Maybe, but it seems unlikely that there would be such an extreme concentration (more than half the spam from 20 ISPs out of 42,000) if it were unsecured servers. More likely those few ISPs are conducting or profiting from the spam.
The USPTO is supposed to support itself with fees. The largest fee is for reexamination, creating a financial incentive to grant bad patents (which are likely to be reexamined).
-da
If I got those glass lined reactors, I'd test each one of them before doing anything risky in them.
Sure, but if you're doing serious science or performing risky reactions you'd test the US-made ones as well. Given GP's quoted savings, it's a better deal even if 8/10 Chinese reactors fail.
The loan guarantee program which Solyndra participated in originally budgeted for a 12% default rate on the loans. The actual rate has turned out to be less than 4% (with Solyndra responsible for a bit less than half of that).
This. When we trade unbacked, non-convertible pieces of paper (which we can produce or destroy at arbitrary rates) for real goods, we are on the better end of the deal.
As an academic who does basic research in bioinformatics and computer vision, I think this issue is simple and the argument straightforward. If a software is not open source, then you cannot verify that the algorithms it uses were correctly implemented.
In particular, many academic works present an algorithm without its implementation details, something which severely compromises reproducibility if the implementation source is unavailable. Furthermore, projects which are not also free (libre) often require you pay or conform to strict requirements in order to merely view code. The requirements can be incompatible with science. For example the license for Gaussian, the quantum chemistry suite, prohibits licensees from competing with the authors academically. So much for "standing on the shoulders of giants."
Glad you thought so, if you want to read more about "business cycle macro-economics" from a similar perspective I recommend searching for information on "Modern Monetary Theory" and "Monetary Realism."
Robert Brenner's paper What's Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America is also a must-read (or at least, must-skim) item. He covers the global macro-economy during the second half of the 20th century and up to the 2008 financial crisis; even if one disagrees with some of his conclusions the graphs and exposition are indispensable towards developing your own "realist" view of the present situation.
Sorry for the length of the reply, it sort of got away from me, even though I left out China and the legislators.
Some people think you can help the economy by throwing a rock at a storekeeper's window.
I am not one of them. Under "normal" conditions the money that gets spent to fix the window (from the shopkeeper's savings, say) should have already been invested in the private economy by the bank, so fixing the window wouldn't actually boost demand. My philosophy when it comes to economics is to always look to what's real. In this case, the world simply loses the window: a real asset.
All money the government spends was confiscated from the private sector in some way
Under our current political economy and monetary system, your statement is factually incorrect. Taxes are a confiscation of money from the private sector. Taxes do decrease the financial wealth of the private sector. Yet, government spending is not funded by taxation in the same way my spending is funded by my wages.
When our government collects taxes, it does so by ordering some clerk to reduce private account balances, and the money is simply destroyed. When our government spends, it does so by having the clerk increase private balances - the money is simply created. Nothing is physically stopping that government clerk from entering completely arbitrary values, whereas everything from electronic security to law enforcement is stopping me from doing the same to my accounts.
In other words, taxation decreases the total number of financial wealth (dollars) held by the private sector. Spending increases it. The balance between the two determines if the money supply (number of dollars existing) is growing or shrinking. Again, the above is simply descriptive. Rates of taxation and spending are determined only politically, though of course they have real impacts.
So the government's spending of money is _by default_ a harmful action to the economy
I disagree, for three reasons. The first is that growth, especially productivity growth (for example from improved technology), causes deflation. If we care about price stability, we must increase the money supply. Of course, if too much money is created, the prices will become unstable in the opposite direction (inflation).
The second reason is the existence of the output gap. This is the difference between what we could produce at full employment and utilization and what we are actually producing now. Given that the output gap is presently so high, if we expand the money supply today we wont actually see inflation as a result. Instead of price increases (inflation), we'll just get more employment at the same price levels. That's part of why we have such low inflation even though the deficit is so large.
The third is that spending can cause currency depreciation, which under current conditions would actually boost growth through increased competitiveness. Look up the Plaza Accord, an agreement we reached in 1985 with other advanced economies to let our currency get weaker, for just this purpose.
Now, in order to ensure newly created money gets used, I favor giving the new money to those citizens with the highest "marginal propensity to consume," those most likely to spend a dollar received (basically the poor, middle class and expanding businesses). The problem with Quantitative Easing (which involves the creation of money by the Fed) is that all the money ends up in private banks' reserve accounts. Instead of causing inflation now (the real aim of QE), the ability to control inflation is simply ceded to the banks. To get effective money supply expansion we either have to force the banks to lend (economically and politically hard) or give money directly to the poor / middle class (just politically hard).
TL;DR: let's cut the payroll and income taxes, boost spending until the output gap is closed and then cut spending and raise taxes at that time, in order to maintain stable prices and full employment.
Sure. As I understand it, government belt tightening refers to spending cuts and tax increases. Were these cuts and tax increases to create a government surplus, that surplus would be a profit. If the public sector is increasing its net financial wealth (total money), someone has to be losing financial wealth on the other side of the transaction, and that someone is us.
Even if the government doesn't go so far as to run a surplus, government deficit reduction directly causes private deficit increase.
Why do you accept that tax increases cause wealth destruction (reducing the financial wealth of the private sector), but not the complimentary proposition that spending increases equal wealth creation (i.e. increase in financial sector financial wealth)?
Question: if the public sector "tightened its belt," so that the government ran a surplus, where would the profit the government now collects come from?
Sorry, but psychopaths hardly use reason to keep or discard specific behaviors.
In fact, psychopathy is not correlated at all with intelligence, but is highly correlated with substance abuse, ADD/ADHD and certain learning disabilities. Additionally, heritability studies have demonstrated that the environmental contribution to development of psychopathy is significant (on the order of 50%).
It's also worth noting that while most psychopaths could be said to have Antisocial Personality Disorder, most with ASPD are not psychopaths.
About 50 million. They each receive about $130 per month.
Despite this small allowance, hunger and other symptoms of poverty are severe problems in the United States. Worldwide, hunger is far and away the largest single source of suffering (~220 million disability-adjusted life years lost per year, about 12% of the total), and mass unemployment contributes significantly to the unavailability of food.
But there's no reason that demand for these other, non-essential items would then increase the price of energy or food.
I'm not saying that non-essentials or intangibles would necessarily become free as well, but generally those sectors can't provide the sheer number of jobs offered by agriculture and manufacturing before automation. As a result, all the unemployed people might be given food and energy (now nearly free) to prevent them from starving and rioting, etc.
I do agree with you that over time the hypothetical society-of-plenty might develop enough demand for education, research and entertainment that those sectors could employ everyone, but I doubt that the basic income would be then rescinded.
Slashdot Mirror
My bet is on a small ISP based in Santa Rosa, CA.
Maybe, but it seems unlikely that there would be such an extreme concentration (more than half the spam from 20 ISPs out of 42,000) if it were unsecured servers. More likely those few ISPs are conducting or profiting from the spam.
What that concentration of spammers really suggests is control fraud at those ISPs...
The USPTO is supposed to support itself with fees. The largest fee is for reexamination, creating a financial incentive to grant bad patents (which are likely to be reexamined). -da
If I got those glass lined reactors, I'd test each one of them before doing anything risky in them.
Sure, but if you're doing serious science or performing risky reactions you'd test the US-made ones as well. Given GP's quoted savings, it's a better deal even if 8/10 Chinese reactors fail.
The loan guarantee program which Solyndra participated in originally budgeted for a 12% default rate on the loans. The actual rate has turned out to be less than 4% (with Solyndra responsible for a bit less than half of that).
This. When we trade unbacked, non-convertible pieces of paper (which we can produce or destroy at arbitrary rates) for real goods, we are on the better end of the deal.
As an academic who does basic research in bioinformatics and computer vision, I think this issue is simple and the argument straightforward. If a software is not open source, then you cannot verify that the algorithms it uses were correctly implemented.
In particular, many academic works present an algorithm without its implementation details, something which severely compromises reproducibility if the implementation source is unavailable. Furthermore, projects which are not also free (libre) often require you pay or conform to strict requirements in order to merely view code. The requirements can be incompatible with science. For example the license for Gaussian, the quantum chemistry suite, prohibits licensees from competing with the authors academically. So much for "standing on the shoulders of giants."
Glad you thought so, if you want to read more about "business cycle macro-economics" from a similar perspective I recommend searching for information on "Modern Monetary Theory" and "Monetary Realism."
Robert Brenner's paper What's Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America is also a must-read (or at least, must-skim) item. He covers the global macro-economy during the second half of the 20th century and up to the 2008 financial crisis; even if one disagrees with some of his conclusions the graphs and exposition are indispensable towards developing your own "realist" view of the present situation.
Sorry for the length of the reply, it sort of got away from me, even though I left out China and the legislators.
Some people think you can help the economy by throwing a rock at a storekeeper's window.
I am not one of them. Under "normal" conditions the money that gets spent to fix the window (from the shopkeeper's savings, say) should have already been invested in the private economy by the bank, so fixing the window wouldn't actually boost demand. My philosophy when it comes to economics is to always look to what's real. In this case, the world simply loses the window: a real asset.
All money the government spends was confiscated from the private sector in some way
Under our current political economy and monetary system, your statement is factually incorrect. Taxes are a confiscation of money from the private sector. Taxes do decrease the financial wealth of the private sector. Yet, government spending is not funded by taxation in the same way my spending is funded by my wages.
When our government collects taxes, it does so by ordering some clerk to reduce private account balances, and the money is simply destroyed. When our government spends, it does so by having the clerk increase private balances - the money is simply created. Nothing is physically stopping that government clerk from entering completely arbitrary values, whereas everything from electronic security to law enforcement is stopping me from doing the same to my accounts.
In other words, taxation decreases the total number of financial wealth (dollars) held by the private sector. Spending increases it. The balance between the two determines if the money supply (number of dollars existing) is growing or shrinking. Again, the above is simply descriptive. Rates of taxation and spending are determined only politically, though of course they have real impacts.
So the government's spending of money is _by default_ a harmful action to the economy
I disagree, for three reasons. The first is that growth, especially productivity growth (for example from improved technology), causes deflation. If we care about price stability, we must increase the money supply. Of course, if too much money is created, the prices will become unstable in the opposite direction (inflation).
The second reason is the existence of the output gap. This is the difference between what we could produce at full employment and utilization and what we are actually producing now. Given that the output gap is presently so high, if we expand the money supply today we wont actually see inflation as a result. Instead of price increases (inflation), we'll just get more employment at the same price levels. That's part of why we have such low inflation even though the deficit is so large.
The third is that spending can cause currency depreciation, which under current conditions would actually boost growth through increased competitiveness. Look up the Plaza Accord, an agreement we reached in 1985 with other advanced economies to let our currency get weaker, for just this purpose.
Now, in order to ensure newly created money gets used, I favor giving the new money to those citizens with the highest "marginal propensity to consume," those most likely to spend a dollar received (basically the poor, middle class and expanding businesses). The problem with Quantitative Easing (which involves the creation of money by the Fed) is that all the money ends up in private banks' reserve accounts. Instead of causing inflation now (the real aim of QE), the ability to control inflation is simply ceded to the banks. To get effective money supply expansion we either have to force the banks to lend (economically and politically hard) or give money directly to the poor / middle class (just politically hard).
TL;DR: let's cut the payroll and income taxes, boost spending until the output gap is closed and then cut spending and raise taxes at that time, in order to maintain stable prices and full employment.
Sure. As I understand it, government belt tightening refers to spending cuts and tax increases. Were these cuts and tax increases to create a government surplus, that surplus would be a profit. If the public sector is increasing its net financial wealth (total money), someone has to be losing financial wealth on the other side of the transaction, and that someone is us.
Even if the government doesn't go so far as to run a surplus, government deficit reduction directly causes private deficit increase.
Sorry had a typo, "spending increases equal wealth creation (i.e. increase in private sector financial wealth)".
Why do you accept that tax increases cause wealth destruction (reducing the financial wealth of the private sector), but not the complimentary proposition that spending increases equal wealth creation (i.e. increase in financial sector financial wealth)?
Question: if the public sector "tightened its belt," so that the government ran a surplus, where would the profit the government now collects come from?
I have to add: not only do they get paid to validate, they get paid more to invalidate (reexamination is the most expensive fee).
The USPTO has a financial incentive specifically to accept invalid patents knowing they are likely to be reexamined.
I don't see all the kids who ever hit their parents being locked up.
Not to mention the very real risk to their earnings potential.
No dice, it's up to the DA now.
Sure, but would you want to throw your kid into juvenile justice just because of some dumb stunt?
For a person, killing is an inherently emotional act.
You're a fool if you think life has a "point."
Sorry, but psychopaths hardly use reason to keep or discard specific behaviors.
In fact, psychopathy is not correlated at all with intelligence, but is highly correlated with substance abuse, ADD/ADHD and certain learning disabilities. Additionally, heritability studies have demonstrated that the environmental contribution to development of psychopathy is significant (on the order of 50%).
It's also worth noting that while most psychopaths could be said to have Antisocial Personality Disorder, most with ASPD are not psychopaths.
Here's a better (I mean, more draconian) example of that car thing.
About 50 million. They each receive about $130 per month.
Despite this small allowance, hunger and other symptoms of poverty are severe problems in the United States. Worldwide, hunger is far and away the largest single source of suffering (~220 million disability-adjusted life years lost per year, about 12% of the total), and mass unemployment contributes significantly to the unavailability of food.
For you to claim otherwise is simple ignorance.
But there's no reason that demand for these other, non-essential items would then increase the price of energy or food.
I'm not saying that non-essentials or intangibles would necessarily become free as well, but generally those sectors can't provide the sheer number of jobs offered by agriculture and manufacturing before automation. As a result, all the unemployed people might be given food and energy (now nearly free) to prevent them from starving and rioting, etc.
I do agree with you that over time the hypothetical society-of-plenty might develop enough demand for education, research and entertainment that those sectors could employ everyone, but I doubt that the basic income would be then rescinded.