Sometimes I think that all this litigation is a terrible waste of human effort. Then I try to imagine all these lawyers doing something more productive with their time instead, and I just can't.
We don't know how effective a ban on guns in schools are until we lift the ban on guns. If the number of school shootings go up, then it was effective. If it goes down, then it was ineffective.
I already explained what was wrong with this logic, but I will try again.
Lets say the number of deaths by guns goes down by 100 people every year due to other factors. You repeal the gun bans and this actually causes an additional 50 gun deaths, but because gun deaths normally go down by 100, we see gun deaths go down by only 50.
Someone then claims that repealing the gun bans actually saved 50 lives because after repealing the gun ban, 50 less people died that year, when in fact repealing the gun ban caused 50 deaths.
That's not true either. The logic that B happened after A, therefore A caused B is faulty.
Furthermore, violence in general has been going down. If you do something to increase violenece in society, but it is not enough to counteract the general downward trend in violence, someone can say "We repealed gun laws, and violence went down, therefore gun laws cause violence".
I was referring to the competence of the practitioners of politics (e.g. legislators), as compared to that of the practitioners of software design.
You could probably say that most software engineers are terrible, and I'd agree, but it seems like as an industry we do a good job of ensuring the best engineers work on the most important code. In addition, good code seems to stick around, while bad code ends up getting replaced by good code eventually.
I can't say the same for politics. It seems like people at the highest levels are just as dumb as the rest, and maybe just as dumb as the general population. Laws good or bad, just seem to stay around forever and pile up on top of each other, to the point when it's hard to tell which laws are good and bad. Good laws can become bad when new laws are passed. There isn't even a real attempt at coherence, just short term goals.
Those provisions overlap a bit with the FCC's authority under its own net neutrality law, the Open Internet Order, which already prevents the blockage of websites and services. However, Verizon is in court attempting to kill that law, and there is a real possibility that it could be limited in some way. The Consumer Choice in Online Video Act could provide a hedge against that possible outcome."
We now pass a bunch of redundant laws so that it is harder to repeal them? As a software person, I am horrified.
No, it's the an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged. Don't worry though, Francisco D'Anconia blows up all the Venezuelan Best Buys before anyone gets to loot them.
First off, nobody actually calls in voting rights. Second, I have had voting rights in 2 companies; I have held stock in 34. Common stock doesn't always convey voting rights. Third, common stock can be cancelled.
It's as if I say "The voters decide the winner in an election", and you say "Almost nobody actually votes", as if this is a rebuttal to my statement.
I said IPOs are the only wealth-generating function of the stock market. There are other implications; ideally the stock market functions as a method of transferring partnership with a business, but in practice it doesn't.
Using your logic I could say that IPOs don't generate any wealth either. They just tranfer wealth between the current owners of the company and the new shareholders.
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
This is a pile of nonsense. Non-public companies are bought and sold all the time.
Did I say that *no* public companies are ever sold? No I said that without a market, less companies will be sold. Reading comprehension...
The burden is not there by default because by default vocational education is not accessible to the vast majority of the public. In ages past, in "the good old days", in times long forgotten, there was this thing called "Apprenticeship"
So what stops a kid from deciding to spend 10 years learning blacksmithing right before this skill becomes useless in the face of industrialization?
You keep changing your story. You say this:
It is only natural that people work to enrich themselves; this comes always at the expense of depriving others of wealth.
and then you say
Wealth is created, wealth is transferred. If you create $10 of wealth but you derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to--i.e. you farm wheat, you've created food--you've both increased the wealth in a system and deprived others of wealth.
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
I can't have a discussion with someone that doesn't know what the fuck they are trying to say, and constantly contradicting themselves.
You make these ridiculous "all" or "never" absolutist statements. You: "All bears are brown!" Me: "What about polar bears?", You:"All bears are brown *AND* sometimes they are white".
you go off on these crazy irrelevant tangents that have nothing to do with anything I have said
Why are you talking about sustainability of natural resources? Did I ever claim that we have unlimited resources?
You need to figure out what ever it is you want to say, and try to say it in a clear and concise way. They way you have a discussion, it's like trying to argue with a schizophrenic person. You're all over the place. It's like you are completely ignoring what I am saying and arguing against a different person.
Investment in the stock market moves wealth; it does not create it. In our current system, investment in the stock market decreases wealth: broker's fees and taxes are taken from the movement of wealth in a system that doesn't actually create anything.
The owners of stock are the collective owners of a company. They vote on board members which decide things like who gets hired for high ranking positions in the company and how much they are paid, and ultimately what direction the company is going.
It's a very juvenile perspective that managers don;t actually do anything and that it is only physical labor that creates wealth. It is very easy to waste human effort and create 0 wealth or even negative wealth without proper planning.
You seem to think that IPOs are a good thing, but part of what makes stock in a company valuable is the ability to sell it. If there were no stock market, IPOs would not raise as much capitol.
Stock brokers mainly facilitate "I'm gonna get rich buyin' some stocks!", which has merit only as far as an entertaining and skill-based winnable game (see: Poker); stocks only provide economic benefit in the event of an IPO, where the public is given an opportunity to invest in a company--not necessarily put money in and expect more money out, but at the very least put money in because the company is doing something they think will benefit them (produce wealth in society).
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
Universal higher education--beyond basic math and science and technical skills (computers, etc.)--causes a situation in which students must speculate on the future of the job market, typically resulting in demand booms for certain vocational education (degrees) followed by flooding the market with people who mainly can't get jobs.
There is no crystal ball to tell us what skills will be in demand in the future. Our education system doesn;t create this burden for students. That burden is there by default. Even if education were completely publicly funded, this would only increase the liklihood of people choosing to learn a low demand skill. While their individual financial status won;t be as negatively effected by debt, this will result in higher taxes for the rest of society to pay for useless education.
Furthermore, I just used a student loan as an example of how loans *can* create wealth for everyone involved. I was not defending the American education system.
A teenager who cuts the neighbor's grass for $20 spends less than $20 on the gas and lawn mower, and is doing so to get money for purchase of other goods; he has/is a business, and supplies himself employment. As such, businesses bring in more money than they output--they concentrate wealth.
The teenager is not concentrating wealth. The teenager is converting his labor into the goods he wants (e.g. new clothes). This is no different than a farmer converting his labor to things he wants.
Money is just a tool for trading goods and services. You could ignore all the money that exchanges hands, and what you would see is a society with a bunch of people producing and consuming at different levels. They don't spend a lot of time figuring out whether the trades are fair or not, because money makes this calculation easy.
It is only natural that people work to enrich themselves; this comes always at the expense of depriving others of wealth.
It sounds like it is *you* who are arguing that everything is a zero-sum game.
Can we reach a situation where we can actually avoid all these failure modes perpetually?"
You claimed to already have the answer. You said *ALL* economic systems will eventually collapse.
Yes they are, and they are very commonly used together to form a compound word "zeitgeist".
It's an obvious truth that you can lend money and require more than 100% of the lent money to be paid back as a matter of course of economic activity and not run out of money if the money supply doesn't increase?
Yes, for example, take any economic system that has no lending in it at all. Have one person borrow $10 to buy something and then pay the lender back $11 the next day. Did the money supply run out? No, because we didn't use 100% of the money for borrowing, which is *EXACTLY* what I said.
You're one of those people who thinks the Stock Market isn't a zero-sum game and that magic money comes out of it;
I don;t see how you could infer that from anything I've said. In fact I implied the exact opposite when I said that investment creates wealth, and used the stock market as an example of investing.
Loans are an investment: they transfer wealth from one person to another.
Yes, and if done properly, they create enough wealth so that the wealth transfer form the borrower to the lender is offset by the wealth for the borrower. For example when a student takes out a school loan, the goal is that the wealth of the knowledge the student gains is more valuable than the money spent on the loan. If it is not, then the student's loan was not a good decision.
Loans are an investment for the lender, and *can* be an investment for the borrower as well. The loan is a good investment for the lender if the borrower pays the money back, and it's a good investment for the borrower if whatever he bought with the money increases his income by a margin greater than the payments on the loan.
All economic systems eventually reach a state of unsupportable inflation, excessive wealth concentration, or liquidity failure.
Are you aware of the term falsifiability? Lets say hypothetically this was incorrect, what might be some hypothetical evidence to show that it is wrong?
Drug prohibition have never existed in the first place if they needed to get a constitutional amendment.
That's like saying,"Thank got none of my doors have locks, because it is now much easier to get rid of the burglar that's currently in my house without having to deal with a bunch of pesky locks."
"The government" as in "every government employee" doesn't profit from this. The politicians profit from this with the bribes they are paid in the form of campaign contributions and whatever they get under the table. Maybe you could say that prison guards benefit, but that's very short sighted. If we didn't need so many prison guards they would have probably learned skills for other more productive careers.
And these bureaucrats are making money because the taxes revenue allotted to them X is less than their expenses Y, and the rest is their salaries Z. X - Y = Z. If there were not as many people in jail, X is smaller, but so is Y. You can have the same or even larger Z with a smaller X and a smaller Y, and everyone would benefit. In fact, the government could take the same amount of money X, free all the non-violent prisoners, making Z even higher, and rather than costing money, some of those ex-prisoners may even actually start paying taxes when they get jobs. The government gets more money, inmates have more freedom, and are more productive. If putting people in prison is a way of stealing money, it is a pretty inefficient way to do it.
Prisons are a giant waste of resources. We still need them to remove people that are unfit for society. Any extra people that don't need to be there are a travesty to both justice and economics.
So you can translate from german but you don't know what the term "zeitgeist" (which is also a term used in english) means? You could have just claimed not to have seen the movie without trying to prove you have never even heard of the term before. Even if you had never heard the term, you could have just looked it up.
Should I assume that you are not actually this dumb, and rather are just lying? But that would mean that you are lying in a way that makes you seem dumb, which is pretty dumb. So maybe you are that dumb.
Have you considered I might have a functional brain
I assume that of everyone when I first talk to them. I now have my doubts.
More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
Yes, but I wasn't even trying to argue it. I was stating it as an obvious truth without any support because I didn't think it was required.
just because lending money for interest is allowed, doesn't mean that 100% of the economy is based on lending/borrowing.
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan;
This is false. This assumes you can only work in exchange for an inflationary currency. Even if your paycheck came in dollars, you could immediately exchange your dollars for gold (a non-inflationary currency), and break the cycle, or you could just buy things with it (e.g. food, etc), or you could lend it to someone else (e.g. put it in a bank), or you could invest it (e.g. buying stock).
You call valuing a dollar today higher than a dollar tomorrow "usury", but it doesn't matter what you call it. It is what a rational person would do if you live in a universe where proper investing increases wealth faster than just working hard(e.g. the time used to build a shovel is saved many times over than digging every hole with your hands)
There is an exponential increase in wealth as time goes on, because wealth can be used to create more wealth, and the wealth needed just to survive is a smaller percentage of total wealth, so even more can be used for investing.
There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse.
I could say all mathematical theories are eventually proven wrong. As ridiculous as this statement is, how long will it take to prove I am wrong? Luckily the burden of proof is on me.
Furthermore, you can leave a term like "collapse" vague, and when it turns out that some economic systems just adapt, you can claim that it collapsed and a new one took it's place, regardless of how minor or gradual the change is. Maybe to others the examples of previous economic systems that failed is good evidence that *all* economic systems fail, but this is a logical fallacy.
You need more than $100 to pay off a $100 loan. There is $100 in the money supply. How do you provide more than $100?
Your question is how would it work if someone borrowed the entire supply of bitcoins and had to pay it back with interest?
It would work the same way as any other currency, in that it wouldn't actually work, and you'd have to provide the interest in some other currency or commodity.
Even if you did this in dollars, simply printing more dollars in order to pay the interest is basically like not paying the interest at all.
Inflation is not some tool designed to allow the payment of interest. Interest is supposed to represent a real transfer of wealth in exchange for assuming risk and opportunity cost. By loaning money, you are trying to increase your wealth not just break even with inflation.
I can tell you've been watching zeitgeist plus whatever anti-federal reserves conspiracy "documentaries" you've managed to find, but the arguments that are presented in these circles (and that you are repeating), valid or not, is not relevant to this discussion.
You made a claim that interest is necessary, and have simply recited a bunch of non-sequiturs to support that claim.
"People would not be able to pay the interest on their loans" is not a reason we need inflation. If this were true, we might as well simply eliminate inflation and interest and charge a tax on money sitting in vaults or something
If I'm an alien on earth that means I have access to technology far more advanced than a species whose farthest manned mission was to their own moon. I don't think any of these puny humans will be making me do anything I don't want to do. They're lucky I just want to learn about them rather than killing them all to turn their whole planet into a intergalactic space-golf resort.
The $200 price in my example was already accounting for electricity, hw, and time. But lets say it costs me $400. Would I ever spend $800 on a bitcoin if I can mine one for $400? My point is that there is an upper bound to the value of a bitcoin at any given time.
I'm an alien, convince me why an atom with 79 protons is more valuable than most others. Convince me why it is worth destroying entire civilizations in order to stockpile this element into vaults. Do you need it to survive? Do you need it to procreate? What makes this substance so valuable?
why would it? Anybody can propagate a transaction. Just because you sent a packet doesn't mean that you are the person who knows the private key required to sign the transaction. Lots of people help propagate transactions into the blockchain. You only know which wallets the transactions are between, just because you see a transaction coming from a particular computer, it doesn't mean that computer was the originator of the transaction. this computer could just be propagating the transaction.
Notice how when you borrow $100, you need more than $100 to pay it off? That's why we need inflation for our economy to function.
You're retarded. Even if there were no inflation at all or even deflation, you would need more than $100 to pay of a loan to compensate the lender for opportunity costs. The interest rate would just be lower than with an inflationary currency.
I didn't study economics in college. I got a degree in computer science, but I can use my brain to think. It's pretty obvious to me you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I think that all this litigation is a terrible waste of human effort. Then I try to imagine all these lawyers doing something more productive with their time instead, and I just can't.
We don't know how effective a ban on guns in schools are until we lift the ban on guns. If the number of school shootings go up, then it was effective. If it goes down, then it was ineffective.
I already explained what was wrong with this logic, but I will try again.
Lets say the number of deaths by guns goes down by 100 people every year due to other factors. You repeal the gun bans and this actually causes an additional 50 gun deaths, but because gun deaths normally go down by 100, we see gun deaths go down by only 50.
Someone then claims that repealing the gun bans actually saved 50 lives because after repealing the gun ban, 50 less people died that year, when in fact repealing the gun ban caused 50 deaths.
So no, your logic is not impeccable.
I wasn't disagreeing with you that jhon is wrong. I was just saying that your logic was wrong too.
That's not true either. The logic that B happened after A, therefore A caused B is faulty.
Furthermore, violence in general has been going down. If you do something to increase violenece in society, but it is not enough to counteract the general downward trend in violence, someone can say "We repealed gun laws, and violence went down, therefore gun laws cause violence".
Calm down, I wasn't talking about you.
I was referring to the competence of the practitioners of politics (e.g. legislators), as compared to that of the practitioners of software design.
You could probably say that most software engineers are terrible, and I'd agree, but it seems like as an industry we do a good job of ensuring the best engineers work on the most important code. In addition, good code seems to stick around, while bad code ends up getting replaced by good code eventually.
I can't say the same for politics. It seems like people at the highest levels are just as dumb as the rest, and maybe just as dumb as the general population. Laws good or bad, just seem to stay around forever and pile up on top of each other, to the point when it's hard to tell which laws are good and bad. Good laws can become bad when new laws are passed. There isn't even a real attempt at coherence, just short term goals.
Everything is complicated when you are dumb.
No.
Would you be horrified if at this code?
int function(Class *ptr) {
__//Check for NULL multiple time to mitigate the possibility of erroneous reads reads
__if (!ptr)
____return -1;
__if (!ptr)
____return -1;
__if (!ptr)
____return -1;
__return ptr->something();
}
This is a form of layered security too.
Those provisions overlap a bit with the FCC's authority under its own net neutrality law, the Open Internet Order, which already prevents the blockage of websites and services. However, Verizon is in court attempting to kill that law, and there is a real possibility that it could be limited in some way. The Consumer Choice in Online Video Act could provide a hedge against that possible outcome."
We now pass a bunch of redundant laws so that it is harder to repeal them? As a software person, I am horrified.
No, it's the an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged. Don't worry though, Francisco D'Anconia blows up all the Venezuelan Best Buys before anyone gets to loot them.
What more do people want?
I would want the 'Please pull over safely. Car is shutting down.' part to happen *before* the fire.
First off, nobody actually calls in voting rights. Second, I have had voting rights in 2 companies; I have held stock in 34. Common stock doesn't always convey voting rights. Third, common stock can be cancelled.
It's as if I say "The voters decide the winner in an election", and you say "Almost nobody actually votes", as if this is a rebuttal to my statement.
I said IPOs are the only wealth-generating function of the stock market. There are other implications; ideally the stock market functions as a method of transferring partnership with a business, but in practice it doesn't.
Using your logic I could say that IPOs don't generate any wealth either. They just tranfer wealth between the current owners of the company and the new shareholders.
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
This is a pile of nonsense. Non-public companies are bought and sold all the time.
Did I say that *no* public companies are ever sold? No I said that without a market, less companies will be sold. Reading comprehension...
The burden is not there by default because by default vocational education is not accessible to the vast majority of the public. In ages past, in "the good old days", in times long forgotten, there was this thing called "Apprenticeship"
So what stops a kid from deciding to spend 10 years learning blacksmithing right before this skill becomes useless in the face of industrialization?
You keep changing your story. You say this:
It is only natural that people work to enrich themselves; this comes always at the expense of depriving others of wealth.
and then you say
Wealth is created, wealth is transferred. If you create $10 of wealth but you derive $15 of wealth from others who you pass it on to--i.e. you farm wheat, you've created food--you've both increased the wealth in a system and deprived others of wealth.
In other words enrishing oneself does *NOT* *AWLAYS* come at the expense of depriving others of wealth!!!
I can't have a discussion with someone that doesn't know what the fuck they are trying to say, and constantly contradicting themselves.
You make these ridiculous "all" or "never" absolutist statements. You: "All bears are brown!" Me: "What about polar bears?", You:"All bears are brown *AND* sometimes they are white".
you go off on these crazy irrelevant tangents that have nothing to do with anything I have said
Why are you talking about sustainability of natural resources? Did I ever claim that we have unlimited resources?
You need to figure out what ever it is you want to say, and try to say it in a clear and concise way. They way you have a discussion, it's like trying to argue with a schizophrenic person. You're all over the place. It's like you are completely ignoring what I am saying and arguing against a different person.
I'm done.
Investment in the stock market moves wealth; it does not create it. In our current system, investment in the stock market decreases wealth: broker's fees and taxes are taken from the movement of wealth in a system that doesn't actually create anything.
The owners of stock are the collective owners of a company. They vote on board members which decide things like who gets hired for high ranking positions in the company and how much they are paid, and ultimately what direction the company is going.
It's a very juvenile perspective that managers don;t actually do anything and that it is only physical labor that creates wealth. It is very easy to waste human effort and create 0 wealth or even negative wealth without proper planning.
You seem to think that IPOs are a good thing, but part of what makes stock in a company valuable is the ability to sell it. If there were no stock market, IPOs would not raise as much capitol.
Stock brokers mainly facilitate "I'm gonna get rich buyin' some stocks!", which has merit only as far as an entertaining and skill-based winnable game (see: Poker); stocks only provide economic benefit in the event of an IPO, where the public is given an opportunity to invest in a company--not necessarily put money in and expect more money out, but at the very least put money in because the company is doing something they think will benefit them (produce wealth in society).
You seem to be confusing day trading as the the entire stock market. The ability to buy and sell stocks creates liquidity of ownership. Without this, you will be more likely to have people who don't want to manage or own a company stuck doing this job.
Universal higher education--beyond basic math and science and technical skills (computers, etc.)--causes a situation in which students must speculate on the future of the job market, typically resulting in demand booms for certain vocational education (degrees) followed by flooding the market with people who mainly can't get jobs.
There is no crystal ball to tell us what skills will be in demand in the future. Our education system doesn;t create this burden for students. That burden is there by default. Even if education were completely publicly funded, this would only increase the liklihood of people choosing to learn a low demand skill. While their individual financial status won;t be as negatively effected by debt, this will result in higher taxes for the rest of society to pay for useless education.
Furthermore, I just used a student loan as an example of how loans *can* create wealth for everyone involved. I was not defending the American education system.
A teenager who cuts the neighbor's grass for $20 spends less than $20 on the gas and lawn mower, and is doing so to get money for purchase of other goods; he has/is a business, and supplies himself employment. As such, businesses bring in more money than they output--they concentrate wealth.
The teenager is not concentrating wealth. The teenager is converting his labor into the goods he wants (e.g. new clothes). This is no different than a farmer converting his labor to things he wants.
Money is just a tool for trading goods and services. You could ignore all the money that exchanges hands, and what you would see is a society with a bunch of people producing and consuming at different levels. They don't spend a lot of time figuring out whether the trades are fair or not, because money makes this calculation easy.
It is only natural that people work to enrich themselves; this comes always at the expense of depriving others of wealth.
It sounds like it is *you* who are arguing that everything is a zero-sum game.
Can we reach a situation where we can actually avoid all these failure modes perpetually?"
You claimed to already have the answer. You said *ALL* economic systems will eventually collapse.
Zeit and Geist are very commonly known words
Yes they are, and they are very commonly used together to form a compound word "zeitgeist".
It's an obvious truth that you can lend money and require more than 100% of the lent money to be paid back as a matter of course of economic activity and not run out of money if the money supply doesn't increase?
Yes, for example, take any economic system that has no lending in it at all. Have one person borrow $10 to buy something and then pay the lender back $11 the next day. Did the money supply run out? No, because we didn't use 100% of the money for borrowing, which is *EXACTLY* what I said.
You're one of those people who thinks the Stock Market isn't a zero-sum game and that magic money comes out of it;
I don;t see how you could infer that from anything I've said. In fact I implied the exact opposite when I said that investment creates wealth, and used the stock market as an example of investing.
Loans are an investment: they transfer wealth from one person to another.
Yes, and if done properly, they create enough wealth so that the wealth transfer form the borrower to the lender is offset by the wealth for the borrower. For example when a student takes out a school loan, the goal is that the wealth of the knowledge the student gains is more valuable than the money spent on the loan. If it is not, then the student's loan was not a good decision.
Loans are an investment for the lender, and *can* be an investment for the borrower as well. The loan is a good investment for the lender if the borrower pays the money back, and it's a good investment for the borrower if whatever he bought with the money increases his income by a margin greater than the payments on the loan.
All economic systems eventually reach a state of unsupportable inflation, excessive wealth concentration, or liquidity failure.
Are you aware of the term falsifiability? Lets say hypothetically this was incorrect, what might be some hypothetical evidence to show that it is wrong?
Drug prohibition have never existed in the first place if they needed to get a constitutional amendment.
That's like saying,"Thank got none of my doors have locks, because it is now much easier to get rid of the burglar that's currently in my house without having to deal with a bunch of pesky locks."
"The government" as in "every government employee" doesn't profit from this. The politicians profit from this with the bribes they are paid in the form of campaign contributions and whatever they get under the table. Maybe you could say that prison guards benefit, but that's very short sighted. If we didn't need so many prison guards they would have probably learned skills for other more productive careers.
And these bureaucrats are making money because the taxes revenue allotted to them X is less than their expenses Y, and the rest is their salaries Z. X - Y = Z. If there were not as many people in jail, X is smaller, but so is Y. You can have the same or even larger Z with a smaller X and a smaller Y, and everyone would benefit. In fact, the government could take the same amount of money X, free all the non-violent prisoners, making Z even higher, and rather than costing money, some of those ex-prisoners may even actually start paying taxes when they get jobs. The government gets more money, inmates have more freedom, and are more productive. If putting people in prison is a way of stealing money, it is a pretty inefficient way to do it.
Prisons are a giant waste of resources. We still need them to remove people that are unfit for society. Any extra people that don't need to be there are a travesty to both justice and economics.
What is "Zeitgeist"? Time ghost?
So you can translate from german but you don't know what the term "zeitgeist" (which is also a term used in english) means? You could have just claimed not to have seen the movie without trying to prove you have never even heard of the term before. Even if you had never heard the term, you could have just looked it up.
Should I assume that you are not actually this dumb, and rather are just lying? But that would mean that you are lying in a way that makes you seem dumb, which is pretty dumb. So maybe you are that dumb.
Have you considered I might have a functional brain
I assume that of everyone when I first talk to them. I now have my doubts.
More importantly, are you honestly trying to argue that we could have usury in an economic system that doesn't experience inflation?
Yes, but I wasn't even trying to argue it. I was stating it as an obvious truth without any support because I didn't think it was required.
just because lending money for interest is allowed, doesn't mean that 100% of the economy is based on lending/borrowing.
This works even when you bring into the argument that the primary source of wealth is labor, and that you can work more to obtain more money: that money comes from somewhere, and its eventual source is a loan;
This is false. This assumes you can only work in exchange for an inflationary currency. Even if your paycheck came in dollars, you could immediately exchange your dollars for gold (a non-inflationary currency), and break the cycle, or you could just buy things with it (e.g. food, etc), or you could lend it to someone else (e.g. put it in a bank), or you could invest it (e.g. buying stock).
You call valuing a dollar today higher than a dollar tomorrow "usury", but it doesn't matter what you call it. It is what a rational person would do if you live in a universe where proper investing increases wealth faster than just working hard(e.g. the time used to build a shovel is saved many times over than digging every hole with your hands)
There is an exponential increase in wealth as time goes on, because wealth can be used to create more wealth, and the wealth needed just to survive is a smaller percentage of total wealth, so even more can be used for investing.
There is actually no working economic system; they all eventually collapse.
I could say all mathematical theories are eventually proven wrong. As ridiculous as this statement is, how long will it take to prove I am wrong? Luckily the burden of proof is on me.
Furthermore, you can leave a term like "collapse" vague, and when it turns out that some economic systems just adapt, you can claim that it collapsed and a new one took it's place, regardless of how minor or gradual the change is. Maybe to others the examples of previous economic systems that failed is good evidence that *all* economic systems fail, but this is a logical fallacy.
You need more than $100 to pay off a $100 loan. There is $100 in the money supply. How do you provide more than $100?
Your question is how would it work if someone borrowed the entire supply of bitcoins and had to pay it back with interest?
It would work the same way as any other currency, in that it wouldn't actually work, and you'd have to provide the interest in some other currency or commodity.
Even if you did this in dollars, simply printing more dollars in order to pay the interest is basically like not paying the interest at all.
Inflation is not some tool designed to allow the payment of interest. Interest is supposed to represent a real transfer of wealth in exchange for assuming risk and opportunity cost. By loaning money, you are trying to increase your wealth not just break even with inflation.
I can tell you've been watching zeitgeist plus whatever anti-federal reserves conspiracy "documentaries" you've managed to find, but the arguments that are presented in these circles (and that you are repeating), valid or not, is not relevant to this discussion.
You made a claim that interest is necessary, and have simply recited a bunch of non-sequiturs to support that claim.
"People would not be able to pay the interest on their loans" is not a reason we need inflation. If this were true, we might as well simply eliminate inflation and interest and charge a tax on money sitting in vaults or something
If I'm an alien on earth that means I have access to technology far more advanced than a species whose farthest manned mission was to their own moon. I don't think any of these puny humans will be making me do anything I don't want to do. They're lucky I just want to learn about them rather than killing them all to turn their whole planet into a intergalactic space-golf resort.
Which tend to be people whom have Bitcoin wallets.
Sort of like people who wear hoodies tend to be criminals?
The $200 price in my example was already accounting for electricity, hw, and time. But lets say it costs me $400. Would I ever spend $800 on a bitcoin if I can mine one for $400? My point is that there is an upper bound to the value of a bitcoin at any given time.
I'm an alien, convince me why an atom with 79 protons is more valuable than most others. Convince me why it is worth destroying entire civilizations in order to stockpile this element into vaults. Do you need it to survive? Do you need it to procreate? What makes this substance so valuable?
why would it? Anybody can propagate a transaction. Just because you sent a packet doesn't mean that you are the person who knows the private key required to sign the transaction. Lots of people help propagate transactions into the blockchain. You only know which wallets the transactions are between, just because you see a transaction coming from a particular computer, it doesn't mean that computer was the originator of the transaction. this computer could just be propagating the transaction.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#What_do_I_call_the_various_denominations_of_bitcoin.3F
One exception is the "satoshi" which is smallest denomination currently possible
0.00000001 BTC = 1 satoshi (pronounced sa-toh-shee)
Notice how when you borrow $100, you need more than $100 to pay it off? That's why we need inflation for our economy to function.
You're retarded. Even if there were no inflation at all or even deflation, you would need more than $100 to pay of a loan to compensate the lender for opportunity costs. The interest rate would just be lower than with an inflationary currency.
I didn't study economics in college. I got a degree in computer science, but I can use my brain to think. It's pretty obvious to me you don't know what the fuck you are talking about.