Looking at the screenshots... In the same way the qt people didn't "get it" with Qtopia (do they now? I haven't checked for several years).
You can't simply dump a desktop windowing metaphor onto a phone. A phone has a tiny display and painfully inconvenient buttons. Lets see you hit one of those menus, pull a scroll bar. Try reading the tiny fonts.
or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
"still"?
There is a fundamental contradiction between being a fiscal and social conservative. One requires a belief that government should be small and weak with reducing regulations and laws. The other requires that the government be large and strong with increasing regulation and laws. The American definition of Liberal is equally contradictory; greater freedom through greater regulation...
These contradictions exist because the political system is one dimensional; left and right, and the political system is one dimensional because the electoral system punishes any candidates which do not conform to those stereotypes.
I see your graph. But my point still holds about legislative impact. During the 90s, the growth of the debt was not exponential, it was logarithmic. In the current decade, the debt growth is pretty much straight-line. The reason I bring up these decades is because extrapolating historic data to apply to present times makes sense only if we do not expect legislative action and short-term trends to affect the debt.
No, it's been generally the same exponential function throughout. There's clearly been some fiddling by politicians but they have made virtually no difference, whether they are Republican or Democrats. A margin under 7%pa here, a margin over 7%pa there is irrelevant it's still growing exponentially. And this makes perfect sense because debt interest is exponential. The growth on a loan can be expressed as (1+N%)^Y. Where N is the percentage, Y is the number of years.
Plot this and compare to the National Debt data.
Debt = 7.09338E-53 * 1.07^Years
Where years are from 1940 to 2007. It fits nicely.
At no point... At NO point has the debt reduced, or in fact failed to increase. Basically. It makes absolutely no difference whether you vote Democrat or Republican.
At any rate, what really matters is the debt as a percentage of GDP.
Well, that really depends whether your salary grows at 7% per year as well, to keep up with GDP, doesn't it. Millions of Americans may disagree.
The simple fact of the matter is that our economy has grown only a little bit slower than the debt over the past 40 years.
An inevitable feature of fractional reserve banking. The money always lags the debt, you have to continually take out new loans to pay the existing debt. Again, makes perfect sense.
And this brings us to one of your original points, which is that funding our debt is dependent on continued growth. While growth is not assured in the short term, it's a safe bet in the long run*
LOL. Peak Oil.
It *is* going to run out and probably relatively soon now. There is nothing in the real world which grows exponentially for ever. Nothing. You always always hit a limit and the fast you grow the faster you hit it.
Fractional reserve lending does not impact the national debt, other than by driving inflation.
The reason we have Personal/Corporate/National Debts at all is because we all use Fractional Reserve Lending.
And if you're concerned about the national debt, you should welcome inflation with open arms. It devalues the debt we hold.
Only at the expense of more debt. That is the nature of the beast. You must constantly run faster than the debt.
If you're less than ten years away from retiring, then you should have your saving in a simple interest bank account. No stocks. That way a crash won't devalue your money.
What do you do when the government prints a trillion dollars? Or 1.5 trillion dollars? The reserve ratio in the USA is about 10:1.
The number of little bits of green paper you have may well increase, but they can half in value if the supply of money keeps increasing. That's as big a crash in value as the stock market.
The truth is that there is no such thing as safe, or stable. Someone will always try to find a way to take it away from you. Particularly bankers. The nature of a fractional reserve means that all such banks take deposits, lend out 90% of it and only hold 10% in case of customers demanding money. Well, if there are any problems and people decide to remove their cash (Washington Mutual), only the first 10% get their money, everyone else loses out. Sure there are insurance schemes and guarantees, but a pension fund needs to be very large so only a fraction will be guaranteed.
I recommend you learn about money, understand how it is manipulated by banks and governments, how it affects stock markets etc. Then take active steps to protect yourself from them all.
In fact, I'm about 90% sure it's exponential. It sure fits an exponential curve well. averaging about 7% growth. With percentage growth the doubling time is 100*ln(2)/percent. So at 7% it would be doubling every 10 years.
And just as a check...
1980 909,041
1990 should be double that:
1990 3,206,290
Yikes, even higher than 7%
2000 5,628,700
That's more like it. A fraction under 7%.
It's predictable. I predict with about 90% certainty that the national debt will grow at 7% per year and therefore doubles every 10 years. There you go. "Colin's Law". Though I would like to thank my high school science teachers for an introduction to exponential functions.
Even Excel can do the analysis for you. The function you need is "logest".
Well, that rather depends on how and who's making the loan, doesn't it. If I lend you a fiver. I lose the use of the fiver and no money is created. But if I lent you a fiver but still had the use of half of it, then you have a fiver and I essentially have $2.50. Money is created.
"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." - William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694
"I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people." Reginald McKenna, Chairman of the Midland Bank, 1924.
"The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it." H W White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, 1955
"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing. " Ralph M Hawtry, former Secretary to the Treasury.
There is another feature of the "PT Cruiser" and other less standard looking cars. You are less subject to the manufacturer redesigning the "face" of the car in order to persuade people to upgrade.
I've noticed even the "prestige" brands doing it more often now.
Two words which American politicians should be particularly worried about; "Chinese consumer". When you hear those two words on American news, you know that China is going to be asking itself what America is good for. At the moment, tens of trillions in IOUs.
If your money is created from nothing at the point of a loan and you want to inflate the money supply then you also have to increase the (exponentially growing) debt at the same time.
Now, if you want the "economy" to grow then clearly you have to increase the supply of money faster than the interest on the debt which is consuming credit, or you get a recession.
Whether the debt is public debt, private debt or corporate debt, is irrelevant. The debt must be created. Or at least, it will be until you run out of people willing or able to take on and service the debt, then the system collapses. Doesn't this requirement for perpetual growth sound like something else?
It is a predictable exponential function and therefore has a doubling time, so yes, you could create a "law" about it.
The national debt, the credit crunch, the stockmarket crisis are all the inevitable result of the way your money is created... Long may it continue.
Then approximately in order you have; Air conditioning off. Engine RPMs constant and at the peak of the torque curve if you can. Clean your air filter. Fit iridium spark plugs. Use a fuel with a cleaning agent every 6 months or so.
And probably illegal; Chip your car so it runs at the ideal gas/air mixture, not simply one which will allow it to pass the regulations. Get rid of your catalytic converter.
to build a ramdisk image which contains all of the software and configuration required for a particular application. By "all" I mean "only". You end up with a single file which you put on a tftp server, you boot your servers over dhcp, they pick up the OS image and boot to the image on a ramdisk.
e.g. You might have one squid image, one PHP app server image, one Mysql rdbms server image etc. When the image boots it does whatever is required to run the app successully. e.g. putting a filesystem on the hard disk.
The benefits:
Zero server configuration. (or close to it) this means no need for YUM, no RPM, no APT. No dependencies.
Massive scalability because of above.
Only tested images reach production. You know it is going to work because the production image is the same single file, you know exactly how it is going to perform because you tested exactly the same file already.
Everything is version controlled and completely repeatable as part of the build process.
2 admins can run 500-1000 systems in a site easily because there is really only one machine; the network. Logarithmic increase in effort with the number of systems.
And a custom distribution designed for the purpose scales orders of magnitude better still. Build a system which does only the job you want, boot it over the network on 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 systems just as easily. Just a few people are required.
I agree that a cookie cutter approach like this does not yeild the greatest performance per box, but it does allow for a better performance/administration ratio.
Nope. You have too much state on the machine. You have binary versions, library versions, config files all to manage and distribute. Over time the individual machines diverge in their configuration, even with tools like cfengine and puppet. Which means that errors begin creeping in and things start failing.
It must be extremely expedient for Western governments to punish recalcitrant governments in the developing world by withholding World Bank and IMF "assistance"; and conversely reward compliant ones.
This is the nature of all (fractional reserve) banking.
Have you noticed the calls for co-ordinated action? For a world response? Next it'll be a world council.
Cos a general purpose distribution isn't exactly ideal for providing scalability, particularly when your machines pretty much all provide the same service.
Slashdot Mirror
It's complicated, and banks/VC's aren't stupid.
Clearly...
Looking at the screenshots... In the same way the qt people didn't "get it" with Qtopia (do they now? I haven't checked for several years).
You can't simply dump a desktop windowing metaphor onto a phone. A phone has a tiny display and painfully inconvenient buttons. Lets see you hit one of those menus, pull a scroll bar. Try reading the tiny fonts.
Just toe the party line like a good little debt slave^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsumer and be thankful.
This is why we have the electoral college IMO.
And look at the fine job it has done for you.
Complete, inalienable right for adults to engage in consensual sex, does not mean that the activity can be conducted for cash.
LOL.
or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
"still"?
There is a fundamental contradiction between being a fiscal and social conservative. One requires a belief that government should be small and weak with reducing regulations and laws. The other requires that the government be large and strong with increasing regulation and laws. The American definition of Liberal is equally contradictory; greater freedom through greater regulation...
These contradictions exist because the political system is one dimensional; left and right, and the political system is one dimensional because the electoral system punishes any candidates which do not conform to those stereotypes.
I see your graph. But my point still holds about legislative impact. During the 90s, the growth of the debt was not exponential, it was logarithmic. In the current decade, the debt growth is pretty much straight-line. The reason I bring up these decades is because extrapolating historic data to apply to present times makes sense only if we do not expect legislative action and short-term trends to affect the debt.
No, it's been generally the same exponential function throughout. There's clearly been some fiddling by politicians but they have made virtually no difference, whether they are Republican or Democrats. A margin under 7%pa here, a margin over 7%pa there is irrelevant it's still growing exponentially. And this makes perfect sense because debt interest is exponential. The growth on a loan can be expressed as (1+N%)^Y. Where N is the percentage, Y is the number of years.
Plot this and compare to the National Debt data.
Debt = 7.09338E-53 * 1.07^Years
Where years are from 1940 to 2007. It fits nicely.
At no point... At NO point has the debt reduced, or in fact failed to increase. Basically. It makes absolutely no difference whether you vote Democrat or Republican.
At any rate, what really matters is the debt as a percentage of GDP.
Well, that really depends whether your salary grows at 7% per year as well, to keep up with GDP, doesn't it. Millions of Americans may disagree.
The simple fact of the matter is that our economy has grown only a little bit slower than the debt over the past 40 years.
An inevitable feature of fractional reserve banking. The money always lags the debt, you have to continually take out new loans to pay the existing debt. Again, makes perfect sense.
And this brings us to one of your original points, which is that funding our debt is dependent on continued growth. While growth is not assured in the short term, it's a safe bet in the long run*
LOL. Peak Oil.
It *is* going to run out and probably relatively soon now. There is nothing in the real world which grows exponentially for ever. Nothing. You always always hit a limit and the fast you grow the faster you hit it.
Fractional reserve lending does not impact the national debt, other than by driving inflation.
The reason we have Personal/Corporate/National Debts at all is because we all use Fractional Reserve Lending.
And if you're concerned about the national debt, you should welcome inflation with open arms. It devalues the debt we hold.
Only at the expense of more debt. That is the nature of the beast. You must constantly run faster than the debt.
Is that they knew they wouldn't be able to get away with Windows 2041.
If you're less than ten years away from retiring, then you should have your saving in a simple interest bank account. No stocks. That way a crash won't devalue your money.
What do you do when the government prints a trillion dollars? Or 1.5 trillion dollars? The reserve ratio in the USA is about 10:1.
The number of little bits of green paper you have may well increase, but they can half in value if the supply of money keeps increasing. That's as big a crash in value as the stock market.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7509715.stm
The truth is that there is no such thing as safe, or stable. Someone will always try to find a way to take it away from you. Particularly bankers. The nature of a fractional reserve means that all such banks take deposits, lend out 90% of it and only hold 10% in case of customers demanding money. Well, if there are any problems and people decide to remove their cash (Washington Mutual), only the first 10% get their money, everyone else loses out. Sure there are insurance schemes and guarantees, but a pension fund needs to be very large so only a fraction will be guaranteed.
I recommend you learn about money, understand how it is manipulated by banks and governments, how it affects stock markets etc. Then take active steps to protect yourself from them all.
The important line in that jpg is the dashed green one.
Only if your earnings increase at more than 7% per year. Every single year.
What/when was your last salary increase?
The debt is not growing exponentially...
Sure it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:US_Federal_Debt(gross).JPG
In fact, I'm about 90% sure it's exponential. It sure fits an exponential curve well. averaging about 7% growth. With percentage growth the doubling time is 100*ln(2)/percent. So at 7% it would be doubling every 10 years.
And just as a check...
1980 909,041
1990 should be double that:
1990 3,206,290
Yikes, even higher than 7%
2000 5,628,700
That's more like it. A fraction under 7%.
It's predictable. I predict with about 90% certainty that the national debt will grow at 7% per year and therefore doubles every 10 years. There you go. "Colin's Law". Though I would like to thank my high school science teachers for an introduction to exponential functions.
Even Excel can do the analysis for you. The function you need is "logest".
LOANS DO NOT CREATE MONEY
Well, that rather depends on how and who's making the loan, doesn't it. If I lend you a fiver. I lose the use of the fiver and no money is created. But if I lent you a fiver but still had the use of half of it, then you have a fiver and I essentially have $2.50. Money is created.
"The bank hath benefit of interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing." - William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England in 1694
"I am afraid the ordinary citizen will not like to be told that the banks can and do create money. And they who control the credit of the nation direct the policy of Governments and hold in the hollow of their hand the destiny of the people." Reginald McKenna, Chairman of the Midland Bank, 1924.
"The banks do create money. They have been doing it for a long time, but they didn't realise it, and they did not admit it. Very few did. You will find it in all sorts of documents, financial textbooks, etc. But in the intervening years, and we must be perfectly frank about these things, there has been a development of thought, until today I doubt very much whether you would get many prominent bankers to attempt to deny that banks create it." H W White, Chairman of the Associated Banks of New Zealand, 1955
"Banks lend by creating credit. They create the means of payment out of nothing. " Ralph M Hawtry, former Secretary to the Treasury.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation
etc etc.
There is another feature of the "PT Cruiser" and other less standard looking cars. You are less subject to the manufacturer redesigning the "face" of the car in order to persuade people to upgrade.
I've noticed even the "prestige" brands doing it more often now.
Two words which American politicians should be particularly worried about; "Chinese consumer". When you hear those two words on American news, you know that China is going to be asking itself what America is good for. At the moment, tens of trillions in IOUs.
e.g.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DA133CF937A25751C1A9659C8B63
first link should be: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9050474362583451279
If your money is created from nothing at the point of a loan and you want to inflate the money supply then you also have to increase the (exponentially growing) debt at the same time.
Now, if you want the "economy" to grow then clearly you have to increase the supply of money faster than the interest on the debt which is consuming credit, or you get a recession.
Whether the debt is public debt, private debt or corporate debt, is irrelevant. The debt must be created. Or at least, it will be until you run out of people willing or able to take on and service the debt, then the system collapses. Doesn't this requirement for perpetual growth sound like something else?
It is a predictable exponential function and therefore has a doubling time, so yes, you could create a "law" about it.
The national debt, the credit crunch, the stockmarket crisis are all the inevitable result of the way your money is created... Long may it continue.
Air resistance.
Tyre rolling resistance.
Then approximately in order you have;
Air conditioning off.
Engine RPMs constant and at the peak of the torque curve if you can.
Clean your air filter.
Fit iridium spark plugs.
Use a fuel with a cleaning agent every 6 months or so.
And probably illegal;
Chip your car so it runs at the ideal gas/air mixture, not simply one which will allow it to pass the regulations.
Get rid of your catalytic converter.
-1
Shouldn't that be cubic centimetres? Y'know... The third dimension.
Cash is easier and anonymous too.
Try this for an idea... The whole concept of "installation" is wrong.
Build your own distributions. One per purpose.
Use something like RockLinux
to build a ramdisk image which contains all of the software and configuration required for a particular application. By "all" I mean "only". You end up with a single file which you put on a tftp server, you boot your servers over dhcp, they pick up the OS image and boot to the image on a ramdisk.
e.g. You might have one squid image, one PHP app server image, one Mysql rdbms server image etc. When the image boots it does whatever is required to run the app successully. e.g. putting a filesystem on the hard disk.
The benefits:
2 admins can run 500-1000 systems in a site easily because there is really only one machine; the network. Logarithmic increase in effort with the number of systems.
And a custom distribution designed for the purpose scales orders of magnitude better still. Build a system which does only the job you want, boot it over the network on 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000 systems just as easily. Just a few people are required.
I agree that a cookie cutter approach like this does not yeild the greatest performance per box, but it does allow for a better performance/administration ratio.
Nope. You have too much state on the machine. You have binary versions, library versions, config files all to manage and distribute. Over time the individual machines diverge in their configuration, even with tools like cfengine and puppet. Which means that errors begin creeping in and things start failing.
It must be extremely expedient for Western governments to punish recalcitrant governments in the developing world by withholding World Bank and IMF "assistance"; and conversely reward compliant ones.
This is the nature of all (fractional reserve) banking.
Have you noticed the calls for co-ordinated action? For a world response? Next it'll be a world council.
Cos a general purpose distribution isn't exactly ideal for providing scalability, particularly when your machines pretty much all provide the same service.
The network is the machine.
It doesn't rhyme well enough.