Alan Keyes Michael Savage Tucker Carlson Joe Scarborough Pat Buchanan... etc?
It wasn't Fox News.
MSNBC doesn't have the ideological bent coming from the very very high end of the corporate leadership telling them to run with conservative talking points. MSNBC has a couple of moderates like Chris Matthews and David Shuster, one super liberal, Rachel Maddow, and one member of the reality based community(probably a liberal but doesn't take marching orders from the Obama administration), Keith Olbermann. That's why it's "left leaning" because the front men for the night time shows have a leftward bent. it's the difference between a skew, and a 90 degree bend. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Zucker isn't a dyed in the wool partisan hack. He likes to make money. Olbermann and Maddow and Matthews makes MSNBC money. Well, mostly Olbermann and Maddow, but we're talking about a decision based on money, not complete ideological bias coming from high up as Rupert Murdoch and then cascading to Roger Ailes, the guy who ran media affairs for Bush Sr.
The social aspect is a huge thing for me. Being able to turn to the person next to you and ask something about the subject matter you're studying and potentially getting a useful result is nice.
No it's not. It's not a matter of score in terms of years, it's a matter of whether or not a certain political and economic ideology has any sort of efficacy over the state of affairs in a nation. Clearly liberalism tied with Keynesian economics and a fiat money system work compared to more hands off conservative politics. The further you go from that, the worse it'll be. Libertarianism with a gold standard would most certainly destroy this country.
(Even worse would be if competing currencies were allowed to compete. *shudder*)
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
But this is the point, the wage gap between the rich and the poor tends to GROW no matter what backs our currency(again unless we're discussing liberal Keynesian economics), Shiny ass rocks or the strength of our economic engine to produce products. At that point it becomes a matter of fiscal policy on the Federal Government.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
Neither does yours. You're trying to argue a fiat money system is an attempt to control the country through backroom deals and to support this you cite it's been this way historically. I conclude it's Alex Jones style conspiracy theorist kookery(Albeit with no proof, but this point...) and you then cite ancient armies who controlled population using swords, not paper money systems. I point this out, and this somehow makes no sense? You libertarians are like a fraking cult. Except there's no cult leader.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
But our system isn't taking wealth away. Nor is it creating wealth. That's really for us to decide. Central banking just removes the ability to control the money system from a politically motivated body, the Congress, to a theoretical apolitical body, a Central Bank. It's not that the concept doesn't work, we've just filled it with idiots who thought that Ayn Rand should have been taken seriously. Besides, you just sort of cited Jefferson but never really gave any of his predictions. Now that you have though, time to tackle -those-.
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
But no where in this piece does he actually cite what these abuses are, nor does he acknowledge the abuses of a gold based currency. His claim that it would make a lottery out of private property is laughable. Of course your property is still yours. Fiat or Gold backed bills doesn't matter. Your land, crops, houses, horse drawn buggies, slaves, and spirographs are yours.
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
Jefferson doesn't seem to like the idea that maybe, just maybe, the market wouldn't be a constant deluge of dollars into the market(Yes, right now that's exactly what's happening, but we're not talking a constant deluge since the founding of the Federal Reserve).
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a
So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies. When we had Keynesian economists running things.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business... Strangely enough, comedy's been one field where wages have been growing, so funny business has been good for wages(I dont' know if this is actually the case but it makes a great zinger). Businesses all try to maximize profits and expenditures by ignoring the bulk of their workforce and instead worry about shareholders and owners of business.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority. Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat. I argue with out competent economists our economy is dead in the water anyway.
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
You took me out of context you dick. The crash of foreign markets has everything to do with their tie ins with our really REALLY lousy investment system. When that fell, so did places like Iceland, which was and still is a Libertarian with a big L paradise. Which is going to suffer even worse BECAUSE OF it.
If you are harming someone, then you are dealt with. If you are not harming anyone, then you're fine. It's very simple. Why make it more complicated than that?
Alt-meds harm people by advocating against germ theory. When you're told that germs aren't causing your problems, rather, you're told that subluxations in your spine are the cause of your illnesses, or that you need more vitamins in your diet to cure HIV, cancer, et al. You're lying, haven't researched your product thoroughly or you don't know what you're doing. That harms people. Does a Libertarian society shut these people down or are they instead relegated to the market place of ideas?
Besides, we all know how well the FDA works. They are influenced by special interests, too, and how many bad drugs have gotten past them and hurt or killed many?
Compare Vioxx or Phenphen to entire stores dedicated to Alt-meds. The Alt-med industry is nothing *but* special interests who really don't have a product that can show any sort of real efficacy. Yes, we have acetaminophen from natural sources but I'd rather have asprin than the leaves of the plant it comes from. The FDA operates mostly transparently, the research is typically available and they do deny medicines ALL THE TIME. Further more, stories where you hear how bad drugs are really don't do real research to find out what actually happened. sure, Vioxx sucked. It really sucked, but for every vioxx there can be named 20 drugs that the FDA released that year that actually does something.
I don't believe in homeopathy, obviously. But they, at least, are flat-out honest about how they prepare their "drugs" -- by diluting out a poison so much that you'd be lucky just to get a single molecule of it in your dosage.
So are the drug companies. They must publish all of their research. Some of it for FDA approval and the rest for the patent information. We know how all of these drugs are made. Unfortunately, it's the difference between describing how a bike works and how a Wankel rotary engine work mathematically. One is simple, the other isn't. It's a fact of life. Sometimes you can't understand things others can. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, or that it's a diabolical plot, it just means you don't have a knack for pharmacology.
As long as the honesty is there and the consumer is informed, then it's incumbent upon the consumer to make an informed and rational choice. No one is being harmed by sugar-water, unless, of course, they are doing this in lieu of seeking real medical help.
Telling someone to take a sugar pill and that's going to cure an ear infection IS LYING. When someone buys a homeopathic remedy, the question is, "Will it work?" and the sales droid would be an idiot to say, "no." It's not honest. Does a homeopath get in trouble in a libertarian society?
The placebo effect is a powerful one, so personally I am mixed on what to tell people about homeopathy. Yet, I must be honest about it. It's nothing more than the placebo effect. The normal claims of Homeopathy are pure nonsense, and I won't skip a heartbeat pointing that out. But if the placebo effect is actually doing someone good, I'm not sure how I would handle that.
There is no such thing as the placebo effect. There is the placebo result, which is to say that naturally a certain percentage of patients will survive any given illness versus no drugs when given a sugar pill, but that's not to say there's an effect where you're given nothing and you can expect it to do something. The placebo effect is the same as saying, "A TV turned off can keep a room full of people amused based on the fact that one of the people in the room has an iPhone and is browsing slashdot instead of bitching about the lack of TV." Your mind and determination alone can not cure diseases.
(Yes, Mark Crislip's voice came to me in my head like Obi Wan Kenobi in Empire.)
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's. The value of Gold really did shit itself then. Thanks to eight years of Bush, no one trusts dollars anymore and the buying power of gold shot right back up.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out. Sure the dollar's worth less than it was in the eighties, but anyone in a given field except maybe burger flipping, has seen a rise, and in many segments of the market, not by much but it is a rise, in wages. So the dollar I own now is worth less but I sure do own more of them and it takes less of them to buy the products I own now. The NES for instance, cost 600 bucks in constant dollars in the 80's. For that much I can buy a PS3, a DualShock 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4 and a nice dinner.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones? We've never intended to dominate France, Germany or the UK. We always assumed they'd be on our side. Otherwise, wouldn't you have imagined that when the French elected the American unfriendly Nicholas Sarkozy or when the Germans did the same with Angela Merkel that something would've happened to them? It didn't. Obviously. They're still around, and so are their economies. The failure of their economies has nothing to do with how well liked we are in the world, it has everything to do with how well regulated things were between now and then.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
But it's production of a particular commodity, which could shit itself at any time. Fiat currency is pretty similar but we're putting our hopes in to our own competency, hard work and ability to produce something into the market that's viable. When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
Despite being a Mormon, a particularly hard line religion that considers alcohol so awful that they have enacted laws making booze buying in that state pretty difficult, he's actually for rolling back regulations on booze hounds, so this is not particularly shocking to see Huntsman do this. Bravo, Gov. Huntsman! Let's see you bring Utah into the *20th* century, and hopefully the 21st by inertia of it all.
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term. Yes, Gold can be drawn into wiring, plating, and all sorts of really useful stuff, but most of our Gold supply isn't being used for that, it's going towards jewelry. Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
Stable like a dead canary. Sure, it's not moving much but it's stable! We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt. Basing it on this rather than scarce resources means that the supply of dollars into our system is more flexible. It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
So replace shiny rocks with flammable black goo or any other commodity. Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene. Fiat currencies are our future. I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
Again, you do not understand Libertarianism. Libertarianism is not Anarchy. There is a government, but it has a limited role. It's role is to defend the land, and to make sure there is consequence for one person slamming another person in the nose. Beyond that, it should do little else. Enforcing contracts agreed upon by mutual consent and understanding is another limited role a Libertarian Government should have.
So educate me.
So how would Libertarianism deal with things like spectrum disputes or unfair trade practice complaints? Under a libertarian society, how would a seller of homeopathic remedies be dealt with when it's shown that they're selling sugar pills? Or when it turns out some device is jamming a wide array of consumer devices?
Under a 'liberal' Government you'd have the FTC, the FAA and the FDA. How would a theoretical Ron Paul administration do this? Coase theorem?
There's this stuff called gold... The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
Here's a shocker.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators. Gold just sits there and is shiny. It's also rare, AND not radioactive, but that's no excuse at all.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Income taxation at 39 percent at the marginal rate isn't "too much taxation." It's very much so on the left side of the Laffer curve.
So what? James Madison is dead. The general welfare and necessary and proper clauses nullify the 10th amendent. The Government isn't meant to be either large or small. It's meant to be a compromise of what we, the people, want. Individual liberty is a neat concept and all, but, we live in the real world full of nuance and grey areas. There's more to life than just "individual liberty." There's other people and how we interact with them. What now?
This is the old adage that "Your freedom ends where my nose begins."
So you're a liberal?
I mean, if my freedom ends where my nose is, and yours is too, then you're not free to enforce your freedom on me, because it infringes on my freedom. What's the solution?
A GOVERNMENT.
Libertarianism is one logical step away from liberalism but ideologically similar to conservatism.
not all the founders i hope, otherwise he'd probably wind up looking like Harvey Dent. Some of the founders are damn near socialist in their approach to Government too.
The Constitution is not a document that reads like it was written by a unified body.
The founding fathers believed 2 things A) Rule by the British Crown sucked. B) A loose confederation of states WAS NOT WORKING and a strong federal body needed to be in place.
You realize that if Libertarians get their way, corporate reigns of terror would get *worse* not better?
In a libertarian world, money speaks, and if you've got more money, you speak louder than anyone else. RIAA/MPAA/et al would *love* that. It would mean being able to do things that would be illegal in our current world.
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created. Prior to that the only real influence on the economy was a major war, and I think we're done with those from a global perspective (just incessant minor conflicts, most of them started by us). It's a major Libertarian platform point for the abolition of the Fed.
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
Now, I'm not one to say that a completely free market is the way to go; I think it's a bit of twisted thinking that a society that runs on pure greed will function at all properly - but the Libs do have some good ideas, and giving them a run at the helm for a little while would definitely make for some changes for the better.
Libertarians do have great ideas like, "Stay the hell out of my bedroom, I don't care what gays do. Never have, never will. Neither should you." It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried. No FCC = I'm out of a fucking job.
Also, trying to arrest an economic downturn just draws out the whole thing far longer than it needs to go. Better to let failing businesses fail: propping them up just allows them to continue failing for a longer period of time. It's very similar to the idea of pulling off a band-aid slowly as opposed to just ripping it off - it might hurt more, but it's over sooner. Also, it leaves a reminder for other companies not to screw up so badly, as opposed to leaving them thinking "Oh, it's OK if we completely and abjectly fail: the taxpayers will bail us out".
I think not. Letting failing businesses fail forget that when they go, not only do THEY go but their infrastructure goes too. Jobs, exports, taxes, etc. Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how. Spending on infrastructure like schools, roads, etc. brings that kind of money abck into the system as well.
I'm a huge, flaming liberal, but when it comes to things like personal health, I seriously believe the phrase, "personal responsibility" need to be floated. Yes, smoking pot heavily can cause serious memory problems. But that's really your fault. While I do believe in free healthcare, I also believe that there are more personal problems with doing something like getting baked every night. Memory loss, mood swings, loss of relationships, etc. etc.
So, answer me this. What's so criminal about smoking a bowl in the privacy of my own home, zoning out in my recliner and vegging out on TV after snacking on everything in my fridge? Who gets hurt?
Quite frankly, nothing. But if that comes with deregulation and non interventionist policies, then fuck that. Iraq *was* a mistake, but it's not the antithesis to American intervention which is making good on treaties and agreements which we're in. Bosnia and Kosovo are great examples of *why* we should do this. Yes, it still sucks there, but it takes time for countries mired in a history of conflict to recover. Often longer than the conflict that tore the country apart lasted. Libertarians hated the Marshall plan, but among libertarians, who among them drive Volkswagens and watch Sony TVs? Who among them listen to Kraftwerk or watch anime?
Because when we're dealing with apps that aren't games, say, IIS, or Excel, not being able to write over your own executable or any number of other files in your own directory make it more safe when something goes horribly wrong and something tries to exploit it(like IIS and Excel are prone to do).
Yes, this is something a developer could build into their app's install process and make sure that nothing like this could go horribly wrong, or the OS could be developed properly and not put this onto Dev's shoulders.
There were specific requirements to this dump. Most notably, the source for this dump was done by someone who didn't understand my request and gave it to me in Access format instead of say, something way more MySQL friendly. I also lacked any tools on my workstation to get clean data. So I had to go from MDB->Excel XML->MySQL. Python's XML parsing sounded reasonably good, so I went for it.
Re:If you didn't vote libertarian, you ASKED FOR T
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Obama DOJ Sides With RIAA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I also voted for a candidate who understands that the Government's role isn't to diminish itself small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub and that regulation of markets is a good thing. Sure, legal pot, no Taxes/IRS and "liberty" as it's defined by libertarian wackos, sound great, but let's work in the real world. We had that. And it went all wrong. Booms and busts. Bank failures, market failures, depressions, recessions, all happen independent of regulation but the effects are made much *much* worse when there is nothing there to keep the market from deciding to shit it's collective pants.
it should go into the Documents and Settings directory for precisely the reason outlined. if they want to share saves with other players use copy and paste. Just because it was done in the DOS days doesn't mean that it should be like that. This is one of the many things wrong with the Windows security model./Program Files shouldn't be writable by anything but the System.
Slashdot Mirror
Which news network has hired:
Alan Keyes
Michael Savage
Tucker Carlson
Joe Scarborough
Pat Buchanan... etc?
It wasn't Fox News.
MSNBC doesn't have the ideological bent coming from the very very high end of the corporate leadership telling them to run with conservative talking points. MSNBC has a couple of moderates like Chris Matthews and David Shuster, one super liberal, Rachel Maddow, and one member of the reality based community(probably a liberal but doesn't take marching orders from the Obama administration), Keith Olbermann. That's why it's "left leaning" because the front men for the night time shows have a leftward bent. it's the difference between a skew, and a 90 degree bend. Unlike Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Zucker isn't a dyed in the wool partisan hack. He likes to make money. Olbermann and Maddow and Matthews makes MSNBC money. Well, mostly Olbermann and Maddow, but we're talking about a decision based on money, not complete ideological bias coming from high up as Rupert Murdoch and then cascading to Roger Ailes, the guy who ran media affairs for Bush Sr.
Do you seriously expect someone to refute this point to point? I will if you really *really* want me to.
SHUT UP.
Why can't all of you Alex Jonesites just shut up?
There is no conspiracy against you, me or the free world.
The social aspect is a huge thing for me. Being able to turn to the person next to you and ask something about the subject matter you're studying and potentially getting a useful result is nice.
It is still a losing score.
No it's not. It's not a matter of score in terms of years, it's a matter of whether or not a certain political and economic ideology has any sort of efficacy over the state of affairs in a nation. Clearly liberalism tied with Keynesian economics and a fiat money system work compared to more hands off conservative politics. The further you go from that, the worse it'll be. Libertarianism with a gold standard would most certainly destroy this country.
(Even worse would be if competing currencies were allowed to compete. *shudder*)
Business was already there, the difference is fiat money.
But this is the point, the wage gap between the rich and the poor tends to GROW no matter what backs our currency(again unless we're discussing liberal Keynesian economics), Shiny ass rocks or the strength of our economic engine to produce products. At that point it becomes a matter of fiscal policy on the Federal Government.
It is said that war is politics by other means. All empires seek to control the money supply and most of those were based on a desire to control trade. Even today, war is intimately tied to finance anyway, so your point doesn't make any sense.
Neither does yours. You're trying to argue a fiat money system is an attempt to control the country through backroom deals and to support this you cite it's been this way historically. I conclude it's Alex Jones style conspiracy theorist kookery(Albeit with no proof, but this point...) and you then cite ancient armies who controlled population using swords, not paper money systems. I point this out, and this somehow makes no sense? You libertarians are like a fraking cult. Except there's no cult leader.
No, it's saying that if the process of taking the people's wealth through a cycle of inflation and deflation was predicted as a scam 200 years ago, when it now happens it is extremely naive to put it down to incompetence rather than malice.
But our system isn't taking wealth away. Nor is it creating wealth. That's really for us to decide. Central banking just removes the ability to control the money system from a politically motivated body, the Congress, to a theoretical apolitical body, a Central Bank. It's not that the concept doesn't work, we've just filled it with idiots who thought that Ayn Rand should have been taken seriously. Besides, you just sort of cited Jefferson but never really gave any of his predictions. Now that you have though, time to tackle -those-.
"That paper money has some advantages is admitted. But that its abuses also are inevitable and, by breaking up the measure of value, makes a lottery of all private property, cannot be denied. --Thomas Jefferson to Josephus B. Stuart, 1817. ME 15:113
But no where in this piece does he actually cite what these abuses are, nor does he acknowledge the abuses of a gold based currency. His claim that it would make a lottery out of private property is laughable. Of course your property is still yours. Fiat or Gold backed bills doesn't matter. Your land, crops, houses, horse drawn buggies, slaves, and spirographs are yours.
"Private fortunes, in the present state of our circulation, are at the mercy of those self-created money lenders, and are prostrated by the floods of nominal money with which their avarice deluges us." --Thomas Jefferson to John W. Eppes, 1813. ME 13:276
Jefferson doesn't seem to like the idea that maybe, just maybe, the market wouldn't be a constant deluge of dollars into the market(Yes, right now that's exactly what's happening, but we're not talking a constant deluge since the founding of the Federal Reserve).
"It is said that our paper is as good as silver, because we may have silver for it at the bank where it issues. This is not true. One, two, or three persons might have it; but a
So from a hundred years, about 10 are in favour of fiat money. Great.
In the terms of THIRTY years of being on a fiat currency, ten of that favors fiat currencies. When we had Keynesian economists running things.
And yet a working man's wage used to be enough to support the family and now it isn't, most families require two income earners.
Blame business. not just big business. Small business, big business, medium business, serious business... Strangely enough, comedy's been one field where wages have been growing, so funny business has been good for wages(I dont' know if this is actually the case but it makes a great zinger). Businesses all try to maximize profits and expenditures by ignoring the bulk of their workforce and instead worry about shareholders and owners of business.
No, not the foaming at the mouth type history, the Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, British Empire, Ottoman Empire, Genghis Khan, Catholic Church + various protestant churches, Islam, Communism, Nazism, etc, etc type history.
These were always at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun. That's how you control people, by threatening them with *death* not controlling the gold supply.
There seems to be always at least one group at a time, usually more. Sometimes working relatively openly, sometimes more secretly. When what we see now was warned about by Thomas Jefferson, doesn't that make you at least a little suspicious?
That's a fallacy, appeal to a higher authority. Further more, further investigating the nature of that quote reveals that he called into question the ability for our nation to keep a steady stream of competent economists to keep the thing afloat. I argue with out competent economists our economy is dead in the water anyway.
source: http://books.google.com/books?id=ZTIoAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA70&lpg=PA70&dq=%22most+deadly+hostility+existing+against+the+Principles+and+form+of+our+Constitution%22+origin&source=web&ots=v9jeoT6aW6&sig=POGVM6QY7Qj3W_GuWVBseO0CygI&hl=en&ei=p-KZSYWXJITcNN7jsYkM&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA71,M1
You'd better call the President and let him know then.
You took me out of context you dick. The crash of foreign markets has everything to do with their tie ins with our really REALLY lousy investment system. When that fell, so did places like Iceland, which was and still is a Libertarian with a big L paradise. Which is going to suffer even worse BECAUSE OF it.
If you are harming someone, then you are dealt with. If you are not harming anyone, then you're fine. It's very simple. Why make it more complicated than that?
Alt-meds harm people by advocating against germ theory. When you're told that germs aren't causing your problems, rather, you're told that subluxations in your spine are the cause of your illnesses, or that you need more vitamins in your diet to cure HIV, cancer, et al. You're lying, haven't researched your product thoroughly or you don't know what you're doing. That harms people. Does a Libertarian society shut these people down or are they instead relegated to the market place of ideas?
Besides, we all know how well the FDA works. They are influenced by special interests, too, and how many bad drugs have gotten past them and hurt or killed many?
Compare Vioxx or Phenphen to entire stores dedicated to Alt-meds. The Alt-med industry is nothing *but* special interests who really don't have a product that can show any sort of real efficacy. Yes, we have acetaminophen from natural sources but I'd rather have asprin than the leaves of the plant it comes from. The FDA operates mostly transparently, the research is typically available and they do deny medicines ALL THE TIME. Further more, stories where you hear how bad drugs are really don't do real research to find out what actually happened. sure, Vioxx sucked. It really sucked, but for every vioxx there can be named 20 drugs that the FDA released that year that actually does something.
I don't believe in homeopathy, obviously. But they, at least, are flat-out honest about how they prepare their "drugs" -- by diluting out a poison so much that you'd be lucky just to get a single molecule of it in your dosage.
So are the drug companies. They must publish all of their research. Some of it for FDA approval and the rest for the patent information. We know how all of these drugs are made. Unfortunately, it's the difference between describing how a bike works and how a Wankel rotary engine work mathematically. One is simple, the other isn't. It's a fact of life. Sometimes you can't understand things others can. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, or that it's a diabolical plot, it just means you don't have a knack for pharmacology.
As long as the honesty is there and the consumer is informed, then it's incumbent upon the consumer to make an informed and rational choice. No one is being harmed by sugar-water, unless, of course, they are doing this in lieu of seeking real medical help.
Telling someone to take a sugar pill and that's going to cure an ear infection IS LYING. When someone buys a homeopathic remedy, the question is, "Will it work?" and the sales droid would be an idiot to say, "no." It's not honest. Does a homeopath get in trouble in a libertarian society?
The placebo effect is a powerful one, so personally I am mixed on what to tell people about homeopathy. Yet, I must be honest about it. It's nothing more than the placebo effect. The normal claims of Homeopathy are pure nonsense, and I won't skip a heartbeat pointing that out. But if the placebo effect is actually doing someone good, I'm not sure how I would handle that.
There is no such thing as the placebo effect. There is the placebo result, which is to say that naturally a certain percentage of patients will survive any given illness versus no drugs when given a sugar pill, but that's not to say there's an effect where you're given nothing and you can expect it to do something. The placebo effect is the same as saying, "A TV turned off can keep a room full of people amused based on the fact that one of the people in the room has an iPhone and is browsing slashdot instead of bitching about the lack of TV." Your mind and determination alone can not cure diseases.
(Yes, Mark Crislip's voice came to me in my head like Obi Wan Kenobi in Empire.)
So why don't you do your best to examine the gold market for, say, the last four thousand years, and tell me if you think it's going to be viable long term. You could even compare the value of gold to paper dollars since 1913. I suppose the dollar has kept it's value very well compared to gold, hasn't it? I mean, since you assert that gold has no value and that fiat currency is better, that would mean that people pay less dollars for gold now than then, right? Right?
When you look at the dollar versus Gold over the last 100 years, when we've kept track of the value of Gold versus the buying power of the dollar, there has been atleast one period where an ounce of Gold in constant dollars was worth half of what an ounce of gold would traditionally buy. It was called the 90's. The value of Gold really did shit itself then. Thanks to eight years of Bush, no one trusts dollars anymore and the buying power of gold shot right back up.
An increased supply of gold would not oblige the government to mint more money. The price of gold coins is generally about double the value of the gold in them as they are valued as a product manufactured from gold. Nevertheless, even given the possibility of a rapid increase in gold supply devaluing money, if you look at how the value of the (fiat) dollar has been devalued over time you will see that you haven't been protected from that by fiat money at all anyway.
Yes you would. Rising wages, rising minimum wages, and lowered prices really do balance all of that out. Sure the dollar's worth less than it was in the eighties, but anyone in a given field except maybe burger flipping, has seen a rise, and in many segments of the market, not by much but it is a rise, in wages. So the dollar I own now is worth less but I sure do own more of them and it takes less of them to buy the products I own now. The NES for instance, cost 600 bucks in constant dollars in the 80's. For that much I can buy a PS3, a DualShock 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4 and a nice dinner.
History shows that there is always a group of people intent on dominating nations. If they succeed they are written into the history books as empires, if not, as conspirators. The idea that there is not a group of people intent on controlling our financial and political systems doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There always will be, and the maintenance of civil liberties will always depend on understanding the methods used and countering them as much as possible. Any market can be manipulated, including gold, but fiat currency much more easily.
By history you mean, cranks like Alex Jones? We've never intended to dominate France, Germany or the UK. We always assumed they'd be on our side. Otherwise, wouldn't you have imagined that when the French elected the American unfriendly Nicholas Sarkozy or when the Germans did the same with Angela Merkel that something would've happened to them? It didn't. Obviously. They're still around, and so are their economies. The failure of their economies has nothing to do with how well liked we are in the world, it has everything to do with how well regulated things were between now and then.
It tells you exactly what's been happening because it is determined by production. Fiat currency is based on what we hope happens, which may or may not work out at any particular time.
But it's production of a particular commodity, which could shit itself at any time. Fiat currency is pretty similar but we're putting our hopes in to our own competency, hard work and ability to produce something into the market that's viable. When you've got shitheads in the Federal Reserve who think that lending at %1 and now less than %1 is a great idea and federal regulators who believe that banks and the economic system can do no wrong, then competency and hard work go right out the window and the fiat currency is based on nothing, and as such, eventually takes a huge shit.
Despite being a Mormon, a particularly hard line religion that considers alcohol so awful that they have enacted laws making booze buying in that state pretty difficult, he's actually for rolling back regulations on booze hounds, so this is not particularly shocking to see Huntsman do this. Bravo, Gov. Huntsman! Let's see you bring Utah into the *20th* century, and hopefully the 21st by inertia of it all.
I suspected as much but when I checked out the zip, it's actually got all the level data there.
You need to find out what value means. Value != utility. Gold has always been valued. People are willing to exchange other goods and services for gold, without the government telling them to. Fiat currency only has value because the government forces it to be accepted as payment of debts.
Yeah but utility really does help us determine how viable a market is for a particular commodity in the long term. Yes, Gold can be drawn into wiring, plating, and all sorts of really useful stuff, but most of our Gold supply isn't being used for that, it's going towards jewelry. Let's say that A HUGE lode of gold is discovered and the supply of gold shoots out of the stratosphere. Under a theoretical Gold standard, the value of the dollar would shit itself as there would be an abundance of Gold. Under a fiat system, the value of the dollar wouldn't move much under this kind of discovery. Not in the same way it would be if we base our monetary policy on shiny ass yellow rocks.
Oh no, a stable financial system, how could we cope? You think volatile interest rates is a good thing? I know the basing of our economy on debt instead of capital is widely accepted but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt has been known for thousands of years as a method of bringing people under control. Using it as the basis for currency ought not be accepted by any people who wish to remain free.
Stable like a dead canary. Sure, it's not moving much but it's stable! We're not basing it on debt per se, we're basing it on our ability pay back said debt. Basing it on this rather than scarce resources means that the supply of dollars into our system is more flexible. It's not a matter of "control"(which puts us dangerously in the realm of Alex Jones kookery), it's a matter of flexible monetary supply.
Gold is not the only commodity available for exchange you know. The only "value" of a fiat money system is that it allows the spending of wealth before it has been generated on a national scale rather than being restricted to the handful of idiots who can be allowed to go broke. Fiat money allows us all to have the results of idiocy! Hooray!
So replace shiny rocks with flammable black goo or any other commodity. Basing our currency on a unit that is determined by what we have is dangerous. It doesn't give a great idea of what's actually going on in our market place and our interactions in the international scene. Fiat currencies are our future. I don't know of any modern gold or other commodity backed currency. Period.
Again, you do not understand Libertarianism. Libertarianism is not Anarchy. There is a government, but it has a limited role. It's role is to defend the land, and to make sure there is consequence for one person slamming another person in the nose. Beyond that, it should do little else. Enforcing contracts agreed upon by mutual consent and understanding is another limited role a Libertarian Government should have.
So educate me.
So how would Libertarianism deal with things like spectrum disputes or unfair trade practice complaints? Under a libertarian society, how would a seller of homeopathic remedies be dealt with when it's shown that they're selling sugar pills? Or when it turns out some device is jamming a wide array of consumer devices?
Under a 'liberal' Government you'd have the FTC, the FAA and the FDA. How would a theoretical Ron Paul administration do this? Coase theorem?
There's this stuff called gold ...
The problem is not interest rates, it is the unfettered creation of fiat money by printing and government backed fractional reserve lending. http://www.relfe.com/plus_5_.html
Here's a shocker.
GOLD HAS NO VALUE. Not like say, iPods, Mazda Miatas, or refridgerators. Gold just sits there and is shiny. It's also rare, AND not radioactive, but that's no excuse at all.
Further more, when tied up with a gold standard, interest rates move much too slowly to respond to crisis situations.
I propose that amending the constitution as necessary is a more reasonable method of getting things done than abandoning the concept of the rule of law.
In our day and age, that process would be ridiculously hard. Further more, you're missing two hundred years of constitutional law that disagrees with you thoroughly.
Money only "dries up" because it is based on fractional reserve lending rather than being backed by commodities. Real money does not disappear from existence if people don't pay their loans. Only fiat money created through loans does that.
Which is better than the supply of shiny rocks permanently drying up because we mined it all out of the ground thus leading us to a fiat money system *anyway.*
Income taxation at 39 percent at the marginal rate isn't "too much taxation." It's very much so on the left side of the Laffer curve.
So what? James Madison is dead. The general welfare and necessary and proper clauses nullify the 10th amendent. The Government isn't meant to be either large or small. It's meant to be a compromise of what we, the people, want. Individual liberty is a neat concept and all, but, we live in the real world full of nuance and grey areas. There's more to life than just "individual liberty." There's other people and how we interact with them. What now?
Yes, pot was legal prior to the 20th century, and just a little afterwards.
This is the old adage that "Your freedom ends where my nose begins."
So you're a liberal?
I mean, if my freedom ends where my nose is, and yours is too, then you're not free to enforce your freedom on me, because it infringes on my freedom. What's the solution?
A GOVERNMENT.
Libertarianism is one logical step away from liberalism but ideologically similar to conservatism.
not all the founders i hope, otherwise he'd probably wind up looking like Harvey Dent. Some of the founders are damn near socialist in their approach to Government too.
The Constitution is not a document that reads like it was written by a unified body.
The founding fathers believed 2 things A) Rule by the British Crown sucked. B) A loose confederation of states WAS NOT WORKING and a strong federal body needed to be in place.
You realize that if Libertarians get their way, corporate reigns of terror would get *worse* not better?
In a libertarian world, money speaks, and if you've got more money, you speak louder than anyone else. RIAA/MPAA/et al would *love* that. It would mean being able to do things that would be illegal in our current world.
We need rationalism, not this crap.
I'd like to point out that the boom/bust cycles only really started after the Federal Reserve was created. Prior to that the only real influence on the economy was a major war, and I think we're done with those from a global perspective (just incessant minor conflicts, most of them started by us). It's a major Libertarian platform point for the abolition of the Fed.
I don't like the Fed either, but if we give Congress, a body of people who are heavily influenced by the shift in political tides, direct control over interest rates, it would be pretty dangerous. Reform? Definitely. Abolishment? Not so much.
Now, I'm not one to say that a completely free market is the way to go; I think it's a bit of twisted thinking that a society that runs on pure greed will function at all properly - but the Libs do have some good ideas, and giving them a run at the helm for a little while would definitely make for some changes for the better.
Libertarians do have great ideas like, "Stay the hell out of my bedroom, I don't care what gays do. Never have, never will. Neither should you." It's the rest of their wacky, if it's not strictly in the constitution don't do it, ideas that make me worried. No FCC = I'm out of a fucking job.
Also, trying to arrest an economic downturn just draws out the whole thing far longer than it needs to go. Better to let failing businesses fail: propping them up just allows them to continue failing for a longer period of time. It's very similar to the idea of pulling off a band-aid slowly as opposed to just ripping it off - it might hurt more, but it's over sooner. Also, it leaves a reminder for other companies not to screw up so badly, as opposed to leaving them thinking "Oh, it's OK if we completely and abjectly fail: the taxpayers will bail us out".
I think not. Letting failing businesses fail forget that when they go, not only do THEY go but their infrastructure goes too. Jobs, exports, taxes, etc. Not only that, but when money dries up, it's got to come back into the system some how. Spending on infrastructure like schools, roads, etc. brings that kind of money abck into the system as well.
I'm a huge, flaming liberal, but when it comes to things like personal health, I seriously believe the phrase, "personal responsibility" need to be floated. Yes, smoking pot heavily can cause serious memory problems. But that's really your fault. While I do believe in free healthcare, I also believe that there are more personal problems with doing something like getting baked every night. Memory loss, mood swings, loss of relationships, etc. etc.
So, answer me this. What's so criminal about smoking a bowl in the privacy of my own home, zoning out in my recliner and vegging out on TV after snacking on everything in my fridge? Who gets hurt?
Quite frankly, nothing. But if that comes with deregulation and non interventionist policies, then fuck that. Iraq *was* a mistake, but it's not the antithesis to American intervention which is making good on treaties and agreements which we're in. Bosnia and Kosovo are great examples of *why* we should do this. Yes, it still sucks there, but it takes time for countries mired in a history of conflict to recover. Often longer than the conflict that tore the country apart lasted. Libertarians hated the Marshall plan, but among libertarians, who among them drive Volkswagens and watch Sony TVs? Who among them listen to Kraftwerk or watch anime?
Because when we're dealing with apps that aren't games, say, IIS, or Excel, not being able to write over your own executable or any number of other files in your own directory make it more safe when something goes horribly wrong and something tries to exploit it(like IIS and Excel are prone to do).
Yes, this is something a developer could build into their app's install process and make sure that nothing like this could go horribly wrong, or the OS could be developed properly and not put this onto Dev's shoulders.
There were specific requirements to this dump. Most notably, the source for this dump was done by someone who didn't understand my request and gave it to me in Access format instead of say, something way more MySQL friendly. I also lacked any tools on my workstation to get clean data. So I had to go from MDB->Excel XML->MySQL. Python's XML parsing sounded reasonably good, so I went for it.
I also voted for a candidate who understands that the Government's role isn't to diminish itself small enough for Grover Norquist to drown it in a bathtub and that regulation of markets is a good thing. Sure, legal pot, no Taxes/IRS and "liberty" as it's defined by libertarian wackos, sound great, but let's work in the real world. We had that. And it went all wrong. Booms and busts. Bank failures, market failures, depressions, recessions, all happen independent of regulation but the effects are made much *much* worse when there is nothing there to keep the market from deciding to shit it's collective pants.
no, it doesn't.
it should go into the Documents and Settings directory for precisely the reason outlined. if they want to share saves with other players use copy and paste. Just because it was done in the DOS days doesn't mean that it should be like that. This is one of the many things wrong with the Windows security model. /Program Files shouldn't be writable by anything but the System.