The war put a lot of money into the economy, but since production was concentrated on the war - effectively dumping it all into the ocean, as you say - and not domestic consumables, it was very inflationary. That's why there was such a reliance on formal rationing; otherwise prices for just about everything would have shot through the roof.
During WWII it was pretty much a given that people would have to sacrifice in order to prosecute the war. There was rationing, there was massive recycling of things like metal and rubber, and people bought War Bonds to help finance the effort. Sadly, these days the people who are most strident in promoting each new military misadventure are the very same ones who insist on lower taxes, resist conservation efforts, and generally refuse to make any sacrifice at all. They can, however, wave the flag and call themselves "patriots"...
Don't be so touchy. The point is not that the crisis is the fault of "the nerds", but that the risk was effectively masked by the conversion of mortgages into ill-understood derivatives. Everyone along the chain could ignore it because it would always be the next guy's problem. The models that evaluated the risk of default were based on historical data, and failed to take into account that both the quality of the mortgages and the nature of the housing market were changing rapidly.
Well, that's as good a criterion as any, I suppose. But if I were the person who writes the checks in your company, you'd have some serious splainin' to do...
That's (sort of) my point. You'd be surprised what people believe - or have been led to believe - out there. The guy I was referring to thought that if his company used any FOSS, for any purpose, then everything they'd ever created would have to be open-sourced as well. Beliefs like this aren't at all uncommon, in my experience.
Heh heh... Just the other day an acquaintance was telling me that his company won't use open source software because the GPL is "too restrictive" (huh?). So I suggested that he actually read the EULAs for the software they do use there. He just mutters something about communism and the conversation is over!
How can any reasonable person have an expectation of privacy when their words are on the public record?
The "expectation of privacy" argument only holds water if you're an exhibitionist. Very few of the parties involved in legal proceedings are there because they want to air the details of their lives in public.
It's important that court records be public in order that the legal system be transparent as possible. At one time, that meant that if someone was interested enough to go down to the courthouse and spend days wading through records, they could find out more about you than you might want them to know. With records online and searchable, however, it's a whole new ball game.
Would you want your boss to see the ugly details of your divorce, for example? It's likely that (s)he could, if (s)he routinely googled everyone working for him/her. The ease with which this information can be obtained makes it a virtual blacklist. What if you were fired as the result of allegations - true or not - made by your ex? What if you could never get a decent job again because those allegations were always popping up during the screening process every time you applied for one? There are serious ramifications to the destruction of privacy, even though you may have to become a victim of them yourself before you'll realize it.
It is absolutely meaningless to refer to the compound interest from an non-interest-bearing item like the grail.
No, but the value of such an item is fair game. If I wrongfully deprived you of your ownership of the grail, say, 10 years ago, you'd be suing me today for some appreciated amount and not what it was worth at the time of my dastardly deed.
And of course, inflationary adjustments are always calculated according to the rules of compound interest; i.e. P * (1+r)^t.
Sorry for being prickish there; I guess we're arguing about nothing.
This stuff takes a lot of resources, more than the current crop of entrepreneurs is likely to be able to marshall. The railroads wouldn't have happened, either, without a lot of help and guarantees from the government. Maybe the inevitable failures will just blaze a trail for others who can pull it off down the road. Somebody's still going to have to figure out how to make money at it, though...
I'm thinking that 700 years might be a bit past the statute of limitations...
A good thing, too, because the interest compounded over 700 years doesn't even pass the sanity test. For every "dollar" of principal at 6% per year (compounded annually), that's about $5.177 x 10^17. I could live rather comfortably on that...
No, the original poster made the claim that entrepreneurs "aren't good" at "rocket science".
That's a generalization, but underfunded entrepreneurs who don't appreciate the magnitude of effort and investment that will be required to succeed certainly aren't.
He then claims that waste in government programs is "redundancy" and bureaucracy is "precision".
Here's a question for your reading comprehension (or logic!) quiz: Why is your interpretation of the parent post incorrect? The SAT has lots of questions like this, so think about your answer for a moment.
Answer: (S)he criticized people who interpret "redundancy as waste" and "precision as bureaucracy". Can you tell the difference?
The overhyped nature of current private space fantasies didn't enter into his post at all.
I didn't say "overhyped", I said "hubris". As in, the overconfidence and optimism that comes from ignoring the real difficulties involved. It's not hype if they can actually do what they claim.
Exactly right, private citizens have no right or business being in space.
You're reacting to a point the parent never made. He simply pointed out the hubris that has been so characteristic of the space privatization movement of late. Space flight is hard and requires a huge investment of money, time and talent, whether done by governments or private entities. The "free market" - whatever that is - does nothing to obviate the need for extensive testing, exhaustive engineering, and redundancy that is necessary to achieve consistent success.
I hear people on this forum and elsewhere talking about space hotels and the like in just a few years through private enterprise, and they seem like naive children to me.
I was thinking the same thing. Could this be the most complex device ever assembled by humankind? Just the diagnostics and debugging seems way beyond daunting.
Where did you read that? Points off for citing a conclusion not offered.
More accurate to say that it's the nature of terrorism and the magnitude of its threat that is being deliberately distorted, in order to keep people such as yourself in a perpetual state of fear and docility. Which, in turn, keeps the gravy train rolling as your rights vanish.
Case in point... Turns out the bentonite "evidence" linking the anthrax letters to Iraq just after 9/11 to Iraq was a complete fabrication, just like so much of the other evidence that would be offered subsequently. And yet that episode was instrumental in turning public, media, and Congressional opinion in favor of war (as well as the Patriot Act).
folks: healthy distrust of your government is normal and helpful to the functioning of a virbant society
It's absurd to suspect that our government could possibly have acted to promote fears of terrorism for political gain. Certainly they have been honest with us about other things, such as the reason we're at war.
I could no more distrust the government on matters of security than I could believe that my own Mom & Dad would abandon me alone in the jungle. The thought of that is just too scary to face.
What if your laptop contains trade secrets or the like?
Don't discount the possibility that this is at least partly the motivation here, with "terrorism" merely a red herring. Now the party in power can offer more than just favorable legislation to their corporate patrons. The really dependable donors get a peek at their competitors' proprietary info. And of course it's virtually guaranteed that there will be corruption on an individual level as well.
My brother-in-law was using the "nothing to worry about if you've got nothing to hide" argument a while back, but as someone who regularly bids for government contracts this point gave him cause for pause...
Have you considered that aging, as a mechanism of limiting average life span, may not be a "disorder" but rather a biological adaptation, important for evolution? At the level of populations, where a lot of evolution occurs, it may be advantageous to limit the number of previous generations with which new ones have to compete. Useful new mutations will also be more likely to gain penetrance, I would think. And beyond that, life span is one of those system parameters - like mutation rate, recombination frequency, generation length, etc. - that determine the performance of evolutionary systems themselves as optimizers.
Which is not to say we are bound to accept it, of course. Many species live longer than humans, and many more not nearly as long. There is certainly more to it than the analogy of machinery "wearing out". Were mankind able to unravel this process and stop or reverse it, that would be quite an adaptation in itself, wouldn't it?
I know I'm a bit offtopic, but isn't this statement akin to, "You know, I don't mean to be rude BUT...
Yeah... But when you need to show some well-earned contempt without resorting to abject name-calling, what are you gonna do? Didn't want to call him a poo-poo head out loud, but did want him to know I was thinkin' it...
Without government protection, economics tends to enforce a built-in regulation on the size of businesses.
Well, as long as were reducing the argument to absurdity... Without government protection, there would be no private property at all, nor any notion of legal contracts beyond whatever informal agreements that individuals could enforce through thuggery.
So yes indeed, economies without governments or effective legal systems will enforce limits to the size of enterprises; in fact no modern economy would arise at all. Who will save and invest in an environment where everything can be taken from them with no recourse? No one but the biggest and baddest SOBs on the block. The power vacuum would quickly be filled by warlords and the like, who would make their own rules and effectively become the government that you thought you were avoiding, only far worse.
There are countries in the world that fit that description even today. How is it working out for them, economically?
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
No, I'm afraid it is you who is being short-sighted here, and it's only out of politeness that I don't use a different word. You have elevated the notion of "free markets" to a religion, a kind of God-substitute that ensures everything will be peachy if we just stay out of the way. If you read past Chapter 2 of your Econ 101 textbook, though, you'll find that this is fallacy.
First, even if a "free" idealized market exists, it only guarantees that markets will clear in the short term. Your God makes no promises that His solution will be optimal in any other respect, or that everybody - or anybody - will be happy with it. Starvation is, after all, just another way that the market responds to a food shortage.
Second, your idealization of free markets and their ability to exist and persist in the absence of government "interference" is rather childish and poorly thought out. Ideal free markets depend on a lot of things, among the most important being that no participant - or cartel - have the power to manipulate supplies or prices. But left alone, markets almost always evolve such that one or more participants accumulate market power until monopoly or oligopoly conditions are achieved, and at that point your arguments are moot.
That last point is my main beef with Libertarians. Market power tends to concentrate over time, simply because it's always more profitable to combine in order to dominate a market than to continue struggling in a state of pure competition and commodity pricing. So you can do away with anti-trust laws and regulation and such, but what you'll end up with isn't "free-market capitalism"; it'll be more like corporate feudalism.
In this case they're just reporting impending shortages in some key commodities important to the electronics industry. Will prices rise? I'd bet on it, as I'm sure others already are. Will substitutes be found for some of these materials? Sure, although some may be expensive. Can we count on continuing falling prices for electronics? I doubt it.
You can't both say that shortages are unimportant because cheap substitutes will always be found, and then turn around and decry that they're being talked about in the media. It's the awareness of the problem - and the expectation of future high prices - that spurs the innovation.
What I don't understand is why some people - conservatives in particular - have such a hard time ideologically with some/most resources being in limited supply, or the prospect that wealth may not grow eternally without limit. Maybe it will lead to more gay marriages?
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
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The war put a lot of money into the economy, but since production was concentrated on the war - effectively dumping it all into the ocean, as you say - and not domestic consumables, it was very inflationary. That's why there was such a reliance on formal rationing; otherwise prices for just about everything would have shot through the roof.
During WWII it was pretty much a given that people would have to sacrifice in order to prosecute the war. There was rationing, there was massive recycling of things like metal and rubber, and people bought War Bonds to help finance the effort. Sadly, these days the people who are most strident in promoting each new military misadventure are the very same ones who insist on lower taxes, resist conservation efforts, and generally refuse to make any sacrifice at all. They can, however, wave the flag and call themselves "patriots"...
Don't be so touchy. The point is not that the crisis is the fault of "the nerds", but that the risk was effectively masked by the conversion of mortgages into ill-understood derivatives. Everyone along the chain could ignore it because it would always be the next guy's problem. The models that evaluated the risk of default were based on historical data, and failed to take into account that both the quality of the mortgages and the nature of the housing market were changing rapidly.
Well, that's as good a criterion as any, I suppose. But if I were the person who writes the checks in your company, you'd have some serious splainin' to do...
That's (sort of) my point. You'd be surprised what people believe - or have been led to believe - out there. The guy I was referring to thought that if his company used any FOSS, for any purpose, then everything they'd ever created would have to be open-sourced as well. Beliefs like this aren't at all uncommon, in my experience.
Heh heh... Just the other day an acquaintance was telling me that his company won't use open source software because the GPL is "too restrictive" (huh?). So I suggested that he actually read the EULAs for the software they do use there. He just mutters something about communism and the conversation is over!
How can any reasonable person have an expectation of privacy when their words are on the public record?
The "expectation of privacy" argument only holds water if you're an exhibitionist. Very few of the parties involved in legal proceedings are there because they want to air the details of their lives in public.
It's important that court records be public in order that the legal system be transparent as possible. At one time, that meant that if someone was interested enough to go down to the courthouse and spend days wading through records, they could find out more about you than you might want them to know. With records online and searchable, however, it's a whole new ball game.
Would you want your boss to see the ugly details of your divorce, for example? It's likely that (s)he could, if (s)he routinely googled everyone working for him/her. The ease with which this information can be obtained makes it a virtual blacklist. What if you were fired as the result of allegations - true or not - made by your ex? What if you could never get a decent job again because those allegations were always popping up during the screening process every time you applied for one? There are serious ramifications to the destruction of privacy, even though you may have to become a victim of them yourself before you'll realize it.
They've done some absolutely amazing things in the last couple of years on a budget that makes all the governments combined look pretty silly.
I, for one, don't mind not coming back alive as long as the tickets are cheap...
It is absolutely meaningless to refer to the compound interest from an non-interest-bearing item like the grail.
No, but the value of such an item is fair game. If I wrongfully deprived you of your ownership of the grail, say, 10 years ago, you'd be suing me today for some appreciated amount and not what it was worth at the time of my dastardly deed.
And of course, inflationary adjustments are always calculated according to the rules of compound interest; i.e. P * (1+r)^t.
Sorry for being prickish there; I guess we're arguing about nothing.
This stuff takes a lot of resources, more than the current crop of entrepreneurs is likely to be able to marshall. The railroads wouldn't have happened, either, without a lot of help and guarantees from the government. Maybe the inevitable failures will just blaze a trail for others who can pull it off down the road. Somebody's still going to have to figure out how to make money at it, though...
I'm thinking that 700 years might be a bit past the statute of limitations...
A good thing, too, because the interest compounded over 700 years doesn't even pass the sanity test. For every "dollar" of principal at 6% per year (compounded annually), that's about $5.177 x 10^17. I could live rather comfortably on that...
No, the original poster made the claim that entrepreneurs "aren't good" at "rocket science".
That's a generalization, but underfunded entrepreneurs who don't appreciate the magnitude of effort and investment that will be required to succeed certainly aren't.
He then claims that waste in government programs is "redundancy" and bureaucracy is "precision".
Here's a question for your reading comprehension (or logic!) quiz: Why is your interpretation of the parent post incorrect? The SAT has lots of questions like this, so think about your answer for a moment.
Answer: (S)he criticized people who interpret "redundancy as waste" and "precision as bureaucracy". Can you tell the difference?
The overhyped nature of current private space fantasies didn't enter into his post at all.
I didn't say "overhyped", I said "hubris". As in, the overconfidence and optimism that comes from ignoring the real difficulties involved. It's not hype if they can actually do what they claim.
Exactly right, private citizens have no right or business being in space.
You're reacting to a point the parent never made. He simply pointed out the hubris that has been so characteristic of the space privatization movement of late. Space flight is hard and requires a huge investment of money, time and talent, whether done by governments or private entities. The "free market" - whatever that is - does nothing to obviate the need for extensive testing, exhaustive engineering, and redundancy that is necessary to achieve consistent success.
I hear people on this forum and elsewhere talking about space hotels and the like in just a few years through private enterprise, and they seem like naive children to me.
I was thinking the same thing. Could this be the most complex device ever assembled by humankind? Just the diagnostics and debugging seems way beyond daunting.
therefore, terrorism is not actually real: wtf?
Where did you read that? Points off for citing a conclusion not offered.
More accurate to say that it's the nature of terrorism and the magnitude of its threat that is being deliberately distorted, in order to keep people such as yourself in a perpetual state of fear and docility. Which, in turn, keeps the gravy train rolling as your rights vanish.
Case in point... Turns out the bentonite "evidence" linking the anthrax letters to Iraq just after 9/11 to Iraq was a complete fabrication, just like so much of the other evidence that would be offered subsequently. And yet that episode was instrumental in turning public, media, and Congressional opinion in favor of war (as well as the Patriot Act).
folks: healthy distrust of your government is normal and helpful to the functioning of a virbant society
It's absurd to suspect that our government could possibly have acted to promote fears of terrorism for political gain. Certainly they have been honest with us about other things, such as the reason we're at war.
I could no more distrust the government on matters of security than I could believe that my own Mom & Dad would abandon me alone in the jungle. The thought of that is just too scary to face.
What if your laptop contains trade secrets or the like?
Don't discount the possibility that this is at least partly the motivation here, with "terrorism" merely a red herring. Now the party in power can offer more than just favorable legislation to their corporate patrons. The really dependable donors get a peek at their competitors' proprietary info. And of course it's virtually guaranteed that there will be corruption on an individual level as well.
My brother-in-law was using the "nothing to worry about if you've got nothing to hide" argument a while back, but as someone who regularly bids for government contracts this point gave him cause for pause...
Have you considered that aging, as a mechanism of limiting average life span, may not be a "disorder" but rather a biological adaptation, important for evolution? At the level of populations, where a lot of evolution occurs, it may be advantageous to limit the number of previous generations with which new ones have to compete. Useful new mutations will also be more likely to gain penetrance, I would think. And beyond that, life span is one of those system parameters - like mutation rate, recombination frequency, generation length, etc. - that determine the performance of evolutionary systems themselves as optimizers.
Which is not to say we are bound to accept it, of course. Many species live longer than humans, and many more not nearly as long. There is certainly more to it than the analogy of machinery "wearing out". Were mankind able to unravel this process and stop or reverse it, that would be quite an adaptation in itself, wouldn't it?
"I want us to respond to this pro-actively"
I like that one. I think I'll use it today, just to see if anyone catches the oxymoron.
BTW, being "proactive" is what we used to call "taking initiative", but I suppose that phrase may have had its origin in management-speak, as well...
You should try working in sales for a year, and see if you still have this attitude.
At the very least, it would make a good (and funny) reality TV show...
I know I'm a bit offtopic, but isn't this statement akin to, "You know, I don't mean to be rude BUT...
Yeah... But when you need to show some well-earned contempt without resorting to abject name-calling, what are you gonna do? Didn't want to call him a poo-poo head out loud, but did want him to know I was thinkin' it...
Without government protection, economics tends to enforce a built-in regulation on the size of businesses.
Well, as long as were reducing the argument to absurdity... Without government protection, there would be no private property at all, nor any notion of legal contracts beyond whatever informal agreements that individuals could enforce through thuggery.
So yes indeed, economies without governments or effective legal systems will enforce limits to the size of enterprises; in fact no modern economy would arise at all. Who will save and invest in an environment where everything can be taken from them with no recourse? No one but the biggest and baddest SOBs on the block. The power vacuum would quickly be filled by warlords and the like, who would make their own rules and effectively become the government that you thought you were avoiding, only far worse.
There are countries in the world that fit that description even today. How is it working out for them, economically?
That's extremely short-sighted for a number of reasons.
No, I'm afraid it is you who is being short-sighted here, and it's only out of politeness that I don't use a different word. You have elevated the notion of "free markets" to a religion, a kind of God-substitute that ensures everything will be peachy if we just stay out of the way. If you read past Chapter 2 of your Econ 101 textbook, though, you'll find that this is fallacy.
First, even if a "free" idealized market exists, it only guarantees that markets will clear in the short term. Your God makes no promises that His solution will be optimal in any other respect, or that everybody - or anybody - will be happy with it. Starvation is, after all, just another way that the market responds to a food shortage.
Second, your idealization of free markets and their ability to exist and persist in the absence of government "interference" is rather childish and poorly thought out. Ideal free markets depend on a lot of things, among the most important being that no participant - or cartel - have the power to manipulate supplies or prices. But left alone, markets almost always evolve such that one or more participants accumulate market power until monopoly or oligopoly conditions are achieved, and at that point your arguments are moot.
That last point is my main beef with Libertarians. Market power tends to concentrate over time, simply because it's always more profitable to combine in order to dominate a market than to continue struggling in a state of pure competition and commodity pricing. So you can do away with anti-trust laws and regulation and such, but what you'll end up with isn't "free-market capitalism"; it'll be more like corporate feudalism.
In this case they're just reporting impending shortages in some key commodities important to the electronics industry. Will prices rise? I'd bet on it, as I'm sure others already are. Will substitutes be found for some of these materials? Sure, although some may be expensive. Can we count on continuing falling prices for electronics? I doubt it.
You can't both say that shortages are unimportant because cheap substitutes will always be found, and then turn around and decry that they're being talked about in the media. It's the awareness of the problem - and the expectation of future high prices - that spurs the innovation.
What I don't understand is why some people - conservatives in particular - have such a hard time ideologically with some/most resources being in limited supply, or the prospect that wealth may not grow eternally without limit. Maybe it will lead to more gay marriages?
Stop treating economics like its a theory of everything.
The problem isn't economics, it's the idiots that try to invoke it in the way we see them doing here. The fact that the price of a commodity increases when it's in short supply doesn't cure the shortage or make it less of a problem; it merely allocates what supplies remain to those who are willing to pay the most. It's a manifestation of the shortage, not an explanation of it.
In a severe food shortage, yes, the price of food shoots up. People who can afford it continue to eat well (albeit at the expense of other things), but others starve. As far as your typical affluent conservative is concerned, the market has efficiently "solved" the problem.
How good a radar reflection would you get from a fuzzy tennis ball? Don't know myself, just askin'...