My guess though is that there is insurance against multiple governments in the files, some of which may be interesting to the NSA. They might also want to proof of certain documents having been leaking to Wikileaks in order to further criminal prosecution.
NSA might want leaks from other governments contained in the insurance files, and they might want proof that of possession of certain files for criminal prosecution efforts.
I agree it might actually make sense to send the keys to the targets of the various insurance files, so they know you mean business.
All the files? I'm sure Wikileaks wants insurance from multiple governments. The NSA / US government might also want proof that Wikileaks has certain files in order to further their criminal prosecution efforts.
I think that only some of the files originate with the NSA. The rest may be interesting to them. Furthermore, they may desire proof that Wikileaks possesses certain files to further their grand-jury investigations or future prosecution.
I would guess that NSA documents are only a fraction of the corpus and that they might be interested in the rest. They may also desire proof that Wikileaks possesses certain documents in order to aid criminal prosecution.
If the NSA suspects that certain of their internal documents occur in the insurance files, can't they use these as cribs to break the encryption?
How does one determine the viability of cribs for data of a certain size? E.g. if one is cracking 400GB of data encrypted with a 4096 bit RSA key, how helpful is a 4GB crib?
They publish individual documents, usually with conscious timing, after redacting names and potentially other information. The diplomatic cables were released by accident.
Again, no, you can't. The balance sheet effects of private lending and government borrowing are very different. When banks lend, new deposits are created when the bank credits a debtor's account in the amount of the loan. The loan precedes the existence of the deposit. In stark contrast, the government "borrows" by selling securities in return for money which it has already printed and released previously. Government borrowing does not involve creation of deposits. In fact, it reduces the money supply.
considerable labor competition from cheaper parts of the world
You are seeing things backwards. When we are able to exchange financial assets for real resources from abroad - running a trade deficit - the real terms of trade are in our favor. Imports are real benefits, exports are real costs. A trade deficit by definition involves a capital surplus. The balance sheet effect is to reduce the net financial assets of the sector running the deficit. Domestic
Inflation is an economic structure which can require the US to do such things or face consequences. The people who say that the US should borrow more money never have an answer for inflation.
No, it isn't. Our system is predicated on voluntary market exchange, and there is no mechanism outside voluntary market exchange for our real resources to be exchanged for dollar-denominated financial assets, because the United States only borrows in US dollars of which it is sole issuer and which has a floating exchange rate. The only thing the US can use to redeem its debts is the US dollar, and as currency issuer it need never give up its real resources to obtain those US dollars.
As for inflation and government borrowing, you again are somewhat confused. The government can certainly create inflation via spending if it uses its spending to flood private actors with bank deposits. Such spending however is not operationally funded either by taxation or by sale of Treasuries in the case of a sovereign currency with floating exchange rate.
Sale of Treasuries - "borrowing" - is not inherently inflationary. Indeed, the "reserve drain" that occurs when bonds are sold serves to drive up the interbank lending rate ("the interest rate"), which is generally deflationary. Governments with sovereign currencies conduct bond sales in order to drive interest rates upward, purely as a monetary policy tool.
Now, when securities are redeemed - by debiting a securities account and crediting a reserve account in equal amounts - there are generally more new reserves added then were drained during the original bond sale (positive Treasury yield). If the yield is greater than the rate of inflation over the life of the bond, then the bond redemption is inflationary towards central bank reserves, but has no impact on private sector net financial assets, which already included the face value of the bond. Even then, the Fed can always conduct sales of its own Treasury holdings if it wishes to drain any new reserves.
Well, I wasn't really being clear about the different types of "money" that are out there, like central bank reserves and bank deposits in that case.
But, yes, that's exactly my point. "Trade deficit" by definition means "capital surplus." That should be considered a good thing, as the real terms of trade are clearly in our advantage. Whether or not we issue more non-convertible debts doesn't change that (the key is that we only borrow in our own sovereign currency, which itself is non-convertible and has a floating exchange rate).
A couple things here. Yes, banks create money via lending under fractional reserve banking. However, their lending creates bank deposits which are functionally separate as a system from the central bank's reserves. The only source of reserves is indeed the central government, so the central bank has to do a "reserve add" (buy securities) before it can do a "reserve drain" (i.e. have the Treasury sell securities). Since the "reserve add" comes first it's clear that the central bank / central government is not operationally dependent on either tax levies or debt sales.
However, while it seems the amount of reserves would constrain bank lending, in practice it does not. If a profitable lending opportunity exists, banks will lend and then obtain reserves from the central bank afterwards. The central bank must comply, or else abandon its interest rate target. Thus banks can already expand their reserve balances as needed in order to lend.
You don't understand the difference between private debt and public debt. When the United States "borrows," various entities which have already obtained US dollars compete to exchange their US dollars, which do not bear interest (or only 0.25% for electronic reserves) for US securities which obtain a higher rate of interest but remain highly liquid. It is directly analogous to a depositor of a bank transfering money between checking and savings accounts. Fed employees even refer internally to "securities accounts." When the debt is paid off, all that happens is that securities accounts are debited and reserve accounts credited, in exactly the reverse of the "borrowing" procedure. Thus unlike bank lending no new liquidity is created from government "borrowing" via sale of bonds; private net financial assets are unchanged except for the average rate of interest. The government does not need to obtain money by taxing or further borrowing in order to "pay off" its "debts," because the original "borrowing" only constitutes a reversible asset swap.
There are no existing financial or legal structures which require the United States government or the US private sector to render its real resources to any so-called creditors outside of voluntary market exchange. Our public debts - dollars and securities alike - are non-convertible. These liabilities represent the financial assets of the private sector.
We have plenty of people willing to work, plenty of jobs that need doing and plenty of resources, but are constantly told there is "not enough money" to connect these things. Even the President claims that the "government is out of money," even though the US is the sole issuer of its currency, and only borrows in this currency. You should be able to see the absurdity of this reality.
I think the "exchange" model is absolutely wrong for the application; what you want is to determine a correspondence between the input data and human response required for the real world task, and specific, meaningful in-game actions.
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson has exactly this idea as a plot point. Gamers in a MMO monitor a security checkpoint as part of guild duties, which itself is a model of a real-world airport security checkpoint. The problem with realization is that the system in the book seems to require that the program can itself recognize the input data, in order to construct the model accurately.
Hell, you could do it to speed up some wait for your crops to come in, thus doing some good while doing something pointless.
That's a good idea if you integrate the feature without breeding any resentment. I think the most effective approach would be to model whatever the input is in-game, and have the human analysis required mapped to an in-game action. It's really hard to think of system designs for this which don't require the computer to already be able to perform the analysis.
I think you would have to (somehow) map the real-world task to important in-game activity.
Off the top of my head, in an open-world game like Fallout you might have certain dialogue options with inhabitants of a structure which indicate that the player considers the structure ruined. The difficult part is in having the system model the photograph of the structure without itself being able to recognize its state.
Every action anyone undertakes can always be reduced to some set of selfish motives, since our actions our predicated on the expectation of desired responses from the world. It's not a meaningful critique.
And not just MMOs or even RPGs. "Grinding" exists in a lot of games.
The trick though is to actually map the data to be analyzed as well as the gamer response to purposeful in-game actions. For example, in REAMDE (by Neal Stephenson) gamers in a MMO monitor in-game security checkpoints (e.g. as part of clan duties or in return for gold) which model actual security checkpoints at airports.
It's completely ridiculous that the USPTO is supposed to self-fund via fees. There is a fee to file and another (the largest) to re-examine, which to my mind creates a conflict of interest. I also don't understand what could be going through the examiners' minds when they approve all these absurdly obvious patents, as well as ones (like this one) which just don't describe any actual processes. I mean, what the hell is "create an information model" supposed to cover?
The situation with copyright is probably going to stay shitty for a while longer (before, I think, eventually reverting to the historical norm of no special protection from individual copying), but I do have some hope that the patent situation will improve because of how seriously it is impinging innovation. Patents are definitely a major reason why I probably wont try to develop any of my academic work into a business.
And that's not to mention the absurdity of the treble damages for willfull infringement. It actually incentives us never to look at any patent, thus neutering the supposed benefit that patents provide.
First, you are assuming that the products are being generated inside the economy. If you are borrowing money from China to buy Chinese goods this is no longer true.
You have this backwards. The only de novo source of US dollars is the US federal government itself. We must first purchase goods from the Chinese in order for them to gain US dollars. Once they have gained dollars via this voluntary exchange of their real resources for our paper, they may spend those dollars themselves. However, generally they wish to hold those dollars. Since those dollars collect 0.25% interest, they choose to use those dollars to purchase US securities, currently bearing ~3% interest. They might invest them otherwise to gain higher rates than that, but they would have to accept some risk were they to do so. In other words, federal expenditures fund bond purchases and tax payments and not vice-versa, both in fact and as a matter of logic as explained above.
In this case you really are sending money back in time.
First of all, I said we can't send real resources back in time. Second, we don't send money back in time, either (quite the opposite).
Today, those of us who are working produce a certain amount of real resources. We agree to transfer a portion of those resources to persons who are not currently working. At any point in time, those currently living get to consume all that they produce. The transfer of resources between workers and retirees is mediated via either transfer programs such as Social Security (which is running a surplus now, and a huge surplus at full employment) or via investments. In the case of investments, the worker agreed to reduce his past consumption (by purchasing interest-bearing financial assets rather than real resources) in favor of future consumption.
Mismanagement of pension funds not withstanding, it is up to us as a society to determine how the real resources with exist today are divided among the people currently living. And while we might reduce present consumption in favor of future consumption, in the absence of a time machine it is not possible for us to adjust past consumption in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
My guess though is that there is insurance against multiple governments in the files, some of which may be interesting to the NSA. They might also want to proof of certain documents having been leaking to Wikileaks in order to further criminal prosecution.
NSA might want leaks from other governments contained in the insurance files, and they might want proof that of possession of certain files for criminal prosecution efforts.
I agree it might actually make sense to send the keys to the targets of the various insurance files, so they know you mean business.
All the files? I'm sure Wikileaks wants insurance from multiple governments. The NSA / US government might also want proof that Wikileaks has certain files in order to further their criminal prosecution efforts.
I think that only some of the files originate with the NSA. The rest may be interesting to them. Furthermore, they may desire proof that Wikileaks possesses certain files to further their grand-jury investigations or future prosecution.
Sure, but aren't all ciphers are vulnerable to cribs except for one-time pads?
I would guess that NSA documents are only a fraction of the corpus and that they might be interested in the rest. They may also desire proof that Wikileaks possesses certain documents in order to aid criminal prosecution.
Typically, I believe it actually helps you spree more. Case in point, Saddleback (a chain of SoCal megachurches).
If the NSA suspects that certain of their internal documents occur in the insurance files, can't they use these as cribs to break the encryption?
How does one determine the viability of cribs for data of a certain size? E.g. if one is cracking 400GB of data encrypted with a 4096 bit RSA key, how helpful is a 4GB crib?
They publish individual documents, usually with conscious timing, after redacting names and potentially other information. The diplomatic cables were released by accident.
Their job was to ensure enforce speech codes on the public airwaves, nothing else.
I'm sure they can come up with plenty of "justifications" on demand.
I could view private borrowing in the same way.
Again, no, you can't. The balance sheet effects of private lending and government borrowing are very different. When banks lend, new deposits are created when the bank credits a debtor's account in the amount of the loan. The loan precedes the existence of the deposit. In stark contrast, the government "borrows" by selling securities in return for money which it has already printed and released previously. Government borrowing does not involve creation of deposits. In fact, it reduces the money supply.
considerable labor competition from cheaper parts of the world
You are seeing things backwards. When we are able to exchange financial assets for real resources from abroad - running a trade deficit - the real terms of trade are in our favor. Imports are real benefits, exports are real costs. A trade deficit by definition involves a capital surplus. The balance sheet effect is to reduce the net financial assets of the sector running the deficit. Domestic
Inflation is an economic structure which can require the US to do such things or face consequences. The people who say that the US should borrow more money never have an answer for inflation.
No, it isn't. Our system is predicated on voluntary market exchange, and there is no mechanism outside voluntary market exchange for our real resources to be exchanged for dollar-denominated financial assets, because the United States only borrows in US dollars of which it is sole issuer and which has a floating exchange rate. The only thing the US can use to redeem its debts is the US dollar, and as currency issuer it need never give up its real resources to obtain those US dollars.
As for inflation and government borrowing, you again are somewhat confused. The government can certainly create inflation via spending if it uses its spending to flood private actors with bank deposits. Such spending however is not operationally funded either by taxation or by sale of Treasuries in the case of a sovereign currency with floating exchange rate.
Sale of Treasuries - "borrowing" - is not inherently inflationary. Indeed, the "reserve drain" that occurs when bonds are sold serves to drive up the interbank lending rate ("the interest rate"), which is generally deflationary. Governments with sovereign currencies conduct bond sales in order to drive interest rates upward, purely as a monetary policy tool.
Now, when securities are redeemed - by debiting a securities account and crediting a reserve account in equal amounts - there are generally more new reserves added then were drained during the original bond sale (positive Treasury yield). If the yield is greater than the rate of inflation over the life of the bond, then the bond redemption is inflationary towards central bank reserves, but has no impact on private sector net financial assets, which already included the face value of the bond. Even then, the Fed can always conduct sales of its own Treasury holdings if it wishes to drain any new reserves.
Well, I wasn't really being clear about the different types of "money" that are out there, like central bank reserves and bank deposits in that case.
But, yes, that's exactly my point. "Trade deficit" by definition means "capital surplus." That should be considered a good thing, as the real terms of trade are clearly in our advantage. Whether or not we issue more non-convertible debts doesn't change that (the key is that we only borrow in our own sovereign currency, which itself is non-convertible and has a floating exchange rate).
A couple things here. Yes, banks create money via lending under fractional reserve banking. However, their lending creates bank deposits which are functionally separate as a system from the central bank's reserves. The only source of reserves is indeed the central government, so the central bank has to do a "reserve add" (buy securities) before it can do a "reserve drain" (i.e. have the Treasury sell securities). Since the "reserve add" comes first it's clear that the central bank / central government is not operationally dependent on either tax levies or debt sales.
However, while it seems the amount of reserves would constrain bank lending, in practice it does not. If a profitable lending opportunity exists, banks will lend and then obtain reserves from the central bank afterwards. The central bank must comply, or else abandon its interest rate target. Thus banks can already expand their reserve balances as needed in order to lend.
You don't understand the difference between private debt and public debt. When the United States "borrows," various entities which have already obtained US dollars compete to exchange their US dollars, which do not bear interest (or only 0.25% for electronic reserves) for US securities which obtain a higher rate of interest but remain highly liquid. It is directly analogous to a depositor of a bank transfering money between checking and savings accounts. Fed employees even refer internally to "securities accounts." When the debt is paid off, all that happens is that securities accounts are debited and reserve accounts credited, in exactly the reverse of the "borrowing" procedure. Thus unlike bank lending no new liquidity is created from government "borrowing" via sale of bonds; private net financial assets are unchanged except for the average rate of interest. The government does not need to obtain money by taxing or further borrowing in order to "pay off" its "debts," because the original "borrowing" only constitutes a reversible asset swap.
There are no existing financial or legal structures which require the United States government or the US private sector to render its real resources to any so-called creditors outside of voluntary market exchange. Our public debts - dollars and securities alike - are non-convertible. These liabilities represent the financial assets of the private sector.
We have plenty of people willing to work, plenty of jobs that need doing and plenty of resources, but are constantly told there is "not enough money" to connect these things. Even the President claims that the "government is out of money," even though the US is the sole issuer of its currency, and only borrows in this currency. You should be able to see the absurdity of this reality.
That's like the nicest thing anyone's said to me on slashdot.
I think the "exchange" model is absolutely wrong for the application; what you want is to determine a correspondence between the input data and human response required for the real world task, and specific, meaningful in-game actions.
And let's not forget that FoldIt is real.
REAMDE by Neal Stephenson has exactly this idea as a plot point. Gamers in a MMO monitor a security checkpoint as part of guild duties, which itself is a model of a real-world airport security checkpoint. The problem with realization is that the system in the book seems to require that the program can itself recognize the input data, in order to construct the model accurately.
Hell, you could do it to speed up some wait for your crops to come in, thus doing some good while doing something pointless.
That's a good idea if you integrate the feature without breeding any resentment. I think the most effective approach would be to model whatever the input is in-game, and have the human analysis required mapped to an in-game action. It's really hard to think of system designs for this which don't require the computer to already be able to perform the analysis.
I think you would have to (somehow) map the real-world task to important in-game activity.
Off the top of my head, in an open-world game like Fallout you might have certain dialogue options with inhabitants of a structure which indicate that the player considers the structure ruined. The difficult part is in having the system model the photograph of the structure without itself being able to recognize its state.
Every action anyone undertakes can always be reduced to some set of selfish motives, since our actions our predicated on the expectation of desired responses from the world. It's not a meaningful critique.
And not just MMOs or even RPGs. "Grinding" exists in a lot of games.
The trick though is to actually map the data to be analyzed as well as the gamer response to purposeful in-game actions. For example, in REAMDE (by Neal Stephenson) gamers in a MMO monitor in-game security checkpoints (e.g. as part of clan duties or in return for gold) which model actual security checkpoints at airports.
They could sell it as a service. Actually, the very idea is a plot point in REAMDE, Neal Stephenson's latest book.
It's completely ridiculous that the USPTO is supposed to self-fund via fees. There is a fee to file and another (the largest) to re-examine, which to my mind creates a conflict of interest. I also don't understand what could be going through the examiners' minds when they approve all these absurdly obvious patents, as well as ones (like this one) which just don't describe any actual processes. I mean, what the hell is "create an information model" supposed to cover?
The situation with copyright is probably going to stay shitty for a while longer (before, I think, eventually reverting to the historical norm of no special protection from individual copying), but I do have some hope that the patent situation will improve because of how seriously it is impinging innovation. Patents are definitely a major reason why I probably wont try to develop any of my academic work into a business.
And that's not to mention the absurdity of the treble damages for willfull infringement. It actually incentives us never to look at any patent, thus neutering the supposed benefit that patents provide.
First, you are assuming that the products are being generated inside the economy. If you are borrowing money from China to buy Chinese goods this is no longer true.
You have this backwards. The only de novo source of US dollars is the US federal government itself. We must first purchase goods from the Chinese in order for them to gain US dollars. Once they have gained dollars via this voluntary exchange of their real resources for our paper, they may spend those dollars themselves. However, generally they wish to hold those dollars. Since those dollars collect 0.25% interest, they choose to use those dollars to purchase US securities, currently bearing ~3% interest. They might invest them otherwise to gain higher rates than that, but they would have to accept some risk were they to do so. In other words, federal expenditures fund bond purchases and tax payments and not vice-versa, both in fact and as a matter of logic as explained above.
In this case you really are sending money back in time.
First of all, I said we can't send real resources back in time. Second, we don't send money back in time, either (quite the opposite).
Today, those of us who are working produce a certain amount of real resources. We agree to transfer a portion of those resources to persons who are not currently working. At any point in time, those currently living get to consume all that they produce. The transfer of resources between workers and retirees is mediated via either transfer programs such as Social Security (which is running a surplus now, and a huge surplus at full employment) or via investments. In the case of investments, the worker agreed to reduce his past consumption (by purchasing interest-bearing financial assets rather than real resources) in favor of future consumption.
Mismanagement of pension funds not withstanding, it is up to us as a society to determine how the real resources with exist today are divided among the people currently living. And while we might reduce present consumption in favor of future consumption, in the absence of a time machine it is not possible for us to adjust past consumption in any way.