What the Powers That Be don't like is gold. Keynes called it a "barbarous relic" and Warren Buffett derided it. But, central banks have bought a lot of it. Some countries have tried to limit its private ownership, now and in the past.
Currencies started out as mutually valued, divisible objects. Wampum, cowry shells, etc. For whatever reasons, everyone valued gold. It was divisible, didn't tarnish, didn't burn - essentially indestructible. It had all the qualities of an excellent means of exchange and a store of value, over the millennia.
Then people started putting gold into storage and using slips of paper which represented that gold. They could get gold for their slips of paper at any time. The system grew. Fractional-reserve banking was discovered (you can lend out more than you have in your vault because everyone is not going to try and withdraw at once). Emergent properties appeared. People stopped using gold to transact altogether. In 1971, the US "gold window" was closed - cash could not be redeemed for gold. The system continued to function (though the price of gold skyrocketed, and around that time is the mark is the stagnation of the wages of the lower wealth percentiles of society. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Side note: it seems to me to be much easier to skim paper you're printing, and to distribute it to your favored partners than it is to skim gold. But that's another topic).
Fast forward to today, and people are moving away from even using the slips of paper, going to cashless systems where only the balances of an account are tracked. "Purchasing power" is now totally virtual. Some countries and economists are pushing "cashless societies" (Note: most economists missed the oncoming 2008 Financial Crisis).
The digital accounts represent cash. Cash used to represent gold. Now it just represents "purchasing power". What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.
With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like a siphon becomes self sustaining. As long as there is more money coming in than leaving the game, prices should rise; vice versa for more money leaving than coming in.
But what about historic bubbles? Tulips, South Sea, etc? What prevents an item with little or no use from going to zero? Note that making people feel a certain way, no matter how silly it seems, is a use.
The similarities between non-voting, non-dividend paying stocks and units of crypto are many. People get involved in both because they are games in which one can win money, with a suitable helping of luck, and maybe skill. Kind of like blackjack. Less like poker. Some people win. Most lose.
The key to these things - including also the art market - is the belief that there is a pool of demand out there for the item. Prick that belief and the game spins down.
Americans own less information, be it books, music or software. Heck, Americans have given up rights to their own information, tacitly trading it for services, like use of email and social media. Or to companies like Equifax, which our politicians allowed to happen.
But physical objects? Kitchen knives, cars, houses, desks - that non-information stuff I think is harder to force a lease on. But if companies can figure out a way to force consumers to lease physical objects, that will happen too.
The whole Google productivity suite is right there when you log in. I think it's okay for kids (don't get me wrong, the Google drive is fabulous and the spreadsheet has its place). I can understand trying to get experience in that model. But personally, I like having software and data locally. Also, putting your data on another company's servers lets them get a really solid grip around your balls/profit.
Companies today create a tremendous amount of value and bring in large cashflows. The problem is that the cashflow is not equitably (in many people's minds) distributed. Everyone is working to create that value, from the organizers to the workers.
Also, we're not really talking about traditional non-compete clauses as most people know them, despite the headline. We're talking about clearly illegal collusion between major corporations to suppress already-low worker wages. Calling it a "non-compete clause" is like calling a bank robbery a "third-party withdrawal".
A non-compete agreement is an agreement between an employer and an employee in which the employee agrees not to use information learned during employment to enter into competition in subsequent business efforts.
BREAKING DOWN 'Non-Compete Agreement'
Non-compete agreements usually state that the employee cannot enter into certain professions which would be considered to be in competition with their current employer for a specified period of time and/or within a specified geographic area. This sort of agreement can also be called a "covenant not to compete" or a "restrictive covenant."
Some of Slashdot's lawyers seem to have a beef with calling this a non-compete agreement. The article calls it a "non-poaching agreement". It is de facto (in point of fact) the same thing, and doing the same thing, as a de jure non-compete agreement. It prevents workers from working for competitors.
From Encyclopedia Britannica: "Noble savage, in literature, an idealized concept of uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization.
The glorification of the noble savage is a dominant theme in the Romantic writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Émile, ou, De l’education, 4 vol. (1762), is a long treatise on the corrupting influence of traditional education; the autobiographical Confessions (written 1765–70) reaffirms the basic tenet of man’s innate goodness; and Dreams of a Solitary Walker (1776–78) contains descriptions of nature and man’s natural response to it."
It wasn't necessarily an offensive term back then; the early European Americans did compete with them for resources and land.
So... it pretty much mirrors exactly what the article states. Your emphatic statement on architecture appears less than accurate in light of the Cray information. Fortunately ignorance is relatively easy to remedy, unlike say, personality defects.
Unless there is something VERY special about Norway, a wide-spread trend that cannot be attributed to education, gender, religion, or other environmental factor has pretty good predictive qualities, since the sample size is large, and unbiased (Only males tested most likely, but the service is compulsory, not voluntary. That means *All male citizens*, not "Those that show up to the recruitment office".
People are very different around the world. I mean in gross terms, all mammals want the same things - food, shelter, security, mating. But a sample of likely homogeneous ethnic Norwegian males in one geographic location makes it hard to extrapolate to the rest of the world. To say that male chihuahua dogs are getting larger in New Mexico says nothing about German Shepherds in Thailand. They're all dogs but there are a lot of different factors at play.
People are not fungible. This study says Norwegian males are getting dumber. The next question is why. The answer is probably not obvious.
When I hear law enforcement officials from a plurality of countries state this, instead of central bankers and economic pundits, I'll be more inclined to believe it's a significant factor.
Here is the actual reality: central bankers crave a cashless society so they can impose negative interest rates. That's literally it.
If you want a pretty good overview of the big topics in monetary policy (and everyone should be interested because monetary policy involves the redistribution of purchasing power - it's interested in you regardless of whether you're interested in it), here's a very good overview of the current state of the art, at an established Washington DC think tank, with the former head of the central bank, and several established high level policy makers and pundits.
The term "Natural Monopoly" refers to a business with very high natural barriers to entry. A condition which lends itself to monopoly or even oligopoly. And the resultant monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing.
"Hormesis" is a medical term. It means something that in low doses is beneficial and high doses is harmful. Regulation may be the same way, as it is for beneficial drugs.
Some folks need the world to be digital - all one way or all the other. It's really an analog world.
It always does, eventually. The path there may be circuitous and expensive, but reality always wins out, eventually. The "eventually" is always the only question - it can be quite a long time.
There are a variety of policy and market reasons for the transfer of wealth from young to old. --- * One reason for the age-based increasing income increasing inequality is the transfer of wealth and purchasing power from the society at-large to existing asset holders, who are typically older. And this is done via monetary policy.
Monetary policy is about trying to bring about prosperity via manipulation of the money supply. The net result of monetary policy is the transfer of purchasing power from one group to another. For example, inflation doesn't involve a transfer of money, but it makes a saver poorer and a debtor less poor by changing the purchasing power each one has, by changing the value of the currency. One uses monetary policy to stoke or reduce inflation. Or QE - Quantitative Easing. It was printing money to buy bonds (government debt and mortgage debt). The printing of money has some side effect - it is not consequence-free. The recipients of that money firehose were made wealthier. And the asset bubbles which resulted also made existing asset holders (physical (e.g. real estate) and financial - stock market went from 11K (2011) to 25K (2017) in six years) wealthier.
Governments through the ages have always wanted easy, controllable, predictable prosperity, but in reality achieving prosperity is much trickier and chaotic. It requires first the correct intelligence, temperament and values of the population. Then the population interacts with the natural world and creates legal and physical and security infrastructure. Then, more chaotic, is the creation of items that people value (not merely to satisfy speculative demand (which is quite volatile), like items to gamble on, but things that will satisfy consumption demand (which is more persistent) - demand to consume those items, both goods and services and perhaps non-speculative financial products). And then the march of technology to continue to improve social welfare and the standard of living. And then through some luck, that value and purchasing power must be distributed in some semi-equitable way to the population so that it can consume those things they value.
That's complicated and volatile and not guaranteed. Manipulating the money supply is much simpler. Prosperity through the stroke of a pen. Unfortunately, if it were possible, Haiti or Sierra Leone could become prosperous in short order. Obviously, that will not happen. But manipulating the money supply and the value of the currency to bring about prosperity has been a siren song for policy makers and leaders over the millennia. And the side effect today has been the transfer of wealth from young to older. --- * Also, straight up preying on the young by using them as pass through entities for government money firehosed to the education sector. The young get stuck with the debt, and education costs escalate because they're being paid by our rich Uncle Sam. Yet we all see the reports on how much wealthier those with degrees are versus those without. --- * Next medical costs and insurance. There are both policy and market-based reasons for this. --- * Then, offshoring of manufacturing and intellectual property - offshoring of the production of value. Again both policy and market-based reasons for this. --- * Finally, we're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution, with software automation. The effect is the same as what happened with the industrial revolution - one person could create a much larger amount of product because of technology. To summarize, it was the "consolidation of the production of value." ---
So - the net result of all of these factors? Young people are f-cked.
I dunno. IMO this could be a concentration or a graduate program. I think a classical undergrad CS program would be worth more to a student because it's more generic and thus more widely applicable.
* You can get the year by year murder rate and number of executions per year from the government. They used to be easily accessible but are much more difficult to find today for a number of reasons.
* If/when you get the numbers, you can get the correlation coefficient between the murder rate and execution numbers, to see how the murder rate varies with execution, with the Excel "correl" function. This yields Spearman's rho. From 1950 to about 2010 (I'm not on the computer with that data but I recall it was about 60 years worth of data), the correlation coefficient is -0.7. Excel also has a Pearson function to get Pearson's r. It also yields -0.7. The numbers range from 1 (they move in the same direction) to 0 (random movement relative to each other) to -1 (they move in perfectly opposite directions).
The reality is that the death penalty deters. If it doesn't, it's a huge coincidence. But most people accept that lesser punishments deter. So it doesn't make any sense that a harsher punishment would not deter.
You know... execution is not the only human activity with the risk of accidental death (in this case, accidental being killing the wrong person). I mean, there's driving, flying, construction, swimming - even eating (someone chokes on a steak and dies).
* It prevents the offender from hurting anyone again. Incarceration does not. Incarcerated murder kill prison staff and other prisoners, as well as escape, or serve out their sentences and re-offend.
* It deters as surely as lesser punishments deter, like incarceration or fines. Charts of death penalty vs. murder rate in the US underscore this point. It's curious to assert that lesser punishments deter, but the harshest does not.
* It's the closest to justice as we can get (i.e. a commensurate cost imposed on the offender). Most think the offender should incur some cost for malicious pain inflicted on others. Codes of justice going back to Hammurabi reflect a sense of fairness that it should be commensurate.
There's only a limited number of these logical constructs. IMO they're (cryptos) are very similar to non-voting, non-dividend-paying shares of a company. Not much you can really do other than trade them (Google's class-c's are over a grand a piece now). There's the ledger to which all transactions propagate, like a secure Usenet. Kinda limits its use as a true currency when some rando on the left coast gets his ledger updated when I make a transaction on the other side of the country.
Slashdot Mirror
What the Powers That Be don't like is gold. Keynes called it a "barbarous relic" and Warren Buffett derided it. But, central banks have bought a lot of it. Some countries have tried to limit its private ownership, now and in the past.
Currencies started out as mutually valued, divisible objects. Wampum, cowry shells, etc. For whatever reasons, everyone valued gold. It was divisible, didn't tarnish, didn't burn - essentially indestructible. It had all the qualities of an excellent means of exchange and a store of value, over the millennia.
Then people started putting gold into storage and using slips of paper which represented that gold. They could get gold for their slips of paper at any time. The system grew. Fractional-reserve banking was discovered (you can lend out more than you have in your vault because everyone is not going to try and withdraw at once). Emergent properties appeared. People stopped using gold to transact altogether. In 1971, the US "gold window" was closed - cash could not be redeemed for gold. The system continued to function (though the price of gold skyrocketed, and around that time is the mark is the stagnation of the wages of the lower wealth percentiles of society. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. Side note: it seems to me to be much easier to skim paper you're printing, and to distribute it to your favored partners than it is to skim gold. But that's another topic).
Fast forward to today, and people are moving away from even using the slips of paper, going to cashless systems where only the balances of an account are tracked. "Purchasing power" is now totally virtual. Some countries and economists are pushing "cashless societies" (Note: most economists missed the oncoming 2008 Financial Crisis).
The digital accounts represent cash. Cash used to represent gold. Now it just represents "purchasing power". What does bitcoin represent that is mutually valued?
Some people love to gamble. To them it's a chance to win money. Losing or the thought of losing doesn't really register. They're hooked on the game and the possibilities.
With a bitcoin or a non-voting, non-dividend-paying stock, or art, they're all inherently useless. But once that pool of gamblers becomes "large enough", I think the system becomes self sustaining. An emergent property of such a game perhaps, kind of like a siphon becomes self sustaining. As long as there is more money coming in than leaving the game, prices should rise; vice versa for more money leaving than coming in.
But what about historic bubbles? Tulips, South Sea, etc? What prevents an item with little or no use from going to zero? Note that making people feel a certain way, no matter how silly it seems, is a use.
The similarities between non-voting, non-dividend paying stocks and units of crypto are many. People get involved in both because they are games in which one can win money, with a suitable helping of luck, and maybe skill. Kind of like blackjack. Less like poker. Some people win. Most lose.
The key to these things - including also the art market - is the belief that there is a pool of demand out there for the item. Prick that belief and the game spins down.
Americans own less information, be it books, music or software. Heck, Americans have given up rights to their own information, tacitly trading it for services, like use of email and social media. Or to companies like Equifax, which our politicians allowed to happen.
But physical objects? Kitchen knives, cars, houses, desks - that non-information stuff I think is harder to force a lease on. But if companies can figure out a way to force consumers to lease physical objects, that will happen too.
Per capita doesn't matter to the planet or atmospheric physics. Total carbon emission does.
The only people who care about per capita emissions above total emissions are those attempting some sort of social engineering.
The whole Google productivity suite is right there when you log in. I think it's okay for kids (don't get me wrong, the Google drive is fabulous and the spreadsheet has its place). I can understand trying to get experience in that model. But personally, I like having software and data locally. Also, putting your data on another company's servers lets them get a really solid grip around your balls/profit.
Companies today create a tremendous amount of value and bring in large cashflows. The problem is that the cashflow is not equitably (in many people's minds) distributed. Everyone is working to create that value, from the organizers to the workers.
FYI: Difference between no-poach and non-compete agreement.
Let me cut to the chase: Non-compete agreement definition:
Some of Slashdot's lawyers seem to have a beef with calling this a non-compete agreement. The article calls it a "non-poaching agreement". It is de facto (in point of fact) the same thing, and doing the same thing, as a de jure non-compete agreement. It prevents workers from working for competitors.
What, exactly, was made up?
From Encyclopedia Britannica: "Noble savage, in literature, an idealized concept of uncivilized man, who symbolizes the innate goodness of one not exposed to the corrupting influences of civilization.
The glorification of the noble savage is a dominant theme in the Romantic writings of the 18th and 19th centuries, especially in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For example, Émile, ou, De l’education, 4 vol. (1762), is a long treatise on the corrupting influence of traditional education; the autobiographical Confessions (written 1765–70) reaffirms the basic tenet of man’s innate goodness; and Dreams of a Solitary Walker (1776–78) contains descriptions of nature and man’s natural response to it."
It wasn't necessarily an offensive term back then; the early European Americans did compete with them for resources and land.
More links here.
This PDF from Cray shows that they base at least one of their newest supercomputers on CPUs (Xeons) and use GPUs as accelerators (see p. 3 and p. 7). Also, on their product page, Cray states, "The XC series,and our newest entry the XC50, expands our support for the latest CPU and CPU capabilities with the addition of NVIDIA’s Tesla® P100 GPUs, previously code named “Pascal.”
So... it pretty much mirrors exactly what the article states. Your emphatic statement on architecture appears less than accurate in light of the Cray information. Fortunately ignorance is relatively easy to remedy, unlike say, personality defects.
People are very different around the world. I mean in gross terms, all mammals want the same things - food, shelter, security, mating. But a sample of likely homogeneous ethnic Norwegian males in one geographic location makes it hard to extrapolate to the rest of the world. To say that male chihuahua dogs are getting larger in New Mexico says nothing about German Shepherds in Thailand. They're all dogs but there are a lot of different factors at play.
People are not fungible. This study says Norwegian males are getting dumber. The next question is why. The answer is probably not obvious.
Bill Joy is getting into the act with polymer/solid state batteries.
When I hear law enforcement officials from a plurality of countries state this, instead of central bankers and economic pundits, I'll be more inclined to believe it's a significant factor.
Here is the actual reality: central bankers crave a cashless society so they can impose negative interest rates. That's literally it.
If you want a pretty good overview of the big topics in monetary policy (and everyone should be interested because monetary policy involves the redistribution of purchasing power - it's interested in you regardless of whether you're interested in it), here's a very good overview of the current state of the art, at an established Washington DC think tank, with the former head of the central bank, and several established high level policy makers and pundits.
The term "Natural Monopoly" refers to a business with very high natural barriers to entry. A condition which lends itself to monopoly or even oligopoly. And the resultant monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing.
Industries like utilities, airlines, communications, railways are natural monopolies.
"Hormesis" is a medical term. It means something that in low doses is beneficial and high doses is harmful. Regulation may be the same way, as it is for beneficial drugs.
Some folks need the world to be digital - all one way or all the other. It's really an analog world.
It always does, eventually. The path there may be circuitous and expensive, but reality always wins out, eventually. The "eventually" is always the only question - it can be quite a long time.
There are a variety of policy and market reasons for the transfer of wealth from young to old.
---
* One reason for the age-based increasing income increasing inequality is the transfer of wealth and purchasing power from the society at-large to existing asset holders, who are typically older. And this is done via monetary policy.
Monetary policy is about trying to bring about prosperity via manipulation of the money supply. The net result of monetary policy is the transfer of purchasing power from one group to another. For example, inflation doesn't involve a transfer of money, but it makes a saver poorer and a debtor less poor by changing the purchasing power each one has, by changing the value of the currency. One uses monetary policy to stoke or reduce inflation. Or QE - Quantitative Easing. It was printing money to buy bonds (government debt and mortgage debt). The printing of money has some side effect - it is not consequence-free. The recipients of that money firehose were made wealthier. And the asset bubbles which resulted also made existing asset holders (physical (e.g. real estate) and financial - stock market went from 11K (2011) to 25K (2017) in six years) wealthier.
Governments through the ages have always wanted easy, controllable, predictable prosperity, but in reality achieving prosperity is much trickier and chaotic. It requires first the correct intelligence, temperament and values of the population. Then the population interacts with the natural world and creates legal and physical and security infrastructure. Then, more chaotic, is the creation of items that people value (not merely to satisfy speculative demand (which is quite volatile), like items to gamble on, but things that will satisfy consumption demand (which is more persistent) - demand to consume those items, both goods and services and perhaps non-speculative financial products). And then the march of technology to continue to improve social welfare and the standard of living. And then through some luck, that value and purchasing power must be distributed in some semi-equitable way to the population so that it can consume those things they value.
That's complicated and volatile and not guaranteed. Manipulating the money supply is much simpler. Prosperity through the stroke of a pen. Unfortunately, if it were possible, Haiti or Sierra Leone could become prosperous in short order. Obviously, that will not happen. But manipulating the money supply and the value of the currency to bring about prosperity has been a siren song for policy makers and leaders over the millennia. And the side effect today has been the transfer of wealth from young to older.
---
* Also, straight up preying on the young by using them as pass through entities for government money firehosed to the education sector. The young get stuck with the debt, and education costs escalate because they're being paid by our rich Uncle Sam. Yet we all see the reports on how much wealthier those with degrees are versus those without.
---
* Next medical costs and insurance. There are both policy and market-based reasons for this.
---
* Then, offshoring of manufacturing and intellectual property - offshoring of the production of value. Again both policy and market-based reasons for this.
---
* Finally, we're on the dawn of a new industrial revolution, with software automation. The effect is the same as what happened with the industrial revolution - one person could create a much larger amount of product because of technology. To summarize, it was the "consolidation of the production of value."
---
So - the net result of all of these factors? Young people are f-cked.
Standard CMU undergrad CS curriculum: https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academic/undergraduate/bachelors-curriculum-admitted-2017
CMU AI degree curriculum: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/bs-in-artificial-intelligence/curriculum
I dunno. IMO this could be a concentration or a graduate program. I think a classical undergrad CS program would be worth more to a student because it's more generic and thus more widely applicable.
* There are several studies which show a correlation between increased execution and lower murder rate.
Here's a chart of homicide rates.
Here's a chart with executions by year.
* You can get the year by year murder rate and number of executions per year from the government. They used to be easily accessible but are much more difficult to find today for a number of reasons.
* If/when you get the numbers, you can get the correlation coefficient between the murder rate and execution numbers, to see how the murder rate varies with execution, with the Excel "correl" function. This yields Spearman's rho. From 1950 to about 2010 (I'm not on the computer with that data but I recall it was about 60 years worth of data), the correlation coefficient is -0.7. Excel also has a Pearson function to get Pearson's r. It also yields -0.7. The numbers range from 1 (they move in the same direction) to 0 (random movement relative to each other) to -1 (they move in perfectly opposite directions).
The reality is that the death penalty deters. If it doesn't, it's a huge coincidence. But most people accept that lesser punishments deter. So it doesn't make any sense that a harsher punishment would not deter.
You know... execution is not the only human activity with the risk of accidental death (in this case, accidental being killing the wrong person). I mean, there's driving, flying, construction, swimming - even eating (someone chokes on a steak and dies).
And when it comes to punishment, lots of prisoners are killed in prison every year (PDF - see page 4 for cause of death breakdown). So, there's the theoretical risk from wrongful execution, or the real risk that comes from incarceration.
This has to be balanced with murder recidivism, and the lower murder rates which accompany periods of higher executions (i.e. deterrence).
The countries with the world's first, second and third largest economies all have the death penalty (US, China, Japan).
Some of the world's safest places (Singapore, Japan) have the death penalty.
The places with the world's highest homicide rates (Honduras, El Salvador and many others) do not.
* It prevents the offender from hurting anyone again. Incarceration does not. Incarcerated murder kill prison staff and other prisoners, as well as escape, or serve out their sentences and re-offend.
* It deters as surely as lesser punishments deter, like incarceration or fines. Charts of death penalty vs. murder rate in the US underscore this point. It's curious to assert that lesser punishments deter, but the harshest does not.
* It's the closest to justice as we can get (i.e. a commensurate cost imposed on the offender). Most think the offender should incur some cost for malicious pain inflicted on others. Codes of justice going back to Hammurabi reflect a sense of fairness that it should be commensurate.
There's only a limited number of these logical constructs. IMO they're (cryptos) are very similar to non-voting, non-dividend-paying shares of a company. Not much you can really do other than trade them (Google's class-c's are over a grand a piece now). There's the ledger to which all transactions propagate, like a secure Usenet. Kinda limits its use as a true currency when some rando on the left coast gets his ledger updated when I make a transaction on the other side of the country.