More likely they will be far, far beyond the end of their design life by the time they're decommissioned, and they'll probably get decommissioned because they get a serious accident due to running far, far beyond the end of their design life because they weren't replaced by new reactors or anything else.
Ah, well, I've gotten my own hydro power facility now so my needs are more than covered (well, will be once I bring the turbine on-line).
Yes, isn't it odd that we're only hearing about cases where 'rogue traders' lose money? Out of the group capable of bypassing the systems one would expect at least a few to be bright enough to actually make a couple of billions.
Of course, one would assume that those probably get a fat bonus and a promotion, which indicates a culture where acting outside the rules is accepted behaviour as long as money is made.
The day we see the headline 'Rogue trader arrested for making $2bn for employer' we'll know that the banks are actually taking security seriously. Until then, everyone, including their employees, will know that it's not gambling with other peoples money that's the problem, it's losing.
With first to file you still cannot patent anything that has already been published, so as long as the university publishes instead of sitting on the invention then nobody else can come along and file for a patent.
The claimed 'danger' of currency deflation is that consumers will postpone purchases and lower aggregate demand. Specific sectors demonstrating constant deflation merely indicate that purchases of goods in an environment where prices constantly falls does not mean purchases postponed indefinitely, indicating a demand baseline and that a prolonged period of deflation would stabilize once the stimulus and inflation blown bubbles finish deflating.
While currency deflation might make investments in productive capacity less palatable for a time, as compared to value stores, their profitability would eventually stabilize as well, catering to actual demand instead of demand taken from the future.
And no, vocabulary differences don't mean you're wrong (and as the various economic schools can't even agree on the definition of inflation vocabulary differences are inherent to economic discussions). But the state of the current economic system and the huge inventory of produced goods, like housing, that nobody would have wanted had they actually had to pay for it rather suggests you're wrong.
The response you'll get from actual economists will depend on who is paying them.
HFT is in its essence neither good nor bad, but it has various issues. As it currently works it does allow manipulation of values by allowing fake offers that are withdrawn as soon as they're made. They can often see orders before most humans and 'cheat', but that in itself is not exactly 'evil'.
They provide some liquidity, but that liquidity will probably be gone faster than anyone can react in a situation where it would actually be needed and desired. Simply because they need to protect themselves from running amok.
In the end they'll wipe out a few professions, redistribute some wealth and make the stock market even more of a losers game than it is already, but compared to the pseudo-science of central banks the damage they'll do is minimal.
The issue is that there are two realities of the purpose of currency.
On one hand there is the natural way that most people use it and understand it; as a means for transactions and a store of value.
On the other hand there is the way that certain economic schools want to use it, some for personal gain, some for misguided theories.
The trouble comes when the first group understand what the second group intend, because the first group actually do want a store of value and they are going to get it even if that means hoarding limited real-world resources instead of pieces of organic fibre. Which ends up with the pieces of fibre being worth their actual resource value as the faith in them is lost.
The idea that deflation itself leads to hoarding is flawed. Many economic sectors suffer constant deflation; computing and electronics are a good example. When people know that prices will fall, people invest in products as they are needed instead of before they are needed. That is not a disaster, that is a basis for a stable real economy.
Having people buy things before they are needed (to 'stimulate' and create non-existent jobs) means they are constantly undermining future demand. As soon as a dip comes it's magnified as purchases are not actually needed, they have already been made to get rid of unstable currency, so there is already a large overcapacity and a store of products that will easily let the consuming side forego purchases for a long time.
"I can't do anything of the sort with Xen or KVM/QEMU."
Ive done it for five years without any trouble. Stay away from GFS, but raw volumes, VM-attached iscsi disks or drbd offer varying levels of featurism for underlying storage (and on Xen, raw volumes give me 2-3x the performance I've gotten out of VMFS volumes). Yes, you may need to write a few scripts to manage it seamlessly but once you have it beats firing up the ESX console for every little thing.
There are countless of closed websites where you have to have some kind of proof you really belong to that group before you can start taking part. The reason is simple, they want to know who you are so that you will behave.
Behaving is a function of the group, it's not an objective standard. A religious fundamentalist on an atheist forum will be considered a troll by many and vice versa. A closed forum doesn't care who you are as long as you have a persistent identity that can be ignored.
Enforcing public identities creates a situation wherein information appropriate to one forum interacts with and risks ending up in forums where that information is not appropriate.
Google+ realized the importance of being able to steer information to appropriate channels, but it underestimates the need that anyone not among the most boring personalities may have for segmenting information and identity as appropriate for varying circumstances and social groups.
FTA: Eric-Mark Huitema, a transportation specialist with I.B.M... “To do it you need support of the government, and it needs to happen when there is not an election because there’s always a bit of resistance.”
With people like that, we don't need terrorists hating democracy, we obviously have democracy-haters running the place. Not that it's surprising, but it's even more odious when they're so blatant about it.
Compare the development of the USD vs CHF, JPY, CAD, NOK or even EUR, over the last ten years. Dollar denominated US treasuries have not had a good decade.
Without inflation there's no incentive to invest money in things you don't need or things that give no ROI.
Then again, that may not be a significant problem. In fact, it might be just the thing to prevent the massive mal-investments and dangerous leverage that cause crisis after crisis.
Segments of the economy live with constant deflation, computing in particular. The fact that it's always a bad idea to invest in storage or computing power before you actually need it does not mean it's a bad idea to invest in when you actually do need it.
And removing the utility of currency as a store of value does not mean that the market will not eventually find something else to serve that purpose. In the end, the loss of faith in fiat currency drives the migration to non-perishable commodities as it becomes the last refuge from the fantasy land of pretend economics.
Wait, what? Two party systems discourage extremists and lead to political stability and economic growth. Or so their supporters would have us believe anyway.
Then again, maybe supporters of two party systems simply find it cheaper to only have to buy two politicians to ensure having the winner in their pocket. Compared to many multi-party systems there does not seem to be a dearth of extremists in the major two party systems.
Considering the freefall of the USD against many currencies, the effective yield of treasuries has been between -20% to -40% over the last few years. That makes them close to worthless, as you can get better risk-adjusted yield elsewhere.
And see, it works the other way around; if US bonds become worthless, everything else becomes worth a whole lot more (as expressed in dollars stored in US bonds).
The politicians certainly bear blame, but the fact is that a lot of voters have gotten fed up with debt as well (and not just in the US). That trend is likely to continue, which means that future politicians voted in will feel less bound by enforced debt incurred against the electorates wishes. Drag it too far beyond what the voters willingly condone and you start getting politicians whose campaign promises include defaulting.
Still, the US hasn't deserved an AAA rating in a long time. With the Fed printing dollars like there's no tomorrow, the dollar weakness means you're not getting back anywhere near what you invested.
The easiest and least inequitable way to solve the problem is to simply reduce working hours (which would, incidentally, make it a lot easier to manage retirement problems as well, as it's easier to keep people working if they work a lot less).
Ultimately, as production capacity vastly outstrips demand, you only have two realistic choices: divide the product of the labour or divide the labour. I'd certainly prefer the latter.
I have to agree. I quit using youtube in a signed in fashion when they insisted I connect with a gmail account, and I seriously dislike the integration of g+ into anything else.
Personally I don't use my gmail for anything significant (I'll run my own server for anything I actually care about, thankyouverymuch), but if I did I'd certainly be very leery about using it in a linked way.
Inflation is only easy to control if you get to define 'inflation' to mean whatever you feel like. As in "something went up in price so we'll make up an excuse to exclude it - see we have no inflation". Or "oh, beef got more expensive, but eh, people will eat processed dog instead so their meals got no more expensive - see, we have no inflation".
Perhaps, if we got accurate measurements of inflation it would be a workable model, but unless things like asset inflation get included we'll just get an endless process of bubble-crash-bubble-crash as malinvestments get stuffed into segments that are not accounted for.
A deflationary economy would ultimately be less painful, but as it would put significant problems for stealth taxation and it would create less benefit for the economic actors closest to money creation, it is unlikely to happen.
They can and they have, look up thermochromic paint. I even have a coffee cup which is black when cold but turns white (or rather transparent, but the underlying colour is white) when containing hot coffee.
Network effects are only valid as long as there is a useful network. Once the utility degrades to the extent that you dare not post anything but the most inane chatter because the whole world might be listening in and even the small tidbits that can be gleaned may come back and cause trouble in real life social networks then it doesn't matter if all your friends are there, you can't use it to communicate with them anyway.
Which is pretty much the situation Facebook is in. It's lost a lot of its network effect because for many people it's unusable for the very thing it could be useful for. Which means that any competitor that offers 'something' instead of 'nothing' becomes more appealing.
Still, from what I've seen of google+ it doesn't look like it's going to be it. Slight improvement on Facebook and a company that might be just a bit less sleazy, but nowhere near a place where you can feel safe having private conversations with close friends, sharing your media archive, bantering politics with select groups, etc.
According to TFA, yes, you can be obliged to hand over the key.
With regards to encryption it's an old problem that's solved by using multiple pass keys; the one you hand over decrypts something reasonably embarrassing like your tranny porn collection, while the real key decrypts the actual material you want to hide.
So trying to force people into divulging encryption keys is just asinine; it will merely lead to widespread adoption of readily available methods to defeat it while failing to accomplish the desired goal.
According to IMF insiders quoted in this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/19/imf-pressure-appoint-non-european-head Lagarde basically is the banks, as far as bailouts are concerned. I've read elsewhere that she tried to get Lehman bailed out as well. We can expect a lot more of irresponsible lending, borrowing and bailouts with this lineup.
Ah, well, at least now that fondling IMF hand on your bum will only be after your wallet.
Back in the day Facebook was only.edu and thus didn't have the lowest common denominator on it. We used to make fun of people on MySpace for "ThEiR HoRiBLZ Grammer" and such.
Funny, us old people say exactly the same thing about the internet. Too bad nobody's building a new one.
I suspect facebook is a walking corpse. Not because google+ is exceptionally promising, but because facebook has become so universally reviled that a lot of people seem to consider 'nothing' a better alternative. Hopefully it will become an object lesson in the extent to which you can mistreat your cattle without having it run away.
Personally I hope we'll eventually see a truly distributed social networking app where one can run ones own social shard with connection to friends shards, hostable on your own or by providers. Diaspora had some promise last I looked, but seems to be moving very slowly.
Most countries have laws against lobbing missiles in any direction at all, and I would be very surprised should Iran not have such laws, probably implemented as reckless endangerment, use of unlicensed weapons, manslaughter, etc, etc. The holders of power in any country tend to take a dim view of such capacity in the hands of private citizens.
And yes, starting a war is certainly against international law. Look up crime against peace.
It may not always be enforced, but violators that get away for political reasons, such as for example Tony Blair, will have to exercise a certain care with what countries they visit or risk ending up incarcerated. And hope that those pesky european arrest warrants are only applied to the correct targets.
No, the excuse for having that exclusive right is supposed to be to encourage the creation of new works.
The point of it is, and always has been, control over distribution.
You can easily analyse the nature and implementation to determine the actual reason. Throughout history the author and creator has been the weak party to a transaction; they want and need their material published, they hold a product that is, for the distributors, largely replaceable, they need to get into a limited numbers of venues and channels, they often have limited economic, legal and business capacity. In a system constructed like copyright they are going to get reamed; everything is stacked against them.. And reamed they have been.
If it had actually been about encouraging creation of new works and for the creators sake, the law would have been constructed with automatic licensing and minimum percentages going to the creator of any material of the sales of any instantiation of such material. That would have put the creators in a position to get paid for merely registering and making available their work, and it would have put the extraction of revenue in the hands of more capable agents such as normal tax collecting agencies.
Or some other variation that doesn't give all the power to the capitalized business interest in the equation. But the current system certainly has never been about encouraging creators, except insofar as using it as an excuse for distribution control.
The value of goods produced and held is, as a whole, the wealth of the participants in the economy. Everything has some value to the holder, but it varies over time, often decreasing as things get old, eaten, worn out, etc.
The interesting part is the allocation of resources towards producing that which maximizes the perceived wealth created and held, and when it comes to munitions they tend to be very expensive for the perceived wealth; using those resources for basically any other production would create more value and make the economy wealthier.
The second world war was not essential to getting out of the depression, basically any other production on the same basis would have accomplished the same.
Another misconception is that jobs are intrinsically good for the economy. Make-work jobs are in themselves merely a covert wealth redistribution scheme. As far as the wealth of the economy is concerned, although less palatable, simply taxing the employed and paying the unemployed to sit around doing nothing would be neither more or less valuable (if we assume that munitions have near zero value to the participants in the economy).
Redistribution through building infrastructure or various public works is slightly less wasteful, but ultimately the least inequitable method of managing reduced demand would be to divide the actual work through more general reduced working hours, rather than the binary employed-unemployed tax-makework structure. In the end, as the whole point of an economy is to generate the most wealth for as little work as possible, it would be good to have a method to deal with the end-game in that function, just in case it turns out that demand for goods isn't infinite but balanced against the value of free time.
Slashdot Mirror
More likely they will be far, far beyond the end of their design life by the time they're decommissioned, and they'll probably get decommissioned because they get a serious accident due to running far, far beyond the end of their design life because they weren't replaced by new reactors or anything else.
Ah, well, I've gotten my own hydro power facility now so my needs are more than covered (well, will be once I bring the turbine on-line).
Yes, isn't it odd that we're only hearing about cases where 'rogue traders' lose money? Out of the group capable of bypassing the systems one would expect at least a few to be bright enough to actually make a couple of billions.
Of course, one would assume that those probably get a fat bonus and a promotion, which indicates a culture where acting outside the rules is accepted behaviour as long as money is made.
The day we see the headline 'Rogue trader arrested for making $2bn for employer' we'll know that the banks are actually taking security seriously. Until then, everyone, including their employees, will know that it's not gambling with other peoples money that's the problem, it's losing.
With first to file you still cannot patent anything that has already been published, so as long as the university publishes instead of sitting on the invention then nobody else can come along and file for a patent.
The claimed 'danger' of currency deflation is that consumers will postpone purchases and lower aggregate demand. Specific sectors demonstrating constant deflation merely indicate that purchases of goods in an environment where prices constantly falls does not mean purchases postponed indefinitely, indicating a demand baseline and that a prolonged period of deflation would stabilize once the stimulus and inflation blown bubbles finish deflating.
While currency deflation might make investments in productive capacity less palatable for a time, as compared to value stores, their profitability would eventually stabilize as well, catering to actual demand instead of demand taken from the future.
And no, vocabulary differences don't mean you're wrong (and as the various economic schools can't even agree on the definition of inflation vocabulary differences are inherent to economic discussions). But the state of the current economic system and the huge inventory of produced goods, like housing, that nobody would have wanted had they actually had to pay for it rather suggests you're wrong.
The response you'll get from actual economists will depend on who is paying them.
HFT is in its essence neither good nor bad, but it has various issues. As it currently works it does allow manipulation of values by allowing fake offers that are withdrawn as soon as they're made. They can often see orders before most humans and 'cheat', but that in itself is not exactly 'evil'.
They provide some liquidity, but that liquidity will probably be gone faster than anyone can react in a situation where it would actually be needed and desired. Simply because they need to protect themselves from running amok.
In the end they'll wipe out a few professions, redistribute some wealth and make the stock market even more of a losers game than it is already, but compared to the pseudo-science of central banks the damage they'll do is minimal.
The issue is that there are two realities of the purpose of currency.
On one hand there is the natural way that most people use it and understand it; as a means for transactions and a store of value.
On the other hand there is the way that certain economic schools want to use it, some for personal gain, some for misguided theories.
The trouble comes when the first group understand what the second group intend, because the first group actually do want a store of value and they are going to get it even if that means hoarding limited real-world resources instead of pieces of organic fibre. Which ends up with the pieces of fibre being worth their actual resource value as the faith in them is lost.
The idea that deflation itself leads to hoarding is flawed. Many economic sectors suffer constant deflation; computing and electronics are a good example. When people know that prices will fall, people invest in products as they are needed instead of before they are needed. That is not a disaster, that is a basis for a stable real economy.
Having people buy things before they are needed (to 'stimulate' and create non-existent jobs) means they are constantly undermining future demand. As soon as a dip comes it's magnified as purchases are not actually needed, they have already been made to get rid of unstable currency, so there is already a large overcapacity and a store of products that will easily let the consuming side forego purchases for a long time.
"I can't do anything of the sort with Xen or KVM/QEMU."
Ive done it for five years without any trouble. Stay away from GFS, but raw volumes, VM-attached iscsi disks or drbd offer varying levels of featurism for underlying storage (and on Xen, raw volumes give me 2-3x the performance I've gotten out of VMFS volumes). Yes, you may need to write a few scripts to manage it seamlessly but once you have it beats firing up the ESX console for every little thing.
There are countless of closed websites where you have to have some kind of proof you really belong to that group before you can start taking part. The reason is simple, they want to know who you are so that you will behave.
Behaving is a function of the group, it's not an objective standard. A religious fundamentalist on an atheist forum will be considered a troll by many and vice versa. A closed forum doesn't care who you are as long as you have a persistent identity that can be ignored.
Enforcing public identities creates a situation wherein information appropriate to one forum interacts with and risks ending up in forums where that information is not appropriate.
Google+ realized the importance of being able to steer information to appropriate channels, but it underestimates the need that anyone not among the most boring personalities may have for segmenting information and identity as appropriate for varying circumstances and social groups.
FTA: Eric-Mark Huitema, a transportation specialist with I.B.M ... “To do it you need support of the government, and it needs to happen when there is not an election because there’s always a bit of resistance.”
With people like that, we don't need terrorists hating democracy, we obviously have democracy-haters running the place. Not that it's surprising, but it's even more odious when they're so blatant about it.
Compare the development of the USD vs CHF, JPY, CAD, NOK or even EUR, over the last ten years. Dollar denominated US treasuries have not had a good decade.
Without inflation there's no incentive to invest money in things you don't need or things that give no ROI.
Then again, that may not be a significant problem. In fact, it might be just the thing to prevent the massive mal-investments and dangerous leverage that cause crisis after crisis.
Segments of the economy live with constant deflation, computing in particular. The fact that it's always a bad idea to invest in storage or computing power before you actually need it does not mean it's a bad idea to invest in when you actually do need it.
And removing the utility of currency as a store of value does not mean that the market will not eventually find something else to serve that purpose. In the end, the loss of faith in fiat currency drives the migration to non-perishable commodities as it becomes the last refuge from the fantasy land of pretend economics.
Wait, what? Two party systems discourage extremists and lead to political stability and economic growth. Or so their supporters would have us believe anyway.
Then again, maybe supporters of two party systems simply find it cheaper to only have to buy two politicians to ensure having the winner in their pocket. Compared to many multi-party systems there does not seem to be a dearth of extremists in the major two party systems.
Considering the freefall of the USD against many currencies, the effective yield of treasuries has been between -20% to -40% over the last few years. That makes them close to worthless, as you can get better risk-adjusted yield elsewhere.
And see, it works the other way around; if US bonds become worthless, everything else becomes worth a whole lot more (as expressed in dollars stored in US bonds).
The politicians certainly bear blame, but the fact is that a lot of voters have gotten fed up with debt as well (and not just in the US). That trend is likely to continue, which means that future politicians voted in will feel less bound by enforced debt incurred against the electorates wishes. Drag it too far beyond what the voters willingly condone and you start getting politicians whose campaign promises include defaulting.
Still, the US hasn't deserved an AAA rating in a long time. With the Fed printing dollars like there's no tomorrow, the dollar weakness means you're not getting back anywhere near what you invested.
The easiest and least inequitable way to solve the problem is to simply reduce working hours (which would, incidentally, make it a lot easier to manage retirement problems as well, as it's easier to keep people working if they work a lot less).
Ultimately, as production capacity vastly outstrips demand, you only have two realistic choices: divide the product of the labour or divide the labour. I'd certainly prefer the latter.
I have to agree. I quit using youtube in a signed in fashion when they insisted I connect with a gmail account, and I seriously dislike the integration of g+ into anything else.
Personally I don't use my gmail for anything significant (I'll run my own server for anything I actually care about, thankyouverymuch), but if I did I'd certainly be very leery about using it in a linked way.
Inflation is only easy to control if you get to define 'inflation' to mean whatever you feel like. As in "something went up in price so we'll make up an excuse to exclude it - see we have no inflation". Or "oh, beef got more expensive, but eh, people will eat processed dog instead so their meals got no more expensive - see, we have no inflation".
Perhaps, if we got accurate measurements of inflation it would be a workable model, but unless things like asset inflation get included we'll just get an endless process of bubble-crash-bubble-crash as malinvestments get stuffed into segments that are not accounted for.
A deflationary economy would ultimately be less painful, but as it would put significant problems for stealth taxation and it would create less benefit for the economic actors closest to money creation, it is unlikely to happen.
They can and they have, look up thermochromic paint. I even have a coffee cup which is black when cold but turns white (or rather transparent, but the underlying colour is white) when containing hot coffee.
Network effects are only valid as long as there is a useful network. Once the utility degrades to the extent that you dare not post anything but the most inane chatter because the whole world might be listening in and even the small tidbits that can be gleaned may come back and cause trouble in real life social networks then it doesn't matter if all your friends are there, you can't use it to communicate with them anyway.
Which is pretty much the situation Facebook is in. It's lost a lot of its network effect because for many people it's unusable for the very thing it could be useful for. Which means that any competitor that offers 'something' instead of 'nothing' becomes more appealing.
Still, from what I've seen of google+ it doesn't look like it's going to be it. Slight improvement on Facebook and a company that might be just a bit less sleazy, but nowhere near a place where you can feel safe having private conversations with close friends, sharing your media archive, bantering politics with select groups, etc.
According to TFA, yes, you can be obliged to hand over the key.
With regards to encryption it's an old problem that's solved by using multiple pass keys; the one you hand over decrypts something reasonably embarrassing like your tranny porn collection, while the real key decrypts the actual material you want to hide.
So trying to force people into divulging encryption keys is just asinine; it will merely lead to widespread adoption of readily available methods to defeat it while failing to accomplish the desired goal.
According to IMF insiders quoted in this article http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/19/imf-pressure-appoint-non-european-head Lagarde basically is the banks, as far as bailouts are concerned. I've read elsewhere that she tried to get Lehman bailed out as well. We can expect a lot more of irresponsible lending, borrowing and bailouts with this lineup.
Ah, well, at least now that fondling IMF hand on your bum will only be after your wallet.
Back in the day Facebook was only .edu and thus didn't have the lowest common denominator on it. We used to make fun of people on MySpace for "ThEiR HoRiBLZ Grammer" and such.
Funny, us old people say exactly the same thing about the internet. Too bad nobody's building a new one.
I suspect facebook is a walking corpse. Not because google+ is exceptionally promising, but because facebook has become so universally reviled that a lot of people seem to consider 'nothing' a better alternative. Hopefully it will become an object lesson in the extent to which you can mistreat your cattle without having it run away.
Personally I hope we'll eventually see a truly distributed social networking app where one can run ones own social shard with connection to friends shards, hostable on your own or by providers. Diaspora had some promise last I looked, but seems to be moving very slowly.
Most countries have laws against lobbing missiles in any direction at all, and I would be very surprised should Iran not have such laws, probably implemented as reckless endangerment, use of unlicensed weapons, manslaughter, etc, etc. The holders of power in any country tend to take a dim view of such capacity in the hands of private citizens.
And yes, starting a war is certainly against international law. Look up crime against peace.
It may not always be enforced, but violators that get away for political reasons, such as for example Tony Blair, will have to exercise a certain care with what countries they visit or risk ending up incarcerated. And hope that those pesky european arrest warrants are only applied to the correct targets.
No, the excuse for having that exclusive right is supposed to be to encourage the creation of new works.
The point of it is, and always has been, control over distribution.
You can easily analyse the nature and implementation to determine the actual reason. Throughout history the author and creator has been the weak party to a transaction; they want and need their material published, they hold a product that is, for the distributors, largely replaceable, they need to get into a limited numbers of venues and channels, they often have limited economic, legal and business capacity. In a system constructed like copyright they are going to get reamed; everything is stacked against them.. And reamed they have been.
If it had actually been about encouraging creation of new works and for the creators sake, the law would have been constructed with automatic licensing and minimum percentages going to the creator of any material of the sales of any instantiation of such material. That would have put the creators in a position to get paid for merely registering and making available their work, and it would have put the extraction of revenue in the hands of more capable agents such as normal tax collecting agencies.
Or some other variation that doesn't give all the power to the capitalized business interest in the equation. But the current system certainly has never been about encouraging creators, except insofar as using it as an excuse for distribution control.
The value of goods produced and held is, as a whole, the wealth of the participants in the economy. Everything has some value to the holder, but it varies over time, often decreasing as things get old, eaten, worn out, etc.
The interesting part is the allocation of resources towards producing that which maximizes the perceived wealth created and held, and when it comes to munitions they tend to be very expensive for the perceived wealth; using those resources for basically any other production would create more value and make the economy wealthier.
The second world war was not essential to getting out of the depression, basically any other production on the same basis would have accomplished the same.
Another misconception is that jobs are intrinsically good for the economy. Make-work jobs are in themselves merely a covert wealth redistribution scheme. As far as the wealth of the economy is concerned, although less palatable, simply taxing the employed and paying the unemployed to sit around doing nothing would be neither more or less valuable (if we assume that munitions have near zero value to the participants in the economy).
Redistribution through building infrastructure or various public works is slightly less wasteful, but ultimately the least inequitable method of managing reduced demand would be to divide the actual work through more general reduced working hours, rather than the binary employed-unemployed tax-makework structure. In the end, as the whole point of an economy is to generate the most wealth for as little work as possible, it would be good to have a method to deal with the end-game in that function, just in case it turns out that demand for goods isn't infinite but balanced against the value of free time.