The cars could be anything the engineers could come up with to go faster. Each car unique, a prototype with parts made for the purpose. The idea that you can cheat by using different software at different points during the race is ridiculous, the idea that it should be safe is also ridiculous, they are by definition supposed to be racing at the extreme limits of physical and mental performance.
Now Formula 1 is terminally boring, it's about going round a track and coining in as much advertising and TV revenue as is possible. It's a business rather than the big race it used to be. These days I watch MotoGP instead. Now those guys know how to race.
ODF is a format which can now be relied upon from now into the future. Something not to be sniffed at when archiving (or exchanging) information. Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?
MS lost the war on the 3rd of May 2006. They just don't know it yet. ISO 26300 commoditises the format of word/spreadsheet/database files. It's a lynchpin which has just been pulled from MS Office (and therefore Windows). From now they're going to have to compete on price and merit.
Independants can now take advantage of that without having to run to keep up with the doc format, though that's still going to be an issue for a few years as ODF replaces doc as the standard format. That's the catastrophe, slow at first and accelerating out of control rapidly as the market does what governments couldn't.
It puts the mosquito to shame. But not because it's bigger and bites harder... No the midges are too clever for that. They evolved to be smaller so seeing them and swatting them is more difficult and they can get into much smaller places. Think of them as a form of distributed mosquito. Half a million of them in a 2 square metre area.
Hell they're so vicious we had to invent machines to kill them by the million and prevent them breeding: The Midgeater.
The anthrax research is for a vaccine. In order to make a vaccine, you have to make some anthrax. To say the US 'stockpiles bioweapons' in an abuse of both words.
Yeah, and the Japanese hunt whales for research too. Wink wink.
$1000 at 5%, and inflation is 10%, then the debtor actually makes money in the transaction. Even ARM (adjustable rate mortgages) are typically fixed for years, and even when they do adjust they are not likely to change more than inflation. And that's only talking about mortgages, there are many other types of loans, and many don't adjust at all.
Um, not here in the UK, most mortgages are variable rate. i.e. Set at the central bank base interest rate plus a couple of percent. The central bank increases/decreases the interest rate according to the apparent rate of inflation on a monthly basis. There's certainly a lag so inflation does still work slightly to the benefit of debtors unless the interest rates go very high (we had 17% during the eighties). otherwise I largely agree with you on this.
so if we didn't expand economically we wouldn't need debt at all.
I was referring to the national debt. Something we have already, in fact it's the very basis of the monetary system so we have to expand in order to service it.
If I am wrong about this point, please provide me with a reliable source that says that the people printing the money don't feel the effects of it's inflation as they spend it.
No, I'm saying that the money printers create inflation around them and the inflationary pressure spreads gradually through the economy over a period of time and doesn't happen everywhere instantaneously. Like a ripple. The people on the edge of the ripple benefit from increased money supply on one side and pre-inflationary lower prices on the other. The closer to the supply of money, the larger is the differential, the larger is the benefit.
"Until I can walk outside of my house and immediately jump on a train or bus that will take me exactly where I want to go without any lengthy stops or detours in between, I will not use public transportation. Since that's a completely unrealistic expectation of public transporation,"
That is exactly what PRT is designed to do. It's not an unrealistic expectation at all. Infact it's the cheapest, most efficient form of public transport.
Now, if they really were in control it'd be quite important that they weren't complete morons. However the evidence is very often the contrary, the evidence is that they don't determine anything, indeed the evidence is that they simply follow orders and do what they're told, that doesn't require them to be literate or intelligent.
So who is in control? Well that's obvious. The money is in control. At a guess that'd be the Waltons and friends.
The effect on the holders of the currency is whatever the inflation rate is, 5%, 10% would be quite a big effect, particularly on the poor and if you don't adjust the interest rate on loans you provide in a timely fashion for inflation yup it will be very bad for you. If the inflation rate gets very high it's very bad indeed for the debtor. High interest rates, payments out of control, house lost and all that.
"Economic expansion does not require the exploitation of resources. If exploitation of resources was as important to economic expansion as you imply, Mexico would be rich and Japan would be poor."
Haven't you heard the term human resources?:D and anyway that isn't true, Japan "adds value" to resources that have been exploited by someone else. Turning more iron ore into more cars. Any one stage in the process might produce a greater or less economic benefit, but the resources still have to be exploited at some point.
"Huh? When the money is in circulation, the inflation has already hit."
The effect doesn't hit everyone in the economy simultaneously. e.g. If I counterfeited 100 million dollars perfectly, gave half to my friend, there's a massive inflationary effect on my friends and my money but no effect on the rest of the economy until we start spending the money, and then the effect pushes out slowly from the people we spend the money with. The closer you are to source of the money the more you benefit.
"And I agree: this whole self-driving tech for cars is rather useless if you end up being stuck in a jam. What we need are more dedicated bus lanes, express busses, and faster subway/metro."
So... Could we actually replace the car with any of the existing public transport offerings? Is it physically possible for the existing public transport system to accomodate a 900% increase in usage? 500% increase? How about even a 100% increase? Nope. We're basically wasting our time and money attempting to get people on to the existing public transport systems. Never mind that they don't go where people want to go, when they want to go there.
Even if it works. Well, it reduces driver boredom and allows them to do something else. That's it. It might in the long distant future also reduce accident rates. However it doesn't solve any of the other problems associated with car usage; expense, pollution and congestion.
You're going to be spending just as much money on the vehicle, using just as much energy, producing just as much pollution and spending just as much time stuck in traffic.
While automated driving is cool and interesting, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't solve any of the big problems caused by car usage we have today. It's worth noting that it's not possible for any of the existing public transport technologies to solve the problems caused by car usage either.
Take for example the debt based money system we have now. The government has the ability print money (well, borrow) as it likes. Well when you have that power, it's pretty damned difficult not to use it. After all, raising taxes is about as popular as a fart in a lift and all politicians want to be re-elected. So borrow some money from the central bank to pay for your pet oil liberation project. This has a number of implications:
1: We've increased the amount of money available in circulation. This causes the value of the existing money to decrease; Inflation. Though it's percieved to be a general increase in prices it's essentially a tax on the currency holding population.
2: That debt you have to pay back, well it has an interest rate on it, the bankers want a little bit more back than they loaned, so you and everyone who works for you have to work that little bit harder to pay it back, you have to expand and grow to service the debt. The more you expand, the smaller the debt is in proportion, so you must expand. Which basically means there must be a continual increase in the exploitation of resources. For some reason the ecologists haven't picked up on this.
3: The government has free money to give away. Well, easy money anyway. The military, haliburton and all the direct contractors to the government benefit directly, in fact they get the cash before the inflation hits the economy generally so they benefit and grow hugely. Well we could call the military, it's direct suppliers like haliburton etc the military industrial complex.
4: Money is power, the free money the government is acquiring increases the power it has to intervene in, well anything it wants to.
So... Debt based money gives us... Inflation, mandatory economic expansion, increase in the size and power of the military industrial complex, increasing size and power of the state.
Talking on the phone while driving is bad driving.
There's been research round for a few years now that talking to someone on the phone to take their eyes and attention off the road as they think and respond to the person talking. It's worse than talking to someone in the passenger seat or listening to the radio because you are required to respond to someone who has no idea what situation you're in.
I believe the newer versions of Inuit's software simply use OFX. From gnucash's features page.
"Improved Import Transaction Matching
The development of OFX and HBCI support has also resulted in an improved transaction matching system that more accurately recognizes duplicate transactions during file import."
With bookkeeping I completely understand your reluctance to switch, just pointing out that Gnucash is technically pretty much there when it comes to replacing ms money, quickbooks etc. The difficulty as you point out is learning it's foibles and how it does things. It also has excellent documentation btw, a whole tutorial on how to do double entry bookeeping.
You know the boss is going to have the latest and greatest version. Well, she's going to be sending out files using the latest file format and if you can't read it you're stuffed so you have to upgrade... cue network effect.
It goes into a bank account which is then used to pay suppliers. i.e. somewhere else. the local supply of money is decreased temporarily, it's increased temporarily somewhere else. The important thing for the economy as a whole is that there's an intrinsic balance, there's no overall increase in the supply of money. It doesn't decrease in value.
You're wrong and you're right about money as a symbol, the dollar for instance comes from the word "thaler" which was a silver coin, a weight of silver. When dollars were exchanged, what was being traded was a known weight of silver, a commodity.
Almost all money was originally a weight of a precious metal. A British pound was a pound of silver. Today (actually 1921) the link has been broken so the dollar (or any currency) has no intrinsic value other than what the government decree it as having, (i.e. the government's reputation) but that doesn't change the fact that a dollar is something you trade for. Services, time, DVDs, bread, butter. Money is a commodity just like everything else that is traded and it's subject to the same rules of supply and demand, it increases and decreases in value just like coffee and oil. This is why there's inflation coming, governments print more money to finance wars instead of increasing taxation. They're doing it now, so there's going to be markedly increased inflation in the next few years. Inflation is a form of taxation, but a very subtle one which most people don't understand and one which hits the poor harder than the rich.
In a closed system/gold standard currency. If oil becomes scarce, the price goes up the oil purchasers have fewer dollars to spend elsewhere, the value of everything else decreases in relation to oil, the demand for oil is higher than the demand for everything else. Prices elsewhere for all other commodities are pushed down, everything else deflates in price in relation to oil.
In today's open, elasticated system with additional supply of money, the value of the other commodities will never apparently decrease in price because there's always more money to spend on them. The price remains fixed. Instead, it's the money which decreases in value. This year you're being paid in today's 50,000 dollars which has a 5% additional supply and is now worth 5% less than last year's 50,000 dollars as everything else becomes more valuable in comparison. That's inflation.
Oh and that's another thing about an open/inflationary economy. It doesn't make sense to save, it makes sense to spend now because your money will be worth less tomorrow. In fact it makes most sense to take out lots of loans and to allow inflation to reduce the value for you.
The numbers you're talking about are only indicators of the real underlying inflation. Here in the UK we have the Consumer Price Index and the Retail Price Index. Both are indicators of inflation; They're simply guesses at the real level of inflation.
ok. no money printed/"borrowed" you have an essentially closed system, the money can't devalue. If you increase the cost of gasoline, yes the production cost of things based on it will increase and the retail prices may well increase, but with every dollar spent on those more expensive goods the value of the subsequent dollars you are spending becomes higher, the dollars become more scarce as the supply of money decreases and each one has more buying power. You have a temporary deflation until the money comes back into circulation. Overall it's a stable system which naturally reaches an equilibrium.
With extra money being printed or "borrowed" there's no increase in the value of the dollar when money is spent because there's an increasing supply of money, so no equilibrium, in fact it's a self re-inforcing downward cycle, the money devalues, the prices go up, the government prints more money, the currency devalues further, the prices go up more. The currency just continues decreasing in value until it's essentially worthless. With this cycle you get chaotic booms and busts as the money supply is increased and decreased using interest rates. This is the cycle we're in at the moment, it's been this way since the 1920s when the gold standard was broken. It's how wars are financed you see.
The national debt is an indication of just how much extra money has been pumped into the economy/spent by the government. How much additional supply of money there is. At the moment 28,000 US dollars for every man woman and child in the US. Say only half of them are working we're talking 55,000 for every worker. How long is it going to take to pay that off? In the meantime the dollars become more and more worthless. The UK national debt is running about half that level at the moment.
The other thing, inflation (the devaluation of currency) doesn't affect everyone equally... The people who spend it first get to use the money at the full value. It's only as it spreads through society that prices increase in response to the increased supply and therefore decreased value of money. The people who get paid by the government (or whoever's printing the money) get to spend it at the previous value. That means government employees like the military and government contractors like Haliburton get the first crack at spending money before the inflation really kicks in. Inflation doesn't affect everywhere in the economy at the same time.
Money is a commodity, just like coffee or oil, it's traded just like coffee or oil. Increased supply decreases it's value, just like coffee or oil.
Slashdot Mirror
The cars could be anything the engineers could come up with to go faster. Each car unique, a prototype with parts made for the purpose. The idea that you can cheat by using different software at different points during the race is ridiculous, the idea that it should be safe is also ridiculous, they are by definition supposed to be racing at the extreme limits of physical and mental performance.
Now Formula 1 is terminally boring, it's about going round a track and coining in as much advertising and TV revenue as is possible. It's a business rather than the big race it used to be. These days I watch MotoGP instead. Now those guys know how to race.
ODF is a format which can now be relied upon from now into the future. Something not to be sniffed at when archiving (or exchanging) information. Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?
MS lost the war on the 3rd of May 2006. They just don't know it yet. ISO 26300 commoditises the format of word/spreadsheet/database files. It's a lynchpin which has just been pulled from MS Office (and therefore Windows). From now they're going to have to compete on price and merit.
Independants can now take advantage of that without having to run to keep up with the doc format, though that's still going to be an issue for a few years as ODF replaces doc as the standard format. That's the catastrophe, slow at first and accelerating out of control rapidly as the market does what governments couldn't.
We have the midge!
It puts the mosquito to shame. But not because it's bigger and bites harder... No the midges are too clever for that. They evolved to be smaller so seeing them and swatting them is more difficult and they can get into much smaller places. Think of them as a form of distributed mosquito. Half a million of them in a 2 square metre area.
Hell they're so vicious we had to invent machines to kill them by the million and prevent them breeding: The Midgeater.
Might work with mosquitos, you never know.
Useless!
I'll have one of these instead.
http://europe.nokia.com/A4142030
Sell stuff you don't want/need/like and buy stuff you do want/need/like.
It has a number of benefits, in particular the windows client can also store permission information and open files:
http://www.bacula.org/
It can also do bare metal restores for some platforms.
Yeah, and the Japanese hunt whales for research too. Wink wink.
Um, not here in the UK, most mortgages are variable rate. i.e. Set at the central bank base interest rate plus a couple of percent. The central bank increases/decreases the interest rate according to the apparent rate of inflation on a monthly basis. There's certainly a lag so inflation does still work slightly to the benefit of debtors unless the interest rates go very high (we had 17% during the eighties). otherwise I largely agree with you on this.
I was referring to the national debt. Something we have already, in fact it's the very basis of the monetary system so we have to expand in order to service it.
No, I'm saying that the money printers create inflation around them and the inflationary pressure spreads gradually through the economy over a period of time and doesn't happen everywhere instantaneously. Like a ripple. The people on the edge of the ripple benefit from increased money supply on one side and pre-inflationary lower prices on the other. The closer to the supply of money, the larger is the differential, the larger is the benefit.
That is exactly what PRT is designed to do. It's not an unrealistic expectation at all. Infact it's the cheapest, most efficient form of public transport.
http://www.personalrapidtransit.com/
Now, if they really were in control it'd be quite important that they weren't complete morons. However the evidence is very often the contrary, the evidence is that they don't determine anything, indeed the evidence is that they simply follow orders and do what they're told, that doesn't require them to be literate or intelligent.
So who is in control? Well that's obvious. The money is in control. At a guess that'd be the Waltons and friends.
The effect on the holders of the currency is whatever the inflation rate is, 5%, 10% would be quite a big effect, particularly on the poor and if you don't adjust the interest rate on loans you provide in a timely fashion for inflation yup it will be very bad for you. If the inflation rate gets very high it's very bad indeed for the debtor. High interest rates, payments out of control, house lost and all that.
:D and anyway that isn't true, Japan "adds value" to resources that have been exploited by someone else. Turning more iron ore into more cars. Any one stage in the process might produce a greater or less economic benefit, but the resources still have to be exploited at some point.
"Economic expansion does not require the exploitation of resources. If exploitation of resources was as important to economic expansion as you imply, Mexico would be rich and Japan would be poor."
Haven't you heard the term human resources?
"Huh? When the money is in circulation, the inflation has already hit."
The effect doesn't hit everyone in the economy simultaneously. e.g. If I counterfeited 100 million dollars perfectly, gave half to my friend, there's a massive inflationary effect on my friends and my money but no effect on the rest of the economy until we start spending the money, and then the effect pushes out slowly from the people we spend the money with. The closer you are to source of the money the more you benefit.
http://www.childsupportanalysis.co.uk/analysis_an
ok, it seems to vary from about 5%, but rates of 20% - 30% are common. So... Guys... have you had a DNA test?
So... Could we actually replace the car with any of the existing public transport offerings? Is it physically possible for the existing public transport system to accomodate a 900% increase in usage? 500% increase? How about even a 100% increase? Nope. We're basically wasting our time and money attempting to get people on to the existing public transport systems. Never mind that they don't go where people want to go, when they want to go there.
Even if it works. Well, it reduces driver boredom and allows them to do something else. That's it. It might in the long distant future also reduce accident rates. However it doesn't solve any of the other problems associated with car usage; expense, pollution and congestion.
You're going to be spending just as much money on the vehicle, using just as much energy, producing just as much pollution and spending just as much time stuck in traffic.
While automated driving is cool and interesting, it's not revolutionary, it doesn't solve any of the big problems caused by car usage we have today. It's worth noting that it's not possible for any of the existing public transport technologies to solve the problems caused by car usage either.
http://www.vectusprt.com/
http://www.atsltd.co.uk/
http://www.skywebexpress.com/
http://www.mist-er.com/index-en.htm
It has a profound effect on our society.
Take for example the debt based money system we have now. The government has the ability print money (well, borrow) as it likes. Well when you have that power, it's pretty damned difficult not to use it. After all, raising taxes is about as popular as a fart in a lift and all politicians want to be re-elected. So borrow some money from the central bank to pay for your pet oil liberation project. This has a number of implications:
1: We've increased the amount of money available in circulation. This causes the value of the existing money to decrease; Inflation. Though it's percieved to be a general increase in prices it's essentially a tax on the currency holding population.
2: That debt you have to pay back, well it has an interest rate on it, the bankers want a little bit more back than they loaned, so you and everyone who works for you have to work that little bit harder to pay it back, you have to expand and grow to service the debt. The more you expand, the smaller the debt is in proportion, so you must expand. Which basically means there must be a continual increase in the exploitation of resources. For some reason the ecologists haven't picked up on this.
3: The government has free money to give away. Well, easy money anyway. The military, haliburton and all the direct contractors to the government benefit directly, in fact they get the cash before the inflation hits the economy generally so they benefit and grow hugely. Well we could call the military, it's direct suppliers like haliburton etc the military industrial complex.
4: Money is power, the free money the government is acquiring increases the power it has to intervene in, well anything it wants to.
So... Debt based money gives us... Inflation, mandatory economic expansion, increase in the size and power of the military industrial complex, increasing size and power of the state.
On Windows, accessing Excel and Access files?
Ok I'm typing this using Firefox, Fedora with FreeRIDE running on another desktop and I think VBA is probably the tool for the job.
Talking on the phone while driving is bad driving.
There's been research round for a few years now that talking to someone on the phone to take their eyes and attention off the road as they think and respond to the person talking. It's worse than talking to someone in the passenger seat or listening to the radio because you are required to respond to someone who has no idea what situation you're in.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1885775.stm
I believe the newer versions of Inuit's software simply use OFX. From gnucash's features page.
"Improved Import Transaction Matching
The development of OFX and HBCI support has also resulted in an improved transaction matching system that more accurately recognizes duplicate transactions during file import."
With bookkeeping I completely understand your reluctance to switch, just pointing out that Gnucash is technically pretty much there when it comes to replacing ms money, quickbooks etc. The difficulty as you point out is learning it's foibles and how it does things. It also has excellent documentation btw, a whole tutorial on how to do double entry bookeeping.
So you can avoid such re-typing of information. The GnuCash files can also be converted to QIF which your accountant should be able to read.
You know the boss is going to have the latest and greatest version. Well, she's going to be sending out files using the latest file format and if you can't read it you're stuffed so you have to upgrade... cue network effect.
I'd say sql-ledger but I'm not convinced getting the data migrated would be simple.
They discovered Open Office could still read the new file format. Decided to tweak it that little bit further.
People use PayPal because Ebay demand that they do. Crucially paypal means that you don't have to give bank details to customers/suppliers.
There's e-gold, GoldMoney etc. They're basically banks, can do instant payments. The difference being you can actually get your hands on the gold.
It goes into a bank account which is then used to pay suppliers. i.e. somewhere else. the local supply of money is decreased temporarily, it's increased temporarily somewhere else. The important thing for the economy as a whole is that there's an intrinsic balance, there's no overall increase in the supply of money. It doesn't decrease in value.
You're wrong and you're right about money as a symbol, the dollar for instance comes from the word "thaler" which was a silver coin, a weight of silver. When dollars were exchanged, what was being traded was a known weight of silver, a commodity.
http://www.mises.org/money.asp
Almost all money was originally a weight of a precious metal. A British pound was a pound of silver. Today (actually 1921) the link has been broken so the dollar (or any currency) has no intrinsic value other than what the government decree it as having, (i.e. the government's reputation) but that doesn't change the fact that a dollar is something you trade for. Services, time, DVDs, bread, butter. Money is a commodity just like everything else that is traded and it's subject to the same rules of supply and demand, it increases and decreases in value just like coffee and oil. This is why there's inflation coming, governments print more money to finance wars instead of increasing taxation. They're doing it now, so there's going to be markedly increased inflation in the next few years. Inflation is a form of taxation, but a very subtle one which most people don't understand and one which hits the poor harder than the rich.
In a closed system/gold standard currency. If oil becomes scarce, the price goes up the oil purchasers have fewer dollars to spend elsewhere, the value of everything else decreases in relation to oil, the demand for oil is higher than the demand for everything else. Prices elsewhere for all other commodities are pushed down, everything else deflates in price in relation to oil.
In today's open, elasticated system with additional supply of money, the value of the other commodities will never apparently decrease in price because there's always more money to spend on them. The price remains fixed. Instead, it's the money which decreases in value. This year you're being paid in today's 50,000 dollars which has a 5% additional supply and is now worth 5% less than last year's 50,000 dollars as everything else becomes more valuable in comparison. That's inflation.
Oh and that's another thing about an open/inflationary economy. It doesn't make sense to save, it makes sense to spend now because your money will be worth less tomorrow. In fact it makes most sense to take out lots of loans and to allow inflation to reduce the value for you.
The numbers you're talking about are only indicators of the real underlying inflation. Here in the UK we have the Consumer Price Index and the Retail Price Index. Both are indicators of inflation; They're simply guesses at the real level of inflation.
ok. no money printed/"borrowed" you have an essentially closed system, the money can't devalue. If you increase the cost of gasoline, yes the production cost of things based on it will increase and the retail prices may well increase, but with every dollar spent on those more expensive goods the value of the subsequent dollars you are spending becomes higher, the dollars become more scarce as the supply of money decreases and each one has more buying power. You have a temporary deflation until the money comes back into circulation. Overall it's a stable system which naturally reaches an equilibrium.
With extra money being printed or "borrowed" there's no increase in the value of the dollar when money is spent because there's an increasing supply of money, so no equilibrium, in fact it's a self re-inforcing downward cycle, the money devalues, the prices go up, the government prints more money, the currency devalues further, the prices go up more. The currency just continues decreasing in value until it's essentially worthless. With this cycle you get chaotic booms and busts as the money supply is increased and decreased using interest rates. This is the cycle we're in at the moment, it's been this way since the 1920s when the gold standard was broken. It's how wars are financed you see.
The national debt is an indication of just how much extra money has been pumped into the economy/spent by the government. How much additional supply of money there is. At the moment 28,000 US dollars for every man woman and child in the US. Say only half of them are working we're talking 55,000 for every worker. How long is it going to take to pay that off? In the meantime the dollars become more and more worthless. The UK national debt is running about half that level at the moment.
The other thing, inflation (the devaluation of currency) doesn't affect everyone equally... The people who spend it first get to use the money at the full value. It's only as it spreads through society that prices increase in response to the increased supply and therefore decreased value of money. The people who get paid by the government (or whoever's printing the money) get to spend it at the previous value. That means government employees like the military and government contractors like Haliburton get the first crack at spending money before the inflation really kicks in. Inflation doesn't affect everywhere in the economy at the same time.
Money is a commodity, just like coffee or oil, it's traded just like coffee or oil. Increased supply decreases it's value, just like coffee or oil.