I don't think anyone is talking about abolishing murder laws when talking about deregulation. Usually there is a distinction made between laws and regulations.
The free market is really good at finding efficiencies. Because murders are illegal, there are less murders because the cost of murdering is much higher (e.g. likelihood of jail time, and possibly the death penalty), and usually not worth the risk. The goal of government should be to create laws in such a way that the optimal path to profit in the free market is producing the best product for the lowest price. This price includes the cost in money, safety, environmental impacts, etc)
Good laws are important for guiding the free market in the direction towards a peaceful, fair, and productive society. Unfortunately these sorts of regulations are the minority. Most regulations are a result of lobbyists trying to give themselves an advantage over their competitors. This doesn't mean all regulations are bad. It just means that most regulations are bad. The ones against unjustly harming people are still good to have.
Allowing the banks to fail does not mean allowing all the depositors to lose their savings. Anyone with money deposited in an FDIC insured bank deserves to be have their money reimbursed as long as the USA and FDIC are solvent institutions.
Allowing banks to fail means liquidating assets to pay of as much debt as possible if the bank is in the red (e.g. paying back depositors before closing their accounts), and then the FDIC covers the remainder so depositors don;t lose anything. The shareholders in the company lose all their invested money from the shares in the bank going to $0, with a 0% prospect of ever having any profit every again.
Bailing out the banks was about bailing out the shareholders of the bank, under the pretense that losing market liquidity by the sudden absence of lenders would be devastating to the economy. This is dubious especially in retrospect because after being bailed out the banks immediate reaction was to stop all lending. In fact Goldman sax immediately started buying toxic assets for cheap and reselling them to the government for a profit.
But even if we assume letting the banks fail would grind the economy to a halt, it is a false dichotmoy to say that our only 2 options were bailing out bank shareholders and allowing them to fall flat on their face. The government could have nationalized the bak temporarily, firing all the top executives without pay, letting all the shareholders lose their shirts, but still keeping all middle management and non-management workers on staff, until the bank could be sold to the highest bidder, and that money could be used to pay back the government money used to prop it up.
People, especially the bankers, wanted to tie their own fate to that of small town America during the bad times. During the good times they were perfectly happy keeping all the profits to themselves. That we were duped into believing this bullshit that allowing wallstreet bankers to lose part of their massive wealth would cripple the economy, is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. In fact most people did not buy into this, but their representatives decided to side with the bankers anyway, and most still managed to keep their jobs.
The reason banks are irresponsible is because of bailouts.
You can make banks responsible with regulation, or you can make them responsible by allowing them feel the consequences of their own poor decisions.
Lets say you give someone $1 million to invest. You don't care if he wins or loses, but he owes you $1.05 million the next year.
This person has no incentive to make bad investment decisions.
Lets say you give someone $1 million to invest. He owes you $1.05 million the next year, but if somehow he loses all your money you will forgive the debt.
This person's optimal strategy is now to go to Vegas and bet all $1 million on black. He has a 53% chance of coming back empty handed (i.e. he comes out the same), and a 47% chance of making a $995K. That's an expected value of $467K for 1 day of work.
Yes you can bailout banks as long as you can come up with incredibly smart regulations that prevent them from doing all the myriad of risky and potentially profitable things whose risk for them is completely mitigated by bailouts.
Or you can just remove their safety net. Now instead of incentivizing them to do the most risky things allowed by your regulations, they are incentivized to make the best investments.
I am not saying that we should eliminate all bank regulations. I am saying that bailouts cause bad behavior, and that eliminating bailouts gives us the same result as a mountain of regulations as far as incentivizing good behavior.
that sounds just like my uncle who used the same kind of "reasoning" to explain how to pick a good horse or dog that had really good odds because it just had a bad few weeks...everyone else thought they were crap, but my uncle knew better.
The main difference being that a bad company doesn't need to win (i.e. become the best) in order to be profitable. If 1 horse is clearly the best (it has a 90% chance of winning), It is still a bad investment if it's betting odds are 19:1
Making profit in the stock market is about knowing things that other people don't know. Banning HFT won't change that.
Google is a great company. Google is profitable. Owning google stock is a good thing. This is what causes it's stock price to be as high as it is. Buying google stock doesn't mean you have faith in google. Buying google stock means you have faith that the company will be more profitable than most other investors. The current stock price is based on Google's speculated profitability.
Lets say Alice is willing to sell a share for $10. Bob is willing to buy a share for $20. A HFT sees this discrepancy and immediately buys the share from Alice for $10, sells it to Bob for $20 and makes $10 profit just by being quick. This is the basic idea of what it happening, but because you have many companies competing to do HFT, the differences in buy/sell prices end up being much smaller.
What actually happens is this. The price is of a share is $20. Bob puts out a bid to buy a share at $15. No one is biting, but the price has been dropping. Once the price gets to $14.99, an HFT catches the discrepancy and buys the $14.99 share from Alice and sells it to Bob for $15.
An HFT could have made more money by waiting until the price dropped to like $10 and selling to Bob for $15, making $5 profit, except that another HFT would have jumped on the opportunity way before the price dropped to $10.
Because of HFTs you see a bunch of bids for $14.99 which is your clue that the price is $15. Any lower bids can be ignored because of the $14.99 bids provided by HFTs. Any higher bids are quickly accepted by the HFTs, but these bid's don't really happen because everyone knows the prices.
The efficiency created is that the price of shares is very quickly equalized across different trades and different markets. Because of all the actions of all the trading (a large part being HFT), we know the price is $15. In fact Alice can offer to sell for $14.99 and an HFT will buy the share before Bob even places his bid for $15.01, because the HFT has calculated that someone will offer at least $15.
Alice doesn't need to wait for Bob's offer in order to sell. This market liquidity makes trades happen more quickly and smoothly
It is not the trades between the HFT that has positive effects on the economy. It is the trade between the eventual buyer and seller that might not have happened (or happened so quickly) that was facilitated by HFT that helps the economy.
The market is not supposed to be "fair" in the sense that we should all profit the same amount. The market is fair in that people play by the same rules. If you think HFT is easy money, then you can invest in a company that does it and be guaranteed immense profit.
HFT doesn't necessarily remove value from the market. This assumes that the market's value is static. Yes they are making money, but they are also crunching a bunch of numbers constantly and causing the prices of stocks to quickly converge to a common value. This creates resource allocation efficiency.
The money might be coming out of the pockets of other investors. It also might be coming from efficiency that HFT enables, The economy is not a zero sum game. Efficient allocation of resources leads to less waste and more total wealth. I am not saying that their gains are not to the detriment of others, I am just saying that they aren't necessarily. Also, nobody is forced to invest in the NYSE. They only people getting screwed are people who signed up.
Anyone who thinks the stock market isn't gambling is not entitled to a life of financial stability.
A company that is doing well is not necessarily a good investment, especially if everyone already "knows" it's a good investment. Good investments are companies that are undervalued. They can even be terribly managed companies that are just not as terrible as people think. There are many strong companies out there who's share price is severely inflated and therefore very bad investments.
Everyone can see for themselves how different computer algorithms and different humans investment strategies compare but simply looking at how well they did statistically. If algorithm X statistically makes more money than Billy, then algorithm X is a better investor than Billy. Algorthm X by definition has a better investment methodology regardless of how irrational it may seem or how rational Billy may seem. This goes the other way as well.
The problem isn't more regulations vs. less regulations. The problem is coherent system vs. incoherent system. You can have less regulation, but then you can't have bailouts. You can have bailouts but then you need more regulation. The problem of the recent financial collapse was that the system wasn't coherent. There was less regulation and bailouts, That's a recipe for disaster. The authoritarians blame the lack of regulations and the libertarians blame the bailouts. Neither is right or wrong. They just prefer moving to different coherent systems.
I think facebook takes fake accounts far to seriously already. I think they should just allow anyone to make whatever accounts they want and post whatever they want.
Rights are granted by governments. Different governments define different rights. The real question is not a right exists in some place and time, but whether it should exist. False attribution is probably not a good thing for society, but freedom of speech is. False attribution is certainly speech, and denial of this right is technically a limitation on free speech. We can either limit free speech, or simply encourage more speech to point out false attributions. I personally favor the latter approach. I think having a society where people are free to decide for themselves what is true (rather than a government), is much less susceptible to abuse.
I don't care if people impersonate anybody on facebook. In fact I think lots of fake accounts serves a valuable purpose in society. It raises awareness that the internet can't be trusted. People need to be more skeptical.
The real problem seems to be that there is an unwarranted expectation by some that there are no fake facebook accounts and that anything said by someone with the same name on facebook is definitely what that person actually said.
The solution to this problem is more fake facebook accounts so people realize that the internet is not to be trusted.
I hate facebook. I refused to get a facebook account until last year. A friend of mine finally convinced me to get one because he was tired of sending group messages and needing to email me separately. Fine, I can understand that. I really don't want a bunch of random people finding me and trying to be my friend, so I made a fake account. All my real friends and family that I want to talk to know it's me, and everyone else has no idea. It's the best of both worlds.
Facebook no doubt doesn't want parodies on their site. This doesn't mean that they would welcome legal requirements to eliminate all parodies and having their mistakes punished with fines.
People have the right to stop people from parodying them? Sure, I guess if you live in China or in the middle east. Facebook is offering a free service. If you don't like it then don't use it. The problem is not Facebook. The problem is the unwarranted sense of entitlement people have.
Freedom of speech is more important than people's feelings.
The antidote to unpopular free speech is more free speech. He could simply publicize the fact that he has some online imposters. As long as people in general realize that imposters can and do exist, I don't see the harm.
Why not have the kids *do* something scientific rather than just reading fiction that is only superficially related to science?
Science projects are always really fun and a good way to get kids to learn about science.
I think even doing a "book report" on a youtube video describing scientific principles or recent scientific breakthroughs would be more productive than a report on a fiction book. I know youtube immediately seems less educational than a book, but this isn't English class. I watch youtube all the time on subjects like quantum physics, relativity, dark matter, etc. There are shows like nova and cosmos which are great for sparking people's interest.
Science text books (even the new ones) are about 10 years out of date, because it is important for science textbooks to have only very well tested science in them. However I think kids learning about current scientific trends and breakthroughs provides a very good insight into the scientific process.
On 1: Energy can't be easily exported. You need powerlines, and even with powerlines there are losses the farther the power needs to go.
On 3: Yes exactly, the price of bitcoin will drop to $5, and no one will be willing to mine it for $10 during the day when energy is expensive. There really isn't a good way to store energy on a massive scale. Right now the batteries we have can not hold much charge and are damaging to the environment to produce. Bitcoin mining will stop in about 40 years when we reach the cap. If we get good batteries before 40 years awesome. If we don't then at least we can mine bitcoins guilt free at night with wind farm energy.
This is true for the most part, but I will add 2 points:
1. The cost of energy doesn't necessarily have a net negative externality, although this is often true. Some locations actually produce clean energy and do not have any significant negative externalities. Sometimes energy is going to be wasted anyway, and "wasting" it to mine bitcoins is not creating additional waste. This brings me to my second point.
2. If all externalities were factored into the price of energy, people would mine bitcoin more efficiently. Currently humans use much more energy during the day. Because we don't currently have good batteries, most energy produced must be used or lost. Our electrical infrastructure is based on being able to provide enough power during the peak usage (e.g.during a hot summer day). Some power production can/must be turned off at night (e.g. solar, nuclear, coal, hydro) when less power is needed. Some energy can't be turned off (e.g. wind, geothermal). In places where there is excess wind and geothermal power being generated at night, bitcoins can be mined without wasting any energy than would already be wasted.
Having a large price differential between daytime and nighttime energy will cause all bitcoin mining to occur at times when energy is cheapest. As long as energy is only cheap when it would be wasted anyway, then it will not be wasting as much resources. If you could mine $10 bitcoins for $5 at night. This is better than mining $100 of bitcoins for $99 during the day. No one will be willing to mine bitcoins during the day if the cost of energy is twice as much during the day, because bitcoin mining is all about power efficiency.
There is no obvious explanation for why the digital currency has fallen so far and so fast, although the market correcting after such a huge rise might be a good explanation.
The price of bitcoin rose much higher than the cost to mine bitcoins (i.e. price of computers and electricity). While some people got caught up in speculating, others saw this and started mining and selling instead, causing a crash. Bitcoins are volatile because people don't understand it yet. If they did, they'd realize that the value can not go far above the price of mining. Having said that, the price of mining is continually going up.
Once a few websites start publishing indices of the average cost of mining a bitcoin at any given time, I think that will keep this sort of speculation in check.
The statements "Google branded phones are popular" and "Samsung phones are popular" are not mutually exclusive. Afterall 2 out of 4 google phones were Samsung.
Also samsung (along with other manufacturers) makes a lot of different phones. It is possible for a phone to have a relatively high market share even if the company that makes it does not.
Apple: 36.3%
Samsung: 21%
HTC: 10.2%
Motorola: 9.1%
LG: 7.1%
Furthermore, I don't think the takeaway from this chart is that Samsung is the clear winner and HTC, Motorola, and LG are losers. If that were the case then it would be just as easy to claim everyone except Apple was a loser.
To me that looks like nobody clearly dominates the market.
Remove the legal restrictions prohibiting "hacking" (i.e. modifying) your own device.
We could try to legally force the carriers to do something they don't want to do. I think empowering users to do something they *do* want to do is going to have better and faster results.
Another option is to simply buy unlocked phones.
I would suggest people switch to mobile plans that do not require contracts to subsidize phone. You can get a Nexus 4 for $300. The cheapest subsidized android phones are going to be about $480 ($20 x 24 months) even if you get them for "free". There is already a solution to the problem. Enough people demanded this and T-Mobile listened in order to be more competitive. If enough people switch to T-Mobile, then the other 3 networks will need to update their business model as well.
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I don't think anyone is talking about abolishing murder laws when talking about deregulation. Usually there is a distinction made between laws and regulations.
The free market is really good at finding efficiencies. Because murders are illegal, there are less murders because the cost of murdering is much higher (e.g. likelihood of jail time, and possibly the death penalty), and usually not worth the risk. The goal of government should be to create laws in such a way that the optimal path to profit in the free market is producing the best product for the lowest price. This price includes the cost in money, safety, environmental impacts, etc)
Good laws are important for guiding the free market in the direction towards a peaceful, fair, and productive society. Unfortunately these sorts of regulations are the minority. Most regulations are a result of lobbyists trying to give themselves an advantage over their competitors. This doesn't mean all regulations are bad. It just means that most regulations are bad. The ones against unjustly harming people are still good to have.
Why bail out the investors at all? They invested poorly. They are supposed to lose that investment.
Allowing the banks to fail does not mean allowing all the depositors to lose their savings. Anyone with money deposited in an FDIC insured bank deserves to be have their money reimbursed as long as the USA and FDIC are solvent institutions.
Allowing banks to fail means liquidating assets to pay of as much debt as possible if the bank is in the red (e.g. paying back depositors before closing their accounts), and then the FDIC covers the remainder so depositors don;t lose anything. The shareholders in the company lose all their invested money from the shares in the bank going to $0, with a 0% prospect of ever having any profit every again.
Bailing out the banks was about bailing out the shareholders of the bank, under the pretense that losing market liquidity by the sudden absence of lenders would be devastating to the economy. This is dubious especially in retrospect because after being bailed out the banks immediate reaction was to stop all lending. In fact Goldman sax immediately started buying toxic assets for cheap and reselling them to the government for a profit.
But even if we assume letting the banks fail would grind the economy to a halt, it is a false dichotmoy to say that our only 2 options were bailing out bank shareholders and allowing them to fall flat on their face. The government could have nationalized the bak temporarily, firing all the top executives without pay, letting all the shareholders lose their shirts, but still keeping all middle management and non-management workers on staff, until the bank could be sold to the highest bidder, and that money could be used to pay back the government money used to prop it up.
People, especially the bankers, wanted to tie their own fate to that of small town America during the bad times. During the good times they were perfectly happy keeping all the profits to themselves. That we were duped into believing this bullshit that allowing wallstreet bankers to lose part of their massive wealth would cripple the economy, is one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. In fact most people did not buy into this, but their representatives decided to side with the bankers anyway, and most still managed to keep their jobs.
The reason banks are irresponsible is because of bailouts.
You can make banks responsible with regulation, or you can make them responsible by allowing them feel the consequences of their own poor decisions.
Lets say you give someone $1 million to invest. You don't care if he wins or loses, but he owes you $1.05 million the next year.
This person has no incentive to make bad investment decisions.
Lets say you give someone $1 million to invest. He owes you $1.05 million the next year, but if somehow he loses all your money you will forgive the debt.
This person's optimal strategy is now to go to Vegas and bet all $1 million on black. He has a 53% chance of coming back empty handed (i.e. he comes out the same), and a 47% chance of making a $995K. That's an expected value of $467K for 1 day of work.
Yes you can bailout banks as long as you can come up with incredibly smart regulations that prevent them from doing all the myriad of risky and potentially profitable things whose risk for them is completely mitigated by bailouts.
Or you can just remove their safety net. Now instead of incentivizing them to do the most risky things allowed by your regulations, they are incentivized to make the best investments.
I am not saying that we should eliminate all bank regulations. I am saying that bailouts cause bad behavior, and that eliminating bailouts gives us the same result as a mountain of regulations as far as incentivizing good behavior.
that sounds just like my uncle who used the same kind of "reasoning" to explain how to pick a good horse or dog that had really good odds because it just had a bad few weeks...everyone else thought they were crap, but my uncle knew better.
The main difference being that a bad company doesn't need to win (i.e. become the best) in order to be profitable. If 1 horse is clearly the best (it has a 90% chance of winning), It is still a bad investment if it's betting odds are 19:1
Making profit in the stock market is about knowing things that other people don't know. Banning HFT won't change that.
Google is a great company. Google is profitable. Owning google stock is a good thing. This is what causes it's stock price to be as high as it is. Buying google stock doesn't mean you have faith in google. Buying google stock means you have faith that the company will be more profitable than most other investors. The current stock price is based on Google's speculated profitability.
Lets say Alice is willing to sell a share for $10. Bob is willing to buy a share for $20. A HFT sees this discrepancy and immediately buys the share from Alice for $10, sells it to Bob for $20 and makes $10 profit just by being quick. This is the basic idea of what it happening, but because you have many companies competing to do HFT, the differences in buy/sell prices end up being much smaller.
What actually happens is this. The price is of a share is $20. Bob puts out a bid to buy a share at $15. No one is biting, but the price has been dropping. Once the price gets to $14.99, an HFT catches the discrepancy and buys the $14.99 share from Alice and sells it to Bob for $15.
An HFT could have made more money by waiting until the price dropped to like $10 and selling to Bob for $15, making $5 profit, except that another HFT would have jumped on the opportunity way before the price dropped to $10.
Because of HFTs you see a bunch of bids for $14.99 which is your clue that the price is $15. Any lower bids can be ignored because of the $14.99 bids provided by HFTs. Any higher bids are quickly accepted by the HFTs, but these bid's don't really happen because everyone knows the prices.
The efficiency created is that the price of shares is very quickly equalized across different trades and different markets. Because of all the actions of all the trading (a large part being HFT), we know the price is $15. In fact Alice can offer to sell for $14.99 and an HFT will buy the share before Bob even places his bid for $15.01, because the HFT has calculated that someone will offer at least $15.
Alice doesn't need to wait for Bob's offer in order to sell. This market liquidity makes trades happen more quickly and smoothly
It is not the trades between the HFT that has positive effects on the economy. It is the trade between the eventual buyer and seller that might not have happened (or happened so quickly) that was facilitated by HFT that helps the economy.
The market is not supposed to be "fair" in the sense that we should all profit the same amount. The market is fair in that people play by the same rules. If you think HFT is easy money, then you can invest in a company that does it and be guaranteed immense profit.
HFT doesn't necessarily remove value from the market. This assumes that the market's value is static. Yes they are making money, but they are also crunching a bunch of numbers constantly and causing the prices of stocks to quickly converge to a common value. This creates resource allocation efficiency.
The money might be coming out of the pockets of other investors. It also might be coming from efficiency that HFT enables, The economy is not a zero sum game. Efficient allocation of resources leads to less waste and more total wealth. I am not saying that their gains are not to the detriment of others, I am just saying that they aren't necessarily. Also, nobody is forced to invest in the NYSE. They only people getting screwed are people who signed up.
Anyone who thinks the stock market isn't gambling is not entitled to a life of financial stability.
A company that is doing well is not necessarily a good investment, especially if everyone already "knows" it's a good investment. Good investments are companies that are undervalued. They can even be terribly managed companies that are just not as terrible as people think. There are many strong companies out there who's share price is severely inflated and therefore very bad investments.
Everyone can see for themselves how different computer algorithms and different humans investment strategies compare but simply looking at how well they did statistically. If algorithm X statistically makes more money than Billy, then algorithm X is a better investor than Billy. Algorthm X by definition has a better investment methodology regardless of how irrational it may seem or how rational Billy may seem. This goes the other way as well.
The problem isn't more regulations vs. less regulations. The problem is coherent system vs. incoherent system. You can have less regulation, but then you can't have bailouts. You can have bailouts but then you need more regulation. The problem of the recent financial collapse was that the system wasn't coherent. There was less regulation and bailouts, That's a recipe for disaster. The authoritarians blame the lack of regulations and the libertarians blame the bailouts. Neither is right or wrong. They just prefer moving to different coherent systems.
I think facebook takes fake accounts far to seriously already. I think they should just allow anyone to make whatever accounts they want and post whatever they want.
Rights are granted by governments. Different governments define different rights. The real question is not a right exists in some place and time, but whether it should exist. False attribution is probably not a good thing for society, but freedom of speech is. False attribution is certainly speech, and denial of this right is technically a limitation on free speech. We can either limit free speech, or simply encourage more speech to point out false attributions. I personally favor the latter approach. I think having a society where people are free to decide for themselves what is true (rather than a government), is much less susceptible to abuse.
I don't care if people impersonate anybody on facebook. In fact I think lots of fake accounts serves a valuable purpose in society. It raises awareness that the internet can't be trusted. People need to be more skeptical.
Exactly.
If there is a bad movie in theaters, I have a right not to see that movie. I don't have a right to demand the movie be made better.
The real problem seems to be that there is an unwarranted expectation by some that there are no fake facebook accounts and that anything said by someone with the same name on facebook is definitely what that person actually said.
The solution to this problem is more fake facebook accounts so people realize that the internet is not to be trusted.
I hate facebook. I refused to get a facebook account until last year. A friend of mine finally convinced me to get one because he was tired of sending group messages and needing to email me separately. Fine, I can understand that. I really don't want a bunch of random people finding me and trying to be my friend, so I made a fake account. All my real friends and family that I want to talk to know it's me, and everyone else has no idea. It's the best of both worlds.
Facebook no doubt doesn't want parodies on their site. This doesn't mean that they would welcome legal requirements to eliminate all parodies and having their mistakes punished with fines.
People have the right to stop people from parodying them? Sure, I guess if you live in China or in the middle east. Facebook is offering a free service. If you don't like it then don't use it. The problem is not Facebook. The problem is the unwarranted sense of entitlement people have.
Freedom of speech is more important than people's feelings.
The antidote to unpopular free speech is more free speech. He could simply publicize the fact that he has some online imposters. As long as people in general realize that imposters can and do exist, I don't see the harm.
Why not have the kids *do* something scientific rather than just reading fiction that is only superficially related to science?
Science projects are always really fun and a good way to get kids to learn about science.
I think even doing a "book report" on a youtube video describing scientific principles or recent scientific breakthroughs would be more productive than a report on a fiction book. I know youtube immediately seems less educational than a book, but this isn't English class. I watch youtube all the time on subjects like quantum physics, relativity, dark matter, etc. There are shows like nova and cosmos which are great for sparking people's interest.
Science text books (even the new ones) are about 10 years out of date, because it is important for science textbooks to have only very well tested science in them. However I think kids learning about current scientific trends and breakthroughs provides a very good insight into the scientific process.
On 1: Energy can't be easily exported. You need powerlines, and even with powerlines there are losses the farther the power needs to go.
On 3: Yes exactly, the price of bitcoin will drop to $5, and no one will be willing to mine it for $10 during the day when energy is expensive. There really isn't a good way to store energy on a massive scale. Right now the batteries we have can not hold much charge and are damaging to the environment to produce. Bitcoin mining will stop in about 40 years when we reach the cap. If we get good batteries before 40 years awesome. If we don't then at least we can mine bitcoins guilt free at night with wind farm energy.
This is true for the most part, but I will add 2 points:
1. The cost of energy doesn't necessarily have a net negative externality, although this is often true. Some locations actually produce clean energy and do not have any significant negative externalities. Sometimes energy is going to be wasted anyway, and "wasting" it to mine bitcoins is not creating additional waste. This brings me to my second point.
2. If all externalities were factored into the price of energy, people would mine bitcoin more efficiently. Currently humans use much more energy during the day. Because we don't currently have good batteries, most energy produced must be used or lost. Our electrical infrastructure is based on being able to provide enough power during the peak usage (e.g.during a hot summer day). Some power production can/must be turned off at night (e.g. solar, nuclear, coal, hydro) when less power is needed. Some energy can't be turned off (e.g. wind, geothermal). In places where there is excess wind and geothermal power being generated at night, bitcoins can be mined without wasting any energy than would already be wasted.
Having a large price differential between daytime and nighttime energy will cause all bitcoin mining to occur at times when energy is cheapest. As long as energy is only cheap when it would be wasted anyway, then it will not be wasting as much resources. If you could mine $10 bitcoins for $5 at night. This is better than mining $100 of bitcoins for $99 during the day. No one will be willing to mine bitcoins during the day if the cost of energy is twice as much during the day, because bitcoin mining is all about power efficiency.
There is no obvious explanation for why the digital currency has fallen so far and so fast, although the market correcting after such a huge rise might be a good explanation.
The price of bitcoin rose much higher than the cost to mine bitcoins (i.e. price of computers and electricity). While some people got caught up in speculating, others saw this and started mining and selling instead, causing a crash. Bitcoins are volatile because people don't understand it yet. If they did, they'd realize that the value can not go far above the price of mining. Having said that, the price of mining is continually going up.
Once a few websites start publishing indices of the average cost of mining a bitcoin at any given time, I think that will keep this sort of speculation in check.
The statements "Google branded phones are popular" and "Samsung phones are popular" are not mutually exclusive. Afterall 2 out of 4 google phones were Samsung.
Also samsung (along with other manufacturers) makes a lot of different phones. It is possible for a phone to have a relatively high market share even if the company that makes it does not.
Apple: 36.3%
Samsung: 21%
HTC: 10.2%
Motorola: 9.1%
LG: 7.1%
Furthermore, I don't think the takeaway from this chart is that Samsung is the clear winner and HTC, Motorola, and LG are losers. If that were the case then it would be just as easy to claim everyone except Apple was a loser.
To me that looks like nobody clearly dominates the market.
Remove the legal restrictions prohibiting "hacking" (i.e. modifying) your own device.
We could try to legally force the carriers to do something they don't want to do. I think empowering users to do something they *do* want to do is going to have better and faster results.
Another option is to simply buy unlocked phones.
I would suggest people switch to mobile plans that do not require contracts to subsidize phone. You can get a Nexus 4 for $300. The cheapest subsidized android phones are going to be about $480 ($20 x 24 months) even if you get them for "free". There is already a solution to the problem. Enough people demanded this and T-Mobile listened in order to be more competitive. If enough people switch to T-Mobile, then the other 3 networks will need to update their business model as well.