Any metro program can be compiled for Windows RT or x86 or IA64. And so can have versions that run on the whole family, depending on whether or not various libraries get ported over.
Any existing windows program will not run. That distinction is going to be confusing as hell, because some programs will have ARM versions, some won't, people don't know why they need an arm at all in this process. You and I can figure it out, because if you can read/. you can understand enough about software to know there are ARM and x86/IA64 versions and use the one appropriate. People have trouble with 32 vs 64 bit, this is like a whole other language to them, and they have no idea.
The idea of a metro 'app' is odd in the desktop world. They exist, they're called programs. But why would you want a facebook app, or a new york times app or whatever. If you want to go to those things you have the web. Or maybe you don't. Maybe the app is better. That's confusing enough without adding into it this problem that there might be a facebook app, for RT, but no facebook app for windows desktop, Adobe reader for the desktop, but it's a browser plugin on windows RT (or with the way adobe writes software there might not be a RT version at all). Itunes will probably only work on windows desktop, but not windows RT for obvious reasons. I'm sure Microsoft is working hard to make sure all the microsoft stuff works on both. It's everything else that's going to be an absolute nightmare.
As said, there are alternate solutions to that specific problem. But yes, it's the broader problem of trying to communicate otherwise is hard to deal with.
There aren't patent free, and free solutions to this problem because it's really expensive to make accessibility specific software. They can be as big, if not MUCH bigger projects than regular programs, and they require a lot of specialized knowledge and specialized skills to make work. Not only do you need excellent programmers but you need people who can deal with disabilities and design for that.
Also, it's not fair to people spent the last 30 years of their lives developing and researching technologies and specializing in it to then have that work stolen by someone else and sold for less. These big companies charge big bucks because they spend enormous amounts of money on making the technology. If it really is stolen IP then this kid was deceived by the people who sold her 5000 dollar software for 300 dollars. Of course the patent claim could be complete bullshit and the people filing the claim are to blame. Not knowing the ins and outs of how it works I can't say.
except that diablo 3 isn't a single player game. They baked in all of these social features that plug you into Wow and let you play with other players precisely because the vast majority of their market have constant internet access and may as well take advantage of it.
Admittedly, I, to coin a phrase 'accidentally' a word or two there. Complaining that a game company is using the internet to connect you to other gamers would have made more sense. Because that's what they're doing.
Now admittedly, you may not like that plan. I'm not entirely sure I'd like my boss to know I was up at 3am failing in a raid on throne of the 4 winds last night (I wasn't actually, but two friends of mine were, I was playing diablo and laughing at them). But it was fun being able to laugh at people who can clear hard mode dragon soul fail at throne of the four winds while playing a completely different game.
Sure, he could use bitcoins. In the same way the government could say 'we have 500 billion dollars in gold, (which I proclaim to be 500 tonnes) and we're only printing 500 billion dollars in notes and we don't care how many people live here'. Which would mean the 'gold per person' metric would constantly be going down, making prices constantly trend in one direction. It would tank the entire economy.
And sure, governments officially expect any trading you do, including pure bartering, to be counted as your income and taxed in the currency of the country equivalent basis. But that isn't what actually happens. You couldn't trade me 6 50 million dollar houses for one 300 million dollar yacht and dodge taxes on that, the government would be on you in a heartbeat. But you could very easily trade me beers for a ride on my boat to the beach. Assuming I drank, and had a boat.
You and I might disagree on what counts as too much debt or unsustainable growth, in that scenario we vote our respective positions and the majority wins. Even when there are reasonably quantifiable correct values it's still hard to figure out which path is correct at any point in time. If you're an expert in economics go work for the federal reserve and advise them officially, but that doesn't mean your numbers are necessarily more right that anyone else. That's why there's a whole field of economics devoted to trying to quantify how best to manage money. And there are competing ideas of what the priorities should even be.
You completely misunderstand the entire concept of money.
If you took that as an actual treatise on money you're an idiot. It was intended to convey the series of problems that led us to where we are today.
Because the government is responsible for the collection of a large chunk of the money in the economy, and then paying people with it to provide services it very much determines the most basic unit of worth of money. The government decides that 1 hour of labour with no education is worth 7.25 in the US or whatever it is. And it decides what to pay all of its employees and contractors. Everything else is adjusted from there. If you and I disagree on that valuation (you think 7.24, I think 7.26) well then either we compromise in the middle, even if that isn't economically sound, or we vote for our respective politicans and get whatever number they can actually pass, which is itself a form of agreement. We just collectivize much of that bargaining in the government on our behalf, and we do so with whatever political biases we attach to it.
The issuer of money must be trust worthy not to devalue the currency *too much*, you missed the 'too much' part which is critical to the whole thing. You and I want the government to devalue money, because deflation is far worse than inflation.
you're right, in that no one could easily cause a massive gold rush for the fun of it. But that wasn't my point. My point is that australia and south africa produce more gold than the US. That means the US, to keep up with it's population needs gold from those places, or those places could in effect buy huge tracts of the US, or a bit of both. If the US has nothing they want (you know, cars, airplanes, software, you know, boring stuff), and you create completely bizarre imbalances between countries because of this pegging to a random metal that happens to be in some places and not others. If the chinese, who now produce a pile of goods people want start collecting gold, well... then they can hoard it, and flood the market with it (or continue to hoard it), which is basically them holding you by the balls. Now the thing is, they can do that with the US dollar already basically. Just as the Eurozone is doing that to the greeks and spanish basically, note the difference though. China *could* try and flood the market with US dollars (which would be good for the US, but not really very much), whereas the Eurozone is withholding currency from Spain and Greece, which is leaving them seriously fucked.
Lets not forget reserves either. Lots of countries have piles of gold in reserve under the assumption that if they need to sell it they can get money for it. That's fine as long as it's only one country trying to sell the gold. If everyone needs to sell gold you tank the price, or worse, much worse, is if a party with a lot of gold intentionally dumps it on the market for next to nothing, even if that costs them 'money' they're still fucking everyone else.
16 century spain managed to use their wealth to make powerful alliances have possession of half of italy and the netherlands and had a massive fleet to try and capture england. Their gold also got them possession of a huge swathe of the world. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Spanish_Empire_Anachronous_0.PNG). Conquering south america and the Philippines was far more cost effective than trying to capture say... france.
Spain also had massive inflation problems in andalusia during that time period. In modern times that wouldn't be nearly so bad, as it would have spread to the rest of europe and evened out relatively easily. That shitty technology era also cost them a lot, in that they had a huge consumption pressure on everything shipped by sea because things kept sinking.
I wasn't sure how to read that honestly. Probably everyone should be teaching their kids at least basic sign language.
But as a practical matter out in the real world sign language doesn't help you a lot. Because most of us wouldn't recognize it. If the kid can *only* do sign you're narrowing their world significantly. That's better than nothing, but a simple speech device that can enable them to talk to anyone, including those of us illiterate in sign would help a lot.
They're trying to tug at hearstrings with the 'can't tell dad she loves him' nonsense. There are definitely free solutions to that problem. But her ability to speak to a whole variety of people would be cut off if she were restricted purely to sign. Aunts uncles grandparents siblings cousins neighbours police security in shopping malls restaurant servers etc. are all going to be illiterate in sign most likely.
It's possible they realize the folly of Windows RT and are trying to make it possible but not probable.
It's not really clear who windows RT is actually going to be good for. It's clear who it's aimed at. But if the whole plan is to have a single windows 8 family why the hell would you buy the ugly incompatible step child of the family? That doesn't mean windows RT will be bad, or won't behave exactly the same from a user perspective as x86/IA64, at least until they go to install software and find out nothing works. But for a tablet the whole advantage of windows is that it runs windows software, if it's not going to run windows software... why would you want it?
The fact that intel and AMD haven't really kicked into gear for mobile has hurt microsoft a lot. There should be x86 phones running well... actual windows. And there should have been for 5 or 6 years at this point. I have a 6 year old touch and pen enabled windows XP tablet that behaves pretty much exactly as you'd expect a touch device to, other than the whole having a fold out keyboard because it's a convertible laptop, and I have a touch enabled windows vista HP laptop thats about 4 years old that's the same deal.
I'm still struggling to figure out what Windows RT is aimed at. Maybe it's for emerging markets and developers for emerging markets? It's possible they want regular windows as the main product line in rich countries, and poor ones that only get arm devices to have a cheap edition? Selling a cheap tablet to compete on price with the iPad in any market is a stupid plan if there's no software for it, which seems to be what windows RT would be, that's just going to make millions of customers angry, fast. Making a shitty product more expensive doesn't make it a better product, but it might make manufacturers think twice about trying to stuff it in every pile of bad hardware they can shovel out the door. But as you say... who whole strategy seems internally inconsistent.
yes. And the US government has had to bail out its own banks for the same reason.
Unlike the US the Eurozone doesn't really have one overarching banking rules afaik (FDIC I guess in the US? I'm in canada we have an equivalent here as well), that would insure private deposits.
Basically in all cases the insurer of last resort is the government. If the government can't pay, the bank collapses. Or, as you say, they're insured up to an amount, which may be very high. But it's still just an amount.
You're better off with banks than bitcoins for a slew of reasons, and you're definitely better off in theft scenario with a bank than a bitcoin. But banks still have risks.
Now the problem with barter is inefficiency, that you can't really pay me in chickens for software with effective granularity. So we really need a unit of exchange that can be broken down into small parts that are easily tradable. Say rice. Well the problem with rice if you have a bumper crop you have massive inflation in rice, and anyone who can grow rice will grow rice rather than something actually useful, since they think they're printing money. If crops fail there's not enough rice to supply both food and currency needs and everyone goes broke. So then we try gold. Gold has it's perks. It can be broken down a lot, it doesn't degrade, it has only limited commercial value which derives mostly from it's being money at all (jewelry). But then there's a constant tick of inflation in gold assuming production can keep up with inflation, and since china, south africa and australia produce a crap load of gold (and especially the latter two who out produce the US), you can end up with one country controlling the value of gold in the US or China or wherever, offering to supply gold cheap, or flooding the market with gold, preventing the US from buying goods abroad or the reverse, making things prohibitively expensive. Oh and since they have gold, they can pay for an army to defend themselves.
Since rice, and gold don't work. lets come up with a new system. The Bimetal, erm.. bigood system, which uses both as a currency, but their individual problems remain. So now lets add into the mix iron, silver, nickel, oil and a few other things, a giant aggregate basket of things to barter with. So to buy a video game from me you need to give me 1 chicken, 25g of silver, 10g of iron, and 250ml of oil. Or just one half of a barrel of oil, but since a barrel of oil is 158 litres, trying to carry around 79 litres of oil is kind of a pain, I'd rather the chicken and the metal, a barbecued chicken sounds good right now..
So now we've done this for a while, and you get sick of carrying around a large jar of oil, and having to have armed guards for your 2 bricks of gold in your basement, and the equipment needed to shave off slices for payments for valuable things. We agree that we're going to just write down these transactions. But since I don't trust you, because you're a raving fucking loon, and you don't trust me, because I'm an asshole who makes software we need a 3rd party to do it. You and I agree that Okian Warrior is a sufficiently neutral party that any exchanges we make we'll file with him on paper, and it's up to him to decide how much value things have. We start by having everything considered as 'equivalent to gold' but since everything in our wagons full of things used as money fluctuates relative to gold and frankly, we don't want to think about this shit anymore, we have actual work to do, we leave it up to him. He decides that the best way to do this is to only have official notes that he issued and tracked, of course this takes time for him, so he takes a cut. But then, we don't have to pay for armed guards for our gold, so we're net ahead. In the course of this little experience I've had kids, and they're in the software business, and you've had kids and they're in the gold/rice/oil/iron business. And Okian now has to make sure they can get enough of his notes to account for the fact that they have increased the production of software and other goods. More people = more production. So he starts making more notes. The problem with this plan is that he's not really sure how productive my kid is. Lines of code is a terrible metric. So he decides it's better to err on the side of caution, and create a little bit more money than we need, rather than to little. Because if he creates too little you and I can't fulfill our contracts, and never will, but if he creates just a little bit too much we can still fulfill our contracts and we've only lost out a little bit. We still don't need to lug around jars of oil and bricks of gold, or have personal guards for our gold, and we just pay a lit
Governments understand this perfectly well. In fact bitcoins are built with an explicit inflationary mechanism in mind, as it can be inflated indefinitely to a point.
Once you end up with a fixed total currency you end up with a much much much much much more insidious problem than inflation. Deflation.
Governments don't just print money to devalue currency. They print money to keep up the supply of money with population growth, economic growth etc. If they undershoot then the currency per person goes down. When that happens... well things get bad. Fast. It means debt grows, both personal private, in relative terms, wages need to be clawed back. It's bad all ways around. The biggest problem is debt growing. Your mortgage at 300k when you have an income of 60k looks a lot less approachable when your income is now 50k. And if you want to sell your house well... you'll get less for it, because everything is worth that much less.
Small persistent inflation is vastly preferable to deflation. How small depends. Some inflation lets debt riddled societies claw their way out over time. Right now the eurozone and the US fed should be targeting something up around 3 or 4%. At a rate that small people who deserve more money can always get raises, and people who have money can still get more.
Not necessarily true. Banks are only insured so much against failure. Including, for example, if they hold massive amounts of loans to construction companies and construction workers in spain and will not be able to collect those loans.
Thus far the Eurozone has, through various mechanisms, organized bailouts of banks to prevent them from collapsing and to prevent bank runs. However, there is not actual insurance system keeping the banks afloat. There's just the implicit expectation that eurozone governments will cough up the cash to keep all their banks from collapsing and taking the rest of the economy with them.
You realize that vivendi still owns activision blizzard it just glued activision onto blizzard at a corporate brand level. Blizzard was all about making money from when they were owned by a private childrens game maker before vivendi.
Also, World of Warcraft is all about gamers. Which is why it's this huge deep multiplayer experience. Blizzard recognizes that a world of diablo is not something they could make successfully right now (nor world of starcraft), but that people playing StarCraft and Diablo still want to connect to their friends, play drop in games with their friends, talk to their friends in WoW etc. That's very much for their customers, who are a giant collection of gamers, because they want those features to connect.
Complaining that a game is using the internet is like complaining a program is using more ram to run faster. Isn't that the whole fucking point of having the hardware in the first place?
except that diablo 3 isn't a single player game. It's not a persistent MMO either. But it's definitely a multiplayer experience. Being able to just jump into your friends game and help them out, have enemies scale to the fact that you have more people, jump into a mutiplayer game, talk to other people actually makes it a very different experience than a signel player.
Diablo II was multiplayer, but not quite in the same way. I don't think I'd want a blizzard game that doesn't tie into WoW in some ways. For example I don't think they could release a fully standalone Warcraft 4 and not have the first 1000 features being asked for as "chat with friends, multiplayer with friends'.
You can play diablo 3 entirely single player. But you'll spend forever getting anything because without the Auction house getting gear would be a nightmare. In diablo II you either had this unwieldly and unreasonable trade forum nonsense, or you kept respawning vendors over and over, or you just traded with friends. This AH is part of the recognition that the vast majority of the diablo experience is actually multiplayer. Not at the lower difficulties, but at higher difficulties it very much will be (now that they took out the damage buff on mobs when you're grouped). But even without that to even figure out how to play is this meta social experience.
I realize you *think* diablo is a single player game, because you haven't bought it. But you're wrong. Diablo 2 wasn't really a single player game either. Nor are call of duty or battlefield 3. They have some limited single player elements, but primarily they are multiplayer experiences. Diablo 3 was built from the ground up recognizing that, and recognizing that the vast majority of their players are going to want to connect with friends in WoW and Starcraft at the same time.
I know, it's weird to think of gaming as a primarily social connected experience. It's even more weird to think of a franchise like final fantasy, doom, diablo etc. as transforming from purely single player to primarily social net driven experiences. But they are. And that does actually make them better games. That doesn't mean it will always make the game better, systems that are purely online authentication for the sake of online authentication (I'm looking at you Kalypso media, and most of Ubisoft) are annoying as hell.
Also, you realize that the buy a boxed game model is going the way of the dodo bird. Those of us who are small can only afford to sell through online services, which you authenticate with, like steam. And the big guys will all have some sort of online interconnected social services (Ubisoft, EA and activision blizzard essentially all do that or have them in the pipeline).
It sounds good to say "oh this multiplayer game I think is a single player game i won't buy because I don't know it's mulitiplayer' sounds cool. But it's just misinformed. That's admittedly partially blizzards fault, but Diablo III isn't really world of diablo to deserve a complete rebrand. Just about everything is constantly net connected these days, if you can use that to make a better experience (and doing that costs a boatload of money) you should. With diablo 3 the main things are integrated chat with WoW and Starcraft, multiplayer drop in on friends, the auction house, and public games.
Oh, and before you say "well I don't play wow or starcraft so I don't care about that'. Blizzard doesn't care. They sold more games on their first day than some of the most successful games ever have sold. And I don't play wow anymore, but I can talk to all of my friends who do while I'm playing diablo. that's actually kind of nice.
It depends what component is failing or how. It could be a component is overheating for the case that the machine is in, causing it to crack, but not overheating from the thermal tolerances of the board perspective.
The BIOS usually only monitors CPU and mobo temps. A dedicated GPU or any plug in card that is overheating (including due to a defect) may not register on the mobo, but could have already damaged it.
I suppose in a broadly theoretical sense a linux driver could cause that. That's happened to GPU's with windows drivers before (the nviida 196.75 I think), but if you're using the manufacturer approved drivers and they fry it, well, then you're under their warranty, and that cost nVIDIA a lot of money. It may be that absolutely nothing on linux counts as 'lenovo approved' at which point you've voided your warranty just installing linux. While that sounds extreme there are too many linux distros to approve all of them on every laptop, and 'I wrote this operating system myself and wrote the drivers myself' reasonably wouldn't be covered, so having a warranty on a spectrum of 'some linux distros but not anything at all' seems more reasonable than no linux at all. But maybe this just means you never buy a lenovo laptop for linux. There are lists of incompatible hardware, if that includes everything that has a lenovo brand on it, or any laptop sold from newegg well so be it. I'm sure there are other sellers happy enough to oblige the geek community.
No really. Why? It is the most prestigious prize in economics, given in honour of Alfred Nobel, rather than from the estate of Alfred Nobel. It's listed on the official Nobel prize website with the longwinded clarification as to what it is actually named. ( The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). It's the recipients are chosen by the same organization as the physics and chemistry prizes.
It's not like the people who decide the nobel in physics are the same people who decide the nobel in medicine. Hell in making my other post on this thread I linked a bunch of nobel prizes and I couldn't figure out what half of the prizes in medicine or chemistry actually meant (so I didn't link those). And I'm a physicist by training. The economics prizes seem to be either rewarding epic sized research, or people in economics use non specific names for their research areas and papers. If you were going to give a prize in economics you basically have to hire a bunch of economists to figure out who to give the prize to, and that means federal reserve types who gather and analyze data. What do you think the Royal swedish academy of sciences is? They're the meta organization of scientists strewn across universities and public bodies that have meetings about who to give prizes to. There's no great mystery here. I would go so far as to say the separate groups for literature, physics/chemistry/economics, medicine are all more of a matter of book keeping. Obviously the physics prize is different from the literature one, and it's not the same people deciding.
The real caveat is would be that the Norwegian parliament elects a committee to give the peace prize. That's overtly more political, and less arms length and academically neutral than any of the others. But then politics is inherently less neutral and arms length than any of the others. An economist describes the suffering of millions, and tries to quantify it. A politician tries to do something about it, even if they have a monumentally stupid plan.
They aren't even always ethically suspicious. I'm a pasty white guy with a father from india. 2 generations from now my descendants could wonder if my father is really my father and they actually have a great grandfather from india. That could be especially important if it turns out we carry some genetic disposition to disease that would effect women, that we will never see manifest.
If you're Black in the US you may want to know what tribe or area you ancestor was kidnapped from in africa.
Testing like this can also, on a macroscopic level, pose serious questions about any notion of racial purity. This jackass in hungary may be definitely not be partially roma or jewish, but that doesn't ask what percent of the population in hungary are.
So you could have done for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/ and think it's only worth a dollar?
or: for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2010/
How about "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2011/
maybe "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"." (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/)
Maybe something so fundamentally pointless as "for the development of in vitro fertilization" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2010/
or how about something that no one would ever use like ", one half awarded to Charles Kuen Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"." http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/
Because you know.. those achievements are low standards. Cutting the prize money is unlikely to matter much. By the time people get it they are either young enough that the real money is in speaking fees and in the huge salary boost they get, or old enough their estate planning is already done and adding more to it is giving money to their kids or charity.
When you develop a cure for aids, develop a quantum computer that can actually solve a meaningful problem, find a way to replace the government in north korea and china with ones that respect human rights, or lift a couple of billion people out of poverty, then you get to claim the nobel prize is worthless. Until then, you're talking out of your ass.
besides that, the Nobel is awarded for a specific piece of work in science or economics. It's not supposed to reward a long illustrious career, it's about a specific piece of work with lasting impact. Granted in physics especially it tends towards people with long illustrious careers.
Krugman happens to have had a good track record on economic theory. But just as easily he could be a complete trainwreck on macroeconomic theory but have very correctly described one specific phenomena. That would still warrant a nobel prize. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/krugman.html specifically lists what his prize is for.
I remember a few years ago UBC was looking to hire a nobel in physics. I don't know if they got him, but that's immaterial. His nobel was in some actual physics research, but everything he was doing at that point was about innovation in teaching physics.
You can write one ground breaking science paper, and then be a complete loon for the rest of your career, as long as that specific paper is sound you can still theoretically be considered.
In this case I'm not sure it's that the US cash holders (rich people and corporations) are all necessarily opposed to more taxation. Certainly as a corporate matter taxation would mean you have less shareholder money and is therefore bad, but in practice most of them aren't stupid. They can't voluntarily pay tax, because that would make them uncompetitive for investment dollars. But if everyone was taxed well, that would move more money around.
The wealth gap in the US is reflects a fundamental problem, that rich people have money, are getting more of it, and aren't spending it. They literally have more money than they know what to do with. However you phrase it, that's not helping anyone. Borrowing it at negative real interest rates would make them feel like they're not being taxed more, taxing it would well... not require borrowing it.
No, inflation would benefit any debtor in the Eurozone. Personal and private. And all countries in the Eurozone have public debt. It would benefit greece the most, but anyone in germany with a 300k euro mortgage would see that mortgage decrease in relative value. Even that bastion of economic stability germany has 80% or so of GDP in debt, which 5 or 6 years ago we would have claimed was too high (and, in fact they did, by having targets less than that for Eurozone debt).
The countries that would benefit most from inflation are admittedly the ones with the most relative debt. Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal France, Germany are all up over 80% (with the first 4 at or above 100 and France getting close). Spain is down around 70% of GDP in debt.
And yes, without inflation Greece is screwed, if greece implodes then they'll take a number of european banks with them, who will in turn need to be bailed out by their governments or the eurozone will collapse (or more likely both), and it will cascade through the whole system. Or.. you know, they could actually try and solve the problem before it gets to that stage.
Right, it should be the ECB printing money, because he PIIGS are in a credit card debt spiral, they need to borrow more money, but at a lower rate, to get rid of the expensive debt and then get their economies going. it doesn't need to be massive inflation. 3-4% would do the trick.
And yes, austerity is putting on a proverbial emergency brake in the middle of a highway when your car is in trouble. It was bad that you were only going 80% the speed everyone else, now you're about to cause a pileup. if you can't get out of the way (exit the eurozone) you need to speed up, or someone needs to help drag you along faster.
Sure if the EU stood fully behind the struggling countries but Germans aren't interested in taking on billions of debt from all the PIIGGS, particularly not with an election in a little over a year.
I understand perfectly well what's happening. And this is it. The germans know full well that their refusal to allow the ECB to increase its inflation target has been a disaster for the so called PIIGS, and that austerity has ravaged the economy in spain and greece, has flatlined ireland and is about to catch up to Italy. They are either trying to force through a political union as a 'you can't afford not to' or they're trying to get those weak countries to exit the euro. The latter seems foolish because then they'd have debts, including with german banks in euros that they'd never be able to pay and the germans would be on the hook then anyway.
And yes, austerity has led to a near complete collapse of the greek economy and the spanish economy, which is why they need bailouts of various sorts, which will, and has, essentially pushed those two into a depression sized slump. They will take the rest of the eurozone with them without a fiscal union or massive bailouts. The germans are playing a very dangerous game. Whether they are doing so for political reasons or abject stupidity is hard to say, but probably political reasons as you said.
Well they are comparable. The greeks are borrowing money to pay off debt in a currency they can't devalue. The japanese are borrowing money to invest in a currency they control.
The reason they have the huge disparity is because greece is in a death spiral of borrowing money to pay for money it borrowed, and it can't reduce the value of the debt, create exports or attract tourists by lowering prices. Japan on the other hand can make its exports more competitive and drive demand. Greece alone couldn't do a stimulus plan, it should be eurozone wide and greece would be the primary beneficiary (per capita) of a well targeted plan.
E.g. (and I'm not seriously suggesting this). A space programme with a launch pad and assembly area in greece. Or a eurozone tourism pact, where you can travel from any eurozone country to any other eurozone country and get government cash back based on where you go. Go to greece, get 25% back from the EU fund. Go to germany, get 5% back. (And yes, those numbers are entirely made up).
Well the member states are better off than the US. Greece in particular and spain would be better to have never joined the Euro area. Of course some sort of political union to manage certain aspects of finance would go a long way to fixing that problem.
Borrowing money isn't fraud, and raising taxes isn't fraud. Nor is taxation theft. Taxation is agreeing that some things are best for the state to manage and paying for those from everyone.
So let's say a state taxes you at 100% because you're of Mexican heritage. It's passed by all the elected officials much like the Nuremberg Laws, so there is agreement. Makes it some grand agreement, right?
Actually it does. it's called the tyranny of the masses. And it's why countries have various layers of laws to prevent discrimination or to enshrine 'rights' etc. But yes, the government in its entirety is entitled to tax as it sees fit. And has in various countries. Including over 100% taxation in sweden at once point.
Get real. Contracts require consensus from everyone involved, laws don't. Rather than waxing poetic like an idiot trying to make the idea conform to your political ideology, just realize taxes just are. There's very little the average person can do to change them, other than leave the country, if that's allowed (I believe ex-convicts aren't allowed a passport, iirc, so tax evaders watch out) but that's also not always a viable option.
And you proposing going where that's tax free exactly? You're the one who needs to get real. Suggesting an absurdity does not validate your argument. Governments everywhere collect tax and provide services. The "average" person actually does decide what that money is spent on in through voting, which is a method of averaging. You don'd need a passport to leave btw. You need a passport to enter a country that requires you have a passport. Which used to, for example, not include canada. If you're a convict in the US you can travel anywhere that will accept you. It's not the US government stopping you.
So don't try to assign some bogus morality to the whole thing. I pay my taxes, and I hope the next guy puts in his share just out of a sense of fairness, but it doesn't make us better or worse people - especially in this age of loopholes and thousands of pages of rules, where a rich guy can legally fulfill his obligation paying less than me (which your argument would support because that was what was agreed to by society as a whole via representatives). Gandhi evaded salt taxes and that didn't make him a bad person.
In the eyes of the british it did. In eyes of the majority of indians the tax was unfair, and they voted by non violent revolution in a non democratic society. And yes, rich people can and do pay for laws convenient to them. If you don't like it vote people into office who will prevent it. If you want to be practical about it create a house of lords where the 700 richest americans are guaranteed a seat. Money will always buy influence in politics, it's the job of the commons to balance that with the will 'of the people' so to speak.
You need to focus more on jobs, which will create wealth. Cutting spending is creating a spiral of destruction in its wake that is destroying wealth left right and centre. Without jobs there's no demand, without demand there's no production and no innovation, without which there's less demand, and less wealth.
The Paul Krugman line of economic thought, going back to Keynes. He keeps this mantra too. I don't buy it because....
You don't like evidence based decision making? His argument in fact is that the stimulus from 2009 was woefully inaequate and that you wouldn't see much effect because it wasn't big enough. And he was basically right.
Idk what the right solution is, but it seems we have this huge balloon here, and every time it deflates, people are screeching for someone to pump it up. And this has been the case for decades, not just since 2008. Every little bump in the road, "stimulus!" Hell, we've been living with the lowest interest rates since I remember in my entire lifet
Slashdot Mirror
Erm... no.
Any metro program can be compiled for Windows RT or x86 or IA64. And so can have versions that run on the whole family, depending on whether or not various libraries get ported over.
Any existing windows program will not run. That distinction is going to be confusing as hell, because some programs will have ARM versions, some won't, people don't know why they need an arm at all in this process. You and I can figure it out, because if you can read /. you can understand enough about software to know there are ARM and x86/IA64 versions and use the one appropriate. People have trouble with 32 vs 64 bit, this is like a whole other language to them, and they have no idea.
The idea of a metro 'app' is odd in the desktop world. They exist, they're called programs. But why would you want a facebook app, or a new york times app or whatever. If you want to go to those things you have the web. Or maybe you don't. Maybe the app is better. That's confusing enough without adding into it this problem that there might be a facebook app, for RT, but no facebook app for windows desktop, Adobe reader for the desktop, but it's a browser plugin on windows RT (or with the way adobe writes software there might not be a RT version at all). Itunes will probably only work on windows desktop, but not windows RT for obvious reasons. I'm sure Microsoft is working hard to make sure all the microsoft stuff works on both. It's everything else that's going to be an absolute nightmare.
As said, there are alternate solutions to that specific problem. But yes, it's the broader problem of trying to communicate otherwise is hard to deal with.
There aren't patent free, and free solutions to this problem because it's really expensive to make accessibility specific software. They can be as big, if not MUCH bigger projects than regular programs, and they require a lot of specialized knowledge and specialized skills to make work. Not only do you need excellent programmers but you need people who can deal with disabilities and design for that.
Also, it's not fair to people spent the last 30 years of their lives developing and researching technologies and specializing in it to then have that work stolen by someone else and sold for less. These big companies charge big bucks because they spend enormous amounts of money on making the technology. If it really is stolen IP then this kid was deceived by the people who sold her 5000 dollar software for 300 dollars. Of course the patent claim could be complete bullshit and the people filing the claim are to blame. Not knowing the ins and outs of how it works I can't say.
except that diablo 3 isn't a single player game. They baked in all of these social features that plug you into Wow and let you play with other players precisely because the vast majority of their market have constant internet access and may as well take advantage of it.
Admittedly, I, to coin a phrase 'accidentally' a word or two there. Complaining that a game company is using the internet to connect you to other gamers would have made more sense. Because that's what they're doing.
Now admittedly, you may not like that plan. I'm not entirely sure I'd like my boss to know I was up at 3am failing in a raid on throne of the 4 winds last night (I wasn't actually, but two friends of mine were, I was playing diablo and laughing at them). But it was fun being able to laugh at people who can clear hard mode dragon soul fail at throne of the four winds while playing a completely different game.
Sure, he could use bitcoins. In the same way the government could say 'we have 500 billion dollars in gold, (which I proclaim to be 500 tonnes) and we're only printing 500 billion dollars in notes and we don't care how many people live here'. Which would mean the 'gold per person' metric would constantly be going down, making prices constantly trend in one direction. It would tank the entire economy.
And sure, governments officially expect any trading you do, including pure bartering, to be counted as your income and taxed in the currency of the country equivalent basis. But that isn't what actually happens. You couldn't trade me 6 50 million dollar houses for one 300 million dollar yacht and dodge taxes on that, the government would be on you in a heartbeat. But you could very easily trade me beers for a ride on my boat to the beach. Assuming I drank, and had a boat.
You and I might disagree on what counts as too much debt or unsustainable growth, in that scenario we vote our respective positions and the majority wins. Even when there are reasonably quantifiable correct values it's still hard to figure out which path is correct at any point in time. If you're an expert in economics go work for the federal reserve and advise them officially, but that doesn't mean your numbers are necessarily more right that anyone else. That's why there's a whole field of economics devoted to trying to quantify how best to manage money. And there are competing ideas of what the priorities should even be.
You completely misunderstand the entire concept of money.
If you took that as an actual treatise on money you're an idiot. It was intended to convey the series of problems that led us to where we are today.
Because the government is responsible for the collection of a large chunk of the money in the economy, and then paying people with it to provide services it very much determines the most basic unit of worth of money. The government decides that 1 hour of labour with no education is worth 7.25 in the US or whatever it is. And it decides what to pay all of its employees and contractors. Everything else is adjusted from there. If you and I disagree on that valuation (you think 7.24, I think 7.26) well then either we compromise in the middle, even if that isn't economically sound, or we vote for our respective politicans and get whatever number they can actually pass, which is itself a form of agreement. We just collectivize much of that bargaining in the government on our behalf, and we do so with whatever political biases we attach to it.
The issuer of money must be trust worthy not to devalue the currency *too much*, you missed the 'too much' part which is critical to the whole thing. You and I want the government to devalue money, because deflation is far worse than inflation.
Um...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gold_production
But either way.
you're right, in that no one could easily cause a massive gold rush for the fun of it. But that wasn't my point. My point is that australia and south africa produce more gold than the US. That means the US, to keep up with it's population needs gold from those places, or those places could in effect buy huge tracts of the US, or a bit of both. If the US has nothing they want (you know, cars, airplanes, software, you know, boring stuff), and you create completely bizarre imbalances between countries because of this pegging to a random metal that happens to be in some places and not others. If the chinese, who now produce a pile of goods people want start collecting gold, well... then they can hoard it, and flood the market with it (or continue to hoard it), which is basically them holding you by the balls. Now the thing is, they can do that with the US dollar already basically. Just as the Eurozone is doing that to the greeks and spanish basically, note the difference though. China *could* try and flood the market with US dollars (which would be good for the US, but not really very much), whereas the Eurozone is withholding currency from Spain and Greece, which is leaving them seriously fucked.
Lets not forget reserves either. Lots of countries have piles of gold in reserve under the assumption that if they need to sell it they can get money for it. That's fine as long as it's only one country trying to sell the gold. If everyone needs to sell gold you tank the price, or worse, much worse, is if a party with a lot of gold intentionally dumps it on the market for next to nothing, even if that costs them 'money' they're still fucking everyone else.
16 century spain managed to use their wealth to make powerful alliances have possession of half of italy and the netherlands and had a massive fleet to try and capture england. Their gold also got them possession of a huge swathe of the world. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Spanish_Empire_Anachronous_0.PNG). Conquering south america and the Philippines was far more cost effective than trying to capture say... france.
Spain also had massive inflation problems in andalusia during that time period. In modern times that wouldn't be nearly so bad, as it would have spread to the rest of europe and evened out relatively easily. That shitty technology era also cost them a lot, in that they had a huge consumption pressure on everything shipped by sea because things kept sinking.
I wasn't sure how to read that honestly. Probably everyone should be teaching their kids at least basic sign language.
But as a practical matter out in the real world sign language doesn't help you a lot. Because most of us wouldn't recognize it. If the kid can *only* do sign you're narrowing their world significantly. That's better than nothing, but a simple speech device that can enable them to talk to anyone, including those of us illiterate in sign would help a lot.
They're trying to tug at hearstrings with the 'can't tell dad she loves him' nonsense. There are definitely free solutions to that problem. But her ability to speak to a whole variety of people would be cut off if she were restricted purely to sign. Aunts uncles grandparents siblings cousins neighbours police security in shopping malls restaurant servers etc. are all going to be illiterate in sign most likely.
It's possible they realize the folly of Windows RT and are trying to make it possible but not probable.
It's not really clear who windows RT is actually going to be good for. It's clear who it's aimed at. But if the whole plan is to have a single windows 8 family why the hell would you buy the ugly incompatible step child of the family? That doesn't mean windows RT will be bad, or won't behave exactly the same from a user perspective as x86/IA64, at least until they go to install software and find out nothing works. But for a tablet the whole advantage of windows is that it runs windows software, if it's not going to run windows software... why would you want it?
The fact that intel and AMD haven't really kicked into gear for mobile has hurt microsoft a lot. There should be x86 phones running well... actual windows. And there should have been for 5 or 6 years at this point. I have a 6 year old touch and pen enabled windows XP tablet that behaves pretty much exactly as you'd expect a touch device to, other than the whole having a fold out keyboard because it's a convertible laptop, and I have a touch enabled windows vista HP laptop thats about 4 years old that's the same deal.
I'm still struggling to figure out what Windows RT is aimed at. Maybe it's for emerging markets and developers for emerging markets? It's possible they want regular windows as the main product line in rich countries, and poor ones that only get arm devices to have a cheap edition? Selling a cheap tablet to compete on price with the iPad in any market is a stupid plan if there's no software for it, which seems to be what windows RT would be, that's just going to make millions of customers angry, fast. Making a shitty product more expensive doesn't make it a better product, but it might make manufacturers think twice about trying to stuff it in every pile of bad hardware they can shovel out the door. But as you say... who whole strategy seems internally inconsistent.
yes. And the US government has had to bail out its own banks for the same reason.
Unlike the US the Eurozone doesn't really have one overarching banking rules afaik (FDIC I guess in the US? I'm in canada we have an equivalent here as well), that would insure private deposits.
Basically in all cases the insurer of last resort is the government. If the government can't pay, the bank collapses. Or, as you say, they're insured up to an amount, which may be very high. But it's still just an amount.
You're better off with banks than bitcoins for a slew of reasons, and you're definitely better off in theft scenario with a bank than a bitcoin. But banks still have risks.
Now the problem with barter is inefficiency, that you can't really pay me in chickens for software with effective granularity. So we really need a unit of exchange that can be broken down into small parts that are easily tradable. Say rice. Well the problem with rice if you have a bumper crop you have massive inflation in rice, and anyone who can grow rice will grow rice rather than something actually useful, since they think they're printing money. If crops fail there's not enough rice to supply both food and currency needs and everyone goes broke. So then we try gold. Gold has it's perks. It can be broken down a lot, it doesn't degrade, it has only limited commercial value which derives mostly from it's being money at all (jewelry). But then there's a constant tick of inflation in gold assuming production can keep up with inflation, and since china, south africa and australia produce a crap load of gold (and especially the latter two who out produce the US), you can end up with one country controlling the value of gold in the US or China or wherever, offering to supply gold cheap, or flooding the market with gold, preventing the US from buying goods abroad or the reverse, making things prohibitively expensive. Oh and since they have gold, they can pay for an army to defend themselves.
Since rice, and gold don't work. lets come up with a new system. The Bimetal, erm.. bigood system, which uses both as a currency, but their individual problems remain. So now lets add into the mix iron, silver, nickel, oil and a few other things, a giant aggregate basket of things to barter with. So to buy a video game from me you need to give me 1 chicken, 25g of silver, 10g of iron, and 250ml of oil. Or just one half of a barrel of oil, but since a barrel of oil is 158 litres, trying to carry around 79 litres of oil is kind of a pain, I'd rather the chicken and the metal, a barbecued chicken sounds good right now. .
So now we've done this for a while, and you get sick of carrying around a large jar of oil, and having to have armed guards for your 2 bricks of gold in your basement, and the equipment needed to shave off slices for payments for valuable things. We agree that we're going to just write down these transactions. But since I don't trust you, because you're a raving fucking loon, and you don't trust me, because I'm an asshole who makes software we need a 3rd party to do it. You and I agree that Okian Warrior is a sufficiently neutral party that any exchanges we make we'll file with him on paper, and it's up to him to decide how much value things have. We start by having everything considered as 'equivalent to gold' but since everything in our wagons full of things used as money fluctuates relative to gold and frankly, we don't want to think about this shit anymore, we have actual work to do, we leave it up to him. He decides that the best way to do this is to only have official notes that he issued and tracked, of course this takes time for him, so he takes a cut. But then, we don't have to pay for armed guards for our gold, so we're net ahead. In the course of this little experience I've had kids, and they're in the software business, and you've had kids and they're in the gold/rice/oil/iron business. And Okian now has to make sure they can get enough of his notes to account for the fact that they have increased the production of software and other goods. More people = more production. So he starts making more notes. The problem with this plan is that he's not really sure how productive my kid is. Lines of code is a terrible metric. So he decides it's better to err on the side of caution, and create a little bit more money than we need, rather than to little. Because if he creates too little you and I can't fulfill our contracts, and never will, but if he creates just a little bit too much we can still fulfill our contracts and we've only lost out a little bit. We still don't need to lug around jars of oil and bricks of gold, or have personal guards for our gold, and we just pay a lit
Governments understand this perfectly well. In fact bitcoins are built with an explicit inflationary mechanism in mind, as it can be inflated indefinitely to a point.
Once you end up with a fixed total currency you end up with a much much much much much more insidious problem than inflation. Deflation.
Governments don't just print money to devalue currency. They print money to keep up the supply of money with population growth, economic growth etc. If they undershoot then the currency per person goes down. When that happens... well things get bad. Fast. It means debt grows, both personal private, in relative terms, wages need to be clawed back. It's bad all ways around. The biggest problem is debt growing. Your mortgage at 300k when you have an income of 60k looks a lot less approachable when your income is now 50k. And if you want to sell your house well... you'll get less for it, because everything is worth that much less.
Small persistent inflation is vastly preferable to deflation. How small depends. Some inflation lets debt riddled societies claw their way out over time. Right now the eurozone and the US fed should be targeting something up around 3 or 4%. At a rate that small people who deserve more money can always get raises, and people who have money can still get more.
Not necessarily true. Banks are only insured so much against failure. Including, for example, if they hold massive amounts of loans to construction companies and construction workers in spain and will not be able to collect those loans.
Thus far the Eurozone has, through various mechanisms, organized bailouts of banks to prevent them from collapsing and to prevent bank runs. However, there is not actual insurance system keeping the banks afloat. There's just the implicit expectation that eurozone governments will cough up the cash to keep all their banks from collapsing and taking the rest of the economy with them.
You realize that vivendi still owns activision blizzard it just glued activision onto blizzard at a corporate brand level. Blizzard was all about making money from when they were owned by a private childrens game maker before vivendi.
Also, World of Warcraft is all about gamers. Which is why it's this huge deep multiplayer experience. Blizzard recognizes that a world of diablo is not something they could make successfully right now (nor world of starcraft), but that people playing StarCraft and Diablo still want to connect to their friends, play drop in games with their friends, talk to their friends in WoW etc. That's very much for their customers, who are a giant collection of gamers, because they want those features to connect.
Complaining that a game is using the internet is like complaining a program is using more ram to run faster. Isn't that the whole fucking point of having the hardware in the first place?
except that diablo 3 isn't a single player game. It's not a persistent MMO either. But it's definitely a multiplayer experience. Being able to just jump into your friends game and help them out, have enemies scale to the fact that you have more people, jump into a mutiplayer game, talk to other people actually makes it a very different experience than a signel player.
Diablo II was multiplayer, but not quite in the same way. I don't think I'd want a blizzard game that doesn't tie into WoW in some ways. For example I don't think they could release a fully standalone Warcraft 4 and not have the first 1000 features being asked for as "chat with friends, multiplayer with friends'.
You can play diablo 3 entirely single player. But you'll spend forever getting anything because without the Auction house getting gear would be a nightmare. In diablo II you either had this unwieldly and unreasonable trade forum nonsense, or you kept respawning vendors over and over, or you just traded with friends. This AH is part of the recognition that the vast majority of the diablo experience is actually multiplayer. Not at the lower difficulties, but at higher difficulties it very much will be (now that they took out the damage buff on mobs when you're grouped). But even without that to even figure out how to play is this meta social experience.
I realize you *think* diablo is a single player game, because you haven't bought it. But you're wrong. Diablo 2 wasn't really a single player game either. Nor are call of duty or battlefield 3. They have some limited single player elements, but primarily they are multiplayer experiences. Diablo 3 was built from the ground up recognizing that, and recognizing that the vast majority of their players are going to want to connect with friends in WoW and Starcraft at the same time.
I know, it's weird to think of gaming as a primarily social connected experience. It's even more weird to think of a franchise like final fantasy, doom, diablo etc. as transforming from purely single player to primarily social net driven experiences. But they are. And that does actually make them better games. That doesn't mean it will always make the game better, systems that are purely online authentication for the sake of online authentication (I'm looking at you Kalypso media, and most of Ubisoft) are annoying as hell.
Also, you realize that the buy a boxed game model is going the way of the dodo bird. Those of us who are small can only afford to sell through online services, which you authenticate with, like steam. And the big guys will all have some sort of online interconnected social services (Ubisoft, EA and activision blizzard essentially all do that or have them in the pipeline).
It sounds good to say "oh this multiplayer game I think is a single player game i won't buy because I don't know it's mulitiplayer' sounds cool. But it's just misinformed. That's admittedly partially blizzards fault, but Diablo III isn't really world of diablo to deserve a complete rebrand. Just about everything is constantly net connected these days, if you can use that to make a better experience (and doing that costs a boatload of money) you should. With diablo 3 the main things are integrated chat with WoW and Starcraft, multiplayer drop in on friends, the auction house, and public games.
Oh, and before you say "well I don't play wow or starcraft so I don't care about that'. Blizzard doesn't care. They sold more games on their first day than some of the most successful games ever have sold. And I don't play wow anymore, but I can talk to all of my friends who do while I'm playing diablo. that's actually kind of nice.
It depends what component is failing or how. It could be a component is overheating for the case that the machine is in, causing it to crack, but not overheating from the thermal tolerances of the board perspective.
The BIOS usually only monitors CPU and mobo temps. A dedicated GPU or any plug in card that is overheating (including due to a defect) may not register on the mobo, but could have already damaged it.
I suppose in a broadly theoretical sense a linux driver could cause that. That's happened to GPU's with windows drivers before (the nviida 196.75 I think), but if you're using the manufacturer approved drivers and they fry it, well, then you're under their warranty, and that cost nVIDIA a lot of money. It may be that absolutely nothing on linux counts as 'lenovo approved' at which point you've voided your warranty just installing linux. While that sounds extreme there are too many linux distros to approve all of them on every laptop, and 'I wrote this operating system myself and wrote the drivers myself' reasonably wouldn't be covered, so having a warranty on a spectrum of 'some linux distros but not anything at all' seems more reasonable than no linux at all. But maybe this just means you never buy a lenovo laptop for linux. There are lists of incompatible hardware, if that includes everything that has a lenovo brand on it, or any laptop sold from newegg well so be it. I'm sure there are other sellers happy enough to oblige the geek community.
Why does that matter?
No really. Why? It is the most prestigious prize in economics, given in honour of Alfred Nobel, rather than from the estate of Alfred Nobel. It's listed on the official Nobel prize website with the longwinded clarification as to what it is actually named. ( The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). It's the recipients are chosen by the same organization as the physics and chemistry prizes.
It's not like the people who decide the nobel in physics are the same people who decide the nobel in medicine. Hell in making my other post on this thread I linked a bunch of nobel prizes and I couldn't figure out what half of the prizes in medicine or chemistry actually meant (so I didn't link those). And I'm a physicist by training. The economics prizes seem to be either rewarding epic sized research, or people in economics use non specific names for their research areas and papers. If you were going to give a prize in economics you basically have to hire a bunch of economists to figure out who to give the prize to, and that means federal reserve types who gather and analyze data. What do you think the Royal swedish academy of sciences is? They're the meta organization of scientists strewn across universities and public bodies that have meetings about who to give prizes to. There's no great mystery here. I would go so far as to say the separate groups for literature, physics/chemistry/economics, medicine are all more of a matter of book keeping. Obviously the physics prize is different from the literature one, and it's not the same people deciding.
The real caveat is would be that the Norwegian parliament elects a committee to give the peace prize. That's overtly more political, and less arms length and academically neutral than any of the others. But then politics is inherently less neutral and arms length than any of the others. An economist describes the suffering of millions, and tries to quantify it. A politician tries to do something about it, even if they have a monumentally stupid plan.
They aren't even always ethically suspicious. I'm a pasty white guy with a father from india. 2 generations from now my descendants could wonder if my father is really my father and they actually have a great grandfather from india. That could be especially important if it turns out we carry some genetic disposition to disease that would effect women, that we will never see manifest.
If you're Black in the US you may want to know what tribe or area you ancestor was kidnapped from in africa.
Testing like this can also, on a macroscopic level, pose serious questions about any notion of racial purity. This jackass in hungary may be definitely not be partially roma or jewish, but that doesn't ask what percent of the population in hungary are.
So you could have done for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2011/ and think it's only worth a dollar?
or:
for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2010/
How about "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2011/
maybe "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"." (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2010/)
Maybe something so fundamentally pointless as "for the development of in vitro fertilization" http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2010/
or how about something that no one would ever use like ", one half awarded to Charles Kuen Kao "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor"." http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/
Because you know.. those achievements are low standards. Cutting the prize money is unlikely to matter much. By the time people get it they are either young enough that the real money is in speaking fees and in the huge salary boost they get, or old enough their estate planning is already done and adding more to it is giving money to their kids or charity.
When you develop a cure for aids, develop a quantum computer that can actually solve a meaningful problem, find a way to replace the government in north korea and china with ones that respect human rights, or lift a couple of billion people out of poverty, then you get to claim the nobel prize is worthless. Until then, you're talking out of your ass.
besides that, the Nobel is awarded for a specific piece of work in science or economics. It's not supposed to reward a long illustrious career, it's about a specific piece of work with lasting impact. Granted in physics especially it tends towards people with long illustrious careers.
Krugman happens to have had a good track record on economic theory. But just as easily he could be a complete trainwreck on macroeconomic theory but have very correctly described one specific phenomena. That would still warrant a nobel prize. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/krugman.html specifically lists what his prize is for.
I remember a few years ago UBC was looking to hire a nobel in physics. I don't know if they got him, but that's immaterial. His nobel was in some actual physics research, but everything he was doing at that point was about innovation in teaching physics.
You can write one ground breaking science paper, and then be a complete loon for the rest of your career, as long as that specific paper is sound you can still theoretically be considered.
In this case I'm not sure it's that the US cash holders (rich people and corporations) are all necessarily opposed to more taxation. Certainly as a corporate matter taxation would mean you have less shareholder money and is therefore bad, but in practice most of them aren't stupid. They can't voluntarily pay tax, because that would make them uncompetitive for investment dollars. But if everyone was taxed well, that would move more money around.
The wealth gap in the US is reflects a fundamental problem, that rich people have money, are getting more of it, and aren't spending it. They literally have more money than they know what to do with. However you phrase it, that's not helping anyone. Borrowing it at negative real interest rates would make them feel like they're not being taxed more, taxing it would well... not require borrowing it.
No, inflation would benefit any debtor in the Eurozone. Personal and private. And all countries in the Eurozone have public debt. It would benefit greece the most, but anyone in germany with a 300k euro mortgage would see that mortgage decrease in relative value. Even that bastion of economic stability germany has 80% or so of GDP in debt, which 5 or 6 years ago we would have claimed was too high (and, in fact they did, by having targets less than that for Eurozone debt).
The countries that would benefit most from inflation are admittedly the ones with the most relative debt. Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal France, Germany are all up over 80% (with the first 4 at or above 100 and France getting close). Spain is down around 70% of GDP in debt.
And yes, without inflation Greece is screwed, if greece implodes then they'll take a number of european banks with them, who will in turn need to be bailed out by their governments or the eurozone will collapse (or more likely both), and it will cascade through the whole system. Or.. you know, they could actually try and solve the problem before it gets to that stage.
Right, it should be the ECB printing money, because he PIIGS are in a credit card debt spiral, they need to borrow more money, but at a lower rate, to get rid of the expensive debt and then get their economies going. it doesn't need to be massive inflation. 3-4% would do the trick.
And yes, austerity is putting on a proverbial emergency brake in the middle of a highway when your car is in trouble. It was bad that you were only going 80% the speed everyone else, now you're about to cause a pileup. if you can't get out of the way (exit the eurozone) you need to speed up, or someone needs to help drag you along faster.
Sure if the EU stood fully behind the struggling countries but Germans aren't interested in taking on billions of debt from all the PIIGGS, particularly not with an election in a little over a year.
I understand perfectly well what's happening. And this is it. The germans know full well that their refusal to allow the ECB to increase its inflation target has been a disaster for the so called PIIGS, and that austerity has ravaged the economy in spain and greece, has flatlined ireland and is about to catch up to Italy. They are either trying to force through a political union as a 'you can't afford not to' or they're trying to get those weak countries to exit the euro. The latter seems foolish because then they'd have debts, including with german banks in euros that they'd never be able to pay and the germans would be on the hook then anyway.
And yes, austerity has led to a near complete collapse of the greek economy and the spanish economy, which is why they need bailouts of various sorts, which will, and has, essentially pushed those two into a depression sized slump. They will take the rest of the eurozone with them without a fiscal union or massive bailouts. The germans are playing a very dangerous game. Whether they are doing so for political reasons or abject stupidity is hard to say, but probably political reasons as you said.
Well they are comparable. The greeks are borrowing money to pay off debt in a currency they can't devalue. The japanese are borrowing money to invest in a currency they control.
The reason they have the huge disparity is because greece is in a death spiral of borrowing money to pay for money it borrowed, and it can't reduce the value of the debt, create exports or attract tourists by lowering prices. Japan on the other hand can make its exports more competitive and drive demand. Greece alone couldn't do a stimulus plan, it should be eurozone wide and greece would be the primary beneficiary (per capita) of a well targeted plan.
E.g. (and I'm not seriously suggesting this). A space programme with a launch pad and assembly area in greece. Or a eurozone tourism pact, where you can travel from any eurozone country to any other eurozone country and get government cash back based on where you go. Go to greece, get 25% back from the EU fund. Go to germany, get 5% back. (And yes, those numbers are entirely made up).
Well the member states are better off than the US. Greece in particular and spain would be better to have never joined the Euro area. Of course some sort of political union to manage certain aspects of finance would go a long way to fixing that problem.
So let's say a state taxes you at 100% because you're of Mexican heritage. It's passed by all the elected officials much like the Nuremberg Laws, so there is agreement. Makes it some grand agreement, right?
Actually it does. it's called the tyranny of the masses. And it's why countries have various layers of laws to prevent discrimination or to enshrine 'rights' etc. But yes, the government in its entirety is entitled to tax as it sees fit. And has in various countries. Including over 100% taxation in sweden at once point.
Get real. Contracts require consensus from everyone involved, laws don't. Rather than waxing poetic like an idiot trying to make the idea conform to your political ideology, just realize taxes just are. There's very little the average person can do to change them, other than leave the country, if that's allowed (I believe ex-convicts aren't allowed a passport, iirc, so tax evaders watch out) but that's also not always a viable option.
And you proposing going where that's tax free exactly? You're the one who needs to get real. Suggesting an absurdity does not validate your argument. Governments everywhere collect tax and provide services. The "average" person actually does decide what that money is spent on in through voting, which is a method of averaging. You don'd need a passport to leave btw. You need a passport to enter a country that requires you have a passport. Which used to, for example, not include canada. If you're a convict in the US you can travel anywhere that will accept you. It's not the US government stopping you.
So don't try to assign some bogus morality to the whole thing. I pay my taxes, and I hope the next guy puts in his share just out of a sense of fairness, but it doesn't make us better or worse people - especially in this age of loopholes and thousands of pages of rules, where a rich guy can legally fulfill his obligation paying less than me (which your argument would support because that was what was agreed to by society as a whole via representatives). Gandhi evaded salt taxes and that didn't make him a bad person.
In the eyes of the british it did. In eyes of the majority of indians the tax was unfair, and they voted by non violent revolution in a non democratic society. And yes, rich people can and do pay for laws convenient to them. If you don't like it vote people into office who will prevent it. If you want to be practical about it create a house of lords where the 700 richest americans are guaranteed a seat. Money will always buy influence in politics, it's the job of the commons to balance that with the will 'of the people' so to speak.
You need to focus more on jobs, which will create wealth. Cutting spending is creating a spiral of destruction in its wake that is destroying wealth left right and centre. Without jobs there's no demand, without demand there's no production and no innovation, without which there's less demand, and less wealth.
The Paul Krugman line of economic thought, going back to Keynes. He keeps this mantra too. I don't buy it because....
You don't like evidence based decision making? His argument in fact is that the stimulus from 2009 was woefully inaequate and that you wouldn't see much effect because it wasn't big enough. And he was basically right.
Idk what the right solution is, but it seems we have this huge balloon here, and every time it deflates, people are screeching for someone to pump it up. And this has been the case for decades, not just since 2008. Every little bump in the road, "stimulus!" Hell, we've been living with the lowest interest rates since I remember in my entire lifet