I am not saying that all speculation that has happened in history has been a good thing, but I think overall it has been. When you have people who are good speculators that are consistently predicting the future relatively accurately, what you end up with is good businesses and industries being valued higher than businesses and industries that are not as strong economically.
On the flip side, poor speculators are supposed to lose their money, giving them a smaller influence in the total economy. This system has been perverted by allowing poor speculators to keep their riches and continue to have a large influence.
You could say the problem is with speculators. But if you look beyond that you could also say the problem is that certain government bailouts create a moral hazard and encourage risky/poor speculation by not allowing the bad speculators to fail.
In San Diego we have a gigantic wild fire about every 5 years. You could say that this is because we failed to put the fires out in time. But we we really have is about 20x the amount of dry brush that is natural because we have been so good at putting out fires. The problem is that this causes the fires that do happen to have 20x the amount of fuel, and we get real large wild fires.
We allowed ourselves to get caught in the trap of letting some investment banks become too big to fail, but it was not allowing them to fail that made it possible for them to get this big in the first place. When you prevent the natural course of events (wild fires clearing out brush, poorly managed companies from failing), you just push this disaster farther into the future and with more serious consequences.
I am not saying the solution to both problems is exactly the same, but I think the problems themselves are similar and require similar solutions.
It's not the difference between working with knowns and unknowns.
Because if they advertised minimum guaranteed speeds then you wouldn't know the potential speeds. You seem to care about minimum speeds and not potential speeds, but I don't think that is what you should care about.
Let's say your internet speed over a year has fluctuated between 15Mbps and 100Mbps. You think your minimum speed is 15, but it's not. You're minimum speed is actually probably closer to 1Mbps or maybe even lower. The fact that not everyone uses the internet at the same time, causes you to never reach your minimum speed.
As much of a disservice it is to tell you that your speed is 100Mbps when it is almost never 100, it is also a disservice to tell you that your speed is 1Mbps when the lowest it has gone in a year is 15Mbps.
You could pass a law making it illegal to advertise a speed that is not upheld 100% of the time for all customers. ISPs would simply advertise a speed of 0 to avoid liability if the fines were high enough. Customers would still figure out that it's actually somewhere between 15Mbps and 100Mbps.
My point is that inaccurate advertisements of speed are bad if they are too high or too low. The minimum speed you are guaranteed is much lower than you will probably ever see. In fact if you want to be technical, your minimum guaranteed speed is 0 because the ISP can't guarantee that there will be no outages.
No I am not arguing that ISPs are doing a good job of advertising speeds honestly. I am saying that advertising the minimum guaranteed speed is not any better.
Running at full bandwidth 24/7 means that they are capping you during off peak hours. If I can do 24Mbps during peak hours and off peak hours, then that means there is unused bandwidth at off peak hours that I could be using but are not.
You can go on forums to see what speeds customers are actually getting. Even if the companies were telling the truth, you should still be doing research on products before you buy them, to verify that they are telling the truth.
It would be better if nobody ever lied, but these lies are pretty transparent, and I don't think they are really fooling that many people. They are just irritating rather than actually being harmful.
Lobbying is only useful when voters are dumb. If we had an engaged and informed electorate, all the money from lobbyists would not help politicians get elected, because you can only transform money into votes when the voters are ignorant.
The practice of metering and capping it it for every user adds costs to every user that exceeds the cost of the bandwidth itself.
Not true at all.
Where on earth did you hear this?
The ISP knows your MAC address, it knows your IP address. All they need to do is tally packet sizes. My cheap-ass buffalo wireless router can do this.
Tallying packet sizes does incur and overhead cost, but it's small and nothing compared to all the crazy traffic analysis that goes on this those beefy cisco routers.
Well for one thing they could raise taxes and have the government pay for the lines and have ISPs just administer the network. That way if an ISP sucks the public can vote to hire a new ISP to administer the public lines.
Unfortunately voters are stupid, and therefore we have politicians who won't raise taxes even if it means lower costs for everyone in the long term.
Where I live we used to have redlight cameras. Because nobody wanted to pay for them, we made a deal where we get the cameras for free, but the companies that built the cameras get the money from the traffic tickets. These companies would try to catch everyone one they could because that's how they made money. Now we voted to get rid of them because people felt abused.
I actually think redlight cameras is a really good idea if you use it as a way to catch people unsafely going through red lights cheaply (e.g. freeing police to do more important things) rather than as a way for politicians an corporations to get rich.
Would you really be happier if no ISPs ever oversold their services and they sold you exactly how much you would get?
Instead of 10/5 you'd get 1/0.5 because that's what they can guarantee if everyone uses their internet at the same time. When almost no one is using it, you still get 1/0.5 because the ISP needs to keep that bandwidth ready for the other people that might us it at any time.
Yeah I don't like being lied to either. But we all know how it works. We all know that we aren't going to get the advertised bandwidth at all times. No one is getting tricked. This is a better system than giving everyone their own dedicated guaranteed small data channel.
Maybe it would be nicer if they said you get 1/0.5 and usually it's 10x faster because most people are not using the internet at once, but the product you would get would be the same and it would cost the same thing.
Seriously the ISPs who get behind metering and capping are just trying to stop the cord cutter movement.
I am a cord cutter. But that doesn't mean this is a bad idea.
Lets say hypothetically, that the broadband companies are not allowed to charge customers on average more than they are now. why is paying per byte bad?
Some people will pay less, some people more, and some the same.
Do I trust the cable companies to not attempt to make more money through switching payment schemes? no, but I don;t trust them to refrain from trying to make more money if they keep the existing system either.
The nice thing about charging per byte, is that you can incentivize people to create traffic that doesn;t require low latency (torrenting, etc) during off peak hours because it will be cheaper. This will lead to higher bandwidth for everybody.
Imagine if we could all use unlimited electricity all day long and just paid a flat monthly rate. We wouldn't have any incentive to use less power. In fact the power companies would be forced to cap our wattage to like 500 watts, and we'd need to charge huge batteries all day long so we could run our major appliances.
This is how internet works now.
Since Google isn't in the TV game really, they have nothing to lose by letting you pass all the data you want.
google does not have a data cap, but instead has a bandwidth cap. Bandwidth caps are necessary when you don't charge people per byte. This is what stops people from using more than their share, when you let them use "unlimited" data. The data is in fact not unlimited because your monthly limit is precisely equal to your datarate multiplied by 1 month.
And from a theoretical perspective, I don't see any reason to believe that the total welfare of a collection of individual agents is maximized when each agent focuses on maximizing its own individual welfare
It depends on how you are valuing "total welfare". Lets say society A has 100 people and 100 apples, each person having 1 apple. Society B has 200 apples and 100 people, but all the apples belong to one person. Which society has a higher "total welfare"? I would say society B does.
Maybe having more total stuff is not necessarily better, especially if there is great disparity.
What about society C where there is 300 apples and 100 people. 99 people have 2 apples each, and one guy has 101 apples. I think everyone agrees this is better than society B. But is it better than society A? It has more wealth disparity, but each person has more apples.
At the moment I am not arguing that capitalism leads to society C, but I think it is important to decide the answer to this question of "What is it we actually want?", "more stuff" or "more equality", before we can effectively evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of various systems.
But is there actually a sound mathematical/scientific reason to conclude that your claim is valid in a very general sense? Or is it just that you can sometimes find specific cases where it's true and you'd like to believe that it's true as a matter of wishful thinking?
Aside from the fact that the advent of capitalism coincided with the most dramatic increase in economic growth ever, no. Granted this could all just be a correlation rather than a cause. Or maybe the increase in economic growth is what caused us to go to capitalism. I don't think there are any definite answers, but if you consider that what came before capitalism was mercantilism and feudalism, I don't think we are in such bad shape
Poor people today have access to medicine and cell phones. I would rather be a poor person today than a nobleman in the middle ages. Is this a result of capitalism? I would argue that it is a big part, but I don't claim to have conclusive proof. I don't have a way to compare our world with an alternate reality where capitalism was replaced with something else.
If you believe anything that economists have to say, you can certainly find many well regarded ones that have written volumes on the subject of how capitalism leads to efficiency. Even the ones that believe in heavy government interference, will usually still regard capitalism as an engine for growth even if it is a suboptimal one.
Yes the mugger redistributes money as well. It is the job of government to prevent mugging, otherwise the free market will reward the most efficient muggers.
In order for the free market to work well, the government must set the rules so that the most efficient way to profit is by making better/cheaper products.
Wealth is more than just raw materials. Matter and energy can not be created, and in fact all systems increase in entropy, but luckily lack of entropy is not equivalent to wealth.
There is more entropy in the universe after the invention of the internet, but the internet is a source of abundant wealth. It saves an uncountable amount of man hours of human labor. The whole advancement of technology means that more humans can spend more time on more fun things rather than on finding food and building shelter. We can spend less time being sick and mourning dead relatives. This is what wealth is. We can be wealthier with less materials and less energy if we have more/better information.
If JP Morgan collapsed tonight, we (as a society) would certainly care about what happens.
Why? Because some "random companies" are so big that their troubles would shake the (inter)national economy.
1. If our country is contingent upon a particular company to survive, then I don;t think it fits the definition of "some random company".
2. The reason we have companies like this is because they got preferential treatment (e.g. regulations that benefited them over their competitors, along with bailouts, etc)
3. There is no reason that we need to have a system with too big to fail companies, we just don't yet have the political will to remove corrupt and inept politicians who help foster the current environment.
The market is not self regulating, unless it is self regulating towards oligopolies, oligopsonies, cartels, and general shittiness.
I didn't say it was 100% self regulating in every imaginable respect. The government does not need to decide that iphone is a better phone than the blackberry. The market did this one it's own. If mobile phone production levels and profits were determined by the government, then this would be an area of self regulation that would cease to exist.
I assume you don't think *every* single feature of the free market is shitty. I by the same token don't believe that *nothing* about the free market is shitty.
There was no room in his ideology for private companies to intentionally abandon risk management and externalize the risk by selling it off.
So despite his attempts to mince words, the results of his Ayn Randian ideology ended up being exactly what one would historically expect from not having meaningful regulation.
1. The whole idea of a federal reserve, is in itself, an abomination according to Ayn Rand's philosophy.
2. I am not a proponent of Ayn Rand's philosophy so even if Greenspan where a reputable source on the matter, his repudiation wouldn't really affect me.
I am talking about efficiency in the sense of how well it works vs. how much management is required to make it work that well. Since the free market requires relatively very little management, the fact that it works at all is pretty amazing. Some things are not best under the control of the free market, particularly things which need to be fair (e.g. the justice system, etc), however, these things require an exceptional amount of effort to ensure that they work properly.
The free market would arguably be more efficient at running the justice system, if fairness was not an essential requirement, but it is, so not only is it not more efficient, but also not even up to the task. So there you go. I present an example case where I believe the free market is not the right tool for the job.
I was responding to a comment that suggested this was a failure of the private sector. I responded that this is an example of what the private sector is supposed to be doing, and actually does quite well. When you talk about 1 company in the private sector losing money, this doesn't mean the private sector as a whole lost wealth (e.g. what happened here). When you talk about the public sector losing money, it almost always translates to lost wealth.
As a society we don't need to care what happens to some random company. This is a great strength of the private sector, and this property is what is referenced by the phrase "the market is self-regulating". The government however is not self regulating. It is regulated by voters. We *do* need to care if a government agency loses money, because it is usually not losing it to some competing government agency. It is usually just wasted.
The wealth that the money represented was not "lost", but rather redistributed. Efficient redistribution of wealth is a strength of the private sector not a weakness. The private sector is good at redistributing money where it needs to go for economic growth. This company was not exercising an appropriate level of caution and it's money was redistributed elsewhere.
I believe this is only true of actual Turing machines (i.e. with 1 infinite tape) and not true of Turing equivalent machines which have no more computational power, but can compute faster, with less memory, and smaller instruction sets.
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I am not saying that all speculation that has happened in history has been a good thing, but I think overall it has been. When you have people who are good speculators that are consistently predicting the future relatively accurately, what you end up with is good businesses and industries being valued higher than businesses and industries that are not as strong economically.
On the flip side, poor speculators are supposed to lose their money, giving them a smaller influence in the total economy. This system has been perverted by allowing poor speculators to keep their riches and continue to have a large influence.
You could say the problem is with speculators. But if you look beyond that you could also say the problem is that certain government bailouts create a moral hazard and encourage risky/poor speculation by not allowing the bad speculators to fail.
In San Diego we have a gigantic wild fire about every 5 years. You could say that this is because we failed to put the fires out in time. But we we really have is about 20x the amount of dry brush that is natural because we have been so good at putting out fires. The problem is that this causes the fires that do happen to have 20x the amount of fuel, and we get real large wild fires.
We allowed ourselves to get caught in the trap of letting some investment banks become too big to fail, but it was not allowing them to fail that made it possible for them to get this big in the first place. When you prevent the natural course of events (wild fires clearing out brush, poorly managed companies from failing), you just push this disaster farther into the future and with more serious consequences.
I am not saying the solution to both problems is exactly the same, but I think the problems themselves are similar and require similar solutions.
define reliable...
a week every 3 years the speed is 0 due to equipment failure
one day every year the speed drops to 1 Mbps due to exceptionally high usage
one day every month the speed drops to 5 Mbps due to high usage
a couple hours every week the speed drops to 10 Mbps due to cyclical patterns
a couple hours every day the speed drops to 15 Mbps due to cyclical patterns
The rest of the time the speed is 25Mpbs
What speed should be advertised?
I was stating an opinion of the way things are, not expressing a desire, or implying that this desire was likely to become a reality.
It's not the difference between working with knowns and unknowns.
Because if they advertised minimum guaranteed speeds then you wouldn't know the potential speeds. You seem to care about minimum speeds and not potential speeds, but I don't think that is what you should care about.
Let's say your internet speed over a year has fluctuated between 15Mbps and 100Mbps. You think your minimum speed is 15, but it's not. You're minimum speed is actually probably closer to 1Mbps or maybe even lower. The fact that not everyone uses the internet at the same time, causes you to never reach your minimum speed.
As much of a disservice it is to tell you that your speed is 100Mbps when it is almost never 100, it is also a disservice to tell you that your speed is 1Mbps when the lowest it has gone in a year is 15Mbps.
You could pass a law making it illegal to advertise a speed that is not upheld 100% of the time for all customers. ISPs would simply advertise a speed of 0 to avoid liability if the fines were high enough. Customers would still figure out that it's actually somewhere between 15Mbps and 100Mbps.
My point is that inaccurate advertisements of speed are bad if they are too high or too low. The minimum speed you are guaranteed is much lower than you will probably ever see. In fact if you want to be technical, your minimum guaranteed speed is 0 because the ISP can't guarantee that there will be no outages.
No I am not arguing that ISPs are doing a good job of advertising speeds honestly. I am saying that advertising the minimum guaranteed speed is not any better.
Running at full bandwidth 24/7 means that they are capping you during off peak hours. If I can do 24Mbps during peak hours and off peak hours, then that means there is unused bandwidth at off peak hours that I could be using but are not.
You can go on forums to see what speeds customers are actually getting. Even if the companies were telling the truth, you should still be doing research on products before you buy them, to verify that they are telling the truth. It would be better if nobody ever lied, but these lies are pretty transparent, and I don't think they are really fooling that many people. They are just irritating rather than actually being harmful.
Lobbying is only useful when voters are dumb. If we had an engaged and informed electorate, all the money from lobbyists would not help politicians get elected, because you can only transform money into votes when the voters are ignorant.
The practice of metering and capping it it for every user adds costs to every user that exceeds the cost of the bandwidth itself.
Not true at all.
Where on earth did you hear this?
The ISP knows your MAC address, it knows your IP address. All they need to do is tally packet sizes. My cheap-ass buffalo wireless router can do this.
Tallying packet sizes does incur and overhead cost, but it's small and nothing compared to all the crazy traffic analysis that goes on this those beefy cisco routers.
Well for one thing they could raise taxes and have the government pay for the lines and have ISPs just administer the network. That way if an ISP sucks the public can vote to hire a new ISP to administer the public lines.
Unfortunately voters are stupid, and therefore we have politicians who won't raise taxes even if it means lower costs for everyone in the long term.
Where I live we used to have redlight cameras. Because nobody wanted to pay for them, we made a deal where we get the cameras for free, but the companies that built the cameras get the money from the traffic tickets. These companies would try to catch everyone one they could because that's how they made money. Now we voted to get rid of them because people felt abused.
I actually think redlight cameras is a really good idea if you use it as a way to catch people unsafely going through red lights cheaply (e.g. freeing police to do more important things) rather than as a way for politicians an corporations to get rich.
Would you really be happier if no ISPs ever oversold their services and they sold you exactly how much you would get?
Instead of 10/5 you'd get 1/0.5 because that's what they can guarantee if everyone uses their internet at the same time. When almost no one is using it, you still get 1/0.5 because the ISP needs to keep that bandwidth ready for the other people that might us it at any time.
Yeah I don't like being lied to either. But we all know how it works. We all know that we aren't going to get the advertised bandwidth at all times. No one is getting tricked. This is a better system than giving everyone their own dedicated guaranteed small data channel.
Maybe it would be nicer if they said you get 1/0.5 and usually it's 10x faster because most people are not using the internet at once, but the product you would get would be the same and it would cost the same thing.
Seriously the ISPs who get behind metering and capping are just trying to stop the cord cutter movement.
I am a cord cutter. But that doesn't mean this is a bad idea.
Lets say hypothetically, that the broadband companies are not allowed to charge customers on average more than they are now. why is paying per byte bad?
Some people will pay less, some people more, and some the same.
Do I trust the cable companies to not attempt to make more money through switching payment schemes? no, but I don;t trust them to refrain from trying to make more money if they keep the existing system either.
The nice thing about charging per byte, is that you can incentivize people to create traffic that doesn;t require low latency (torrenting, etc) during off peak hours because it will be cheaper. This will lead to higher bandwidth for everybody.
Imagine if we could all use unlimited electricity all day long and just paid a flat monthly rate. We wouldn't have any incentive to use less power. In fact the power companies would be forced to cap our wattage to like 500 watts, and we'd need to charge huge batteries all day long so we could run our major appliances.
This is how internet works now.
Since Google isn't in the TV game really, they have nothing to lose by letting you pass all the data you want.
google does not have a data cap, but instead has a bandwidth cap. Bandwidth caps are necessary when you don't charge people per byte. This is what stops people from using more than their share, when you let them use "unlimited" data. The data is in fact not unlimited because your monthly limit is precisely equal to your datarate multiplied by 1 month.
And from a theoretical perspective, I don't see any reason to believe that the total welfare of a collection of individual agents is maximized when each agent focuses on maximizing its own individual welfare
It depends on how you are valuing "total welfare". Lets say society A has 100 people and 100 apples, each person having 1 apple. Society B has 200 apples and 100 people, but all the apples belong to one person. Which society has a higher "total welfare"? I would say society B does.
Maybe having more total stuff is not necessarily better, especially if there is great disparity.
What about society C where there is 300 apples and 100 people. 99 people have 2 apples each, and one guy has 101 apples. I think everyone agrees this is better than society B. But is it better than society A? It has more wealth disparity, but each person has more apples.
At the moment I am not arguing that capitalism leads to society C, but I think it is important to decide the answer to this question of "What is it we actually want?", "more stuff" or "more equality", before we can effectively evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of various systems.
But is there actually a sound mathematical/scientific reason to conclude that your claim is valid in a very general sense? Or is it just that you can sometimes find specific cases where it's true and you'd like to believe that it's true as a matter of wishful thinking?
Aside from the fact that the advent of capitalism coincided with the most dramatic increase in economic growth ever, no. Granted this could all just be a correlation rather than a cause. Or maybe the increase in economic growth is what caused us to go to capitalism. I don't think there are any definite answers, but if you consider that what came before capitalism was mercantilism and feudalism, I don't think we are in such bad shape
Poor people today have access to medicine and cell phones. I would rather be a poor person today than a nobleman in the middle ages. Is this a result of capitalism? I would argue that it is a big part, but I don't claim to have conclusive proof. I don't have a way to compare our world with an alternate reality where capitalism was replaced with something else.
If you believe anything that economists have to say, you can certainly find many well regarded ones that have written volumes on the subject of how capitalism leads to efficiency. Even the ones that believe in heavy government interference, will usually still regard capitalism as an engine for growth even if it is a suboptimal one.
Yes accounting for externalities is another way that government can (and should) help make free markets better.
Yes the mugger redistributes money as well. It is the job of government to prevent mugging, otherwise the free market will reward the most efficient muggers.
In order for the free market to work well, the government must set the rules so that the most efficient way to profit is by making better/cheaper products.
I didn't say money can *never* be wasted. I said in this case it wasn't.
Gambling has always been a part of the economic system.
Wealth is more than just raw materials. Matter and energy can not be created, and in fact all systems increase in entropy, but luckily lack of entropy is not equivalent to wealth. There is more entropy in the universe after the invention of the internet, but the internet is a source of abundant wealth. It saves an uncountable amount of man hours of human labor. The whole advancement of technology means that more humans can spend more time on more fun things rather than on finding food and building shelter. We can spend less time being sick and mourning dead relatives. This is what wealth is. We can be wealthier with less materials and less energy if we have more/better information.
If JP Morgan collapsed tonight, we (as a society) would certainly care about what happens. Why? Because some "random companies" are so big that their troubles would shake the (inter)national economy.
1. If our country is contingent upon a particular company to survive, then I don;t think it fits the definition of "some random company".
2. The reason we have companies like this is because they got preferential treatment (e.g. regulations that benefited them over their competitors, along with bailouts, etc)
3. There is no reason that we need to have a system with too big to fail companies, we just don't yet have the political will to remove corrupt and inept politicians who help foster the current environment.
The market is not self regulating, unless it is self regulating towards oligopolies, oligopsonies, cartels, and general shittiness.
I didn't say it was 100% self regulating in every imaginable respect. The government does not need to decide that iphone is a better phone than the blackberry. The market did this one it's own. If mobile phone production levels and profits were determined by the government, then this would be an area of self regulation that would cease to exist.
I assume you don't think *every* single feature of the free market is shitty. I by the same token don't believe that *nothing* about the free market is shitty.
There was no room in his ideology for private companies to intentionally abandon risk management and externalize the risk by selling it off. So despite his attempts to mince words, the results of his Ayn Randian ideology ended up being exactly what one would historically expect from not having meaningful regulation.
1. The whole idea of a federal reserve, is in itself, an abomination according to Ayn Rand's philosophy.
2. I am not a proponent of Ayn Rand's philosophy so even if Greenspan where a reputable source on the matter, his repudiation wouldn't really affect me.
I am talking about efficiency in the sense of how well it works vs. how much management is required to make it work that well. Since the free market requires relatively very little management, the fact that it works at all is pretty amazing. Some things are not best under the control of the free market, particularly things which need to be fair (e.g. the justice system, etc), however, these things require an exceptional amount of effort to ensure that they work properly.
The free market would arguably be more efficient at running the justice system, if fairness was not an essential requirement, but it is, so not only is it not more efficient, but also not even up to the task. So there you go. I present an example case where I believe the free market is not the right tool for the job.
I was responding to a comment that suggested this was a failure of the private sector. I responded that this is an example of what the private sector is supposed to be doing, and actually does quite well. When you talk about 1 company in the private sector losing money, this doesn't mean the private sector as a whole lost wealth (e.g. what happened here). When you talk about the public sector losing money, it almost always translates to lost wealth.
As a society we don't need to care what happens to some random company. This is a great strength of the private sector, and this property is what is referenced by the phrase "the market is self-regulating". The government however is not self regulating. It is regulated by voters. We *do* need to care if a government agency loses money, because it is usually not losing it to some competing government agency. It is usually just wasted.
To other companies running better trading algorithms.
The wealth that the money represented was not "lost", but rather redistributed. Efficient redistribution of wealth is a strength of the private sector not a weakness. The private sector is good at redistributing money where it needs to go for economic growth. This company was not exercising an appropriate level of caution and it's money was redistributed elsewhere.
Also, even with a slowdown, you could just run the simulation on a much faster computer to overcome any overhead or increase in time complexity.
I believe this is only true of actual Turing machines (i.e. with 1 infinite tape) and not true of Turing equivalent machines which have no more computational power, but can compute faster, with less memory, and smaller instruction sets.
If they were talking about computational complexity why would they say:
any attempt to determine the decider’s decision independently must take longer than the decider itself.
The time complexity of the real decision and the simulation are the same.