They may be buying assets, like shares or houses, which is a transfer and doesn't represent any economic activity (except for commissions, etc). Or they may be saving it in a bank account. In a bank account most of the money will be lent out again,
Shares are the primary economic activity: they represent investments in companies and produce both economic activity plus the generation of additional wealth. Banks lend privately, they invest, and they lend to the government. Of those, lending to the government generally results in pure consumption, the other two are basically like investments and generate wealth.
However, one thing should be obvious: sooner or later the US is going to have to get over its allergy to tax and, at the very least, start taxing income from capital and to wealthy people at least as much as it taxes everyone else. And it needs to use that to reduce its deficit.
What allergy to taxes? The US already has some of the highest overall capital gains taxes in the world, and even its nominal capital gains tax is higher than the OECD average. Likewise, the top marginal income tax rates in the US are some of the highest in the world, nearly as high as Sweden. Furthermore, if you tried to increase those taxes, people would simply avoid them, legally.
The reason the US has a deficit is not because we don't tax enough, it's because we spend too much, on tons of useless and ineffective federal programs.
notes missing steel industry, almost dead car industry, Detroit, electronics industry, retreating engineering industry, small widget manufacturing, semiconductor manufacture, computer manufacture, clothing manufacture... I'm really not sure that open trade has worked out that well, frankly.
Looks like it has worked out very well: all the low margin, polluting, back breaking industries are leaving the country, while more people than ever before are working in the US (well, that was true until Obama).
Within our borders, we have a large workforce, many of whom are unemployed, a large market, and immense natural resources, all within our borders. Economically speaking, it seems to me that a round of protectionism might not be a bad idea at all at this juncture.
Even after Obama's disastrous tenure, which erased several percent of labor participation rate gains, there are far more people working today (absolute or percentage of population) than in the heyday of the industries whose demise you bemoan. You're right: a round of protectionism would take us back to that.
That's the reason why economists distinguish between transfers and actual spending
Economists do lots of things, some of them even sensible. TheRaven64, however, didn't.
Government taxes and spends it on infrastructure: infrastructure spending is not a transfer and IS money being made to circulate. Government taxes well off people who save more and gives it to poorer people: a transfer, but money in the hands of poorer people tends to circulate more.
When people "save" money, what they are actually doing is investing it in businesses. Those businesses use that money to buy equipment in order to do something productive with it. When government takes that money instead and gives it to people who will use it for consumption, the consumer goods they buy with it won't be used to produce anything new. So your idea that taxing and then transferring the money to poor people is good for the economy is wrong.
But it's not money crossing borders that's so much the problem,
Did anybody say it was? Why are you putting up straw men?
For that reason, a government borrowing heavily in a country with a low savings rate, as in the US, can cause problems for that country's exporters.
Well, gee, you just wanted to tax people who save, thereby discouraging from saving. Now that causes problems for the country's exporters. Can't make up your mind?
Better in a way that people felt that they had a stable life with stable income, and were able to plan their lives tens of years ahead.
Yeah, if you were a straight white middle aged male with a decent education, lucky enough to land a boring corporate managerial job, you found a wife that actually would stick with you for tens of years, and nothing else happened, then you could look forward to decades of boring, mindless stability in a system that was was cheating you in many ways, living in a cheap house and spending your time watching TV and maybe playing golf. In the end, you'd still get cheated on your pension. If you were a single female, gay, or minority, you couldn't be part of that system if you wanted to.
But do you really want to work in the same job for the next 30 years, having your income keep up barely with inflation, seeing the biggest losers at your company get the same raises as you, and then retire on a pittance that the company assigns to you? That's what you're asking for, and that's what many Europeans get, the lucky ones that is.
This is a big part of the reason why countries try to give companies tax breaks: even if none of the money is paid directly in taxes, it's better to have it circulate locally than to be sent elsewhere.
In well functioning economies, "circulating money" is a sign of lots of useful economic activity. Such useful activity happens when companies make things people want.
But you're confused about cause and effect: you can't make an economy function well by forcing money to circulate. You and I can play ping pong with our wallets and circulate money between us all day long and nobody is going to benefit. If you tax that activity, the money will disappear entirely.
This worked a lot better when you got a factory employing ten thousand people for your multimillion dollarpound tax break, rather than a datacenter employing 50...
"Better" in what sense? The people back then had a much lower standard of living, their work was harder and more dangerous. And fewer people were working overall.
if its infrastructure and employees are all based in the EU then that's money circulating in the EU,
Because in Economics 101, we all learn that if we force goods (and hence money) to circulate within a country and to stop them from crossing borders, everybody is so much better off than if we let them engage in trade! Protectionism, yeah! It's worked so well!
Will you take off your anti-corporate blinders and get a f*cking clue?
It's a cooperative, not a corporation. The customers are the owners. The victims are the perpetrators. They are raping themselves.
And if they don't have an alternative service in their area, it is likely because they themselves kept it out.
Yeah, "'Murica at its best", namely the kind of people who want to nationalize, regulate, and de-privatize everything with promises that it works better, and actually making things work worse and worse.
Isn't there already a serious market for organ "donations"? Lack of supply drives up the effective price, etc.
Yes, there is. Effectively, doctors and hospitals "sell" these organs. Often, the price paid for the organ is hidden within the medical procedures, since the only medical providers that can actually perform transplants are those that actually get organs.
At other times, there is fraud and bribery going on and there are kickbacks or "donations" for doctors to reprioritize cases.. In cases doctors and hospitals can't benefit financially, they are likely going to use organ waiting lists to get political favors.
Life insurance is much more valuable than a few organs, and the murderer would have many more options since he doesn't need to worry about the stat of the body. Really, that's not a realistic worry.
I think allowing the sale of cadaveric organs is reasonable; right now, hospitals and doctors effectively enrich themselves and frequently engage in fraud and nepotism. Getting that money to the family of the deceased is a good thing.
I draw the line at for-pay live organ donations. Taken on their own, they are likely to be beneficial to both recipients and donors. However, once there is a large market and medical facilities for for-profit live donations, the risk of criminal activity in this area becomes much larger, including blackmail and other forms of coercion, and that worries me.
That actually breaks the C standard, but I suppose control systems aren't much worried about portability.
No, it doesn't. You're free to declare any return type for main, but if it isn't an "int" then the value returned to the environment is undefined. See Section 5.1.2.2.3. Having undefined values in a program doesn't break the standard, and it doesn't even automatically break portability (i.e., almost every correct C program contains undefined values somewhere, they simply don't matter).
I know I will be bombarded by right wing-nuts and tough love justice advocates (cold fjord are you here?), but does anyone not see the ridiculous hypocrisy of the death penalty? You are not allowed to kill, but it okay for us to kill you.
The morality of an act depends on its context and intent. For example, if I ask my doctor to kill me because I'm in agonizing pain, it is not immoral for him to comply with my wish. I think the death penalty should be abolished, because it's costly, ineffective, and threatens innocent people. But I don't see it as intrinsically immoral to kill people who have committed grave crimes.
For normal densities, standard deviations and MAD are just proportional, with a factor of about 1.25, so it doesn't matter which you use.
For non-normal densities, neither of them really is universally "right" for characterizing the deviation, but it's mathematically a whole lot easier to understand how standard deviation behaves in those cases than MAD. So even there, standard deviations are usually the better choice.
in that "battle" the heroic Spaniards ambushed and slaughtered thousands of Atahualpa's unarmed entourage. Yes, sneak attacks using technology unknown to your victims is quite effective.
Who do you think the European conquerors were? Well-off middle class folks who just got up one day to destroy some peaceful South American civilizations in order to boost their retirement plans? In reality, for the most part, they came from totalitarian, theocratic regimes that had just barely survived attacks from powerful and thoroughly destructive neighbors, and for whom the choice was death or conquest. Most of them had been indoctrinated from birth by the totalitarian ideologies of their time.
And who do you think they were destroying? Peaceful, prosperous, liberal communities? Of course not. They were attacking totalitarian, bloody theocracies. And most of the destruction wasn't even due to actions by the Spanish, it was either due to disease or self-inflicted, neither of which the Spaniards bore any moral responsibility for.
You are applying 21st century assumptions about international relations and societies to conflicts and situations where they simply do not apply, and you aren't even doing that correctly. And even under 21st century assumptions, the Inca and Aztec empires would be destroyed and occupied in a heartbeat; they were far worse than any of the totalitarian regimes we have today.
As I have seen from your posts, you consider civilization to be the most precious attribute of any people.
I certainly don't consider the Inca or Aztec civilizations to have been "precious". They were totalitarian, bloody, murderous, backwards, and destructive. Those monumental buildings and fancy trinkets you admire and like so much are drenched in blood (as are most of the monuments and trinkets European civilization produced).
Most civilizations and most political systems throughout history have been evil, and their destruction by revolution or conquest has been a good thing for humanity and the individuals living under those regimes.
but your philosophy and politics always turn out to be horrid?
They seem "horrid" to you because your understanding of morality is based on abstractions unrelated to reality, and because you hold some twisted racist and nationalist ideas while fancying yourself morally superior.
That's correct. The Aztecs and Incas were *wiped out* by some of those "settlers".
No, only their civilizations, and most of those were on their last legs anyway due to smallpox and local wars, something that the Spanish simply took advantage of. By the time the Spanish actually settled in large numbers, the civilizations had ceased to exist, although many of the indigenous people still survived and continued to live under the new rulers.
None of this is in any way different what civilizations around the world had been doing to each other for thousands of years. In fact, the Spanish were militarily effective because they had just been defending themselves against the Moors, invaders from Africa who had been close to wiping out all of European civilization.
Put a time limit on the funds, but require the recipient take classes, look for work, etc - then provide enough assistance towards the end so that the newly-working single mother isn't faced with instant penalties just for making a paycheck.
Putting a time limit on things and providing assistance means that you assume that the people have the life skills to plan and get out of poverty; but if they were capable of that kind of planning and execution, they wouldn't be poor in the first place. The only way to break this cycle is to actively force people to make changes in their lives after some time by placing conditions on receiving any further assistance: move to a different community, accept a job or a public work program, lose weight, complete training, etc.
The area where the reward structure needs to change the most is probably single parenthood. Single parenthood is, in most cases, a choice: a choice to have sex, a choice not to have an abortion, and a choice not to give up the kid for adoption. We should stop rewarding these choices financially.
Cutting food stamps might cause people to eat more poorly. Or maybe it will cause them to eat better. To eat better, you need to prepare food yourself (rather than eat out or buy prepared foods), cut down on meat, and eat more vegetables and fiber. All of those are things that you tend to do when you need to save money on food.
That's ridiculous. Physics is largely advanced mathematics that takes more than the practical knowledge of the average engineer.
The math used by many engineers is basically the same math used by physicists: linear algebra, ODEs, PDEs, FFTs, transform methods, moments, expansions, perturbation methods, tensors, etc.
Are you saying we should only pursue theories and bodies of knowledge if the average idiot can understand them?
Actually, physicists just have a propensity for ignoring techniques and terminology in other fields and rolling their own. There is little scientific content in that article that an engineer wouldn't understand if it were translated into more familiar terms. Of course, an engineer would likely call the whole thing a collection of wild, unproven speculations anyway and would simply ignore it.
What that web page describes is simply regions of space that can't communicate due to FTL inflation, and that might or might not have somewhat different fundamental constants. The claim the web page adds is that inflation may be stopping at different times in different regions.
The multiverse in quantum mechanics means something entirely different.
"You can automate 100% of what is currently a specific job/task, but you can't automate 100% of all work."
Depends on the type of work.
I made a statement about all work. You can't automate 100% of all work.
What makes you think the labor is 100 times as productive? Where did that number come from?
I gave an example: "Let's say 99% of all work is automated. That means labor is 100 times as productive," If 80% of all work is automated, labor (overall) is 5 times as productive. Get it?
I don't see why they'd be free just because the task is being done more efficiently. Scarcity would still exist, and how much more efficient the machines are is still relevant.
If everything is automated, tasks aren't done "more efficiently", they are done infinitely efficiently.
And I think you're underestimating human greed.
Not at all. Human greed is what makes free market economics work. The greedier its participants are, the better it works.
Slashdot Mirror
Shares are the primary economic activity: they represent investments in companies and produce both economic activity plus the generation of additional wealth. Banks lend privately, they invest, and they lend to the government. Of those, lending to the government generally results in pure consumption, the other two are basically like investments and generate wealth.
What allergy to taxes? The US already has some of the highest overall capital gains taxes in the world, and even its nominal capital gains tax is higher than the OECD average. Likewise, the top marginal income tax rates in the US are some of the highest in the world, nearly as high as Sweden. Furthermore, if you tried to increase those taxes, people would simply avoid them, legally.
The reason the US has a deficit is not because we don't tax enough, it's because we spend too much, on tons of useless and ineffective federal programs.
Looks like it has worked out very well: all the low margin, polluting, back breaking industries are leaving the country, while more people than ever before are working in the US (well, that was true until Obama).
Even after Obama's disastrous tenure, which erased several percent of labor participation rate gains, there are far more people working today (absolute or percentage of population) than in the heyday of the industries whose demise you bemoan. You're right: a round of protectionism would take us back to that.
Economists do lots of things, some of them even sensible. TheRaven64, however, didn't.
When people "save" money, what they are actually doing is investing it in businesses. Those businesses use that money to buy equipment in order to do something productive with it. When government takes that money instead and gives it to people who will use it for consumption, the consumer goods they buy with it won't be used to produce anything new. So your idea that taxing and then transferring the money to poor people is good for the economy is wrong.
Did anybody say it was? Why are you putting up straw men?
Well, gee, you just wanted to tax people who save, thereby discouraging from saving. Now that causes problems for the country's exporters. Can't make up your mind?
Yeah, if you were a straight white middle aged male with a decent education, lucky enough to land a boring corporate managerial job, you found a wife that actually would stick with you for tens of years, and nothing else happened, then you could look forward to decades of boring, mindless stability in a system that was was cheating you in many ways, living in a cheap house and spending your time watching TV and maybe playing golf. In the end, you'd still get cheated on your pension. If you were a single female, gay, or minority, you couldn't be part of that system if you wanted to.
But do you really want to work in the same job for the next 30 years, having your income keep up barely with inflation, seeing the biggest losers at your company get the same raises as you, and then retire on a pittance that the company assigns to you? That's what you're asking for, and that's what many Europeans get, the lucky ones that is.
Perhaps because it's not a "conspiracy"?
What's next? Are you going to throw people in jail who deliberately park in no parking zones?
In well functioning economies, "circulating money" is a sign of lots of useful economic activity. Such useful activity happens when companies make things people want.
But you're confused about cause and effect: you can't make an economy function well by forcing money to circulate. You and I can play ping pong with our wallets and circulate money between us all day long and nobody is going to benefit. If you tax that activity, the money will disappear entirely.
"Better" in what sense? The people back then had a much lower standard of living, their work was harder and more dangerous. And fewer people were working overall.
Because in Economics 101, we all learn that if we force goods (and hence money) to circulate within a country and to stop them from crossing borders, everybody is so much better off than if we let them engage in trade! Protectionism, yeah! It's worked so well!
She's self-righteous, arrogant, and downright evil. It's high time she get kicked out of office.
Will you take off your anti-corporate blinders and get a f*cking clue?
It's a cooperative, not a corporation. The customers are the owners. The victims are the perpetrators. They are raping themselves.
And if they don't have an alternative service in their area, it is likely because they themselves kept it out.
Yeah, "'Murica at its best", namely the kind of people who want to nationalize, regulate, and de-privatize everything with promises that it works better, and actually making things work worse and worse.
Yes, there is. Effectively, doctors and hospitals "sell" these organs. Often, the price paid for the organ is hidden within the medical procedures, since the only medical providers that can actually perform transplants are those that actually get organs.
At other times, there is fraud and bribery going on and there are kickbacks or "donations" for doctors to reprioritize cases.. In cases doctors and hospitals can't benefit financially, they are likely going to use organ waiting lists to get political favors.
Life insurance is much more valuable than a few organs, and the murderer would have many more options since he doesn't need to worry about the stat of the body. Really, that's not a realistic worry.
So what if he had? Oh, right, insulting religion is illegal in many European countries.
A Pastafarian after my own heart. You WILL be touched by HIS noodly appendage.
There are many other (and better) ways to profit financially from someone's death, so I doubt that's provides a big new incentive for murder.
I think allowing the sale of cadaveric organs is reasonable; right now, hospitals and doctors effectively enrich themselves and frequently engage in fraud and nepotism. Getting that money to the family of the deceased is a good thing.
I draw the line at for-pay live organ donations. Taken on their own, they are likely to be beneficial to both recipients and donors. However, once there is a large market and medical facilities for for-profit live donations, the risk of criminal activity in this area becomes much larger, including blackmail and other forms of coercion, and that worries me.
No, it doesn't. You're free to declare any return type for main, but if it isn't an "int" then the value returned to the environment is undefined. See Section 5.1.2.2.3. Having undefined values in a program doesn't break the standard, and it doesn't even automatically break portability (i.e., almost every correct C program contains undefined values somewhere, they simply don't matter).
The morality of an act depends on its context and intent. For example, if I ask my doctor to kill me because I'm in agonizing pain, it is not immoral for him to comply with my wish. I think the death penalty should be abolished, because it's costly, ineffective, and threatens innocent people. But I don't see it as intrinsically immoral to kill people who have committed grave crimes.
For normal densities, standard deviations and MAD are just proportional, with a factor of about 1.25, so it doesn't matter which you use.
For non-normal densities, neither of them really is universally "right" for characterizing the deviation, but it's mathematically a whole lot easier to understand how standard deviation behaves in those cases than MAD. So even there, standard deviations are usually the better choice.
Who do you think the European conquerors were? Well-off middle class folks who just got up one day to destroy some peaceful South American civilizations in order to boost their retirement plans? In reality, for the most part, they came from totalitarian, theocratic regimes that had just barely survived attacks from powerful and thoroughly destructive neighbors, and for whom the choice was death or conquest. Most of them had been indoctrinated from birth by the totalitarian ideologies of their time.
And who do you think they were destroying? Peaceful, prosperous, liberal communities? Of course not. They were attacking totalitarian, bloody theocracies. And most of the destruction wasn't even due to actions by the Spanish, it was either due to disease or self-inflicted, neither of which the Spaniards bore any moral responsibility for.
You are applying 21st century assumptions about international relations and societies to conflicts and situations where they simply do not apply, and you aren't even doing that correctly. And even under 21st century assumptions, the Inca and Aztec empires would be destroyed and occupied in a heartbeat; they were far worse than any of the totalitarian regimes we have today.
I certainly don't consider the Inca or Aztec civilizations to have been "precious". They were totalitarian, bloody, murderous, backwards, and destructive. Those monumental buildings and fancy trinkets you admire and like so much are drenched in blood (as are most of the monuments and trinkets European civilization produced).
Most civilizations and most political systems throughout history have been evil, and their destruction by revolution or conquest has been a good thing for humanity and the individuals living under those regimes.
They seem "horrid" to you because your understanding of morality is based on abstractions unrelated to reality, and because you hold some twisted racist and nationalist ideas while fancying yourself morally superior.
No, only their civilizations, and most of those were on their last legs anyway due to smallpox and local wars, something that the Spanish simply took advantage of. By the time the Spanish actually settled in large numbers, the civilizations had ceased to exist, although many of the indigenous people still survived and continued to live under the new rulers.
None of this is in any way different what civilizations around the world had been doing to each other for thousands of years. In fact, the Spanish were militarily effective because they had just been defending themselves against the Moors, invaders from Africa who had been close to wiping out all of European civilization.
Putting a time limit on things and providing assistance means that you assume that the people have the life skills to plan and get out of poverty; but if they were capable of that kind of planning and execution, they wouldn't be poor in the first place. The only way to break this cycle is to actively force people to make changes in their lives after some time by placing conditions on receiving any further assistance: move to a different community, accept a job or a public work program, lose weight, complete training, etc.
The area where the reward structure needs to change the most is probably single parenthood. Single parenthood is, in most cases, a choice: a choice to have sex, a choice not to have an abortion, and a choice not to give up the kid for adoption. We should stop rewarding these choices financially.
Cutting food stamps might cause people to eat more poorly. Or maybe it will cause them to eat better. To eat better, you need to prepare food yourself (rather than eat out or buy prepared foods), cut down on meat, and eat more vegetables and fiber. All of those are things that you tend to do when you need to save money on food.
The math used by many engineers is basically the same math used by physicists: linear algebra, ODEs, PDEs, FFTs, transform methods, moments, expansions, perturbation methods, tensors, etc.
Well, you certainly are ignorant.
You can get B12 from fermented foods, milk products, eggs, and algae. In fact, it's not even produced by animals, only by bacteria.
Actually, physicists just have a propensity for ignoring techniques and terminology in other fields and rolling their own. There is little scientific content in that article that an engineer wouldn't understand if it were translated into more familiar terms. Of course, an engineer would likely call the whole thing a collection of wild, unproven speculations anyway and would simply ignore it.
What that web page describes is simply regions of space that can't communicate due to FTL inflation, and that might or might not have somewhat different fundamental constants. The claim the web page adds is that inflation may be stopping at different times in different regions.
The multiverse in quantum mechanics means something entirely different.
I made a statement about all work. You can't automate 100% of all work.
I gave an example: "Let's say 99% of all work is automated. That means labor is 100 times as productive," If 80% of all work is automated, labor (overall) is 5 times as productive. Get it?
If everything is automated, tasks aren't done "more efficiently", they are done infinitely efficiently.
Not at all. Human greed is what makes free market economics work. The greedier its participants are, the better it works.