actually important. It just keeps the relationship between an arbitrarily chosen unit and a not very useful product constant over time.
Gold standard advocates like it because it ties the central bank's hands with respect to monetary policy. It does nothing at all to give a currency a fixed value because gold is mostly not what people want to consume.
High public debt drains away valuable resources faster than low public debt
How does it do that? Where do the resources go? Yes, in some cases countries (eg, Greece, Italy or Portugal) are losing huge proportions of their most qualified workers, but that's because of the recession rather than the debt itself. There's an argument that high debt causes high taxes which causes economic distortions which reduces activity, but the reduced activity isn't caused by resources being 'drained away', it's caused by those resources sitting there and not being used.
Given the same amount of initial resource, a country with high public debt will have smaller chances for recovery
That's an assertion. Do you have reasons? And why specifically public debt, and not total debt?
It may be better to distinguish between foreign debt (public and private) and domestic debt. Greece had a lot of public debt borrowed from foreigners. Spain had little public debt, but lots of private debt borrowed from foreigners. When that debt was building up there was more being consumed in those countries than was produced.....the borrowing of money from abroad allowed this to happen, because without it there'd have been no euros left in those countries, they'd have all been used to pay for imports. Now they have to pay back their debts, and to do that they need to reverse those flows: make more than they consume, receive an inflow of euros in exchange for them, and send them back out again to pay the debts. This isn't happening, but not because of a lack of resources, or because of any sort of draining away. They have lots of unused resources. It's working because the control system of their economy - markets, prices, contracts, banks, laws and so on - can't do the right thing to organize those resources in to productive use. And, of course, one reason for that is because there's no exchange rate there to create across-the-board price reductions for their domestic inputs and outputs.....
AIUI, the NAO is a parliamentary body, not a government one, and reports to a commons select committee, not the government. In any case, the opposition have been keen to use anything they can get (including this) to convince people that the government's budget strategy doesn't work that it'd be far more likely to be pushed and publicized by them than by the coalition.
In this case selling the spectrum was the thing to do, unless you want the govt. to' do what? Rent it out?
It's not guaranteed to them forever. A quick search suggests an initial term of 20 years.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.
Charities are not a waste disposal service. Have them disposed of properly and safely, and the useful materials extracted and recycled. Even if you find a charity who'll take them, you're just dumpling that problem on them a year or two from now - and, as several other commenters have said, they probably use enough power the charities would be better of buying something newer.
I think a big part of it is that StackOverflow answers the questions that people actually ask, whereas documentation tends to answer questions like 'What does the setBackgroundColour function do?' with the answer 'Sets the background colour'. Developers writing documentation tend to plunge in to systematically describing details. Worse, there's usually a lack of description of high-level conceptual structure (which you probably won't get from StackOverflow). I've lost count of the number of software projects/products' websites which plunge in to detail change logs, announcements, version numbers, etc., whilst missing out the one most vital piece of information: a one or two sentence description of what it actually does.
Someone who might hope to persuade those who operate them not to use them, or to switch sides, or to involve foreign governments. Wars are very political. And, of course, if you make like more dangerous for government servicemen who don't really believe in a cause you can alter the fight/desert/fight for the other side equation.
I think you may be underestimate the cost of interruptions of that sort, and how much those who ask frequent questions take that in to account. Some people just like to solve their problem by asking someone else to do it for them, and I've sometimes found myself essential doing someone else's googling for them whilst they stand and wait. People like that won't consider the 15 minute penalty their imposing on you, or try to group their questions together - and it's when you become known as the person who is good at solving those problems that you have a big problem (for all managers like the word 'teamwork', unless you're a manager yourself they'll still assess you on how much of your own work you do). That can be a serious issue in a mixed ability team, with the best people constantly prevented from being productive to help the worst do just a little. But others, of course, will work for ages on something without asking and waste a lot of time - or, worse, leave lots of bad code lying around for someone else to do a whole bunch of work to find and fix.
You can't have an effective team without having at least some people working effectively in it (nor one where everyone works effectively at the wrong thing because they don't talk). But managers tend to live in a world where interacting with people IS working effectively, so I suspect there's a tendency for them to push too hard in favour of lots of communication because it feels good for them.
I think it can be quite difficult to find a right answer. Remote working I think biases people a little more towards asking less, which is good when it's some people and bad when it's others. A supervisor/project manager/technical lead can try to make sure people aren't failing to ask good questions, and try to take most of the questions himself. Then he could all but give up trying to do serious development to manage. But if he's much more technically able that's not necessarily a good idea....
Most European powers are less than a century out of independence from various European powers, too:) Not to mention Hong Kong, India, Pakistan and so on. Naturally, it'd be worth a look at differences in growth rates before colonies, too....a quick check suggests to me that Africa was mostly colonized in the late 19th century, long after European growth really started to take off.
Also, corruption is rampant in many places with middle and higher incomes, too.
Economists tend to be interested in how human behaviour relates to the study of money. Which is not exactly a neutral research direction.
Economics isn't the study of money (it's a study of how human societies make production and distribution decisions and the effect of those on humans - though, of course, until recently the human psychological element was sadly lacking), and if you find an academic economist you're likely to find him more interested in outcomes in terms of economic welfare. I remember one very good series of lectures for first year undergraduates which didn't mention money at all until around the end of the term. Why whole societies in some parts of the world fail to develop and the human behaviour which drives it is quite fundamental to a development economist, and since it's a whole-economy level treating as a study of money would be obviously foolish. Even to an economist.
One of the biggest mistakes amateur economists seem to make is to treat money as if it were a real thing that can do magic, rather than merely a control system for real resources and work. eg, consider a bunch of revolutionaries giving $10k each to all US citizens by taking it from the very richest....many people might think they'd get to choose $10k worth of arbitrary stuff from the shops, but that's not an obviously likely outcome at all. If you want to get anywhere you always have to keep track of the real resources underneath, and it'd be quite unreasonable for an economist to forget that....but I think the public has a tendency to project what they think economics is on to economists and their attitudes.
It's a statement of a very plain and rather limited personal opinion. It contains no argument, no additional facts, no exploration or suggestion of consequences or alternatives. For example, should seeds be freely re-plantable and research funded publicly? Or not funded at all? Or should some other form of funding or protection be granted? What are the negative consequences and why does the poster believe them to be greater than any benefits? How does the statement add to the discussion? Where is the, umm, insight?
All it tells us is that there exists one person on slashdot who doesn't like either seed or software patents, which we already know, and that five others have decided to use the '+1 insightful' option as if it meant '+1 I agree'. The comment is worthless and the moderators are lying....sounds like a good reason for someone to down-mod it to me.
Slashdot Mirror
For an economy, efficiency isn't just about doing a particular thing with fewer resources. You can also be inefficient by doing the wrong things. Think of the badly organized communist state which manufactures - very efficiently - twice as many left shoes as right. Or more plausible government that piles its country's resources in to terrorism prevention, whilst ignoring road safety.
- If the tax money collected by the government is spent on a program which yields a higher return (by increasing the nation's productivity) than if the money had remained in private hands, then tax evasion is stealing from other taxpayers.
It isn't quite as simple as that. Suppose you're a better carpenter than me and I'm a better gardner than you. And suppose there's some carpentry I want I could do myself in 10 hours, and you could do in 8. And suppose there's some gardening you want you could do in 10 hours and I could do in 8. The logical thing - the efficient thing - is to swap tasks and do each others. We both get what we wanted with less effort. Now suppose there's a 25% or more tax - for every 8 hours work you do, you have to do another 2 or more effectively for the government. This swap is no longer in our interests, and we're better off doing the work ourselves even though its less efficient. So, added to the cost to individuals of taking away some of what they consume to provide government services, there's an additional cost caused by reduced efficiency. Considering efficiency grounds only, the public program needs to provide higher economic welfare than the amount lost to the individuals who are taxed, plus the amount used up administering the tax, plus the efficiency loss caused by the distortion of economic decision making.
Of course, as any basic economics course will tell you, this effect can also be used to increase efficiency where purely private decision making comes out with poor results. Pollution is the classic case. And its also worth noting that the same effect occurs with monopoly prices.
But there's more to an economy than being efficient. Its purpose is to promote the economic welfare of its citizens. In the political view of most people, this includes some (widely varying) amount of redistribution, too. And if you take maximum overall economic welfare as the goal (which is tricky, because adding welfare across people is rather conceptually difficult), and notice that giving a little to a poor person produces a much bigger increase in his welfare than giving a little to a rich person, the logical outcome would involve quite a lot of this redistribution.
I think some variation between people has to be allowed for (not to mention locating households with several occupants who travel to different places). There are lot of differences between large cities and small towns/villages other than house size - air quality, noise levels, environment, leisure activities, crime levels and so on. Some people love the busy-ness, noise, access to shops, vibrancy and general shittiness of cities, whereas others hate those things. Those numbers aren't going to be the same for everybody - and some commuters will spend some chunk of their commuting time on foot, which makes a difference.
It's a lot better with adequate transport and well chosen locations. My first commute from a village involved a five minute walk, 26 minutes on a train to travel 30 miles (to London), then another five minute walk. Many people travel for much longer than that just inside the city. London is a bit different to most US cities, though.....most journeys to central London are by public transport, and it's almost totally inaccessible by car for most commuters (outer parts are different, though). (There also aren't actually enough homes in London for everyone who works there to live there). And central London salaries can be 40% greater (and a lot more for some people).
I'd hazard a guess that more workers are injured or killed during nighttime construction, too, because of both lighting and effects on sleep.
They may have the right, just as they have the right to close their border entirely or impose trade restrictions. It doesn't make it the right thing to do, nor make it illegitimate to criticise it, or seek to change it through politics. Nor would there be anything illegitimate in a country using diplomacy to try and make other countries treat its citizens better. (Not that the US would, they'd probably love to do it themselves).
This isn't the US. Far more likely to be a political maneuvre than some sort of corruption or lobbying. It isn't hard to imagine the Conservatives seeing it as a way to pander to their core voters (just before the local elections), and to make life hard for the Liberal Democrat half of the coalition, who are generally keener on civil liberties. The Conservatives are also even more under threat from UKIP (the UK Independence Party, anti-EU and more conservative than the Conservatives), especially in things like local elections because people don't think they actually matter.
That reminds me of a claim in a book I have (Software Estimation by Steve McConnell)....'Magne Jorgensen reports that increased experience in the activity being estimated does not lead to increased accuracy in the estimates for the activity'. Having found the study (http://www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/su/publ/ebse/RK15-reviewexpertestim-jorgensen-jss04.pdf) I can't actually find anywhere obvious it says this. Still, it's going on my 'to read properly' list.
slashdot....where multiplication is +5 insightful. The point, of course, is to tell readers who may not know that 1GW might be a reasonable size for a power plant. That way, journalists can copy-paste the press release instead of having to do any actual work, so it's more likely to end up in news publications. I think they fail, however, for sticking two photos together on the right, and writing the captions in to the images. Presumably, if it makes the general news, it'll be illustrated with a generic light-bulb picture, possible with an unreasonably attractive somewhere in the background.
Why does population come into it? Does it really matter how many people there are in a country? Especially if a great deal of them are still barely scratching at the earth.
Does it really matter what political boundaries have been drawn around a person? Does a subsistence farming hermit in the US have a moral right to emit more greenhouse gases and particulates than a subsistence farming hermit in Montserrat, or Myanmar, or Uganda? Does person X have more moral right to impose costs on others via pollution than person Y merely because of his habitual location? It's hard to imagine a reason why.
Would people demand emission cutbacks from a country populated by a single cow, just because that country's methane output per capita was the highest in the world?
If the country has no population then I can't help thinking demanding cutbacks from the local wildlife would be ridiculous. Besides, it's consumption that matters, not production, so if this magical cow were to export its own milk to import grass then the pollution burden is being caused by its customers.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, economically speaking, wouldn't it be far better to measure pollution in relation to GDP (or another measure of national productivity)? A more "green" country is surely one which can manage to eke out more productivity with the same amount of pollution (or the same productivity while being less polluting). It surely shouldn't matter (in terms of ranking) if they manage that with solar power, people power, robots, or whatever?
A more efficient economy would product more stuff with less cost (and pollution is still a cost, even if there's often no transfer of money to represent it). That more efficient economy could provide more consumption to its participants for the same amount of pollution rights. But I don't see why person X consuming more than person Y would give person X more right to impose pollution costs on others than person Y. Aside from being a destructive and inequitable feedback loop that entrenches the current world balance of resource use, it makes no sense. There's nothing inherent about person X that makes him 'worth' more pollution and deserving of more of its products. He's just a random human, no more or less than person Y.
And FWIW, I have no idea which country would "win" using such a measure.
Why do countries matter? Giving everyone equal rights to pollute would, of course, mean those rights would have to be traded (because most people don't do the polluting themselves, they do it via trade (ie, buying stuff from people who do it for them)). The outcome would be that most especially high consumers (but almost everyone to some degree) in the industrialized world would have to pay to buy pollution rights from low consumers outside it. There'd be very strong incentives to produce more efficiently, very strong incentives to substitue certain kinds of consumption for other kinds, and a large transfer of consumption to poorer parts of the world. In some ways it'd be a sort of global basic income. We'd all suffer lower pollution costs, but most people on slashdot (including me) would be a lot poorer. For that reason - self interest - neither I, nor most people here, nor our politicians are going to push for this. But don't pretend there's a moral excuse. There isn't.
Complaining to Facebook is complaining to a software program.
Ah, so they outsource their call centre, too?
I can't help thinking that if a company makes money out of publishing large amounts of known false information which is damaging to others, then 'oh, but that's not how our business works' is not a legitimate response to being challenged. If your business model doesn't work without doing this, then you should either fix it by finding an appropriate mechanism to deal with this, or shut yourself down (or you should get shut down by appropriate laws and the courts). Being a household name isn't an excuse for acting like a twat.
Hmm, I wonder how they cope with the German laws on service providers providing their users with a way to communicate with them which were referenced on slashdot recently...(not that this necessarily would help him, as he's not one of their users).
I think that blaming someone for the actions of others merely because he lives in the same geographical area where those others lived and died is a bit of a stretch. However, I do think it's next to impossible to come up with any morally defensible position that doesn't start with assuming everyone has a right to an equal share of the planet's pollution carrying capacity. That's a problem for industrialized countries (and most especially some individuals within them), and it'd be politically impossible for their politicians to start there. So instead of it being about what's fair, it's always been about power, and it'll remain all about power unless technology can make the problem obsolete.
My point was that violence is inherently anti-social.
Hmm, is it really? Some violence perhaps, like the mass/serial killer examples (though if one serial killer is copying his hero, is that social behaviour or not?). But take, say, Northern Irish terrorism, or perhaps extreme religious terrorism, too. Or gang violence. Couldn't that be caused in part by inherently social processes? By people wanting to belong to the group, to be admired by the group, or a group talking each other in to more and more extreme and 'pure' views? The most extreme example - war - is a very social activity indeed. Being anti-violence in a war can itself be seen as anti-social by others.
I wouldn't want to say that (especially) bizarre behaviour motivated by extreme religious views or behaviour isn't a mental health issue as well, though, one that sometimes turns in to a criminal issue. But it isn't easy to draw the line (Jonestown? Al Qaeda in 2001? The crusades? Terrorist groups responding to relatives killed by US drones? The Westboro nutters?).
Only if the rate at which the money changes hands stays the same. If a recession causes money to change hands half as often then doubling the money supply might just put you back where you started, to give a hopelessly naive example. And, of course, the two may affect each other. You could print a load of money and give it all to people who just hoard it, for example, in which case those two things change simultaneously.
Money != resources. People's time, land, oil, capital (roads, factories), etc are resources. Money is not (and it doesn't get used up). Resources will, of course, be used to produce output which is sent abroad to bring in money which can be sent back out again to pay foreign creditors. But when people say 'recovery' they're not talking about domestic consumption. They're talking about domestic production - ie, GDP, jobs and growth.
It's pretty much the same with and without the gold standard. There is no such thing as an absolute amount of 'value'. Money is a relative thing: it relates an amount of apples to an amount of oranges, an amount of labour to an amount of land, an amount of labour to an amount of gold, an amount of apples now to an amount of apples in six months. Given a random unknown currency you know nothing about, the number X$1 gives you no information at all. You need to know the price of at least one thing to know if that's a lot or a little. That's still true if the currency uses the gold standard. All the gold standard does is say that the price of gold a year from now (or any other time) will be the same as it is now, assuming no political upheaval that abolishes it. All of the other prices can still vary freely, relative to each other and to gold. It doesn't fix the price of labour to the price of apples, or of land to oranges, or anything actually important. It just keeps the relationship between an arbitrarily chosen unit and a not very useful product constant over time.
Gold standard advocates like it because it ties the central bank's hands with respect to monetary policy. It does nothing at all to give a currency a fixed value because gold is mostly not what people want to consume.
High public debt drains away valuable resources faster than low public debt
How does it do that? Where do the resources go? Yes, in some cases countries (eg, Greece, Italy or Portugal) are losing huge proportions of their most qualified workers, but that's because of the recession rather than the debt itself. There's an argument that high debt causes high taxes which causes economic distortions which reduces activity, but the reduced activity isn't caused by resources being 'drained away', it's caused by those resources sitting there and not being used.
Given the same amount of initial resource, a country with high public debt will have smaller chances for recovery
That's an assertion. Do you have reasons? And why specifically public debt, and not total debt?
It may be better to distinguish between foreign debt (public and private) and domestic debt. Greece had a lot of public debt borrowed from foreigners. Spain had little public debt, but lots of private debt borrowed from foreigners. When that debt was building up there was more being consumed in those countries than was produced.....the borrowing of money from abroad allowed this to happen, because without it there'd have been no euros left in those countries, they'd have all been used to pay for imports. Now they have to pay back their debts, and to do that they need to reverse those flows: make more than they consume, receive an inflow of euros in exchange for them, and send them back out again to pay the debts. This isn't happening, but not because of a lack of resources, or because of any sort of draining away. They have lots of unused resources. It's working because the control system of their economy - markets, prices, contracts, banks, laws and so on - can't do the right thing to organize those resources in to productive use. And, of course, one reason for that is because there's no exchange rate there to create across-the-board price reductions for their domestic inputs and outputs.....
AIUI, the NAO is a parliamentary body, not a government one, and reports to a commons select committee, not the government. In any case, the opposition have been keen to use anything they can get (including this) to convince people that the government's budget strategy doesn't work that it'd be far more likely to be pushed and publicized by them than by the coalition.
In this case selling the spectrum was the thing to do, unless you want the govt. to' do what? Rent it out?
It's not guaranteed to them forever. A quick search suggests an initial term of 20 years.
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.
Charities are not a waste disposal service. Have them disposed of properly and safely, and the useful materials extracted and recycled. Even if you find a charity who'll take them, you're just dumpling that problem on them a year or two from now - and, as several other commenters have said, they probably use enough power the charities would be better of buying something newer.
I think a big part of it is that StackOverflow answers the questions that people actually ask, whereas documentation tends to answer questions like 'What does the setBackgroundColour function do?' with the answer 'Sets the background colour'. Developers writing documentation tend to plunge in to systematically describing details. Worse, there's usually a lack of description of high-level conceptual structure (which you probably won't get from StackOverflow). I've lost count of the number of software projects/products' websites which plunge in to detail change logs, announcements, version numbers, etc., whilst missing out the one most vital piece of information: a one or two sentence description of what it actually does.
Someone who might hope to persuade those who operate them not to use them, or to switch sides, or to involve foreign governments. Wars are very political. And, of course, if you make like more dangerous for government servicemen who don't really believe in a cause you can alter the fight/desert/fight for the other side equation.
I think you may be underestimate the cost of interruptions of that sort, and how much those who ask frequent questions take that in to account. Some people just like to solve their problem by asking someone else to do it for them, and I've sometimes found myself essential doing someone else's googling for them whilst they stand and wait. People like that won't consider the 15 minute penalty their imposing on you, or try to group their questions together - and it's when you become known as the person who is good at solving those problems that you have a big problem (for all managers like the word 'teamwork', unless you're a manager yourself they'll still assess you on how much of your own work you do). That can be a serious issue in a mixed ability team, with the best people constantly prevented from being productive to help the worst do just a little. But others, of course, will work for ages on something without asking and waste a lot of time - or, worse, leave lots of bad code lying around for someone else to do a whole bunch of work to find and fix.
You can't have an effective team without having at least some people working effectively in it (nor one where everyone works effectively at the wrong thing because they don't talk). But managers tend to live in a world where interacting with people IS working effectively, so I suspect there's a tendency for them to push too hard in favour of lots of communication because it feels good for them.
I think it can be quite difficult to find a right answer. Remote working I think biases people a little more towards asking less, which is good when it's some people and bad when it's others. A supervisor/project manager/technical lead can try to make sure people aren't failing to ask good questions, and try to take most of the questions himself. Then he could all but give up trying to do serious development to manage. But if he's much more technically able that's not necessarily a good idea....
Most European powers are less than a century out of independence from various European powers, too :) Not to mention Hong Kong, India, Pakistan and so on. Naturally, it'd be worth a look at differences in growth rates before colonies, too....a quick check suggests to me that Africa was mostly colonized in the late 19th century, long after European growth really started to take off.
Also, corruption is rampant in many places with middle and higher incomes, too.
Economists tend to be interested in how human behaviour relates to the study of money. Which is not exactly a neutral research direction.
Economics isn't the study of money (it's a study of how human societies make production and distribution decisions and the effect of those on humans - though, of course, until recently the human psychological element was sadly lacking), and if you find an academic economist you're likely to find him more interested in outcomes in terms of economic welfare. I remember one very good series of lectures for first year undergraduates which didn't mention money at all until around the end of the term. Why whole societies in some parts of the world fail to develop and the human behaviour which drives it is quite fundamental to a development economist, and since it's a whole-economy level treating as a study of money would be obviously foolish. Even to an economist.
One of the biggest mistakes amateur economists seem to make is to treat money as if it were a real thing that can do magic, rather than merely a control system for real resources and work. eg, consider a bunch of revolutionaries giving $10k each to all US citizens by taking it from the very richest....many people might think they'd get to choose $10k worth of arbitrary stuff from the shops, but that's not an obviously likely outcome at all. If you want to get anywhere you always have to keep track of the real resources underneath, and it'd be quite unreasonable for an economist to forget that....but I think the public has a tendency to project what they think economics is on to economists and their attitudes.
It's a statement of a very plain and rather limited personal opinion. It contains no argument, no additional facts, no exploration or suggestion of consequences or alternatives. For example, should seeds be freely re-plantable and research funded publicly? Or not funded at all? Or should some other form of funding or protection be granted? What are the negative consequences and why does the poster believe them to be greater than any benefits? How does the statement add to the discussion? Where is the, umm, insight?
All it tells us is that there exists one person on slashdot who doesn't like either seed or software patents, which we already know, and that five others have decided to use the '+1 insightful' option as if it meant '+1 I agree'. The comment is worthless and the moderators are lying....sounds like a good reason for someone to down-mod it to me.