There are "left" and "right," but our current national politics are a struggle between the center-right and far-right. If you look at local governments there is a lot more variation and mixture in general. For example in California, the open primary and citizen-controlled redistricting have recently blown open the field. Last year all my local contests were between the Dems and Peace and Freedom, which is actually sort of left-wing.
The press is "left leaning" on certain social issues, such as gay marriage and voter suppression, but other than that the press is nearly uniformly in support of fiscal austerity (commonly presenting the deficit as unambiguously bad in so-called news pieces), is vitriolically anti-labor (unions are portrayed as "hostage takers"), anti-regulation, generally hawkish on armed conflict, etc.
Not that I would call them "right wing" either. The US press is essentially pro-business and supportive of the status quo, but also very sensitive to current trends in public opinion (which they both reflect and manipulate).
You might be right about our ordinances (I will have to find out), but still you are saying that even though there is still no economic incentive whatsoever for Comcast to improve service, they would do so if only our big bad city council would permit them to?
I don't actually believe there is an infrastructure problem here as higher service tiers are available in new subscriber packages. Their strategy is to get subscribers at a low tier, then make (or just "turn on") marginal improvements to attract new customers while locking in existing subscribers to their current tiers. Further, Comcast is actually more competitive about 1 mile from here - where there is a AT&T CO.
In all seriousness I will look into our municipal regulations, but nevertheless there is overwhelming evidence that Comcast is the entity responsible here.
Just a little reminder that, not only are we 1st in incarcerations per capita, but also in total number of incarcerations.
In the US, about 2.2 million people were in prison at the end of 2011, and 7 million under correctional control of some kind. As of 2012, China had a prison population of approximately 1.6 million.
I live in an urban area in the East Bay. Comcast's cheapest tier is $50/mo. for 15 Mbps - at least twice the price you pay per megabit. Reliability is OK, but the latency is not great (depends on connection type, actually) and their DNS sucks.
It's just more evidence that there is no normal economic logic behind their pricing decisions. Their actual costs are so low that they can profitably provide rural areas 35 Mbps at $50/mo. when it suits their strategy. I am sure it is not cost which is keeping them from developing the infrastructure in my area - there is just no incentive for them to do it.
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities. My connectivity, in an urban area in a technological center of the country, is piss poor and extraordinarily expensive because Comcast has an effective monopoly.
In addition to their price setting ability, Comcast has no incentive to systematically increase network capacity. Instead, they use incremental upgrades made in the course of necessary maintenance to provide new introductory offers while locking in existing customers at lower and more expensive tiers. I tried to find out recently if I could upgrade to a higher service tier - and the answer was no. Even though I'm on the lowest tier (15 Mbps @ $50/mo) and am an existing customer, they will only "offer" me new subscriber packages for which I am not eligible.
I know JSMol isn't complete, but I had reviewers complaining about the confirmation dialogs and didn't need much more than structure visualization of proteins in my software, so really it was good enough.
IMHO, HTML5/JS is definitely preferable to applets in general, mainly because it's much easier to integrate with the various web frameworks. We had to jump through a lot of hoops to use Jmol in a modal dialog inside of a Flash / Flex UI inside of a site powered by another framework, and all using a Java backend. Things were actually much simpler after user complaints about the confirmation dialogs led us to use JSMol instead.
It still sucks big time when existing, working software is broken by tiny configuration changes like these confirmation dialogs though. And I don't get why they have to request confirmation (sometimes more than once!) for signed applets, too.
Good luck, Chrome has the same behavior. Even with a signed applet and updated Java, Chrome users had to click twice to run.
For the/.ers astounding by the persistence of Java applets, I was working with JMol. I bypassed the issue by switching to the HTML5-and-JavaScript version and using the applet as a fall-back.
It is, obviously, possible to make RTG's out of other materials.
Sure, like Sr-90. But they don't work as well as Pu-238. Sr-90 is considered second best and its half-life is about 1/3 as long and power density about 20% lower.
As for TOPAZ, it's certainly viable. But total reactor mass is still several times greater than a Plutonium powered RTG.
1.3% of GDP in so-called interest payments isn't that much. It's funny how all of our "interest" payments are actually bond redemptions at face value - that is, we only pay back principle and interest together in a single transaction - but folks only manage to worry about the interest.
The truth is the US doesn't even have to resort to money printing to pay back its bonds, because the act of "printing" actually occurred way back when the bond itself was sold. After that, the bond is just another kind of paper with a dollar figure stamped on it.
Very insightful post. Not to mention the fact that right now we are suffering from a severe plutonium shortage that is jeopardizing future space missions - nearly all of our long-term space missions rely on plutonium-powered radioisotope thermal generators.
The UK is nowhere near the point where money printing creates negative effects. Their interest rates are at all time lows while they have massive unemployment. Export-based economies should love to see English money printing right now, since it will put people to work instead of devaluing their currency. Then those workers will buy more stuff from Germany, China, Japan, etc. Only when England gets to full employment can they effectively devalue their currency - only then should export-dependent countries be against the proposition.
Instead, their government is unilaterally withdrawing huge amounts of money from the economy via spending cuts and tax hikes. If excessive money printing is bad for prices, so is throwing all of it into a furnace. They only reason they don't have massive deflation in response is that folks tend to prefer layoffs to wage cuts - an effect which is now well documented in both the economic and psychological literature.
Not if there are idle hands and resources. Given the huge output gap and mass unemployment, unsterilized injections of new money can just put unused resources and unemployed workers to work at the same price levels.
And right now, the government is doing exactly the opposite. By simultaneously hiking taxes and cutting spending, they are making unsterilized withdrawals of money from the system. The only reason we don't have deflation is because businesses prefer layoffs to wage cuts. Instead of deflation we get unemployment.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. First of all, governments like the US and UK do not need to issue bonds in order to spend. Currently, they issue bonds when they spend only because the central banks believe it to be less inflationary (which is a highly questionable proposition as the issued bonds are themselves traded as money).
Furthermore, at any time in the future, our grandchildren will be able to consume all the resources they produce. They will never have to send money or resources back in time to the present in order to cover our public "borrowing." The quotes are more than warranted, since the United States "borrows" just by conducted asset swaps between different forms of dollar-denominated government debt instruments (the dollar and the Treasury security). Reserve accounts (dollar accounts at the Fed) are debited, and securities accounts at the Fed are credited. When we "repay" our "loans," the same asset swap is conducted in reverse - it is just debiting and crediting of accounts recorded at the Fed. The dollars don't "come from" anywhere.
The fact that China holds so many US bonds means nothing more than that we have been giving them lots of dollars in exchange for their labor and resources. They pile up dollars, which they turn into securities. They need to turn the dollars they earn into securities because if they don't, not only will they earn no interest, but their currency will rise against the dollar. Right now, we are letting them "lend" to us to help them keep exporting their labor and resources to us. Why do we do that? Because then we get to consume their time and effort and treasure, and they can never get it back.
I can't stop you from ignoring the difference between countries which have fixed exchange rates or use foreign currencies - but if you look you'll see that I made that distinction.
In practice, there is a huge difference. Currently in the United States, you see immense political spent to convince people that the "government is out of money." The president himself has said just that on numerous occasions. At the same time, inflation is extremely low - below the target of the central bank. In particular, real wages have been unchanged for 40 years, while productively has continued to grow rapidly. There is mass unemployment, and many necessary tasks left undone, because folks have convinced themselves that there's not enough money. There's not enough money to employ extant resources to pay available workers to do needed job, and the solution is more money.
The debate to have is definitely about the level of inflation, not the ability of the government to fulfill payment obligations or incur new ones.
For the tuition example, the situation is not quite so simple as universities often use increased aid to fully support more students while increasing the tuition paid by the rest. Depending on the particular university and tuition policies, higher tuition can actually be redistributive. The key is that higher nominal tuition has no effect at all on the ability of the university to issue tuition waivers.
Wouldn't society be better served by giving a heart transplant to, say, a young parent of three than to a wealthy spinster?
Scarce goods will always be rationed, but rationing just based on however money is already distributed is not all that likely to be efficient for accomplishing various goals.
So then you claim as a matter of logic that it is impossible a priori for any system to be more fair than that of a totally free market, even if said system is under democratic, rather than autocratic control as you assume?
Or maybe, you meant a kinda-sorta-free market that breaks monopolies? Or some other variation? All of which, of course, exist out of some top-down impulse, democratic or otherwise.
Miss. The majority of the homeless here (San Francisco, where you obviously are not) are mentally ill. Unlike our immigrants - legal or otherwise - they do not as rule have jobs. Furthermore, many of them were shipped here illegally by irresponsible jurisdictions in distant areas of the country.
You can't make an argument about the wisdom of large nations accepting immigrants on a net basis, by referring to a particular public health issue in a single city.
The United Kingdom spends, borrows and taxes in a medium of which it is the sole issuer. It cannot "run out" of this medium. It does not need to take it from others before spending it. Rather, it simply credits accounts, and then tries to avoid inflation by "sterilizing" the new money by withdrawing an equal amount back from the private sector. This is accomplished either by bond sales or through taxation. To clarify, there is no requirement that the UK sterilize, but it chooses to because it believes it to be wise (correctly or incorrectly).
The problem with unlimited government spending is that it would eventually lead to inflation - not that the government would "run out" of "other people's money" and be mechanically unable to spend. This is a key difference, and ignoring exactly this distinction is why debt-scare obsessives have been so wrong empirically - at least with regard to currency issuers like Japan, the US and the UK. Of course, this is not the case for governments which use a foreign currency, like Ecuador or all Eurozone countries.
France, Greece and Iceland all use an external currency - they have to get it from somewhere before they spend it.
The US, Mexico and Great Britain all use a sovereign currency - they just spend it, no need to collect it first.
There would certainly be economic consequences if the US federal government were to increase its outlays by 12% of GDP, but as a matter of logic dollars are created out of thin air when congress so orders them to be.
The honest assessment is that the British treasury could issue as much money as needed to NHS, but has not been instructed to do so by parliament - like the USD but not EUR, GBP is a sovereign currency. The question then is not, "can they pay for it?" Rather, it is "should they pay for it (given possible economic effects of the new spending)?"
The conclusion to the latter question may very well be that NHS spending should be limited, but the truth of the matter is that the UK has a choice here. They can't actually run out of GBP.
Slashdot Mirror
So we have a "slap on the wrist society" ... in which 1% of citizens are in prison and 4% of them are under correctional control. Uh, right.
There are "left" and "right," but our current national politics are a struggle between the center-right and far-right. If you look at local governments there is a lot more variation and mixture in general. For example in California, the open primary and citizen-controlled redistricting have recently blown open the field. Last year all my local contests were between the Dems and Peace and Freedom, which is actually sort of left-wing.
The press is "left leaning" on certain social issues, such as gay marriage and voter suppression, but other than that the press is nearly uniformly in support of fiscal austerity (commonly presenting the deficit as unambiguously bad in so-called news pieces), is vitriolically anti-labor (unions are portrayed as "hostage takers"), anti-regulation, generally hawkish on armed conflict, etc.
Not that I would call them "right wing" either. The US press is essentially pro-business and supportive of the status quo, but also very sensitive to current trends in public opinion (which they both reflect and manipulate).
You might be right about our ordinances (I will have to find out), but still you are saying that even though there is still no economic incentive whatsoever for Comcast to improve service, they would do so if only our big bad city council would permit them to?
I don't actually believe there is an infrastructure problem here as higher service tiers are available in new subscriber packages. Their strategy is to get subscribers at a low tier, then make (or just "turn on") marginal improvements to attract new customers while locking in existing subscribers to their current tiers. Further, Comcast is actually more competitive about 1 mile from here - where there is a AT&T CO.
In all seriousness I will look into our municipal regulations, but nevertheless there is overwhelming evidence that Comcast is the entity responsible here.
Just a little reminder that, not only are we 1st in incarcerations per capita, but also in total number of incarcerations.
In the US, about 2.2 million people were in prison at the end of 2011, and 7 million under correctional control of some kind. As of 2012, China had a prison population of approximately 1.6 million.
I live in an urban area in the East Bay. Comcast's cheapest tier is $50/mo. for 15 Mbps - at least twice the price you pay per megabit. Reliability is OK, but the latency is not great (depends on connection type, actually) and their DNS sucks.
It's just more evidence that there is no normal economic logic behind their pricing decisions. Their actual costs are so low that they can profitably provide rural areas 35 Mbps at $50/mo. when it suits their strategy. I am sure it is not cost which is keeping them from developing the infrastructure in my area - there is just no incentive for them to do it.
No one questions that its more costly to supply infrastructure to rural areas. The question is why that excuse is at all relevant to American cities. My connectivity, in an urban area in a technological center of the country, is piss poor and extraordinarily expensive because Comcast has an effective monopoly.
In addition to their price setting ability, Comcast has no incentive to systematically increase network capacity. Instead, they use incremental upgrades made in the course of necessary maintenance to provide new introductory offers while locking in existing customers at lower and more expensive tiers. I tried to find out recently if I could upgrade to a higher service tier - and the answer was no. Even though I'm on the lowest tier (15 Mbps @ $50/mo) and am an existing customer, they will only "offer" me new subscriber packages for which I am not eligible.
I know JSMol isn't complete, but I had reviewers complaining about the confirmation dialogs and didn't need much more than structure visualization of proteins in my software, so really it was good enough.
IMHO, HTML5/JS is definitely preferable to applets in general, mainly because it's much easier to integrate with the various web frameworks. We had to jump through a lot of hoops to use Jmol in a modal dialog inside of a Flash / Flex UI inside of a site powered by another framework, and all using a Java backend. Things were actually much simpler after user complaints about the confirmation dialogs led us to use JSMol instead.
It still sucks big time when existing, working software is broken by tiny configuration changes like these confirmation dialogs though. And I don't get why they have to request confirmation (sometimes more than once!) for signed applets, too.
It just drives people to chrome
Good luck, Chrome has the same behavior. Even with a signed applet and updated Java, Chrome users had to click twice to run.
For the /.ers astounding by the persistence of Java applets, I was working with JMol. I bypassed the issue by switching to the HTML5-and-JavaScript version and using the applet as a fall-back.
It is, obviously, possible to make RTG's out of other materials.
Sure, like Sr-90. But they don't work as well as Pu-238. Sr-90 is considered second best and its half-life is about 1/3 as long and power density about 20% lower.
As for TOPAZ, it's certainly viable. But total reactor mass is still several times greater than a Plutonium powered RTG.
1.3% of GDP in so-called interest payments isn't that much. It's funny how all of our "interest" payments are actually bond redemptions at face value - that is, we only pay back principle and interest together in a single transaction - but folks only manage to worry about the interest.
The truth is the US doesn't even have to resort to money printing to pay back its bonds, because the act of "printing" actually occurred way back when the bond itself was sold. After that, the bond is just another kind of paper with a dollar figure stamped on it.
Very insightful post. Not to mention the fact that right now we are suffering from a severe plutonium shortage that is jeopardizing future space missions - nearly all of our long-term space missions rely on plutonium-powered radioisotope thermal generators.
The UK is nowhere near the point where money printing creates negative effects. Their interest rates are at all time lows while they have massive unemployment. Export-based economies should love to see English money printing right now, since it will put people to work instead of devaluing their currency. Then those workers will buy more stuff from Germany, China, Japan, etc. Only when England gets to full employment can they effectively devalue their currency - only then should export-dependent countries be against the proposition.
Instead, their government is unilaterally withdrawing huge amounts of money from the economy via spending cuts and tax hikes. If excessive money printing is bad for prices, so is throwing all of it into a furnace. They only reason they don't have massive deflation in response is that folks tend to prefer layoffs to wage cuts - an effect which is now well documented in both the economic and psychological literature.
Not if there are idle hands and resources. Given the huge output gap and mass unemployment, unsterilized injections of new money can just put unused resources and unemployed workers to work at the same price levels.
And right now, the government is doing exactly the opposite. By simultaneously hiking taxes and cutting spending, they are making unsterilized withdrawals of money from the system. The only reason we don't have deflation is because businesses prefer layoffs to wage cuts. Instead of deflation we get unemployment.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. First of all, governments like the US and UK do not need to issue bonds in order to spend. Currently, they issue bonds when they spend only because the central banks believe it to be less inflationary (which is a highly questionable proposition as the issued bonds are themselves traded as money).
Furthermore, at any time in the future, our grandchildren will be able to consume all the resources they produce. They will never have to send money or resources back in time to the present in order to cover our public "borrowing." The quotes are more than warranted, since the United States "borrows" just by conducted asset swaps between different forms of dollar-denominated government debt instruments (the dollar and the Treasury security). Reserve accounts (dollar accounts at the Fed) are debited, and securities accounts at the Fed are credited. When we "repay" our "loans," the same asset swap is conducted in reverse - it is just debiting and crediting of accounts recorded at the Fed. The dollars don't "come from" anywhere.
The fact that China holds so many US bonds means nothing more than that we have been giving them lots of dollars in exchange for their labor and resources. They pile up dollars, which they turn into securities. They need to turn the dollars they earn into securities because if they don't, not only will they earn no interest, but their currency will rise against the dollar. Right now, we are letting them "lend" to us to help them keep exporting their labor and resources to us. Why do we do that? Because then we get to consume their time and effort and treasure, and they can never get it back.
I can't stop you from ignoring the difference between countries which have fixed exchange rates or use foreign currencies - but if you look you'll see that I made that distinction.
In practice, there is a huge difference. Currently in the United States, you see immense political spent to convince people that the "government is out of money." The president himself has said just that on numerous occasions. At the same time, inflation is extremely low - below the target of the central bank. In particular, real wages have been unchanged for 40 years, while productively has continued to grow rapidly. There is mass unemployment, and many necessary tasks left undone, because folks have convinced themselves that there's not enough money. There's not enough money to employ extant resources to pay available workers to do needed job, and the solution is more money.
The debate to have is definitely about the level of inflation, not the ability of the government to fulfill payment obligations or incur new ones.
For the tuition example, the situation is not quite so simple as universities often use increased aid to fully support more students while increasing the tuition paid by the rest. Depending on the particular university and tuition policies, higher tuition can actually be redistributive. The key is that higher nominal tuition has no effect at all on the ability of the university to issue tuition waivers.
Wouldn't society be better served by giving a heart transplant to, say, a young parent of three than to a wealthy spinster?
Scarce goods will always be rationed, but rationing just based on however money is already distributed is not all that likely to be efficient for accomplishing various goals.
So then you claim as a matter of logic that it is impossible a priori for any system to be more fair than that of a totally free market, even if said system is under democratic, rather than autocratic control as you assume?
Or maybe, you meant a kinda-sorta-free market that breaks monopolies? Or some other variation? All of which, of course, exist out of some top-down impulse, democratic or otherwise.
Miss. The majority of the homeless here (San Francisco, where you obviously are not) are mentally ill. Unlike our immigrants - legal or otherwise - they do not as rule have jobs. Furthermore, many of them were shipped here illegally by irresponsible jurisdictions in distant areas of the country.
You can't make an argument about the wisdom of large nations accepting immigrants on a net basis, by referring to a particular public health issue in a single city.
Or raise retirement age requirements to reflect the reality of longer, more functional life spans.
And so doom any hope of employment recovery among the lower age brackets.
The United Kingdom spends, borrows and taxes in a medium of which it is the sole issuer. It cannot "run out" of this medium. It does not need to take it from others before spending it. Rather, it simply credits accounts, and then tries to avoid inflation by "sterilizing" the new money by withdrawing an equal amount back from the private sector. This is accomplished either by bond sales or through taxation. To clarify, there is no requirement that the UK sterilize, but it chooses to because it believes it to be wise (correctly or incorrectly).
The problem with unlimited government spending is that it would eventually lead to inflation - not that the government would "run out" of "other people's money" and be mechanically unable to spend. This is a key difference, and ignoring exactly this distinction is why debt-scare obsessives have been so wrong empirically - at least with regard to currency issuers like Japan, the US and the UK. Of course, this is not the case for governments which use a foreign currency, like Ecuador or all Eurozone countries.
France, Greece and Iceland all use an external currency - they have to get it from somewhere before they spend it.
The US, Mexico and Great Britain all use a sovereign currency - they just spend it, no need to collect it first.
There would certainly be economic consequences if the US federal government were to increase its outlays by 12% of GDP, but as a matter of logic dollars are created out of thin air when congress so orders them to be.
Seems germane, rather than ironic.
The honest assessment is that the British treasury could issue as much money as needed to NHS, but has not been instructed to do so by parliament - like the USD but not EUR, GBP is a sovereign currency. The question then is not, "can they pay for it?" Rather, it is "should they pay for it (given possible economic effects of the new spending)?"
The conclusion to the latter question may very well be that NHS spending should be limited, but the truth of the matter is that the UK has a choice here. They can't actually run out of GBP.