> Hiding public records is how people stack votes; doing that now just because people MIGHT be annoyed with an email or a phone call goes against everything this nation is supposed to stand for.
I'd consider this a great argument if only it was relevant. This has nothing to do with voting (which is secret now); hiding the petitioners' names has no effect on voting. I don't see any problem with anonymity in petitions, because they mean nothing until and unless they pass muster by garnering sufficient votes. Who cares that I don't get to see a list of signers? I can still vote it up or down at my preference and nobody will know which way I voted. Since there's fear that retaliation against petitioners will follow the revelation of names, I'm on the side of protecting these people from unnecessary risk, and I'll get my shot at whatever petitions appear on election day.
> This is an important point. If it were pro-equality signatories who were being "exposed", then I'd be a lot more worried about it.
The problem is that the actual topic is the exposure of petitioners' names in a searchable format. The very problem that worries you becomes much easier if this happens, and I defy you to tell me that the "right wing" that worries you so much won't immediately start using this very law to expose their opponents.
I'm concerned for the same reason that you're not. This sunshine law is a system that encourages abuse and intimidation of petitioners, thereby interfering with the voting process by suppressing petitions. Anonymity may not be a big concern for this particular petition, but it's a concern for every future petition.
The point is marriage is not a right, it's a license.
The same logic applies to voting. You miss.
> The limited purpose of marriage is procreation (although it is not a requirement).
Fail again. The historical reason for marriage was establishment of lineage and property rights. It had nothing to do with having kids, it had to do with how the laws affected those kids.
Gays cannot procreate.
Why not? It's true that a gay couple can't procreate with each other, but there's nothing about being gay that makes a person sterile.
We also limit marriage so you can't marry mulitple spouses, the same gender, immediate family, animals or objects.
There are plenty of cultures that practice polygamy. The restriction against homosexual marriage is religious in nature (and parallels the fight against interracial marriage pretty closely, which was also disputed on Biblical grounds). The restrictions against incest are based on medical issues, and the legal construct of marriage makes no sense if one of the participants isn't a consenting adult so mentioning animals and objects is a straw man. All fails in this discussion.
Since the dawn of time, the family, consisting of a husband, wife, and their children, has been the fundamental unit of society.
Fail. As above, there are plenty of cultures that don't follow the Christian ideal of the nuclear family. Also, the most fundamental family unit until relatively recently has been the clan.
Now, gays want to legitimize their recreational lifestyle by demanding marriage.
Convenient wording, but one could easily phrase heterosexual marriage as a lifestyle as well. There are legal reasons to want to marry another person, and the gender of those people should not figure into that legal construction any more than the race, class or religion of those people.
You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but we are not going to alter the whole structure of our civilization for your sexual preference.
Speak for yourself. Equality doesn't discriminate.
> If you're voting on something that affects other people's lives (and most things do), the public certainly has a right to know who voted which way. If you're ashamed to vote for something, then you shouldn't vote for it.
The problem falls as mentioned above, where retaliation is a threat. I'm sorry, but your argument doesn't stand up to the idea that petitioners could face retaliatory action for petitions, and as such it's just as important as secret ballots. History has amply demonstrated the will of certain groups and individuals to apply force against those whose votes they know about (bosses demanding that their employees vote a certain way on pain of dismissal or thugs beating or killing those who vote against their bosses in elections, death threats against people who sign public petitions for certain things) so in this situation, the privacy of the petitioners needs to be protected for safety. Election officials can verify the validity of petitions without releasing names, and votes and petitions should be private except in cases of elected officials, who agree to public announcements of their voting record as a matter of the job.
> Yes, joining the military pays more than minimum wage, but you have to be physically fit and willing to go overseas and get blown up. Most jobs that don't require a degree or prior experience but pay well either get you killed or require some form of special skill. Very few kids wake up and say "I want to be a plumber!" Nor are these jobs particularly easy to find nowadays, what with the massive unemployment of adults looking to make money.
I agree that jobs that pay above minimum wage have requirements, but there's a pretty big break (and a lot of job opportunities) between minimum wage and being a skilled craftsman. As I said, it took me six months to move from minimum wage to noticeably higher than that. Jobs can be tough to find, but that doesn't equate in any realistic way to "work minimum wage for a decade or borrow eighty grand".
> Your post points to the military a lot. The military is not for everyone.
I picked military service because it was a reasonable example of a job that doesn't require a degree and pays better than minimum. I could go through a raft of other possibilities if you like. Get a minimum wage job at a place that allows advancement, and then advance. Get a low end job that offers OTJ training, and learn your way up. Heck, one of my friends flipped burgers during the day and then worked after hours three days a week with an auto mechanic to learn to do it. After less than a year he knew enough to certify and sign on with a shop. Nine years after that he owns his own shop. He's certainly not making minimum wage. It's not easy, but the opportunities are out there.
> Would little Billy be safer simply taking out the damn loan? Definitely. It seems a bit extreme when possible death or physical injury is less of a hazard than having debt.
The vast majority of people who join the military survive their enlistments without major injury, so your example is indeed a bit extreme. Sure, there's extra risk, but that's true of a lot of jobs, with or without degrees. There's a reason why demolitions experts get paid so much.
> Just like not every high school student is going to be the next Einstein, not every high school student is going to be a soldier. We're all good at certain things, and we really need to stop trying to make everybody okay at everything.
This is way outside the scope of the discussion, but I'll address it insofar as I only suggested military service as one possibility. There are other ways to avoid the "work minimum wage for a decade or borrow eighty grand" dichotomy.
the fact that it isn't a risky investment is why the government isn't ending up getting wiped out by the losses.
No need for the government to get wiped out, just print more money! Hy-Brasil is NOT sinking. Repeat, NOT sinking.
You just love jumping the border on this one, don't you? Just like this isn't ancient Rome, it's not Brazil either. We'd have to maintain our current rate of inflation for several thousand years to reach the levels that Brazil suffers.
Sorry, but banking doesn't exist by government edict.
I'll admit to wording it too generally. My statement should have been that in the absence of oversight, running a bank profitably would make credit so expensive that the vast majority of the population couldn't afford it, effectively shorting economic growth to much lower levels than it can achieve with the surety. Oh, wait, I did say it that way, but now it's explicit. I humbly apologize for wording it badly.
Increase in taxation isn't inflation, full stop. An increase in taxation is a reduction of spending power, and inflation causes a reduction in spending power, but they're not the same thing at all.
Well your comments on this and other aspects of the fall of Rome mean several wikipedia edits are required, I'll leave it to you. Your self-contradiction on the banks existing by government and your comment on the government not getting wiped out (in the light of the borrowing enabled bailouts) makes me uninterested in reading another post of yours on this topic. You may be suffering from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Get over yourself. I could resort to name-calling and accusing you of mental illness as well, but I find it to be poor form in a debate. The borrowing-enabled bailouts happened because of a flaw in the oversight that allowed some companies to roll subprime debt into financial vehicles that they then advertised as low risk. Since you love Wiki so much, here's my citation for that. This is simply cheating on the risk level of the debt to make money before it collapses because of the cheating. I suppose that vaporizing the FDIC and the current banking system would solve that problem, but I find that to be equivalent to using a shotgun to kill a mosquito. I confess to being appalled that more people involved in this didn't end up in prison, but that's more a political problem than a monetary one so I'll leave it for another discussion. The upshot of this (and it pains me to say it) is that this problem would have been fixed before it happened by more oversight, not less. One would have hoped that disguising the risk level of an investment would have been forbidden in the beginning, but that's more of a legal problem than a monetary on, so I'll leave that one too. Oh, and before you say that the FDIC is disguising the risk level of a bank account, I'll short-sircuit that by saying it's not disguising, it's insuring, which is different in that the surety is actually there (where it wasn't in the case of the rerolled investments).
The problem isn't that a bank account is a bad investment.
So too many people were losing their money but it wasn't a bad investment. Whatever, you and I obviously have very different ideas of what constitutes a good or bad investment.
Um, it wasn't a problem with too many people losing their money. It was a problem that too many people were afraid of losing their money, even though it wasn't happening in most cases, because when it did it was devastating to the few who did lose their money. It runs very much like people who would rather drive somewhere than fly because they're afraid of planes, when statistics show that you're more likely to die in a car crash. the governmental surety allowed them to invest without fear that they'd be wiped out, and the fact that it isn't a risky investment is why the government isn't ending up getting wiped out by the losses.
One of the big reasons for bank failure before the FDIC was graft, where people within the bank skimmed off money or faked the books until the bank died.
Thankfully that doesn't happen any more. Oh wait...
Sure, it happens today, but graft is less likely to wipe out a bank, and when it does the bank's closure doesn't wipe out all of the depositors. That's why the surety is in place.
government protection covers the investments you tout above, by protecting you from the effects of criminality on the part of those you're invested with.
Which is entirely different to having the industry exist only by government edict, such as is the case with banking.
Sorry, but banking doesn't exist by government edict. However, it's much more effective in driving economic growth with the FDIC than it would be without it.
You'll have to cite some reasonable sources for the imminent hyperinflation
Your governments finances are propped up by borrowing and inflating the currency supply. Other countries are less likely to be willing to lend to you as your currency loses value and ceases to be the reserve currency of the world, that leaves inflation or massive cutbacks in government spending. Cutbacks in government spending do not seem to be on the agenda. It's only one possible scenario but it is possible. Given that those who couldn't foresee the GFC are still in control of your financial system it's hard to have much confidence in them.
Our government was running surplus eight years ago. I hesitate to blame the Bush administration entirely, but that administration did drive up the deficit quite a bit. But, as was proven by the Clinton administration, it's possible to get it controlled, and so I disagree that spending cuts are not to be seen. Frankly, I see significant reductions in military expenditure over the next few years, but we'll see how that goes.
As to your cite for the fall of Rome, you must be joking.
I reviewed a number of the links listed, and inflation does represent a problem, but not in the way you seem to want to present. I'll never argue that severe inflation isn't damaging, but I will (and have) argued that the banking industry is not causing severe inflation. Deficit spending (and the government creating money from nowhere) isn't the banking industry's fault, so it's not very relevant to the discussion we're having here.
There's little mention of the explosive expansion of the empire causing problems, there's no mention of uneven taxation (taxation, by the
This is wordsmithing. All investment is "risky debt" by this definition, so it's useless to this discussion.
No, I've got investments in capital that don't require the government to make any guarantees. That's capitalism. When you have the government guaranteeing deposits or investments because they aren't good investments it doesn't turn them into good investments it just spreads the loss, through the government, to the whole population. They are still bad investments.
The problem isn't that a bank account is a bad investment. The problem is that it's subject to issues that the average person can't afford to take a chance on, that have nothing to do with the investment. One of the big reasons for bank failure before the FDIC was graft, where people within the bank skimmed off money or faked the books until the bank died. Government invervention makes perfect sense to prevent that, and in fact it's very likely that government protection covers the investments you tout above, by protecting you from the effects of criminality on the part of those you're invested with.
I've already covered what would happen in a society that can't support a banking industry.
Inflated currency has been part of the downfall of many an empire. It's a temporary boost only. What happens in societies that can't inflate their currency at will (the basic purpose of banking) is that they can't afford continual war to expand their empires and ever increasing welfare programs.
Neither the U.S. nor Australia is an empire, and neither of these countries have driven their economies through conquest expansion in more than a century.
You can say that my money is worth a lot less than it was, but that's meaningless if my purchasing power is better than it would have been without the banking industry. Because of that industry I have a house on mortgage that I could never have afforded to buy flat out with cash, and back in 1900 I would never have qualified for the credit to buy it. That's a net gain in my financial well-being. I didn't get hoodwinked into knowing that.
Yet at this stage there is significant risk of the US going into hyperinflation. Hopefully that won't happen but your big house won't do you much good if it does, although you'll be on the right side of the debt, especially if you have a fixed interest rate, so it could still turn out well for you. If it does happen I wonder if you will associate the cause accurately. It's interesting to have a look at http://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/ which lists nine contributing causes to the fall of the Roman empire. I'd say at least five of those are in action right now in the US and in Australia right now (although Australia we don't have an empire, what do we fall from?), arguably more. Inflation is one of them.
You'll have to cite some reasonable sources for the imminent hyperinflation, since inflation hasn't reached that level in the U.S., well, ever, and even in the '70s it didn't break 20 percent.
As to your cite for the fall of Rome, you must be joking. It sounds like it was written by a priest, and it only addresses Rome itself, not the Roman Empire, which was quite a bit bigger. There's little mention of the explosive expansion of the empire causing problems, there's no mention of uneven taxation (taxation, by the way, doesn't cause inflation as your article states), there's no mention of the slave/freeman imbalance, there's no mention of east/west ideological splits. It doesn't cover most of the issues that real scholars discuss when discussing the fall of Rome, so you'll have to pardon my discounting its comments on inflation, even if I thought that the economics of Rome and the U.S. could be reasonably compared (which I don't). "Decline of morals and values"?!? Please.
Most careers won't even look at you unless you have either 5 years of experience in their field, or a college degree. The careers that don't ask for such things are minimum wage, typically dead-end too.
This would be a good point if it was anywhere approaching true. There are plenty of career options that don't fit either of these descriptions. Heck, if you really think that, then you could join the military, which will take you without a high school diploma and pays significantly better than minimum wage.
So, for little Billy student his options are a little limited. He can either take the financially responsible route and go for those minimum wage jobs, working seven days a week and getting roughly $20k a year to live on. Maybe when he's in his 30's he can start on college with a responsible loan size and really get started on his life.
if Little Billy can't rise above minimum wage given a decade, then he's certainly not going to cut it in college. It took me six months to get promoted to floor manager at a grocery store, and I was in high school at the time. As I said above, if he's got no other options, ten years in the military would get him a huge boost on his college bills, and would pay him a living wage in the meantime.
Or, little Billy student can take a huge risk and bank on his career choice being a good one. If he gets a good paying job, $70k a year let's say, the student loan debt will be manageable and easy to deal with. There's a lot of college-level jobs that aren't filling up because everybody tried to cram into IT.
Or, he can attend a school that won't leave him with crushing debt. There are plenty of colleges that can net you a degree for a sum that doesn't require $70k a year to afford.
Just to look back: Billy student can be responsible and put his future on hold for over a decade, or Billy student can be risky and plunge right in. If he's diligent and doesn't give up, he may be rewarded. If he fails, then he'll go back to the minimum wage jobs. Of course, the huge difference is that he'll be able to continue sending out his application to jobs his college degree fits with.
Or he can be a bit more sane about what he can afford and get a degree without swamping himself. Just to look back, the world isn't divided up into jobs that require a degree and minimum-wage-forever dead end jobs. Anyone who can't find something in the middle of that (at least when they're coming out of high school) isn't looking hard enough.
Banking failures aren't being blamed on free market economics
Well all I can say is you haven't been reading the papers in Australia.
You have me on that. I haven't been following Australian media.
It's not a deception, it's a gamble.
Yes, it works just like a casino. The casino always makes money, the punters are the losers.
Well, no, it doesn't work like a casino. This analogy fits so badly that I'm not even going to bother with it, because I'd be all day just taking apart the "punters always lose" part alone.
Creating money supply didn't cause these failures, disguising risky debt as good debt did.
Which is what happened when those deposits got "guaranteed", it's all risky debt propped up only by government intervention.
This is wordsmithing. All investment is "risky debt" by this definition, so it's useless to this discussion. The question is the level of risk that the government takes on versus the benefit to society at large, which has been demonstrably massive. Without the FDIC, small depositors got wiped out often enough that the banking industry fell apart for lack of deposits. With the FDIC, the banking industry works. I've already covered what would happen in a society that can't support a banking industry.
In fact, many bank instruments compare their gains to inflation to show real value growth, so it's not only not deceptive, it's right there in the ad copy.
Official inflation figures are deceptive. They don't include house prices for example, which affect everyone, borrower or renter.
So? There are many segments of society that don't directly figure into inflation figures, because (in some cases) it's unnecessary to include them because we have enough data to figure it out, or (in the case of segments like housing) they're too affected by local issues to figure into things. None of that has to do with the banking industry ties to inflation, which are running returns versus inflation at large and which show that they're turning more growth than inflation is taking away. Besides which, the housing market (with some float) has followed inflation very closely over the last hundred years. Why assume that it's magically not a good barometer now?
it's not a scam against confidence, which means someone convincing you of something detrimental.
I disagree. They've devalued the US dollar by about 96% since the creation of the Fed, Australian currency by about the same proportion, which is undoubtedly detrimental, yet they've convinced you and many others that it's a good system.
If that devaluation is outstripped by economic growth, then it's not a bad thing. You can say that my money is worth a lot less than it was, but that's meaningless if my purchasing power is better than it would have been without the banking industry. Because of that industry I have a house on mortgage that I could never have afforded to buy flat out with cash, and back in 1900 I would never have qualified for the credit to buy it. That's a net gain in my financial well-being. I didn't get hoodwinked into knowing that.
The problem is that, in the absence of the government oversight, there wasn't any real way to run a bank profitably
Yet the banking failures are being blamed on free market economics.
I'm not sure where you plan to go with this. Banking failures aren't being blamed on free market economics, they're being blamed on greed and mismanagement, fueled by people who failed to learn yet again that the market never goes up like a rocket forever.
If the system is only sustainable through such spin, it's a fraud and ought to be exposed as such. What is the reason that nobody wants to admit that it's a government system, not a real free market enterprise? You say most people want that, but it seems to require ongoing deception of those people to keep them wanting it.
It's not a deception, it's a gamble. Just like homeowner's insurance is a gamble, the banking industry and its supporting insurance is a gamble. The problem is that some of the banks started gambling against the odds, and came up with methods to hide that risk from insurers, and then when the economy cycled just as it always does, those banks tanked, and then the insurance companies that were backing them up got pulled under. This isn't a problem with the setup as a whole, it's a problem where some people purposely deceived investors and depositors to make more money. Graft could wipe out a bank even without any government control whatsoever (and graft did ruin many private banks and lending companies in the past, before the FDIC). Creating money supply didn't cause these failures, disguising risky debt as good debt did.
The simple answer is that the need for small depositor protection is because the risk to reward for most people is too high without a guarantee. Most depositors who keep less than $10,000 in the bank would lose their house if their bank account disappeared if the bank failed, so they'd just keep their money at home in a box (which is what they did in the past). That's a vast amount of capital that's useless to driving the economy, and insurers couldn't afford to insure those funds because in aggregate, it's too much risk to afford (as I said above). So, the government established the FDIC to reduce the risk to small depositors, by giving them a guarantee that their bank account won't vaporize due to mismanagement or a bank CEO that decides to cook the books and make off with the money. That draws in small depositor funds.
People didn't want to deposit their money in a bank that couldn't guarantee they'd get it back
And yet they'll accept the current inflationary system, guaranteeing that their money will lose value. Again, they've been deceived.
You can pretend that it's deception if you like, but it's not deception unless the banking industry tries to hide the concept of inflation from depositors, which they don't. In fact, many bank instruments compare their gains to inflation to show real value growth, so it's not only not deceptive, it's right there in the ad copy.
The problem isn't that the money disappeared, it was that the faith in the market started cycling down
So it's a confidence scam?
Nice try at using an entirely difference definition of "confidence" to make a point, but it's not a scam against confidence, which means someone convincing you of something detrimental. The economy cycles up and down, and the money market is sensitive to that. As the housing bubble grew, more people jumped on to ride it up. As it grew even more, driven by all of those new entrants, some people start saying to themselves, "this is going too far to last" and they start pulling out. That slows the growth, causing more people to bail out, and so on. The same thing happens at the other end, where value losses start to convince people that the market has "hit bottom" and there's money to be made. Those investors slow the fall, whi
I try not to be biased about it, and I'm sure there are indeed quite a few people who wouldn't tolerate such blatant discrimination, but I lived there for years and saw it with my own two eyes. I watched as a black couple walked into a grocery store in Roswell, and I watched not one, not a few, but a dozen people leave the store and either drive away or wait in their cars until the black couple bought their stuff and left. This isn't Hazzard County, either, it's the pretty upscale north end of Atlanta.
I have little doubt that such a sign would start a riot in Dekalb County, but there are plenty of places south of Atlanta that would have no problem with it.
Well, keep in mind that in the world of today and the place of New York City, Shakrai is right. What (s)he lacks is historical perspective. In NYC in 2009, any business that put up such a sign would indeed be driven out of business posthaste, but that's because the racial climate is very different than it was forty years ago, and NYC is racially progressive (compared to other parts of the U.S.) to begin with. Shakrai, the reason the law exists is because when it was written, it needed to exist because the marketplace did nothing to prevent racial discrimination, and the attitude of the general public was much more accepting of such discrimination. In fact, in the '60s such signs did exist and businesses survived just fine, which is why the laws got put into place to begin with. I consider it a very good thing that you don't see the point of such a law, because it means that we've progressed as a society to the point where at least some of us have never been exposed to systemic prejudice that would show you the worth of anti-discrimination laws. That said, if you think that a sign like you describe would be a death sentence for a business, you should take a trip to Georgia. There are lawsuits filed there constantly because business owners blatantly discriminate based on race and have to be forced by the courts to stop because "the marketplace" doesn't apply any such force on them.
then they'd need to hold every cent deposited, in cash, against that possibility.
No, they'd just need to admit that it isn't simultaneously available to the borrower and the lender (depositor). Term deposits meet this criteria for example.
Sure, they could do it that way, and then you'd have exactly what happened with most early banks, which is that they couldn't attract enough depositors to operate because most depositors don't want term deposits, they want to put their money in accounts that can give it back essentially on demand. History says that this isn't a workable banking model, which is why it got pushed out in favor of reserve.
the only people who could loan money are those who already have enough to loan out.
You and I are in that position right now. We can only loan things we have accumulated. I like to call that "reality".
Sure, it's "reality", but it also proved insufficient to borrowing, and economies without access to banks get stunted against economies that have that access.
Demand for lots of things outstrips supply. Every other industry responds to this first by raising prices which then provides incentive for others to enter the market and increase supply which then in turn lowers the price so that an equilibrium is reached between supply and demand that allows for a normal profit margin.
In an industry that can't create more supply, this model is nonsensical, and your posit is that the banking industry (and the government) shouldn't be able to increase supply. So, what happens (and what did happen historically) is that most businesses and people simply couldn't afford to get credit at all, which made for an extremely lopsided business landscape that served only those who already had access to the money, while the middle class found themselves unable to afford housing and finance businesses.
The idea that the proper response to increased demand is to simply declare the demanded good to exist is in essence the same as creationism, but with the bank or government in place of god.
That would be a great analogy if the money is being created from nowhere, which is your argument but it's not reality. The reality is that the money is created from the differences in risk aversion that different people have. Essentially, it's the value that people will assign to a gamble, and that's a very real thing, as evidenced by lottery ticket sales and, incidentally, the banking industry. Just because risk aversion (or the lack of it) isn't a tangible good doesn't mean that it's valueless any more than an electrician's training, which is also intangible but has value.
Except the government isn't very good at creationism because from time to time the money disappears again and we have a crash.
This is a function of how people react to world events by changing their level of risk aversion. The government plays a part in how this change affects the industry, but to blame the government for its existence is too big a stretch.
Production creates value. The demand for capital can only be truly met by production. If we pretend we've met that demand by magic we'll get the results of magic, the magician leaves the stage at the end of the show and everyone else is left wondering what happened. That's fine for entertainment, not as the basis of well being of a country.
Wait, I've heard this line somewhere. I think it was one of the Marx brothers, or something. As I said above, managing risk aversion isn't magic. There are plenty of investors who will give you money with no guarantee that it will grow, as long as they're comfortable with the likelihood that it will. Say what you will about market crashes, but if you take a good look at the actual history of the market, even including the crashes, it's been a steady upward climb for the last century
> Indeed, TOS and TNG were remarkably short on civilian vessels, and when encountered it was usually because they were in some sort of trouble. That doesn't suggest a universe where anybody who wants to can get their own little starship.
This was mostly because the main characters of the shows were crew members on military vessels. There were plenty of plot lines involving civilian ships that weren't in trouble, and almost constant mention of the ability to travel among worlds for non-military personnel. DS9 centered on a station with a huge volume of civilian traffic. I'd say that there wasn't a warp-capable ship in every garage but they were certainly common enough that anyone who would want transport somewhere didn't have a lot of trouble doing it.
> To the extent that a private organisation can create money, they ought to have to make a real product like everyone else, not just enter numbers into an account because the government says they can.
This comment indicates that you don't want a banking industry at all. If a bank is required to "make good" on the idea that all depositors can take all of their money at any time, then they'd need to hold every cent deposited, in cash, against that possibility. Given that, they wouldn't be able to loan out any of it, and so there's no way for a bank to make money. So why would anyone open a bank? Given that nobody would be able to turn a profit on opening a bank, the only people who could loan money are those who already have enough to loan out. History have proven that there are simply not enough rich people to support the demand for credit, which is why the banking industry appeared in the first place. If the only money supply was what the government could create, then the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to afford credit at all, which is exactly how things went until less than a hundred years ago. It's easy to say that society would be better off without people using credit, but a lack of credit stalls an economy pretty severely, as we've just seen recently, and stifles businesses, which we've also seen, which in turn leads to business failures, which again we've seen.
> When banks have been given that power it is ludicrous to blame their actions on the free market.
Sorry, but this doesn't ken. The reason the banking industry is so strongly regulated is because people demanded banking services, and without central regulation each bank ended up creating its own money supply, which made the whole system fragile. The banks were given that power by borrowers, not the government, and the regulation came because the borrowers (and depositors) demanded the control to limit the damage that fraud or mismanagement could do to the system.
The problem isn't water, it's energy. It takes a lot of energy to lift anything out of Earth's gravity well. Getting water to the moon in large volume is energetically too expensive to make it worth the trouble. Finding water on the moon makes a moon base a lot cheaper.
This brings me to the next step. Water on the Moon isn't valuable because it's water. Water on the Moon represents energy. Using solar power, it can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burned back into water vapor (or just used as separate gases; oxygen can obviously be used for life support and hydrogen can be used as a thrust medium, since you're venting it into an essential vacuum so there's no risk of ignition). The value behind this is that hydrogen/oxygen is cheaper to move around, which makes it a lot more useful for fueling machines than batteries driven directly from solar power. Therefore, we'd be able to start constructing much better vehicles and engines on a moon base than if it was all electrical. The presence of water locally is what makes a moon base economically more feasible, so it's important to know if it's there.
> Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.
The market can indeed drive companies to provide it, since not everyone discovers they need it at the same time (so person A could discover the need before person B even signs on, and then person B finds out when the company tells him that it's available) and the market can drive third-party solutions that would then become available external to the company.
> So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...
His point is that the data lock-in isn't a designed in thing, it's just the nature of providing the service. More importantly, it's not impossible to get one's data back out, it just doesn't come out in a format that's simple to convert. There's nothing preventing anyone from writing an application that can export data from a cloud. Taking the article's example of Facebook, one could easily put together an app that would crawl a user's account (and could even crawl it administratively if given proper credentials) to pull out all of the information there and then write it in neatly organized files that would be ready to pass to some other cloud. What some of the commenters have been lamenting is that (in our example) Facebook isn't building such an application.
> Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".
It's exactly the same thing, which is why you don't see file conversion abilities in Microsoft Word. What motivation does Microsoft have to provide an easy way to convert to another program? What motivation does Facebook have to write software to allow export of their data (other than as browser pages, which is the point of the service)? For that matter, what motivation does Salesforce have to provide an easy export? As I said above, there's nothing preventing you (in general) from writing an export processor for whatever cloud you use, and I see that as a task for the one needing the export. After all, even Word documents don't obfuscate the text to the point where you can't get it back by any means.
> The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.
I agree that the author didn't complain about the companies not providing export services, but as above I don't see the data as "locked in" in the sense of a DRM-laden program like iTunes or the like. The cloud will give back virtually everything you put into it in most cases, if asked in the right way.
> Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.
You've got a flaw in comparison here, in that a Facebook user (or MySpace or whatever) provides all of their own content. The stuff you upload is your stuff to begin with, so it doesn't directly compare to DRMed songs because you presumably have access to the original content. You're only "locked in" in the sense of the data layout itself. Someone who buys a non-Apple player loses access to iTunes stuff they can't get back without rebuying it, but if Facebook went dark you'd still have your images and text, unless you uploaded them and then destroyed the originals. In fact, if you uploaded pictures or text and then did destroy the originals, you could get them back by logging into your Facebook account and downloading them back to your machine, and you could capture any comments or stuff that doesn't have an "original" just by loading the page and then saving the text (or the whole page) to a local file.
The fact is, you could replicate your Facebook page on MySpace by uploading the same content and manually retyping comments and such, so what you're complaining about is that these sites aren't providing free conversion services for you to save you the time involved in manually building a replication. I don't see any reason why these sites should be busting out software to make conversion easier for free, and (as evidenced by the absences) neither do they.
See, this is the problem. A computer is only an appliance if "the kitchen" is an appliance, because most people don't use a computer for a single narrow function. They use a kettle to hold and heat water, but they're not going to use a kettle to grind the coffee beans. They turn on a TV and watch the pretty pictures, but other than that it's not useful for much of anything. Then they sit down in front of the PC, and they expect to play games, check their email, maybe watch a video, store pictures from a camera, play some music, and so on, all from one machine that's got to be capable of doing it all. A kettle's "jargon" needs only consist of capacity and suitability for your stove, because that's all it does. Since the computer needs to do more, more jargon is necessary. There's a limit, of course, but the limit is far higher than the necessary jargon for a TV.
> Unless you're a doctor you shouldn't have to know anatomy, pathology, pharmacology, physiology etc.
You do need some basic knowledge in this case. To take an absurd example:
Patient: "Doc, I'm in pain!"
Doctor: "What hurts?"
Patient: "I don't know anything about anatomy! Just fix it!"
You say there's no reason why ordinary users should learn about lots of computer terms, but you include terms that ordinary users need to understand for ordinary use, like dialog boxes. The fact is, because a computer has to be complex enough to handle a pretty wide range of tasks in one device, it behooves the user to learn at least a little about the machine so they can understand how it will handle the tasks they want it to perform. Nobody would buy a kettle without asking if it will hold enough water for their needs. Nobody should consider buying a TV without making sure it can be hooked up to their antenna/cable/dish. So, why shouldn't I be able to expect someone to research whether the computer they want can do what they want it to do, or at least ask directly, "Will this machine be able to do W, X, Y and Z?" When the "Everyman" is shopping for a car and the salesman says, "This baby gets 300 horsepower!" they respond by saying, "That's great. Is that enough to tow my 800 pound boat?" When the salesman starts barking jargon, why do they play along instead of just asking whether a particular feature is required for a particular task?
The breakdown here is that the jargon and the technobabble is partly due to geeks, and partly due to the people who "neither know nor care about computers". I deal with this sort of thing constantly since I'm the "expert" that my friends and neighbors ask when they have questions. The biggest problem I've run into is that people jump into the technobabble willingly, to the detriment of actually understanding what stuff they want to get done. "This machine has a jillion gigasquat processor and fifteen megawillies. This other one has a jillion point two but only ten megawillies. Which one is better?" I can only respond by asking, "Better for what?"
It's easy to blame the PC sales guy for feeding them these meaningless numbers, but it's as much their fault for not thinking about what they want before they dive in. Nobody goes out looking for a car without considering a number of things, all of which have to do with how they'll use the car. Does it have enough seats? Does it get good gas mileage? Will it handle the driving/towing/carrying that I want to do? Then they go looking for a computer, and they won't ask such simple questions as, "Will fifteen megawillies allow me to run these programs that I use every day? Will ten megawillies? If both of these machines will do what I want, why buy the more expensive one? What am I getting for the extra money?" If they'd stop trying to act like experts and simply figure out what they want to do (or at least formulate sensible questions about their needs) they'd have an easier time getting what they need without being rooked.
Why was he lying to customers? It's not that hard to do a little research on the side to keep up. For example, when he got assigned to the "sound systems" floor, he should have taken a half hour at home on the Internet teaching himself the basics of sound systems in general and the stuff he's selling (and he could even note the major brands/models and read up on them specifically) and he'd have not only avoided lying to the customers, but he'd actually have become better at selling since he'd understand the stuff he's selling and could recommend specific models that fit well with the customers' requirements.
You say that GH is harder by an order of magnitude than playing a real instrument but then point out how quickly one could play one or two classic songs on GH? That's contradictory. I'm familiar with both GH and playing a real guitar, and GH is nowhere near as challenging to master. It requires you to ramp up your skill level a lot faster than the real thing, but there are no "nuances" in GH. You're either pressing the right button when you strike the strum bar at the right time or you're not. You're holding the button for the right length or you're not. There's no bending of notes, there's no "ad lib", you can't modulate if the mood strikes you. You can't play the same note three different ways, or tap out the melody on the fingerboard. You can't lean into the amplifier to get some feedback, or pull off any of a thousand other techniques that allow you to fiddle with your sound.
Guitar Hereo is a game. It's a fun game, but it's not a good substitute for playing a real guitar. It uses different skills that don't translate to the instrument. In fact, I'm a bit embarrassed to play GH, because my ability to play a guitar doesn't make me any good at the game and it's humbling to find that I can't do it all that well. Play it for fun, but don't play it to try to get good at the guitar.
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> Hiding public records is how people stack votes; doing that now just because people MIGHT be annoyed with an email or a phone call goes against everything this nation is supposed to stand for.
I'd consider this a great argument if only it was relevant. This has nothing to do with voting (which is secret now); hiding the petitioners' names has no effect on voting. I don't see any problem with anonymity in petitions, because they mean nothing until and unless they pass muster by garnering sufficient votes. Who cares that I don't get to see a list of signers? I can still vote it up or down at my preference and nobody will know which way I voted. Since there's fear that retaliation against petitioners will follow the revelation of names, I'm on the side of protecting these people from unnecessary risk, and I'll get my shot at whatever petitions appear on election day.
Virg
> This is an important point. If it were pro-equality signatories who were being "exposed", then I'd be a lot more worried about it.
The problem is that the actual topic is the exposure of petitioners' names in a searchable format. The very problem that worries you becomes much easier if this happens, and I defy you to tell me that the "right wing" that worries you so much won't immediately start using this very law to expose their opponents.
I'm concerned for the same reason that you're not. This sunshine law is a system that encourages abuse and intimidation of petitioners, thereby interfering with the voting process by suppressing petitions. Anonymity may not be a big concern for this particular petition, but it's a concern for every future petition.
Virg
The point is marriage is not a right, it's a license.
The same logic applies to voting. You miss.
> The limited purpose of marriage is procreation (although it is not a requirement).
Fail again. The historical reason for marriage was establishment of lineage and property rights. It had nothing to do with having kids, it had to do with how the laws affected those kids.
Gays cannot procreate.
Why not? It's true that a gay couple can't procreate with each other, but there's nothing about being gay that makes a person sterile.
We also limit marriage so you can't marry mulitple spouses, the same gender, immediate family, animals or objects.
There are plenty of cultures that practice polygamy. The restriction against homosexual marriage is religious in nature (and parallels the fight against interracial marriage pretty closely, which was also disputed on Biblical grounds). The restrictions against incest are based on medical issues, and the legal construct of marriage makes no sense if one of the participants isn't a consenting adult so mentioning animals and objects is a straw man. All fails in this discussion.
Since the dawn of time, the family, consisting of a husband, wife, and their children, has been the fundamental unit of society.
Fail. As above, there are plenty of cultures that don't follow the Christian ideal of the nuclear family. Also, the most fundamental family unit until relatively recently has been the clan.
Now, gays want to legitimize their recreational lifestyle by demanding marriage.
Convenient wording, but one could easily phrase heterosexual marriage as a lifestyle as well. There are legal reasons to want to marry another person, and the gender of those people should not figure into that legal construction any more than the race, class or religion of those people.
You can do whatever you want in the privacy of your bedroom, but we are not going to alter the whole structure of our civilization for your sexual preference.
Speak for yourself. Equality doesn't discriminate.
Virg
> If you're voting on something that affects other people's lives (and most things do), the public certainly has a right to know who voted which way. If you're ashamed to vote for something, then you shouldn't vote for it.
The problem falls as mentioned above, where retaliation is a threat. I'm sorry, but your argument doesn't stand up to the idea that petitioners could face retaliatory action for petitions, and as such it's just as important as secret ballots. History has amply demonstrated the will of certain groups and individuals to apply force against those whose votes they know about (bosses demanding that their employees vote a certain way on pain of dismissal or thugs beating or killing those who vote against their bosses in elections, death threats against people who sign public petitions for certain things) so in this situation, the privacy of the petitioners needs to be protected for safety. Election officials can verify the validity of petitions without releasing names, and votes and petitions should be private except in cases of elected officials, who agree to public announcements of their voting record as a matter of the job.
Virg
> Yes, joining the military pays more than minimum wage, but you have to be physically fit and willing to go overseas and get blown up. Most jobs that don't require a degree or prior experience but pay well either get you killed or require some form of special skill. Very few kids wake up and say "I want to be a plumber!" Nor are these jobs particularly easy to find nowadays, what with the massive unemployment of adults looking to make money.
I agree that jobs that pay above minimum wage have requirements, but there's a pretty big break (and a lot of job opportunities) between minimum wage and being a skilled craftsman. As I said, it took me six months to move from minimum wage to noticeably higher than that. Jobs can be tough to find, but that doesn't equate in any realistic way to "work minimum wage for a decade or borrow eighty grand".
> Your post points to the military a lot. The military is not for everyone.
I picked military service because it was a reasonable example of a job that doesn't require a degree and pays better than minimum. I could go through a raft of other possibilities if you like. Get a minimum wage job at a place that allows advancement, and then advance. Get a low end job that offers OTJ training, and learn your way up. Heck, one of my friends flipped burgers during the day and then worked after hours three days a week with an auto mechanic to learn to do it. After less than a year he knew enough to certify and sign on with a shop. Nine years after that he owns his own shop. He's certainly not making minimum wage. It's not easy, but the opportunities are out there.
> Would little Billy be safer simply taking out the damn loan? Definitely. It seems a bit extreme when possible death or physical injury is less of a hazard than having debt.
The vast majority of people who join the military survive their enlistments without major injury, so your example is indeed a bit extreme. Sure, there's extra risk, but that's true of a lot of jobs, with or without degrees. There's a reason why demolitions experts get paid so much.
> Just like not every high school student is going to be the next Einstein, not every high school student is going to be a soldier. We're all good at certain things, and we really need to stop trying to make everybody okay at everything.
This is way outside the scope of the discussion, but I'll address it insofar as I only suggested military service as one possibility. There are other ways to avoid the "work minimum wage for a decade or borrow eighty grand" dichotomy.
Virg
the fact that it isn't a risky investment is why the government isn't ending up getting wiped out by the losses.
No need for the government to get wiped out, just print more money! Hy-Brasil is NOT sinking. Repeat, NOT sinking.
You just love jumping the border on this one, don't you? Just like this isn't ancient Rome, it's not Brazil either. We'd have to maintain our current rate of inflation for several thousand years to reach the levels that Brazil suffers.
Sorry, but banking doesn't exist by government edict.
Funny, you already acknowledged in the absence of the government oversight, there wasn't any real way to run a bank profitably AKA the banks can't exist except by government edict. Government oversight happens by edict, ie command.
I'll admit to wording it too generally. My statement should have been that in the absence of oversight, running a bank profitably would make credit so expensive that the vast majority of the population couldn't afford it, effectively shorting economic growth to much lower levels than it can achieve with the surety. Oh, wait, I did say it that way, but now it's explicit. I humbly apologize for wording it badly.
Increase in taxation isn't inflation, full stop. An increase in taxation is a reduction of spending power, and inflation causes a reduction in spending power, but they're not the same thing at all.
Well your comments on this and other aspects of the fall of Rome mean several wikipedia edits are required, I'll leave it to you. Your self-contradiction on the banks existing by government and your comment on the government not getting wiped out (in the light of the borrowing enabled bailouts) makes me uninterested in reading another post of yours on this topic. You may be suffering from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Get over yourself. I could resort to name-calling and accusing you of mental illness as well, but I find it to be poor form in a debate. The borrowing-enabled bailouts happened because of a flaw in the oversight that allowed some companies to roll subprime debt into financial vehicles that they then advertised as low risk. Since you love Wiki so much, here's my citation for that. This is simply cheating on the risk level of the debt to make money before it collapses because of the cheating. I suppose that vaporizing the FDIC and the current banking system would solve that problem, but I find that to be equivalent to using a shotgun to kill a mosquito. I confess to being appalled that more people involved in this didn't end up in prison, but that's more a political problem than a monetary one so I'll leave it for another discussion. The upshot of this (and it pains me to say it) is that this problem would have been fixed before it happened by more oversight, not less. One would have hoped that disguising the risk level of an investment would have been forbidden in the beginning, but that's more of a legal problem than a monetary on, so I'll leave that one too. Oh, and before you say that the FDIC is disguising the risk level of a bank account, I'll short-sircuit that by saying it's not disguising, it's insuring, which is different in that the surety is actually there (where it wasn't in the case of the rerolled investments).
Virg
The problem isn't that a bank account is a bad investment.
So too many people were losing their money but it wasn't a bad investment. Whatever, you and I obviously have very different ideas of what constitutes a good or bad investment.
Um, it wasn't a problem with too many people losing their money. It was a problem that too many people were afraid of losing their money, even though it wasn't happening in most cases, because when it did it was devastating to the few who did lose their money. It runs very much like people who would rather drive somewhere than fly because they're afraid of planes, when statistics show that you're more likely to die in a car crash. the governmental surety allowed them to invest without fear that they'd be wiped out, and the fact that it isn't a risky investment is why the government isn't ending up getting wiped out by the losses.
One of the big reasons for bank failure before the FDIC was graft, where people within the bank skimmed off money or faked the books until the bank died.
...
Thankfully that doesn't happen any more. Oh wait
Sure, it happens today, but graft is less likely to wipe out a bank, and when it does the bank's closure doesn't wipe out all of the depositors. That's why the surety is in place.
government protection covers the investments you tout above, by protecting you from the effects of criminality on the part of those you're invested with.
Which is entirely different to having the industry exist only by government edict, such as is the case with banking.
Sorry, but banking doesn't exist by government edict. However, it's much more effective in driving economic growth with the FDIC than it would be without it.
You'll have to cite some reasonable sources for the imminent hyperinflation
Your governments finances are propped up by borrowing and inflating the currency supply. Other countries are less likely to be willing to lend to you as your currency loses value and ceases to be the reserve currency of the world, that leaves inflation or massive cutbacks in government spending. Cutbacks in government spending do not seem to be on the agenda. It's only one possible scenario but it is possible. Given that those who couldn't foresee the GFC are still in control of your financial system it's hard to have much confidence in them.
Our government was running surplus eight years ago. I hesitate to blame the Bush administration entirely, but that administration did drive up the deficit quite a bit. But, as was proven by the Clinton administration, it's possible to get it controlled, and so I disagree that spending cuts are not to be seen. Frankly, I see significant reductions in military expenditure over the next few years, but we'll see how that goes.
As to your cite for the fall of Rome, you must be joking.
It's a tourism site, but it isn't the only one out there that links inflation to the fall of the roman empire. http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=inflation+fall+of+rome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
I reviewed a number of the links listed, and inflation does represent a problem, but not in the way you seem to want to present. I'll never argue that severe inflation isn't damaging, but I will (and have) argued that the banking industry is not causing severe inflation. Deficit spending (and the government creating money from nowhere) isn't the banking industry's fault, so it's not very relevant to the discussion we're having here.
There's little mention of the explosive expansion of the empire causing problems, there's no mention of uneven taxation (taxation, by the
This is wordsmithing. All investment is "risky debt" by this definition, so it's useless to this discussion.
No, I've got investments in capital that don't require the government to make any guarantees. That's capitalism. When you have the government guaranteeing deposits or investments because they aren't good investments it doesn't turn them into good investments it just spreads the loss, through the government, to the whole population. They are still bad investments.
The problem isn't that a bank account is a bad investment. The problem is that it's subject to issues that the average person can't afford to take a chance on, that have nothing to do with the investment. One of the big reasons for bank failure before the FDIC was graft, where people within the bank skimmed off money or faked the books until the bank died. Government invervention makes perfect sense to prevent that, and in fact it's very likely that government protection covers the investments you tout above, by protecting you from the effects of criminality on the part of those you're invested with.
I've already covered what would happen in a society that can't support a banking industry.
Inflated currency has been part of the downfall of many an empire. It's a temporary boost only. What happens in societies that can't inflate their currency at will (the basic purpose of banking) is that they can't afford continual war to expand their empires and ever increasing welfare programs.
Neither the U.S. nor Australia is an empire, and neither of these countries have driven their economies through conquest expansion in more than a century.
You can say that my money is worth a lot less than it was, but that's meaningless if my purchasing power is better than it would have been without the banking industry. Because of that industry I have a house on mortgage that I could never have afforded to buy flat out with cash, and back in 1900 I would never have qualified for the credit to buy it. That's a net gain in my financial well-being. I didn't get hoodwinked into knowing that.
Yet at this stage there is significant risk of the US going into hyperinflation. Hopefully that won't happen but your big house won't do you much good if it does, although you'll be on the right side of the debt, especially if you have a fixed interest rate, so it could still turn out well for you. If it does happen I wonder if you will associate the cause accurately. It's interesting to have a look at http://www.rome.info/history/empire/fall/ which lists nine contributing causes to the fall of the Roman empire. I'd say at least five of those are in action right now in the US and in Australia right now (although Australia we don't have an empire, what do we fall from?), arguably more. Inflation is one of them.
You'll have to cite some reasonable sources for the imminent hyperinflation, since inflation hasn't reached that level in the U.S., well, ever, and even in the '70s it didn't break 20 percent.
As to your cite for the fall of Rome, you must be joking. It sounds like it was written by a priest, and it only addresses Rome itself, not the Roman Empire, which was quite a bit bigger. There's little mention of the explosive expansion of the empire causing problems, there's no mention of uneven taxation (taxation, by the way, doesn't cause inflation as your article states), there's no mention of the slave/freeman imbalance, there's no mention of east/west ideological splits. It doesn't cover most of the issues that real scholars discuss when discussing the fall of Rome, so you'll have to pardon my discounting its comments on inflation, even if I thought that the economics of Rome and the U.S. could be reasonably compared (which I don't). "Decline of morals and values"?!? Please.
Virg
Most careers won't even look at you unless you have either 5 years of experience in their field, or a college degree. The careers that don't ask for such things are minimum wage, typically dead-end too.
This would be a good point if it was anywhere approaching true. There are plenty of career options that don't fit either of these descriptions. Heck, if you really think that, then you could join the military, which will take you without a high school diploma and pays significantly better than minimum wage.
So, for little Billy student his options are a little limited. He can either take the financially responsible route and go for those minimum wage jobs, working seven days a week and getting roughly $20k a year to live on. Maybe when he's in his 30's he can start on college with a responsible loan size and really get started on his life.
if Little Billy can't rise above minimum wage given a decade, then he's certainly not going to cut it in college. It took me six months to get promoted to floor manager at a grocery store, and I was in high school at the time. As I said above, if he's got no other options, ten years in the military would get him a huge boost on his college bills, and would pay him a living wage in the meantime.
Or, little Billy student can take a huge risk and bank on his career choice being a good one. If he gets a good paying job, $70k a year let's say, the student loan debt will be manageable and easy to deal with. There's a lot of college-level jobs that aren't filling up because everybody tried to cram into IT.
Or, he can attend a school that won't leave him with crushing debt. There are plenty of colleges that can net you a degree for a sum that doesn't require $70k a year to afford.
Just to look back: Billy student can be responsible and put his future on hold for over a decade, or Billy student can be risky and plunge right in. If he's diligent and doesn't give up, he may be rewarded. If he fails, then he'll go back to the minimum wage jobs. Of course, the huge difference is that he'll be able to continue sending out his application to jobs his college degree fits with.
Or he can be a bit more sane about what he can afford and get a degree without swamping himself. Just to look back, the world isn't divided up into jobs that require a degree and minimum-wage-forever dead end jobs. Anyone who can't find something in the middle of that (at least when they're coming out of high school) isn't looking hard enough.
Virg
Banking failures aren't being blamed on free market economics
Well all I can say is you haven't been reading the papers in Australia.
You have me on that. I haven't been following Australian media.
It's not a deception, it's a gamble.
Yes, it works just like a casino. The casino always makes money, the punters are the losers.
Well, no, it doesn't work like a casino. This analogy fits so badly that I'm not even going to bother with it, because I'd be all day just taking apart the "punters always lose" part alone.
Creating money supply didn't cause these failures, disguising risky debt as good debt did.
Which is what happened when those deposits got "guaranteed", it's all risky debt propped up only by government intervention.
This is wordsmithing. All investment is "risky debt" by this definition, so it's useless to this discussion. The question is the level of risk that the government takes on versus the benefit to society at large, which has been demonstrably massive. Without the FDIC, small depositors got wiped out often enough that the banking industry fell apart for lack of deposits. With the FDIC, the banking industry works. I've already covered what would happen in a society that can't support a banking industry.
In fact, many bank instruments compare their gains to inflation to show real value growth, so it's not only not deceptive, it's right there in the ad copy.
Official inflation figures are deceptive. They don't include house prices for example, which affect everyone, borrower or renter.
So? There are many segments of society that don't directly figure into inflation figures, because (in some cases) it's unnecessary to include them because we have enough data to figure it out, or (in the case of segments like housing) they're too affected by local issues to figure into things. None of that has to do with the banking industry ties to inflation, which are running returns versus inflation at large and which show that they're turning more growth than inflation is taking away. Besides which, the housing market (with some float) has followed inflation very closely over the last hundred years. Why assume that it's magically not a good barometer now?
it's not a scam against confidence, which means someone convincing you of something detrimental.
I disagree. They've devalued the US dollar by about 96% since the creation of the Fed, Australian currency by about the same proportion, which is undoubtedly detrimental, yet they've convinced you and many others that it's a good system.
If that devaluation is outstripped by economic growth, then it's not a bad thing. You can say that my money is worth a lot less than it was, but that's meaningless if my purchasing power is better than it would have been without the banking industry. Because of that industry I have a house on mortgage that I could never have afforded to buy flat out with cash, and back in 1900 I would never have qualified for the credit to buy it. That's a net gain in my financial well-being. I didn't get hoodwinked into knowing that.
Virg
The problem is that, in the absence of the government oversight, there wasn't any real way to run a bank profitably
Yet the banking failures are being blamed on free market economics.
I'm not sure where you plan to go with this. Banking failures aren't being blamed on free market economics, they're being blamed on greed and mismanagement, fueled by people who failed to learn yet again that the market never goes up like a rocket forever.
If the system is only sustainable through such spin, it's a fraud and ought to be exposed as such. What is the reason that nobody wants to admit that it's a government system, not a real free market enterprise? You say most people want that, but it seems to require ongoing deception of those people to keep them wanting it.
It's not a deception, it's a gamble. Just like homeowner's insurance is a gamble, the banking industry and its supporting insurance is a gamble. The problem is that some of the banks started gambling against the odds, and came up with methods to hide that risk from insurers, and then when the economy cycled just as it always does, those banks tanked, and then the insurance companies that were backing them up got pulled under. This isn't a problem with the setup as a whole, it's a problem where some people purposely deceived investors and depositors to make more money. Graft could wipe out a bank even without any government control whatsoever (and graft did ruin many private banks and lending companies in the past, before the FDIC). Creating money supply didn't cause these failures, disguising risky debt as good debt did.
The simple answer is that the need for small depositor protection is because the risk to reward for most people is too high without a guarantee. Most depositors who keep less than $10,000 in the bank would lose their house if their bank account disappeared if the bank failed, so they'd just keep their money at home in a box (which is what they did in the past). That's a vast amount of capital that's useless to driving the economy, and insurers couldn't afford to insure those funds because in aggregate, it's too much risk to afford (as I said above). So, the government established the FDIC to reduce the risk to small depositors, by giving them a guarantee that their bank account won't vaporize due to mismanagement or a bank CEO that decides to cook the books and make off with the money. That draws in small depositor funds.
People didn't want to deposit their money in a bank that couldn't guarantee they'd get it back
And yet they'll accept the current inflationary system, guaranteeing that their money will lose value. Again, they've been deceived.
You can pretend that it's deception if you like, but it's not deception unless the banking industry tries to hide the concept of inflation from depositors, which they don't. In fact, many bank instruments compare their gains to inflation to show real value growth, so it's not only not deceptive, it's right there in the ad copy.
The problem isn't that the money disappeared, it was that the faith in the market started cycling down
So it's a confidence scam?
Nice try at using an entirely difference definition of "confidence" to make a point, but it's not a scam against confidence, which means someone convincing you of something detrimental. The economy cycles up and down, and the money market is sensitive to that. As the housing bubble grew, more people jumped on to ride it up. As it grew even more, driven by all of those new entrants, some people start saying to themselves, "this is going too far to last" and they start pulling out. That slows the growth, causing more people to bail out, and so on. The same thing happens at the other end, where value losses start to convince people that the market has "hit bottom" and there's money to be made. Those investors slow the fall, whi
I try not to be biased about it, and I'm sure there are indeed quite a few people who wouldn't tolerate such blatant discrimination, but I lived there for years and saw it with my own two eyes. I watched as a black couple walked into a grocery store in Roswell, and I watched not one, not a few, but a dozen people leave the store and either drive away or wait in their cars until the black couple bought their stuff and left. This isn't Hazzard County, either, it's the pretty upscale north end of Atlanta.
I have little doubt that such a sign would start a riot in Dekalb County, but there are plenty of places south of Atlanta that would have no problem with it.
Virg
Well, keep in mind that in the world of today and the place of New York City, Shakrai is right. What (s)he lacks is historical perspective. In NYC in 2009, any business that put up such a sign would indeed be driven out of business posthaste, but that's because the racial climate is very different than it was forty years ago, and NYC is racially progressive (compared to other parts of the U.S.) to begin with. Shakrai, the reason the law exists is because when it was written, it needed to exist because the marketplace did nothing to prevent racial discrimination, and the attitude of the general public was much more accepting of such discrimination. In fact, in the '60s such signs did exist and businesses survived just fine, which is why the laws got put into place to begin with. I consider it a very good thing that you don't see the point of such a law, because it means that we've progressed as a society to the point where at least some of us have never been exposed to systemic prejudice that would show you the worth of anti-discrimination laws. That said, if you think that a sign like you describe would be a death sentence for a business, you should take a trip to Georgia. There are lawsuits filed there constantly because business owners blatantly discriminate based on race and have to be forced by the courts to stop because "the marketplace" doesn't apply any such force on them.
Virg
then they'd need to hold every cent deposited, in cash, against that possibility.
No, they'd just need to admit that it isn't simultaneously available to the borrower and the lender (depositor). Term deposits meet this criteria for example.
Sure, they could do it that way, and then you'd have exactly what happened with most early banks, which is that they couldn't attract enough depositors to operate because most depositors don't want term deposits, they want to put their money in accounts that can give it back essentially on demand. History says that this isn't a workable banking model, which is why it got pushed out in favor of reserve.
the only people who could loan money are those who already have enough to loan out.
You and I are in that position right now. We can only loan things we have accumulated. I like to call that "reality".
Sure, it's "reality", but it also proved insufficient to borrowing, and economies without access to banks get stunted against economies that have that access.
Demand for lots of things outstrips supply. Every other industry responds to this first by raising prices which then provides incentive for others to enter the market and increase supply which then in turn lowers the price so that an equilibrium is reached between supply and demand that allows for a normal profit margin.
In an industry that can't create more supply, this model is nonsensical, and your posit is that the banking industry (and the government) shouldn't be able to increase supply. So, what happens (and what did happen historically) is that most businesses and people simply couldn't afford to get credit at all, which made for an extremely lopsided business landscape that served only those who already had access to the money, while the middle class found themselves unable to afford housing and finance businesses.
The idea that the proper response to increased demand is to simply declare the demanded good to exist is in essence the same as creationism, but with the bank or government in place of god.
That would be a great analogy if the money is being created from nowhere, which is your argument but it's not reality. The reality is that the money is created from the differences in risk aversion that different people have. Essentially, it's the value that people will assign to a gamble, and that's a very real thing, as evidenced by lottery ticket sales and, incidentally, the banking industry. Just because risk aversion (or the lack of it) isn't a tangible good doesn't mean that it's valueless any more than an electrician's training, which is also intangible but has value.
Except the government isn't very good at creationism because from time to time the money disappears again and we have a crash.
This is a function of how people react to world events by changing their level of risk aversion. The government plays a part in how this change affects the industry, but to blame the government for its existence is too big a stretch.
Production creates value. The demand for capital can only be truly met by production. If we pretend we've met that demand by magic we'll get the results of magic, the magician leaves the stage at the end of the show and everyone else is left wondering what happened. That's fine for entertainment, not as the basis of well being of a country.
Wait, I've heard this line somewhere. I think it was one of the Marx brothers, or something. As I said above, managing risk aversion isn't magic. There are plenty of investors who will give you money with no guarantee that it will grow, as long as they're comfortable with the likelihood that it will. Say what you will about market crashes, but if you take a good look at the actual history of the market, even including the crashes, it's been a steady upward climb for the last century
> Indeed, TOS and TNG were remarkably short on civilian vessels, and when encountered it was usually because they were in some sort of trouble. That doesn't suggest a universe where anybody who wants to can get their own little starship.
This was mostly because the main characters of the shows were crew members on military vessels. There were plenty of plot lines involving civilian ships that weren't in trouble, and almost constant mention of the ability to travel among worlds for non-military personnel. DS9 centered on a station with a huge volume of civilian traffic. I'd say that there wasn't a warp-capable ship in every garage but they were certainly common enough that anyone who would want transport somewhere didn't have a lot of trouble doing it.
Virg
> To the extent that a private organisation can create money, they ought to have to make a real product like everyone else, not just enter numbers into an account because the government says they can.
This comment indicates that you don't want a banking industry at all. If a bank is required to "make good" on the idea that all depositors can take all of their money at any time, then they'd need to hold every cent deposited, in cash, against that possibility. Given that, they wouldn't be able to loan out any of it, and so there's no way for a bank to make money. So why would anyone open a bank? Given that nobody would be able to turn a profit on opening a bank, the only people who could loan money are those who already have enough to loan out. History have proven that there are simply not enough rich people to support the demand for credit, which is why the banking industry appeared in the first place. If the only money supply was what the government could create, then the vast majority of people wouldn't be able to afford credit at all, which is exactly how things went until less than a hundred years ago. It's easy to say that society would be better off without people using credit, but a lack of credit stalls an economy pretty severely, as we've just seen recently, and stifles businesses, which we've also seen, which in turn leads to business failures, which again we've seen.
> When banks have been given that power it is ludicrous to blame their actions on the free market.
Sorry, but this doesn't ken. The reason the banking industry is so strongly regulated is because people demanded banking services, and without central regulation each bank ended up creating its own money supply, which made the whole system fragile. The banks were given that power by borrowers, not the government, and the regulation came because the borrowers (and depositors) demanded the control to limit the damage that fraud or mismanagement could do to the system.
Virg
The problem isn't water, it's energy. It takes a lot of energy to lift anything out of Earth's gravity well. Getting water to the moon in large volume is energetically too expensive to make it worth the trouble. Finding water on the moon makes a moon base a lot cheaper.
This brings me to the next step. Water on the Moon isn't valuable because it's water. Water on the Moon represents energy. Using solar power, it can be split into hydrogen and oxygen, and then burned back into water vapor (or just used as separate gases; oxygen can obviously be used for life support and hydrogen can be used as a thrust medium, since you're venting it into an essential vacuum so there's no risk of ignition). The value behind this is that hydrogen/oxygen is cheaper to move around, which makes it a lot more useful for fueling machines than batteries driven directly from solar power. Therefore, we'd be able to start constructing much better vehicles and engines on a moon base than if it was all electrical. The presence of water locally is what makes a moon base economically more feasible, so it's important to know if it's there.
Virg
> Hence, it's not a factor they consider when choosing a service -- at least, not the first time they choose a service. And hence we can't expect market forces to lead companies to provide these things.
The market can indeed drive companies to provide it, since not everyone discovers they need it at the same time (so person A could discover the need before person B even signs on, and then person B finds out when the company tells him that it's available) and the market can drive third-party solutions that would then become available external to the company.
Virg
> So the Insightful comment here is bascially that there is no such thing as data lock in? After all, you can always recreate the data you put in. It's not like these services make it up...
His point is that the data lock-in isn't a designed in thing, it's just the nature of providing the service. More importantly, it's not impossible to get one's data back out, it just doesn't come out in a format that's simple to convert. There's nothing preventing anyone from writing an application that can export data from a cloud. Taking the article's example of Facebook, one could easily put together an app that would crawl a user's account (and could even crawl it administratively if given proper credentials) to pull out all of the information there and then write it in neatly organized files that would be ready to pass to some other cloud. What some of the commenters have been lamenting is that (in our example) Facebook isn't building such an application.
> Sorry, but that's a bit like saying "Microsoft Word documents aren't proprietary, you could always re-type the same thing in Open Office!".
It's exactly the same thing, which is why you don't see file conversion abilities in Microsoft Word. What motivation does Microsoft have to provide an easy way to convert to another program? What motivation does Facebook have to write software to allow export of their data (other than as browser pages, which is the point of the service)? For that matter, what motivation does Salesforce have to provide an easy export? As I said above, there's nothing preventing you (in general) from writing an export processor for whatever cloud you use, and I see that as a task for the one needing the export. After all, even Word documents don't obfuscate the text to the point where you can't get it back by any means.
> The author doesn't appear to indicate cloud providers should be mandated to prevent data lock in, just that customers should be aware of the data lock in of most cloud services.
I agree that the author didn't complain about the companies not providing export services, but as above I don't see the data as "locked in" in the sense of a DRM-laden program like iTunes or the like. The cloud will give back virtually everything you put into it in most cases, if asked in the right way.
Virg
> Compare with DRM, and the iTunes customer who's perfectly satisfied, until he buys a new non-Apple MP3 player.
You've got a flaw in comparison here, in that a Facebook user (or MySpace or whatever) provides all of their own content. The stuff you upload is your stuff to begin with, so it doesn't directly compare to DRMed songs because you presumably have access to the original content. You're only "locked in" in the sense of the data layout itself. Someone who buys a non-Apple player loses access to iTunes stuff they can't get back without rebuying it, but if Facebook went dark you'd still have your images and text, unless you uploaded them and then destroyed the originals. In fact, if you uploaded pictures or text and then did destroy the originals, you could get them back by logging into your Facebook account and downloading them back to your machine, and you could capture any comments or stuff that doesn't have an "original" just by loading the page and then saving the text (or the whole page) to a local file.
The fact is, you could replicate your Facebook page on MySpace by uploading the same content and manually retyping comments and such, so what you're complaining about is that these sites aren't providing free conversion services for you to save you the time involved in manually building a replication. I don't see any reason why these sites should be busting out software to make conversion easier for free, and (as evidenced by the absences) neither do they.
Virg
See, this is the problem. A computer is only an appliance if "the kitchen" is an appliance, because most people don't use a computer for a single narrow function. They use a kettle to hold and heat water, but they're not going to use a kettle to grind the coffee beans. They turn on a TV and watch the pretty pictures, but other than that it's not useful for much of anything. Then they sit down in front of the PC, and they expect to play games, check their email, maybe watch a video, store pictures from a camera, play some music, and so on, all from one machine that's got to be capable of doing it all. A kettle's "jargon" needs only consist of capacity and suitability for your stove, because that's all it does. Since the computer needs to do more, more jargon is necessary. There's a limit, of course, but the limit is far higher than the necessary jargon for a TV.
> Unless you're a doctor you shouldn't have to know anatomy, pathology, pharmacology, physiology etc.
You do need some basic knowledge in this case. To take an absurd example:
Patient: "Doc, I'm in pain!"
Doctor: "What hurts?"
Patient: "I don't know anything about anatomy! Just fix it!"
You say there's no reason why ordinary users should learn about lots of computer terms, but you include terms that ordinary users need to understand for ordinary use, like dialog boxes. The fact is, because a computer has to be complex enough to handle a pretty wide range of tasks in one device, it behooves the user to learn at least a little about the machine so they can understand how it will handle the tasks they want it to perform. Nobody would buy a kettle without asking if it will hold enough water for their needs. Nobody should consider buying a TV without making sure it can be hooked up to their antenna/cable/dish. So, why shouldn't I be able to expect someone to research whether the computer they want can do what they want it to do, or at least ask directly, "Will this machine be able to do W, X, Y and Z?" When the "Everyman" is shopping for a car and the salesman says, "This baby gets 300 horsepower!" they respond by saying, "That's great. Is that enough to tow my 800 pound boat?" When the salesman starts barking jargon, why do they play along instead of just asking whether a particular feature is required for a particular task?
Virg
The breakdown here is that the jargon and the technobabble is partly due to geeks, and partly due to the people who "neither know nor care about computers". I deal with this sort of thing constantly since I'm the "expert" that my friends and neighbors ask when they have questions. The biggest problem I've run into is that people jump into the technobabble willingly, to the detriment of actually understanding what stuff they want to get done. "This machine has a jillion gigasquat processor and fifteen megawillies. This other one has a jillion point two but only ten megawillies. Which one is better?" I can only respond by asking, "Better for what?"
It's easy to blame the PC sales guy for feeding them these meaningless numbers, but it's as much their fault for not thinking about what they want before they dive in. Nobody goes out looking for a car without considering a number of things, all of which have to do with how they'll use the car. Does it have enough seats? Does it get good gas mileage? Will it handle the driving/towing/carrying that I want to do? Then they go looking for a computer, and they won't ask such simple questions as, "Will fifteen megawillies allow me to run these programs that I use every day? Will ten megawillies? If both of these machines will do what I want, why buy the more expensive one? What am I getting for the extra money?" If they'd stop trying to act like experts and simply figure out what they want to do (or at least formulate sensible questions about their needs) they'd have an easier time getting what they need without being rooked.
Virg
Why was he lying to customers? It's not that hard to do a little research on the side to keep up. For example, when he got assigned to the "sound systems" floor, he should have taken a half hour at home on the Internet teaching himself the basics of sound systems in general and the stuff he's selling (and he could even note the major brands/models and read up on them specifically) and he'd have not only avoided lying to the customers, but he'd actually have become better at selling since he'd understand the stuff he's selling and could recommend specific models that fit well with the customers' requirements.
Virg
No, no, it's:
"Pass the salt, please!"
"Get it yourself!"
"sudo Pass the salt, please!"
"OK."
Virg
You say that GH is harder by an order of magnitude than playing a real instrument but then point out how quickly one could play one or two classic songs on GH? That's contradictory. I'm familiar with both GH and playing a real guitar, and GH is nowhere near as challenging to master. It requires you to ramp up your skill level a lot faster than the real thing, but there are no "nuances" in GH. You're either pressing the right button when you strike the strum bar at the right time or you're not. You're holding the button for the right length or you're not. There's no bending of notes, there's no "ad lib", you can't modulate if the mood strikes you. You can't play the same note three different ways, or tap out the melody on the fingerboard. You can't lean into the amplifier to get some feedback, or pull off any of a thousand other techniques that allow you to fiddle with your sound.
Guitar Hereo is a game. It's a fun game, but it's not a good substitute for playing a real guitar. It uses different skills that don't translate to the instrument. In fact, I'm a bit embarrassed to play GH, because my ability to play a guitar doesn't make me any good at the game and it's humbling to find that I can't do it all that well. Play it for fun, but don't play it to try to get good at the guitar.
Virg