At the moment there is no permission required to pollute, you could pump as much CO2 into the air as you like. Well, instead of that the government says:
1: You need permission to pollute. 2: You get those permissions from the carbon credit markets. 3: You have to buy them at whatever they cost in that market every year. 4: You can sell permissions if you have more than you need.
Then the government auctions enough credits to represent a slight reduction in the overall production in CO2. Each credit might represent one tonne of CO2. Then each year the government reduces the numbers of credits available in the market. The cost of a credit then increases simply due to the reduction in supply or the increase in demand.
As the cost of emitting the CO2 increases, companies will switch to alternative solutions, choosing whichever they like best.
Of course, this only works if politicians aren't completely corrupt or utter morons, as seems largely to be the case. In that case they might give companies credits and allow them to sell them on the markets, it's basically free money to those companies which receive the credits.
Their currency has been deflating year on year for a decade or so. This is important for manufacturers because it means that the money becomes more valuable over time, not less valuable. This means that when you're spending that money, you want to spend it on something which will last a long time, you buy quality rather than crap. When a currency is inflating, it's best to get rid of it quickly knowing that the longer you hold it the less it's worth. People become less choosy about buying cheap crap.
The result is that the more inflation there is the more disposable the society becomes. PCs are inherently disposable, 2-3 years before being surpassed or upgraded. As the article suggests, making the PC a sort of home hub is probably the best option for producers there. Something like MythTV should go down well.
How much energy do you have to put in to get energy back out. Compare solar and oil. Solar you have to put a load of energy in to refine the silicon, grow crystals then manufacture the cells. The energy you get back out may ultimately be more than you put in, but it's a long slow process. Oil, you drill a hole and suck. What it means is that a much smaller percentage of the economy needs to be involved with an oil economy than is required under a solar economy.
With oil, the return is something like 100:1, reducing as the oil gets scarcer and you have to use lower quality supplies. With solar, it starts out negative and only gradually becomes positive.
The EROEI numbers are questionable, the nuclear industry for instance, claim approx 95:1.
The EROEI numbers indicate the proportion of the economy and society which has to be involved in energy production. If the proportion is 1:1 then 100% of the economy has to be involved in finding and exploiting energy sources.
No, we're not. We've seen no signs of approaching the peak of our ability to extract oil from the earth. It's not about ability. It's about cost.
Increasing oil prices are mostly due to an unstable political environment a panicky speculation market. Primarily increasing demand from China and India... Plus the dollar consistently falling.
Making water from alcohol! Alchemists have been trying to transmute one element into another for hundreds of years! This is really big. If we can transmute carbon into oxygen, or hydrogen it solves the global warming problem entirely.
I've recently switched from Gnome to Xfce in Ubuntu...
The pager/session management works better, it remembers the position of windows when you logout and when you log back in, it puts them back where they were.
The Window List works well. It handles large numbers of windows with ease, where the Gnome window list would be freaking out.
But if MS creates a new language and it's beloved of "web developers", it won't take long to be implemented within Firefox, Opera and Safari. If not beloved and not supported, it'll die.
All the money in existence represents all the buy able "stuff" in the economy. (Wrong) In macroeconomics, money supply ("monetary aggregates", "money stock") is the quantity of currency and money in bank accounts in the hands of the non-bank public available within the economy to purchase goods, services, and securities.
WTF? You just repeated what I said. What are "goods, services, and securities." but buyable "stuff"? And all the money as currency or in bank acccounts etc can be used to buy all that stuff. If you take all the stuff in one hand and all the money in the other, the money represents the value of the stuff because we use money to measure the value of the stuff. Which is fine in and of itself, but as you point out, money acts just like any other commodity and if you start fucking about with the amount of money there is, the value of individual units of money change. The totality of the money in existence still represents the value of the totality of the real stuff in the economy, it's simply divided more finely in the case of inflation or more coarsely in the case of deflation.
What happened to the money supply? Well nothing. What happened to the price of oil today? Well Nothing.
But wait the guy who found all that oil just got rich right? Where does that money come from? Well at some point people with money is going to want to buy oil so someone is going to pay money to extract that oil so they will pay for the land.
Note: At no point in this process does the amount of money change. And the price of all other goods in the economy stay the say it's the price of the land that increases to represent it's new value.
Nope. This is where you're wrong. This would cause deflation in the rest of the economy were the supply of money to actually remain at zero and the level of money to remain constant (with for example a gold backed currency). The relative value of the land increased with respect to everything else in the economy. Everything else would reduce in price and the value of individual units of money increased.
However, the money supply rarely remains at zero. It's only an increase in the amount of money which would allow the land to increase in value/price while leaving the prices of other goods constant.
The supply of money in the UK is increasing at 15% per year just now. The supply of money in the EU is increasing at 12% per year just now and the supply of money to the USA is an unknown figure because they stopped publishing those numbers last year. It's estimated to be at anything from 10% to 24%.
Now back to stock. Owning a stock is not the same thing as owning cash. It's value tends to increase because that's what companies do
????????
Stocks are no different from apples or pork bellies. Their value is determined by supply and demand in exactly the same way as it is for coffee or oil.
The only reason stock prices increase is because the supply of stocks is limited and the demand for the stock has increased. The same is true of money itself, a general reduction in stock prices is because the demand for stocks has reduced relative to the demand for money. The reverse is true, the general devaluation in a currency as the money supply increases leads to a relative increase in the price of stocks, in exactly the same way as it does for apples, pork bellies, coffee or oil. In fact if the money supply were to remain at zero, stocks wouldn't increase in price at all, after the initial crash, they would decrease in price almost exactly in line with the real growth of the "stuff" in the economy.
A booming stock market (and housing market) is a sign of inflation, it just isn't included in RPI or CPI figures for the reasons I mentioned previously.
I don't really care if the economy grows and 100 people are now billionaires I only care how much salt, gold, oil, doctors time etc I can get with my stock not how my relative place in the
This thing will be like the Betamax once there are nanotech vats which will enable anyone to create anything as long as they have raw material i.e. household trash and whatnot. Yeah... Try holding your breath for that, see what happens.
They all started looking like this thing. Someone will develop a better media, multiple colours, multiple media, a more accurate nozzle, finer motor control, better software etc etc. They might well turn out to be the next Hewlett or Packard.
Inflation rates are based on a basket of prices, and prices are what actually matter when you want to know how much your money is really worth (This dollar is worth 2 previously-frozen clams at the supermarket, for instance) Sure, but increases in the stock markets and increases in house prices are just as much part of inflation as frozen clam prices. It's exactly the same phenomenon, though of course they're not included in RPI or CPI figures. The banks and traders wouldn't be able to make money if they were, and politicians wouldn't be able to promise the sun and moon to their voters.
All the money in existence represents all the buyable "stuff" in the economy. Increasing the money doesn't make the stuff any more valuable, it simply makes each unit of money represent a smaller division of the stuff. Now, if someone increases all the money which exists by 10% and the value of your investments in stuff only increases by 9%, your investment has decreased in value, it's a smaller proportion of the economy, it's shrunk relative to the rest of the economy. This may well be fine if the economy has really grown and there's more real buyable stuff around. If the real economy hasn't grown, the money supply has increased by 10% and your investments have only taken 9% then you've actually become poorer. Even if the real economy has grown, the money supply increased by 10% and your investments only increased by 9% then you may not actually be poorer but your investments are still not increasing in proportion with the economy.
This is my point. In general, the vast majority of the people involved in the housing/stock markets are at the very best standing still in reality. A few who are really good do manage to climb up a few percent above the money supply and are really gaining. The rest of the population, the ones earning cash in their salaries/wages, with only cash in the bank earning a few percent, or even bonds, are basically in free fall while the money supply increases. Their value is decreasing annually as a proportion of the economy and they are sliding down the economic ladder.
Take a look at the historical money supply figures. If you're beating those then you're winning, otherwise you're only standing still or falling. e.g. in the uk your stocks would have to have increased at 15% this year just to stand still.
Slashdot Mirror
At the moment there is no permission required to pollute, you could pump as much CO2 into the air as you like. Well, instead of that the government says:
1: You need permission to pollute.
2: You get those permissions from the carbon credit markets.
3: You have to buy them at whatever they cost in that market every year.
4: You can sell permissions if you have more than you need.
Then the government auctions enough credits to represent a slight reduction in the overall production in CO2. Each credit might represent one tonne of CO2. Then each year the government reduces the numbers of credits available in the market. The cost of a credit then increases simply due to the reduction in supply or the increase in demand.
As the cost of emitting the CO2 increases, companies will switch to alternative solutions, choosing whichever they like best.
Of course, this only works if politicians aren't completely corrupt or utter morons, as seems largely to be the case. In that case they might give companies credits and allow them to sell them on the markets, it's basically free money to those companies which receive the credits.
Peak oil is going to do the job instead.
Microsoft taketh away.
2Gb RAM, 3GHz CPU, 20Gb of disk - Windows Vista: 1
4Mb RAM, 4MHz CPU, 500Kb ram disk - Minix: ?
Their currency has been deflating year on year for a decade or so. This is important for manufacturers because it means that the money becomes more valuable over time, not less valuable. This means that when you're spending that money, you want to spend it on something which will last a long time, you buy quality rather than crap. When a currency is inflating, it's best to get rid of it quickly knowing that the longer you hold it the less it's worth. People become less choosy about buying cheap crap.
The result is that the more inflation there is the more disposable the society becomes. PCs are inherently disposable, 2-3 years before being surpassed or upgraded. As the article suggests, making the PC a sort of home hub is probably the best option for producers there. Something like MythTV should go down well.
The year of Linux on the desktop is irrelevant, because the desktop itself is irrelevant. Linux flood fills computing niches. It's already everywhere.
Then sue the fucker. For real.
The alchemists didn't know that... And I think you should see your doctor ASAP, you're badly in need of an irony transplant.
Fool me four times, shame on my customers...
How much energy do you have to put in to get energy back out. Compare solar and oil. Solar you have to put a load of energy in to refine the silicon, grow crystals then manufacture the cells. The energy you get back out may ultimately be more than you put in, but it's a long slow process. Oil, you drill a hole and suck. What it means is that a much smaller percentage of the economy needs to be involved with an oil economy than is required under a solar economy.
With oil, the return is something like 100:1, reducing as the oil gets scarcer and you have to use lower quality supplies. With solar, it starts out negative and only gradually becomes positive.
http://www.environmenthamilton.org/reports/oilEra_spec040918.htm
The EROEI numbers are questionable, the nuclear industry for instance, claim approx 95:1.
The EROEI numbers indicate the proportion of the economy and society which has to be involved in energy production. If the proportion is 1:1 then 100% of the economy has to be involved in finding and exploiting energy sources.
However, Saudi is by far the largest oil producer and:
http://www.iags.org/n0331043.htm
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2331
http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2007/02/saudi_oil_produ_1.html
Making water from alcohol! Alchemists have been trying to transmute one element into another for hundreds of years! This is really big. If we can transmute carbon into oxygen, or hydrogen it solves the global warming problem entirely.
The planet has been saved!
I've recently switched from Gnome to Xfce in Ubuntu...
The pager/session management works better, it remembers the position of windows when you logout and when you log back in, it puts them back where they were.
The Window List works well. It handles large numbers of windows with ease, where the Gnome window list would be freaking out.
It's fast, and light.
But if MS creates a new language and it's beloved of "web developers", it won't take long to be implemented within Firefox, Opera and Safari. If not beloved and not supported, it'll die.
ITYM rubber stamps them.
And one man could command a tank division. No other humans involved. Quite a centralisation of power.
All the money in existence represents all the buy able "stuff" in the economy. (Wrong) In macroeconomics, money supply ("monetary aggregates", "money stock") is the quantity of currency and money in bank accounts in the hands of the non-bank public available within the economy to purchase goods, services, and securities.
WTF? You just repeated what I said. What are "goods, services, and securities." but buyable "stuff"? And all the money as currency or in bank acccounts etc can be used to buy all that stuff. If you take all the stuff in one hand and all the money in the other, the money represents the value of the stuff because we use money to measure the value of the stuff. Which is fine in and of itself, but as you point out, money acts just like any other commodity and if you start fucking about with the amount of money there is, the value of individual units of money change. The totality of the money in existence still represents the value of the totality of the real stuff in the economy, it's simply divided more finely in the case of inflation or more coarsely in the case of deflation.
What happened to the money supply? Well nothing.
What happened to the price of oil today? Well Nothing.
But wait the guy who found all that oil just got rich right? Where does that money come from? Well at some point people with money is going to want to buy oil so someone is going to pay money to extract that oil so they will pay for the land.
Note: At no point in this process does the amount of money change. And the price of all other goods in the economy stay the say it's the price of the land that increases to represent it's new value.
Nope. This is where you're wrong. This would cause deflation in the rest of the economy were the supply of money to actually remain at zero and the level of money to remain constant (with for example a gold backed currency). The relative value of the land increased with respect to everything else in the economy. Everything else would reduce in price and the value of individual units of money increased.
However, the money supply rarely remains at zero. It's only an increase in the amount of money which would allow the land to increase in value/price while leaving the prices of other goods constant.
The supply of money in the UK is increasing at 15% per year just now. The supply of money in the EU is increasing at 12% per year just now and the supply of money to the USA is an unknown figure because they stopped publishing those numbers last year. It's estimated to be at anything from 10% to 24%.
Now back to stock. Owning a stock is not the same thing as owning cash. It's value tends to increase because that's what companies do
????????
Stocks are no different from apples or pork bellies. Their value is determined by supply and demand in exactly the same way as it is for coffee or oil.
The only reason stock prices increase is because the supply of stocks is limited and the demand for the stock has increased. The same is true of money itself, a general reduction in stock prices is because the demand for stocks has reduced relative to the demand for money. The reverse is true, the general devaluation in a currency as the money supply increases leads to a relative increase in the price of stocks, in exactly the same way as it does for apples, pork bellies, coffee or oil. In fact if the money supply were to remain at zero, stocks wouldn't increase in price at all, after the initial crash, they would decrease in price almost exactly in line with the real growth of the "stuff" in the economy.
A booming stock market (and housing market) is a sign of inflation, it just isn't included in RPI or CPI figures for the reasons I mentioned previously.
I don't really care if the economy grows and 100 people are now billionaires I only care how much salt, gold, oil, doctors time etc I can get with my stock not how my relative place in the
The first personal computers...
http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
They all started looking like this thing. Someone will develop a better media, multiple colours, multiple media, a more accurate nozzle, finer motor control, better software etc etc. They might well turn out to be the next Hewlett or Packard.
All the money in existence represents all the buyable "stuff" in the economy. Increasing the money doesn't make the stuff any more valuable, it simply makes each unit of money represent a smaller division of the stuff. Now, if someone increases all the money which exists by 10% and the value of your investments in stuff only increases by 9%, your investment has decreased in value, it's a smaller proportion of the economy, it's shrunk relative to the rest of the economy. This may well be fine if the economy has really grown and there's more real buyable stuff around. If the real economy hasn't grown, the money supply has increased by 10% and your investments have only taken 9% then you've actually become poorer. Even if the real economy has grown, the money supply increased by 10% and your investments only increased by 9% then you may not actually be poorer but your investments are still not increasing in proportion with the economy.
This is my point. In general, the vast majority of the people involved in the housing/stock markets are at the very best standing still in reality. A few who are really good do manage to climb up a few percent above the money supply and are really gaining. The rest of the population, the ones earning cash in their salaries/wages, with only cash in the bank earning a few percent, or even bonds, are basically in free fall while the money supply increases. Their value is decreasing annually as a proportion of the economy and they are sliding down the economic ladder.
Can already do this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope
Maybe someone will use the basic technology to produce some sort of fabber.
Take a look at the historical money supply figures. If you're beating those then you're winning, otherwise you're only standing still or falling. e.g. in the uk your stocks would have to have increased at 15% this year just to stand still.