Oh yeah? The simulation doesn't have to be broken completely though, one bad transaction does not necessarily break the program.
Also by using a transaction metaphor, if it was then possible to enter the transaction state but not to commit it and instead to roll it back, would it imply ability to travel forward in time for any time period instantaneously, and that is what time dilation becomes?
Think: you reach speed of light, the time stops. Why is that? Maybe that's because you have entered a single transactional state that is not committed until you slow down and get out of the transaction?
But what if you manage to roll back your transaction instead of getting out, does it necessitate rolling back of only that portion of the Universe or does it trigger a large rollback for the entire simulation? I think it would just roll back that portion of the time and space, not the entire Universe.
Who said that it was unintended rather than being the point of the simulation, to see if we can do it from the inside if certain things were possible to breach?
Oh alternatively this has nothing to do with 'great interest in developing technologies', etc., but it is simply a way to steal money from the tax payers and put it into gov't officials and other special interest pockets? (special interest in this case is pretty obvious, it's in the name of the story).
Millions of years? It seems like it's a long time within this simulation, what gives you the idea that only a couple of hours of "actual time" hasn't passed in the 'outside world', outside the simulator?
- in the modern society figuring out such things are simpler than ever before. There are entire sites dedicated to customer reviews. This is much better than anything that ever was available until now, including FDA, because FDA is just another corrupt government agency. Believing that government agencies are set up for your benefit and that they can stay that way even if they were thought up that way in the beginning, now that is incredibly naive.
And a private FDA, funded entirely by large drug companies, is a lot more susceptible to the evils you describe then a government agency.
In exactly the same way, that government has the power over the credit rating agencies, which rate government bonds, and the government with the banks (sellers of bonds), pay the agencies and only recognize those agencies that get paid that way, and in exactly the same way, that ONE credit agency that works for buyers and not for sellers of bonds, in the same way that the agency (Egan-Jones) works for the consumer and is sued by the SEC when it decides to downgrade US gov't treasury credit rating. In the same way FDA is exactly the same type of garbage and it ends up being a corrupt institution.
The people who are interested in having a rating on their medicine by some authoritative rating agency would be looking for that label and they are the buyers of the rating, so they pay the rating agency.
The reason the rating agency would much more likely stay incorruptible as compared to the government agency, is because it's good name is on the line, the entire business of that agency depends on its brand being clean of any tarnishing cases.
Of-course it can always be sued or otherwise attacked by the people that it rates, but that's a different story.
But basically I am giving you the perfect analogy that is happening right now and it involves exactly the same types of players - rating agencies and government and end clients and it's the same exact dynamic.
The rating agency that is not working for the seller is the one that is acting in the most responsible manner and is rating the debt as it should be (though I think it should be rated even lower).
The government system doesn't work. It doesn't allow people to buy drugs that are NOT rated, and people must be able to access drugs that are unrated and take their own risk. If a drug came out yesterday and it may help somebody who has a month left to live, he should be able to access that drug without having to wait for all the rounds of certifications.
People who want certifications would be paying for them and other people could pay much less for not buying certified product, and it's their risk to do the other research then.
As to Marxism, unfortunately for me I was born in a Marxist society, not communist, but always 5 years away from it. We had that, it was called Marxism-Leninism, and in its heart it was the totalitarian regime, with central planning, justifying its outrageous murderous and anti-human behavior with the fairy tale of the collective being able to cultivate "The New Person", who will bring forward the Marxism and Leninism, so Communism into the world, the Person will be absolute Collectivist and Communist and everybody will be that person, everybody will work together, do what they can and only take what they need, etc.etc.
Lenin was perfectly clear (as were the French revolutionaries) that this was nonsense and could not be achieve without TYRANNY and DICTATORSHIP.
The actual name for it was the: Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
It had to be dictatorship because no person in his right mind wants to give up his sovereignty, to be controlled by the central plan, to be part of the ant farm without
All Authoritarianism is built on the same exact principle as collectivism - denial of individual rights, denial of the right to private property, denial of voluntarism in the market, denial of free market capitalism and of competition.
As to corporate interests, that's what the Constituion is supposed to be for, to prevent government from abusing the law and going above and beyond its mandate and thus from stealing individual freedoms so that they can be sold to the highest bidder.
Corporatism is the goal of politicians, they want it because that's the best thing to keep politicians rich and happy, and it works for them better than dictatorship, because they can pretend there is some form of 'self-governance' for the people while robbing them blind.
Self-governance for the people, by the way, should not be confused with democracy. Democracy is just one step before totalitarian tyranny sets in, it's a transitional state between Representative Republic (which USA was set up as) and between the socialist or fascist (but either way - collectivist) next stage, which crashes the economy and society, hopefully without a huge war, but by crashing the society that system crashes the government as well.
The difference between a place like USA and USSR would be that by the END of that cycle, at least in USA there is a POSSIBILITY that it will return to a Republican government, pushing democracy and all forms of socialism aside, setting up better controls over government to try and prevent the next cycle from happening in the same manner.
Not necessarily a bug, it could be just a way the memory is used, with data and instructions not being properly separated, then maybe you could access instructions by overwriting memory, and normal buffer overflow, but it doesn't have to be a bug, just lack of security features.
Wouldn't one of the interesting consequences of the Universe being a 'hologram mapped on a two-dimensional boundary region' be that we could then postulate the reason for the speed of light? Speed of light could be then some upper boundary on the most primitive matrix transformation, sort of like the maximum GHz that the Universe is running at (assuming that the matrix itself is a memory map and that there is a gigantic number of processors that can access and modify memory simultaneously), or maybe the speed of light is then a manner, in which race conditions and dead locks are prevented? Sort of like in a bad system, where you know an atomic transaction takes 1ms, so you force a wait condition on the memory it access for 2ms, so you know for sure that the transaction committed.
At the same time, if that is the case, then going above and beyond speed of light could cause transactional failure and that could mean some form of memory corruption and destruction of the matrix or space time distortion and destruction:) But then if we didn't care about transactionality we could somehow breach the speed of light, but only by going outside of the memory boundaries of the simulation, crossing into the instruction stack and overwriting that constant!
I just gave myself a mental highfive on the level of crazy.
The whole collectivism rubric is ridiculous. A Collectivist is (by definition) someone who puts the interests of some group above his personal interests, which is a pretty fair description of the entire freakin human race.
- I would like to add a couple of words on this.
Collectivism is a way to buy the lowest common denominator, the mob, with the promise of a free lunch, by playing on the people's lack of understanding of basic principles of running a business. They don't understand what it means to run a business, they don't understand why a person can make much more money by running a business than by working as an employee, they see it as 'unfair' and they vote for every measure that an opportunist politician would put forward, to curb people's ability to get ahead in life. There is nothing fair or moral about the idea of income taxes in itself, but once you have that, having so called 'progressive' taxes is even less moral and less fair, yet it is sold as if it is the paragon of fairness and morality.
Morality in theft. Theft = fairness. Theft = morality. That's the principles of collectivism.
But it is worse than that. Collectivists actually spawn the subcultures: socialists, fascists, nazists, all these 'ists' are collectivists first of all. Their main shared value is hatred towards individualism, towards capitalism and their main goal is achieving something they see as 'fairness', but it has nothing to do with a normal set of rules.
Yeah, their idea of what is 'fair' cannot be expressed in a simple code, in rules that would just apply to people uniformly. Their ideas of 'fairness' depend on a situation, thus they cannot be based on a lawful society, on a society based on rules - formal law, by which every case must be judged according to general rational precepts, which have as few exceptions as possible and are based on logical assumptions. That type of formal law and rational judgment is only achievable in competitive 'liberal' (in a classical sense) capitalism.
Yes, collectivism is about denying the individual liberties, about putting the 'collective above the individual', which is exactly the principles that Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism were based upon. Those exact words were used to justify murder of tens *and over the years of hundreds* millions of people.
Collectivism is the greatest moral evil that society has been able to perpetrate upon itself.
No, who the people that are incredibly naive are those, who believe in 'good motives' of government. You believe, because you were told, that the government started FDA to 'make food safer', while in reality all such things are implemented in order to create unfair advantage and reduce competition in the market.
Even when the original ideas are "to help", they should never be implemented by government! Yes, the information is not always readily available, but this does not mean that people must allow government to cease power, to steal individual liberties to run their lives and their businesses based on information that they can themselves attain.
What actually happens is that eventually the government takes all of your freedom (and money obviously, that's the goal of taking your freadom), while the information becomes more and more available and technology and industry becomes more and more streamlined due to one thing: PROFIT MOTIVE.
Streamlining the business, creating conveyor lines, using capital to buy and build labour saving devices allows a company to make more money, but this is exactly the same principle that makes the end product safer!
Standardization of operations that provide more profit ALSO provide safer product and this has nothing to do with government (except probably the reason for the search for more labour saving devices, which also can be ascribed to government interfering with the labour market, passing regulations making human labour more expensive and thus making capital investment more profitable if it means investing in labour saving devices).
But in any case, with or without people, businesses must scale, and with scale comes standardization, and that's what makes food safer - standard approach, standard methodology. It's what makes the operations less costly and allows for lower prices, while more market penetration and better margins, and it's the same thing that makes the product safer.
Collectivism is the direct result of Marxist ideology, which grounds everything on the principles of central planning, and it's central planning that distorts and destroys economies and thus society. Every example shows it, people choose not to see it, because guess what, they are ready to sell their freedoms for a promise of a free lunch.
More money from government to private interests, because obviously the government is the best judge of how to spend other people's money. Solyndra? F22? Wars? Bridges to nowhere?
It's all about the money -- and it should be illegal.
- no, what should be illegal is government telling people what they can or cannot advertise, what drugs they can or cannot take.
It should be illegal for government to impose patents and copyrights, that's what should be illegal.
It should be illegal for government to set up agencies like FDA, which destroy competition and cause higher prices for all.
It is all always about productivity, which means money. It's all business and only business is interested in satisfying the customers. But once government is involved, the incentives get screwed up. With crazy fees and other costs added by the FDA it becomes unprofitable to research and develop drugs and procedures and methods for less known diseases, but it becomes very profitable NOT to research, but instead to milk the patent protection racket.
Take the same pill, modify it slightly from 'version to version' and then sell it as the next best drug in the world while being protected from any competition by the all powerful government.
Listen, I personally want the most research in biology and all the medical aspects of life and I know that people are inventive and that the best driver and motivator is a personal need - an itch to scratch.
That's exactly why I don't want any government to stand in between me and anybody in the WORLD coming up with ideas and trying to sell them to me. In the age of the Internet I (and most others) have enough access to information to make up our mind. We are all going to die at some point, so let us live our own fucking lives the way we fucking want, and if that means getting high on crack cocaine or on Zoloft, it should be our choice.
Saying that a business must become a 'non-profit' means saying that you want UNLIMITED TAXATION or borrowing or printing (inflation) to be spent on that nonsense, because to be 'non-profit' means exactly that. Once you regulate somebody to that point, that they can't make a profit by offering the best product to the market, they'll become part of government, and their salaries and bonuses will keep creeping up, as the efficiencies and productivity falls through the floor.
Sure sure, they'll invent SOMETHING, there is no question about it. F22 exists after all. But people don't actually need F22. They need something they WANT TO BUY and that's CHEAP, and that's not what governments do, and it's not what government structure encourages.
All money goes to R&D and moderate salaries.
- that's the most IMMORAL thing that you could do.
Of-course the government is already doing an immoral thing with patents, with FDA, etc.
Telling somebody, who wants to scratch his own itch, and who works in a garage: you can't do what you are doing, you can't attempt and alleviate some condition against some health issue, you can't do that for profit.
The most moral system that exists to create and distribute what people need is free market capitalism. That's the reason that the last 200 years have been so prosperous on this planet.
You see, governments have always wanted more power and they always existed, they always could DICTATE their ideology. But governments never invented Zoloft or computer screens or whatever. It's not what they do, it's not their purpose, it's not possible to do with their incentive structures and it goes against humans, against individual freedom to try and make one's life better on his own.
Of-course in other aspects of life you seem to be getting your wish. Collectivism is not dead unfortunately, you'd think people would learn over the last 100 years.
WWI, WWII, cold war, communism, fascism. It's all collectivism. Apparently people aren't learning from history and they will repeat it and on a bigger scale.
As I said, Bill Gross runs the largest in the world bond fund, so he holds US Treasuries, but he CUT his holdings of US treasuries, that's his trend.
The fact is that even with his understanding he is still wrong on the US dollar and Treasuries, they are not "going down the road" with an 'IF', the USA is bankrupt today.
It's not a question of whether USA will go bankrupt in the future, USA is bankrupt right now at this very precise moment. USA was bankrupt 10 years ago already, so that didn't change, it's just with more money printing it's in a worse hole (for the bond holders), so today bond holders are in even a more dire situation than they were 10 years ago.
Bill Gross is cutting his US treasury holdings month after month. He cut his US treasury holdings to 21% from 33% in just a month. He is SELLING Treasuries, he is not rolling them over, he is not buying them.
He is clearly not buying LONG term treasuries either, he is selling them. He was moving from long term to short term securities while the Fed was conducting 'operation Twist', which was to sell short term papers that the Fed had and buy long term paper. That was Fed's attempt to keep interest rates down.
Now the Fed can no longer continue with this 'Twist', they can't keep sterilizing their purchases to push interest rates down, now they are just on a trajectory to print money.
QE3 is the last QE, because it can never end until it kills the dollar.
USA has attempted mostly free market and it worked wonders. 1870 to 1913 was a pretty good stretch of mostly free market. Certainly it was free of gov't printing money, setting interest rates, regulating businesses in almost every way, stealing income from people as taxes, regulating labour.
There was no FBI, CIA, Fed, FDIC, IRS, FHA, EPA, FDA, FAA, FCC, HUD, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, dep't of energy, agriculture, education, interior, small business. There was no Patriot Act, NDAA, illegal undeclared wars, military industrial complex, 1000 or so military bases around the world and the entire 'world domination' narrative didn't exist.
That's when USA actually became the super productive nation, turning from a huge debtor to the world's largest manufacturer, exporter and creditor.
So that was tried in USA.
It is now practiced in other places, Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China even, Switzerland to a larger degree than anywhere else in the world.
Even Scandinavia with its supposedly 'welfare state' is actually moving in the right direction, running trade surpluses, constantly reducing income taxes, creating a better environment for business opportunities. They have learned from the terrible outcome and disaster that they have experienced 20 years ago.
Now, I am not saying that it will change your life or anything like that, but it is a very good book for people stuck in the modern era of government worshiping.
Gross runs the largest bond fund called 'Pimco', he manages 1.8Trillion dollars.
Here is his latest investment letter, I just found out:
To keep our debt/GDP ratio below the metaphorical combustion point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, these studies (when averaged) suggest that we need to cut spending or raise taxes by 11% of GDP and rather quickly over the next five to 10 years. An 11% "fiscal gap" in terms of today's economy speaks to a combination of spending cuts and taxes of $1.6 trillion per year! To put that into perspective, CBO has calculated that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and other provisions would only reduce the deficit by a little more than $200 billion. As well, the failed attempt at a budget compromise by Congress and the President - the so-called Super Committee "Grand Bargain"- was a $4 trillion battle plan over 10 years worth $400 billion a year. These studies, and the updated chart "Ring of Fire - Part 2!" suggests close to four times that amount in order to douse the inferno.
Investment Conclusion
So I posed the question earlier: How can the U.S. not be considered the first destination of global capital in search of safe (although historically low) returns? Easy answer: It will not be if we continue down the current road and don't address our "fiscal gap." IF we continue to close our eyes to existing 8% of GDP deficits, which when including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare liabilities compose an average estimated 11% annual "fiscal gap," then we will begin to resemble Greece before the turn of the next decade. Unless we begin to close this gap, then the inevitable result will be that our debt/GDP ratio will continue to rise, the Fed would print money to pay for the deficiency, inflation would follow and the dollar would inevitably decline. Bonds would be burned to a crisp and stocks would certainly be singed; only gold and real assets would thrive within the "Ring of Fire."
The proportion of U.S. government and Treasury debt in Pacific Investment Management Co.â(TM)s $278 billion Total Return Fund dropped to 20 percent of assets in September from 21 percent the prior month, according to data released on the Newport Beach, California-based companyâ(TM)s website. Mortgages remained his largest holding at 49 percent. Pimco doesnâ(TM)t comment directly on monthly changes in its mutual funds.
Gross wrote in his monthly investment commentary last week that the U.S. will no longer be the first destination of global capital in search of safe returns unless fiscal spending and debt growth slows, saying the nation âoefrequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth.â Mortgages have accounted for 50 percent of the fund holdings since January as Gross correctly bet the Federal Reserve would announce a new round of monetary stimulus using the securities.
Well, of-course, it was the same argument about other securities, mortgages as well before 2009. I mean "everybody knew that houses could not fall in price", right?
"Everybody knows" that the interest rates will not go up, right?
Fed is buying all the new debt, the long term debt that is held by other parties is held by foreign central banks and pension funds.
Foreign central banks are not in the business of investing, their purchases are political in nature, not economically motivated.
Pension funds have almost no leeway of how to 'invest', they are basically forced into government treasuries, that's why the gov't is so pissed off about the one rating agency downgrading the US debt.
Nobody is willing to give US gov't money at negative interest rates unless they are forced to, or there is a political calculation that has nothing to do with economics, which is all the central banks purchases.
Are world's institutional investors more stupid than I am? SOME ARE without a question, without a doubt. They are Keynesians and all that they are doing is following the same flawed model that is crashing the economies world wide (USSR fell apart, though it was a super-Keynesian society, former Communist China, whatever 'communist' country you look at, from Cuba to Somalia, they all fell apart and are still falling apart).
Other institutional 'investors' are not investors at all, they are politically motivated entities, those are the central banks.
If a rating agency downgrading US debt is a non-event, then why is SEC targeting them (and not for example all the bank managers, who were part of the financial bubble of the last 20 years)? Not Bernie Madoff, not Enron, not Lehman, not Freddie/Fannie but Egan Jones.
Why do the world investors accept a lower yield for US government bond that German government bond?
- because 'world investors' are not buying long term US debt. The Federal Reserve is buying long term US debt, the US banks are buying long term US debt, other central banks are holding US debt, but nobody in his right mind buys long term US debt as an investment. Short term paper is trading still, and pension funds are (unfortunately for the pensioners) mandated to be in "least risky assets", and since the government defines 'least risky assets' to be its own debt, the pensioners will bear the consequences of the US debt and dollar crisis.
The rating agency that works for the buyers and not the sellers downgraded US debt a couple of times and now it is under investigation for that. That's what the gov't is worried about - somebody changing the status of its debt to not be least risky, but to actually a very much risky asset, and then the pension funds will finally not have to be in US Treasury bonds.
The real interest rates for US Treasury bonds are negative, and you, personally, would give US gov't money for 10, 20, 30 years, you may as well just throw it into a fire.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't count on hyperspace, it's more likely you'd end up scrambled to bits and would need a backup restore :)
Oh yeah? The simulation doesn't have to be broken completely though, one bad transaction does not necessarily break the program.
Also by using a transaction metaphor, if it was then possible to enter the transaction state but not to commit it and instead to roll it back, would it imply ability to travel forward in time for any time period instantaneously, and that is what time dilation becomes?
Think: you reach speed of light, the time stops. Why is that? Maybe that's because you have entered a single transactional state that is not committed until you slow down and get out of the transaction?
But what if you manage to roll back your transaction instead of getting out, does it necessitate rolling back of only that portion of the Universe or does it trigger a large rollback for the entire simulation? I think it would just roll back that portion of the time and space, not the entire Universe.
That's time dilation for you.
Who said that it was unintended rather than being the point of the simulation, to see if we can do it from the inside if certain things were possible to breach?
Oh alternatively this has nothing to do with 'great interest in developing technologies', etc., but it is simply a way to steal money from the tax payers and put it into gov't officials and other special interest pockets? (special interest in this case is pretty obvious, it's in the name of the story).
Here is my prediction: this is money lost.
Millions of years? It seems like it's a long time within this simulation, what gives you the idea that only a couple of hours of "actual time" hasn't passed in the 'outside world', outside the simulator?
whether Joe Blow made up his success stories
- in the modern society figuring out such things are simpler than ever before. There are entire sites dedicated to customer reviews. This is much better than anything that ever was available until now, including FDA, because FDA is just another corrupt government agency. Believing that government agencies are set up for your benefit and that they can stay that way even if they were thought up that way in the beginning, now that is incredibly naive.
And a private FDA, funded entirely by large drug companies, is a lot more susceptible to the evils you describe then a government agency.
- bullshit.
BULLSHIT.
Here is why
That is precisely why.
In exactly the same way, that government has the power over the credit rating agencies, which rate government bonds, and the government with the banks (sellers of bonds), pay the agencies and only recognize those agencies that get paid that way, and in exactly the same way, that ONE credit agency that works for buyers and not for sellers of bonds, in the same way that the agency (Egan-Jones) works for the consumer and is sued by the SEC when it decides to downgrade US gov't treasury credit rating. In the same way FDA is exactly the same type of garbage and it ends up being a corrupt institution.
The people who are interested in having a rating on their medicine by some authoritative rating agency would be looking for that label and they are the buyers of the rating, so they pay the rating agency.
The reason the rating agency would much more likely stay incorruptible as compared to the government agency, is because it's good name is on the line, the entire business of that agency depends on its brand being clean of any tarnishing cases.
Of-course it can always be sued or otherwise attacked by the people that it rates, but that's a different story.
But basically I am giving you the perfect analogy that is happening right now and it involves exactly the same types of players - rating agencies and government and end clients and it's the same exact dynamic.
The rating agency that is not working for the seller is the one that is acting in the most responsible manner and is rating the debt as it should be (though I think it should be rated even lower).
The government system doesn't work. It doesn't allow people to buy drugs that are NOT rated, and people must be able to access drugs that are unrated and take their own risk. If a drug came out yesterday and it may help somebody who has a month left to live, he should be able to access that drug without having to wait for all the rounds of certifications.
People who want certifications would be paying for them and other people could pay much less for not buying certified product, and it's their risk to do the other research then.
As to Marxism, unfortunately for me I was born in a Marxist society, not communist, but always 5 years away from it. We had that, it was called Marxism-Leninism, and in its heart it was the totalitarian regime, with central planning, justifying its outrageous murderous and anti-human behavior with the fairy tale of the collective being able to cultivate "The New Person", who will bring forward the Marxism and Leninism, so Communism into the world, the Person will be absolute Collectivist and Communist and everybody will be that person, everybody will work together, do what they can and only take what they need, etc.etc.
Lenin was perfectly clear (as were the French revolutionaries) that this was nonsense and could not be achieve without TYRANNY and DICTATORSHIP.
The actual name for it was the: Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
It had to be dictatorship because no person in his right mind wants to give up his sovereignty, to be controlled by the central plan, to be part of the ant farm without
All Authoritarianism is built on the same exact principle as collectivism - denial of individual rights, denial of the right to private property, denial of voluntarism in the market, denial of free market capitalism and of competition.
As to corporate interests, that's what the Constituion is supposed to be for, to prevent government from abusing the law and going above and beyond its mandate and thus from stealing individual freedoms so that they can be sold to the highest bidder.
Corporatism is the goal of politicians, they want it because that's the best thing to keep politicians rich and happy, and it works for them better than dictatorship, because they can pretend there is some form of 'self-governance' for the people while robbing them blind.
Self-governance for the people, by the way, should not be confused with democracy. Democracy is just one step before totalitarian tyranny sets in, it's a transitional state between Representative Republic (which USA was set up as) and between the socialist or fascist (but either way - collectivist) next stage, which crashes the economy and society, hopefully without a huge war, but by crashing the society that system crashes the government as well.
The difference between a place like USA and USSR would be that by the END of that cycle, at least in USA there is a POSSIBILITY that it will return to a Republican government, pushing democracy and all forms of socialism aside, setting up better controls over government to try and prevent the next cycle from happening in the same manner.
Unless the point of the simulation is to see if we can break out of the system the way it is set up.
Not necessarily a bug, it could be just a way the memory is used, with data and instructions not being properly separated, then maybe you could access instructions by overwriting memory, and normal buffer overflow, but it doesn't have to be a bug, just lack of security features.
Well well well, Cypher, we meet again. Still enjoying the stake in blissful ignorance, I see?
Wouldn't one of the interesting consequences of the Universe being a 'hologram mapped on a two-dimensional boundary region' be that we could then postulate the reason for the speed of light? Speed of light could be then some upper boundary on the most primitive matrix transformation, sort of like the maximum GHz that the Universe is running at (assuming that the matrix itself is a memory map and that there is a gigantic number of processors that can access and modify memory simultaneously), or maybe the speed of light is then a manner, in which race conditions and dead locks are prevented? Sort of like in a bad system, where you know an atomic transaction takes 1ms, so you force a wait condition on the memory it access for 2ms, so you know for sure that the transaction committed.
At the same time, if that is the case, then going above and beyond speed of light could cause transactional failure and that could mean some form of memory corruption and destruction of the matrix or space time distortion and destruction :) But then if we didn't care about transactionality we could somehow breach the speed of light, but only by going outside of the memory boundaries of the simulation, crossing into the instruction stack and overwriting that constant!
I just gave myself a mental highfive on the level of crazy.
The whole collectivism rubric is ridiculous. A Collectivist is (by definition) someone who puts the interests of some group above his personal interests, which is a pretty fair description of the entire freakin human race.
- I would like to add a couple of words on this.
Collectivism is a way to buy the lowest common denominator, the mob, with the promise of a free lunch, by playing on the people's lack of understanding of basic principles of running a business. They don't understand what it means to run a business, they don't understand why a person can make much more money by running a business than by working as an employee, they see it as 'unfair' and they vote for every measure that an opportunist politician would put forward, to curb people's ability to get ahead in life. There is nothing fair or moral about the idea of income taxes in itself, but once you have that, having so called 'progressive' taxes is even less moral and less fair, yet it is sold as if it is the paragon of fairness and morality.
Morality in theft. Theft = fairness. Theft = morality. That's the principles of collectivism.
But it is worse than that. Collectivists actually spawn the subcultures: socialists, fascists, nazists, all these 'ists' are collectivists first of all. Their main shared value is hatred towards individualism, towards capitalism and their main goal is achieving something they see as 'fairness', but it has nothing to do with a normal set of rules.
Yeah, their idea of what is 'fair' cannot be expressed in a simple code, in rules that would just apply to people uniformly. Their ideas of 'fairness' depend on a situation, thus they cannot be based on a lawful society, on a society based on rules - formal law, by which every case must be judged according to general rational precepts, which have as few exceptions as possible and are based on logical assumptions. That type of formal law and rational judgment is only achievable in competitive 'liberal' (in a classical sense) capitalism.
Yes, collectivism is about denying the individual liberties, about putting the 'collective above the individual', which is exactly the principles that Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism were based upon. Those exact words were used to justify murder of tens *and over the years of hundreds* millions of people.
Collectivism is the greatest moral evil that society has been able to perpetrate upon itself.
No, who the people that are incredibly naive are those, who believe in 'good motives' of government. You believe, because you were told, that the government started FDA to 'make food safer', while in reality all such things are implemented in order to create unfair advantage and reduce competition in the market.
Even when the original ideas are "to help", they should never be implemented by government! Yes, the information is not always readily available, but this does not mean that people must allow government to cease power, to steal individual liberties to run their lives and their businesses based on information that they can themselves attain.
What actually happens is that eventually the government takes all of your freedom (and money obviously, that's the goal of taking your freadom), while the information becomes more and more available and technology and industry becomes more and more streamlined due to one thing: PROFIT MOTIVE.
Streamlining the business, creating conveyor lines, using capital to buy and build labour saving devices allows a company to make more money, but this is exactly the same principle that makes the end product safer!
Standardization of operations that provide more profit ALSO provide safer product and this has nothing to do with government (except probably the reason for the search for more labour saving devices, which also can be ascribed to government interfering with the labour market, passing regulations making human labour more expensive and thus making capital investment more profitable if it means investing in labour saving devices).
But in any case, with or without people, businesses must scale, and with scale comes standardization, and that's what makes food safer - standard approach, standard methodology. It's what makes the operations less costly and allows for lower prices, while more market penetration and better margins, and it's the same thing that makes the product safer.
Collectivism is the direct result of Marxist ideology, which grounds everything on the principles of central planning, and it's central planning that distorts and destroys economies and thus society. Every example shows it, people choose not to see it, because guess what, they are ready to sell their freedoms for a promise of a free lunch.
More money from government to private interests, because obviously the government is the best judge of how to spend other people's money. Solyndra? F22? Wars? Bridges to nowhere?
I sold my sole share in GOOG because my new kid means I need the cash right now
- you are a real power player, aren't you? Don't spend it all in one place though!
It's all about the money -- and it should be illegal.
- no, what should be illegal is government telling people what they can or cannot advertise, what drugs they can or cannot take.
It should be illegal for government to impose patents and copyrights, that's what should be illegal.
It should be illegal for government to set up agencies like FDA, which destroy competition and cause higher prices for all.
It is all always about productivity, which means money. It's all business and only business is interested in satisfying the customers. But once government is involved, the incentives get screwed up. With crazy fees and other costs added by the FDA it becomes unprofitable to research and develop drugs and procedures and methods for less known diseases, but it becomes very profitable NOT to research, but instead to milk the patent protection racket.
Take the same pill, modify it slightly from 'version to version' and then sell it as the next best drug in the world while being protected from any competition by the all powerful government.
Listen, I personally want the most research in biology and all the medical aspects of life and I know that people are inventive and that the best driver and motivator is a personal need - an itch to scratch.
That's exactly why I don't want any government to stand in between me and anybody in the WORLD coming up with ideas and trying to sell them to me. In the age of the Internet I (and most others) have enough access to information to make up our mind. We are all going to die at some point, so let us live our own fucking lives the way we fucking want, and if that means getting high on crack cocaine or on Zoloft, it should be our choice.
Saying that a business must become a 'non-profit' means saying that you want UNLIMITED TAXATION or borrowing or printing (inflation) to be spent on that nonsense, because to be 'non-profit' means exactly that. Once you regulate somebody to that point, that they can't make a profit by offering the best product to the market, they'll become part of government, and their salaries and bonuses will keep creeping up, as the efficiencies and productivity falls through the floor.
Sure sure, they'll invent SOMETHING, there is no question about it. F22 exists after all. But people don't actually need F22. They need something they WANT TO BUY and that's CHEAP, and that's not what governments do, and it's not what government structure encourages.
All money goes to R&D and moderate salaries.
- that's the most IMMORAL thing that you could do.
Of-course the government is already doing an immoral thing with patents, with FDA, etc.
Telling somebody, who wants to scratch his own itch, and who works in a garage: you can't do what you are doing, you can't attempt and alleviate some condition against some health issue, you can't do that for profit.
That's absolutely immoral. It's absolutely anti-human.
The most moral system that exists to create and distribute what people need is free market capitalism. That's the reason that the last 200 years have been so prosperous on this planet.
You see, governments have always wanted more power and they always existed, they always could DICTATE their ideology. But governments never invented Zoloft or computer screens or whatever. It's not what they do, it's not their purpose, it's not possible to do with their incentive structures and it goes against humans, against individual freedom to try and make one's life better on his own.
Of-course in other aspects of life you seem to be getting your wish. Collectivism is not dead unfortunately, you'd think people would learn over the last 100 years.
WWI, WWII, cold war, communism, fascism. It's all collectivism. Apparently people aren't learning from history and they will repeat it and on a bigger scale.
As I said, Bill Gross runs the largest in the world bond fund, so he holds US Treasuries, but he CUT his holdings of US treasuries, that's his trend.
The fact is that even with his understanding he is still wrong on the US dollar and Treasuries, they are not "going down the road" with an 'IF', the USA is bankrupt today.
It's not a question of whether USA will go bankrupt in the future, USA is bankrupt right now at this very precise moment. USA was bankrupt 10 years ago already, so that didn't change, it's just with more money printing it's in a worse hole (for the bond holders), so today bond holders are in even a more dire situation than they were 10 years ago.
Bill Gross is cutting his US treasury holdings month after month. He cut his US treasury holdings to 21% from 33% in just a month. He is SELLING Treasuries, he is not rolling them over, he is not buying them.
He is clearly not buying LONG term treasuries either, he is selling them. He was moving from long term to short term securities while the Fed was conducting 'operation Twist', which was to sell short term papers that the Fed had and buy long term paper. That was Fed's attempt to keep interest rates down.
Now the Fed can no longer continue with this 'Twist', they can't keep sterilizing their purchases to push interest rates down, now they are just on a trajectory to print money.
QE3 is the last QE, because it can never end until it kills the dollar.
USA has attempted mostly free market and it worked wonders. 1870 to 1913 was a pretty good stretch of mostly free market. Certainly it was free of gov't printing money, setting interest rates, regulating businesses in almost every way, stealing income from people as taxes, regulating labour.
There was no FBI, CIA, Fed, FDIC, IRS, FHA, EPA, FDA, FAA, FCC, HUD, SS, Medicare, Medicaid, dep't of energy, agriculture, education, interior, small business. There was no Patriot Act, NDAA, illegal undeclared wars, military industrial complex, 1000 or so military bases around the world and the entire 'world domination' narrative didn't exist.
That's when USA actually became the super productive nation, turning from a huge debtor to the world's largest manufacturer, exporter and creditor.
So that was tried in USA.
It is now practiced in other places, Hong Kong, Singapore, mainland China even, Switzerland to a larger degree than anywhere else in the world.
Even Scandinavia with its supposedly 'welfare state' is actually moving in the right direction, running trade surpluses, constantly reducing income taxes, creating a better environment for business opportunities. They have learned from the terrible outcome and disaster that they have experienced 20 years ago.
The Road to Serfdom
Now, I am not saying that it will change your life or anything like that, but it is a very good book for people stuck in the modern era of government worshiping.
This is good stuff, I didn't know Bill Gross was 'an extremist'
Gross runs the largest bond fund called 'Pimco', he manages 1.8Trillion dollars.
Here is his latest investment letter, I just found out:
To keep our debt/GDP ratio below the metaphorical combustion point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, these studies (when averaged) suggest that we need to cut spending or raise taxes by 11% of GDP and rather quickly over the next five to 10 years. An 11% "fiscal gap" in terms of today's economy speaks to a combination of spending cuts and taxes of $1.6 trillion per year! To put that into perspective, CBO has calculated that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and other provisions would only reduce the deficit by a little more than $200 billion. As well, the failed attempt at a budget compromise by Congress and the President - the so-called Super Committee "Grand Bargain"- was a $4 trillion battle plan over 10 years worth $400 billion a year. These studies, and the updated chart "Ring of Fire - Part 2!" suggests close to four times that amount in order to douse the inferno.
Investment Conclusion
So I posed the question earlier: How can the U.S. not be considered the first destination of global capital in search of safe (although historically low) returns? Easy answer: It will not be if we continue down the current road and don't address our "fiscal gap." IF we continue to close our eyes to existing 8% of GDP deficits, which when including Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare liabilities compose an average estimated 11% annual "fiscal gap," then we will begin to resemble Greece before the turn of the next decade. Unless we begin to close this gap, then the inevitable result will be that our debt/GDP ratio will continue to rise, the Fed would print money to pay for the deficiency, inflation would follow and the dollar would inevitably decline. Bonds would be burned to a crisp and stocks would certainly be singed; only gold and real assets would thrive within the "Ring of Fire."
To hedge against the inflation risk, Mr. Gross has cut down holdings of Treasury debt to 21% at the end of August compared to 33% in July.
Here is an institutional investor, he runs the largest bond fund in the world.
Quote:
The proportion of U.S. government and Treasury debt in Pacific Investment Management Co.â(TM)s $278 billion Total Return Fund dropped to 20 percent of assets in September from 21 percent the prior month, according to data released on the Newport Beach, California-based companyâ(TM)s website. Mortgages remained his largest holding at 49 percent. Pimco doesnâ(TM)t comment directly on monthly changes in its mutual funds.
Gross wrote in his monthly investment commentary last week that the U.S. will no longer be the first destination of global capital in search of safe returns unless fiscal spending and debt growth slows, saying the nation âoefrequently pleasures itself with budgetary crystal meth.â Mortgages have accounted for 50 percent of the fund holdings since January as Gross correctly bet the Federal Reserve would announce a new round of monetary stimulus using the securities.
Well, of-course, it was the same argument about other securities, mortgages as well before 2009. I mean "everybody knew that houses could not fall in price", right?
"Everybody knows" that the interest rates will not go up, right?
Fed is buying all the new debt, the long term debt that is held by other parties is held by foreign central banks and pension funds.
Foreign central banks are not in the business of investing, their purchases are political in nature, not economically motivated.
Pension funds have almost no leeway of how to 'invest', they are basically forced into government treasuries, that's why the gov't is so pissed off about the one rating agency downgrading the US debt.
Nobody is willing to give US gov't money at negative interest rates unless they are forced to, or there is a political calculation that has nothing to do with economics, which is all the central banks purchases.
Are world's institutional investors more stupid than I am? SOME ARE without a question, without a doubt. They are Keynesians and all that they are doing is following the same flawed model that is crashing the economies world wide (USSR fell apart, though it was a super-Keynesian society, former Communist China, whatever 'communist' country you look at, from Cuba to Somalia, they all fell apart and are still falling apart).
Other institutional 'investors' are not investors at all, they are politically motivated entities, those are the central banks.
If a rating agency downgrading US debt is a non-event, then why is SEC targeting them (and not for example all the bank managers, who were part of the financial bubble of the last 20 years)? Not Bernie Madoff, not Enron, not Lehman, not Freddie/Fannie but Egan Jones.
Police, fire, healthcare and schools are just as profitable as any other private business and that's exactly what they should be operated as.
Why do the world investors accept a lower yield for US government bond that German government bond?
- because 'world investors' are not buying long term US debt. The Federal Reserve is buying long term US debt, the US banks are buying long term US debt, other central banks are holding US debt, but nobody in his right mind buys long term US debt as an investment. Short term paper is trading still, and pension funds are (unfortunately for the pensioners) mandated to be in "least risky assets", and since the government defines 'least risky assets' to be its own debt, the pensioners will bear the consequences of the US debt and dollar crisis.
The rating agency that works for the buyers and not the sellers downgraded US debt a couple of times and now it is under investigation for that. That's what the gov't is worried about - somebody changing the status of its debt to not be least risky, but to actually a very much risky asset, and then the pension funds will finally not have to be in US Treasury bonds.
That's the reason the US gov't is fighting Egan-Jones.
The real interest rates for US Treasury bonds are negative, and you, personally, would give US gov't money for 10, 20, 30 years, you may as well just throw it into a fire.